5434a
4d ago
Very nice. Are you a cross-stretchers-for-legs sceptic? I have no position, just curious.
I finished my headphones, they turned out surprisingly okay. Not great, could certainly make a better and quicker job if I did it again, but more than serviceable enough to not want to do a better job and better than I had any reason to expect given it was my first attempt at an experiment made with leftovers. Unfortunately I've lost all my photos after my phone decided that booting up was no longer to its tastes.
5434a
5d ago
I've heard people recommend Citymapper here in UK/Europe. Their website says they're partnered with Via in the US.
5434a
7d ago
For practical purposes, lower middle. My family background spans doctors and engineers at the upper end to car mechanics and carpenters at the lower end.
5434a
15d ago
If we're both using broadly the same kind of bio-neurological substrate (ie not colour-blind, no drugs, no pathologic photosensitivity, etc) I don't see why we would have a grossly different experience. I think there are subtle differences in processing and interpretation (some people might have visual snow, some cultures don't clearly distinguish blue from green) but nothing so different as experiencing the other person's blue qualia.
It's an interesting idea and I used to ponder it myself when I was a kid, but now I'm older I take the other side and ask why wouldn't we share similar qualia.
5434a
19d ago
Could try having a look at the pinned threads and top scoring posts from the last year in /r/beermoney. Seems like people are claiming anything from $50 to $1000 per month, and I imagine it all entails grinding your way through endless hoops.
5434a
20d ago
Just finished James Clavell's King Rat. Have read enough Clavell now that I can pick out his personal writing tropes.
Now skipping through Nancy McWilliams' Psychoanalytic Diagnosis after seeing it repeatedly mentioned around the SSC-sphere.
5434a
20d ago
If X and Y are not meaningful then what would it mean for X to become Y? Nothing, it's empty semantics. X can have none of the qualities of Y and be Y regardless because X and Y no longer have any qualities that meaningfully separate them. The only thing that's changed is the referent. Some Xs are now called Ys, no other changes required.
Sorting X from Y, whether correctly or incorrectly, requires a coherent method to discern X from Y. That's what imparts meaning to the labels.
To wit, if a woman can have a penis then why can't a woman have a male name, male pronouns, wear trousers and use the men's locker room? [Transmen: "Yeah! Why not!" Transwomen: "...Hang on, that's my card you're palming!"] The rest of the women do and you don't hear us complaining.
5434a
21d ago
Context is enough to convey that "they" = the people who support and defend transgenderism.
The difference with Christians is indeed that I've never heard an individual Christian sincerely deny allegiance to the Pope one minute and then affirm it when it suits them. Transgenderists on the other hand must switch positions because the indispensably binary framing of the question requires that they do so.
I don't know the formal logic notation but it's logical that only an X can be a trans-Y, therefore no Y can be a trans-Y, therefore trans-Ys are not Ys. QED.
Extend the logic a little further and it resolves to X=X, Y=Y, X=/=Y, and anything that falls outside of X and Y can be Z, or Q, or K, but it's not X or Y. Or we can throw the whole lot out, there's nothing inherently inconsistent in writing the whole thing off and washing one's hands of it.
Trans logic rests on an argument that X and Y are not meaningful categories, and therefore X can in fact be Y. The flaw in the logic is plain to see (only one of those conditions can be true) and if you press them on one they must abandon the other to defend it. If you point out that the underlying inconsistency remains they'll switch back as required by the last conditional you pressed on even as it demonstrates the same inconsistency.
5434a
22d ago
the number one thing that drives me up the wall about the trans activism online is the retreat to rigid, and rigidly enforced, gender roles
Because it serves their ends. They deny a binary exists as a means to exit, and then depend on the same binary as a means to gain entry. The fact it's inconsistent is by necessity entirely uninteresting to them.
"Heads I'm X, tails I'm not Y" is all that matters. Engaging in a spirit of anything less than full credulity (or flat denial) is like getting lured into a three card monte game and getting vexed that the money card isn't where they showed you it was.
5434a
22d ago
These girls can’t produce content forever, and what they have produced can only depreciate as it’s copied, leaked, or imitated
SoftWhiteUnderbelly had a recent interview with an OnlyFans agency manager/founder who claimed that his clients rely on a stack of content that they endlessly recycle as the subscribers fade out and are replaced. The average subscriber lasts about a year and I imagine you can keep the diehards hooked with a sprinkling of new material released at random much like a Skinner box. The manager also confessed that he's retiring due to, among other reasons, the foreseeable competition coming from AI.
5434a
23d ago
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/child-10-caught-knife-capital-35322556
"More than a dozen 13-year-olds - including two girls - were also subjected to positive blade searches"
She probably was worried about being harassed - by other teenagers with knives. I bet she knows more people who have been stabbed than have been groomed/abused.
When the police in London wanted to reduce knife crime they asked Scotland for help.
5434a
26d ago
My take on helping people is that if I can I should
I used to feel the same. I don't anymore, but I used to.
It took me a long time and a lot of money/free labor to learn the "within reason" part
Amen. I never did it in the hope of being liked. I did it because I wasn't doing anything else with my time so why not pitch in. I stopped doing it because I reached the conclusion that doing nothing and losing nothing was preferable to helping people and ending up worse off, plus getting lined up to be volunteered to have the process repeat.
The last time I did a good deed worth talking about post resolution was when me and my gf at the time found a pair of debilitatingly intoxicated students in the park around midnight so I called a taxi and gave the driver £20 to take them home. They, a boy and a girl, were half naked and had just crawled out of a large water-filled ditch together. God knows what they'd been doing but it was clearly not working out and it was time to call it a night. When the taxi arrived the girl complained that she didn't want to share the taxi with the boy so I let her know that she could either deal with it or resume searching for her shoes. She wisely decided she'd deal with it.
In that instance I was pretty confident that I wouldn't become jaded from repeatedly encountering the same situation.
5434a
30d ago
The motto is Peace, Love, Unity, Respect (PLUR)
At best this is an aspiration. It's like BDSM heads talk about safe sane and consensual. Look at what you actually see. In a rave it's synthetic drugs and electronic drums, in BDSM it's sex and violence. Too cynical? Take raves and remove the drugs and drums but leave the PLUR. Does the result still look like raves?
Don't get me wrong, I like raves. I'm just tired of people using trite slogans to morally launder their deviancy and hedonism.
I don't know how to dance with other people, especially how to dance up to a girl to get her attention. Any advice here? I often find myself dancing faster than everyone else.
Raves are not partner dances. Raves can be a place for being expressive, playful and a bit childish, so you can try something like miming. I once saw a guy miming out a full shopping trip to a supermarket. You could try something interactive like bouncing an imaginary basketball and passing it to the people who catch on, then build up the interaction from there - celebrate scoring a half court three pointer, draw them up on a foul/travelling, send them to time out, then if it's a cute girl you could joke about their team's uniform and rib them for not having showered after the match. Just make stuff up. Drugs help. Even if it's not for the women it's a fun change from trying to be all serious. But if you're looking to dance with a partner you should go to partner dances.
5434a
1mo ago
From what I remember seeing the members were basically normal in terms of looks, just wildly over-invested in the idea/ideal of One True Love romanticism and the childish wish that the way to get what you want is to really really really want it. You don't have to be fat and ugly to to be dissatisfied with being judged solely for your looks.
5434a
1mo ago
If you spend too much time online following the culture war I think you'll enjoy watching Eddington.
I don't want to say too much about it as it's probably more fun to go in blind.
5434a
1mo ago
What was the climate and weather like? Was it a factor in your timing? Obviously winter is out.
Yeah I'd want to complete a full circuit. Cannes, Nice, Turin, Lake Como, Milan, Verona, Graz, Vienna, Salzburg, maybe Munich, Zurich, Geneva, Grenoble, Aix. Peak Europe, minus the peaks.
5434a
1mo ago
Very cool. I sometimes entertain an idle daydream about cycling around the Alps for my mid-life crisis (around as in around the comparatively lower elevation periphery, not around as in through). I'd definitely want a more road based route than that though.
5434a
1mo ago
poppers
I've tried poppers exactly once. The high from poppers is 1:1, 100% indistinguishable with the high of standing up too quickly. The one minor difference is that standing up too quickly isn't followed with ten minutes of your heart going BOOM... BOOM... BOOM and then two hours of an absolutely pounding headache.
I had strong reservations about that claim, and made a note to check later.
Did you follow up?
5434a
1mo ago
Interesting analysis of dollar cost averaging vs buy the dip at https://ofdollarsanddata.com/even-god-couldnt-beat-dollar-cost-averaging/amp/
5434a
1mo ago
many Western environmentalists are only tooting the horn about climate change as a convenient pretext to instate global communism
I started drafting a top level post last week touching on a related trend but I didn't have enough to round it out. I still don't really, but I think there's something in there. Anyway, last week I saw a poster for an Alternative Pride March in my city. My CW radar was pinged, I looked it up and found out that it's explicitly Marxist ("Pride without cops or corporations!" etc). Events under the same banner are being organised in other cities suggesting it's unlikely to be a grass roots movement.
So now the social acceptance and establishment endorsement of LGBT is... bad? That doesn't seem convincing.
What I think is happening is that Marxists prey on these fringe movements. It's not that LGBT and environmentalists are eager for Communism. I think many of them are sincere that what they want is no more than reasonable policies addressing their defined political interest (gay marriage, say, or clean rivers). I suspect that Marxists court and enter these movements that are made of what are already soft radicals who are acculturated to being unhappy with an aspect of the status quo and begin efforts to turn them into hard radicals who will become convinced that the status quo has to be disposed of wholesale (our revolution is necessary for the sake of your own cause, Comrade).
That is to say it's not environmentalists who are tooting the climate change horn to instate Communism, nor is it LGBTs, it's Communists. The fact that these movements are already socially accepted gives them cover to expand the agenda because now they can condemn resistance to the veiled Communist ideology as eg ecocidal transphobia.
5434a
1mo ago
Recently finished Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte after seeing it mentioned here. Good fun, entertaining.
Now reading Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. So far it's stuck to interesting reportage and avoided the Road To Wigan Pier trap of segueing into lengthy political rhetoric.
There's a world of people out there with more money than brains. And to avoid uncharitability some of those people have a lot of brains but they have even more money, and so they don't see a problem with spending money to try something out quickly and easily instead of spending brain power to get there slowly.
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