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PaperclipPerfector  30d ago (text post)   2810 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 15, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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A bunch of people here probably have NVGs or thermal optics of some kind. I was hunting caterpillars the other day and got curious if they're as well-camouflaged outside the visual spectrum.

Can anyone check? I would literally comb through my cabbage patches decked out like a rainbow 6 character if it helped kill these bastards.

Thermals don’t pick up bugs. Plant radishes around your cabbage and run chickens through.

I gave up keeping chickens years ago, but that might actually work for the slugs and some of the caterpillars. On the other hand a lot of my other brassicas are 3ft tall and still have eggs planted on the young center leaves.

It's a lot of manual work picking through them, especially the very dense test patch (8" spacing vs my usual 18")

Cheaper option: try a handheld Uv light? https://nightsea.com/galleries/caterpillar-fluorescence/

I would not expect much thermal signature. Bugs are small and don’t retain much heat. A casual online search suggests using FLIR for finding nests, not individuals.

Get ducks

Do you see an end to pop culture within our lifetimes?

Undeniably, we've reached the bookend to the 80's blockbuster era of mega franchises like Star Wars. But the vibe of recent years is not only "These corporate products suck" but a subtle apathy toward media in general. Songs are going viral on TikTok, hitting #1 for a single week, then disappearing. Obscure songs from the past are going briefly viral and then disappearing. We see and consume more media than ever, yet paradoxically we care about it less than ever too. There are no new phenomena like the Deadheads or 80s goths where media spearheads an alternate lifestyle. There are no new games we continue talking about for years after release. Fanbases are less passionate, less distinct, and shorter lived. Fanfiction is less popular. Being a gen Z fan of the smiths or deftones means having their greatest hits in your playlist while not knowing any of the band members besides Morrissey, Marr and Chino, let alone their history, their gear, their influences, famous gigs, etc. Modern artists get this treatment too. People just don't care anymore.

Do you guys notice that in your hobbies too? I.e. younger "fans" totally lacking the ability to nerd out? Do you sense the general level of passion drying up?

There are no new games we continue talking about for years after release

Roblox and Fortnite are the big ones for young people. The reason there hasn’t been a ton of new contenders for popular games is that the industry has figured out which game types are most addictive and have optimized for it. If you want to compete against Fortnite, you will have to compete against a company with 100x more resources and half a decade in specialized knowledge. You need a psychological zero day to compete against Fortnite, in the way that Fortnite competed against CoD (more colors, more discovery, more progression, third person skin views, updated maps, etc). Fortnite was such an insane piece of popular culture that when I saw an opera in ~2019 a character did the dancing emote to the laughter of the crowd. Fortnite was plausibly more culturally dominant than any other game in history — it changed how kids danced and created new slang (“bro did the default emote”)

There are no new phenomena like the Deadheads or 80s goths where media spearheads an alternate lifestyle

The egirl and eboy aesthetic is arguably new, and it’s not like there were many 80s goths

Pop culture is definitely much more atomised (at least for men, apparently Swiftdom has taken over like 80% of the female population). I assume it's a case of there simply being far more media, and with the distribution channels changing from central to algorithmically personal.

Young people don't build their identities around music any more. When I was a teenager, what you listened to mattered in a social sense. Now kids just have their own perfectly-tailored Spotify playlist with songs from many eras and genres.

Cinema is dead as the medium of importance, replaced by TV. But even TV is much more atomised. I'm trying to think of pop-culture quotes from the past five years that I could say in a crowded room and assume that everyone would understand. All that comes to mind is 'Hi Barbie'.

I feel like a lot of it comes down to something both being a good line and being memeable like

I don't even know who you are? In Avengers end game

or

You get what you fucking deserve! From Joker

or

Lisan Al-Gaib! From Dune.

People will not only learn the line from the movie but from the memes as well.

I'm 21, which places me well on the younger tip of my two biggest strictly recreational interests: MLB and menswear, and I would generally say I make a serious attempt at nerding out in those areas. What I think has changed is how atomized the communities are from broader audiences. Being a baseball fan 60 years ago meant arguing over whether Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle was better. Today, it means arguing over whether or not to use defense-adjusted or fielding-independent statistics to measure the value of pitchers, which is a much more interesting question (Mays was clearly the better player), but also far more granular and inaccessible to casual fans and passive bystanders. Similarly, I think a lot of people are surface-level fans of the Smiths than in the past, but I think past Smiths fans are probably pretty comparable to present Bladee fans in terms of depth of knowledge (although Bladee is probably a much bigger leap for a non-fan than the Smiths are). I think it's actually gotten harder than ever to start getting interested in a lot of subjects because most of the in-depth communities are in so deep that there aren't really any clearly visible footholds to start off with.

I agree with you but it’s also a very online thing. In real life an autistic hardcore fan is happy to talk to a casual fan at a party because it’s still better than talking to the 90% of other people who don’t care about [baseball / The Smiths / coffee] very much at all.

Аs an autistic hardcore fan, I definitely agree. Another thing worth noting is that you have to kind of obscure your level of knowledge around people you don't know well. Being a SABR member might embellish my resume among baseball fans, but it's not gonna help me much when I'm talking to a girl at a bar. I suspect we see a lot more hardcore enthusiasts on a daily basis than we realize, but there's a sort of social contract we sign to make casual conversations more bearable.

I have found that I can't stand reading anything written by most fanbases of the things I nerd out over, but I am happy to discuss with those I happen to meet in person. People can really be insufferable assholes online.

This may work both ways, because then there's the Motte. Which makes me wonder how recognizable any of us on the Motte would be to one another in real life, or if we would have anything at all to say to each other. Probably not nearly as much as we type.

What I see is a general culture of superficiality, short-lived interest and discarding yesterday's investments behind seven layers of irony and distraction. Maybe what I'm gesturing at is a general aversion to sincerity and commitment. It's not just media consumption. People shamelessly speak in nothing but crass hyperbole, waste their attention on worthless trash that changes by the day, and cannot be pinned down on any opinion or behavior, are in fact panically anxious to avoid ever needing to stand by anything they might have said or done in the past, are deathly afraid of who they were yesterday. Much better to pretend that today is all there ever was. Everyone else is doing it, too.

When was the last time someone made you a promise and kept it? Speaking for myself, I can't remember. Appointments are made and ignored, assurances given and immediately forgotten, grand statements given with full conviction and their ever having been uttered is denied on the next day. Obvious lies are spoken with the expectation that they will be accepted, and failure to do so is seen as a grave faux-pas. Try to tell someone that you respectfully do not buy their excuse on any given renegation and see what happens - adamant insistence on the validity of the excuse, even in the face of damning evidence, followed by indignation at your hostile behavior.

It's probably always been this way and I'm just being grumpy. But let's assume for a moment that no, something is changing.

So pop culture. We don't need it anymore. We used to need some constancy in culture to rally around it; it took time to do so. A fanbase grows, you join it, make friends, or even share some media among your friends and bond about it. Nowadays you just join a fad online, ride it for a few minutes, enjoy the parasocial relationship, and hop off before anyone can actually associate you with it or it grows stale or you miss out on the next thing. And there is always a next thing. Media consumption isn't social anymore; instead we enjoy a much more direct algorithmically powered producer-to-brain pipeline. Which may soon be an AI-tailored-to-your-predelictions-to-brain pipeline, obviating even the need even for pseudo-social platforms like youtube.

We're wireheading. Shamelessly and effortlessly and increasingly efficiently.

Wireheading, definitely.

Another perspective that's been knocking around in my head is that for ~150 years, we've been burning through residuals from Christianity, and we're discovering that things we took for granted aren't human universals. Your point about promises is exactly right. The last few years have made me feel exactly like those Great War veterans who complained about the decline in manners, values, and behavior in the youth. It seemed like we'd reached a new equilibrium but something tells me we're about to slide even further.

There are many libertarians that oppose The War On Drugs, in part, based on that police sometimes abuses it and plants fake evidence on people they don't like. This is understandable. A fair fraction of these also supports ban on child porn. But CP is easier to plant and more difficult to defend. Why they support it?

Because it’s worse.

Drug legalization only requires “your body, your choice.” Under the common understanding of consent, CP legalization requires taking that choice away from someone else.

Evidence planting is a distant second.

Evidence planting is a distant second.

ah, that part was actually useful

Drug legalization only requires “your body, your choice.”

Not always--see second-hand smoke.

Under the common understanding of consent, CP legalization requires taking that choice away from someone else.

Depends on how the CP was created. Drawn CP doesn't for instance.

Most libertarians oppose bans on loli hentai for exactly this reason.

Under the common understanding of consent, CP legalization requires taking that choice away from someone else.

what about drawn porn and adult people distributing recordings of oneself when they were young? The former is almost universally banned, the latter is universally banned. What about people long dead?

Why even worry about it? Just don't do any of it.

I'm a nerd that if why I am here to start with. As for utility, I think I'd been better if I spent same time working as a cab driver.

Libertarians are notorious for not supporting the ban on CP. Or the age of consent restriction.

I can't say I've ever met any libertarians who were against age of consent. The entire philosophy is based around respecting what consenting adults do. They're fine with restricting what children do.

You have now internet-met a libertarian who thinks it's too high.

(I'm grudgingly in favour of an AoC simply because five-year-olds aren't going to understand sex ed and people who haven't had sex ed pose rape-by-implicit-deception issues where a kid doesn't understand that consenting to unprotected sex is consenting to possibly produce a baby and/or possibly get HIV. But putting it above 14 is crazy talk.)

The entire philosophy is based around respecting what consenting adults do. They're fine with restricting what children do.

  1. Define all X as not-human with some scientific-sounding justification ("brain not developed till 25", "they're closer to gorillas", etc.)
  2. Claim anyone who disagrees with that definition is in opposition to the Science, and are obviously just in favor of X freedom because they want to have sex with [more generally, exploit] the women in X
  3. Rinse and repeat for Y, Z, etc. until you've reinvented traditional morality wholesale (more popularly known as "intersectionality")

No, I can't imagine why any freedom-minded person would have any problems with that. From a liberal standpoint, the problem with this strategy in an illiberal milieu is that you can't really take it on directly, and liberals being mistake theorists (and their tendency to be sexual mistake theorists doesn't help that) generally fail to understand that.

Thus, they tend to get baited into attacking (2), when the actual answer is to either go after (1) [which isn't scalable and is still vulnerable to "why do you care so much about hoaxes?", where people who can attack (1) can still be somewhat-credibly accused of having the same motivations as the people who just attack (2) do], or seek/implement/maintain social conditions such that yeschad.jpg is a valid response to (2)- this is being able to respond "all of them" to "how many children have to die before people who have (and will do) nothing wrong will give up their freedom to X" criticisms of [insert civil right here].

What would the federal government do if, like a podcast I recently listened to suggested, the Utah state government were to stop supplying water to the NSA's Utah Data Center?

Get into a legal pissing match.

Utah has less leverage than Texas(which is getting away with adjusting its border with Mexico over federal objections), but it does pay its own bills(so it has more than say, Alabama) and it’s unclear how important the Utah data center is for the NSA. So what happens after the legal battles is kind of up in the air.

What belongs on a nuclear-prep shopping list?

NB: I live in country Australia, so there will be some things notably missing from mine that others might want. In particular, Australia is not going to have a long-lasting food shortage due to our immense food production and paucity of viable nuclear targets, and I don't need to worry about being directly injured by nuclear blasts (this is not a coincidence; it's why I didn't move back to Melbourne).

Here's what's already on my list:

  • Bottled water (as in, the cheap huge bottles), in case water supplies get contaminated by fallout (I have 20L)
  • A battery- or hand-powered radio, to pick up emergency broadcasts (don't have this yet)
  • Aluminium foil, to wrap up electronics (including aforementioned radio) to protect from EMP (don't have this yet)
  • Some means of transportation that will work after EMP (I have a bicycle; an ICE car would arguably be better but I can't drive)

What else belongs on such lists? Does something I mentioned not belong on the list?

Sorry for bumping last week's thread, but I rediscovered what civil defence nerds seem to agree is the best "how to survive nuclear war" book out there - Cresson Kearney's Nuclear War Survival Skills. The 1987 edition is available free online in numerous places (the 1999 edition adds a one-page low-content update downplaying the risks of nuclear terrorism, but is otherwise identical). The 2022 version (updated by Steven Harris after Kearney's death) is only available in paper format. I haven't read it and can't vouch for the quality of the update.

If you are going to attempt to build the "Kearney Fallout Meter" then you will need a published paper copy because the calibration of the meter relies on actual-size templates in the book. Given the unreliability of computer tech post-nuke, I think a (possibly self-)printed copy is a nuclear prep essential in any case.

The primary audience for the book is urbanites and suburbanites who are planning evacuate a city when the Soviet tanks are crossing Germany (or equivalent) and need to build a fallout shelter in 48 hours or less when they arrive at their bugout destination with the contents of a 1980's-size family car plus locally available materials (and potentially with the military-age male family members absent - he specifically includes shelter designs that can be built by average-strength women). There is a reasonable amount of content about a permanent pre-built shelter though (the basement as is doesn't offer enough protection if you are downwind of a groundburst or it rains during the key fallout window), which would be more relevant given that Bendigo is outside any plausible blast zone.

Given Kearney's background at Oak Ridge, this book is almost certainly the civil defence advice that the US government developed and then decided not to publish because they didn't want the plebs to think that nuclear war was winnable. You can tell it is written by someone who is serious about this because it takes for granted that you will not be trying to follow normal radiation-safety rules in the aftermath of a nuclear blast - for example it recommends prioritising airflow over radiation safety because you will need a lot of airflow to keep the shelter occupants cool in hot weather and the risk of airborne contamination is low, whereas official government advice on both sides of the Cold War was to minimise ventilation to the minimum needed to keep CO2 levels down.

Aluminium foil, to wrap up electronics (including aforementioned radio) to protect from EMP (don't have this yet)

I don't think that is how EMP shielding works. Also would your electronic need to be shielded before hand, so having materials to shield them later is irrelevant?

I don't think that is how EMP shielding works.

It is. Nuclear EMP is a (very powerful) radio burst; you shield against that by putting the item in a Faraday cage - an enclosure of conductive material (which, when exposed to EM fields, will generate transient currents that cancel out the field inside it; this is why phones don't work very well inside metal vehicles). Aluminium foil is conductive (aluminium is, in fact, frequently used for power transmission, as it's the most conductive material per mass short of superconductors), so it works, although because you can't exactly seal it into a solid enclosure without significant equipment, you need multiple layers at different angles and you ideally want the items to be relatively small.

(The use of metal foil to block EM radiation is the reason that literal "tinfoil hats" were invented; the physical principle's sound, although of course the schizophrenics' worry about people mind-controlling them with radio waves is nonsense, and Faraday cages need to completely or almost-completely surround the shielded item so a "hat" isn't really that effective.)

Also would your electronic need bmto be shielded before hand, so having materials to shield them later is irrelevant?

Correct, but a) some items, like the emergency radio, aren't useful outside a crisis, so you can just keep them wrapped up permanently; b) nuclear war usually comes out of an existing military conflict, which means that upon hearing about said conflict (WWII was not secret; the Cuban Missile Crisis was not secret; Able Archer 83 and the Soviet concern about it was AFAIK not secret) you can wrap things up then against the possibility of EMP attack.

I get that encasing something in aluminum with no gaps would shield it. Aluminum is the fourth most conducive metal and a good shielding design made out of aluminum would work.

But merely wrapping something in aluminum foil would leave small gaps that I think would defeat the shield. I get that you'd overlap the aluminum layers and not have large gaping holes, but I don't think that's good shielding. I sometimes deal with EMI issues at work and it is much harder than you'd think to shield parts. "Wrap it in foil" is not a clear path to success. I have literally seen parts wrapped in foil in misguided attempts to shield them. They were really quite leaky from an EMI point of view. "Put it in a metal enclosure whose lids or openings are sealed with metal EMI gaskets" is what actually works.

I think if the typical person tried shielding a radio with aluminum foil, they would screw it up.

Aluminum is the fourth most conducive metal

It depends on how you're counting it. Resistivity is usually measured by dimensions, and aluminium's #4 by that measure, but aluminium is far less dense than copper/silver/gold, so if your limiting factor is weight (often the case) aluminium is the best.

But merely wrapping something in aluminum foil would leave small gaps that I think would defeat the shield.

There's leakage, yes. But everything I've read suggests that you can achieve very high reduction with enough layers, and "very high" suffices (one only needs to bring the voltage inside below that needed to destroy the device, after all - it doesn't have to be brought to zero).

your limiting factor is weight (often the case) aluminium is the best

I didn't think about that. That's actually a good point.

"With enough layers" would be the key. Not merely wrapping with a bit of overlap, which I think the typical person would mistakenly do. Multiple layers offset or wrapped in different directions. And having a DC path to ground would defeat charge buildup.

I my work I seal things correctly by putting copper tape over the cracks and joints. 3M sells it. The conductive adhesive is only good for one or maybe two sticks though. EMI shielding goes to shit if the tape is even slightly lifted or the adhesive not quite sticking on well.

And also bare metal boxes with EMI gaskets. Which if you really wanted to shield your stuff you should use.

"With enough layers" would be the key. Not merely wrapping with a bit of overlap, which I think the typical person would mistakenly do. Multiple layers offset or wrapped in different directions.

Yes, there's a reason I bought 60 metres of the stuff. Still under 10 bucks.

But merely wrapping something in aluminum foil would leave small gaps

I wouldn't worry about small gaps.

No, he's at least partially right.

Nuclear EMP is not the same thing as an electric arc; it's a massive burst of radio waves that induces currents inside devices. Gaps do matter. That's why you need multiple layers, so that there's metal connected between any two given directions (ideally closed circuits, to cancel the magnetic component as well as the electrical one).

A reliable and relatively painless method of suicide for yourself and those you care about. A gun (of sufficiently high caliber that if you fire at the wrong angle you won’t spend your final hours in agony) or high dosages of certain medications, such as opioids or insulin. I do not recommend paracetamol or sleeping tablets.

Life for those unlucky few to survive full-on nuclear holocaust (as opposed to a limited exchange, which our current logistical systems would probably survive) and subsequent total societal collapse would be horrific. If it gets bad enough, a quick way out is much better than starving to death, dying of thirst, succumbing to radiation sickness, or most other violent and ignoble ends, which you can’t all prepare for.

Not to mention the psychological toll of watching your world literally go up in flames. Maybe better not to survive it at all than to scrape by an existence in the ashes.

No. I mean to live.

Kant's categorical imperative says that we should do those things that we would have all do. If all shirk in such a time, there will be no more humanity, and all we have accomplished will come to naught: the ultimate tragedy. Bentham said we should act to ensure the greatest happiness for the greatest number - which means we need to maintain that number if ever there is to be happiness again.

For all history, mankind has taken the world with all its faults and worked to make it better for the next generation. I will not abandon that proud tradition. If destiny says I'll live in hard times, I want to endure them, so that there may again be good times for me, for the children I hope to have, and for humanity.

I believe in something greater than myself, greater than some momentary pain. I want a better tomorrow, and I can't help build it if I'm dead. Dying for a cause can be worthwhile, if the death achieves enough. But dying for nothing? No, thank you.

It is a good thing to believe in a purposeful existence, whether through religion or philosophy. It sustains the mind when the body has reached its limit. Even among the burning charnel pits of the apocalypse, hope will die last. Good. Better for the man of the future to believe in and affirm life.

But if you want a realistic “nuclear-prep” shopping list, it would be delusional not to include a (self-?) euthanasia agent, even if it’s not the primary purpose of the item. Keep some fentanyl in your medicine cabinet as an anasthetic, and when a family member is writhing in pain and begging for its end, you can let them pass with some kind of dignity rather than beating their head in with a shovel because you refused to prepare for the scenario. And maybe, who knows, you won’t always hold the same beliefs you do now, and you’ll be glad to have that way out.

Anyway this is all hypothetical. I know it’s fashionable in some parts of the internet to fantasize about society collapsing and having to build it back, being revealed as a Nietzschean superman in the process or whatever. I guess the aesthetic vision doesn’t appeal to me. Personally? I’m not preparing for Armageddon. The bombs won’t fall. And if they do, I’m happy to be amidst the slaughtered.

I know it’s fashionable in some parts of the internet to fantasize about society collapsing and having to build it back, being revealed as a Nietzschean superman in the process or whatever. I guess the aesthetic vision doesn’t appeal to me. [...] The bombs won’t fall.

It's definitely not locked in, which is why I'm not following extreme advice like "manufacture a ghost gun" which would have substantial downside risk. But come on, basic gambler's logic. A 1% chance of avoiding death is worth spending $500 iff my life is worth more than $50,000 to me, which it obviously is since I can't exactly spend my money if I'm dead and I don't have any children yet; a probability of <1% for nuclear war in the next ten years seems pretty risible to me (from base rates: nukes have been used in anger in one conflict in the 79 years they've existed, so 10 years = 1/8 = 12.5%; from Reliable Sources: the Doomsday Clock is set closer to midnight than it's literally ever been; from my own actual Inside View: the West is reeling from the culture war, the PRC shows little interest in playing by the rules, there are intersecting red lines on Taiwan, and the spooks are spooked which has me spooked).

And, um... you do realise how offensive it is to implicitly accuse me of a) adopting beliefs because of fashion and/or hope rather than logic, and b) hoping for a billion people to die, yes? I am not Hitler and I'm not a sheep.

Does China have enough nukes that you need to be worried about "Taiwan goes nuclear" in country Australia? (Wikipedia claims they have 438 usable nukes, but it looks like they only have the ICBMs to hit a low 2-figure number of targets outside the region) The only scenario where I see Australia getting more than one bomb for Sydney and one for Melbourne (and the area downwind of those cities where the fallout is likely to land is water) is if Russia and the US go full MAD.

Prep for the chaos following a US-China nuclear war in which Sydney and Melbourne are glassed is generic SHTF prep, not nuclear prep. Obviously all bets are off if you are using "country Australia" as a euphemism for commuterland.

Military targets are:

  • Sydney (naval base in the harbour, which is perhaps not the best place to put it)
  • Perth (naval base just offshore, which is perhaps not the best place to put it)
  • Darwin (US nuclear bombers in airbase there; not going to object to this one since Darwin's low-population and much of that is for the military base)
  • Pine Gap (major control station for ABM radar, which is fairly relevant in a nuclear exchange)
  • maybe Cairns
  • Canberra (capital)

Obvious civilian targets are, yeah, the five state capitals Brisbane/Sydney/Melbourne/Adelaide/Perth, especially Syd/Melb.

And, obviously, it only takes one high-altitude nuke to EMP much of the continent, so why wouldn't you?

Agreed that they might not have the nukes to hit all of those.

Adelaide is usually upwind of me (as is Perth, though it's far enough away to be less of a problem), and frankly Victoria's weather is weird enough that I'm not entirely confident in being upwind of Melbourne (I'm in Bendigo). And, well, EMP is still a thing. But yes, fallout is much less of a danger than in the 'States.

WRT number of ICBMs, remember that they have MIRVs (i.e. in some cases "one ICBM" can drop nukes on 12 different cities as long as they're close enough to each other). Australia is also closer to China than the USA, so some of their missiles that can't hit the USA can hit us.

Stockpile lots of food! Just because there’s theoretically a lot of available land doesn’t mean there’s not going to be mass starvation in the event of a nuclear conflict, for multiple reasons.

  1. Local and international logistical breakdown. International commerce is going to grind to a halt for several years. Maybe even several decades. Maybe even forever. Domestic supply chains will too. Even a limited nuclear conflict will likely involve targeting major rail and logistics terminals. Just because there’s food somewhere in the country doesn’t mean there’s going to be any wherever you are.
  2. There’s likely going to be massive food shortages after a nuclear war for several years, several decades even. The American Midwest and the Russo-Ukrainian steppe feed over two billion people on the planet. Those are going to be fallow for a long, long time. And although there’s a hundred pedants on the Motte that will fight me about this, no one really knows what large scale nuclear a war will do in the long term to the environment. Food is probably going to be tight everywhere for a while. Which leads me to...
  3. Forced requisitioning. What happens when what’s left of NATO starts demanding food subsidies from Australia for continued protection from China? What happens when Chinese troops roll up on the shore and announce that Australia’s food supplies are all being socialized to feed the three hundred million remaining Chinese people? You are after all the only non-irradiated food source on this side of the planet. What happens if your own government starts rationing and sends out commissars to take all the food that isn’t nailed down?

Additionally, you must acquire a leather jacket, a souped-up fast car and a sawed-off shotgun. If the rest of us Mottizens are dead, you have a moral duty to live out all our Mad Max LARP fantasies for us.

What happens if your own government starts rationing and sends out commissars to take all the food that isn’t nailed down?

Then the stockpile is irrelevant because it would be taken by those commissars.

It's tricky to come up with a situation where both I actually need the food and I get to keep it, particularly since I'm regional, not rural (a cult compound in the middle of nowhere can definitely use the food, but I don't live in one).

It's tricky to come up with a situation where both I actually need the food and I get to keep it

Not really. There are plenty of potential scenarios where the rationing doesn't provide enough food but you also don't have such a humongous stockpile that the goverment would bother (or even know to) to go to great lengths to confiscate amounts that can't feed an entire large military unit or something like that.

Solar panels and battery with an islandable inverter that you can physically disconnect from the grid. EMP shielding won't do much if your electrical assets are on the wrong end of 100MV of induced transmission wire.

If you have land, then planting potatoes could be a godsend. Potatoes have almost everything you need foodwise.

It might be a good idea to start planting the potatoes now so you'll be able to scale up production rapidly if the need should arise.

I'm wondering if a hydroponic setup (maybe in a greenhouse?) would be a good way to protect from fallout.

Australia is not going to have a long-lasting food shortage due to our immense food production and paucity of viable nuclear targets

You may still have them once you get a fuel shortage. Growing food is one thing, trucking it to the cities is another. Planting new crops the next year will be hard without fuel for the agricultural equipment. Australia has a lot of coal, but you can't just put it in a truck. Coal can be liquified, but you'd need to have the infrastructure for that in place already, plus you'd need to modify the engines, which, modern eco-conscious computer-controlled engines aren't going to like much. You also need spare parts; this problem is, again, exacerbated by the fact that modern agricultural equipment is often locked down by the manufacturer so they can milk you for repairs, which will be a problem when their HQ in the USA gets nuked.

I think you might be underestimating the sheer scale of Australia's food surplus; we could lose a lot of efficiency without Australians starving (as opposed to Asia starving from our exports stopping), because we've got 2.5 times the arable land/people ratio of even the USA. Transporting it is still an issue, but Australia does have some oil.

Fortunately a lot of Australian food can walk in flocks for quite surprising distances! They wouldn't even have to become nomads

Solar panels, for charging devices(and access to a charger can be a valuable trade good if networks are operating). Potassium iodide. Vodka or whiskey- hard liquor is a reliable trade good and it has a few uses anyways. I’d swap the bicycle for a moped. You’re in Australia and thus don’t have the ability to get ahold of firearms, but alternative/less lethal self defense makes sense.

I’d also get a swamp cooler, batteries, and decent toolkit.

Solar panels, for charging devices(and access to a charger can be a valuable trade good if networks are operating).

Any electronics in them will be toast from a single EMP. Possibly also the panels themselves.

Keep them in a faraday cage until you need them?

If you're storing this stuff purely for use after a nuclear exchange, wouldn't you store it in a DIY Faraday cage?

You'd hope so, but I'm not sure if people realize just how much trouble that is with solar panels which aren't exactly tiny and obviously can't be used while they're in such specialized storage. You can't just wrap them in aluminium foil or similar super lightweight "protection".

Doing a bit of googling, the solar panels would probably be the highest risk since they have the longest dimensions and thus highest field strength difference from end to end.

Update: apparently tiny solar panels are, in fact, a thing. The emergency radio I bought has, in addition to its hand-crank and charging port, a ~5cm2 solar panel on it. I can't imagine it provides much power (it does have a cable to charge other things), but eh.

(Given the solar panel, I didn't even bother asking if the radio was EMP-proof; it's going in foil if/when there's a crisis.)

Doing a bit of googling, the solar panels would probably be the highest risk since they have the longest dimensions and thus highest field strength difference from end to end.

Note that size only matters here if it's the size of a conductor (i.e. metal) attached to a semiconductor, not the size of the semiconductor itself (because the semiconductor's resistance also depends on size and that cancels out).

But that's kind of irrelevant; yes, photovoltaic solar cells are low-voltage semiconductor devices (specifically, they're giant diodes) and are thus likely toast if exposed to EMP. Solar-thermal can be EMP-proof, as there's no specific need for semiconductors and metals don't really care about EMP, but AIUI solar-thermal generators are more a thing for power stations than something remotely portable.

metals don't really care about EMP,

Metals do care about EMP but only by heating from the induced currents. This is why power delivery networks are going to be toast and can have problems even from major geomagnetic storms. For shortish length and reasonably large surface area (ie. most things you're likely to have at home), it of course won't be a problem.

So really two mechanisms: field strength induced overvoltage breakdown in semiconductors and heating from high currents induced to long wires.

This is why power delivery networks are going to be toast and can have problems even from major geomagnetic storms.

It's specifically the transformers that are vulnerable to E3; the extra voltage/current buggers up the assumptions that go into their design, so they lose efficiency (efficiency at transmitting the normal power from power stations) and, yes, overheat. Of course, power grids don't work without the transformers, but the long wires themselves are in no danger (we know that one experimentally due to the Carrington event).

But yes, transformers are metal and they are vulnerable if not unplugged.

I'd argue for proper storage shielded against EMP - a couple metal ammo cans with a grounding wire would be very good, a microwave would be mediocre, don't forget dessicator packets and maybe oxygen absorbers or displacers - and a couple smartphones, loaded with info and entertainment. A local backup of digital docs you care about, could be a thumb drive, probably cloud storage services with maximum replication will survive but be spotty to access. Basic cellular service will be a priority to restore, fast data won't. If you want to splurge on EMP shielding a closet-scale volume, an ebike and the delicate bits of a solar power system. I dunno if solar panels will be impacted by EMP. Consumables for your tech, tires and lubricants for your vehicles. Food. Water filters, rule of thumb is 2L a day, more if you're working hard. Gas for cooking, a compatible stove. Maybe a compatible generator? Multivitamins.

...you know what, just read everything on https://www.ready.gov/ .

Fun fact.

In 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. government updated their page on nuclear war. They reminded people that, inside nuclear shelters, they should be mindful to socially distance.

Because of Covid. 🤦

Potassium iodine tablets.

A gun.

Hmm, hadn't put two and two together regarding 131I having a long enough half-life that I'd need to eat before it was all gone and also being somewhat inhalable. Guess that goes on the list; thanks.

Guns are a legal headache here in Oz, and going the illegal route doesn't seem like a great cost-benefit at present. I suppose I could get a compound bow; those are the most effective fully-legal weapon of which I'm aware.

Look into 3D printing a gun. Get a gun by all means necessary.

I recall reading a Substack article or a comment here about how the NYT article on early female coders doesn't represent the whole picture. It asserted that women were mainly doing equivalent of data entry.

Could someone help me find it?

Has anything noteworthy improved in the world in the past 10-15 years?

I've wondered if it's just a natural product of depression or aging, but I was thinking recently about how absolutely everything feels as if it were so much better a few short years ago. Housing/food/necessities more affordable, political discourse less toxic, the internet was both more wild west but also more self-regulating, TV was in its golden age (Breaking Bad, The Wire, Mad Men, etc.), sports felt more like an escape than circus, technology still held promise of a brighter future rather than potential enslavement of humanity, people still talked to one another without being addicted to smartphones, the media was still somewhat believable, medicine was still a respected profession by a wide margin, college was the smart choice for many/most young people... I could go on but you get the idea.

What has actually improved in the time since? Uber? Starlink? That's all I can think of, and I don't use either one.

From a British perspective, things that were not widely available in 2009 but now are include:

  • Smartphones
  • Keyhole surgery
  • Cars with powerful driver-assist features like parking assist and adaptive cruise control
  • Induction hobs
  • Affordable next-day delivery of online shopping
  • Ocado and similar grocery-delivery services

Interestingly, "Uber" is not on the list because London had a healthy ecosystem of minicab apps before Uber came in and crushed them all by pricing below cost.

Also, we had mass unemployment in 2009 (remember Subprime!) and now don't.

Smartphones are much better. Video streaming is much faster. It's much easier to navigate in a car by hooking it up to your phone and using the built-in display. Half decent laptops are much more affordable. Good quality large televisions are much more affordable.

More on the technology point: cheap storage. It feels like every time I go into town the flash drives and SSDs in the tech aisle are twice as large and half as expensive as the last time I went.

Solar and battery technology have rapidly expanded, greatly reducing reliance on fossil fuels.

I live in a bubble and I don't know what other people do, but to me Substack has brought a real renaissance in self-published long-form articles; the discoverability and follow-ability, and ease of doing these things, is greatly improved from anything else I knew of before.

To give kind of a corny answer to your broader question: I more or less agree that most things have gotten worse, including several things which were really important to me. (The landscape of fiction publishing is a big one.) But it's not entirely a bad thing; to some extent it forces us to define what is important to us and actively fight for it, instead of assuming that a gentle and friendly world will keep providing it without our doing anything. For example the smartphone problem: if you respond to this by intentionally selecting for "people who have fought this off and remained unaddicted" as your friend group, you may end up with a cooler and more resilient friend group than you would have if it had never happened.

TL;DR I agree with you, but let's make the best of it.

I'm getting the same impression overall.

A long time ago, normies were sold a lie: "modern capitalism is so great that even average people with modest means will have access to affordable loans". This lie went out the window after 2008. Then they were sold another lie: "globalization will mean that producers will compete in the free market for your money, so goods will become ever more affordable". This lie also went out the window after the catastrophic economic consequences of COVID lockdowns started to have an effect on average people. Now the system is done with lies because they're no longer needed, and it rules through intimidation, threats, blackpilling and gaslighting.

Has anything improved in your life?

There's a bias Steven Pinker talks about in Enlightnement Now. In surveys, respondents will predict that the average person in their country will get poorer in the next few years, while simultaneously predicting that they themselves will get richer.

Do you earn more money now? Live in a bigger house or have more savings? Multiply that by most people on the planet.

I was a student, so I had no income, but make less now that I thought I would make as a starting salary, live in a much much smaller house. I have a little bit more savings, but I'm also considerably closer to retirement.

I thought you were actually going to say something different. Most people's lives just get worse and worse as they get older, but each generation is better off than the last.

Really depends a lot on the person. I loved being a kid, hated being a teen, I liked being a young adult but hated college life and now love being a parent & working ( though I'd prefer a different job at this point). And I'm barely past 30! I don't think I'll become less happy for quite a while. Probably peak happiness is still in the future, since I'm already looking forward to my kids being a bit older so that we can do stuff we currently can't.

I don't think any time of my life after about 5 was happy, but I do enjoy the freedom of adulthood, so I'm probably happier now than I was. But problems just seem to compound throughout life for the most part, and your health and looks get worse over time.

Most people's lives just get worse and worse as they get older...

That's definitely not true. It's more that you exchange one set of pleasures for another as you get older. Whether that is as fulfilling as before is more up to the individual than anything else. For example, I'm just about 40 now. Compared to when I was 20, I:

  • Make almost 5x as much money (not inflation adjusted to be fair but still significant)
  • Own a house
  • Got a girlfriend, married her
  • Have nephews who are an incredible bright spot in my life
  • Finished my degree (note that I don't mean I graduated at 22, I mean I flunked out of college and finished later)
  • Am in worse shape physically
  • Don't have as much free time as I used to (but still have a fair bit cause I don't have kids)
  • No longer can enjoy my friends' company as easily as I could when we were all in school together

There are both good and bad things in my life since then. But I think they balance each other out. My life may not be better than it was 20 years ago, but it isn't worse either.

80 year old East German: “Things were better under Communism.”

“Why’s that?”

“Sex was better then.”

Answering the question as stated, though perhaps not as intended, the vast majority of the people in the world have seen substantial improvements in their material standard of living over the past two decades. In some places that might just mean going from being desperately poor, sick, and starving, to being desperately poor, malnourished, and overworked, but China went from being a source of cheap plastic knockoffs to a maker of electric cars and smartphones on par with anything Western companies can produce, there's now high-speed rail in Indonesia, Morocco, and Uzbekistan, and countries like Malaysia and Poland have more or less converged with the developed economies.

Limiting ourselves to the US, Gwern has a good writeup on the subject, though it's pre-pandemic and so misses things like anti-obesity drugs. Obviously nothing on the scale of first getting access to cars or the internet, but that's a pretty high bar to expect to clear every generation, and even then there's a decent chance AI has you covered in that department. In the end though, whether we're born into a time of progress or decline (or material progress coupled with moral decline, or any combination thereof) is never under our control to begin with, so it's just something we have to learn how to accept and live with, whichever way the dice roll.

As to not duplicate from the other comment:

  • Compact utility vehicles, the turbocharged 2-litre 4 cylinder engine, and plug-in hybrids having more performance than non-V8 muscle cars of 15 years ago
  • All new cars are ludicrously luxurious by the standards of 15 years ago (performance models now have 600-1000 HP)
  • Small trucks made a [limited] comeback
  • All new construction is ludicrously luxurious by the standards of 15 years ago
  • Grocery pre-compilation for later pickup is cheaper than the cart rentals; delivery not much more expensive than that
  • Food delivery at very reasonable rates; ride-sharing limits what taxis can charge
  • Board games have gone through a renaissance; RP (D&D, etc.) is much more popular and approachable
  • Credit card skimming was 100% solved via NFC (UX of terminals notwithstanding)
  • Android phones more likely to be supported for the physical lifetime of the device
  • Holosun and Primary Arms drove the price of a good rifle or pistol optic down dramatically
  • Optic sights on handguns now widespread, and the variety and capabilities of compact and subcompact pistols in particular has increased dramatically
  • The collapse in price of good AR-15s, Kel-Tec in general, Palmetto State Armory in general, (US only but has knock-on effects worldwide) NFA being completely trivialized means innovation can continue (shoulder braces mean short rifles mean cartridges designed around short barrels, forced reset triggers mean full-auto is functionally no longer banned, e-Form 1 filing for silencers mean you get them in 2 weeks, not 2 months or 2 years)
  • 3D printing, and the accessibility thereof
  • Anti-piracy law is well and truly a dead letter (people were still worried about BitTorrent lawsuits 10 years ago, VPNs weren't yet a thing, Internet Archive didn't exist [for now])
  • Indie games (Minecraft most importantly), mature online distribution for games and music (Steam, Bandcamp, Spotify to a point) and books, backwards compatibility for consoles, subscription services for games
  • Distributed funding platforms (specifically Kickstarter and Patreon)
  • Effectively unlimited cellular data plans, and cell plans having fallen in price by 50% (especially considering inflation)
  • Dramatically cheaper plane travel (except for the last year or so)
  • People work from home more often
  • Computers are faster and consume 10x less power (netbooks finally reached maturity as tablets and hyper-thin laptops)
  • SSDs made computers dramatically faster (this was later taken away by MS bloat, but was true for the majority of the last 15 years)
  • Functional programming principles make UI development far easier

And that's all I have for now.

Functional programming principles make UI development far easier

Can you explain

Based on what little I know about cars, "muscle cars" as such disappeared after California and other US states enacted all sorts of emission regulations in the name of protecting the environment and so on. I think it's just another example of Western civilization becoming ever more lame-ass, but whatever. Anyway, I find the concept of a "non-V8 muscle car" sort of laughable.

All new construction is ludicrously luxurious by the standards of 15 years ago

Huh? Like...what?

All new cars are ludicrously luxurious by the standards of 15 years ago (performance models now have 600-1000 HP)

What does more HP have to do with luxury?

"muscle cars" as such disappeared after California and other US states enacted all sorts of emission regulations in the name of protecting the environment and so on

Muscle cars simply became their own segment; they simply stopped putting V8s in everything.

What does more HP have to do with luxury?

Past about 300-400 you don't actually need any more. Stuff you want and don't need is generally 'luxury', like 500 screens, massaging seats, etc.

Anyway, I find the concept of a "non-V8 muscle car" sort of laughable.

Larger turbo-4s have at this point totally eclipsed the V6 (even in trucks). I think the only company that still offers one is Nissan (and that's because they're reusing an old design- the Z is not a new car). Most cars that have V8s are turbos now too (trucks not so much), so instead of 300-400 HP you're getting 600-700.

Basically anything that can be mass produced at scale has dropped greatly in price over the last 15 years or so. Consumer electronics, vehicle parts, musical instruments, firearms and accessories, some building materials, clothing and shoes etc. Electronics also seems to have reached a sort of plateau of capabilities where you don't need a new phone or pc every 2 years to use current software.

Yep. Say what you will about China replacing essentially all domestic manufacturing, but China is damn good at making cheap stuff.

It's kinda mind-boggling how cheap some stuff is today.

Just for one random example, you can buy a blender today for about the same price as it cost in 1970, and it will be delivered to your door cheaply in less than 48 hours.

I've been playing the drums since about 1988. An entry level drum set in 2024 still costs roughly what it did in 1988 in whole dollars, while the quality has gone up significantly. Cymbals have risen in price a bit as there is still a fair amount of unavoidable manual labor involved, but the actual wooden drums shells, metal hardware, and plastic heads have benefited tremendously from improvements in mass production and automation.

Some of your bullet points reminded me that quality home gym stuff is way easier to get and probably cheaper when adjusted for inflation than it was.

Lots of things are better. Off the top of my head:

  • Cancer is much more treatable

  • Many forms of surgery are better

  • GLP-1 agonists will lower obesity rates and improve life spans by multiple years

  • LLMs have made it much easier to get answers to random questions

  • Twitter has enabled free speech to a greater degree than ever before

  • Credit cards and ATMs just work in other countries now, where they didn't before

  • Most people have good navigation systems on their phone. In 2009, they didn't.

  • Electric cars are available now and have many advantages over gas cars in specific circumstances

  • Electric bikes provide a new form of transportation

I'm sure I'm missing lots. Personally I think the western world has gotten worse due to declining social connections. But 2 steps back, 1 step forward! There are many areas where things are better than ever.

Twitter has enabled free speech to a greater degree than ever before

Is this meant to be some joke?

No. Prior to Elon's takeover of Twitter, you were basically at the mercy of media outlets to filter things for you.

Even pre-Elon Twitter vastly increased the amount of information available to an average person, so long as it wasn't in the relatively small subset of things which were censored.

so long as it wasn't in the relatively small subset of things which were censored

So basically cat videos, baby pictures and other content if approved by the Blue Tribe.

So, what are you reading?

I’m still on The Conquest of Bread and Future Shock.

Picking up Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, a book about the inner universe of a 16th century miller who was executed by the Inquisition. The title is a reference to his belief that the world was created from a chaos “just as cheese is made out of milk” and “worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.” The man himself sounds like a decent man, not particularly crazy, concerned with the money-making aspects of the Church and the apparent absurdity of its teachings, preferring a simplified, natural religion of doing good deeds.

Started reading And The Band Played On, about the handling of the very beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the early 80s. Seems interesting so far, and I have at least some expectation of it going against some of the things I believed.

To pre-register what I currently believe, I think it was probably handled within about a standard deviation of about as well as it could reasonably be expected to have been, considering both the highly novel nature of the disease and the behavior of the victims, including being highly reluctant both to seek medical care and to cease high-risk behaviors like sharing needles to inject drugs and highly promiscuous gay sex. I am skeptical that any reluctance of authority figures to take it seriously due to the nature of the victims was a bigger factor than either of those. Considering that even now, ~45 years later, we still don't have a great handle on medical treatment, it's hard to see doing more sooner helping much. The only thing they could have semi-realistically done differently was to crack down much harder on those high-risk behaviors, which probably would have been pretty ugly and would have further outraged the affected community. So yeah, AIDS sucks and hindsight is 20/20, but give us a realistic alternative that the people involved could actually have done if you want to really convince me that we screwed it up.

I'll caveat, as before, that some of Shilts' history is... somewhere between rumor and hearsay. If you read a particularly horrifying quote said by a dead man to an unnamed person in a private conversation, or if there's certainty about the internal state of mind about someone the author never talked with, there's reason to be more skeptical than the prose is.

To pre-register what I currently believe, I think it was probably handled within about a standard deviation of about as well as it could reasonably be expected to have been, considering both the highly novel nature of the disease and the behavior of the victims, including being highly reluctant both to seek medical care and to cease high-risk behaviors like sharing needles to inject drugs and highly promiscuous gay sex.

And The Band Played On doesn't do a lot, imo, to challenge those bounds. For all Shilts puts a lot of blame on Reagan and co, most of it's a complaint for more funding or public announcement, both of which were not very plausible to change without hindsight; most other models run around some early surveillance that the US CDC simply wasn't set up to do in that era. I think there's a steelman available, but it's not generally what people want to talk about.

Thanks, I'll check that thread out after I finish reading.

I'll caveat, as before, that some of Shilts' history is... somewhere between rumor and hearsay.

I did notice that kind of thing, both in this book and the last new non-fiction book I read, The Devil's Chessboard, which I also posted about. They're both non-fiction books that manage to be decently engaging. I think part of the price of that is the authors filling in and making up or embellishing a lot of details about what people said, thought, and were like. On the one hand, it helps draw more casual readers in, but on the other, how could anybody possibly know that for sure? What might a different observer with different opinions think about these people and their situations? You don't get that in this type of book. Maybe it qualifies for being a distinct genre? I'd like to think I'm decent at picking up that theme and not taking the impressions too seriously at least.

I'm finishing up On The Edge by Nate Silver in print. The River vs Village dichotomy is really getting sweaty now that he's talking about things like NFTs and SBF. I like Silver a lot, but this is starting to feel like a Law Review Note where a student picked a topic at the start of the semester only to realize that there really isn't much to say about it, and tried to grind it out anyway. I'm hoping maybe the last 100 pages are about cheating, which might salvage the whole project if he has a robust theory of cheating.

I'm still on Seeing Like a State on my tablet. I'm sure I have nothing to say that hasn't already been said about it.

On audiobook I just listened to Down and Out in Paradise, a quick bio of Anthony Bourdain my wife got on audible. Holy shit that book was terrible. It combined a preening retroactive wokeness (Can you BELIEVE that Tony referred to people as Puerto Ricans and Swedes?) with a deep misogyny whenever it discussed Tony's partners. The author didn't seem to have gotten more or less any original material, no one close to Bourdain spoke to him much. Another book that really felt like the author got an advance, tried to do some research, didn't find anything, but wrote the book anyway. Most of the pages are just a rehash of Kitchen Confidential with occasional emphasis from another public interview or published material. Then the author drop facts at random, but not really go into them. He points out that Anthony Bourdain was on steroids near the end of his life, but doesn't go into when or why he started doing it. Which is emblematic of my problems with the whole book! I'm probably more pro-steroid than most, but there's something obviously weird about Anthony Bourdain doing steroids, it doesn't fit his core public persona, how did he get into it, how did he justify it to himself? The lack of research makes his attempts at deflating the Bourdain myth fall completely flat. I would highly recommend against this book, read Kitchen Confidential and any post-suicide profile of Bourdain and you'll get the same substance.

Very slowly, I'm reading Phenomenology of Spirit, I've started the Half Hour Hegel series, which goes through the whole book paragraph by paragraph. I am still many many many videos from the end, it feels kind of like the year I spent reading the bible in daily bite size chunks.

If anyone knows one, I'm looking for a good history of the Kennedy family. Joe to JFK/RFK/Ted.

I'm reading Nate's blog currently, and this review of the book does not terribly surprise me. In general, I get the impression that he has a prodigious ability to silence his own biases when the data goes against them - in my experience a very unusual skill - , combined with a serious attitude to competently do the single thing he is doing. But in most other ways he is not actually very exceptional. His polling/election model, which he is focusing pretty much all his attention on, is well done and very reasonable, but it doesn't actually include anything surprising. It's just that the competition tend to blatantly ignore or diminish the biases of their favourite polls or use kind-of insane assumptions, such as current-538 (which isn't affiliated with Nate in any way, under the hood) enforcing a fundamentals-only polling approach that, among other things, led to a better election forecast when DEMs polled badly.

Symbols of Transformation by Carl Jung

If you like to read pages upon pages of "And in this culture they have..." to prove an archetype exists (I don't) then this is the book for you.

Nevertheless I have been trudging through it because interspersed throughout there are tidbits of information essentially about mommy issues (which I would say I and a significant portion of modern men have) so it feels like this weird job of like panning for gold or finding a needle in a haystack or whatever.

Worth it but it's been a slog. Can't wait to be finished.

oooh that sounds like the book for me. send it over once you're done ;)

I don't have a take. I have issues and I'm tired of them.

I'll say this. Jung tends to be misunderstood IMO in the sense that he gets lumped in with mystics, and while he is something of a mystic he's actually really big on living in the external world, and the whole inner journey thing is only a thing you do when you have no choice and it's dangerous because you can get "stuck down there", i.e. so in love with your introversion that you get separated from reality and become increasingly useless even as you become so captivated and bedazzled by "insights" and imagine yourself to be specially favored by the higher powers.

Jung seems to be a proponent of "getting over yourself" and taking the slings and arrows of living as a person among the other people. When you do find yourself on the journey, he seems to be a proponent of caution, of a skeptical attitude toward the stuff you're being "blessed" with, of staying at all times connected with anything that keeps you connected to the real world (elsewhere, I think in his autobiography, he mentions that when he had his famous "encounter with the unconscious" he used his duties to his practice and to his children to keep him grounded in the external world), and of getting the fuck out of there once you find the thing you're looking for.

"Mommy issues" is not a term he uses in this book per se, but he talks extensively about the regressive longing for the warmth and protection of the womb and how dangerous this can be for an adult, and it made me think of my own cowardice, my tendency to want to be some sort of exception, my unwillingness to face the simple facts of my own external life such as my isolation and near-friendlessness and my unwillingness to do basic common sense things about these like taking up a hobby (Jung is big on common sense solutions and like being a normal fucking functional person in society, again very misunderstood guy). It's been a surprisingly effective wake-up call for me since there are few voices these days I'm actually willing to listen to but his is one of them for some reason.

Here's a fun quotation I just read from the book:

In reality the neurosis is manufactured anew every day, with the help of a false attitude that consists in the neurotic’s thinking and feeling as he does and justifying it by his theory of neurosis.

My theory of neurosis has been bad for me nooooo 😭😭😭

I'm reading Surface Detail, the 8th culture novel. I'm pretty far in and fairly disappointed so far. I'm comparing it to Matter which I just finished. It's apparently poorly thought of, but I'm comparing the vivid imagery of the eternal, subterranean war in the latter with the simplistic, extended exposition for each new element in Surface Detail.

I'm close to finishing the series at this point, hoping that Hydrogen Sonata isn't a poor sendoff.

yeah I love the Culture series but sadly some of the later ones are pretty lackluster

I'd love to hear your opinions of Hydrogen Sonata when you're done. I didn't like Matter as much as Surface Detail, but I thought both of them were a noticeable step down from The Player of Games, Use of Weapons, Excession, or Inversions, and I never got around to reading Hydrogen Sonata at all. Of course, I might have stopped from the get-go after Consider Phlebas if I hadn't previously been assured by a friend that better sequels were to follow.

Do author's works have the same "bathtub curve" for failure probability that engineered products do? Not quite for the same reasons, but for similar ones? Their first book(s) are done without enough practice, so have issues due to lack of experience. Then they hit a personal Golden Age. Then when their stock of good original ideas starts to wear out they either dig into the mediocre original ideas or they get repetitive.

I thought Hydrogen Sonata was an okay novel (by Bank's standards). I read it after exhausting the others and I wished the Culture had a better send-off. If I had to pick favorites it would be either Player of Games or Excession. Perhaps Matter as a third.

On the other hand, if you're done with the Culture, the Algebraist is really good even if it's not set in the main universe.

Can someone steelman humor to me?

I’m beginning to wonder if humor is actually bad for us. Important qualification: in-person humor exchanged between friends is amazing for connection and friendship, and so in this capacity it is instrumental toward a good thing (bonds and brotherhoods). But this is no longer the dominant form of humor. The dominant form of humor is now worthless, distracting, and frankly retarded stuff on social media. This humor serves no instrumental purpose. It’s not the teacher whose sense of humor enhances your comfort and learning. It’s not a friend whose sense of humor bonds guys together. It’s not Scott’s wordplay that makes his ideas memorable. It’s just cheap pleasure. And I think it distracts people from taking life seriously.

Have you ever been in a serious conversation where someone keeps making jokes, and it’s impossible to obtain the same seriousness again? To me that’s the Worst Thing Ever, and I think this mental state is how many people are living because humor has penetrated every social media platform. The way many friends now stay in touch is sharing an instagram reel or a meme. But this is all occurring online, so rather than reinforcing friendship it reinforces (anti)social media consumption.

It kind of sounds like you're saying "I like X when executed well, but hate when it's executed poorly". Which is true of pretty much everything. Whenever someone writes or tells a joke, they have no idea how it will be received: it might land or it might bomb.

Sure there are instrumental functions to humour (easing tension, conveying an idea in a memorable way) but that's not what humour is for. Even if expressing a political sentiment in a humorous or satirical way made me less likely to remember it than expressing it in a dry deracinated fashion - I would still love to laugh. Laughing so hard you can hardly breathe is one of the most delightful experiences life has to offer, right up there with delicious food, beautiful music or orgasm. It needs no justification - it is its own justification.

While I can somewhat appreciate where this post is coming from, it is bordering on a parody of autistic rationalist overthinking. You might as well ask for a steelmanned case for listening to music, or dancing, or looking at a beautiful sunset. Laughter is an inherently positive human experience. It doesn’t require a justification. That’s not to say that humor can’t be employed toward malicious ends, just as music can be used to deliver damaging philosophical/thematic content. It’s just to say that humor and music and love and joy are, in and of themselves, indispensable parts of what makes life worth living.

The distinction you draw between laughter as a social lubricant and laughter as a commodified social media engagement-farming product has the shape of a compelling argument, but fundamentally I think that laughter is basically equally valuable whether it’s my friend making me laugh, or a comedian on the internet making me laugh. In fact the latter is often more valuable, because professional comedians are more skilled at reliably inspiring laughter than most of my friends and loved ones are.

Now, the point about how humor is often used as a crutch or a dodge in order to avoid having to be serious is a fair point. While humor is good, serious discussion and introspection are also good (just like sometimes negative emotions are valuable as a counterbalance to positive ones) and I agree with you that humor can be used as a sort of manipulative “cheat” or “exploit” in discourse. Unsophisticated observers (and often even sophisticated ones) risk coming away from a debate with the erroneous impression that the funnier and more wry/sardonic guy won, even if his arguments are worse.

There’s a case for humor being inappropriate for certain scenarios; I love dancing maybe more than almost anyone else here, but I would consider it wildly inappropriate to dance at a funeral.

@faceh makes the case below that humor is maybe the most important element of charisma. This would be very flattering for me to agree with, since I am personally quite funny. I have performed stand-up comedy, I was a member of an improv comedy team, I’ve performed in dozens of comedic staged productions and made hundreds of people laugh. Outside of my day job, I moonlight as a bar trivia host (I’ve been cagey about giving specifics about this before because of fears of doxxing, but at this point I’ve given so many other details about my life that this additional piece isn’t going to move the needle) and I’m very comfortable working a room.

Yet @Ponder makes what I think is the correct observation that charisma is very dependent on confidence, and on the ability to confidently and smoothly adapt to shifting social/interpersonal scenarios. While I have a strong sense of humor, I can really only consistently deploy that humor if I feel like I’m “in my element”. If I’m nervous or concerned that my attempt at humor will be seen as inappropriate or unwelcome, I usually clam up.

A truly charismatic person, in contrast, makes every scenario his element. He creates the paradigm wherein his humor will be appreciated. (That or he simply has such a keen ability to intuitively assess every interpersonal scenario that he just knows exactly which canned joke or humorous observation will fit any given opening.)

It’s well-known that many very funny people are also profoundly insecure and self-hating. I think part of this is that absurdity is often a major source of comedy; recognizing the contrast between expectation and reality - exploiting cognitive dissonance - is a reliable way to get laughs. However, individuals who are good at spotting absurd, fake, hypocritical, bizarre quirks in the things normal people take for granted - good at de-encrypting the comforting illusions that help normal people function and maintain emotional stability - are usually not very well-adjusted, well-socialized people. In that sense, humor could in some way be self-destructive. Making others laugh while making oneself miserable. Pro-social but personally maladaptive.

Self-deprecating comedy is an especially powerful and dangerous double-edged sword in that sense. I know I’ve resorted to self-deprecation in the past as a way of trying to seize control of the things about me that people make fun of. I can draw attention to the stuff about me that’s superficially funny and keep the conversation focused on that, so that nobody notices the much more hurtful things that they could take shots at if they were brought to light. Chris Farley made a lot of hay out of fat jokes, whereas the things about himself that he actually hated, and which he did not want people to notice or joke about, were ultimately much more destructive to him (physically and emotionally) than his weight ever was. Robin Williams (who, to be honest, was not actually consistently funny, if you ask me) was constantly bombarding his audiences with a chaotic stream of disparate humor-adjacent quips and silly voices, such that the real man at the center of it all became inscrutable.

Personally, I like to stay away from satirical/topical commentary and focus on stuff that’s far more anodyne and ideologically-empty. Either stuff that’s just harmless and uncontroversial (wordplay, physical/visual comedy, whimsical surrealist stuff), confessional storytelling (guys like Mike Birbiglia and some of Louis C.K.’s material) or stuff that’s so over-the-top self-awarely “shocking” that it can’t possibly be mistaken for sincerity (guys like Anthony Jeselnik, Jimmy Carr, etc.). Leave the actual serious shit for people to talk about seriously.

You might as well ask for a steelmanned case for listening to music, or dancing, or looking at a beautiful sunset

But I have asked these to myself. I’m still considering the steelman case for music. The overuse of music is problematic because it’s a superstimuli that utilizes aural emotional cues. When you listen to too many sad songs you may become desensitized to the natural aural cues of sadness (in the voices of others, primarily). At the same time, because music is simply a packaged emotional state, we have to be wary of enjoying misleading music, which presents an emotional state that isn’t beneficial or realistic. The consequences of poor music consumption are both the potential dulling of real life emotional sensitivity (listening too much) and in being carried away into a fantastical emotional state (obsessing over the wrong kind of music). There’s adolescents who experience unreasonable despair because they listen to too much music of despair, just like how in 18th century youths were captivated reading the Sorrows of Young Werther (which Dostoevsky mentions in the opening of one of his books). This is a normal line of inquiry in the Socratic and Christian West, by the way. It’s only today that we have the idea that human proclivities and interests shouldn’t be instrumental to a greater good. Dances were organized to increase communal bonding and enhance mate selection, while conveying the physical movements of peacefulness and mirth rather than aggression. Sunsets were enjoyed in a spiritual way which deterred one from pantheistic thinking. Etc.

Laughter is an inherently positive human experience

So is doing opiates. But the reason we don’t do opiates is because the pleasure is transient and “pleasure” is a limited experience, so if we experience pleasure from opiates, we experience less pleasure from real life — which has disastrous consequences. So it is with an inappropriate use of laughter. Laughter is relief, and if you experience too much relief from the comedic superstimuli, you may experience less relief where it matters — real life. This is really the root claim… laughter can be deeply relieving, but it’s a relief that is completely unattached from anything significant.

This is a normal line of inquiry in the Socratic and Christian West, by the way.

Yes, I know, I’ve read Plato as well. I remember rolling my eyes and audibly groaning at the passage where he implores the state to regulate the musical modes people are allowed to listen to, such that music can only be used for “pro-social” ends.

It’s only today that we have the idea that human proclivities and interests shouldn’t be instrumental to a greater good.

Absolutely untrue. We have examples of hedonistic philosophy as far back as the Epic Of Gilgamesh; the alewife Siduri offers the advice: “Fill your belly. Day and night make merry. Let days be full of joy. Dance and make music day and night… These alone are the concern of men.” In Ancient Greece, Socrates’ student Aristippus of Cyrene founded a whole philosophical school of explicit hedonism. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were arguing about the particulars of egoist hedonism 200 years ago.

Dances were organized to increase communal bonding and enhance mate selection, while conveying the physical movements of peacefulness and mirth rather than aggression.

Do you genuinely believe that this is the primary reason people have danced throughout history? Not to experience spontaneous joy? I think you have a very blinkered understanding of human psychology. People fifty thousand years ago were quite capable of having fun, and of doing things spontaneously without needing to have all social action coordinated by authorities optimizing toward the “greater good”.

Sunsets were enjoyed in a spiritual way which deterred one from pantheistic thinking. Etc.

Again: When and by whom?

It’s so ironic, because what’s one of the most common conservative critiques of rationalist materialism? “You just want to reduce all human affairs into a systematizable spreadsheet. Your worldview leaves no room for organic human experience. You want every human action and utterance to have a quantifiable rationalistically-legible purpose, such that humans become mere cogs in a machine.” Yet to me, this is precisely what you are doing, and claiming that all the great Christian and/or Western civilizations of old were exactly like this! Where is the room for joy and spontaneity in any of this?

Why didn’t you think about it instead of “rolling your eyes and groaning audibly”? This doesn’t mean anything to me. My dog also rolls her eyes and sometimes groans and her reasoning is mediocre.

You have misinterpreted the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s an epic, which commemorates the deeds of a heroic man who meets a variety of figures and obstacles. The very existence of the Epic is a rebuke against hedonic philosophy. Siduri is a young woman who keeps wine, both symbolic of vanity. Gilgamesh argues against Siduri and moves on. The advice of Siduri is placed in the epic so that it can be rebuked by the writers of the epic. As your first example was way off I have to assume your others are as well.

Do you genuinely believe that this is the primary reason people have danced throughout history? Not to experience spontaneous joy?

Dances were not spontaneous in European history. They were organized, the dance routines themselves were orderly, they were scheduled on a calendar, and there were rules about gender intermingling. The only people I see dancing spontaneously in joy are homeless people, schizophrenics, and characters in Hollywood movies. Even today dancing is not spontaneous. You plan to attend an event in which you dance, and you conform to the dancing tradition of the group — this occurs even if you’re a member of the Crips!

I think you have a very blinkered understanding of human psychology

blinks

People fifty thousand years ago were quite capable of having fun

People 50,000 years ago are irrelevant.

Where is the room for joy and spontaneity in any of this?

“Spontaneity” is a late 20th century meme. But joy is a real thing, and it’s telling that we no longer speak in terms of joy today but fun. Joy is a deeper pleasure than fun. We wouldn’t say that a person who spontaneously binge drinks experiences “joy”, or the person who stands in a crowded bar jumping up and down. People experience joy from deeply satisfying experiences which don’t leave a residue of guilt but which are actually beneficial for them in every dimension (physical, spiritual, etc). There is joy around a campfire after a hike with friends, but there’s no joy in “spontaneous” unreasonable pleasure.

The advice of Siduri is placed in the epic so that it can be rebuked by the writers of the epic. As your first example was way off I have to assume your others are as well.

I never claimed that the author(s)/compiler(s) of the Epic agree with Siduri. I am saying that her existence in the text very clearly demonstrates that there were in fact people at that time who did espouse hedonism. Your claim was that hedonism is “a recent phenomenon”. Yet I have provided you with what I consider very strong evidence that it is not, in fact, recent. (And how convenient for you that you received to even give a cursory look at the other examples I provided.)

People 50,000 years ago are irrelevant.

Again, they are very much not irrelevant if your claim is that fun and hedonism are a recent phenomenon. If in fact people who are the exact opposite of “recent” can be shown to have fun, your argument falls apart.

When I read Tacitus’ account of the Germanic peoples, I see a great deal of spontaneity and unstructured play/fun. You don’t have to think this is a good or admirable way to live - I think there are a lot of very unsavory things about the lifestyle he imputes to them - but to flatly state that it didn’t exist strikes me as a highly tendentious claim.

People experience joy from deeply satisfying experiences which don’t leave a residue of guilt but which are actually beneficial for them in every dimension (physical, spiritual, etc). There is joy around a campfire after a hike with friends, but there’s no joy in “spontaneous” unreasonable pleasure.

Yeah no, this is a textbook example of joyless thinking, and it makes me wonder if you’ve ever actually experienced what normal people would think of as joyful.

Look, I agree with you that people should be temperate in their indulgences! I agree that the life of a heroin addict merits scorn! To be entirely ruled by one’s passions and incapable of distinguishing between the appropriate decorum in different scenarios is indeed beastly and unbecoming. However, everybody needs to be capable of letting loose sometimes. Everybody needs moments that are unstructured, unplanned, and not directed toward rationally-legible ends. I would not wish to live in a purely “Apollonian” civilization shorn of any appreciation for simple pleasures.

I've always had this problem with overbearing scores in film or blatantly manipulative music that dosen't stand up artistically.

Granted that films are supposed to be emotionally manipulative experiences (why else would you ever watch a horror film?) but yeah, I really, REALLY hate when a movie's score is trying to sell me on some moment as though it is a huge deal, be it the action, or romantic elements, or some 'huge' twist, and I NOTICE I'm being manipulated because the music is telling me to feel an emotion that the film simply hasn't earned or induced with its other elements.

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is the most obvious example of this experience for me.

Humor is a socially acceptable way to critique controversial topics. Historically, clowns have special permission from their society to parody or criticize defective aspects of their own culture.

In modern society it a way to signal intelligence. If you know something is not true but you also know there are social consequences to directly stating this then you can use humor to avoid the social consequences. Humor also allows you to shift the conversation from the object level (where you could objectively be proven wrong) to a social status game that is basically subjective.

Humor also gives people plausible deniability behind their true intentions. For instance, there is a yard sign that says, “In this house we believe:…science is real…love is love…”. Someone made a parody of this sign that says, “In this house we believe: Simplistic platitudes, trite tautologies, and semantically overloaded aphorisms are poor substitutes for respectful and rational discussions about complex issues”. The parody could have several meanings beyond the literal such as: the person is not a progressive, or the person thinks politics in general are a joke, or the person just thought it was a funny sign. Parody can also sometimes provide a defense that you are just giving homage to the original work.

Humor allows you convey your ideas as emotions/feelings instead of logical statements, which makes them more receptive to some audiences.

Humor (including funny memes) is often a more memorable way to convey an idea. A funny meme is much easier to recall than some long statistical argument about a topic.

Humor shows us a clash of perspectives in our ethical framework. It undermines self-righteous absolutism. It can show us the limits of our understanding, which can lead to self-transcendence. For a further steelman see: https://youtube.com/watch?v=KcvsipxzjXw

Have you ever been in a serious conversation where someone keeps making jokes, and it’s impossible to obtain the same seriousness again

This could be the person using humor as coping mechanism to avoid deeply thinking about their own beliefs, but it isn’t really a problem with humor itself.

It is interesting, I've been trying to inject a little serious conversation into friend gatherings recently, because the normal mode of interaction everyone has is just riffing off cultural touchpoint du jour and relatively low level gossip over local goings on. Which is fine but my brain loses interest fast.

I don't try to force seriousness, but I'll bring up a topic that isn't blatantly humorous, make some initial contributions on it, and encourage debate and exchange, but it'll only be a couple minutes at best before someone spots a joke or humorous segue and that puts the topic back onto the riffing.

And its not like I bring up depressing topics, more just bringing up things that would require a bit more mental effort and maybe a tad bit of vulnerability. I'm not so autistic as to expect people to be comfortable announcing deep personal insights in a group setting. Humor just seems to be the way they maintain the conversation without any real attachment to it.

My rough model is that most people just really want to avoid thinking about the real world while just 'hanging out' and if the topic isn't something they can make brief contributions to without much mental effort (topics they're experts on) they just not contribute on that topic. So hard to generate engaging discussion when a particular gathering isn't intended for such.

Which is also why politics is a popular topic (if everyone shares similar beliefs) since you can just repeat the normal mantras and memes and get along just fine.