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OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
25m ago
I found it really confusing on mixing up shame and guilt together. Rumi is ashamed of being half demon but she's not guilty the same way the guy who sold out his family for a comfortable life.
JarJarJedi
27m ago
From where I stand, it all just feels like racketeering by H&R Block et al. to extort fees year after year.
Now that's mostly the case, but the roots of this system were actually in minimizing governmental intrusion into private life. In order to calculate your taxes for you, the government has to be aware of a lot of things you are doing. Now, you would say this is true anyway, and you'd be right. But the way the system was designed initially, that wasn't the case - the government was supposed to know what you report to them, and no more. That, of course, went out of the window long ago, but the system remained. Thus the idiotic situation where the government has all the data about you and your business (unless you take special steps to hide it, which are mostly illegal by now) but they are now allowed to use this data to calculate your taxes, so you have to do it by yourself. Then they will be allowed to use the same data to catch you if you're cheating. For me, as a software developer often dealing with, by now, decades-old code, this is a common situation - the system started with one set of assumptions in mind, they changed, but rebuilding the whole system from scratch is too inconvenient, so now everything works in weirdest ways that make no sense anymore.
wsgy
35m ago
When I was a first year in med school, staring at the sheer amount of knowledge I was supposed to cram into my brain, I would get too anxious and stressed out to even concentrate enough to study. So my girlfriend suggested I take some of her Xanax, which calmed me down enough that I could hit the books. The next day though I would have forgotten everything because as you know (and I had not yet learned at the time) benzos fuck with your hippocampus and it's harder to form memories. I did this three times before I recognized the pattern enough to bother googling it. So uh, don't do that.
What ended up working out for me was getting plenty of daily exercise. I was basically trying to study for 14 hours a day, then I'd watch a movie to unwind, then go to bed. Cutting that back to 13 hours of trying to study and one hour of exercise in the morning made me a lot less stressed out. And of course commiserating with people in the same boat as me. The worst thing you can do is not talk to your friends and colleagues about this.
Now, the thing that tends to stress me out the most is parenting. I am fully confident at times that I am fucking up my kids and they're going to need a lot of therapy in their mid-20s when they realize how much damaged my wife and I caused. But, and maybe this makes me look silly, I find the sycophantic nature of ChatGPT as well as its always available-ness is perfect for stopping me from spiraling.
Anyway: physician, heal thyself and so forth.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
45m ago
It would be nice if it was the social media digital id thing all the five eyes countries are currently doing to try to ensnare the US and enforce their social media policies.
TIRM
46m ago
Israel is continuing to oppress Christians
Can we please proactively provide evidence for inflammatory claims? Or at least a clear explanation of what manner of oppression is occurring?
I know public proselytizing is illegal in Israel. I suppose the claimed oppression is something far harsher than that.
Laura Ingalls Wilder would be amazing. I basically grew up with her Little House book series (the first proper novel sized book I ever read was her Little House in the Big Woods). A few years ago I read the recently published Pioneer Girl which I'd strongly recommend to anyone who wants to get a good idea of what it was like living in the then desolate American Midwest in the 1870s.
I even spent a fair amount of time cataloging her family tree and learning about them from other sources on the internet. For instance Charles Ingalls was a Freemason, which was of course good to see. I'd have liked to have had the chance to meet some of her descendants today but unfortunately the whole line has died out, even including her sisters' descendants.
wemptronics
54m ago
Such individuals are often consumed by powerful manias to the point of self-ruin, or else they become condemned to inaction, paralyzed with fear over not being able to fulfill the momentous duties they have placed upon themselves.
What names come to mind?
gattsuru
1hr ago
Which invites the obvious question: what will the next Current Thing™ be? ... Playing the game on Easy Mode, and the answer might be that something which was a secondary issue for the last two years now jumps forward to become the pack leader in the Pareto distribution.
Immigration is the duh example, and I'd expect that we'll continue to see a parade of real and imagined oversteps by the Trump admin, along with real and imagined bad behaviors by protestors or state governments in response.
On this side, I think you're going to see trans stuff become much more prominent, quickly. Republicans see a lot of options as 80-20 issues, and a large part of the Dem activist branch isn't willing to Sister Souljah even the clearest nutjobs. But a lot of the political activists have very strong opinions and/or investments in this matter, they've got a massive amount of logistical and big corp support, and there's a lot of things that look like low-hanging fruit to social conservatives that are either hard problems or unacceptable compromises to even moderate Dems.
From the other direction, I expect that we'll have a Mass Casuality Gun Incident (a la Los Vegas) or targeted assassination (... that Dems care about, a la Giffords), and gun control will show up as a major political discussion again. There's a lot of Dems and self-described moderates that are absolutely sure they've got a vast majority of the population on their side, here, and they just need the right salience/terms, and while some of that reflects badly-run poll manipulation and huffing their own farts, it genuinely is a space that a lot of Republicans shoot their own feet.
In this light, do any of you have candidates in mind for dark horse black swan events which could dominate the discourse for the next two years or so?
Serious domestic infrastructure attacks by a coordinated and uncaught adversary. We've seen them in warfront environments, a few nutjobs using them for publicity, and a few dry runs (aka Metcalf) by uncaught (and thus presumably serious) actors, and maybe some arguable cases (aka Florida Oranges), but there's Moore's Law of Mad Science reasons to suspect it to hit in the next ten years. It's bad when 'someone kills dozens at multiple subway stations and gets away with it' is the optimistic version of the problem, but the pessimistic one is much worse, and either version will have obvious direct culture war ramifications as increasingly broad conspiracy theories drop. More critically, it will also have a ton of 'obvious' and wildly contradictory solutions with large-scale impact on the innocent.
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
1hr ago
Scott once noticed that the best place in the middle east to be an Arab outside the oil rich states is Israel. Smart Palestinians should be arguing to the world that the just punishment for Israel's actions is that they must annex all of Gaza and the West Bank, make everyone living there full citizens of Israel and provide them with the same access to resources as they do to any other Israeli citizen right now.
Bartender_Venator
1hr ago
In Classical philosophy, this question is generally framed as "should the philosopher engage in political life", where he can maximally help his city but at the cost of cultivating wisdom. The simple answer is generally no, because the best way the wise man can help others is making them wiser, and some of those he teaches will go out and help the city themselves (and much better than if they didn't have his teaching).
Much appreciated! I'll take you up on that and DM you if I ever need a serious talk, but I'm quite all right for the time being. I'm not worried about dying per se, but the original surgery was very much Not Fun for various reasons (I woke up during the operation) and I'd like to avoid being in that position again if I can.
Something like an Apple Watch with ECG tracking might be good just for the peace of mind. I told my dad to get one
Very useful in some ways, surprisingly un-useful in others. It lets you have a look and get an idea of what is 'normal' and what is 'not normal' on a moment to moment basis. It's less useful in that many conditions produce the same biomarkers. For example, low heart rate variability can either be a sign of relaxation and recovery (good, go and get some exercise) or your body desperately trying to relax and activating the parasympathetic nervous system after serious exertion (maybe not good, you need to relax and not do anything strenuous). Low stress just before you wake can be a sign that you're well-rested (good) or that you're very tired and your alarm woke you in the middle of a sleep cycle (less good). And so on.
Ideally sensors are a good way to sort through the psychological chaff such as excess stoicism or excess hypochondria/anxiety and get a good idea about what's actually going on with people, but it doesn't seem to work that way. There also seems to be a dearth of individual high-detail studies, just very specific medical studies on unusual cohorts or vast field surveys.
I'm sorry, I had to laugh. This is a good reminder that patients are not made alike
I imagine this comes up a lot :) But for certain types of people saying 'I would love to do X with you but the doctor says I can't because of Y, what a joyless bastard he/she is amirite?' can be much easier than saying 'I'd like to do X but it makes me nervous'. I don't know how you'd go about finding which patient responds to which approach except through experience and stereotyping, but I bet it has a big payoff especially if you ever go private.
Bartender_Venator
1hr ago
I can't say anything about Parker and Stone, but the creators of The Office (US) were big DFW fans and wrote in a lot of references to his work.
Bartender_Venator
1hr ago
So many German books on the Hohenstaufen I will never be able to read... Oh well, I don't really need to, considering that Kantorowicz's Frederick II is an entirely true and accurate portrayal of just how great he was.
knob
1hr ago
The reason to believe that paying so much gets you a good CEO is that companies that want to continue existing care about costs, and so if large compensation packages for CEOs didn't attract good CEOs, market forces would pressure them to offer lower compensation. So the fact that we continue to see successful companies pay CEOs a ton is reason to believe.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Immigration enforcement/concern about trump authoritarianism(real or not, people are worried about it).
ulyssessword
1hr ago
No significant amount of aid. The claim I've heard is that there's enough to serve as a fig leaf and no more. By any fair assessment it's an anti-Israel activist project instead of a direct humanitarian one.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
In the long term, is that distinct from (2)? IIRC South Africa has had long-term white emigration that at some point starts to look like the "suitcase" option there, or sometimes worse. There was even that drama earlier this year when the current US administration looked to consider it as ethnic-cleansing-adjacent.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1hr ago
Abiah Folger, Benjamin Franklin’s mother. She had ten children.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2hr ago
Eventually someone is going to realize that grotesque jihadi violence is counterproductive and that they would get way more stuff if they kept the Jews around to milk welfare out of.
Because that someone will just get killed and replaced with someone else who values killing Jews over everything else.
BahRamYou
2hr ago
Would you agree that, even if in general CEO pay is not a major expense on their companies, there are particular cases where it could be, and Musk at Tesla is one of those examples? And it's interesting that he wa able to get it past the board and all sorts of normal shareholder protections, to the point where it required a court ruling to stop it. It's not some perfect elegant self-maintaining system.
Quantumfreakonomics
2hr ago
Why do you exclude South Africa-style reintegration? Eventually someone is going to realize that grotesque jihadi violence is counterproductive and that they would get way more stuff if they kept the Jews around to milk welfare out of.
stuckinbathroom
2hr ago
What was stopping him before?
Domestic political pressure to bring home as many live hostages as possible.
Yes, Israel had been accused of callousness from without, and Bibi doesn’t seem to care (see e.g. his “super Sparta” remarks). However, his legitimacy and that of his coalition are hanging by a thread and so he is sensitive to political considerations from within.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
To be clear, if I was dictator of the US, and I decided not to do a maximum troll answer(let’s have $5 bills assigned to have Margaret Sanger or Phyllis Schafly at random…), I’d probably do Elizabeth Ann Seton and send the first run as bonuses to schoolteachers.
Bessie Coleman simply seems like an answer that makes everyone happy.
gattsuru
2hr ago
If you're doing TCP, even small amounts of latency can have bizarre impact when you're dealing with relatively large bandwidth compared to the underlying MTU size, window size and buffer size (and if going past the local broadcast domain, packet size, though getting any nontrivial IPv6 layout to support >65k packets is basically impossible for anyone not FAANG-sized). I can't say with much confidence without knowing a lot about the specific systems, and might not be able to say even with, but I've absolutely seen this sort of behavior caused by the receiving device taking 'too long' (eg, 10ms) to tell the sender that it was ready for more data, and increasing MTU size and sliding window size drastically reduced the gap.
Of course, there's another reason why the Nobel committee would be adverse towards granting Trump Nobel right now - there's already a precedent of giving an US president a Nobel for practically nothing (sure, sure, cease-fire and all that, but it's still uncertain how well it holds and the decisionmaking process had already been going on for quite a period at that time) and then getting a lot of flack for it. For American conservatives, certainly, this might seem unfair with Obama and Trump being considered the opposites, but for practical purposes the rest of the world does often tend to consider them to belong to the same category - American presidents.
Some have also pointed out that the Machado decision is generally well in line with other recent Nobel Peace Price decisions - four out of five last years have seen the NPP being at least in part awarded to dissidents from American enemy countries (Dmitry Muratov from Russia in 2021, Ales Bialiatski from Belarus in 2022, Narges Mohammadi from Iran in 2023, Machado now.)
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