domain:alethios.substack.com
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
21hr ago
- Stuttgart I guess, around 60km from here.
- There used to be one (several in earlier times) in town here. Not sure if it still exists. So, maybe 4km. Otherwise: No idea, I don't own a suit.
- About 20 meters, I can see hear and smell it from here. They used to farm vegetables for their own use, have some crop fields further out but I don't know which ones are theirs and what crops are on them (lots of corn is up right now in general though), and they do have good number of cows.
- Presumably it's in America, so at least one Atlantic away. But if you just mean a generic train station - about an hour on foot if you know the slippery shortcut up a hidden valley, about ten minutes by car if you take the long way. 2km away if you could fly.
- Supposedly there's one in Switzerland. There aren't any in Germany as far as I know. The closest generic supermarket is about 3km away, over in the next village.
- Stuttgart again. Somewhat over 60km, since it's on the wrong side of the city.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
I mean, I wouldn't allow these in my house, but we're used to the idea of being recorded all the time in public. Security cameras are everywhere(and one needs no special permission to put them up), there's people livestreaming, taking selfies with others in the background, etc.
Cameraphones were what killed the privacy expectation. Not these things.
2rafa
21hr ago
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A couple of miles
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Less than a mile
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I didn’t know, but there are apparently dozens of commercial farms in the green belt around London, maybe 20 or 30 miles? Livestock, milk, fruits, the usual.
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The north-easternmost Amtrak station, so either Boston or somewhere in Maine if they go that far north.
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Don’t have it here, but their nearest former subsidiary Asda is ~4 miles away. The nearest Costco is like 6 or 7 miles away.
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5 miles to London City, 20 to Heathrow.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
There is massive latent demand for sex
in the economy.
Fixed it.
MayorofOysterville
22hr ago
Yes I agree 100%. But in this aspect tattoos are like clothes. It's not tattoos in themselves that are bad news in terms of social signaling but the type of tattoos.
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
22hr ago
My story about getting banned by reddit was really strange.
I was on /r/anime participating in a subreddit watch of Re:Zero. The only important thing about that show is the main character has the ability to go back in time by dying, he returns to a set "save point" defined by the plot.
At one point I said " Try to get your sword repaired it's really useful for the small amount of fighting you can do, but more importantly you can use it to Kill yourself" which got me a temp ban on reddit.
Meanwhile this phrase didn't even get a peep
"Get a knife and be ready to stab myself to death if things are going south"
So it must have been a bot.
What was incredible of course is that the /r/anime mods apparently messaged the admins defending me and my post. This is mind you a 13 million user forum yet the mods feel really that strongly about defending users from admins.
IDK why the mods in /r/anime are like this but it's convinced me that it's the best modded subreddit by a large margin and it remains one of the only subreddits I actually use. (that and /r/slatestarcodex)
MayorofOysterville
22hr ago
I judge anti tattoo posts online more harshly then actual tattoos IRL. My initial snap emotional judgement is that online anti tattoo stigma is the province of, "timid men“. I feel like there's a reason here and reddit both hate tattoos and sometimes look down drinking. It's the original virgin chad meme where Chad is comfortable and chill and the virgin is uncomfortable in his own skin. IRL most people under 50 that I know with these opinions on tattoos tend to be coming from a position of fear and inability to hang with the boyz rather than solid judgment. Online I can't help but feel this is more so, when I see an anti-tattoo post here or on reddit my strong initial snap judgement is it's written by a timid man who is uncomfortable with masculinity.
As for tattoos themselves in the Portland area it matters a lot what kind of tattoos you have. I am not saying I don't judge tattoos but a hipster girl with arty tattoos is entirely different than a girls with a tattoo of her baby daddies name or Jesus saves. There are tattoos and tattoos but trying to exclude all tattoos in Portland is gonna make you go insane. In Western culture tattoos are totally mainstream these days.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
22hr ago
The law in most of the West (maybe world) says that you can effectively record strangers in public without permission with a few exceptions.
Is this true in the EU? I'm not the most aware of it's specific laws, but it seems like something GDPR and friends might frown upon. The EU is a non-trivial part of "The West", although I know the UK likes it's CCTV.
Bartender_Venator
22hr ago
All except 3 are within 40 minutes by public transit. 3 I can't tell. Probably about a 90 minute drive.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
22hr ago
I can see that, actually. And the reality is that my own worldview can sound very "F", depending on the context. That said, my general view of the world is that we should be making reasonable decisions based on logic -- and accounting for people's emotions and the real fallout of a decision on people is a part of that. I read "You prioritize facts over people’s feelings when determining a course of action." as referring to, not taking people's actual feelings as a result of the action into account, but "making a gut decision based on people feel at the current moment rather than actually evaluating whether those feelings will reflect how they experience the fallout of the decision." Other people might read it differently, and that's a big ambiguity!
That's my problem with the T vs F dichotomy -- it's not real. People who are so far in the extreme that an emotional argument from their partner or their child would not persuade them barely exist. And people who are so extreme that they'd rather make a feelings-based argument over what kind of mortgage to get also barely exist. People are both feelers and thinkers. I agree with @Primaprimaprima on this.
I'm not a utilitarian, but I guess I sound like one in this context. But my values on these kinds of questions are shaped by the fact that my feelings and emotions are very flighty and unhelpful a lot of the time: if I made decisions based on how I feel right now I would make horrible, impulsive, and often extremely avoidant decisions! I couldn't function. My life has been a long struggle of using the "heartless robot" to override the useless emotions that can't help me in the moment, to try and develop a path forward that will lead to the best emotional state I can possibly expect and to proper functioning. I have to think in terms of telos, because I need some kind of a star in the East to walk towards in the desert.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
22hr ago
Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.
And don't look up more recent pics of Kelly LeBrock.
FtSoA
22hr ago
It's worse than that.
IQ is a better predictor of job performance than a college degree is. (Especially now, when the vast majority of colleges aren't selective anymore.)
Education is usually just a proxy for general intelligence on the job market. We could just cut out the credentialist middle man, but that's not going to make things better on the disparate impact front.
Meritocracy is, in some very real sense, "discrimination against dumb people" because, while intelligence is not all one needs, it's the single biggest thing in most cases.
FtSoA
22hr ago
To date, I've personally met maybe five or six people smarter than me
You don't get out much I take it?
How ugly do Nobel Prize winners look? I think it's a pretty standard finding that there is only a small positive correlation, but if you look at say top 20% IQ vs. bottom 20% I think it's pretty clear who looks better. (Obesity make this all the more obvious.)
but this horseshoes at the ends of the distribution.
As Yud would put it, the tails come apart.
I don't think being wildly intelligent is negatively correlated with physical attractiveness, the way extreme height is negatively attributed with athleticism, for both reasons of physics and often resulting from a disorder.
Here's why you're probably less smart than you think you are:
Height's relationship to athleticism is a pretty bad example because those are both physical things. Height comes with performance tradeoffs due to physics, and in certain sports that is very apparent. Being extremely tall also tends to come with greater fragility and various health ailments at higher rates because it's "out of spec."
Intelligence and beauty are completely different things. There's no inherent trade offs for the shape of one's face with the performance of one's mind. There's also no reason to believe sexual selection would totally divorce the two.
People also try to believe that being really smart means you also are not as good as various mental things, or have a higher risk of mental health problems.
Which to my knowledge is all bogus cope because most humans don't like to realize that life is actually just unfair and it's not a like a video game with a finite amount of skill points for a character.
cjet79
22hr ago
they bought the land in exchange for half the skin on their babies pensises
Too antagonistic.
You have been warned and banned before for this type of behavior. You have multiple other comments in the queue right now. 7 day ban
ulyssessword
22hr ago
But now I'm curious what is acceptable to judge people about. Let's say you're walking to your workplace or your university class or your school and you see...
Yes to your entire list. It's acceptable to judge people based on their fashion choices, including clothes, hair, piercings, tattoos, or other body mods. Note that "choices" excludes medical devices like braces, and accepts external constraints like dress codes, weather/dirt/hazard resilience, etc.
I typically don't care about most of that, but me choosing to judge them neutrally doesn't mean that you should be forced to share my opinion.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
23hr ago
HRV should give a decent indicator of stress levels.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
23hr ago
The work of getting a business off the ground doesn't differ that much whether your business becomes a trillion dollar company or goes bust. The labor theory of value is wrong.
Mackenzie was also working at Amazon in the early days, doing accounts, packing orders, etc. So I find it entirely reasonable that this made her rich.
DoctorMonarch
♬We're so happy that we live in 1800's Alabama 'cause it's sunny and there is no crime!♬
23hr ago
Birmingham, Alabama. Suburban neighborhood called Crestline Park.
Alabama Symphony Orchestra's offices are 3ish miles away, but I hear them perform 6ish miles away.
I can get a custom suit within 1 mile, actually bespoke 10 miles.
I'm having trouble sorting through recreational barns, hobby farms, plant nurseries, LLCs that own houses which call themselves farms, wedding venues etc. The nearest Tractor Supply store is 14 miles away, I have had commutes that involved passing small groups of cattle, cotton fields.
Amtrak is 6 miles away, Walmart is 1 mile away. Birmingham Airport calls itself international and presumably has a minimal number of flights to various Caribbean island countries or Mexico per year. It is 5 miles away. Atlanta Airport 147 miles.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
23hr ago
- Two hours by car
- Two hours by car
- Five minute walk (wheat)
- Hour and a half by car
- 8 minutes by car
- Two hours by car
FtSoA
23hr ago
First off, does Hamas really care about what happens to Assad or Iran? They take Iranian weapons but they also backed the Syrian rebels against Assad, they aren't exactly a full on proxy of Iran like Hezbollah.
Assad, no. Iran and Hezbollah, yes. One needs supplies.
Hamas is Sunni, not Shia, but the shared devotion to destroying Israel gave them an otherwise strange set of Islamic allies.
If anything the fact that Iran was ultimately dragged into the fight despite desperately trying to stay out of it directly is a Hamas W.
Sure, they wanted the whole Islamic world to rise up. The more the merrier. Except for the part where Iran and Hezbollah got their ass handed to them. That's not the result one wants for one's allies.
Hezbollah is in the same position it was in 2006
This is not true. Israel was largely considered to be the loser in that conflict, or at least having underperformed. In 2025, Israel blew the fuck out of Hezbollah after demonstrating that Hezbollah was almost entirely militarily ineffective.
Hezbollah is much weaker than in 2006, and will remain that way if the Israelis aren't exaggerating about their intent.
Houthis are stronger and more influential than ever,
They are doing pretty well, yes. But they are overall the least important bit as demonstrated by the fact that they're having a great time while their allies get wrecked.
Iran survived Israel's best shot at regime change and responded with enough missiles to break Israel's missile shield and deplete it's interception capacity down to nearly 50%
Thanks to Trump, so far yes the regime survives. However, it's in a much weaker position than it was before, and longstanding problems like the economy continue to worsen. I've seen some credible-sounding reports that moderates/reformers are rising in power/prominence due to the embarrassing defeat, and how much Khamenei is in touch with reality is hard to know. His succession will be much more fraught than it would have been if it had happened without the 12-Day War.
Iran's missile production and launching capacities were hammered pretty hard, so you really have to squint to see the silver lining in the dark clouds of "we launched a bunch of our prized military capability at Israel and had nearly zero military effect."
It remains to be seen what Israel's red lines will actually be for e.g. Iran rebuilding certain military capacities. But the IAF demonstrated the ability to conduct air strikes at will and there's little hope for Iran that they can suddenly acquire or develop top-tier air defense systems. And assassinations on the ground are also always a fun fear for Iranian leaders.
Syria is a real loss but Assad was always the weakest link and his fall had more to do with his own incompetence than Israeli brilliance
Who suggested otherwise? Israel was not the primary factor there. The Turks did more, I think. Plus the fact that Iran and Russia both had to back off the level of support given their other military priorities.
It's not a great time for Iran. They spent decades preparing to put up a good fight against Israel and/or the U.S. and in a matter of days they were revealed to be a paper tiger against Israel, with just a dash of U.S. involvement. They can try to pretend they did more damage to Israel than they actually did, but they can't deny their own high losses, or that Israel could do it all again.
I was driving through an extremely rural suburb of a city the other day that was also extremely wealthy. There was a wildly high end custom furniture store next to a Walmart. As I drove home, I saw an Amtrak station in the city, then realized there was another out in the middle of nowhere.
It made me realize that a lot of the things that people use as tribal or economic indicators in the US might not be as cleanly distributed as people think.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
23hr ago
I can’t remember the last time I saw an “indie vtuber” who didn’t have an OF or a Patreon where she sells audio porn, it seems to be a requirement.
As I understand it there is a large cluster of people whose strengths and weaknesses come out to around average. There is a somewhat smaller cluster of people who are dumber, less athletic, uglier, etc than average, but well within normal variations. There is a smaller cluster of people who are about a standard deviation above in every trait, and an even smaller cluster that is more than two standard deviations below in every trait(tards are usually ugly and unathletic to go with it), but no corresponding cluster of people more than two standard deviations above average on every metric. Looking back at the people noticeably smarter than me who I've met, they've been overwhelmingly male so caveat about judging their looks, but their appearances follow the same distribution as everyone else's. The one woman was not very pretty but more of a slightly below average than ugly.
This isn't DnD where you have a set number of character points to spend. Some people get a better hand than others. There are beautiful, highly athletic people with genius level IQ. Not very many of them, but they exist.
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