DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
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DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2d ago
Rules for magic give us an interface for magic.
It’s like teaching arithmetic to the youngest kids, then gradually explaining over the next fifteen years of Masters-track schooling how it works under the hood. Eventually you get top math-wizards inventing new types of numbers and functions named after them, because they need them to make X go widdershins into Y through a tensor, but only if it’s not imaginary otherwise you get a strange attractor set and that’s not ideal at all.
Rowling’s system is about this deeply connected energy flowing through most living things, and where other magical sapients get instinctive and powerful ways to use it, humans have to use tools like wands and words to reach an instinctive level beyond wild flailing. (Like mundane animals having fangs and claws and venom, but mundane humans have to make tools.) But once humans can do wandless wordless magic, they’re basically instinctively programming flows of raw magic and can just blow past boundaries the first year students think are immutable.
Then, some magics were modeled by geniuses after the instinctive magics of beasts and beings and so the restrictions don’t apply for those spells, and other magics are basically like having admin access so certain artificial restrictions interact differently with them, like the Hallows.
The “anything can happen” feel is meant to retain the wonder of high fantasy, while the “you can’t do that spell that way” is meant to retain the utility manipulation of low fantasy. I think she did a great job at letting both levels work together, at least for the genre-redefining work of urban fantasy/Roald Dahl pastiche/bildungsroman/YA fascism dystopia it evolved into.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4d ago
Malfoy’s mates Crabbe and Goyle - lower class or lower middle class? Servants of House Malfoy? As an American, all I can tell is they’re somewhere between soccer hooligans and Alfred Pennyworth.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7d ago
The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya and rereading From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler for the first time. I was too young to pick up on it the first time, but the pre-incident life experiences of the latter’s protagonist is described from the start in upper middle class terms. It feels like she’d easily become fast friends with Rudy Huxtable from the Cosby Show.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7d ago
#Procrastination thoughts:
(As always with Wellness Wednesdays, if you have never suffered from this problem, please don’t proclaim How Easy This Has Always Been For Me, You Just Need To Buckle Down And Do It.)
On ADHD-style time-blindness: Some moments are a destination, others a path to other moments. Learn to differentiate these, not mistaking a path-moment for a destination-moment… or vice versa. Playing with your sister’s kids is a destination moment, not something just to get through. Playing games on your phone with as little depth as Cookie Clicker out of boredom is a path-moment; don’t build a life around it.
On the states of mind of procrastination: I find my personality shifts depending on the state of my distractions, not the state of my work:
- I don’t want this Now to end, because I’m harvesting Fun, even of the worst and most boring sort. Or maybe the best sort, because I’ve got a schedule but yeah, I’ve got time. I am “Not Done” playing. I am in Freud’s id mode, and my name is Not Done.
- I don’t want people to stop me from completing my procrastination activity, because it cost me too much hassle to get to this point and I’ll be damned if I give up the progress, but time is summoning me out of Now-mode, and I know I have responsibilities to get to, and I am “Almost Done” with my distractions. I’m in Freud’s ego mode, and my name is Almost Done.
- I am doing the needful and my distractions are outside the warp bubble of flow mode. Time and I are partners here, I am digesting time as fuel. Whatever I was distracted with, it’s in the past and “I’m Done” with it whether I finished it or not. I’m in Freud’s superego mode, and my name is I’m Done.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
8d ago
I didn’t bat an eye at the “bloody altar” or “evil [god]” comments, misunderstandings of my faith I expect from unbelievers, but it’s fascinating how much I bristled at the “gnostic” comment.
I’ll return to this thread later, just wanted to post first thoughts.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
10d ago
He then nailed me to the wall by saying, “Surely a man of your diverse intellectual interests and wide-ranging curiosity must have tried to find God?”
(Eureka! I had it! The very nails had given me my opening!) I said, smiling pleasantly, “God is much more intelligent than I am — let him try to find me.”
This answer from Asimov pleases me immensely. To be a humanist Jew, a top-notch scientist, and world-famous author, and to taunt the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in this way, pretty much guarantees a response.
I’ve been trying on a bit of theology recently, the idea that YHWH is the “God of the lost,” in the way other people call Thor the god of thunder and Hera the goddess of marriage. My dad has always instructed my siblings and me to pray as soon as we notice something is missing, because God knows where it went. It only makes sense to start any search by asking the One who knows literally everything and has a O(0) search time complexity, and can have prearranged everything in the universe since the beginning of causality to decrease my own search time.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
10d ago
My personal definition of GenX:
- if you remember the Kennedy assassination, you’re too old.
- if you don’t remember the Challenger explosion, you’re too young.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
12d ago
I’ve been on the IT side of healthcare, helpdesk with a few admin duties, and I do not envy you one bit.
Here are some of Ronald Reagan’s predictions from the 60’s about government-run healthcare:
‘The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They're equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him, "You can’t live in that town. They already have enough doctors." You have to go someplace else. And from here it's only a short step to dictating where he will go.’
These concerns seem almost quaint next to the never-ending grind of being at the intersection of public regulation, private underwriting, and technical debt.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
+18
14d ago
We are living in an Ayn Rand fanfiction, and I am 100% down for this.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
16d ago
The true black pill is that, somehow, they will claw this back. Court case, rent a mob, assassination attempt number three, something.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
16d ago
Each quadrant of the political compass has Jewish representation. They tend toward lib-left because social justice is a big part of the Jewish identity, and unlike David Mamet, they haven't noticed they're being used by the failed versions of socialism. To me it's that simple.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
17d ago
Let's look at the moral math on that: "If the state kills/jails/bankrupts me and takes my kids, my courage has no protective effect. Only if I survive/am free/am financially capable can I continue to protect my kids. Therefore I will appear to acquiesce but plan to renew the fight."
Never underestimate the lengths a parent will go to. Thousands of years of evolution in societies has ensured that humans will fight every arm of the state in every way possible to ensure that their kids are safe.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
20d ago
How to fix the Ivy Leagues: require every student to have held a non-intern job earning no more than 2x minimum wage for their locale for no less than six months.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
22d ago
The term “white trash” is a fascinating insult in this day and age. Trash or garbage is something discarded after its usefulness has ended.
The “Rust Belt” is full of towns which were thriving industrial concerns until unions inflated the cost of their labor, companies offshored production, and the towns were reduced to service economies. Discarded after being used up.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
22d ago
At least one news source reported it with an apostrophe and emphasized it: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters’.”
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
24d ago
He also had four years of control of America’s executive branch and armed forces, at the time an exclusive club of 45 men throughout history. A quarter of Americans would willingly fight and die to return him to that control, were cheating provable. That’s riches.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
24d ago
· Edited 24d ago
A fetish, or paraphilia, is traditionally a focus on a part or feature of one’s sexual partners, or oneself considered sexually, or a behavior/role. By contrast, a sexual orientation or gender preference is based in the partner’s identity, and a gender is how one’s sexual features relate to their own identity.
One can have a thumb fetish: for big thumbs, small thumbs, thumb-play, gloves, mittens, art focused on thumbs, etc. Most people would not consider the thumbed to have an orientable identity, so a fetish it remains. (I can think of two specific exceptions for that sentence.)
Features traditionally considered primary, secondary, or tertiary sexual characteristics of one sex (size and shape of genitalia, big/small breasts, long/short hair, short/tall stature, small/large hands or feet, hair color, etc.) can be immediate dealbreakers if they go against one’s typical image of their target orientation. However, they can also be fetishes, not just identifiers.
Race can be a fetish or an orientation. So can height. For people toward the middle of the bisexuality spectrum, major categories of genitalia can be fetishistic; those toward or on the edges will generally consider them orientable.
For furry fans, consult a furry scale. Everyone inside and outside of the fandom will have different opinions on what level of furriness is a furry fetish, what level is xenospecies orientation, and what level is a bestiality perversion. Levels 5 and 6 do not have thumbs. Level 6 does not have linguistic sapience.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
25d ago
Knowing the names of my five ancestors aboard the Mayflower, listening for their names during a Thanksgiving narrative is more exciting.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
25d ago
Go ahead and watch at 1.25 speed. I’m glad I did.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
25d ago
He’s a showman and a patriot.
He’s the reincarnation of PT Barnum, running a rally at Barnum’s own Madison Square Garden. He’s a dealmaker from Queens. He’s someone who took the silver spoon he was given and made the most of it. He’s the average non-ideological American who never really thought about partisan politics until it started affecting him.
He’s a husband and father whose family saw him almost get killed several months ago.
He’s a political moderate who came in as an outsider at a time when Americans wanted an outsider and Bernie had been taken down by the ultimate insider, “Crooked Hillary” Clinton. He’s an anti-woke political moderate who’s seen the beast from the inside, and wants another stab at its blackened heart. He’s the kind of man who believes in strength and power and expects to be lauded for using them for common-sense win-win goals. He’s the kind of American the founders imagined standing next to kings and holding his own.
When everyone else is playing chess, he’s prepping a pro-wrestling move that’ll knock the board over. If Ted Cruz is Batman, Trump is Superman.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
25d ago
In 1995 when NewsRadio first aired, Trump had just lost his casinos in a billion dollar business bankruptcy. It’s wild to think Joe Garelli’s actor interviewing someone similar to billionaire radio boss Jimmy James* might be the most consequential media event of the twenty-first century.
* Jimmy James’ actor, comedian Stephen Root, refers to his character as “Trump-like” in this Uproxx intervew from 2020
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
29d ago
To do this, we’d need some sorting algorithm beyond “rich parents.” I propose Triessentialism, my own philosophy, as a guide for creating a sorting mechanism.
Humans are born (I theorize) with an inherent drive to understand systems, which in most neurotypicals is geared either toward understanding and manipulating the physical world or the emotional inner worlds of their fellow people.
If an autistic human develops without either of those, they instead find a system with as much internal logic and interface consistency: the train routes and engines of trainspotters, the elemental type advantages and weaknesses memorized by Pokémon fans, the logics of Aristotle or Boole, a computer language or operating system, etc.
If people with emotional, logical, and physical intuitions were catered to in their early education, and their natural deficits accounted for by society, they could find their “Michael Jordan” field much more efficiently in one of the seven Venn categoricals: Physical, Logical, Emotional, Scientific, Philosophical, Psychological, or Moral.
Of course, any such development is more likely to be a split based on a test administered by Pearson, the neurocrats underlying the psychostate, resulting in a dystopia like in the Divergent series.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
29d ago
For the sake of argument: that’s after six months of doing shoddy work at dozens of job sites, plus however long the court cases take.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
In my (American) opinion, NATO is the empire and America is the primary annexed province.
Thanks! That's a high compliment on a sensemaking forum.
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