domain:badcyber.com
Yeet_far
2d ago
I dunno -- I think the bit about "But the less-closely related you are to someone genetically, the stranger his world would seem to you" is just really not ... true? Totally begging the question?
I am sure on average you are going to have a more similar internal world to your family than a random stranger. But it has absolutely not been the case for me that my family "gets me" more than my friends do.
Like.
I love my family.
There are certain things I have in common with them, sure.
But I haven't lived at home in fifteen years. I have been with my wife for twelve of those. Whenever we go visit my family, it's a bit weird. I don't have nearly as much in common with them as I did when I was a child. My wife's (or, for that matter, by friends in the city I live in's) world is far closer to mine than my family's is, because we have grown together over the years.
It seems like the only way you could write that is if you've never left home (or at least did not stay away if you did). Or just have done a much better job of staying in close contact with your family than I have, I guess?
But regardless, you're conflating shared history and experience (memetic closeness) with genetic closeness.
I really hope this isn't a load-bearing part of your thesis in later chapters, but I guess I'll find out...
Throwaway05
2d ago
Unrelated but should still mention: not all specialities are sedentary/radiology, it's pretty common for proceduralists to actually do a decent amount (even if its just standing on your feet >16 hours a day) with Ortho at times being legitimately physically demanding (depending on what you do in Ortho).
My specific life course is highly identifiable which is one of the reasons why I've been vague about my specialty and background here but keep in mind that things like hobbies, pre or concurrent to medicine employment and family background can give people manual labor experience without the main career being one of those things.
To quote Heinlein - “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
If you aren't moving your body on a regular basis in some productive way you are leaving behind a ton of physical and mental health gains.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2d ago
Aren't you a doctor? How do you do manual labor?
pigeonburger
2d ago
They soft retconned the entire point of the last two movies. Dinosaurs got loose and spread throughout terrestrial ecosystems, being somewhere between invasive and endemic. Photos of Triceratops herds migrating through Wyoming, Pteranodons nesting on skyscrapers, the works. And then they just... died off. No, seriously, dinosaurs - which colonized everything from the Arctic to the Antarctic - just couldn't handle conditions outside the modern equator. Thanks, global warming?
I think that's also pretty much what they did with the last two movies, in the sense of them trying to execute as little as possible on the premise of Dinosaurs Everywhere(tm), probably because it's not conducive to the kind of plot they want to tell, or it would be too high budget, or it would make the dinosaurs seem boring and not special anymore. So what they do is put out trailers that show prominently Dinosaurs Everywhere(tm), put it in opening or closing scenes, and then quickly in the movie find an excuse why yes, there's Dinosaurs Everywhere(tm) but not really dinosaurs everywhere and the trailer feels like a bait and switch.
GoofyGoose
2d ago
The pathologization of savings always struck me as economist cope.
It’s not even good economics. Any good economist knows that the “deflation bad” meme is wrong unless you add extra assumptions.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2d ago
Tried to read The Deepgate Codex and had to quit halfway through, way to gruesome for no reason.
Just finished The Rot which was great.
When really using a shovel properly, hard, throughout a day, is a much more complicated physical task than the bench press is. Experience completing labor tasks will add to your ability in those tasks, no different from any athletic specialization.
I think most of the gym strength vs labor strength comes down to this.
On a practical level, most construction workers will have the added advantage of having both much higher work capacity in the movements most relevant to their work - gym strength is not commonly built by doing hundreds of reps (per hour, for 10 hours, in the sun) - and by having already built the mental fortitude necessary to complete hundreds of reps (per hour, for 10 hours, in the sun).
if someone tells me that they are strong but not with "gym muscles" then I know they aren't actually all that strong at all
The laborer will of course turn that around. The inability (in work capacity or mental fortitude) to lift all day is the same as not being "all that strong at all" - no matter what the little numbers on the plates say when they get moved around for a grand total of 10 minutes every other day.
Throwaway05
2d ago
I absolutely hypothesize it's this. I'm getting older now and while I still go to the gym the numbers are much lower than they used to be, I hear my younger friends brag and I mourn the old days.
Ask me to actually do something and I smoke them.
Presumably because I have a bigger frame, more practice, and more experience actually using my muscles in manual labor.
roystgnr
2d ago
There are enough stories about the laziness and incompetence of ordinary law enforcement work out there already. "Here's a video of the guys who burgled my house driving away; their license plate number is clear." "Well, we can't prove the owner of the car was the one driving the car, so our hands are tied." "Can you at least check out their garage, where my AirTag says my stuff still is?" "Huh?" I don't want to call this all routine incompetence, since surely I'm only reading about the worst cases that made it through social and news media selection bias, but it's at least repeated incompetence. (these examples also aren't necessarily law enforcement's fault - e.g. if they can't get a judge to issue a warrant or a DA to prosecute in situation X then it's hard to blame cops who just give up on X)
But the incompetence of enforcement of extraordinary cases, with the death toll up to six here, is still shocking to me. Rationally, I know the US homicide clearance rate is down to 50/50, and I know that's in spite of the low average intelligence of people dumb enough to commit murder, but I still like to pretend to myself that cops are just too busy to stop the little crimes because they're on the case on the big ones.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Of course, this is not the actual logic. What's actually going on is plain old sympathy.
pbmonster
2d ago
They weren't strong
Often, they were extremely strong a decade (or two) ago, and are now in a chill, but meticulously managed decline. Especially if they managed to avoid long injuries, their muscles might not be bulging anymore, and might be covered by a layer of fat, but the muscle mass is still mostly there. Advanced age and sinking testosterone levels makes building muscle much more difficult, but careful maintenance is doable.
It's even more apparent in the endurance sports. If you look at 10k/half marathon/marathon times of senior/grandmaster division runners, they often maintain impressive amateur times into their sixties. The real performance cliff only seems to come in the late sixties.
but they knew how to leverage what strength they had.
This is, of course, also true.
FistfullOfCrows
2d ago
What are the lore implications? Do these Native American Kangz have a Yakub of their own?
Eetan
2d ago
I think it deserved to be a bigger deal than it largely was.
If so, it is to highlight the routine laziness and incompetence of ordinary law enforcement work. (Yes, you can shoot your parents, do the minimal work to do not be caught at the crime scene and you will get away with it. Yes, if you are wanted, you can just let it know you died in boating accident and TPTP will let it slide)
The Zizians were anything but 180IQ master criminals from pulp fiction, but the limited smarts they had were sufficient to get away with everything for long time.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2d ago
On the one hand, replacing every American with a higher-IQ Chinese or Indian person might raise the GDP by 15%, but it's weird to say to say it would be good for "America."
I've seen people who would argue this, in two different types. First, there's the open borders set; the sort who, when someone talks about how current trends will, say, destroy France, respond with "What, is it going to sink into the ocean? Iberia will be turned into an island somehow?" To them, "America", or any other country, is just a chunk of land, an arbitrary geographic division marked by "imaginary lines," utterly independent of the people living on it. That the job of a country's government is to provide administration for the Universal Human Rights, both "negative" and "positive", of all people within its particular arbitrary domain, without discrimination — they have a duty to treat equally everyone who happens to be living there in any given moment, regardless of how long they've been there, or any arbitrary fiction like "citizenship." Further, their view generally sees the existence of separate countries as a historical mistake, a remnant of the xenophobia of our ancestors, who failed to see past superficial cultural differences to our universal humanity, and thus drew borders instead of politically unifying into a larger and larger multicultural polity that would come to embrace all humanity; and thus that existing nations should at the very least, in practice, be reduced to mere administrative subdivisions of a de facto or de jure one-world government.
(There's also a slightly more libertarian-leaning technocratic subset, who see the duty of the state's administration as less about the welfare state, and more about maximizing their territory's GDP. A corporation's leadership has a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, thus, if a CEO thinks firing the entire workforce of the company and replacing them with new hires will make it more profitable, he isn't just allowed to do so, he's required. Analogously, if a government thinks replacing the "legacy" population of the country with immigrants will increase total GDP, well then, 'line goes up equals world more gooder.')
Then there's the people who would reject the idea for other countries, but would make the case for America specifically, because the USA is not like other countries — "America" is an idea. America is a system of government, laid down by the Founders (some argue via divine inspiration), and enshrined in the (sacred) Constitution. Wherever those ideals exist, there is "America." So, yes, you can replace every American with a higher-IQ Chinese or Indian person, but so long as the structures of the federal government remain, so long as the Constitution is still there, then it's still "America."
Eetan
2d ago
My theory of crypto value is that most of the coin gets stolen every few years
It is lost and misplaced, not stolen, and it is not most, estimated number of lost BTC is about 10-20% of total supply
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2d ago
Moonlight Relic: Guardian of Aster Fall Book 3 by David North.
So I've been looking at my family history recently and can't help but notice that some of my personality traits are exactly what you would expect given where I come from. I can't prove my hypothesis is true, but the suspicion is unshakeable. My question is: Do groups with merchant history have consistently different behaviour from other groups?
I'm about three-quarters Hokkien and one-quarter Cantonese, and while I haven't been able to trace the ancestries of all of my grandparents I know at least one of their fathers grew up in Quanzhou. It was an important port city for four hundred years during the Song and Yuan dynasties, and many people there were traders - in fact, the name for "satin" comes from the Arabic name for the city. Given its importance, it saw merchants from all over the world and played host to many religions - it was a place where Buddhists, Confucians, Taoist, Muslims, Christians, Hindus and even Manichaeans would have congregated (many of these religions, including Manichaeism, still exist in Fujian). A gigantic proportion of overseas Hokkien trace their history back to Quanzhou, and it is likely their ancestors would have been involved in a whole lot of trading and seafaring along the Maritime Silk Road. (As previously noted, I'm not sure where my other two Hokkien grandparents trace their ancestry, but it's not unlikely they trace it back to some similarly large trading port like Amoy which became the hub in Fujian after the decline of Quanzhou. And Cantonese were also, unsurprisingly, big traders and merchants.)
Five months ago - before I started looking at any of this - I had written a post about my inexplicable need to wander, and in that post I even mention the romanticism and pull of the Maritime Silk Road. When I was six or seven I had claimed ownership of many of the travel books my parents owned, and placed Post-Its in these books to mark destinations for future reference. I have always lacked a need for human interaction and connection, while also possessing an unusually high openness to experience as well as a deep longing for exploration and novelty. Some part of me has always wanted to be a nomad of sorts, and the idea of being tied down to one place doing the same thing for the rest of my life - even something I like - actually sometimes induces low-level panic. It feels uninspired and uninspiring. It feels domesticated. I recently watched a video where an old hippie recounts his time travelling through Southeast Asia on the Banana Pancake trail, and couldn't help but feel nostalgic and wistful while watching it.
I've seen this urge in other male members of my family too, who seem to have this compulsion to travel and wander and see new things. I don't know if this is real or if it's just me inappropriately pattern-matching, but it's weird and disconcerting to look back into your history and come across a glaringly obvious selection pressure that might have produced your specific pattern of behaviour.
Eetan
2d ago
Eetan
2d ago
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2d ago
Western democracies are designed to make it difficult for politicians to directly control the judiciary.
Which is yet another reason "Western democracy" needs to go. Bring in an Augustus who will solve this swiftly and decisively.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2d ago
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
DOGE didn't ultimately succeed in shrinking the government, but it eliminated the security of government employment.
3 Ariane 6 launches in the last year, but it looks like they've got 9+ planned for 2026 ... I looked that up because I was going to talk smack about Ariane flight rates, but 9 Atlantic round trips per year might actually be in the sweet spot between "frequent enough that speed is important" and "infrequent enough that additional capital investment doesn't get a chance to pay off".
The most prominent one seems to have migrated to kite-based electrical generation. Not sure why, but it can't be a great sign for the idea. Is it just that cargo ships don't have much of a keel, so they only benefit from the component of the wind that's parallel to their course?
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