domain:epistle.us
philosoraptor
12hr ago
Please do bear in mind that most people who wanted Ukraine to win thought they were going to lose in weeks/months, and were pleasantly surprised that the Russians proved so incompetent at modern maneuver warfare, and the Ukrainians so resilient. This includes the bulk of Western military/geopolitical analysts.
I do distinctly remember saying at the time - not here, but to friends and coworkers - that Ukraine's best scenario (that was realistic without the US or EU doing most of the heavy lifting) was creating a Vietnam-style quagmire. In broad strokes, it seems to me that's what's happened.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
12hr ago
It's not, but it explains why someone might empirically think it is. Someone who eliminates hfcs from their diet will likely see various improvements in health.
Armin
12hr ago
Gotcha
I think that there is too much digital ink used in explaining why and how modern western parties behave in an almost erratic way, about philosophy, material reasons or political doctrines etc, when the usual explanation and the one that we use in a Occam's razor way is women dominate them.
Armin
12hr ago
Because of demographics. They are basically women's parties, and women organise along intersectionalist ways because of their inherent egualitarism and mean girl culture. Analysis about material society or industrialism or whatever are nonsensycal because they are social clubs about what is ick and what is not.
2rafa
12hr ago
Sure, but how is that relevant to replacing hfcs with cane sugar in Coca Cola?
2rafa
12hr ago
Very true but it is also true that after the good faith effort by Obama (against Israel’s wishes) to sign a deal that had a clear pathway to full integration with the Western economy / markets on trade - the main economic goal Iran has sought for decades - with the sole price being (easily cheated) checks by nuclear monitors, the Iranians continued to funnel billions into regional Shia militias in Yemen and Lebanon (as well as Syria and Iraq) that fought against US allies and whose funding was solely intended to prolong conflicts with Saudi Arabia, Israel and others as part of the ongoing plan since 1979 to make the Islamic Republic the moral and spiritual center of the Ummah’s collective consciousness and to serve Iranian foreign policy.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
12hr ago
If someone’s leaving because “I didn’t know people would get so angry when I asked them questions” then it’s possible that they could acclimate after getting used to the general tone of discussion here.
If someone’s leaving because “I didn’t know racism was allowed here” I would tell them to not let the door hit them on the way out.
aldomilyar
12hr ago
They're definitely mutually intelligible but I hear a lot of comments from Malaysian Mandarin speakers that they find Mainlanders tricky to understand/phrasing things differently and vice-versa. Part of it's the Malaysian chinese vocabulary picking up a lot of loanwords from English/Malay/dialect
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
13hr ago
but that something changed and now (to make up some numbers) 20% of the games are classic instead of 60%.
How many games were there released per year in the 90s, and how many are released now?
My impression is that there are, to put it simply, a metric fuckton of games now and even if a smaller proportion of them are good, that still means way more good games than in the 90s.
Green parties in Europe reflect the policy priorities of highly-educated, middle class but not rich rich hippies.
This is true in Germany, in Britain and elsewhere. In practice their policies typically involve:
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Limiting new housing construction on ecological grounds (good for NIMBYs and accepted by progressive students who think all pricing problems in housing have nothing to do with demand and are just because of ‘evil landlords’, who the Greens promise to deal with in vague terms).
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Limiting any infrastructure development (especially airports and roads) - again good for NIMBYs / BANANAs and supported idiotically by young progressive college graduates who imagine cancelling this funding is some blow against the nebulous ‘rich’ who are both greedy and destroying the environment for sport.
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Generic progressive positions on immigration, race, foreign policy etc as adapted to the circumstances of the broad left in their country and region, with none of the pesky non-college-going native working class who are still present in the established center-left parties.
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Welfareism targeted specifically towards the young(ish). Greens certainly aren’t opposed to welfare for the old (pensions / social security) or children (tax credits etc), but will focus on growing the welfare state to cater more to college students and graduates, especially those destined for low wage careers.
Essentially they are parties for people who rarely encounter the underclass, and so have no resentment for them, but do often encounter the affluent as well as fellow young people on upwardly mobile career trajectories toward whom they bear a great deal of resentment.
For example, a typical Green-voting family in the Anglosphere:
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Two highly educated parents, possibly retired, one [formerly] a publisher at an academic press or a teacher, the other one an academic in the humanities or soft social sciences or a therapist with a client list of middle aged women. Live a comfortable life in an outer suburban affluent town in a house they bought in 1992, now asset rich, cash OK but enough to vacation regularly and support their kids a little.
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Their two kids; one a NEET / part time barista in a band who studied music at a conservatory for a few years before dropping out; the other a college graduate junior project manager at an NGO reliant on a government ministry for funding working on wildlife protection legislation that is itself funded by a levy on construction companies. Both kids rent is ‘supported’ by their parents, who are worried about them ever becoming self-sufficient and think the state should step in rather than letting all those fat cat bankers and lawyers take all the money.
RenOS
something is wrong
13hr ago
My impression based on left-leaning friends & acquaintances (of which I have very, very many) is twofold:
The first is a general aesthetic. When people draw images for the green future, it's just a really nice-looking, organic neighbourhood, farms with happy animals, it's clean, people still live in modern-style housing right next to a beautiful forest. On the other side, when climate change and fossil fuels are shown, it's dirty, it's ugly same-looking cities with large heavy industry, animals in pain from ugly, pustulous wounds, people in cramped apartments far away from any green (which probably is dead anyway). On that level, it really is just the good ol' politics of in-favor-of-everything-good-against-everything-bad; If given the choice, absolutely everyone would take the former over the latter, if there are no other ramifications (which at least aren't shown nor talked about). Woke is mostly the same; It generally sells itself first and foremost on extremely benign-sounding slogans and tries to just ignore, talk away and suppress the mention of any and all problems. Of course trans is just about letting a small minority live as they please, of course women's rights are only about not being taken advantage of by evil men, of course anti-racism/colonialism is just about giving formerly oppressed groups their freedom back, etc. And the - primarily - women who make up the bulk of the support really aren't unpleasant for the most part, often the opposite, they just want everyone to get along, everyone to work towards the obvious, common good and to exclude the minority of evil men. If you just avoid calling their politics into question - which in daily life will be 99% irrelevant anyway - they are usually exceptionally helpful and pro-social. But, of course, they have a massive, noble-lie shaped hole (and also, they can be irritating busybodies, but that's more manageable).
The second is a general distrust of the profit motive. Several of my (mostly male) friends who are much more successful than me (managing-your-own-company or high-tier BigCorp middle-manager successful) have had more than enough personal experience of engaging in what they perceive as anti-social behaviour just to keep their company/section afloat (stuff like cutting out a newly emerging competitor with legally grey tactics, deliberately hiring badly-paid interns with the promise of a permanent position over and over, actively managing a funnel into addictive behaviour for your freemium game, etc.). They genuinely feel bad about this and want to restructure society so that this isn't done anymore in the future. They're rarely communists and are aware of its failure modes, they want markets, but their experience makes them believe that a many of the arguments against renewables are as bullshit as the old pro-smoking arguments; If you put up just the right limits on the market, we will have a great, green future!
Tbh the latter isn't even that far from my own position; It's just that I'm much more suspicious of government intervention blocking progress and protecting old, wasteful structures in an unholy BigState BigCorp marriage (also frequently called the cathedral).
pbmonster
14hr ago
The way you typically put energy in is to have a fast-moving neutron that is flying in to hit the mercury-198 atom. When you do the calculation, the required energy in for the neutron is just under 8.5MeV.
[Uranium/plutonium fission] produce a spectrum of neutron energies, but the peak of that spectrum (the most number of neutrons produced) is around 0.7MeV, the average being about 1.9MeV
That is, the short answer is that existing fission reactors just don't produce enough neutrons that have enough energy to convert mercury isotopes
Makes perfect sense, thank's for writing it all out!
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14hr ago
The problem isn’t birthrates, it’s excess deaths and emigration. The population is much lower because people who didn’t flee are being killed in the war. And keep in mind that win or lose, the population will not be enough to weather another invasion later on.
functor
14hr ago
I have never understood why green parties are woke. Their ideology is naturally anti woke.
Remove fossil fuels from society and you are going to have a society that reflects that material basis. A society without fossil fuels doing most of the work is reliant on male physical strength. If agriculture is going to be entirely organic and sustainable people are going to be skinny. Much of feminism builds on people leaning on the state or insurance companies for their old age and care instead of family. Social structures are seen as oppressive by the left if people can recieve a pension and be cared for by the state. A large state that takes care of people requires industrial civilization. Without a huge state people need families, children, and social structures for support.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
14hr ago
However, Russia also has plenty of militarily eminently sensible moves that it has not taken yet, presumably because of Western sensibilities
Yep, the number of bridges across the Dnieper is quite limited, and yet they haven't been taken out, nor have the railroad hubs in Western Ukraine been covered with petal landmines.
Being monolingual isn't a stable situation either! Languages change and evolve, and morph into new ones. I resist the urge to make sweeping pronouncements or value judgements here.
The Romans learned Greek for centuries even after their own uncontested dominance. Latin was a mark of class and a scholarly language for tens of generations after it had died out in common use.
Surely you have some good experience with this process as an Indian who writes long internet articles in English?
India has almost as many languages as gods. Very few of them have died for good, and those that did were closer to tiny dialects with a few hundreds or thousands of speakers. I don't think any language that had a million speakers or more in living memory has died out, even if there's been a trend of consolidation with English and Hindi. A lot of people speak their native tongue as usual, but write it using Latin characters. There's no clear trend of one particular language sweeping everything else away.
I'm not sure what we're arguing about, this conversation has veered far away from what I criticized as flaws in the grandparent comment. I have no objection to the claim that people who learn multiple languages tend to be better at a few and only passable at others. That's obviously true.
The question is why. The comment far above claims that it's because languages are mutually exclusive, learning one necessarily takes away from the others.
I say this isn't true. If you take math and history lessons, learning more history won't make you worse at math, but you will obviously not learn as much math as someone who hyperfocused on it.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
14hr ago
I agree that good games (even great games) are still to be found, especially from indie devs. My observation is just that there has been a decrease over time in the rate of getting those great games. Early on (like in the 80s), devs were strongly limited by technology, but in the 90s they started to be unshackled from those limitations and were putting out incredible games that blew everything before them away. Doom, Fallout, the various Infinity Engine games, FF6, FF7, Deus Ex, Starcraft, Alpha Centauri, etc etc. And that torrent of classics kept up for a good long while. But at some point it slowed down - around 2010 is where the inflection point seemed to me to be. Not that we don't get classics any more (we do, some of my favorite games are from after the golden age), but that something changed and now (to make up some numbers) 20% of the games are classic instead of 60%. We can still get a lot of great games while it also being true that we get fewer than before
I suspect that the primary driver here is because AAA game development has become way too expensive and time-consuming. When it takes 5-10 years and a team of 200 people to make the game, there's always going to be pressure to play it safe so as to recoup the investment. Not to mention that long dev times hurt because games (like other software) benefit a lot from iteration. If you make a game in a year or two, you can test out your ideas and learn from your mistakes so much faster than at the current pace of AAA dev. And I bet that this is why so many of the great games in recent memory have been indie games. Free of the constraints their AAA colleagues face, they can focus more on quality for their intended audience than safe broad appeal. They can iterate faster and dial in what makes the best games. But even though the indie devs still knock it out of the park a lot, time was that all the devs were doing that! It really does strike me as a golden age that we aren't quite experiencing any more.
The US has been the Great Satan from Day 1.
Day 1 of the revolution to oust a CIA backed dictator that was installed to thwart the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company by a democratically elected Prime Minister, that is.
The Persians have plenty of legitimate historical grievance against Anglo-Americans, let's not pretend otherwise. But they could probably let it all go if their main regional rival didn't have such strong military ties with the US.
TowardsPanna
15hr ago
Wait what? I never heard about Lovelace being in Civ before now. A mathematician and "the first computer programmer". They have no business making her a leader of a nation. Or several nations across history, as is the case in 7.
But on the note of how to label these 'woke practices', I have started thinking it's more about female chauvinism/favoring women than about merely increasing diversity.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
15hr ago
Being multilingual is not a stable situation. Languages exist in a hierarchy wrt each other and their relative strength changes over generations often drastically. In the modern world without some heavy nationalist pressure all but the highest prestige language(s) typically dies out. Surely you have some good experience with this process as an Indian who writes long internet articles in English?
StJohnOfPatmos
15hr ago
What's funny is that this exact series of events (male founding figure of a Green party focused on environmental policy becomes ostracised and removed from power by the next generation of overwhelmingly female party apparatchiks who want the party to revolve mainly around woke identitarian politics) is now turning into a recurring trope across Western democracies, virtually always following the same beats.
The Austrian Greens sabotaged Peter Pilz, a founding figure of the party and a star investigative journalist who uncovered (and to this day still keeps uncovering) some of the biggest political scandals in modern Austrian history. After he was denied a safe seat for an upcoming election, despite being a senior leadership figure, he left the party to found his own movement, after which the vengeful Green party leaked years-old internal party protocols that revealed he had once called his secretary "Schatzi" (essentially the German form of calling someone "honey"), she had complained, and they had resolved the issue internally without further problem. This complete nothing-story was of course blown up to the scale of serial predation (this happened in MeToo years) and Pilz was pressured to resign all political functions and retire from politics.
An almost identical scandal happened in Germany in the run-up for this years election, Stefan Gelbhaar - an established, handsome, charming, popular male Green partisan - was slated to receive a safe seat for the Greens until one of the fattest, ugliest women in the Greens party structure started spreading anonymous false accusations against him that collapsed the second anyone tried to verify their legitimacy - but by then it was too late, as the Greens had already decided to remove Gelbhaar from his seat without even sharing the nature of the allegations with him. As the head of the Young Greens said, regarding the matter - "the presumption of innocence exists in the courts, not in the Green party".
I think there's a similar story within the French Greens, but I'm not that knowledgeable about them since they're a largely irrelevant presence in French politics.
TowardsPanna
15hr ago
You have a dangerous line of thought. You're almost downplaying the problem of police brutality and similar abuses of power.
Predators seek out vulnerability in the victim and the opportunity to get away with the crime. Finding particularly guilty people to punish does not really enter into the equation except coincidentally.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
15hr ago
Yeah, I agree that those sounded good in principle. That's why I was excited for Humankind when it came out, because I thought the idea of growing your civilization over time could be a really fresh take on the genre. In practice it didn't turn out so well (at least to me, and it sounds like to you) because the lack of identity just made civs feel soulless and disconnected from any historical flavor.
Accordingly I was already skeptical with the direction for Civ 7, because they were building on ideas that I already knew I didn't like when they were in another game. And unfortunately it seems like they too have gotten things completely wrong flavor wise (seriously, why does Firaxis think that the leader is what we players care about??). Not to mention the harsh age resets, which seriously undermine the core thing people like about Civ (building stuff up over time).
I find it especially galling because according to Firaxis, this all was in service of trying to get people to finish more games of Civ, since stats show most people don't finish the game. But I do! I find the entire arc of a game of Civ fun, and while the late game isn't quite as good as the early game, it's still really fun to me. So with Civ 7 they are trying to solve a problem I don't agree that the game has, by using methods that I don't like (and which go against the core identity of the series). It's very frustrating.
ResoluteRaven
15hr ago
The fertility crisis isn't going to be solved in or by Ukraine. If a solution is found, then Ukrainian wartime casualty counts will be irrelevant assuming they stay within 20th century (i.e. WWI level or less) norms, but could make the difference between Ukraine existing or not as a sovereign state in the future. Presumably the soldiers fighting are motivated by nationalism and care about such things. If a solution isn't found, then we go extinct and this discussion is moot.
Im currently dieting around similar numbers as you are. IMHO you should invest more energy of your process into the mindset. Why are you dieting in the first place? It seems you are training towards a marathon whilst also lifting? Things that people usually enjoy in a diet:
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