domain:parrhesia.substack.com
Mudchute farm is great and kids love it, but I wouldn't call it a commercial farm.
The M25 is 15-20 miles out of central London and there is some agricultural land inside it, particularly in Kent and around Watford. Mostly a mixture of wheat and rough grazing. The serious market gardening is further out - presumably because it is labour intensive and needs to be somewhere where migrant farm worker dorms are cheaper.
The density of ASDAs in London outside zone 1 is such that I am surprised you can be more than 2 miles away from the nearest one. If the "Walmart equivalent" is any big-box retail discounter (including Aldi/Lidl) then make that 1.5 miles.
For my own answers to the questions (also in London suburbs)
- 8 miles, 45 minutes door-to-door whether you bike, train, or drive outside rush hour. (In central London)
- 1.5 miles for a studio which sends designs to Italy for cutting. Savile Row is 9 miles away.
- 13 miles, about 1 hour by bike or public transport, 40 minutes driving. (Nearest land which is clearly farmland based on Google satellite)
- Nearest commuter rail station is <0.5 miles. If I leave the house 7 minutes before the train is due I won't miss it. Nearest station with intercity trains is 5 miles away on the edge of central London.
- Nearest ASDA is <1 mile away.
- 5 miles
HereAndGone
1d ago
Any controversy about, say, recordings in bathrooms is going to go through the roof if these things become commonplace. You can (maybe) grab some pervert with a phone in the women's bathroom or changing room, but someone just wearing a pair of spectacles?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
HereAndGone
1d ago
I'm honestly not sure how much of this is that management thinks we're too retarded to estimate people's ages
There is that, of course, but I think this is just CYA from management for scenarios such as the one outlined by Westphalianpeace. Can't be accused of racism if you're scanning everyone's ID.
(Of course they still can, and will, accuse you of racism and management will still throw you under the bus despite any video evidence to the contrary because a law suit is the last thing they need and some bleeding-heart activist judge will rule that asking a potentially underage urban youth for ID is racism on the same level of voter suppression, don't you know minorities have little free time to get, or access to, forms of ID you bigot? But it's a tiny shred of protection for both the business and the employees.)
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
There are plenty of mountain lions in the US, and I think they're "big cats". I've also seen claims of jaguars' range extending across the border from Mexico, but relatively few documented encounters.
I've personally seen a bobcat, but that probably is too small to count.
FistfullOfCrows
1d ago
Now that is a name I haven't heard in a long time. I simply must link this old classic. Dear lord has it really been 19 years. Uncle Ghastly's Ghastly Hubjo - Savior blues.
FistfullOfCrows
1d ago
Listening to his dunking on Wernher von Braun was enough for me to know he's a shithead.
There's probably some way to play a high INT+secondary stat with an appropriate weapon that scales with both.
Edit: Just looked it up since I didn't quite remember it, there are INT+FTH and INT+ARC staffs, so these are technically hybrid, but not really relevant for you. No +STR or +DEX or others sadly.
Edit edit: The demihuman queens staff has high base scaling and low INT scaling, so that would be the correct staff for a hybrid physical build I think.
But generally FTH is easier for hybrid builds in two different ways: First, there are more explicit hybrid seals that make your incantations scale with another stat, and second there are much more utility incantations that have no or very little scaling. Golden Vow for example is a great generalist dmg/def % buff that has no scaling whatsoever, anyway.
faceh
1d ago
Sounds like the streamers and their watchers really deserve each other.
Its fair to say that's almost a symbiotic relationship. It just seems obvious that they'd all be a bit better off/happier in a different equilibrium.
There are in fact 'non-toxic' streamers and communities out there, of course!
Its just more common than not that once streamers 'get big' its a ticking clock on when they get outed as either terrible people or they have their big obvious 'sell out' moment.
Getting outed as a terrible person might not even hurt their popularity (I'm thinking of Dr. Disrespect, but there's a lot of them).
I can certainly believe that people, despite having literally an internet full of all sorts of porn at their fingertips, nevertheless prefer hot women streaming video games.
There definitely seems to be a factor where a lot of normies are wired up to perceive themselves as part of a community and having a 'friendship' of sorts with livestreamers, since at least they can 'interact' (using that term pretty damn lightly) with that person and see their impact on the streamer's show.
If you are streaming while wearing makeup and elaborate sexy clothes, then you are already accepting that part of your appeal is that guys will be aroused by your videos.
Yep.
By not having a paywalled explicit channel, you are likely leaving most of the monetarization opportunities on the table. So getting an explicit account where you sell videos of your feet or tits likely has a big payoff.
YEP. I've noticed this is a path that some streamers have taken. Creating actual content is HARD. So a women might get popular for being good at a game, or she's pretty but stays very modest. But how to keep interest in your channel going? See my point about the zero-sum attention economy.
But over time if the popularity starts to taper (or she just wants more money) she'll follow the incentive gradient to risque cosplays, to bikini/pool streams, to lewd but not explicit content, then there's the decent shot she goes from there to straight up porn (and, who knows, maybe escorting behind the scenes). And every step of the way generally being coy and plausibly deniable ("just getting more confident in my body, guis!").
World's oldest profession, after all. Of course when I say "incentive gradient" I mostly mean her overly invested fans who, if they feel like they don't have a shot at dating her, will probably be satisfied just getting to see her naked eventually.
birb_cromble
1d ago
I have a few thoughts.
Bears: I'm going to throw in a vote for the US. Black bears, brown bears, and grizzlies are all common. Russia might be in the running too.
Big cats: are you only including panthera, or "cats that are big"? The US might come back into the running with mountain lions if it's the latter.
Canines: the US probably wins here hands down if you include the larger eastern coyote. If you don't, it gets a lot murkier.
Big snakes: this might be the US these days. The Burmese python population is out of control in Florida, and they get enormous.
You might want to include a few more categories as well.
"Large browsers" are different from "large grazers". The US and Canada have moose and elk. Several countries in Africa have giraffe.
"Crocodilians" have representatives in the US, China, India, multiple South American countries, and at least Egypt. This probably goes to the US or China
"Aquatic mammals" is another interesting one, with freshwater dolphins (India, China, South America), manatees, and dugongs. This probably goes to the US, unless the dugong is more common in the Taiwan straight than I thought.
I'm not sure what the technical term is, but "giant honkin' birds" would be tricky. You have ostriches, and emus, but a few other that might fit as well. This gets complicated by the fact that the big two have been exported and farmed all over the world.n Australia probably wins here?
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
1d ago
Trans women are a tiny presence for all the noise they make, and if surveys say 3% of heterosexual men would consider dating a trans woman, I'd bet the number who really would date a trans woman is <1%.
Given the fraction of men who participate in machismo-based homosexuality in places where it is socially acceptable (American prisons, non-Taliban Afghanistan, ancient Greece etc.) or the demand for ladyboys as sex workers in cultures like Thailand where that is the normative way of being a trans woman, I would say that 3% is on the low side for "What fraction of men would dick another guy if there was a non-gay way of doing it?" I would bet that the real number is in the 3-10% range.
Men don't want AGPs and AGPs don't want cishet men, so if AGPs are more visible than ladyboys (and in the West they are) then surveys are going to underestimate willingness to date transwomen.
FarmReadyElephants
1d ago
Obviously I think the culture here is much higher quality than .win would be
The original question in my head was ‘how first world can you get without driving your big cats extinct’ which then evolved into the broader question with wealth as a proxy.
If so, I don't really think any answers to this question (your broader one) are really indicative of much because there is one glaring confounding factor in the metric you're using. Most megafaunal extinctions did not occur during the transition to industrial modernity; rather they occurred when all modern humans were still firmly in the hunter-gatherer stage. The giant ground sloths in South America, the mammoths and mastodon in North America, as well as Diprotodon and the marsupial lion in Australia were all driven extinct via a combination of human pressure + environmental shifts during the late Pleistocene. 65% of megafaunal species went extinct during this period, and when it came to animals above 1000 kg, 80% of them disappeared.
What really does this metric in is that this loss of megafauna wasn't exactly evenly distributed throughout the world, it was particularly severe in the Americas and Australia, whereas Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia were less affected. And the worst Pleistocene megafaunal die-offs occurred in regions which happen to correlate with first-world-ness today. Long before any human societies became recognisably first-world the distribution of megafauna globally was already very skewed, and relative megafaunal diversity in any region has a whole lot to do with whatever happened during the late Pleistocene and not quite so much to do with industrialisation.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
1d ago
1.) 20mi / 32km
2.) 20mi / 32km
3.) If you count horses, or wine grapes, less than 5mi / 12km. Otherwise like double that, I have lots of produce, hay, corn, soybeans in the area.
4.) 12mi / 20km
5.) 12mi / 20km
6.) 12mi / 20km
The place I live is suburban but right on the edge of a rural & agricultural area.
TowardsPanna
1d ago
Oh. Balls. Guess I wasted those runes then.
So Faith is the way to go for combining physical with magic?
Assembling Google, as a glorified directory, is not knowledge work, even if you consider the slightly more complex algorithms that go into its modern iterations. Full stop.
The Russel conjugation lives. Sneerers in the other direction call LLMs things like "a blurry JPEG of the internet". These sneers are not helpful, and I notice that you've now abandoned any speak of a test in terms of economic value.
"LLMs display jagged intelligence" or "spiky intelligence" or something of that nature.
Does Google Web Search display jagged/spiky intelligence? Clearly, it is not generally applicable and has major failure states and such.
Anyways, no real test needed
Then yeah, probably no response really needed from me to you. You don't seem to have much other than vibes. That which can be asserted without justification and all.
RenOS
something is wrong
1d ago
You need a catalyst to use spells. For sorceries that would be glintstone staffs or that one sword. But afaik sorceries always scale only with INT, so it's a difficult choice for mixed builds.
RenOS
something is wrong
1d ago
Just looked it up, my build in ER was a str/fth hybrid with golden halberd + clawmark seal as the main hand weapons. Buffing, manaless short range, mana-dependent long range all in one neat package that scales with both attributes. Thanks to str I can use large shields in the offhand. Especially on higher lvls you can also branch into other seals/incantations for other dmg types.
But it's just one example, there's plenty of viable mixed builds.
TowardsPanna
1d ago
I need to walk the line between clowning around aimlessly, and looking up too much info and taking the mystery and challenge out of the game. Giving myself some direction so that I might actually finish the game and not abandon it, without making it a paint by numbers affair.
Right now I don't know if I should head for that Castle that seems to be the main quest thing to do, or level up and get more equipment first. I've got some cool spirit summons but haven't applied any war ashes yet, don't think I have any worth using. I will not be using online mode btw.
I'm using the armors I started the game with, a sword that's a tiny tiny bit better than the default one, and I've got a flail (increased my dex to 18 to be able to wield it) for whatever situation might require blunt/strike damage.
I found Sellen(?) the Sorceress under the waypoint ruin in Limgrave (after beating the boss there), and bought a cheap spell that can send a glimstone projectile or something. I increased INT from 9 to 10 to be able to use it, and added the spell to a memorized slot, but it's still greyed out on the up-arrow and I don't seem to have a button for throwing magic...?
Noted! And I'll try to get my hp flask's effectiveness upgraded too. It heals less than half my hp currently.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
The original question in my head was ‘how first world can you get without driving your big cats extinct’ which then evolved into the broader question with wealth as a proxy. ‘Marginal’ and ‘wealthiest’ are turning out to be more relevant questions than I thought.
Texas ranchers have a few big antelopes, but I don’t know that it makes much difference- bison are native to Texas anyways. I guess free ranging gemsbok makes a difference if you’re specific to big antelopes.
Reticulated pythons in Florida probably matters, though.
kky
1d ago
All of them are within about 15 miles. The farm is regular produce for bourgeois consumption.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
You're allowed to judge people. The reasonable and equanimous thing to do is to determine whether your judgment is actually rational or merely a prejudice.
At one time, a prejudice against tattoos was rational because it really was only criminals and prostitutes and peripatetic sailors and vagabonds and the like who got them, let alone displayed them brazenly. So it was reasonable to assume a tattoo signified someone you likely did not want to associate with.
Nowadays, it's increasingly becoming a default fashion accessory of the young. So it really doesn't tell you much except "This person is of a generation that finds this acceptable." You can still be prejudiced against it because you don't like it and you grew up disliking tattoos, but you can't reasonably make much of a moral judgment about them (you can't even really predict anymore from tattoos alone whether or not someone is a conservative Christian, for example).
Arguably tattoos are permanent markings on your body that indicate short time preference and poor aesthetic taste, but I think this is pretty weak when you're talking about something that is widely accepted by society. You can dislike that society has changed, but then you're just judging someone for not resisting social change in exactly the way you want them to.
Most of your other examples are either aesthetic judgments (you can think chewing tobacco is gross, and it's certainly a gross and unhealthy and unfeminine habit) though some probably do signal a certain culture or mindset (blue hair, septum piercings, mohawks).
People are allowed to make superficial aesthetic judgments. I just think you shouldn't try to rationalize it with some reason why actually this is a very reliable predictor of whether or not someone is a good or smart person or even politically aligned with you.
Stats fall into two categories: generalist stats that can help most characters, and build-specific stats. Literally any build can benefit from more health and stamina, but faith is effectively a wasted point if you never use it.
This adds up because of how level rune requirements increase. You generally want to invest as little as possible in more offensively/build-oriented stats (strength, dex, int, faith, luck) that you are not using. The ones you do use are among the highest priorities. Each stat has their own benefits and shortcomings - probably pretty self-explanatory. The way I generally build my characters in these games is they pick one or two of these offensive stats to specialize in. You can go up to 3 comfortably in Elden Ring (eg a strength + dex + faith build). Some combinations (i.e. the worthwhile ones) have unique benefits (like int+faith spells), but spreading your offensive stats out is a choice between versatility and high performance. Simple answer: allocate levels based on whichever gives you the stat requirements you need to use a weapon you like, then level as needed to make that weapon's damage go up the most. If you get a very high offensive stat level, focus on the weapon's scaling damage over base damage if seeking new weapons.
My general suggestion is that vigor is your first priority, followed by your favored offensive stats. Add to the rest of the generalist stats as you need them, but try to only do so when you actually need to (eg "I think being able to attack more would help more than extra damage therefore more stamina") Note that most stats softcap around 40 or so (varies) which means diminishing returns, which makes other stats take priority.
Tips: Weapon upgrades are far more important than character level, though both are important. Be sure not to infuse your weapon with a modifier that reduces damage output.
Also, it you press start, you can choose items to quick select on the right side of the screen. Definitely put the horse on one of those slots.
Some of the comments about women and marriage on here are also creating incentives for women to avoid marriage. Even relatively tame, like "The thing is, that work doesn’t hugely differ whether you’re the wife of a coal miner or a self-made billionaire."
Yes, gentlemen, I hope all of you are telling the women in your lives (mothers, grandmothers, aunts, female cousins, sisters, daughters, wives) that you don't consider them equal partners, that you are the superior person in this relationship because you are the breadwinner and her little job (if she works outside the home) doesn't count. Working in the home only? Absolutely does not count for anything, she's replaceable by a coal-miner's wife because being the spouse and mother for an upper-middle class household doesn't involve any kind of extra work at all, and maybe even less work because you're rich enough to hire help. If you do decide to dump her, she deserves maybe ten bucks and a pat on the head, but certainly nothing more. Not one drop of your vast wealth (should you have vast wealth), even if that share does not, in fact, leave you penniless but you retain possession of the majority of the vast wealth.
Why, with such examples of how respected they are, why aren't women jumping at the notion of not getting an education and a career of their own and instead getting married as soon after high school as possible then producing a few kids as rapidly as possible? And if hubby gets tired of you after a while, well, you can probably find work somewhere scrubbing floors or something, automation and AI hasn't yet taken those jobs away!
Women - such ungrateful bitches, to turn down a wonderful offer like that!
I don't consider myself a misandrist, but some of you guys make it tough going, and more and more I am grateful to the Lord God Almighty for making me without the wiring to desire and need love and romance, because blow me down, I'd be fucked if I had to rely on a guy for anything from emotional validation on up.
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