domain:felipec.substack.com
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
31m ago
Maximally sunny. That brilliant blue sky with absolutely everything bathed in light. I don't care if it's 40°C and the land is sere, baking and withering, or it's wet and humid and everyone sweats even at rest in the shade. Give me a good wind on top of it and that's my day. Just the sky and me. I put on my floppy hat and shorts and a backpack full of water, and off I go for a day of hiking, alone with the world.
Maybe I just enjoy heat stroke.
2rafa
53m ago
You would spend 3 months in Scotland between December and February and be begging for a return to the sun.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
40m ago
I'm neutral/okay with sunlight. I just HATE heat. I run my home AC at 16C (60F) 24/7. Fortunately there exists cold and sunny places.
Also I don't really think I would hate Scotland all that much, I'm just built different and like gloomy weather. I spent 2 weeks in the East Coast of the US this January and being able to walk out all day and not sweating felt like crack.
2rafa
52m ago
Europeans still have the popular conception of upper class Brits (see stuff like Dinner for One in DACH), they just know it’s only one kind of British person.
2rafa
54m ago
It’s a common complaint about Succession, too. Things like ending sentences in “yeah?”. Here’s an interview with Matt Walsh (not that one) who plays Mike in Veep where he discusses it. GTA is a good example, I played 4 again recently and it’s full of Americans saying stuff that just sounds off for Americans to say. Even Red Dead 2 has it on occasion, and they made a real effort there. The same of course exists in reverse when American writers try to write British characters.
quiet_NaN
5hr ago
punk bands
For some reason the idea of punks of all people forming rigid, hierarchical societies which have palace intrigues and make sure that their members conform to their norms feels really amusing in an absurdist way to me.
functor
2hr ago
A big difference between Americans and Europeans is how we view Brits. If your image of Brits is upper class posh people you are American.
If you associate Brits with obese football hooligans causing a scene at a McDonalds at 3 am you are European.
HalloweenSnarry
1hr ago
My first exposure to the term was with free-2-play, non-mobile games.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
2hr ago
What's perfect weather to you? To me it's low twenties/low seventies during the day, high teens/low sixties during the night, mostly sunny, random showers during the business hours but not on the weekends.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
59m ago
Further evidence that Iran is relatively high IQ, that is actually quite neat.
ResoluteRaven
1hr ago
“Women don’t actually want to be raped by literally every man ever” is not in the slightest incompatible with “many women genuinely quite like perceiving themselves as victims or potential victims, enjoy the social power adopting that mantle gives them over others, and will often happily recontextualise their prior experiences as victimhood in order to capitalise on social sympathy”. Given how we relate to the sexes and the amount of empathy afforded to each, the return-on-investment of damselling is probably higher for women than men.
Victimhood politics only exist because portraying oneself as a victim lacking agency can be a very useful power to wield over others. It gives one the sledgehammer of social power and moral superiority, and is sufficiently covert and by-proxy so as to allow one a huge amount of plausible deniability. Voicing one’s (real or imagined) victimhood can certainly also foster internal feelings of being Stunning And Brave.
In other words, I don’t think people actually have this aversion to victimhood. It’s a status that lots of people, and I suspect particularly women, actively seek out, at least in terms of how they are perceived. It’s probably a less healthy self-concept than viewing oneself as effectual and capable, but it is adaptive, it can be utterly intoxicating to wield, and it is often the case that telling someone that they are not in fact uniquely victimised or at risk of such invokes outrage, not relief. Non-binary identification is just another facet of these kinds of status games.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
5hr ago
Not my random opinion. It's what is predicted by public choice economics for a first past the post / two-party system. The party with the median voter wins, so that is where party behavior trends towards.
The MVT binds for IRV with compulsory voting (as is the case in Australia, where indeed there is little difference between the two biggest parties' policies). It binds here because the base can't defect. In optional plurality voting, the base can defect, either by futilely voting third-party or by staying home, so being a micron closer to your base than the other guy is is not necessarily enough to win their votes and, thus, the MVT is not valid - base turnout depends on your policies, and tends to counterbalance swing voters, so taking the maximally-moderate position is not a dominant choice.
ResoluteRaven
2hr ago
The early literature in the Irish language always struck me as precocious by northern European standards, particularly in prose, and the Irish also developed the Ogham script within a few centuries of the Nordic runes, so I think they have a literary tradition to be proud of even discounting the Anglo-Irish contribution.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
1hr ago
half the expressions are British
Would you mind giving some examples? I've been curious ever since I heard this claim, but for a few reasons I'm not very good at distinguishing them myself.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
7hr ago
And then the second generation voted Democratic. But they were the last socialist refugees to oppose socialism; Venezuelan refugees just think the revolution was betrayed.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
1hr ago
I'm a wet and cold maximalist. Somewhere between 0C (30F) and 7C (45F) with rain is heaven to me. So basically fall and early winter in any temperate country.
Mostly because I live in a very hot and dry place and am sick of it.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
20hr ago
This doesn't suffice to limit the liabilities of diversity. It's very hard to overstate how much self-inflicted damage the United States has accepted in the name of refusing to discriminate between migrant populations on the basis of their cultural backgrounds. People are obviously aware of major incidents like 9/11, but dealing with petty intrusions like not being able to check a backpack at a race because an Islamic extremist bombed the Boston Marathon are just everywhere. We also get the low-level annoyances of antisemitic losers on college campuses and women in beekeeper outfits. There is no plausible case that the benefits of Muslim immigration have outstripped the costs.
quiet_NaN
4hr ago
I think simply embedding a copyrighted artwork in junk DNA will probably not fly in court. But if software can be copyrighted, I don't think there is a reason why GMOs -- whose design also involves some stylistic decisions -- can't be. I hope I am wrong about this, though.
The reason that patent law is widely considered more evil than copyright law in software is that avoiding copyright infringement is often a very easy task (the exception being APIs and the like). If you have a copyrighted bubblesort library, I can simply decide not to use your library and write my own implementation. By contrast, if you have patented bubblesort (depending on the sanity of the patent system in question, you might have to patent a specific instance of bubblesort which affects something specific in the real world), then every other implementation is infringing.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
7hr ago
I believe you'd find that sword has but a single edge.
2rafa
3hr ago
The Thick of It isn’t less sweary than Veep. It’s more that Veep was written by outsiders rather than insiders and so after season 3 the jokes were less creative or funny and they had to rely on a combination of character-based humor and funny profanity. They swapped to a largely American writers’ room afterward and that had advantages in some ways and made things worse in others. Veep season 1 makes no effort to even be American, it’s about as American as GTA, half the expressions are British.
ResoluteRaven
12hr ago
I think there's just more educational stratification in Britain. Upper-class Britons including, to throw out two random examples, Boris Johnson and the actor Tom Hiddleston, still receive a classical education at Eton and Oxbridge which is very verbally-loaded and includes learning Latin and Greek. The comparable tradition in the US died out nearly a century ago (the last American president to know Latin well was apparently Herbert Hoover).
By contrast, the best and brightest Americans today go into STEM fields and receive an education that is very challenging technically, but not so much verbally, at least in my experience (I was genuinely challenged by some of my math, physics, and engineering courses, but writing an essay for a humanities class was always something I could blow off until the last minute and I literally fell asleep during the verbal portion of the SAT and got a perfect score).
From stories my sister and brother (older than me by ~15 years) have told me of the 80s local punk scenes, it has always been thus.
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