domain:mattlakeman.org
Pasha
Defend Kebab
37m ago
I hiked the salkantey trek in the past as it was sold to me as more nature heavy version of the İnka trail. Definitely amazing
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1hr 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.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr ago
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.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
2hr 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
2hr 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
2hr ago
You would spend 3 months in Scotland between December and February and be begging for a return to the sun.
2rafa
2hr 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.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
2hr ago
Further evidence that Iran is relatively high IQ, that is actually quite neat.
ResoluteRaven
2hr ago
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
2hr 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.
HalloweenSnarry
3hr ago
My first exposure to the term was with free-2-play, non-mobile games.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
3hr 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.
ResoluteRaven
3hr 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.
functor
3hr 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
3hr ago
As I understand it, a lot of prison labor is in agriculture and food production.
TowardsPanna
3hr ago
Same.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
3hr 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.
TowardsPanna
4hr ago
Do you have lewd designs on it? :/
2rafa
4hr 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.
There was some historic oral and literary tradition. More recently though much famous ‘Irish’ literature in the revival was not written by ethnic Irish but by the Anglo-Irish. Even Joyce claimed to be of Norman and Scandinavian descent and that his ancestors came over during Cromwell’s settlement, although that’s a topic of some historic debate. If you were asking for evidence of a great historic African literary tradition and I cited a bunch of Boer writers I presume that would be similarly invalid.
One theory (discussed elsewhere in this thread I think) is that the Irish were probably on the level of other peer populations in the dark ages but deteriorated considerably from the 16th to 19th centuries with the potato monoculture, ever smaller plots of land, worse nutrition, overpopulation and so on. Perhaps it begun even earlier in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. It then took emigration, selection of the smartest and improved nutrition to successively drive huge performance improvements over time.
I don’t think it’s as easy to dismiss poor estimates of Irish performance from the Victorian/Edwardian era as some people suggest. It’s entirely possible they were correct but that outsized gains have led to the current equivalence. We know poor nutrition can have a deleterious effect on IQ and the diet of the Irish in 1850 was probably substantially worse than their ancestors’.
CanofWorms
5hr ago
I should have been more clear. No Democratic elected official is in favor of open borders.
Lewis2
5hr ago
Oh, I have no doubt that they’d get shut down, and that right quick. But it seems to me that there’d be a chance, however slight, that the process of shutting it down could force the other NGOs to modify their practices as well, especially if the Republicans were to make hay out of the issue.
Wait, what? The cattle raid of Cooley was set in pre-Christian history, 1st century AD according to Wikipedia. The famine started in 1845, but the Normans/English/British/whoever had been messing with the island since 1169.
My understanding was the proximate cause of the problem was the sheer poverty of most of the Irish, and the lack of work, or more broadly the lack of an economy, that could lift them out of poverty. The poor tended to rent a small farm where they grew potatoes to eat, and worked odd jobs for money which mostly went to rent. Without the potatoes, they were simply too poor to survive on their own, and the British work-fare programs came late and had problems. It was a horrible situation, and mostly I blame the British, but the basic dynamic was that there were a lot of working people who were so poor that the only food they could afford was potatoes that they grew themselves. When the potatoes went away, everything collapsed. It's not like they were buying most of their food with money, but then there wasn't enough food. They just didn't have enough money to buy food in the first place.
In contrast, America is absurdly wealthy, with a diverse economy, and has huge amounts of absurdly cheap food. Even without the subsidies, we'd have cheap food. I've personally been part of an organized group that cooks food and gives it to anyone who shows up (100-150 a day, mostly homeless). (Maybe I'm part of FCfromSSC's problem?) There's no way that people kicked off of welfare would starve, as long as they can find work, and assuming they didn't also have crippling mental illness, physical disability, or drug addiction. (Not to get into other big problems.)
That said, I agree that cutting off all welfare and similar services, cold turkey, would be a disaster. Any such reduction would have to be done slowly, making sure that there were sufficient jobs and cheap enough housing to handle everyone. (We do have plenty of housing, it's just not where people want to live, or it costs too much.) But I doubt that America has the political will or attention span to pull this off, and so we may be stuck with the current system or a disaster.
(I'm not personally against the existence of a safety net, and the optimal amount of exploitation is probably not zero. But I worry that it's gotten so complex that we don't know what's going on, or what the effect is. And the people who run it seem to be ideologically committed to expanding it forever, and that worries me most of all.)
More options
Context Copy link