domain:questioner.substack.com
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
3m ago
What, you mean you don't insert?
Felagund
18m ago
I unfortunately accidentally deleted my response. It looks like it used to be about 38% in 2008, which seems to be the high point of South Africa's production, and around when the statistic was made. I didn't find the original source, though.
Felagund
28m ago
It looks like past production used to be higher from Eskom, and lower for the rest of Africa, but you're still right that that seems not to have been true.
The site cited by wikipedia puts Eskom at 230 terawatt hours, in 2008. (Eskom's own data puts it at 224 sold, 239 produced.) 2008 also looks to be the peak year of Eskom's power generation.
If Eskom were 45% of Africa's power, going with the more generous 239 figure, then Africa would be producing 531 terawatt hours. But your statistics site puts it at 625 gigawatt hours, meaning that Eskom was only 38%.
I haven't found what the source is for Africa's electricity production is yet.
plural
33m ago
It would be interesting to see how people would respond if you asked them would you rather be stuck in a forest with a bear or a black man. Would the fear of being thought of as a racist overcome the fear of men?
It's funny that you mention that because my first thought when I saw this question was "what kind of bear?"
I think it's interesting because if I think of the question being "would you rather be stuck on a desert island with a man or a tiger?" (or even something less likely prey on you like a chimpanzee) I bet the answers come out way different. It's like a kind of scissor-statement someone constructed in a lab. Something about choosing the woods changes things dramatically in my mind for some reason and I bet a lot of it is media related. Being stuck in the woods implies something a lot more menacing from a human perspective than being stuck elsewhere. But it could also just be because "stuck in the woods" doesn't really make sense and implies something else happening because can't you just leave the woods? It's not like a desert island or a locked room, what does stuck mean here? Anyway, I think it's all just Tik-Tok brainrot and pure signaling. Also, I think there's something to be said about how a lot of younger people seem to interact with things with absolute insincerity as a default probably because they're afraid if their real opinion will be culturally wrong.
This whole thing reminds me of the that red pill/blue pill question/poll that was apparently 8 months ago where, to me, it seemed most people probably chose blue pill because it said "save" and also it used the framing of red pill vs blue pill and people just chose blue reflexively.
HighResolutionSleep
33m ago
I think roughly 0% of respondents would actually pick the bear. They are, to borrow a phrase from yesteryear, virtue signalling.
The more notable revelation is how cleanly this whole ordeal demonstrates that hating men is very much considered a virtue in some spaces.
Outlaw83
39m ago
Even before Swift, Kelce was more famous than even a very good football player that he was due to his podcast with his brother, and that unlike many football players, who can be shockingly uncharismatic and boring, they're actually funny, interesting, and such together.
I can sort of see the conspiracy argument if it was truly random TE or LB, but if you actually know the NFL, you know Kelce isn't a random player, even if TE isn't usually a sexy position.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
41m ago
I might humbly suggest that if a person's biggest fear about being stuck in a forest is being catcalled or labeled a lesbian, their priorities are way out of whack. I think @SlowBoy's obviously correct that the bear doesn't really exist to these trend-chasers, they're not actually thinking about staring down a bear. It feels like we're dealing with very sheltered, not-worldly-wise people who have no concept of what danger is like. Sorry to reference The Book Movie Series Which Must Not Be Named, but I'm reminded of a quotation from Sorcerer's Stone:
"Now, if you two don't mind, I’m going to bed before either of you come up with another clever idea to get us killed or worse… expelled!"
And, of course, the relevant reply:
"She needs to sort out her priorities!"
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
54m ago
The most famous woman in the history of the world would be Virgin Mary, I believe.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
55m ago
"Strange" can also mean "unknown," as in "stranger." In context, I think that's the meaning of the word as SlowBoy's using it. I don't think he's saying the man and bear are weird.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1hr ago
In other words, someone who's homeless can immediately become not homeless, right, if they find shelter. Someone who is addicted to drugs, it's not so -- so easy. It seems to me that in Robinson, it's much easier to understand the drug addiction as an ongoing status, while, here, I think it is different because you can move into and out of and into and out of the status, as you would put it, as being homeless. - Roberts
Interesting to pick apart the hidden variables. With drugs, the addiction is the status and being high (or low, or otherwise altered) is the desired condition caused by the regulable conduct of using drugs. Homelessness (or rather shelterlessness) is here treated as the undesired condition resulting in the regulable conduct of sleeping in public, and the indigence/extreme poverty is the status usually conflated with the condition of homelessness.
TIRM
1hr ago
I keep seeing posts in my neighborhood about coyotes. "A coyote went through my yard", "Watch out at night, my camera saw a bunch of coyotes running around", etc.
Everyone, yes, I know there are coyotes around here. It is filled with coyotes. Please stop saying you saw one. They are all around every night and sometimes at day. This isn't news. And your little dog that's been missing for a few days was eaten by coyotes the first night it was out.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
1hr ago
(While I was checking its power situation, I ran across the quote that Eskom, as of 2010, produced 45% of all electricity in the entire continent, which was surprising to me.)
This seems beyond belief. This USG page makes the claim, but this article deboonks it. IEA statistics back up the deboonking, putting South African generation at 27% of all Africa's generation.
That seems somewhat more plausible, although it's interesting to note that in PPP terms South Africa generates only 1/8 of Africa's GDP.
ResoluteRaven
1hr ago
Here are some suggestions depending on what your exact interest in linguistics is:
- If you're interested in learning languages for travel, reading literature, impressing foreigners, etc. then you might want to check out Ecolinguist, Benny Lewis, Moses McCormick, Xiaomannyc, or Alexander Arguelles on YouTube and in terms of podcasts anything with slow in the title e.g. Slow German Podcast, News in Slow French, etc. for learning purposes.
- If you're interested in linguistics because you want to channel your inner Tolkien and invent conlangs for a fantasy novel, then jan Misali or the conlang and neography subreddits are your friends (and so is a historical linguistics textbook like this one).
- If you just think languages are cool for intellectual or aesthetic reasons, then ILoveLanguages, NativLang, Langfocus, Watch your Language, and the Lexicon Valley podcast may be of interest to you.
Also if you want to learn Latin or Ancient Greek check out ScorpioMartianus and if you want song covers in obscure dead languages then check out the_miracle_aligner.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 For more information please reread this post
1hr ago
After I kept yelling “Go away, bear!” it ran back off, and I was surprised by just how fast that thing was; it felt like a marvel of biomechanics.
Also effective: "I need you to go now. I hope you enjoyed my yard." and "PERKELE!!!1!"
Glassnoser
1hr ago
I'm not sure if I believe they really have that preference. Imagine a woman running into a hear in the woods. She's probably going to freak out. Now imagine her running in to a random man. She's probably going to feel relieved and ask him for help. Just, intuitively it seems obvious that women are not nearly as scared of men as they are of bears. I think the framing of the question causes people to think about how men can be dangerous and to answer in a way that doesn't actually comport with their true beliefs.
Scott Sumner has a whole series of posts about this phenomenon. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/05/theres_no_such_2.html
Forgotpassword
1hr ago
Travis Kelce has been 'good football player' famous for a while, though arguably his brother did more to spark the initial interest in the Kelce brand and then provided the vehicle for Travis to be more outspoken.
TIRM
2hr ago
I blame cell phones. I'd be a better motteposter if I was on my PC.
And as you say: add a distracted teen to the phone problem and quality is horrible compared to an adult looking at a computer screen.
raakaa
2hr ago
Couldn’t this stat just be explained by members of the Chair Force brave pilots having far too much time on their hands at the airbase? I’m not incredulous of the idea that political or governmental actors are attempting to manipulate consensus via botting and astroturfing (it’s been confirmed that the feds have done this in quite a few cases IIRC), but I don’t think that that’s what we’re seeing in this particular statistic from 2013.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2hr ago
Nelson has the right link.
Is that not an example of smearing the enemy team for their side of history?
jkf
2hr ago
If you are in the forest, there is probably a bear around somewhere -- so isn't the question really "would you rather be stuck in the forest with one or more bears, or with a man and some bears"?
It sounds like the ANC can caucus with the EFF/MK if they have to; can they caucus with the DA and friends?
Probably? I don't have too extensive of a sense of how any of the three coalitions would play out—how much each would have to concede, compared to what they're willing, or how much they'd demand.
Looking at the 2021 municipal results, wikipedia lists several coalitions including both DA/EFF and ANC/EFF coalitions, but no ANC/DA ones. I'm not sure how much predictive power that has, though.
I’d be interested in hearing from people with specific knowledge- how much of it is just people with whatever agenda hitching it to complaints about poor national level governance?
My impression is not really? The Referendum party is basically campaigning on "we'll work with the DA completely and entirely, we just want to force a referendum."
That said, I don't know how well independence would work. I'm sure it has some level of dependence on other parts of the country for things, and don't know what Cape Town's economy does mostly and whether that's separable.
(While I was checking its power situation, I ran across the quote that Eskom, as of 2010, produced 45% of all electricity in the entire continent, which was surprising to me.)
To be clear, I really don't think independence is likely, though a referendum is possible.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2hr ago
Hiking, interesting. I'm reading stuck as trapped not just "lowered down into the area gently to hike or whatever." I imagine the distinction and how people understand this may affect their answer.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3hr ago
What is the "it" here? Maybe you made a top level comment instead of a reply?
What do you answer (verbally, quite brief) if someone asks you what wokeism is? Or what your problem with the woke is?
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