domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
self_made_human
C'est la vie
6hr ago
Escape from Tarkov just wiped, and I had previously been somewhat interested in playing again, after a prolonged break due to lack of interest and circumstance. I already had about 1700 hours in it over a few years, so I'm hardly a newbie.
Yet, as usual, BSG managed to screw up royally. The game already started out immensely grindy, and only got worse. Half of the actually good guns, gear and ammo was locked behind ball-busting quests. Back when I used to play with a group of buddies from Singapore and Malaysia, we'd cheese the worst of them, 5 or 6 of queuing up at the same time but separately, in the hopes we'd spawn in the same match as 'enemies' and then kill each other for the sake of quests.
And yet, like many things in Tarkov, it got worse. The new patch is supposed to be a "hardcore" one. What does that entail?
Removing 90% of the progression, in the sense you literally can't progress. You don't have access to quests, unlike before, where you could directly queue into maps, now, you have the choice of about 2 or 3 by default, and need to travel within a map to find an exit leading to the next one.
This works... terribly. The game already had abysmal queue times, now you can easily spent 30 minutes waiting for the sake of entering and running through a map for the sake of getting to where you actually want to go.
The game has a feature where you could pay to insure your gear. If your killer didn't loot you, anything left over would find its way back to you a few IRL days later.
Nikita, the owner and lead dev, in his infinite wisdom, made it so that insurance is so exorbitantly expensive that it costs more than buying an entirely new set of gear.
You can't access the player-run market. The sell price to NPCs was gutted, and the price to buy inflated.
There's hardly any actual new content, and you can't access 90% of the old one.
A change last patch made it so that you couldn't use items you didn't personally find in game for upgrades. So if you bought a pack of screws and a drill to upgrade your shelter, now, unless it came with a special found in raid status, it's next to useless.
At one point, they'd finally added a feature that had been teased for years, and which I'd looked forward to - realistic armor hitboxes. Armor plates were modeled, with proper coverage and weak spots. Then they rolled that back next patch.
I could go on and on, but the game has gone from a diamond in the rough to a lead pencil in the shit, aimed at your butthole.
The only good news is that their decisions are being absolutely roasted, with an immediate exodus of the player base. They're starting to roll back some things, but it's too little, too late. Good, fuck them, maybe someone can make a hardcore milsim extraction shooter that respects the player's time and energy.
FtSoA
6hr ago
Can you trust the Soviet investigators who "investigated" Auschwitz?
More than the Nazis who built the place I'd say. But notice that nowhere did I cite Soviet-only information as far as I can tell.
The authors of the Soviet investigation of the Katyn massacre, which falsely blamed the Germans for a crime that they had actually committed,
Funny, that episode is I believe a major reason why the Nazis wanted to burn evidence.
Can you trust the confession of someone that was extracted through physical torture, under duress with no access to legal representation and no access to documentary evidence?
Frequently, yes actually. Especially if corroborated with other forms of evidence. Especially given what Hoss wrote after his interrogations. He never admitted guilt, only following orders.
It's not about trust, it's about weighing the quality of the evidence against the nature of the claims being made.
Ok, sure. Let's agree on that.
Himmler's denial is relevant because Himmler's explanation for the conditions on the Eastern Front aligns with an enormous body of documentary evidence
By default, one expects a criminal to deny the accusation. By default, one expects a clever criminal to tell a lie that is plausible. By default, one expects a coverup if the circumstances allow it.
whereas the documentary evidence for gas chambers disguised as shower rooms performing executions of millions of people is completely nonexistent.
So you just don't understand how coverups work and deny the numerous witness accounts and artifacts? There were public accounts of the Holocaust in like 1942, Allied intelligence collected indications of it (which was not used at Nuremburg), and quite a bit of physical evidence for the whole shebang, including soil readings finding the relevant chemicals.
He also claimed there were gas chambers at Dachau and Mauthausen, which is known not to be true.
Is that known? https://www.ushmm.org/search/results/?q=dachau+gas+chamber+door
Best I can tell, there was a gas chamber at Dachau, but it was not used for extermination. The crematoriums did seem like they got some use though.
https://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de/en/historical-site/virtual-tour/crematorium-area/
Seems the mainstream disagrees with you about Mauthausen, too: https://www.mauthausen-memorial.org/en/News/Concerning-Doubts-about-the-Existence-of-a-Gas-Chamber-at-the-Mauthausen-Concentration-Camp
You've demonstrated to me that I cannot trust anything you say about even the simplest of facts, including representing the "mainstream," so you'll excuse me for wanting you to at least make an attempt prove your assertions by default when you say things like "which is known."
According to mainstream historiography, there were no gassings at all, ever, in Treblinka I, which was a penal/labor camp.
Oh, so you do know what Treblinka I was? That's nice. You know, it is entirely possible one account gets any given detail wrong. As someone with some background in the interrogation business, I definitely agree that's an issue. But here it seems like you're trying to pull a stunt of "well if he got some things wrong the entire testimony is out" as if there isn't evidence the Nazis were using gas chambers for one thing or another since like 1939. Or other confessions. Or other material evidence. The general history seems to be that in the summer of 1941, mass killings started by the SS and they decided to switch to gas instead of bullets. More efficient that way. Cleaner. Thereafter, they built out the extermination program for the Jews in 1942.
We'll never know, but it's entirely possible Hoss witnessed some experimental gassings at Treblinka I. Or his mind was addled and he mixed up the sites (there were three in Operation Reinhard: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka). Or, actually, his statement need not be read as his visit taking place in June 1941 either. Given the rest of his statements about the extermination of the Warsaw Ghetto Jews at Treblinka II, that aligns with July of 1942. Of course, that seems to conflict a little bit with Hoss also saying that his subordinate Fritzsch came up with the whole Zyklon B idea in August 1941. Hoss also says that at Treblinka the victims knew it was coming, whereas Auschwitz fooled 'em, which conflicts with at least later accounts of Treblinka also trying to fool victims. (But what did happen to all those hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto?)
Here's a historical analysis of Hoss's memoirs: https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/hoess-memoirs/
That's an impressive level of corroboration from multiple other accounts for a conspiracy this large, and over some decades too. I love that Hoss got the estimate of the exterminated at Auschwitz down to merely 1.1 million later on. Weird way to be a coerced witness. "Yeah it was mass murder, but less massive."
There's no documentary record or physical evidence to corroborate the claims of millions of people gassed in secret extermination facilities.
How, on earth, can you say this if you're even remotely aware of the mainstream evidence on the matter? It's all made up? Multiple nations, thousands of witnesses? Hoss is just a total liar, as are the other confessors telling similar stories? The showers with airtight doors are just an outcome of German over-engineering and commitment to hygiene?
Where did all the Jews in those Jewish communities in Europe end up then? Spirited to Heaven? What were these trains doing? https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau7292
Your view is something like:
The real conspiracy isn't that the Nazis tried to exterminate the Jews, it's that the Allies and Jews created the appearance of the Nazis trying to exterminate the Jews. Which was believable, given how much Hitler and the Nazis seemed to have it in for the Jews. Yeah, sure, the Nazis really didn't like Jews. But the "Final Solution" didn't involve mass murder, let alone with gas chambers and ovens. Just some forced labor. Deaths from disease. Actually, it's better to trust the Nazis denials over any confessions, or eyewitnesses--Jewish or otherwise--or intelligence reports, or aerial photography, or soil samples. Instead, this was all a massive concoction to ...
... to do what exactly? The Nazis had lost the war. No one needed to execute them just for fun.
Reminds me of my favorite antisemitic sentiment (common in the Middle East) is: "Obviously the Holocaust is a Jewish myth; sure would be cooler if it wasn't though."
There have been no excavations of any mass graves on the site. The ground radar has not "found evidence", or any more evidence than the same ground radar evidence at Kamloops Indian Reserve found evidence for the mass graves of children.
I was hoping you'd mentioned the Canadians.
So this is fabricated? https://www.livescience.com/44443-treblinka-archaeological-excavation.html
Last I checked the Canadians hadn't found anything or even pretended to. Also no corroborating evidence.
Frankly I trust the NSA and CIA on this analysis. Would be weird if they, decades after the fact, were still really committed to the bit using previously unpublicized information.
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/305894?objectPanel=transcription https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/cryptologic-quarterly/sigint_and_the_holocaust.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-D-PURL-LPS92209/pdf/GOVPUB-D-PURL-LPS92209.pdf
You really gotta admire the competence of the international, multigenerational commitment to this fabrication across so many information sources.
Do you have any evidence there was intent and planning to construct such a false narrative?
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
6hr ago
An important ingredient here is that the overwhelming majority of tattoos are just hideous. Aesthetic harm. Visual downgrade. I know of a grand total of one person whose tattoos actually look good, and I think the secret sauce is that he has only a few, and they're perfectly sized to be clearly visible and framed on his body as you would normally look at them. Most people look like either a toddler slapped stickers on them, or like a derelict wall in a shit part of down.
I actually kind of like this interpretation of the plot, that Rorschach initially intended to build another version of itself around the sun but Captain turned it into an advantage for itself instead. Actually a pretty good resolution of the apparent contradiction.
Incidentally, this all implies that almost all of the character actions in Blindsight are irrelevant to the plot, and even actively counterproductive, because the single most important thing occurring is the Captain making sure that Big Ben never susses out that there is another super-intelligence in the mix.
The crew in Blindsight even without this interpretation are mostly irrelevant to the Captain's plan - they spend most of their time following Captain's orders or being manipulated by Captain, and even then much of what they do doesn't end up directly contributing to the resolution of the story. Most of the events in the story were planned by Captain long beforehand. I actually think this is a theme of the story - your amount of actual agency in the plot inversely correlates with your level of consciousness.
Susan James is probably the most conscious individual on Theseus, and Rorschach easily turns her against herself and co-opts her for its own plans. Isaac Szpindel, who boasts a huge amount of augmented senses that elevate his sensory world far beyond an average baseline, gets unceremoniously killed early on in the book before he even has any time to put his skillset to use. Amanda Bates, the combat "specialist", is pretty much entirely useless and is just a glorified safety-catch to make sure her automated drones aren't as effective as they could be without her. Siri Keeton, the famously un-self-aware protagonist who does his job without realising how he does it, ends up being one of the least co-opted or affected by Rorschach, and ends up being a surprisingly relevant part of Captain's plan when it turns out his role is to play stenographer and relay all the information to the public (And how do they get him to do this? They break him to make him more human and more manipulable).
The critical revelation that the aliens are not conscious and are hostile was made by the vampire, who has a reduced level of consciousness compared to your baseline human - or Captain itself, depending on how you interpret their neural link. Literally everything else was planned by Captain, an automaton that likely operates in a manner not too dissimilar to how Rorschach itself does.
The fact that very few of the characters actually had any agency at all in Blindsight is a feature, not a bug. You're not reading about plucky oddballs making decisions and saving the world, you're reading about an extended game of 4D chess between two non-conscious gods in which the humans are a footnote at best. Theseus itself is an analogy for how the book says the human brain works, with the conscious actors being irrelevant at best and actively harmful at worst, and the non conscious actors being responsible for almost everything in spite of the fact they’re usually backgrounded in the plot.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6hr ago
Yeah, I don't know, chalk it up to small sample size I guess. I only know a couple of these guys and they're both pretty relaxed and have no tattoos at all. I'm obviously aware that plenty of soldiers have tattoos, but I get a completely different impression than I do from the face and knuckle tattoo guys on that front as well.
cjet79
6hr ago
My gaming tastes have changed so much now that I have kids. In many ways the shallowness of the game is a plus rather than a negative. It's just wrapping a bunch of game elements I've played dozens of times into an isometric action game that I haven't officially completed. And that's enough to occupy my brain in my few hours of off time, or during my partial off time when I need to drop the game at a moments notice to handle something happening.
The sailing and exploration is fun. I think I'm getting close to exploring just about every game mechanic it has. I'm not sure I want to grind out the fishing mini-game. It's similar to mining other resources, but with a failure option. I've always hated fishing in games. I'm still confused why devs bother adding it. (Dave the diver was great, but that is mostly spear fishing).
I'll play it for another week and then leave on vacation and forget it/drop it while I'm gone from my PC.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
6hr ago
I didn't expect a banana to give me trypophobia today. Out of a desire to upgrade my diet from becoming 100% junk food to merely 90%, I bought a bunch of them.
They arrived at a non-ideal level of ripeness, and then I let them sit for a few days. Now they're nice and yellow, but have a pattern of spots on them makes my skin crawl. Just about the only image on earth that otherwise does that is a photoshopped pic of someone's tits with holes added on, purportedly from worms.
DefinitelyAnAlt
6hr ago
It's not too bad. It's easy to avoid crazy people. Crazy people ooze craziness. Gotta look out for yourself and make sure to have witnesses. Additionally, having a reputation for being trustworthy means you build goodwill with women. An woman would need real evidence for her accusations to stick. As long as you're in a public place, it's generally safe.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6hr ago
I have no idea what you guys are on about, every operator type guy I ever met had tons of bad tattoos on the forearms and legs that were visible in normal casual clothing. They don't get face, hand, or neck tattoos because of military regulations, not because they are squeamish about showing off.
If anything, these guys are less likely to get into stupid fights for no real reason than the average guy because of their ability to easily keep their cool in stressful situations.
I just read American Sniper and like a good 10% of the book is dedicated to describing in great detail the bar fights that Kyle and his SEAL colleagues got into. There's an extended story about a townie bar in, I want to say Arizona?, where SEAL teams kept going for training and getting into wars with the yokels. Actually right next to the part where he talks about getting tats after his deployment.
Which again pretty much matches my real life experiences with such guys.
The second is the question of where did their ideas of purity come from. Was it objective, rational, independent inquiry, or was it just a different strain of meme?
This is where you get to postmodernism — the view that there is no objectivity, it's just warring memes and primate social games all the way down (the wordcel version of "there is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it"), you fight for your tribe and its memes because it's your tribe. For many people, they do not have "principles" or even beliefs, they have a side. (Wasn't that the whole "arguments as soldiers" thing?)
So why such a lack of confidence? Because of the repressed awareness that their own beliefs are merely memetic infections, aka psychological projection.
I'd push back a little here, thinking about both the Sacred Congregation of the Index, and modern online debates, about the memetic competitiveness of ideas on equal versus unequal knowledge bases — a priest is equipped to defeat the "viral memes" of a heretic in the way the lay person is not. Because a "heretic" often knows more about the field of their heresy than the average lay person. To consider items from this forum, the average HBD proponent probably knows a lot more about human genetics than your average "blank slate normie." Or, to go to the "Nazis at a table" analogy, our own resident Holocaust revisionists know a lot more details about the history of the camps than someone who's maybe just watched Schindler's List once.
In fact, I see people on the left make this argument; that between equally well-educated academic experts in a field, the left-wing ideas inevitably win the debate against their rivals — hence the left's near-total dominance of academia — but the ignorant lay people, not so well-armed, end up being led astray down the "far-right radicalization pipeline" by smart-but-evil figures like Jordan Peterson.
By this logic they should be inviting Nazis to their table to convert them away from Nazi-ness.
Except that they do sometimes try to "convert them away from Nazi-ness"… in the matter of an inquisitor (or a fire-and-brimstone Puritan preacher): "Repent your heresy, or suffer the consequences!" And for Puritans in particular, expulsion from the community, shunning from "polite society" is a major part of "consequences." Remember, excommunication is "a medicinal penalty of the Church," intended to bring the offender to reform their behavior, repent, and return to full communion.
(And maybe add in a bit of the disgust/contamination mechanisms behind the concept of "untouchability" that appears in so many cultures — that some people are just so indelibly tainted that anything and anyone they contact will be irreversibly polluted by it, as to why certain people must never be associated with, and anyone who has so associated must be treated as one of them as well. EDIT: see also @Southkraut's comment here.)
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6hr ago
Honestly, I used to be able to discriminate against anyone with visible tattoos, and you just...can't anymore.
I couldn't really hire contractors in some fields if I refused guys with tattoos, though I did once lose the number of an HVAC guy because he had swastika tattoos on his hands. That was a bit much. I can't really rock climb or do BJJ or crossfit comps without interacting with people with tons of tattoos. I can't get a decent cup of coffee without trusting someone with tons of tattoos. It's just not possible for me to run my life while avoiding people with tattoos, and most of them are pretty normal. So, you know, exposure therapy.
But to @ABigGuy4U 's point, there was a time when the same was said of a man without a hat.
There was a time when a wall street wealth manager could say "I'll never invest in a company if I haven't seen the head of the corporation at the Astor's ball or at the opera." And that was a pretty good, or at least a fine enough, investment strategy: only people in that sphere ran companies worth investing in, so following that social prejudice worked as a barometer of a worthwhile company. Then that time ran out, as less socially suave men ran great companies, and a manager who hung on to old social prejudices lost out.
There was a time not long ago when a wall street wealth manager could say "I'll never invest in a company if the CEO doesn't wear a tie." And that worked pretty well for a long time! Then the tech boom happens, and if you followed that social prejudice as your rule of thumb, you would have fallen way behind your competitors.
Tattoos are just another example. I used to be able to avoid anyone with tattoos. Now I can avoid people with "job-stopper" tattoos, or particularly offensive ones. But I imagine for people a step below the social ladder from me, it's tough to even avoid those people, and it becomes normalized.
There's a major difference between:
"The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain."
and "Americans are willing to do unspecified jobs that illegal immigrants do (at some unspecified but presumably higher wage)"
The former is basically an insult. The latter is vague politician opportunity and positivity speak. It's not deliberately and specifically picking out the lowest status roles. Hauling equipment, what is this, a Simpsons episode? https://youtube.com/watch?v=zTK_5Xz6X8Y&t=195
Likewise with 'skilled, up-skilled'. That's the future they envision. Some kids will be picking fruit as a summer job at a good wage - while not defrauding benefits like illegals. Then farmers will get some Made-in-America machine to scoop the tomatoes out of the ground. The kids will move onto more productive labour like making or maintaining machinery or building good houses... Whether this will actually happen is unknown but that's the idea.
And tariffs aren't even relevant here, the quote you find is about illegal immigration. Tariff 'industrial policy' may be ill-conceived and poorly executed but the goal is not to develop the lucrative ditch-digging sector. Trump and co want a revitalized US industrial sector - steel, semiconductors, assembly, machine-tools, rare-earths, manufacturing generally, petrochemicals... They dislike being dependant on foreign countries for anything and want everything made in America, even textiles and similar. Ideally in some high-tech, very productive factory like in the golden age of American industry but if not, they probably still would prefer low-tech industry to HR and 'professional services' industries or NGOs they think are working against them.
Why would switching to a .280 or something a little smaller wouldn't have made sense then?
Because it's not sufficiently intermediate and it's not just the rifles (which only form a minor part of the equation). It's worth noting that both France and Switzerland both flirted with intermediate caliber rifles (in .30 Carbine), but ultimately rejected them; if you want to go "7.62 bad because fat burger country", fine, but then why did every other Western nation that was looking to change calibers and was capable of indigenous weapons development also reject the idea? They all should have been aware of the StG-44.
We have the benefit of hindsight, and the Americans had the 'benefit' that the first war in which intermediate caliber weapons were being used against them in large numbers was one of the two terrain types in which submachine gun-type weapons utterly dominate (the other being urban warfare).
Note also that the first commercially-viable .22-caliber cartridge that wasn't an overpowered meme (sorry, .220 Swift) was a 1950s invention. It's far more difficult to make a viable bullet that small; your manufacturing tolerances have to be much better than they do with the .30s or with the .264s (which appear to be the lower limit of this, considering that other than the US adopting a bleeding-edge 6mm rifle that one time in 1895, no other military would adopt a smaller cartridge until 5.56 NATO). That's feasible with 1960s manufacturing technology, but not necessarily with 1920s or 1940s (and the Russians would take into the 1970s to figure it out).
NATO adopted what it did at the right times and nobody really got screwed over. European nations used their 1950s equipment until it wore out, then unloaded it on the Africans as military aid then developed indigenous 5.56 rifles around 1980. Not really a setback.
How many rifles or machineguns were re-barelled to use .308 post war? Some Garands
It's not just the rebarreling, it's also to facilitate easy manufacture of already-existing designs. Britain did this with the Enfield and the Bren, Germany did it with the MG3 (and some MG42s), Spain did it with the FR7/FR8, the Italians famously did it with the BM59, and the US did it with the M1919 (as well as the M14).
Converting an existing design, especially one that had seen significant and continuous improvement due to actually being used in warfare, is generally going to produce a better product than a clean-sheet design. This is one of the reasons the FAL lost in the US' rifle trials, by the way (the other is that it's just a bad gun lol).
90,000 British fought in Korea
A war they fought with Brens and No. 4s in .303. And honestly, no, the other ones don't really matter.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7hr ago
I honestly don't know why some women are so stupid. Yeah, loving and devoted up to the minute he swings at you with a sword, you silly girl.
Because up until that point, they think it's hot that he could attack other people with a samurai sword, but he could never do that to them because he just loves them that much / they alone have the power to tame him / he's so emotionally dependent on them that his world would collapse without them / insert-their-preferred-framing-here.
So the hotness can win out over prudence and risk aversion.
I think that very few people in the West would say that it should be legal for people to be employed in jobs they can't quit. The number of people who would say that is, I think, not much larger than the number of people who would say that it should be legal to enslave people. Which is not surprising, given that being employed in a job you can't quit is basically a form of slavery.
"People who quit their job and can't find another one should be allowed to starve" is a position with non-negligible support, but that is a different view to "people should not be allowed to quit their job in the first place". The right to quit your job for a better one is fundamental to the capitalist concept of freedom.
Let me elaborate my hypothetical a bit and see if you understand where I'm coming from.
Poll Question A: Should the US legalize Slavery?
I suspect the Yes answers to this would meet the Lizardman constant. A few trolls and a few people whose politics are so insane as to indistinguishable under Poe's Law.
Poll Question B: Should it be legal for Employers to sign contracts with Employees which guarantee lifetime employment, in exchange for which the Employees agree to work for that Employer for the rest of their lives or until released by the Employer, and to do any job requested by the Employer?
I suspect that while this would still be a distinct minority, it would draw more support than A. Many people who oppose slavery oppose it conceptually, oppose Slavery as a boo-light, but don't actually oppose the underlying reality of slavery. In the same way that Fascism probably polls lower than the elements of Fascism.
Hell I could imagine that a decent number of red tribe types would support forcing chronically unemployed or unemployable people into jobs they aren't allowed to quit.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7hr ago
I just realized an absolutely fantastic essay/blogpost title would be “Shoplifters In The Marketplace Of Ideas.”
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7hr ago
The extremely dangerous men of special forces military units have no desire to signal their extreme dangerousness to the general public when they're out for some drinks with the boys. If anything, these guys are less likely to get into stupid fights for no real reason than the average guy because of their ability to easily keep their cool in stressful situations.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7hr ago
Many men are just as stupid, or worse. OK, obviously this guy's lady friend is a moron, but at least she's emotionally invested in the circumstance and is unable to recognize what absolute garbage this individual is. What excuse does anyone else have? Why would anyone's reaction be anything other than advocating a swift and clean execution?
The longer I'm alive, the more straight up antipathy I feel towards addicts. Some people seem to develop more empathy for them over time, but I am pretty well fresh out of it. Guys like this will predictably make life worse for everyone around them, they're much worse than simply worthless, and it's absurd that they just keep getting to make the world around them worse every day.
"each citizen is an educated adult fully qualified to choose on his own what to think".
Lots of people may profess to believe this when asked directly, but it doesn't really seem all that popular a concept in practice. Plus, as for "free speech," this is also the 'your speech is violence, our violence is speech' and 'free speech does not include "hate speech"' crowds. And social media seems to be eroding people's confidence in "the marketplace of ideas" as well. Again, the woke are more correct than the mainstream, and they're just ahead of the curve on abandoning these false and unworkable positions.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
7hr ago
I get unreasonably angry that our justice system doesn't have exponential escalators such that by the time one is convicted of a 10th criminal charge over distinct incidents they arent sent to the gallows or an effective lifw sentence. No one needs an 11th chance, you've told us who you are by then.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7hr ago
I also backed First Monday In October. That company is one of those that's been posting on the impacts of tariffs (they have had several games delayed). Most recently they thought they found an alternative by printing in Brazil... and then Trump announced BRIC tariffs.
shoeonfoot
7hr ago
There’s a farm near me where people — college-educated, white, smart — sign up to plant and reap for free. Because in return they get free room and board, and most importantly a social environment filled with other young white people.
Are they willing to do it for a living, or is it just a fun summertime activity with friends? Is this something they do on the weekend outside of work? I assume they have other jobs, unless they're wealthy enough to have retired already, in which case they're extreme outliers.
I find it hard to believe that college-educated people, regardless of race, would cover even a small portion of the necessary workforce on Americans farms.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7hr ago
Oh, that sucks. I actually do enjoy boardgames, but I don't buy them often enough to have bumped into that. We grabbed Wingspan and its expansions, Ark Nova, and Brass: Birmingham and we've been pretty happy with that rotating set for the time being. My wife bought me a preorder copy of First Monday in October which makes for delightful nerd cross appeal, but that order went in quite a while ago.
shoeonfoot
7hr ago
I think it’s fair to say that nobody proposes that Americans are jumping at the chance to do the worst possible jobs.
There was a lot of noise on X about this article from last month. Specifically, a lot of anti-immigration people were quoting the first paragraph as proof that Americans were indeed eager to do the dirty jobs that illegals do now:
Every seat in the waiting area of Glenn Valley Foods was occupied with people filling out job applications early Thursday afternoon, two days after the meatpacking plant became the center of the largest worksite immigration raid in the state of Nebraska so far this year.
The second paragraph was not included:
Dozens of prospective employees, many of them Spanish speakers, had been coming in and out of the plant all day. Some were hoping to land a new job; others were coming in for training.
I assume that what's going to happen across the country is illegal Hispanics being replaced with legal Hispanics if mass deportations actually happen.
I don't think the 'true' upper class ever really started wearing tattoos, is the thing.
Celebrities, athletes, maybe some actors, but rarely anyone with real 'power.'
I would defy you to find any tattoo worn by an actual human being that actually signals "I am a higher class than you."
I just did a cursory google search and I can tentatively say that ZERO billionaire business magnates have a single tattoo. Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Dorsey, not even Palmer Luckey. Wait, Jensen Huang apparently has one, but I can only find the one photo and he clearly states he won't get another.
Not even Steve Jobs back in the day had one.
And these are guys that could hire the literal best artists alive to create absolute masterworks for them. And, goes without saying, couldn't easily be fired for getting one.
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