Yeah, it wasn't very good. Also the weird speech from Jesus about their legal drama with Paramount. I didn't feel offended, but kind of bored and confused, like their characters should go grill pill at Casa Molina or something. There was a funny scene with Randy talking to his digital assistant with his wife looking grumpy next to him. There was an episode where everyone came in from Denver and tried to order cortados from a few years back was pretty funny. Scott's most recent Bay Area House Party post would make a good episode.
Gaashk
1mo ago
(and just because you filtered out the em-dashes doesn't mean I don't see what you did there)
I looked at the new, improved GPT5 free content I got today, and, lol, there are 18 in a single response. But then it generated a .docx of basically the same content, and lo and behold, the em dashes are gone, and now there are a lot of colons instead. Also, it's formatted nicely with headings. Huh.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Thanks! That is pretty interesting. I did like the few Lovecraft stories I read more than I had expected as well.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I meant I only watched the first actual Avatar, not the other two actual Avatars. But if you haven't read A Fire upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, they're quite good.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I would be more interested in watching the Vernor Vinge version of Avatar, where it's heavily implied they're a downgraded planet that used to be in a higher zone. As it is, I only watched the first movie.
Where to look for what? Interesting artists?
On the one hand, that's likely to be true, like the interesting music coming out of various subcultures in the 90s.
On the other hand, I'm not sure how one would go about looking for that. They have an "artist studio tour" in my area, and although there are something like 40 artists, I didn't find anything I felt any energy from. They were mostly boomers painting hills, or sometimes textural abstract sorts of things.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Is there anything interesting going on artistically lately?
Aside from the obvious, that digital artists are getting supplanted by cheap, fast AI images?
I tried searching a bit, and asking ChatGPT, and mostly people seem to be saying that there are a bunch of different things going on, many of which are identity based and fairly boring as far as I'm concerned. The last large movement I liked was probably Impressionism; Art Deco is also pretty good.
People around here mostly paint the hills and skies, which I think is just kind of a default, I don't know if I'd call it a movement. I guess recently I like the atmospheric, somewhat out of focus landscape artists, like Gareth Edwards or Paula Dunn.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Yes, I think it's something like that.
A couple of years ago, when I was off birth control, I was driving alone and kept puking which is very rare for me, but didn't have anywhere to pull off. Not pleasant at all. Then later that day got an unusually heavy and abrupt period. Probably an early miscarriage.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Meritocracy is probably useful at very high, best in the world levels. Like I said, I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with an actually wise judge, who would look at a surgeon, or researcher, or entrepreneur -- how competent they are, who they're planning to bring with them, how excited they are to become American, etc, and let some number of competent, excited potential Americans over. On balance, I'd rather have Musk as an American than not. Or even Ramaswamy, despite having mixed feelings about some of the things he stands for. If there are 100 Von Neumanns out there somewhere, sure, let them in. If some of them are Chinese, let them in but watch them. If they start complaining about whiteness, or prom queens, or high school football, let them go back. Not that I even care for those specific things, but those are pretty bad red flags.
At the same time, no, I do not want Ramaswamy or Musk to be able to each import ten thousand compliant, desperate engineers from India. Even if they are marginally better than the locals (though I mostly doubt they are). They should have to work with Americans. If they're trying to do things Americans don't want to work on, for wages Americans are not willing to accept, while they should change their plans. I'm not so desperate for a Grok powered humanoid robot army in ten rather than thirty years.
While it's useful to have meritocracy at the top, I'm less convinced of its usefulness at the middle and bottom levels, especially with automation proceeding apace. I would prefer to live in a world where I work fewer hours, then bake, sew, and pick fruit with my kids. I already do that to some extent, and there's a lot of angst about how all the straightforward housewife tasks have been outsourced, and that it's not entirely a good thing. Like the communist Xitter about wanting to lead discussion groups and make clothes out of scraps. Things like sewing undergarments and picking strawberries are fine in moderation, and terrible as a full time job. Keeping a flock of chickens is fun, people will do it at cost. There are a decent number of tasks like that. American boys won't pull weeds for nine hours in the sun for $10/hr, while others might -- but the people who have accumulated nine hours of weeds are doing it wrong.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I suppose I have less of an issue with citizens who have done bad things having to get shit jobs, since they're their home country's problem to deal with either way.
Still, I'm confident that our economic system is robust, and we'd figure something out if we had to. Would our houses be slightly worse? I don't know, since you didn't say what the jobs are, specifically. If it's roofers working in Phoenix when it's 120 out or something, maybe it would be more expensive and certain styles of roof would become less feasible, hard to say, it would be worth trying. Almost everyone used to work in agriculture and repair their own houses, I'm sure the current arrangement of turning everything into an assembly line isn't the only possible one.
Gaashk
1mo ago
picking strawberries is still a job that really sucks
I've heard that mentioned a lot, as a reason it's so, so important to have slaves. It just seems incredibly weak. Coal, sure. It was super important. But... think of the strawberries??
Oh, I see. Looking at Netstack's post I guess it's only been 4 hours; maybe he'll come back.
I was getting pretty tired of the AlexanderTurok inspired you people posts, with minimal drive by engagement.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I wanted to argue about the core disagreement I think I have with the prevailing political views and values on this forum.
It's not a great sign that it's been 8 hours and you haven't been arguing with any of the responses.
Of course there are vanishingly few self made men, everyone gets almost everything from their family, nation, ancestors, etc. That's proper, right, and necessary.
I don't believe very strongly in meritocracy. Reports of the striver rat race to get into the best colleges, of South Korean grind culture, and of elite overproduction suggest failure points. I would be alright with a world where people mostly followed their parents' professions (assuming they're competent enough for the position -- the child of a brain surgeon might be a more generalist doctor, or if they don't want to do the work, some other PMC for, for instance), aside from the obvious issues with underclass kids with no profession to look to (sure, intermittent work in a warehouse or fast food restaurant is not a good life plan), and technological obsolescence. Trying to get everyone to go to college because blue collar is just so terrible was a bad idea. America should focus more on making things like working in all aspects of chicken farming/processing less terrible, not on importing desperate Guatemalans who will work until their fingernails rot off.
Individualism is fine to the extent that it's possible to interact with people as individuals. If there were some wise judge who was actually wise reviewing all potential immigrants as individuals, and they really had the best interests of the nation in mind, over multiple generations, then sure, fine. But that's not going to happen, just like the communism of a monastery isn't going to scale to a whole country, or even city. States often can't operate at that level (cue Nikolai Rostov "they're actually trying to kill me! Me, whom everybody loves!")
Anyway, yes of course most Americans are citizens because their parents were. Just like everywhere else. There's no frontier that could absorb large numbers of stateless people who failed to earn their citizenship. I guess if the Starship Troopers plan were on the table, where people had to earn the right to vote through national service (but still retained the right to live and work through birth), that would be fine. I dislike the custom of anchor babies, but doubt that anything much will change in that respect.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Without looking each one up:
- 30 miles?
- I'm not sure. The only person I know who asked about this ordered one from Vietnam.
- 20 miles? Green Chile, probably.
- 30 miles?
- 15 miles?
- 30 miles?
I feel like most of these are just different ways of asking "how far are you from the core of the nearest city?"
Gaashk
1mo ago
Gaashk
1mo ago
It's interesting that every myers-briggs temperament corresponds to aristotelian temperament combinations, but there's not much of a pattern as to which to which. That tells me there's a there. It may not mean much but it surely exists
Myers and Briggs were reading Jung, who was almost certainly reading Aristotle (along with all the myths he could find), so it makes sense.
Gaashk
1mo ago
If I'm really disregulated, I can just keep refreshing this and DSL over and over (operator error, I know).
Gaashk
1mo ago
Sure, it's good advice. It's just good advice in almost all contexts, hardly anyone gets enough exercise nowadays. It's worse for the purposes of differentiating various personalities.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I may have underrepresented how much I tried getting into it, though it's been most of a decade. I bought and read a book (not sure which), had coffee with a neighbor who was a certified counselor and used it in her work, who also lent me a book, and put probably about 20 hours into it, with no results, just confusion. Meanwhile, MBTI people say things like "use your second function more," which is much more actionable.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I definitely doomscroll The Motte, and find it more addictive than social media.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I've heard of the Big 5 being used in management, but mostly as a hiring screen, to try not to hire people who are too low in conscientiousness. Which is of course a zero sum game, so not useful for society at large.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I tried looking into Enneagram for a while (recommended by a Five, I think), but just couldn't. It seemed like everything that might have been interesting was not just paywalled, but sold as "retreats" and "experiences." I came out type nine, and I think it had super generic advice one would get from a generic check-up, like getting more exercise, which seemed actually worse than a horoscope.
Good for them.
I haven't read the others, but as I recall Freddie's position is explicitly that, yes, there are better and worse teaching methods, and that teaching can and sometimes does improve. And that's good! More kids can read when teaching improves! But to the extent that the improvements are important and sustainable, everyone else will pick up on it fast enough, and then everyone will be back in their relative positions again, but now with more people able to read (again: good and worth doing).
The test for that is whether in a decade, (assuming people still care how many kids can read and haven't just switched to voice interfaces for a large chunk of the population) Mississippi ends up exactly where you would expect them to be, based on their demographics. They already have to adjust for demographics to look really impressive. Tenth is good, but not groundbreaking.
You can also get programs that are good but not sustainable, like KIPP. It's sort of sustainable, because New York schools in general are able to absorb all the burnt out teachers leaving there, and supply a constant stream of new, talented, excited teachers. But it's not sustainable at scale, you can't just replace all the normal schools in a state with KIPP schools, because in addition to teacher burnout, you have to have family buy in, which is a limited resource. I suppose whatever Mississippi is doing is reasonably sustainable, or they would have flamed out by now.
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