veqq
2d ago
But the point stands that in an organization theoretically inclined towards "cultivating masculine virtues", the first five years were mostly run by women
RAND just published: The Limited Presence of Male Mentors in the Lives of Boys and Young Men
veqq
2d ago
My current favorite is Keturah Hickman
I had no idea she had a blog; I met her and her husband some months ago.
veqq
6d ago
Christianity is alien
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-believe-by-ross-douthat
if He didn’t rise from the dead, then wasn’t it actually the worst advice ever? The example Jesus provides is an example of how to get killed: first you make people jealous, then you make them mad, then you confuse and demoralize your followers, then you refuse to speak in your own defense. If the real story ended with the Crucifixion, then surely it’s a story about what not to do.
...
just taken at face value, it’s a really weird story ...
And then there’s the wandering part — most of it just seems to involve upsetting or confusing people. Zero monsters are slain. Zero Roman legionnaires are ambushed or waylaid by this supposed revolutionary folk hero. His only really heroic acts are miracles of healing, but whoever heard of a legend of a Great Physician? And the people who get the healings tend to be ones who, in the view of this society, don’t deserve it — heretics, prostitutes, lepers, the possessed — all of them “unclean.” Some of the healings even deliberately violate the law. Is he the first ever anarchist, come to overthrow not only the Roman occupation but also the rules of the Jewish religion? Is he a prophet of just using common sense and being nice to each other?
No. At other times He makes the law more restrictive, sometimes to an almost unbelievable degree. There were already rules against adultery, but this new hero, or prophet, or whatever He is demands perfection. “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away.” (Matthew 5:28-29). I’m sorry what? Just who does this guy think He is? And yet His morality gets even weirder than that. Many of the worlds religions, philosophers, and sages have roughly converged upon a recognizable set of ethical principles for being a just and righteous man. You know what it doesn’t include? “…do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well… love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” (Matthew 5: 39-44). This is an impossible standard and seemingly insane advice. In most places, following it is the equivalent of slow suicide.
He seems oddly unconcerned about fairness. Often, as He wanders the countryside healing and upsetting people, He explains His view of the world in simple stories. The stories are about everyday things familiar to the agrarian population of first century Palestine, sheep and vineyards and olive trees and rapacious officials, stuff like that. But think a little too hard about any of these stories, and they make no conventional sense at all. “You know how sometimes you have a hundred sheep?” I imagine everybody nodding along at this point. “Well, if one of your sheep went missing, wouldn’t you ignore the other ninety nine, and spend all of your time looking for the lost one?” Yeah, totally… hey, wait a minute! No, I would not do that. That is not what any sensible shepherd would ever do! Ninety nine is a bigger number than one! But He’s already moved on: “So you know how when you have a group of vineyard workers who work all day, and another group who only show up at the last minute, and then you pay both groups the exact same amount, and…” NO! I do not know that, because that does not make any economic sense at all, ARGH. But He has no time for your arithmetic born of scarcity, because He lives amidst infinity, and keeps telling you, maddeningly, that you do too, and that by giving yourself away you’ll have more left than you started with.
Third world countries tend to be third world countries because the people there have absolutely retarded attitudes about the world and society
Context: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-sick-societies-by-robert-b/
I was guy C. But it was just the random last straw, other removals happened and they were already preparing to migrate.
veqq
13d ago
When practicing accountants cook the books, they're embezzling or misrepresenting the company's operations. The professionalized field emerged to protect investors from false data. Presuming this works and public data is real, we may wonder if this data is also useful. A few basic valuation practices which violate regulations:
- Capitalize internally developed intangibles like a "name brand" using marketing spend (while the law requires them to be expensed) (otherwise they're only capitalized when acquired by another company, but goodwill is often a red flag) (a building lease, trademark, customer list or patent are types of intangibles, which may gain value over time, perhaps in relation to money spent building them... Under normal practice, a patent's R&D costs are e.g. expensed as incurred...)
- John Myers' Critical Event Theory recognizes profits at the critical decision (instead of the sale specifically) with cool impacts on how profits from a loan are worked out
- Where dividing normal metrics by revenue gives you a percentage, I advocate doing this far more aggressively. Mining uses AISC, but factoring money out gives you something more like EROI (over LCOE), recycle ratio etc. for businesses to really compare operational efficiency (e.g. COGS misses the point; you'd want, say, to look at CAC but by hours spent, facilities and ads used and depreciate by your repeat customer rate). (Going further, many operations derisk by bartering mineral streams for oil streams. Typical accounting practice treats the royalty buyer as making a deposit, an upfront payment - with convoluted structure adjustment for tax planing. My company happily receives payment in mineral streams for software.)
- Industries closer to commodities do this, e.g. time charter equivalent, scrap value,
Some of this might seem tame, but accepted metrics like COGS leave a lot of alpha on the table because of various violations, which e.g. make illegal some methods to compare companies at different parts of the same industry (e.g. midstream and upstream companies) which help you gauge the cycle.
Similarly, in my system of national accounts, "government spending" is not included in the net material product, a term inspired by the Soviet style which excludes most services and nets out capital depreciation. I use this to forecast growth and market expansion. It's also really import to even out imputed values. From 3% in 1985, now 10% of US GDP is arbitrary imputed rent while e.g. China takes construction cost and depreciates it at 2% per year. This means China's imputed rents on are 1/10 of Germany's for comparable housing, after purchasing power adjustments, when habitable area/person is only 42m^2 vs. 48m^2. In Japan, imputed rent went to 14%.
Now, I don't count "government spending", because monetized transfers like social security directly increase GDP, which is bad. But many governments pay for healthcare and tertiary education - those should be imputed for their real value. This is why I don't count services. After all, greater US healthcare output does not give Americans healthier lives than Italians or Singaporeans, higher European education attainment does not result in greater incomes than Americans; there are obvious confounders for all of this.
veqq
14d ago
Such incentives made accounting stagnate and be all about compliance with precious little insightful metrology. If you really think about operations and valuations, you can easily beat the market (but "non-GAAP" is mostly bs). To practice accounting at work, you must be licensed; if you are the end user, you can do plenty of "illegal" and useful things.
veqq
22d ago
when he speaks ex cathedra where his words have binding power
And both were "just" about Marian doctrine.
veqq
22d ago
John McCain types in the GOP who have national profile but haven't kissed Trump's ring?
Thomas Massie
I have multiple friends who visited recently. I can PM some travelogues, instagrams etc. if you're really curious. (You can e.g. enter by land from Tajikistan and just enter with a US passport, no issues.)
Tl;dr: Ok, for men outside capital. "Ok" means better than the impoverished half of humanity in Africa and India, but way worse than Colombia, El Salvador or such (and far more expensive for luxuries). They're trying but we shouldn't expect economic growth or anything since the huge subsidies disappeared.
The capital's facing a water shortage, which will probably lead to mass deaths. International agencies were transporting supplies and subsidizing life in the capital, whose metro population doubled or tripled (depending on source) since 2000 while the aquifers sunk 100ft. The Taliban aren't particularly competent, but worse: They don't receive massive subsidies.
Pakistan's bombing the capital because the Afghani Taliban are harboring some group.
Otherwise, life in the North is "ok". Some Ismailis are being forced to convert. Beauty salons, women on TV etc. have been banned (but only after a few years). There's a "Fachkräftemangel" since women can no longer work in many fields (but are still common in medicine, education...), while the previous government exerted great effort to train them in particular. (I know some Afghan women in e.g. Indonesia or Turkey, now.)
Much criminality, drug use, pedophilia etc. have been eradicated. Thefts may or may not be up.
Orthodox in the Soviet Union
Ukraine had over half the surviving churches, and 2/3 of convents by the the fall of the USSR. Sergius pledged total loyalty to the state and is goals, feeding believers to hungry quotas until only a few hundred priests remained (100k were executed). When Stalin (responsible for many of those deaths, and a former seminarian) rehabilitated the church during WWII, the NKVD staffed most of it. Today, the Russian Orthodox Church serves the state, not Christ; he current patriarch worked for the KGB from the 70s on. This is no more survival than if the literal anti-Christ headed it. I pray the church cease to exist, like the blessed martyrs of the Assyrian Church of the East in China and the wider East, than actively damn its followers like today.
veqq
25d ago
fighting in Russia during Winter
Napoleon and Hitler failed, but the Mongols, Swedes, Poles and Imperial Germans all won.
veqq
25d ago
There hasn't been a single piece of media anywhere that I'm aware of that made the fighting in Vietnam look 'honorable' or 'cool.'
Randy Weaver
That's precisely the point. You can only radiate heat which isn't particularly effective compared conduction and convection. This telescope has to be in space for other reasons - it's not in space in order to be cold. Sending compute into space in order to cool it is ludicrous. The guy above seems ignorant of basic concepts and falls for marketing buzzwards which the company's own prospectus disagrees with (they are trying to enable computing in space, not going to space in order to compute. In other words, space is not a welcoming environment for this.)
Edit: Circling back, I believe my interpretation was correct and this other guy doesn't understand basic physics nor that things carry costs. Indeed, resorting to space because you don't trust the grid is hilarious considering how much private grid you could build on Earth instead.
I would like to cross post this excerpt about the mathematician Imre Lakatos, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
In Nagyvárad Lakatos restarted his Marxist group. The co-leader was his then-girlfriend and subsequent wife, Éva Révész. In May, the group was joined by Éva Izsák, a 19-year-old Jewish antifascist activist who needed lodgings with a non-Jewish family. Lakatos decided that there was a risk that she would be captured and forced to betray them, hence her duty, both to the group and to the cause, was to commit suicide. A member of the group took her across country to Debrecen and gave her cyanide (Congden 1997, Long 2002, Bandy 2009, ch. 5). To lovers of Russian literature, the episode recalls Dostoevsky’s The Possessed/Demons (based in part on the real-life Nechaev affair). In Dostoevsky’s novel the anti-Tsarist revolutionary, Pyotr Verkhovensky, posing as the representative of a large revolutionary organization, tries to solidify the provincial cell of which he is the chief by getting the rest of group to share in the murder of a dissident member who supposedly poses a threat to the group. (It does not work for the fictional Pytor Verkhovensky and it did work for the real-life Sergei Nechaev.) Hence the title of Congden’s 1997 exposé: “Possessed: Imre Lakatos’s Road to 1956”. But to communists or former communists of Lakatos’s generation, it recalled a different book: Chocolate, by the Bolshevik writer Aleksandr Tarasov-Rodianov. This is a stirring tale of revolutionary self-sacrifice in which the hero is the chief of the local Cheka (the forerunner of the KGB). Popular in Hungary, it encouraged a romantic cult of revolutionary ruthlessness and sacrifice in its (mostly) youthful readers. As one of Lakatos’s contemporaries, György Magosh put it,
How that book inspired us. How we longed to be professional revolutionaries who could be hanged several times a day in the interest of the working class and of the great Soviet Union (Bandy 2009: 31).
It was in that spirit, that the ardent young Marxist, Éva Izsák, could be persuaded that it was her duty to kill herself for the sake of the cause.
Though his research program is interesting and in spite of previously defending art by question artists, I now fear such ideas as memetic viruses cast evil people. How can we verify a communist correctly described the sky as blue, might it not be grey or beautiful and pink? I marvel at just how much we should throw out.
veqq
1mo ago
the great man model
For context, 18th century enlightenment universalism focused on "socioeconomic factors" and described people as interchangeable stereotypes. Romanticism/counter-enlightenment pushed back with worship of genius (elevated by Eduard Young in 1759) and great men's ability to overcome fate. Carlyle praised hero-worship for teaching the necessary lessons of heroic leadership men need to stand up when the occasion arises to be great. While our lifetimes have seen the prior model reign again overall, in business the concept of heroic leader survived even the managerial revolution.
$2 in Santa Monica according to the movie I just saw. Restaurants all knew drivers and many had their own.
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