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edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
4hr ago
Well I just finished The Geneva convention(s). So I started with a new book "In another world with my smartphone"
The Geneva suggestion convention is a way more interesting read when you have all the cultural context of people calling things war crimes. It's a lot of fun to read and go "wow that isn't a war crime and the amount of effort it puts into this is really fun. (admittedly I was also watching an anime with a bunch of people in /r/anime and just recording the war crimes comitted by the good/bad guys (mostly the good guys) really made it a lot more fun of a read.
JarJarJedi
4hr ago
Any task that can be described as "look up the thing which I describe, possibly in vague terms, among vast array of similar things, and bring it to me" is excellent for it. Using it as a search engine that understands natural language very frequently works. I use it multiple times a day this way and it helps a lot. Same for generating simple scripts that I know exactly what needs to be done, and maybe even have an example of doing similar thing but would have to spend 15-20 minutes tweaking it to do the other thing - it can give it to me in one minute. This is an awesome tool for such cases. But nowhere near "junior programmer" or "fresh law degree graduate" as some claim. At least if I had a junior like that on my team, I'd have a talk with the manager that hired him.
zeke5123a
4hr ago
It is evil in the same way that when you strike a bargain, you ought to uphold the bargain.
Sure bargains are revisited after some time. But most people understand that a bargain is designed to last at least for some period of time; not weeks.
Activists therefore are violating the spirit of the bargain.
I also think activists frequently have wrongheaded goals and make things worse off but that’s a separate matter (though it no doubt makes me less favorably disposed to activists in general — in truth I think an activist is a shameful “profession.”)
clo
4hr ago
It's hard for people to take the libertarian lesson from such events because lizard brain instinctively understands that the levers of power are like, right there.
If you think you've won forever and for all time, what possible reason would you have to build in checks and balances to the infinite expansion of state power? They were wrong about this, but there were a significant amount of people in America - some of them reasonably intelligent, just isolated in their own bubbles - that did in fact think they were going to win forever, for all time, and the only thing left to do was consolidate and grind down the boot.
I like libertarians. I lean libertarian. But they're losers. Their win state is to check out and to be left alone to do what they're doing. This is inherently a losing position, because those who show up to the game are those who get to play.
JarJarJedi
4hr ago
The whole concept of "getting your views" from a youtuber sounds quite bewildering to me. I mean, listening to, sure, thinking about some ideas they raise, definitely, agreeing with something, maybe, but "worldview"?
Also, I have no idea who the twitter is and who those blogger types are, but if you compare them to antifa types commonly featured in arrest reports or just plain regular report from places like Portland that gave up on arresting them, they look the normalest normal of the bunch by far. They don't even have blue hair!
JarJarJedi
4hr ago
Finished the Rhesus Chart from the Laundry Files. I am sure it were a lot funnier for me if I were a Brit, absent that it kinda feels the series are running out of steam. Started the Annihilation Score which only supports the conclusion so far. Maybe it will get better, but starting it I found it a bit hard to sympathize with Mo so far. We'll see how it goes.
clo
4hr ago
This is very weird to me because this is heavily colored by recency bias. China looks like this because this is intentional. Their realpolitik and pragmatism is born out of fire, revolution, infighting over the levers of power and millions dead.
The reasons people like to hold up for China's success - their uniparty, the absolute dominance of the governing power, their zero-tolerance model of governance, their model of state and local governments, their high-IQ population - are also reasons to doubt them.
China has unique strengths, but also unique weaknesses. The Party is bloated, corrupt, inefficient, and bloodless transitions of power are not guaranteed. Local governance lies, schmoozes, and fakes numbers to look good to state governance. Measures are targets. Their state capacity leaves other states green with envy. But for all the bemoaning that You Can Just Do Things, or that the Chinese Government Can Just Do Things, the corollary is that the Government Can Just Do Things to You.
They're facing some genuinely difficult problems now; real estate collapse, the income trap, historical weakness in domestic consumption, demographic issues with tax base + aging population. It's too early to call the Chinese century. But broad policy strokes can affect billions.
The best way to understand this is that in China, the trains will not stop for you, even if you get caught in the doors. It'll drag you for miles, uncaring of if you become a corpse or not. And you have little control over where the train is going. It may lead to a prosperous, stable future, but if it doesn't and the train is headed for a cliff, what control could you possibly have over it, short of killing your way to the front?
OliveTapenade
4hr ago
I think that generally holds true for older, more established churches, like Catholics and Anglicans. They tend to be asset-rich and cash-poor, all the more so because many of the most conspicuous assets have substantial maintenance costs. There's a reason why most cathedrals you visit have donation boxes for upkeep, because just having a cathedral is a major ongoing expense.
Younger or more 'low church' groups often don't have this issue. If your church is run out of a big concrete block, or even a warehouse or something, you can enjoy much lower operating costs. You may just rent the building and be quite mobile, or if you own it, it can much more easily be shared with others or rented out for an additional income stream. Traditional church buildings don't have that flexibility.
I note that Deverell's fourteen aspirations put a particular emphasis on property sales, which I take as reflecting the reality that the Anglicans are declining in numbers and are therefore regularly selling church buildings that are no longer used in sufficient numbers to justify their upkeep. The same is true of Uniting, though somewhat less so of Catholics (who have done better at buoying their numbers through migration). Probably there's opportunity there?
Property sales were, to my knowledge, required from the churches to fund compensation about the sexual abuse scandals - or at least, that's what the Anglicans and Uniting did. They just don't have the cash on hand.
Anyway, yes, in general the stereotype that the churches are rich is misleading. The churches often have a lot of valuable stuff, if only because they are very old and have accumulated property intergenerationally, but their actual budgets are much more shoestring than one would expect.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4hr ago
I think rich countries shouldn't be building houses and infrastructure in flood plains without damming or proper measures to control the water. It's not impossible. The Netherlands has most of its economic activity below sea level, they eroded the North Sea.
There are big floods all the time in Britain and Australia that wreck people's houses. There ought to be a more aggressive stance taken towards the weather, bring it under control one way or another.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
4hr ago
but I didn't need a klaxon to tell me that
It's a Blue Tribe Is Right About Global Warming alarm; the fact it's a klaxon in the first place tells you it really isn't well-meaning.
Alarm fatigue is a real thing. I know lots of people that have mentioned disabling alerts like this because they're tired of Amber Alerts (missing kids, often custody disputes) or Blue Alerts (for police getting fired at) from hundreds of miles away, or to be honest, even lots of NWS alerts, which IMO seem to have started appearing more often for less severe weather. I feel like I get weather alerts that are well meaning, but not surprising: "severe heat warning" for most of the South in summer isn't wrong, but I didn't need a klaxon to tell me that (uncertain if I've gotten one exactly like that, but not too far from it).
There is a tier of unblockable alerts, but we've only tested that once. I think we need to better-align the alerts with the people that need to see them.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5hr ago
I don’t think this is the case? It’s very, very, very hard to disentangle beauty from wealth.
You can see a bit of dynamics on smaller scales with skin tone ranges as defined by tans in-community: historically traditionally whiter skin implied you were rich enough to stay indoors, but in more modern times tanner skin implies you’re rich enough to spend free time outside, but these are fairly weak and obviously context dependent. But that’s clearly not what you’re talking about.
The fact of the matter is that by the time a post-puberty person can “fairly” judge attractiveness, they have a ton of stereotypes and social influence floating around. Plus, wealth often leads to fitness and attractiveness even semi directly, both in things like bone structure, teeth, weight, muscle tone, and more (some of which also have socioeconomic connotations). Also, worth noting as an aside, measures you’d assume to be universal indicators of appeal are not perfectly universal - if I remember correctly there are differences in eg hip ratio preferences that differ between groups. All this to say that it’s a fool’s errand to make a claim like that.
Anecdotally it’s whatever. I don’t think it’s wrong to have preferences even if they aren’t perfectly fair. I think it’s wrong to discriminate, but I’m not gonna bat an eye if someone says Ukrainians are the best or something, but don’t pretend it’s some universal truth
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
5hr ago
I've pretty much given up on asking for troubleshooting help or other non-subjective feedback for this very reason. Even for scripting, it sometimes invents command switches that don't exist or that only work on certain OSes which means I need to correct it 5 times before I get a working script. And then, it often favors complex, messy, and difficult to maintain solutions over simple, elegant ones. Just about the only tech task LLMs are good for at this point is parsing stack traces or weird error messages. They're pretty handy for that.
HaroldWilson
5hr ago
I find activists in part evil because they never hold up their end of the bargain. On Friday, they will celebrate their hard won compromised victory and on the next Monday they will be telling us how the status quo is intolerable and needs changed. Every time you move the line a little, the next movement of the line is only slighter more expensive compared to the new status quo and the government has already admitted the alleged moral case.
I don't really understand how this makes activists 'evil'. If they believe in A, how is trying to get to halfway to A first an illegitimate way to pursue your goals. Compromises never constitute a recognition on the part of one party that the new status quo is actually desirable, merely better than the alternative, and this is always how politics has functioned. Most obviously, as soon as each thought they had the ability to put their cause in a better position, those both North and South who had acceded to the compromises of 1820 and 1850 were more than willing to jettison them.
The NWS got the estimate of severity wrong for which they are being blamed by Texan GOP officials. Did the firings affect that estimate? Who can say. If there is blame to assign though, it should go to the elected officials of Kerr County who decided not to install rising water warning systems despite a similar tragedy occurring previously (and their neighboring counties having installed these systems) and who delayed any kind of emergency response that night until hours after the floods started despite having received those flood warnings from the NWS.
What I expect is for the GOP to blame nameless government functionaries despite being the reigning regime, the Dems to blame Trump who will attract ire (deserved and undeserved) like a lightning rod, and the idiotic good ole boy Republicans that actually dropped the ball and got people killed to escape scrutiny.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5hr ago
· Edited 5hr ago
This obviously doesn't mean that technical and formal mastery was irrelevant or unappreciated, but it was seen as a given for someone who pursued an artistic training since childhood and was considered inadequate to make a painting great without the added components of composition (which was tied to studies of mathematics and proportionality), ingenuity (where the term "genius" comes from, i.e. someone able to innovate and add), and especially subject matter - Botticelli being the eminent early example of someone who purposefully selected obscure and complex myths as subject matters because it proved he was a well-read intellectual and not a handyman.
Well, isn't that part the crux though? It's not that the "art scene" that only asks for craftsmanship is good, but that the "art scene" that does not ask for craftsmanship is bad. It's the same situation as with poetry and philosophy - technical requirements, whether it's the ability to paint well, to stick to a meter and rhyme in a way that tickles the unexpectedness sense, or to write out your argument formally, are useful because they filter out the uncommitted, the generally incompetent and those whose comparative advantage lies primarily in the social game of becoming respected in a subculture.
Poetry, nowadays, appears to be dominated by harpies writing free-form word vomit about their lived experience as a 1/16 Native American, and being very good at coordinating meanness towards anyone who suggests their poems may be trash or precious limited space in anthologies and events should be allocated to someone who is not of their tribe. If rhyme and meter still were table stakes for poetry, they would not be able to occupy the positions of power and taste-making that they do, because ability in rhyming and ability in coordinating meanness are not very correlated (and might even be anticorrelated because both take time to hone). I assume similar things are going on in art, though there whatever social games the monochromatic-canvas crowd engages in are less obviously entangled with SJ.
Picasso actually could draw when he had to, and therefore unsurprisingly was a good artist even when he drew weird cubist stuff. The golden age of art, indeed, seems to have been the period between the 17th and early 20th century, when craftsmanship was still required but no longer considered sufficient. (Some exceptions before that from good craftsmen that coincidentally also had interesting artistic visions, e.g. Bosch.)
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
5hr ago
"Worst" is measured in acres, in this case, 70,800 of them.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5hr ago
I think back in the day it was so manifestly obvious that swearing an oath meant you had to stand by it they never encoded such a section. In any event she could say 'i take this obligation freely and sincerely' in her usual overtly insincere and obnoxious manner. Root problem isn't solved. In the 1930s a fair few Wehrmacht officers felt restricted from plotting against Hitler because they swore an oath to him. It was not on! People would go around saying 'my word is my bond'.
In any event she did sign the paper so she formally ticked the box. Oaths are just box-ticking these days, no more meaningful than terms and conditions for free software, no more meaningful than the King's Champion who used to ride up, throw down a gauntlet and challenge anyone who disputed the new monarch's right to rule in single combat. He's still there of course, just holds a standard now.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5hr ago
Here’s my theory. Confluence of at least three things:
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It seems to be the case (a few studies + anecdata) that women prefer if not a full beard than at least some stubble to being clean shaven. It helps that the new wave of beards are generally speaking a little more cared for than previously. So “looksmaxxing” does slightly trend this direction (the historical norm?) and I think some evolutionary people would say that’s because it’s a loose indication of maturity and high T (?)
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It has lost its strongest political coded connotation. I don’t know if I’m actually capable of fully accounting for their trajectory, but you had liberals with their fancy oiled mustaches and beards at a similar time as the “manosphere” right wing comeback, at the same time as millennials started flexing their social media dominance (and millennials are older and at the age where beards are nice and full and age appropriate), plus some lower or working class people who never stopped wearing them so much, and so now you have a situation where a beard isn’t necessarily a strong signal in any direction. This helps mass adoption.
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Most importantly, prominent people have done it. Beards are one of the few ways men have to significantly “rebrand” their looks. Hair can do a bit, but only so much. Dress can do a bit, but is a little more subtle. But no matter if you are a celebrity, Twitter famous, a politician, or a regular dude, growing a beard is a very obvious change that gives you a different “vibe”. It’s very handy for a politician to be able to do a rebrand, and many have jumped on it. But this trend started IMO with other generalized influential people outside the political area - how many traditionally cowardly politicians have done it is a sign the movement is coming to a head
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
5hr ago
Unfortunately, the only person on that app within a 100 miles of me is Dante from DMC, and the other stuff from the rec isn’t generalizable to other apps. Thanks for the suggestion tho
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6hr ago
I’m not sure. I like America as a country, and it wouldn’t be bad if they win the war of civilization if it happens, but im also very impressed with what the Chinese have built in their own country and the competence of their leaders. They’re pragmatic to say the least, value stability both at home and abroad, they make decisions based on fact rather than feelings, and the society itself is pretty balanced and sane. A Chinese century would be boring but probably fairly stable and prosperous.
MonkeyWithAMachinegun
Dancing to Tom Paine's Bones
6hr ago
Thorpe claimed she had instead said "her hairs". Constitutional law expert Anne Twomey stated in response that the signed oath would have stated "heirs", and that the presiding officer could exclude Senator Thorpe if they believed a valid oath had not been sworn.
Does Australia not include a portion of their oath which reads "that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion" or something to that effect?
I mean yes oaths are just words which are just hot air until someone decides they mean something, but still. For example, on US federal forms, the point is not to catch the honest (e.g., on the US citizenship form the question which reads "Have you ever been a member of, involved in, or in any way associated with any Communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?") but to punish the dishonest. The Honest Communist who reads that question and checks the box marked "yes" is not the target of the form, because he does not exist. The Dishonest Communist who checks the box marked "no" is the target of the form, because then three years later when it comes out that yes he was a member of the Marxist International Domestic Workers Political Activism Party (of Lenin) of Farlandia, you can yoink his citizenship for lying on the form.
faceh
6hr ago
Interestingly, women’s reply rate is highest for bios which are only slightly negative, whereas men’s reply rate is highest for very negative bios.
Cursed stat. They complain about the men with the nasty bios and the disparaging comments yet reward that with extra attention.
Although I'd be very surprised if that was what led to actual dates and even MORE surprised if it led to relationships.
In this case the context is also that most senators dislike that oath and took it insincerely. If you look at the recording of Thorpe swearing the oath and making a fuss, the other senators in the room were rolling their eyes. One commented, "None of us like it", and a minister afterwards called the oath "archaic and ridiculous".
Australian parliamentarians are legally required to swear an oath to the Queen (as it was at the time; it's now the King) when they take office, but it is safe to say that very few of them actually believe the oath or take it remotely seriously. This is from 2016, but over half of them support a republic (yes, this is significantly out of step with popular opinion, politicians as a class are often unrepresentative), and I think it's fair to say that on a plain reading of the oath, bearing true allegiance to his majesty and his heirs and successors would be incompatible with wanting to abolish him.
But none of them take it seriously. We are not a nation that takes oaths seriously.
(I would not single out Australia in this respect - I think the West in general has largely given up on oaths. My favourite example of this, actually, is that becoming an American citizen requires a person to explicitly renounce any other citizenship or allegiance, and yet large numbers of people become American citizens while retaining prior citizenships. Nobody cares.)
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