domain:kvetch.substack.com
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9m ago
Having big muscles does change people's perceptions of you. I doubt he would've gotten this banger song made about him if he looked like a nerd: https://youtube.com/watch?v=vTyeZjo7n_M
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13m ago
He has a space program, I don't believe it's beyond his power to get someone to manage dinner parties easily, or at least more easily than a massive 80 million dollar wedding. If anyone is elite human capital, it's bezos. He can learn!
Nobody goes that far as a matter of convenience. Bezos is not marrying out of convenience, there must be some deeper reason.
chooky
25m ago
Hard to say without the quote, but it wouldnt be surprising if Levine is just making fun of Elizabeth Holmes.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
26m ago
· Edited 19m ago
I think this is actually sort of analogous to women allegedly preferring "dad bods". I don't think any woman genuinely finds a dad bod more sexually thrilling in isolation, but for a woman self-conscious about her own weight the idea of a man that lives at the gym and eats a stricter diet than a supermodel just sounds intimidating and miserable. I think 4chan NEETs are not necessarily attracted to a NEET girl so much as they just imagine that she will be attainable and have low standards in men and make their own failure less humiliating.
Why is whatever this boils down to as a notion of attraction less legitimate than the "in isolation" notion, though? People choose partners on complex criteria, which tend to include some reflexive components like "can I convince myself that the other person in fact desires me" and "how will society judge us as a pair". This is not just a strategic cope to make up for an organic preference that can not be realised - as I see it, for most people, the realisation where you see a happy future for yourself with another is attraction, butterflies and everything! (No judgement intended about respectability - the happy-future fantasy could be anything from "we'll fuck like rabbits in a public toilet" to "we will grow old discussing philosophy until one of us closes their eyes, never to complete their final thought")
I don't see why attraction based on this compound metric should be written off as less legitimate than attraction based on what the man might choose to beat his meat to while completely derealised at the tail end of a gooning all-nighter, or the woman's equally derealised fantasies after drifting off to trashy romance novel la-la land. In fact there seems to be a certain kind of essentialism that bitter people in all sorts of domains converge upon, where some very specific and often even irrelevant metric is elevated to Ground Biological Truth and everything else is ultimately seen as fakery and pretense - "he might say he likes me but Science says that he ultimately would prefer someone with balloon tits and a hourglass figure. We don't make the rules", or "she might claim to like nice guys but Science says that women only really get off on rape and dominance, she may deny it but I'm sure it will come out eventually", or "I might seemingly be performing about as well as everyone else, but Science says that people of my sex/ethnicity are not good at my research area". Every such belief conveniently has the nature of those delusional parasite infections which compel the patient to scratch at them until they actually bleed and get infected.
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
29m ago
Always Windows 98 of course. Check my flare.
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
29m ago
When is the best time to go where there aren’t other people?
jkf
29m ago
I can fit your stated requirements into 1301 ft2. Use your imagination!
Congratulations, you just invented the double-wide trailer!
We could all technically live, Gilded Age–style, in a single room, but I don't want that. I'd want a living room and a space for a dinner table.
Clarification: That big central room is a combination living/dining room, as permitted under IPMC § 404.5.2. (I was just too lazy to label it.) A width of 7 feet may seem small, but under IRC § R312.2 it is permissible, and Architectural Graphic Standards for Residential Construction fig. 2.24 indicates that it is sufficient for a dining table to fit, as long as everybody sits on the same side. (If I'd had the book in front of me when I made the drawing, I would have made the living/dining room 8 feet wide, so that people could face each other across the dining table. With that mild augmentation, the area rises to 1347 ft2 + 94.5 in2.)
I'm also trying to do a 2-floor build.
Note that the IRC's prescriptive design assumes that the second floor will contain only bedrooms and implicitly bathrooms. (Compare table R403.1(1) note b with table R301.5.) If you ignore that assumption, you may have to pay extra for an engineer's services, since the architect will not be able to just copy-and-paste from the IRC's tables.
Here's a design that meets your new criteria. (I'm assuming a detached garage, and not bothering to draw it.) (Whoops—swap the office and the kitchen.)
After this thread I think I need to hire an architect.
Come up with your own original design first, before letting an architect mess stuff up. Doodling random floor plans is fun!
Also, I think you should go straight to a homebuilder (which will have an in-house architect), not to an architect. I tried hiring several architects, and did manage to get one to help me pick a lot, but they generally didn't seem very interested in me. Presumably they have bigger fish to fry, such as designing larger commercial, industrial, and apartment buildings.
jkf
39m ago
"Roadside trash grass" is about the equivalent of the Jungle Juice you are talking about -- making any kind of decent alcohol at home takes a lot more effort than growing good weed -- which is basically just gardening with extra steps.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
42m ago
That's akin to borrowing happiness from tomorrow at a very high interest rate, it doesn't end well.
If were talking about the effect of a ~one time experience, then comedowns arent necessarily relevant. We might imagine for example someone seeing "Wow, its possible to be happy" and that giving him hope in life. That hope might point down the abyss, but thats only measurable when you get there.
But taking this at face value: do you think peoples lives are worse for alcohol? Theres a hangover there too, and in the narrow pleasure-pain accounting, youre not coming out ahead - yet there are many apprently non-addicted people who are using it a decent amount.
It's highly reductive to dismiss such advances as "Drugs can make you feel better when used responsibly".
Yes, thats the point. The value of the cliche depends on not thinking you can outsmart it.
Nobody has lost their job or family because they drink too much coffee.
I am well aware. The link is not directly related to my point here, and I was wondering more about the idea that shes better off for it.
It also remains fascinating, the way people will respond to every part of my comment but the main one. Why do you think apparently different drugs work in such similar ways here?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
47m ago
It’s stupid because nobody really bothers to argue policy (and probably never really did, unless you’re a policy nerd), they’re arguing on the basis of propaganda and vibes. Tge West and especially America are absolutely soaked in propaganda all day everyday and don’t even realize it. Name any issue, and people will be able to quote various talking points for what they want to be true, but won’t understand it. Get them off into the woods where there are no talking points or standard arguments available and people will absolutely sputter trying to come up with any sort of argument or explanation of what they actually want or how the policies they say they want will get them there.
But until people actually see themselves as embedded in the machine they won’t even understand that they understand nothing about the world. So they argue about it and spend a lot of time trying to convince others they’re right. And each set of propaganda has the same feel good stuff in them. My side is the educated side and if the other side wasn’t so uneducated and stupid, they’d agree. My side is the moral side, they’re evil.
DradisPing
50m ago
I mean you should keep that in mind. Getting called into a meeting with your manager because GenericUserIsRetardedError showed up in a stack trace for an end user isn't fun.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
52m ago
But as an adult I'm wondering how on earth you'd clean and maintain such a system.
It is self-cleaning.
While it is inevitable that some dirt settles at seldom-used outlets (especially those at lower points in the plumbing run), that problem tends to solve itself as soon as you connect a hose to that port by consequence of what the system does. And since when you're vacuuming an entire floor you'll use (almost) every port at least once, the remediation for ports seldom-used is "connect the vacuum line and run the system briefly".
Additionally, the hose opening tends to be a smaller diameter than the vacuum lines. So if you suck up something absurd, like a plastic bag, if it'll fit through the hose, it'll fit through the lines just fine. It would be wise to leave a couple of access ports, though.
The only real fail points are:
- the central unit itself (generally quite reliable, it's just a nicer Shop-Vac- solution: replace unit if it burns out somehow, hookup is standard)
- the hose between the vacuum head and wall (generally, electrical outlets are installed right next to the vacuum ports so you can run the vacuum's power head; the cord for that is embedded in the hose and will degrade with use- solution: replace hose, they're all standard)
- the access ports (just a sufficiently-airtight door with 2 low-voltage electrical contacts, both properties can degrade over time; when you connect the hose, the circuit is bridged by the metal and the vacuum starts up- solution: replace door)
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
53m ago
Depends on the quality of the take-out. In any case my illustration was an example of the usual man's lack of gumption when it comes to certain aspects of life. With a wife, certain aspects change, and I'd argue mostly for the better. Of course YMMV.
ulyssessword
55m ago
I think it's pretty clear they reduce overdoses...
They may reduce overdoses, but I think that's far from clear.
As a (sort of) counterexample, "...B.C. has implemented every harm-reduction program that has been proposed, from safe-injection sites to safe supply and effectively making all drugs legal. As each new measure has been introduced, drug overdose deaths have increased, except for a brief drop in 2019."
The toy model is that they would otherwise stop (often from from death), but instead they continue for longer before stopping (slightly less often from death), and the time they spend doing drugs is higher and therefore the social cost is higher as well.
You would better serve yourself and your arguments by affirming rather than downplaying their leftism. I'll also here not take the euphemism, socialism is communism's beachhead in capitalism.
Redistribution of wealth is communist. It cuts both ways, your list includes instances where the primary beneficiaries are corporations, the policies remain communist.
I guess this is the issue lol. Point-by-point, why none of this is particularly radical in most societies that people don't consider "socialist":
Communists, as masters of duplicitous rhetoric, have done an expectedly superb job propagandizing leftist policy objectives as "common sense" and especially as "not communist" or "not socialist." They are not considered radical today because it is the way of things, but those fears named in opposition to, e.g. compulsory education, have been justified. We can't go back, so there's not a real use in invoking either their past appraisal as radical or their current view as normal.
But also not specifically socialist, at all. Very much no means of production being seized.
I would agree directionally, in very strict terms. The concept of regulation is not inherently redistributive, and even in practice I don't know that many examples are redistributive, but they do often impair the market from competition and there corporations benefit.
Another exaggeration. The free part is for buses only. As someone who's taken a lot of public transit in many different cities, buses are frequently used by more blue collar / "barista" type workers, whereas light rail is more often used by professionals. It's a pragmatically progressive (in the sense of: tax those who can afford it) solution to the problem of rising fare prices, imo.
Strictly redistributive. Communist.
Obviously an experimental / pilot project. Curious to see if there's a nice food distribution middle ground between "soup kitchen" and "Whole Foods" that a city government can occupy. An ideal implementation of this looks more like a 7-days-a-week farmer's market to me than a crumbling Aldi with yellowed fluorescent lights and grimey 90s tiles.
The experiment was run for decades and it failed. Communist.
Are grade school, middle school, and high school not "free childcare"?
Compulsory education is indeed free childcare, and it is the perfect example of the myriad failures of ideology in communism:
- That inequality in outcome can be solved through money; here school funding
- That effective systems create effective people; here that good schools make good students
- That a bureaucracy can be trusted with considerable power; here that teachers are broadly competent and judicious
- That the system will fulfill its primary objective rather than be co-opted or brought to heel by superior agents; here a minor rehashing of #2, but specifically that the school exists to educate
Compulsory education as the public school doesn't actually exist to educate. It educates incidentally, just as a little less incidentally it incorporates students into the cult of the state. Its function is redistributing wealth to the bourgeoise so they don't have to either pay for childcare, accommodate flexible hours for their laborers, or worst of all, have to deal with a 50% smaller workforce and the massive leverage the laborers would gain in negotiations. All to say, the classic example of bad actors prospering from exploiting the system, here capitalism's maybe third-worst practice.
Where I would say today communist ideology has strength is cynicism toward the bourgeoise, where it fails is not showing enough, as even with the means of production seized, the bourgeoise are not made but born, agnostic to actually being of class "bourgeoise," and a communist system will inevitably be controlled by them. The best system accounts for their chronic existence and allows them to flourish in dozens of lanes of competition with each other, while exerting just enough regulation to prevent their exploitation of the commons. Communism reduces that competition to a single lane, and for that it will necessarily and always fail.
Nothing would help the working class more than our economy returning to one where only a single parent needs to draw a salary to support their spouse and children. To that end, anything Mamdani does that increases or keeps static the supply of labor will have harms outweighing all other benefits, and that's even granting that all of his other policies achieve their stated goals.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
59m ago
Thats not democracy, it’s stability. And I agree. I don’t necessarily put democracy on a pedestal as though it’s automatically and axiomatically the best form of government you could have. It’s a social technology much like anything else humans have developed to create orderly societies. I think I’m personally much more interested in the meta part of the question of government— what produces the kind of society where the majority prosper, where the rule of law is more or less kept, and where people are generally left alone to enjoy life. A lot of times, that’s democracy. On the other hand, sometimes it’s something else. The high Roman Empire probably was a pretty good place to live, some of the better monarchies did quite well. On the other hand, there are lots of failed democratic societies as well.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
59m ago
I was gonna say, if you have a kids a wife is essential (so is a husband, tbh). With more than 1-2 kids, you no longer have a "relationship," you now have a "small business" that requires more than one employee to smoothly operate.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
Her dad died when she was 17 and I'm not aware of her mother having any ties to the MB. For that matter I'm not even sure what her dad's ties are supposed to have been, but I admit I haven't looked deeply into it.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1hr ago
The central units are generic and easy to get, cost only a little more than a nice portable unit, and the sweepers generally conform to one of only a couple standard types. The rest is just plastic tubes and wall ports. Biggest advantage is that the central unit can exhaust to outside, so heavy filtration is not needed to reduce fine particles and dust, and the power of even a low end central unit can't be matched by any kind of portable vacuum cleaner. The central unit typically has a collection bin you can remove and empty, like a shop-vac.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
1hr ago
All wives are trophy wives
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
1hr ago
I hear what you're saying, but it's still possible to have friends like this. I have a cousin with whom I've always been very close. We've both been married for a while now, but we make a conscious effort to stay in touch and check in on each other. It's a little more awkward to open up now than it was when we were both freewheeling teens, but it's possible.
DradisPing
1hr ago
I see it more as a rejection of Cuomo than any great socialist uprising.
My takeaway is that it's just over for white boomer Democrats. They can keep their current jobs but won't be able to win nominations for any new office.
Ezra Klein had some good articles talking about the progressive theory of power and how it causes problems for city administration.
These are more for background than supporting my argument.
Basically the problem is that progressives are completely dedicated to the idea that billionaires and greedy corporations are the ones causing all of the problems.
However at the city level the problems tend to stem from:
-
Disorderly elements. eg low level criminals like shoplifters, people with sever substance abuse problems, or severe mental illness.
-
Left wing organizations trying to tack on fees to everything to get paid.
Progressives are completely unable to acknowledge that either of those groups cause problems. The idea that left wing groups are just being greedy rent seekers goes against their whole world view.
So you get ideas like government owned grocery stores. During a past attempt to tackle "food deserts", in I think Detroit, a grocery store complained that shoplifting was putting them out of business. A city councillor told them that lossage was just part of the price of doing business in Detroit. So the grocery store shut down the location.
I don't think the solution is really any fundamental social change. The issue is that people on the center left like to play defence for the farther left and hide the crazier elements of their philosophy from the general public. The progressives think that the media hides their beliefs out of some conspiracy against them instead of an attempt to protect them.
There needs to be a documentary series on a major streaming service that, as fairly and calmly as possible, shows what progressive populists believe and what the problems with it are. Right now it's being taught in colleges as the absolute truth with no analysis.
Thanks for your response. I appreciate the insight.
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