erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
If you are dumb enough, memorizing the combinatorial explosion of something is much easier than mastering the small number of concepts that give rise to it. It's why most adults know their times tables but cannot for the life of them perform the multiplication algorithm. Humans are inherently good at memorization; it's the reason kids can easily learn languages, or all 151 Pokemon.
But the problem with memorization without understanding is that, if you vary the problem even slightly, it comes crashing down. Ask those same adults what 13 x 14 is and they will be lost; that's not on the table.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
It's cowritten by lintamande (Kelsey Piper), Swimmer963 (who wrote the specific line you quoted), and lantalótë (who plays the role of Alfirin). Most glowfics are collaborations between two or more authors who take turns posting their character's responses; it's basically a public roleplay log.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual instinct that could give that stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race the name of the fair sex; for the entire beauty of the sex is based on this instinct. One would be more justified in calling them the unaesthetic sex than the beautiful.
I am reminded of AntiDem's advice to Nick Fuentes:
Since Nick Fuentes is young, he still can occasionally be blind to things like the sometimes-thin line between based and gay. So, to help:
Based: "Feminism has really hurt our women. It has turned them into what both God and nature never intended them to be, and it's making both them and us quietly miserable. I hope we can rescue them from it all soon - to heal their hearts and the relations between us, so we can be partners and helpmates again."
Gay: "Eew! Girls are icky! Get them away from me!"
On the other hand, goats have actual uses beyond 'Alice will give me useful stuff in exchange for this because Bob will give her useful stuff in exchange for it because Carol will give him useful stuff in exchange for it because Dave will give her useful stuff in exchange for it because....'; they'll clear out overgrown vegetation, fuel themselves in doing so, and are delicious!
The drawbacks outweigh the benefits. Goats are not fungible (no two goats are exactly alike), goats are not durable (they die after a decade or two), goats are cumbersome to move and transfer, etc. Money is simply a tool to make exchange easy; it is the goods and services of an economy that are valuable.
(I still don't get how people can be like 'USD is only valuable because people think it is, but gold has real value.'; they both derive their value from that same endless loop.)
Apart from being a Schelling point (gold has been used around the world for thousands of years while the fiat dollar has only been around since 1971, 54 years ago) the big difference is that you can't fuck with the supply of gold the way you can with USD. Gold exists in limited quantities and more gold can only be mined from the Earth with great effort (equivalent to crypto's proof of work).
To some people this is gold's great advantage, the only way to enforce a modicum of discipline on governments, and all economies since we departed from the gold standard are a house of cards. To other people, this is gold's great weakness, and you cannot have a modern economy without fiat currency. I don't have the economic chops to have a firm opinion one way or the other. But I do recommend Extra History's excellent "History of Paper Money" (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, & 6).
erwgv3g34
2d ago
Try The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. You already did the hard part; you have enough money that you can afford retire and live in a low cost of living area indefinitely, and you are still young. The question now is, what do you fill the rest of your life with? Strongly advise against getting a career; even if it's something you are truly passionate about, nothing kills passion like the demands of a job.
From Chapter 4, System Reset:
What Do You Want? A Better Question, First of All
Most people will never know what they want. I don’t know what I want. If you ask me what I want to do in the next five months for language learning, on the other hand, I do know. It’s a matter of specificity. “What do you want?” is too imprecise to produce a meaningful and actionable answer. Forget about it.
“What are your goals?” is similarly fated for confusion and guesswork. To rephrase the question, we need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
Let’s assume we have 10 goals and we achieve them—what is the desired outcome that makes all the effort worthwhile? The most common response is what I also would have suggested five years ago: happiness. I no longer believe this is a good answer. Happiness can be bought with a bottle of wine and has become ambiguous through overuse. There is a more precise alternative that reflects what I believe the actual objective is.
Bear with me. What is the opposite of happiness? Sadness? No. Just as love and hate are two sides of the same coin, so are happiness and sadness. Crying out of happiness is a perfect illustration of this. The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is—here’s the clincher—boredom.
Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all. When people suggest you follow your “passion” or your “bliss,” I propose that they are, in fact, referring to the same singular concept: excitement.
This brings us full circle. The question you should be asking isn’t, “What do I want?” or “What are my goals?” but “What would excite me?”
erwgv3g34
2d ago
She withdrew the money and closed her account, then deposited it in my account. It was only a few thousand dollars, anyway.
The 'dirty' secret is that a woman can actually "have it all," bear and raise some kids, enjoy significant amounts of leisure time, and end up with a rewarding, even high-status career if she marries well early on. A guy who can support her while she's at home raising kids, and can give her career a boost when needed, and take her on nice vacations once they're financially established solves this equation entirely.
The extended adolescence thing seems like a particularly nasty trick on women since front-loading their 'fun and games' time is the opposite of their ideal strategy. Do all the leisure stuff up front, then try to get a career going, and ONLY THEN give consideration to marriage and kids? The failure modes for this are numerous.
From "Fertility" by The Dreaded Jim:
Ovaries dry up a lot quicker than testicles. At age thirty six two fifths of women are infertile, and most of the women that are theoretically fertile have a hard time getting pregnant, plus there is a substantially higher risk of the pregnancy going wrong. So you should have your babies before thirty six. If planning three babies two years apart, need to get pregnant at thirty one. If pregnant at thirty one, married at thirty. Which is why your prospects for getting married plunge abruptly at thirty, because any potential husbands are doing the same arithmetic. Yes, some woman you know got pregnant and married at forty four – but your chances of being that woman are not good.
Getting married and having kids is going to deep six your career to the same extent regardless whether you marry at eighteen or thirty five. Being successful in your career makes you less attractive to men, because of the higher divorce risk, bitchiness risk, and infidelity risk of successful career women. You can always do the career thing later. You cannot do the baby thing later. Male doctors marry nurses. They do not marry female doctors.
I do the same thing, and the one time I had a medical emergency (pneumonia), I got hit with a bill for $40,000 from the hospital, plus a few more thousand from random other medical entities. I went "lolno" and spent months applying for financial aid and negotiating with the billers, letting them know upfront that my BATNA was to declare bankruptcy (in which case I would have transferred all my money to my mother's bank account first so it could not be seized; she did the same thing with my bank account the time she declared bankruptcy). In the end, I only paid out a couple thousand dollars. feelsgood.jpg
erwgv3g34
2d ago
The value of their talents now is almost intrinsically less than the value of her ability to produce more individuals with those talents going forward, all the more so because of the narrow window in which she is able to produce them. Its like Nature's most brutal tradeoff, especially since it echoes through the generations either way.
Our options are to exhaust the capabilities of one (1) exceptional individual during their life, but lose their abilities after they die... or have them produce, hopefully, 2-3 at least somewhat exceptional individuals who can, on net, produce 2-3x more value during their lives than exhausting the exceptional individual would have during theirs.
Wow, we've got a woman of genius intellect, showing prodigy-level talent in science and math, as well as the drive to actually compete in those fields... and if she does compete as hard as she can, we're basically guaranteed that her genes won't pass on and thus whatever genetic advantages she may have possessed will be expressed less in future generations.
Yes, this is the kind of thing you do in an existential emergency. If there was an asteroid about to crash into Earth in a decade, maybe, and you needed to gang-press every last human with a bit of STEM talent into the global effort to deflect it.
Or, for a less fantastical example, it was understandable when the Soviets ended up making their women into bomber pilots and snipers during World War II. They were eating the seed corn, but if they lost the war they were all going to die anyway; their time-horizon had collapsed to surviving the next battle. And once the war ended, they turned back to celebrating motherhood.
Needless to say, America is the last country in the world to face an existential military crisis. Canada and Mexico aren't going to invade, the US Navy rules the seas, and then there is the nuclear triad deterrent. It is insane for a country under such conditions to push women into military service as hard as it does. If a woman has eight children, half of them boys, you have a choice between half a soldier now and four full soldiers in the future, plus another four women who can go on to have eight kids each. How shortsighted do you have to be to pick A?
A woman with a towering stature and musculature that actually holds her own in physical feats against men in her weight class? Uhhh yeah make sure she marries a reasonably intelligent corn-fed U.S. Marine so her kids can be the next generation of super-soldiers.
A woman with an exceptionally cool head, innate motivational ability, and a keen business sense? Well we could plug her in as a CEO but why not guarantee that all of her offspring will be admitted to Wharton School of Business on a full-ride scholarship and have her raise a generation of top-tier MBAs? (mostly tongue-in-cheek, that's probably a waste too)
From in His strength, I will dare and dare and dare until I die:
Aroden might renounce her and if that happens she will have to pursue different life plans but it's still very hard to imagine them involving children. She argued it endlessly with her mother, when she was a child.
"If I'd gone off to be a holy warrior," her mother had said, "none of you would exist, and instead I raised three noble and good sons who will serve Aroden, and that's three times the effect any man can have, no matter how great. If you are unusually suited to His service, so will your sons be; character breeds true."
"If Aroden foresees that will be better I guess He won't pick me," says Iomedae, though of course if that were all there were to it she would be indifferent and she isn't.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
AllTheTropes has no real activity. It's basically just a snapshot of TVTropes as it existed in 2013.
Whoops, fixed! Yeah, sorry, it was supposed to be https://alljapanesealltheti.me/index.html
erwgv3g34
4d ago
In neurotypical, this means "I want to talk to you and I am using the book as an icebreaker" (I don't know why they can't just say that, though). They will eventually go away if you show you are more interested in the book than in talking back.
Back when I started learning Korean, the core of my learning strategy was adapted from AJATT. It seems the website is down now, but the core of it is summarized here: https://learnanylanguage.fandom.com/wiki/All_Japanese_All_The_Time
It's not down, it just moved from alljapaneseallthetime.com to alljapanesealltheti.me
erwgv3g34
4d ago
There is a wider question here: discoverability. Some friends have inquired if a space like the theMotte exists. I usually shurg and pretend this place doesn't exist. My policy has been that if you are meant to find it, you will find it. But, after our divorce from Reddit, I'm not so sure anymore.
We don't have a pipeline anymore. You should absolutely be recommending The Motte to your friends. If we don't get new members, we are going to die of attrition.
erwgv3g34
4d ago
There simply isn't enough pre-90's material available. The internet produces exponentially more content than the printing press, and even with it AI trainers are running out of text and resorting to artificial (AI-generated) data.
Letting Reddit purge all thoughtcrime out of the platform is going to have far more implications than were ever imagined.
erwgv3g34
5d ago
erwgv3g34
5d ago
Archipelago (Scott Alexander).
Please, please link to the original version of "Archipelago", not to the (horrible) revised edition.
Which is, of course, why the Allies did not march all the way to Berlin from Italy; they invaded Normandy.
Off-topic, but what does The Motte in 1904 actually look like (let alone Tang-era China)? A republic of letters made up of philosophes writing comments to each other across Europe? A group of renegade thinkers meeting in coffee house in Paris to discuss the culture war? A resistance movement distributing pamphlets with top-level posts at the university of Munich? Dissident intellectuals spreading self-published copies of blog posts all over Russia? Come on, give me ideas; it'd make for a pretty cool cameo in an alternate history novel.
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