domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3hr ago
The Soviets were great at espionage but at the end of the day, they were outmatched. USA + Western Europe + Japan > USSR + Eastern Europe + poor China. And China switched sides to the US camp late in the Cold War, which is almost forgotten today. USA + Western Europe + Japan + poor China >>> USSR + Eastern Europe.
And the Soviet system didn't work either, they were consistently behind in basically all fields of technology with rare exceptions. Temporary lead in spaceflight (but not missile force), temporary lead in tanks with the T-64. Far behind in semiconductors, submarines, guided weapons. They had talent but weren't good at innovation. Regardless of ideology it's tough when you and your allies are the poor countries who got hit hardest in WW2 and you're facing the industrialized, rich countries.
China is the biggest manufacturer in the world, they have scale the Soviets never had. Over twice US electricity production, 3x US car production, 13x US steel production, 1.5x more industrial robots per worker. And their system works in that they can do high-tech.
phailyoor
3hr ago
Libs are right: there is enormous danger of misinformation and disinformation.
Wait Alex, are you even reading what you are writing here? It's right wing 101 that "yeah disinformation is bad, but acktually the media and journalists are spreading it, not witches on twitter ad 4chan." People all the way from boomercons to hardcore white supremacists and neo nazis would agree with that statement.
So obviously (well you didn't link the tweet because of course not) the author of the tweet meant that, not meant any actual agreement with the libs. I can't see any other way to interpret this statement at all.
phailyoor
3hr ago
It seems like journalists and government officials have been spreading disinformation since before the invention of the telegraph.
Journalists have been spreading disinformation since the invention of writing.
phailyoor
3hr ago
Jason Kessler, the organizer of the Charlottesville goon march.
Who is that? Do you have a link to the Tweet?
Why does it matter that he's "right" about something? You know the saying about a broken clock?
there's no downside at all to every random person with a two-digit IQ having a social media megaphone.
So you think the libs are right about this. Maybe you should explain your reasoning instead of seething that right-adjacent tech bros don't agree with banning all the conspiracy theorists off the internet.
TitaniumButterfly
3hr ago
May have technically been Elk Grove.
HereAndGone
3hr ago
We do have a lot of Brazilians working in the meat processing industry over here (something that surprised me when I learned it). One of the GPs in the practice I attend is Spanish/Brazilian (so I guess that means Portuguese-speaking, though he went to Spain before he came to Ireland - he'd be "White Hispanic" by US census categories) and he was telling me about when he first moved here and the landlord was the 'cash in hand, no rent books, no contract' type that can kick you out in the morning.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3hr ago
Eddie started classical piano at 6. And, for that matter, had a paper route as a kid.
Jimi worked as an usher in a local theater, as a stage hand at a local music club, and as a construction laborer before he joined the army.
HereAndGone
3hr ago
Oh sure, but this was one case at least where "white couple adopt troubled black kid, it goes terribly wrong" wasn't about the black kid but the white couple (or one of them). A counterpoint to the "invasive species" bit. There's enough terrible things happening on both sides of adoption/fostering not to put all the blame on one set.
There's been an egregious case around fostering in Ireland recently, which finished up a decade-long investigation with what amounted to a shrug about "well we can't prove the charges of sexual abuse, so all good I guess?" even though the other details were of gross neglect and abuse. Seems like nobody did a damn thing over the years, and even when somebody wanted to, the management decided "well no we can't take the girl out of the placement because that would make us look bad". The country as a whole was seething over this, and rightly so.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
These people mostly have nuanced-if-not positive views on grown men dating sixteen year olds. They are simply mistaken as to the actual ages of Epstein's victims.
Throwaway05
3hr ago
Best example I can think of is Game of Throne's "we aren't sure if they are bastards or not" .......are they half Black? If so.... Recasting debacle.
plural
3hr ago
Okay, but the Wire has more investigative elements than most shows procedural or not. Procedural pretty much really only means self-contained because most investigative shows are filled with gobs of pointless drama and soap-opera b plots that are strung through many episodes or like any British investigative show about 40 minutes of the victim's family arguing about vague things to present them as red herrings. Law & Order is probably the only thing that represents a show that's just investigations contained in an episode, maybe the early CSI seasons as well.
HereAndGone
3hr ago
Look, even human-alien hybrids are entitled to become actors if that is their calling.
Pongalh
3hr ago
even the racists don't complain about them.
Hm, dunno about that. Not if they're spotted in some street snapshot of an English town posted on X and accompanied by the complaint, "this is not the country I grew up in"
HereAndGone
3hr ago
I used to wonder why books sometimes had a little disclaimer on the copyright page about "the views expressed are not necessarily those of the author" because duh, of course someone can write about a thing without thinking it is a good thing (e.g. crime writers writing about serial killers).
And then this sort of literalism and inability to separate out viewpoints expressed by characters from what the author thinks came along. If it is not 21st century liberal to progressive all the way through, then clearly you are saying bad things, and clearly you only say bad things because you believe bad things, and clearly that means you are a bad person.
Though I can't blame "kids these days" for that, even if it is the most egregious examples; it happened back in the day as well. Arthur Conan Doyle had to make it clear to a review that yes, thank you very much, he was aware that he was working in the same field as Poe and Gaboriau of detective fiction, and that just because in early Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes had a poor opinion of Dupin, it did not mean that Doyle himself had a poor view:
To An Undiscerning Critic by Arthur Conan Doyle, in London Opinion (28 December 1912)
Sure there are times when one cries with acidity,
'Where are the limits of human stupidity?'
Here is a critic who says as a platitude
That I am guilty because 'in gratitude
Sherlock, the sleuth-hound, with motives ulterior,
Sneers at Poe's Dupin as "very inferior".'
Have you not learned, my esteemed communicator,
That the created is not the creator?
As the creator I've praised to satiety
Poe's Monsieur Dupin, his skill and variety,
And have admitted that in my detective work
I owe to my model a deal of selective work.
But is it not on the verge of inanity
To put down to me my creation's crude vanity?
He, the created, would scoff and would sneer,
Where I, the creator, would bow and revere.
So please grip this fact with your cerebral tentacle:
The doll and its maker are never identical.
plural
4hr ago
Berlin ER or Krank Berlin as it should've been called since that's its name is a pretty good show that has the same sort of hectic pace and stays in the vein of only slight bits of story/personal lives away from the hospital.
It's doesn't have the constant woke injections like The Pitt but I'd say it still does the special bit of showing that cops are just as bad or worse than gang members thing by the end.
I was shocked at the show seemingly displaying the immigration demographics as they are (I assume, I'm not German). Much of the cast is brown/black and immigrant and most of the people coming into the hospital are as well. And for the first few episodes it felt like there wasn't going to be much of political angle at all but after much of the emergency room visits being immigrant gang members knifing each other I suppose maybe they had to have their cops beating innocent people because they're the wrong color part to not be accused of being racist. Either way it's pretty good but gets kinda washed out in the middle, treading water and extending plots over episodes when they could have wrapped up more quickly. But I think it finishes well, it's not many episodes anyway.
The medical accuracy felt much weaker but I don't know about German medical standards and the hospital in the show is supposed to be a piece of shit that barely runs so it's less about watching a well-oiled machine work like The Pitt and more about seeing how a hospital that has no real facilities, equipment, or staff to handle pretty much any medical situation muddles through. It does have much less insufferable characters and situations than The Pitt. But it also feels amateurish by comparison when showing the medical cases and treatments which is a shame.
HereAndGone
4hr ago
I imagine it was "the bad guy didn't think he was a bad guy, he introduced the Nazi ideology to help this planet's culture unify and it was then taken over and brought to an extreme by power-grabbing native politicians" so that of course makes it Evil and it should be censored. Because trying to say that anything at all about Nazism was even slightly good (e.g. using what Hitler did to unify post-First World War Germany to try and unify a culture falling apart) means that you are saying "all Nazism is good" and we know that is not true.
I honestly don't know what the hell has been going on with education since I was scratching cuneiform on clay tablets back in my time at school. Just recently I saw someone on Tumblr showing why censorship of old books is wrong by saying she never even knew Long John Silver had a black wife until she grew up and read an old, uncensored version of "Treasure Island" (and even then in the comments people were going on about "but it is Racism to use the term 'negress' so censorship is good!").
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
4hr ago
Apart from the taking high road and just reading and doing carpentry or something instead)
Bingo. Reading, working out, listening to music, doing hobbies, socializing with friends, etc. I haven't seriously watched anything since Twin Peaks: The Return.
HereAndGone
4hr ago
That is the point I guess, all these kids not even born forty years ago imagine they've invented Liberal Media Talking-Points on TV shows for the first time 😁
Look. The rate of adoptees who go on to ruin their parents' lives and their own is high. It's much higher than polite society acknowledges, or many prospective adopters realize. Granted. But it's nowhere near 100%. For a considerable number of children, it's exactly the life-improving, beneficial change that adopters want to give, and it works out good-to-great. Many more sit in the middle, with adoption neither a massive mistake, nor a miraculous cure-all - those kids might never make anything much of themselves, but at least they got a happier childhood in the bargain, and the parents have nothing to regret even if they might, perhaps, have hoped for grander outcomes.
So yeah, the firefighter analogy still seems apt to me. If there's someone stuck on the top floor of a burning building, and I decide to go in there - I know there's a good chance, a really good chance, that we'll both die today and I'll have thrown my own life away "for nothing". But I'm going in anyway, because I also know there's a solid chance I'll save their life. Ideally I'll get them out without injury to either of us; more likely, they'll sustain some severe burns before I can get to them… but hey, it would still beat letting them die. Taking that gamble is what we call "being a hero". In the movies the life-or-death gamble always pays off. And that's a nice story. But celebrating and encouraging heroic behavior in the real world involves acknowledging that sometimes the dice are against you and you sacrifice yourself "for nothing", and that's just the way of it, and it doesn't make it worthless to try.
I don't see how you can possibly argue against this unless 1) you preposterously believe that an overwhelming majority of adoptions wind up net-negative for all involved, 2) you think even adoptions that don't blow up the parents' lives have a negligible positive impact on the children, or 3) you think improving the children's lives has no positive value and base the EV of adoption purely on the potential harm to the parents. 1) would be incredibly dumb and 3) would be skin-crawlingly evil. If it's 2), I'd like to see some solid evidence, because it'd be a pretty counterintuitive claim, what with the foster care system's track record being a massive horror story of its own.
A surprising number of people just literally don't know that Eptstein's victims were adult-presenting teens who were mainly 16-17 and performed escort work.
Western society has been on a media diet of near-constant agitprop over at least the last 100 years equating 17 year olds with 7 year olds, and most people unironically believe it, including said 17 year olds.
Why on Earth would we start drawing the distinction now, especially when the delightful moral treat of getting to call public figures pedophiles presents itself (or at least, presents itself to a media who knows its audience has been sufficiently mindkilled to parrot it uncritically)?
Pongalh
4hr ago
Those who have been left behind by the media are not going to be easy to convince that modern TV shows are now worth watching.
The problem is that if you care about production chops and are not content to rewatch stuff you ALREADY like over and over again, what's the alternative? (Apart from the taking high road and just reading and doing carpentry or something instead)
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4hr ago
The controversy on Reddit was that the writers on that particular episode must be Nazis because the villian of the story was particularly in Starfleet and had dialogue that suggested he believed that Nazis were on to something. So obviously the only reason that you could possibly make a character say something positive about Nazis is that they were obviously Nazis. Which, to me seems like a bizarre way to approach literature where the artist is incapable of imagining a belief he doesn’t actually hold. It’s like saying imagination doesn’t exist. But given that understanding of literature I can easily see why the message tends to be smack people on the head obvious simply because they cannot be anything else.
Pongalh
4hr ago
The reason is that most woke stuff kills verisimilitude (think fantasy filled with black people in clearly Northern Europe).
I give fantasy stuff huge leeway, because it's fantasy you can do whatever, though a specific trope's repetition (black people lopsidedly in everything) is bad. The real bullshit is something like the London blitz containing black characters.
The foster system is horrible everywhere. Broadly, the system doesn't care much to improve it and the public outcry is... limited.
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