Bartender_Venator
No bio...
User ID: 2349
Basically all the stereotypes about X or Y European culture being rude/unfriendly/etc. are false. They come from a combination of clueless tourists not realizing they're being rude first, or from Europeans playing up cultural mismatches/national rivalries. Even Parisians are no less friendly than the inhabitants of any comparable big city.
There are also a bunch of intra-African stereotypes Westerners would find very surprising to hear, but they tend to reflect reasonably accurately how Africans experience other cultures, so they're largely a result of different selection affects from intra-African migration relative to Africa-to-West migration. (This is talking about general stereotypes, of course, not those stemming from national or tribal beefs, which are just as ridiculous as the Dutch calling Germans bicycle thieves, but usually without the joking aspect).
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Gossip on the Hill is that Republican Senators feel they can push back on one of Gaetz or RFK and get away with it (but not both). I suspect it'll be Gaetz.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
Thinking about the potential economics and regulation of self-driving car rental firms makes no sense without considering their closest analogy: the airline industry. If self-driving cars do become dominant, it'll start to look, in some ways, at lot like they're airlines flying a colossal number of tiny flights - for better and for worse in terms of stock prices and average customer experience.
Bartender_Venator
11d ago
Selzer was also an oracle up until random number dialing in Iowa stopped working. The shitting on Nate is mean-spirited, but the reality is that polling methods haven't adjusted for Trump and the response bias issue with his supporters - not to mention the way the game has changed every election he's fought. The models were, I'm sure, statistically beautiful, but garbage in garbage out.
Bartender_Venator
11d ago
It's a legal thing, spending on "issue ads" is treated differently in campaign finance law from explicitly endorsing a candidate.
Bartender_Venator
12d ago
And, according to former staff, has poorly controlled diabetes.
Bartender_Venator
12d ago
SAE is generally considered very Southern, idk about Salisbury but at a lot of schools it's the ultra-Southern chapter.
Bartender_Venator
13d ago
I was going to make an argument about Homer, but in fact after searching to back it up I'll just link this.
Two points he doesn't mention:
- The Greeks always drank their wine heavily mixed with water (this is a key point of the Centaur Wedding myth that distinguishes what it is to be Greek from what it is to be barbarian). Watered down wine looks much bluer, and can even turn fully blue if the wine is poorly made.
- There's a reason from modern times not to read Homer literally. Troy was not very far from a sea we now call the Black Sea. I wouldn't use the name of the Black Sea as an argument that some seas are in fact black instead of blue...
But yeah, it's just one of those things some academics are completely wrong about, but that Science! Journalists repeat because it's catchy and counterintuitive.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
You can just write it down on paper and take it in, or even put it in a note on your phone
Bartender_Venator
17d ago
Obama was also a relatively young guy with relatively little experience, whose campaign image was serious and professional rather than folksy and relatable. In that context, going by one's surname fits better.
Bartender_Venator
18d ago
If you like Green Street, I would suggest The Football Factory as a very realistic/funny look at the same stuff.
Bartender_Venator
19d ago
BAP has published a book under his real name, and has a twitter account for it, but they're very different personas. The book is a revised version of his PhD thesis, which is an excellent read in itself but not really of wider interest beyond BAP fans or people interested in Straussian Classical philosophy scholarship, the account is mostly cryptic posting about the great food he's eating.
Bartender_Venator
19d ago
There is a long-running fake Curtis Yarvin account, which may be what Stellula is referring to. I believe it only posts links to Yarvin's writings as they're published.
Yarvin joined twitter about a month ago, using his Urbit handle, after he rejoined the Urbit foundation - it's basically a work account where he posts near-exclusively on matters of Urbit design.
Bartender_Venator
20d ago
Yeah a bad diet will make your intestines more permeable in such a way that your body's more likely to dump water in there, or at least that's what I've heard the link is.
Bartender_Venator
20d ago
It's not that I literally can't drink coffee any more, but I have to combine it with some kind of light morning exercise, moving around, etc. If I drink it while WFHing I get crazy jittery. Started pretty soon after I went to WFH. Then abstaining from coffee does other things to tolerance - e.g. drip coffee sits much worse on my stomach, and I have a strong stomach when it comes to other stuff. Can still do energy drinks, tea, etc. just fine.
May run in the family, my mum consumed heroic quantities of coffee when she was working, then one day it started giving her awful headaches and she was on decaf for two decades.
Bartender_Venator
21d ago
Like SteveKirk said, your body's reaction to coffee can also change rapidly without much warning. I had a switch-flip moment too and I can basically no longer drink it. I ask about salty food specifically because if your gut is kind of weak eating a lot of salt can dump water into it, so it depends if you always eat a salty breakfast/drink electrolytes in the morning. w/r/t alcohol, that's certainly possible. If it happens on days when you didn't drink the night before, it's probably not an acute effect, just that your gut health may be poor in general and alcohol isn't helping. I'd take a look at your diet and try to shift overall to something better for your gut.
Bartender_Venator
21d ago
Any correlation with what you're eating in the morning? Caffeine, nicotine, salty food, alcohol the night before?
Bartender_Venator
22d ago
For some historical evidence that the taboo comes before the proper understanding of the natural consequences, Xenophon's Socrates claims that the reason for the incest taboo is because the age gap is too great, and thus inferior offspring result because they have a geriatric mother/father. One can argue that it comes about as an instinct through natural selection (my guess tbh), but primitive societies simply didn't have the sample size to note the deleterious effects of inbreeding.
Bartender_Venator
22d ago
re: LA Times, though the owner is a Clinton donor, he met with Trump in 2017 and asked for a cabinet position, then was appointed by Paul Ryan to a health policy advisory committee. He's a pharma billionaire who presumably has strong opinions on relevant issues and would like a seat at the table, the LA Times is definitely secondary to that.
Amusingly, he was also an early investor in Zoom. I wonder whether that or his pharma investments paid off better during Covid.
Bartender_Venator
24d ago
OK, but once you abandon the philosophical consistency of the system and the arguments that justify it, you're left with common sense with some inspiration from utilitarianism. Nothing wrong with that, it just means you're not really that much of a utilitarian (and has the amusing corollary that you'll become a better utilitarian by reading Aristotle than you will by reading Bentham). Of course, this is what the most intelligent utilitarian in history (Mill) did pretty much immediately on thinking seriously about the theory, it just took him a nervous breakdown to get there.
Bartender_Venator
24d ago
I think what my prof was saying was "important to the average Greek listening to the Iliad." It's the bridge between the distant characters of the Iliad and the flesh and blood, the soil and city of the audience. Maybe a mild exaggeration given the different ways passages can be important, but imo a reasonable argument nonetheless.
True - Utilitarianism doesn't work even in theory, because it instantly succumbs to combinatorial explosion once you have to account for multiple orders of consequence. The way utilitarians get around this in practice is adding greebles and epicycles until they're effectively back to deontology/virtue ethics/common sense with a quantitative flavour.
Bartender_Venator
24d ago
This is a little bee in my bonnet for me, but the more I read about Ancient Greece, the more I agree with my old Classics prof claiming the list of ships was in a way the most important part of the Iliad. Not to us, of course, but to the Greeks that list of ships was how each city and region could claim its connection to the political founding myth of Greek civilization. Think of it less like part of the narrative and more like Revolutionary War memorials in New England towns.
The cultures are in some ways more compatible with the US, but there's also an element of those countries being poor and needing tourist $$$ more, so their tourist-facing norms ended up being shaped differently.
More options
Context Copy link