domain:dynomight.net
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
9m ago
How often do you get to perform a notable good deed? Not just putting back a shopping cart, but something worthy of being a least a story about your day? Examples for scale:
A few months ago, I was hiking and happened upon a damsel in distress. A woman had fallen over and couldn't get up. She didn't seem seriously injured, more ungraceful and bruised, but she was struggling to get back up. I helped her to her feet and then escorted her back to the entrance to the park.
A few weeks ago, I was in a Walmart when I was stopped by a very short Hispanic man. He pointed up towards the top shelf and said, in an oddly Italian-sounding accent, "Can you please reach for me? I am too eh-small." I helped him, exchanged a quick pleasantry, and went on my day.
A few days ago, coming home from the same Walmart on an unlit back road, I nearly ruined my month. A tree had fallen across my half of the road. It was long dead and trimmed, leaving it like a telephone-pole sized spiked club. It was partially hidden by poor lighting, a curve, and a hill, and I came within a few feet of doing thousands of dollars of damage to my car. I managed to spot it in time, went around, and then I parked just past it, got out of the car, and hauled the tree out of the road.
With that act, it feels quite possible that I saved some nameless stranger from large expenses and hours of stress. I'll never know who, or if. But doing that felt good. Prosocial. Made me feel strong and competent.
But the real reward was getting to tell the story to my dad. I wound him up with expectations before revealing that I did not fuck up my car. And I got to see, when I mentioned picking up a tree and moving it, a flash of pride on his face at his son's casual might.
A flash of pride that I am reliving by telling the story now. And it occurs to me that this perk is probably a critical mechanism for inspiring people to do random, notable good deeds. And as a man who usually prefers his social invisibility, having one of these stories to tell is one of the rare times I'm happy to draw attention to myself. So.
What was your most recent good deed? Your greatest? And how does your willingness to preform them vary with how much social accolades you expect from people around you?
Tenaz
13m ago
Every living, significant fiction author I can think of is either Mormon or atheist/agnostic.
Eliza
30m ago
I skim-read that as 'Call of the Wild' (the Jack London novel where a sled dog goes to live in the woods with wolves) and was very confused. But happy that 'girl stories' were finally moving in my direction. Alas.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
32m ago
The "he started it", "no HE started it" is almost always pointless if it goes back further than like 1 or 2 decades max. There will usually be some hidden counterexample that can always be trotted out by either side. If that's lacking, they can just pull out an example that's only tenuously related. E.g. say we lived in a world where we could all 100% agree that gerrymandering was initiated by Republicans in 1990; in this case R's could simply say they were responding to the "dirty tricks" the Dems were using in general, such as when they sank Bork's SCOTUS nomination in 1987.
It's more productive to focus on questions like 1) who's benefiting more, right now or in the recent past, and 2) which side is trying to escalate, right now or in the recent past.
I kind of feel that there’s a recent crop of writers who actually suffer the opposite problem: no romance at all, ever. Which feels very… inhuman? The human experience is such that at least some kind of attraction is bound to come up in any developed world covering any significant stretch of time. Even more so for teen protagonists, but hardly exclusively. So it feels weird when these stories don’t bother, either, possibly because writing good romance is admittedly at least a little difficult.
As an example there’s a very noticeable divide in the manga/manhua world between boy audience and girl audience fictions. It’s increasingly common that the guy oriented ones either play the typical harem-flirty route, where everyone is interested but the main character never commits, or increasingly never being it up at all, focusing on other power fantasy aspects or simply going all in on visuals and violence. Depressing, really, that commitment is so rare, and that many relationships (even friendships) are either one-way, or trivialized with no real conflict.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
35m ago
The landlord fears the outdoor (or indoor) chicken farmer.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
35m ago
They're not - the sort of total, top-down mobilization of the economy that characterized the World Wars is fairly unusual. But leaving that aside, these economic arrangements were not intended to be welfare improving for the people living in them.
Tenaz
39m ago
There's more to it than just geography--why are they mostly concentrated? Anyone who wasn't fully on-board with the religion in the 1840s, and willing to give up everything for it, would have stayed behind when they were kicked out of the state.
The result is possibly the most powerful religious selection effect ever. The only comparable effect I can think of is the early Christian church, when converts understood they faced pretty high odds of being executed for their faith if they converted.
It's also much harder to be a lukewarm Mormon than, say, Catholic. Our doctrine is much newer, our church much smaller, and there's far less room to say basically "sure maybe it's all just metaphorical but I like what it teaches my kids" when the Book of Mormon's very origin must be either literally true and from God, or a deliberate scam. (Arguably, other Christian churches are the same, but at least their "scams" were thousands of years ago.)
As a responsible, frugal, young, male driver witnessing the Decline of America, I would be utterly fucked without UMPD coverage, which is extremely valuable and necessary so I don't have to empty my emergency fund every time someone's juvenile delinquent runs a red light; but Collision and Comprehensive are just plain negative-value since their premiums have to be high enough to include the amortized cost of said delinquent replacing his own car also. (Before you ask: Liability is its own thing; I don't mind paying for that.)
I've contacted 5+ insurers trying to purchase an auto insurance package that includes UMPD without Collision, and they all alleged that Alabama bans the sale of UMPD-without-Collision. Most also claimed that Alabama is nearly unique in this.
However, I couldn't find any such law on the books, or any historic arguments/rationale behind the (alleged) Alabama status quo.
What the fuck am I missing? And what due diligence should I do before I start trying to get my state rep to fix this shit?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
42m ago
In fact thé worst gerrymanders in terms of the difference between popular vote percentages and congressional results are in Oregon and Illinois, a complication for the ‘evil republicans’ narrative.
That's not an especially good metric (though people understandably like to focus on it because it's legible); crucially, it is also not correct. MA, for example, saw Republicans get a little over a third of presidential votes* but precisely zero seats. In Iowa, Democrats got 43% of the presidential vote, but zero seats. Astute observers will note that neither of these states are actually gerrymandered, which perhaps illustrates why that metric is suboptimal.
The metric people who study gerrymandering have converged on for measuring partisan bias is performance relative to other maps that could have been drawn. In MA, for example, it would be very difficult to draw a map where the GOP got a third of the seats simply because of how Republican voters are distributed around the state. Iowa could potentially be better, but not by much.
By those standards, Texas is on-par to a little worse than Illinois.
And, of course, none of this addresses the elephant in the room, which is how the parties have, on the whole, tried to resolve the problem of gerrymandering. Democrats have repeatedly sought a nationwide solution, while Republicans have preferred a "gerrymandering for me but not for thee" approach.
*Using presidential votes as a proxy for general support is imperfect but better than statewide tally of legislative races because many House races are unopposed.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
42m ago
If the government is going to give out industrial subsidies, why not get something in return?
In the case of US Steel, the government didn't give out subsidies, it simply demanded a payoff for approving the deal.
More generally, it's not philosophically coherent. If the USG expected to get a stake in exchange for subsidies, the most of the South and Midwest would be government property. The general pattern the US has followed is that it may offer subsidies or very favorable lending terms (which amount to subsidies) for things the government wants to promote, but hasn't insisted on receiving partial ownership. Partly this because Americans (and especially Republicans) have traditionally been averse to state ownership, but also partly because subsidies are not generally conceived of as business investments but the state paying you to do something it wants. The CHIPS Act was not the USG dipping its toes in the market to make a little money, it was promoting the development of domestic chip production.
DradisPing
43m ago
They made the new movies on a crazy timeline. A new movie of the trilogy every two years.
The first final drafts of scripts where due before there was a final cut of the previous movie.
Obviously doing something like that requires careful planning. Naturally they did no planning.
The first movie copied all of the beats of ANH. The second movie is supposed to set up the final conflict of the third movie.
Then Rian Johnson came in for the second and did his own thing. He either ignored or was possibly never aware of some of the things the first movie set up. He killed off The Big Bad / Chessmaster (Snoke) and promoted the Dragon (Kylo Ren) to be the new Big Bad.
Some people liked how it subverted their expectations, but it subverted the arc of the series.
For the third movie they had no villain with a grand plan, no idea where character's stories were supposed to go, and Bob Iger wouldn't budge on the timeline. It had to be out xmas 2019.
sodiummuffin
43m ago
That sounds very much like Let This Grieving Soul Retire!: Woe Is the Weakling Who Leads the Strongest Party, which got an anime adaption last year. It's not cultivation though, just Japanese light-novel/webnovel fantasy.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
44m ago
As far as I can recall, you're correct. The fact that the law necessitates grouping minorities (blacks) into their own districts was started to prevent Southern states from chopping up the districts to give blacks 0 representation, but now it's a net-negative for Dems since it basically forces Dem voters to be inefficiently allocated.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
47m ago
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
48m ago
The other problem for democrats in an all out gerrymandering war is that they simply have fewer seats to eek out. The most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; red states going tit for tat isn't actually something they can escalate that much against.
This isn't true. This dataset shows 4 different metrics of "fairness", and in every single one of them it's shown that Republicans are doing more gerrymandering today than Dems. Both sides could become even more crappy about this in the future if they wanted to, and we're probably going to see that happen unfortunately. It's not particularly hard to find states where Dems could increase their outcome by a lot, e.g. if they did North Carolina-level gerrymandering in New York it could easily amount to several seats.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
51m ago
Where else do you think the Kirk x Bones shipping came from?
faceh
55m ago
Gardening or light landscaping.
Raising chickens, if your zoning allows.
DIY home improvement projects that aren't structurally critical. Teach the kids how the permitting systems works (partially serious there).
If you have trees, you can install a small zipline.
Treehouse, or a similar small construction project that they can then manage and maintain. My friend had his kids build an aquaponics system and they could grow whatever they wanted in it (aside from weed).
Jiro
56m ago
In order to write seriously about religion, you probably have to believe seriously in religion. Given that Mormons are mostly in a small concentrated area of the US I would be unsurprised that a lot higher percentage of Mormons seriously believe than other religions.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
59m ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/09/style/westminster-preview-golden-retrievers.html
Very important story. It makes me realize how hard I fell for the little Golden my family got while I'm away in Scotland.
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
There's probably a worthwhile discussion there, right?
Sanderon, Card, Correia, and Meyer are all Mormons. Now as it happens I don't count Mormons as Christians, but that aside - it is interesting that all these examples are from the same religion. Are Mormons in general punching well above their weight in science fiction and genre spaces?
Tenaz
1hr ago
She wrote a vampire romance story where the main characters waited until marriage. In fact the entire story seems to be built on top of resisting the temptation to sleep together before then; Edward's bloodlust an obvious metaphor for actual lust.
There are some other connections--the eternal youthful marriage, the vampires from Rome possibly representing Catholics, the idea that you need to develop and grow as a person as much as you can before becoming immortal--but those are all stretches.
Sanderson's works deal much more explicitly with religion, but I'd argue his most important religious themes are also subtextual. For example, Mistborn has the explicit themes with Sazed, but the entire story is built around the implicit themes--
All the explicit dealings with gods are pretty lackluster in comparison, and arguably not really "religious" at all. The Percy Jackson books had that.
Kirk/Spock was the original slash, and it (mostly) wasn't guys doing it.
More options
Context Copy link