DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
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User ID: 460
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
15d ago
I asked Google to find me the worst Kinkade painting, and it said there was "no such data" and wouldn't I like a list of the names of his most famous works, and oh, by the way...
Kinkade's last completed painting was The Gazebo Of Prayer. He died at the age of 54 from acute intoxication from alcohol and the drug diazepam.
Wow. That hit me like a sledgehammer. Was he in physical pain? Was he tired of being bullied by the art community like the Austrian painter who had similar problems with proportion and composition? Was he mentally ill and professionally medicated? I'm sure I can find the answers, but really, I don't think I want to know.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
15d ago
From personal second-hand experience, the difference between a parent who tells another adult, "Oh, I would never strike my child!" and the parent heard uttering to their child, "Look at me right now or you are getting a spanking and going to your room!" is about twelve months.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
15d ago
It's the 10% rule I first learned about in the furry fandom.
10% of people who consistently pick fiction by the advertised presence of anthropomorphic animals talk openly online about it. Only 10% of those would wear a fursuit at a con, let alone in public. And guess which ones the media likes focusing on? That 1%, which is still in the tens of thousands.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
15d ago
Another thought:
But in that era, nobody thought of this as a disease.
Psychological (software) and psychiatric (hardware) illnesses have historically been downplayed because of their invisibility. People fell through the cracks and died, or were caught in the social safety net and were institutionalized and forgotten. Nikola Tesla, inventor of radio, AC power, and the electric motor died penniless in a hotel where he kept pigeons in a coop. He was hailed as a great man, but had he known about his autism, he might have been even greater.
(The best explanation I’ve hear for Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” is that Gregor Samsa woke up disabled one morning, and the bug thing is just a metaphor for dehumanization and dependency.)
It’s actually a good thing the rates are going up because, assuming there’s no actual rise in incidence, they’ll get care because the medical industry has got a profit motive to provide them care.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
16d ago
String theory and dark matter being scientific dead ends but great cover stories for gravitics? I love it.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
16d ago
· Edited 15d ago
“The Unobservable Universe: A Paradox-Free Framework for Understanding the Universe” by Scott M. Tyson, self-published and universally shunned.
I was his friend for nearly a decade. The man was a materials scientist and helped solve cosmic ray errors in satellite electronics. Whip-smart but distractible, he was looking for a funder who wouldn’t look at his proposed experiments and think “oh God, another perpetual motion nut.”
His theories start from the concept that we got gravity wrong: instead of masses having gravity, he believes it’s more accurate to say gravities have mass. From there, he explains the Casimir effect, propulsionless motion, and free energy, but doesn’t mention in the book the possibility of gravity bombs more terrible than the Tsar Bomba.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
17d ago
· Edited 17d ago
I'm always working on philosophical meanderings for storytelling and sensemaking purposes, and this one's a doozy -- though not related to Triessentialism, so posting it here instead of my TE thread.
I've been fascinated for a while by the concept of waves: why were sci-fi writers of the 30's through the 70's so fascinated by waves, rays, and beams? Think of how Captain America was not just injected with a serum but also bathed in "vita-rays". Why did they imbue them narratively with almost magical powers? (I've since realized it's just the evolution of technobabble, and "quantum" has taken the place of "waves". But I digress.)
But this focus on waves was also present in real science. What are 3d waves like, in contrast to the simplified 2D diagrams in all the science books? What does it even mean that light and matter have wave-particle duality? The interference patterns of the double-slit experiment are fascinating, but what's the physical reality behind it all? There was always something missing, something on the edge of thought which made waves a slippery concept for me.
At some point, I had an epiphany: waves are a copy of the shape of a thing impacting a medium, propagating through the medium.
Consider a diver, executing a flawless front dive with pike. When she hits the water, she displaces the water around her, carving a 3D tunnel through the water which collapses around her as the gravity returns the water to its lowest local energy state. The wave propagates outward, its shape initially precisely mirroring her shape as it touches the water. As the wavefronts of different continuous impacts of parts of her body interfere with each other, the shape becomes muddled, approximate, and eventually the shape is lost, having averaged out to a circle through this entropy.
Consider a metal cube touching the surface of a still pool. The cube makes a square wave on the surface, which quickly becomes a round wave the further it is from directly touching the cube.
Consider a hologram, a 3D recording of a laser wavefront on a special kind of film substrate. What's captured is multiple perspectives, continuously, simultaneously, and analog. Holograms have always seemed like science magic to me, but now they make a bit more sense.
But that wasn't the doozy! I've recently been considering how systems tend to lose focus on their original purpose and turn into simulacra of what they had been.
Consider problem-solving organizations. Whether that's a system of government, a system of commerce, or a charity with a specific goal, without constant refinement or straight-up replacement, they regularly become jobs programs focusing on makework.
Consider computer operating systems which start out with purpose and clarity, but through the entropy of installations and uninstallations, become slow and befuddled.
Here's the doozy: while a focus on entropy or on individual failures in systems may be useful in modeling them, it may also be useful to model them as waves with interference. Initially, the solutions are shaped by the problems, But over time, additional concerns will round the sharp problem-conformed edges of the solutions.
This suggests what's needed for a sustainable problem-solving system is not a problem-conforming entropic wave, but a solution-propagating wave, like a flute's finely designed and well-played sound waves creating a melody.
Hm. I need to read John Gall's Systemantics. I've heard that it may shed some light on how systems fail and why replacing them is easier than fixing them.
Parting thought: an answer and its question shape each other. ("Why? Because." "How? Thus." "What? This.") But is the answer a wavefront of its question, or the other way around? Hm.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
28d ago
Ironic for all the talk of postmodernity that we’re coming into our best scientific (modern) understandings yet of these neural modalities and structural differences at the same time people are primed to believe them a coincidental set of symptoms overhyped by the sellers of snake oil.
On a side note, there are still battles over the reputation of Doctor Asperger: in 2015, it was believed he heroically kept the Gestapo from taking his clinic’s young patients, but as of 2023 it’s believed he himself sent low-functioning kids to extermination.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
28d ago
The reason Asperger Syndrome was rolled into Autism Spectrum Disorder was because careful review of the diagnostic criteria found the only difference: autism had early mutism, Asperger didn’t. Both had high and low functioning people, often with sensory issues.
Both also have subclinical expressions, people who clearly have it but aren’t impaired enough by it to need treatment or medication.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
29d ago
A 2011 South Korean study with unique methodology for the time suggested autism rates are naturally about 1 per 38, or about three percent, assuming no difference in rates by race. This research came at a time of greater awareness of high functioning autism at nonclinical levels:
The South Korean study probably produced such a high figure because it screened a lot of kids who seemed to be doing OK and included in-person evaluations of any child suspected of having autism, Grinker says. "Two-thirds of the children with autism that we ended up identifying were in mainstream schools, unrecognized, untreated," he says.
American rates have ended up about the same 1/38.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
29d ago
Ah yes, this generation’s “Pentium bug.”
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
I remembered an article comparing America’s gun crimes rate as the best among developing nations but high for developed nations. Certainly gave me food for thought.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
I know the guy who developed the gravity bomb concept. Want a miles-wide chunk of Earth gone? I know which book to point you to.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
Arctic circle is the obvious edge case where it would be worse than useless.
Here in New Mexico, one of the southernmost states, sunrise ranges from 7:13am in winter to 4:53am in summer (without DST), only a 2:20 swing. Sunsets range from 4:55pm to 7:23pm (again without DST). 9am here is about 2 hours post lucem in winter to 3pl in summer with DST. That means three hours of blazing hot summer sunlight before I even get to work, and the A/C is on all day.
DST helps me (other than the sudden transition), but sundial time as hyper-DST with my workplace opening two hours after sunrise would be better for my sanity.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
The Time Wars Have Begun.
President-Elect Trump has put his weight behind ending Daylight Saving Time. Pretty much everyone likes the idea, but immediately the perma-DST vs. Noon-Is-Noon factions drew up battle lines.
I’m not here to litigate that battle, it’s tiresome; all the points have been made elsewhere and basically come down to if 9-5 or 8-4 (solar time) is what our civilization should stick with, and what we should call them, for the sake of the children and for having some evening daylight after work.
Instead I propose that schools and businesses start using “sundial time”.
They’d open at, for example, one hour after dawn and be open 8 or 9 hours. Retail stores, bars, and other businesses that rely on evening business could base their workday around sunset, closing at (let’s say) three or five hours after sundown.
Their door signs could be IOT smart displays, automatically coordinating with a virtual sundial based on their GPS coordinates, with translation into noon-based time. Smartphones could show these times pretty easily, via a settings switch.
We even have the Latin abbreviations AL (ante lucem), PL (post lucem), AV (ante vesperum), and PV (post vesperum) ready to go.
The major plus would be health, as instead of one hour jumps in spring and fall causing heart attacks, times would adjust only minutes each day, steadily.
Would you be opposed to this in your city/town, and would you be more or less opposed if your political rivals suggested this? Do you have any priors re which political tribes would hold which opinions?
Are you PDST or NIN and a night owl or early bird, and do you think that influenced your other answers and arguments? (For transparency, I’m a Noon-Is-Nooner night owl.)
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
What would count as “weaponizing the DOJ” that the Democrats haven’t already normalized? What “unacceptable directives” wouldn’t be illegal, yet would be beyond the pale?
New York Times columnist David Brooks said the quiet part out loud recently while on left-of-center “PBS Newshour”: “if you look at democracies in decline, then it is a pattern that people in office use their power to indict and criminalize and throw in jail the people who were in office before them of the opposing party. And so we are a nation, democracy in decline.” - The Hill
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
How about “Judea”?
When ancient Israel had a civil war, the territory controlled by the tribes of Judah and Benjamin was differentiated by name from the rest of the ten tribes, who kept the name “Israel”. Thereafter the Judeans and Israelites had separate kings, alliances, enemies, and historical run-ins with regional empires.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
Avacado, Bacon, Cheese, and the third M, Mushrooms, would make it ABC KLMMMNOP.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
De facto - Means "in fact" or "in effect". It describes practices that exist in reality, even if they are not officially recognized by laws. For example, a de facto leader is someone who has authority over a country, but their legitimacy is widely rejected.
De jure - Means "according to the law". It describes practices that are legally recognized, regardless of whether they exist in reality. For example, a de jure leader has a legal right to authority, even if they are unable to exercise it.
I was speaking in a right-wing dialect, with brevity, and with the contrast between the two definitions above in mind. You're right that I was not clear because de facto is probably the worse usage here. I'll restate it: "If every right-wing win is assumed to be evidence of Russian election interference and every right-wing loss is declared a victory for democracy, the rules-based world order is screwed because WWIII is inevitable."
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
“Sounds like someone controlled by an oligarch to me…” (sarcasm)
But seriously, this is a major shift in Cthulhu swimming leftwards and making people go insane. If every right-wing win is de facto evidence of Russian election interference and every right-wing loss is a victory for democracy, the rules-based world order is screwed.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
Sounds like the system wanted to make an example of P'Nut.
Like Bill Foster's wife's divorce lawyer made an example of him in "Falling Down".
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
Us Americans, who also spell catsup "Ketchup": Lettuce leaves, Mayonnaise and Mustard spreads, and slices of Nightshade, Onion, and Pickle.
A Buddhist walks up to a food truck and says, "Make me one with everything."
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
If tomatoes were called nightshades, the standard hamburger toppings would be abbreviable as KLMMNOP.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
I wrote that as a list of individual things the ACA did, not a causal sequence. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
I get the 29 hr/wk thing, assuming it's basically a variation on the minimum wage leads to less jobs argument.
Sorry you read too much into this. The main effect of 29 hr workweeks for low income labor was to shift their healthcare from partial plans (now illegal) to Medicaid, being meta-insured by taxpayers in higher brackets.
Why does skyrocketing healthcare costs drive doctors and nurses to quit?
Again, a list of things the ACA did, not a causal sequence. Medical professionals leave the field for a variety of reasons. One of the big ones is the bureaucracies both public and private (their own business insurance, for one) which turn their days into endless paperwork, and turn the brightest and kindest of humanity into overburdened cogwheels.
How does Big Pharma specifically benefit?
Per Google’s search AI: “the ACA mandates that all health plans cover essential health benefits, including prescription drugs, which means more people can afford to purchase their medications.” It wasn't specifically caused by the lack of personnel.
The predictions I made:
Thanks for reminding me that the blackpill mentality is extremely online and conspiracy-focused; mea culpa.
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