Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Has any other natural-born citizen of America here ever spoken aloud the oath of allegiance required to obtain immigration citizenship? I did so once, alone in the dead of night, and it was a surprisingly powerful experience.
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I wonder if there is anything particular and common in the Star Wars and Marvel cinematic universes that made them such an easy prey of the woke vanguard. It's sort of fascinating in a bizarre way how easily both were captured.
Ownership by Disney? Lucasfilm was acquired in 2012. Marvel was acquired in 2009. I tend to like the theory that Iger then tried to use Disney to springboard into a political career by hiring politically active people. If the sole owner wants to do something with a property it's pretty hard for outside pressure to resist it.
Probably yes, but the question I had in mind is why certain media franchises are targeted for wokification and others aren't, and why are some so easy to wokify and others aren't. I heard the argument that the Warhammer universe has a better concept than these other two and that's why it didn't become woke, for example, although the reasons seem rather self-evident in this case.
I think it's less a fundamental property of the franchise or universe, and more a matter of do the people that control this thing care about being consistent to the established rules/characters or not. Disney is pretty famous for sanitizing everything pretty hard going back to Walt (Mainstreet USA vs any real town) or most of the classic animations vs the source material. What's changed over the life of the company is the culture they sanitize for went from being a pretty universal American one to a subculture within the wider American culture.
GW still has enough people who value keeping their universe more consistent to the original design that it resists wokification efforts. I think if Disney had bought GW, they'd be wokifying to the chagrin of GW diehards who would occupy the position Ike Perlmutter had at Disney/Marvel (rich but sad and unable to prevent the destruction of his beloved business).
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When Lucas sold off SW to Disney, he famously compared it to selling off a daughter to white slavers. He obviously had to walk back that comment publicly but I expect he was simply speaking his honest view at the time. On the other hand he has voiced considerable support for Bob Iger.
If your point here is that Iger is looking for political clout points I am not sure I agree, but then I also don't see this kind of businessman as an ideologue. Lucas says "no one knows Disney better" than Iger, whatever that is supposed to mean (I bet I know at least three Japanese young women who know Disney better than Lucas or Iger, but probably not in the way Lucas meant).
I can't speak to @Botond173 's query on the wokeification of Marvel properties but I think one of the tides that has risen all media boats has been the regulatory decision to promote DEI in filmmaking. Disney was recently outed by Musk but Warner, Paramount, Netflix, Sony Universal, etc. have all to the best of my knowledge (which is admittedly far from firsthand) implemented similar policies. I am surprised to discover it was only five years ago that the actress Frances McDormand chastened Hollywood with the cryptic term inclusion rider.
What happens then is what I'll call a Procrustean approach to storytelling, where whatever one starts with has to be hacked up to fit a particular standard. This is not always bad, mind you, and talented artists can often do their best work under restrictions. Robert Frost, according to my poetry teacher long ago, likened free verse to playing tennis without a net. Unfortunately when no one has any historical perspective nor gives a rat's ass about anything but current progressive epiphanies, bizarrely tone deaf films like The Eternals get made. If there is any test of Time I don't expect that film to pass it. Of course I've been wrong before.
On a side note, the cancellation of The Acolyte SE2 and the licking of collective chops at this kind of ironically makes me want to go back and watch it now. My very red tribe buddy back home, who watched it and found it benignly viewable, asked me to watch it and explain what the anger is all about.
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If you just watch it, absent any knowledge of the context or milieu it's bad - just mostly bad in the way that most popular entertainment is bad. Inoffensively and boringly so.
Someone who is truly red tribe is unlikely to hit the common fail states. Someone from that background is probably used to just passively consuming TV (and is therefore unlikely to not notice or care about bad/inconsistent writing, poor cinematography and so on*). They also probably don't know that Star Wars has a rule about having no white male primary protagonists. They don't know about the interviews ranting about Star Wars fans, men, red tribers, etc.
It's entirely possible to watch a season of Star Trek Discovery and not notice that their were no straight white men with a speaking role who weren't fascists but once you start noticing its hard to go back.
Your friend probably hasn't gone through that process, and if he's a real red triber he's probably in a supportive environment. Grey tribe and questioning blue tribe people feel like they are in a hostile environment and are far more likely to notice and get upset about these kinds of things.
Lastly: given the way that Disney cancels projects, especially ones with political correlates like this one (typically they just.....keep saying they are working on it until everyone forgets) the fact that they actually cancelled it tells you how bad it must have been in a watch-metrics sense.
*Compare: some people watched The Last Jedi and walked out of the theater when Admiral Purple Hair turned her ship into a KKV because it fundamentally invalidates decades of writing and world building. Lots of people went "oooooh pretty." The latter isn't invalid but a lot of Star Wars fans were the former type of person.
Edit: let me give a plot example. Here's the season summary: the Jedi were evil AND incompetent, and lesbian space witches were the true power of the force. You can see why this may upset someone with investment in the rest of Star Wars.
Except the Jedi weren't shown as evil, rather misguided and arrogant. Pre-Disney canon says that the pre-Empire Jedi had become over-zealous in their role about collecting force sensitive children and this had driven many smaller force religions into extinction or hiding. Check.
The Jedi had become corrupted by their political role, arrogant and complacent. Yoda says this. Palpatine says this. And is part of the reason their connection to the living force had waned. And why Qui-Gon was seen as a rogue operator by the Jedi. Check.
But even so every Jedi in the Acolyte is trying to do what they think is right. Note the fight is partially caused by the more militant witch choosing to mind control a Jedi, when Sol is only there because he thinks the girls are in danger. The Jedi are not shown as evil, they are shown as good people convinced of their correctness. Which is exactly the arrogance Yoda speaks of.
Now was the show good? Not really, creaky dialog and odd story beats. But was it bad because it suddenly retconned pre-Empire Jedi to have been evil? No, because it showed them in the light, we keep being told they were. The fall of the Jedi was set as soon as they became part of the political sphere in the Republic.
That is the tragedy of the Jedi. And that no-one remembers that, is the tragedy of the Acolyte.
The writer had issues with dialog, and some of the acting was ropey, but they clearly paid a lot of attention to pre-prequel EU material. From cortosis to the Corporate Sector, to yes the Jedi Order basically deciding they should be the only force game in town. What was shown of the Jedi is exactly what we have ben told. Good people in a systemically corrupt institution, that over centuries began to blind even people with access to super-powers.
Yoda, too late realizes this when confronting Palpatine, that he couldn't win, that the Jedi were doomed to lose from long before his own birth. That they had been blinded not by the Dark Side, but by their own hubris. And this is the wisest of the Jedi, who already thought the Jedi were getting too arrogant (as he notes in Ep 2.) This is why he becomes a broken figure in the original trilogy. Why it takes Obi-Wan to convince him.
To address this let me look to The Last Jedi for a bit - what happens to Luke isn't unreasonable but nobody wants to see it. It's contra the vibes people want to see, and the constructions they've had in their head.
Some of the subtext in the prequel trilogy is that the Jedi were blind idiots, but most people just paper that over with uhhh Sith force powers? and then get on enjoying the black and white story, which is what Star Wars is "supposed" to be. It takes a lot of mature writing to make Andor work despite the deviation from that.
It (including the Acolyte) is fundamentally not what people want to see in Star Wars, and it's not done well enough to make up for that.
The other piece is the dripping wokeness. How many white males are in the show? How are they portrayed?
How good the show is exists in a conversation that's driven by decisions of the other Star Wars properties in the last ten years (including public commentary but the creators), not independent of them.
Once you start looking at this stuff with a critical eye it's hard to stop and the wheels are pretty much off.
Obi-wan is relatively inoffensive if you aren't already mad at Star Wars, and is incredibly bad if you are.
That's a large portion of my criticism.
As a specific example: being annoyed and judgmental at Star Wars turns "lets transport this suspected murderer in an unsecured way" from "eesh writers didnt really think about that huh" to "oh god not another attempt at portraying the Jedi as total fucking inbred morons."
But what this shows is that it's the exact opposite problem surely? People were complaining that Disney ruined the Jedi by making them evil and stupid. But the truth you are claiming is that the audience is just not able (or willing) to absorb the kind of nuance which says actually the Jedi (as acknowledged by themselves and other external sources) were kind of stupid, arrogant assholes at the systemic level. Even as much as most of them, were good people at heart. That is fundamentally part of the story Lucas wanted to tell. That is what Star Wars is "supposed" to be.
It's fine that people want to paper over that nuance, if they don't find it enjoyable. But that is a different complaint than, this is all new stuff made up by Disney. Especially when they heap scorn on the creators on not being "real" Star Wars fans, when as you say they themselves have just decided to Flanderize the Jedi in their heads and ignore all the set up. Complaining about wokeness or bad writing and acting is one thing (and to be clear the Acolyte has significant problems in places there, in my opinion. Child actors are tough, but the young version of the twin's were simply not capable of carrying the story beats they were weighed down with.) But it is just ironic that much of what they are complaining about is literally what the story of the fall of the Jedi order is about, while they are complaining that real Star Wars fans know the Jedi are omni-competent good guys while complaining that Rey was boring because she was an omni-competent good guy.
And that is what is slightly annoying me, because as a Star Wars fan, I would like to see more stories about that. Where the Jedi are not simply perfect do gooders. So now the chances of getting some more stories which explore the contradictions in the Jedi philosophy and the interesting bits of Star Wars lore is probably dead in the water.
C'est la vie I suppose. Maybe I'll start up my old Star Wars D6 campaign using the old West End Games rules and set it in the era prior to the Empire, and give the Jedi characters some complex moral topics to wrestle with.
Politics aside, genre fiction exists to scratch a certain sort of itch. Why Batman Can’t Kill People is a very, very good essay that I recommend, and I'll shamelessly steal bits:
In short, you can't keep asking questions like 'can the Light side of the force be immoral under some belief systems?' or, 'isn't an organised, militarised group of warrior monk cultists going to end up with some pretty dubious practices?' without ruining the thing that makes original Star Wars fans enjoy it. It can work occasionally in one-offs or side material, but if you do it too much in the main shows you're going to lose the fans even if your storytelling is impeccable, because you're not telling the stories people want to hear.
The above is a lesson I think about a lot because I had to wean myself out of the 'but it would be so interesting if you took X aspect of the genre seriously' writing mindset and realise that even if there were potential there, it would remove the aspect of the genre that made me want to write stories in the first place. It's especially a problem for the professional authors / scriptwriters / directors / critics, who spend far more time in their chosen medium than their average audience member, and therefore find their tastes diverging. The professionals demand originality, complexity and subversion because they're sick of the same old thing. And at some point somebody has to remind them that they're being self-indulgent and neglecting the interests of the people they're supposed to be working for (employers/audience).
Getting back to politics, KOTOR II did morally-nuanced discussions of the Force and nobody was particularly upset. Even the first game shows a variety of Jedi with some not-especially-admirable traits. Those games, and the prequels, were interesting precisely because up until then the Jedi has been pretty clear-cut good guys. People get upset now because:
But isn't that just the point? The original depiction and backstory of the Jedi Order was that they were flawed, arrogant and compromised their ideals in service to politics. That directly led to them neglecting the will of the Force, having their abilities clouded and weakened and led to their fall. It isn't a deconstruction to show that. KOTOR II is a great example. But in the vast majority of media the Jedi are depicted as always being unambiguously good and competent. That surely is then the deconstruction? Or perhaps Flanderization, that they serve the Light side of the force so therefore they must be all good, all competent.
I think 2 is more likely. That now people see it as enemy action (and perhaps it is!) and therefore instinctively side against it, even when arguably it is in fact being portrayed accurately.
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I don't have anything to add here except I love it whenever somebody links to Shamus' blog. Really good stuff if you're a fan of vidya but also like reading walls of SSC or adjacent material.
I kinda stopped checking it once one of his kids took over after his passing. The content really wasn't as interesting and failed to meet Shamus' level of quality. And when I last did, his steadfast 'No Politics' rule had appeared to have been hollowed out entirely for the usual reasons. I was also really dismayed by what looked to me like his kid publicly throwing his corpse under the bus and painting him as some kind of raging anti-feminist behind the scenes.
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At this point the majority of the total high budget content-hours are about this, despite the fact that the majority of the years and cultural influence are not. It's all over the Disney content.
I think what you're saying is a misread of the Lucas era (although if you quotes from him in that time frame please pass along*). It's clearly not a part of the original trilogy. The prequel trilogy, some of the text has it with stuff like this:
"OBI-WAN: But he still has much to learn, Master. His abilities have made him... well, arrogant. YODA: Yes, yes. It's a flaw more and more common among Jedi. Too sure of themselves they are. Even the older, more experienced ones."
But that's not really a lot.
Per an /r/StarWars thread on the matter:
"Fans have projected an awful, awful lot onto Lucas's intentions for the Jedi. His intentions were to show them get outmaneouvered and trapped by Palpatine. You can reasonably argue that he presented them as complacent and too comfortable.
Yoda observes that many of the 'older, more experienced' Jedi are becoming arrogant, but not in a way that suggests this is massively damning or concerning. It's the kind of observation which a wise, elderly leader whose job is to be mindful would note. Their arrogance plays out in the films where they take gambles which don't pay off in ROTS - but this is very human and mild overconfidence and arrogance.
But Lucas absolutely, 100% neither wanted to make them, nor accidentally made them out to be, a cult of emotion-denying warmongers who kidnap children and whom the Force wants culled for the sake of its balance - which is what an awful lot of people on this board seem to believe."
This contrasts with what has been produced by Kathleen Kennedy - her writing team is clearly ULTRA woke and political. It's not shocking that they are interested in portraying a white male presenting hierarchal organization as ineffective or preferably evil. It's also BORING at this point given these people rule most of media and everything they've put out in the last 10 years has this ideology all over it.
Playing them straight (pun intended) would be novel and interesting at this point.
*I don't know what he is saying now, but that is going to be tightly wrapped up in the contradictory interviews he has put out in the Disney era.
Really? I think most of it still shows the Jedi as much less flawed than they should be. What Lucas said or intended and what he actually showed, wrote and licensed are very different things. Even prior to the Disney take-over. I stand by my argument that a lot of the people criticizing the shows for being woke transfer that energy onto other elements of the show that are arguably exactly as they should be way before Disney ever got involved.
If you think the lead characters being black and asian or the lesbian witches vs Jedi is a woke overreach and this impacted the quality of the show, I think that is understandable. But I think a lot of people then want to criticize everything about the show through the same lens. Especially people who weren't around during the heyday of the expanded universe before the prequels where for example Palpatine gets resurrected and corrupts Luke. And that wasn't anything to do with white men bad or whatever.
In the end I would rate the Acolyte as 6/10. Lovely choreographed saber fights, recanonization of cortosis, the Corporate Sector (Han Solo at Star's End was one of the first Star Wars books I read all the way back in 79.), an interesting look at how even good guys can do the wrong thing for the right reason. Some sub-par acting (especially the child actress), some creaky dialog and a little too much fan service without pay off (Darth Plagueis and Yoda). Though at least Plagueis feeds into the Legends idea that he directly or indirectly created Anakin using dark sorceries gathered in secret.
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What I love about your comment is that it truly is "right is the new left". You could swap some words around and 1:1 have complaints about minority representation circa ten years ago. The stuff about hostile environments heightening objectively-small slights could be from an explanation of microaggressions, etc. I think you could work this out into a general theory of social progress where some tribe of particularists (progressives in this case) develops theory based on concrete allied cases and later on universalists (liberals) generalize it to their enemies.
But it's also the case that the left wield power in a way that fits their critique, right? If you have a movement that complains a lot about minority representation, it's going to put a lot of work into choosing what kinds of people get what roles, ending up discriminating against majority representation. Likewise the stuff about hostile environments - having identified the existence of microaggressions that cause trauma to minorities, they instituted strict speech codes that makes things comfortable for their clients whilst making things uncomfortable for their enemies.
If the US had been unexpectedly invaded by time-travelling Stalin from 1949, we wouldn't be talking about this stuff and we'd be talking about the genocide of kulaks and how the Five Year Plans discriminate against our class and sector. The rhetoric from Faction A is going to be related on some level to the actions of Faction B.
It's also mentally easier for rebels to adopt (and be trapped within) the framings of the propagandistically-superior foes. That's why you had Satanists and Pagans in the 90s/2000s and now you have White advocacy influencers.
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I mean my understanding of the world is very strongly that the woke are the right from my formative years. Intensely racist and sexist, care about what you do in your bedrooms, want to ban books and thought and speech etc...
A lot of the women I know in my life who are woke act like the religious right soccer moms and some of them actually were before that became gauche.
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Have you actually seen it? Your post here offers a compelling view but I have read similar though probably intentionally vague critiques online, particularly the scathing Forbes reviews. I passed on reading all of them because it's too easy to let reviewers chisel pre-formed opinions before one watches.
You seem to be (though I could me misconstruing) making a lot of assumptions about what I would suggest are considerably varied backgrounds and environments of red tribe folks, but to clarify he's a 56-year-old welder, former cop, who grew up as I did on Star Wars and hasn't really enjoyed any of the shows since ESB, though like me he is a fan of both Rogue One and Andor. White guy. Republican voter. Probably more rightwing than he lets on to me--he would consider me relatively left of himself. No stranger to what you and others have termed "noticing," but, similar to myself, doesn't let himself get sidetracked if the story is good Usually only really annoyed when the plot points veer too far from the understandings we all had of the *lore when coming up. (C3P0 as Anakin's droid for example, does not sit welI.) I once asked him, as an ex-cop, if he got annoyed when women were presented as martially capable, physical badasses. He said it didn't bother him; he knew plenty of good female cops (and has always been a fan of Gina Carano.)
Anyway thanks for the response, throwaway number 5.
*I could discuss at length the Holdo Maneuver, as it was eventually called. I would suggest that that scene didn't undue any previously established canonical point. Many other parts of the sequels did really irk me but that wasn't one of them.
Cards on the table? I haven't seen it. I don't want to give them my watch dollars - however I've watched over twice the length of the show in review and complaint shows (because I throw them on at two times speed while I'm cooking, working out etc).
For a different sort of experience, say something by Lynch or something complicated or with a lot of texture like Better Call Saul or The Wire I'd say that means reduced validity of the complaint (even though again, I've seen a looooot of clips) but the thrust of my complaint is stuff like the content being offensive (in a culture war sense) or the plot is ridiculous. These things don't change having seen it or not and it's the kind of product that's going to be the high art that requires experiential engagement and also - the people who are historical Star Wars "fans" generally care about these things, including consistency of established canon and not rewriting the feelings or associated with the themes (like the Jedi now suddenly being deeply questionable at best).
With respect to my Red Tribe commentary what I'm angling for is that there seems to be a certain slice of person who is less offended by/struggles to notice some of the culture war trends. Red tribe people who are well settled in life, older big business democrats, they tend to be more likely to say things like "oh yeah I guess there are no men in this show. Weird. I guess maybe it's the women's turn?" A young guy who feels like he doesn't have a lot of media product to engage with and is being held back in society because of his sex (and likely politics). People who feel like society is working for them get much less upset and find it harder to Notice.
Doesn't apply to everyone though. My dad was one of those for years and is now watching the Critical fucking Drinker somehow.
It's certainly possible for someone to be a Red, like Andor, and to have no problem with this one (and be an noticer).......but I'm absolutely shocked to hear it and haven't really seen that demographic elsewhere. It's not one of the standard buckets for sure lol.
An additional dimension is the lagging tail of people being done with Kathleen Kennedy's bullshit. At this point she's legitimately racist/sexist if you want to use those terms.
With respect to the Holdo Maneuver - if hyperspace interacts with real space in a concrete enough way that you have access to relativistic kill vehicles then you need to explain why they aren't used elsewhere. It's the perfect answer to the plot of most of the movies (any of them involving the super weapons, including Rogue One). Load up an expendable ship and crash it. Death Star done. Go home.
If that's your only objection, I'd suggest piracy.
I mean why though? The only reason I'd watch it at this point is so that I can say I've seen it. I know I won't like it, it appears by some objective measures to be even worse than Ahsoka, Obi-wan, and The Book of Boba Fett all of which I pirated and were awful.
This way I don't even show up on piracy statistics if they have those (although I guess I am supporting hate watching YouTube commentary so not entirely disengaged).
Piracy statistics don't give watch dollars.
And yeah, I did say "if that's your only objection"; wanting to avoid watching shit is indeed a separate objection.
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I'll bite. When I saw that scene in theatres, I grinned like an idiot at the visual for roughly ten seconds, and then immediately thought "this breaks every other Star Wars movie forever," and by the time I walked out of the theatre I'd already decided I was done with Star Wars as a franchise. There were a lot of things I didn't like about the plot and writing of TLJ, but that part in particular really stood head and shoulders above the rest as being completely, egregiously incompatible with the entire setting before and since.
Why didn't they use hyperspace ramming against the Death Star, or against the imperial fleet at Hoth? Why aren't hyperspace-ram missiles the standard anti-ship weapon for every faction in the setting? It can't possibly be a matter of expense or scarcity; hyperdrive-equipped fighters and light transports are ubiquitous throughout the setting. There doesn't appear to be a countermeasure, and she didn't appear to be unusually lucky in her execution. In every subsequent viewing of a space battle, as soon as the situation becomes tense, I'm going to be asking "why aren't they solving this problem with a hyperspace ram missile?" And why shouldn't I?
I had the same specific experience. I enjoyed various parts of EpVIII, and then by the time the credits rolled, I left the theater full of complaints. Didn’t even go see IX.
Having that suspension break during the movie was just…ugh.
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Yeah, me too, and I was genuinely baffled that other SW fans didn't see the problem.
"But... but... the Death Star?"
It was clearly a goshcoolwow moment that looked awesome on screen and gave Admiral Purple Hair an epic swan song and is the reason literary SF > cinematic SF, because an author writing a series would not fuck his own universe over like that (and if he did, his fans would absolutely drag him).
From my view, the annoying part is that a good writer -- and while I don't think you need to be Zahn-level good, coincidentally Zahn did offer his services free of charge -- could have pretty easily pulled it off in a way that made it much more impactful. Even if you don't care about the broader universe or milSF concepts, we never get an idea of why this was heroic and the other suicidal efforts weren't, why it happened now and not earlier or later, and some hints that it was even possible beforehand so people could want it.
Those breadcrumbs don't have to be as explicit in film contexts as in written works, but they still matter there. Instead :
Now, you've established that hyperspace kill vehicles only work when a) targeting someone without shields in the way, b) that you're incredibly close to c) with a big expensive ship with a ton of power, d) targeting a big ship so you can even try to hit it, e) while that big enemy hasn't blown up some vital part of the hyperdrive while disabling the rest of your weapons and engine systems, f) you got really lucky on top of all that to actually hit. What kind of tactical or strategic moron would even risk the slightest possibility of that risk?
Flashfoward to Hux going full 'retreat, at our moment of victory?' He's exactly the sort of moron that would leave a disabled ship in his grasp just to make its commander suffer while he swats down unarmed and unshielded transport vessels. ((That this means DJ's betrayal inadvertently gives Holdo a chance at the cost of countless lives helps.)) Hell, he might try to capture them alive, just to
torture them for the fun of itgive Snoke a Rebel leader's brain to sift through. Have Holdo spell out, while she's desperately trying to come up with some way to distract the Imperials, to save just one life, that every possible system is down -- weapons, engines, shields, scanners, escape pods, life support -- while the Imperial megaship is taking up more and more of the view from the viewscreens. Have the Imperials give a sensor readout: the Rebel flagship is completely dead in the water, with a scattering of life signs.Except the hyperdrive system. And then we hear the distinct heavy rumble of Holdo's ship being scooped in through the megaship's shields, and the viewscreens are no longer a sign of dread; they're a target. It's still a hopeless cause: Holdo doesn't have maneuvering thrusters to aim, or time to calculate a good hyperspace solution, no time to even guess that their damaged ship is big enough to damage the Imperial megacruiser, and they're leaking enough fuel that they might not even be able to enter hyperspace once.
Then the scene.
I recently watched so that’s why they cut all her scenes from the movie from CinemaStix about how different the movie Constantine was before being recut, as well as when the editor has to fix it in post about Ferris Buler's Day Off. Amazing how different those movies could have been without big changes by the editing room. As an outsider, all those changes seem like things a competent reader would have been able to tell from the script.
Your post reminds me of the old What if Star Wars Episode I Was Good, and II and III by Belated Media. These sorts of plot fixing recommendations just sound like common sense; what is wrong with the production process that produces this billion-dollar nonsense?
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Yup ruined all of it for me instantaneously, I laughed at the time and loudly proclaimed how stupid it was in the theater. That is my level of autism...for better or worse.
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"Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy. Without precise calculations we might fly right through a star, or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?"
This is admittedly George Lucas dialogue, but from the first, 1977 film. It suggests at least the possibility of randomly hitting solid (plasma) objects. If this is true or possible, the Holdo ship ramming thing has to be possible.
Now, as to why this kamikaze or automated hyperspace trick isn't used regularly, no idea. I'm sure there are EU authors somewhere scrambling to find a rationale. I could probably think carefully and come up with a few myself if I had the motivation, which I do not (not out of any dismissal of your question).
There are a lot of random issues even in the original trilogy. Tie bombers going over the asteroid field. A space slug with, inexplicably, a mouth full of incisors. The boats on a wave phenomenon of spacecraft floating upright in the same angle. To say nothing of sound. I suspend disbelief, as the saying goes, willfully. Until I don't.
I can think of a lot of potential narrative fixes that could work, if they'd been integrated properly into the movie we all saw. Like, they're in a super-weird region of space with anomalous hyperspace physics; they didn't want to go in there in the first place as the localized threat of hyperspace collisions makes it near-suicidal, but they had no other options and the imperials are arrogant enough to follow them in. Or the super-cap imperial ship has some sort of experimental, super-powerful hyperspace jammer and hyperspace ramming is a unanticipated side effect, or when they infiltrate the supercap they tweak its hyperdrive to create a resonant frequency with the cruiser, allowing an otherwise impossibly-precise ram jump to be programmed, etc, etc... But the common thread of all these is that they establish an explanation for why this is going to be a one-time thing, because it really, absolutely has to be a one-time thing or else all space combat in the setting breaks forever.
The problem is that the movie that we actually got does none of these, nor does it really leave room for anything like them in the story as delivered. I like to think I'm something of a storyteller myself, and technobabble is a thing I've done before. I don't think the issues raised by the holdo manuever can actually be technobabbled.
Authors can make that suspension easier or harder, though, based on what they write and how they write it, and this is a big part of the difference people perceive between good and bad writing. There's a degree to which "I suspend my disbelief willfully, until I don't" is a fully general answer to any complaint about any element of any story, no matter how incongruous or poorly thought out.
Give me a scene where the whole focus is on the tragic death of one of the main characters, and then two scenes later they're suddenly alive again and the story carries on as though nothing happened, and this is never explained or addressed again. Maybe this is some super-subtle 3d-chess thing where the death is supposed to be read as metaphorical, or maybe the author is intending this as a demonstration that something else is going on behind the scenes; maybe the world is actually a simulation. Funny Games did something like this by injecting blatantly incongruous, nakedly-unjustified cartoon logic to abruptly reverse a pivotal character death, very clearly on-purpose and with an obvious narrative intention. The problem with the holdo manuever is that it's very nearly as disruptive to the story and setting as a character literally re-winding another character's death with a VCR remote, and the disruption is never addressed; there's no evidence the authors even understood why it would be disruptive. To the extent that "bad writing" is a meaningful category, this is about as central an example as I've ever seen of bad writing. It makes suspension of disbelief hard enough that there doesn't seem to be a point in trying; if I'm going to have to rewrite the whole story in my head anyway, I might as well do that from the start and just write my own from scratch.
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Not necessarily. Stars and supernovae (which contain neutron stars) both have strong gravity wells. There is an RL theory out there that the reason gravity's so weak is that it leaks into hyperspace (as in, literally, 4th+ spatial dimensions), and that dark matter is normal matter out in other membranes whose gravity is leaking into our membrane through hyperspace.
I don't have my copy of the original Star Wars novel to hand, but I seem to remember "black hole" being used in this line.
Not to geek out, but this is the passage from the book:
“Traveling through hyperspace isn't like dusting crops, boy. Ever tried calculating a hyperspace jump?” Luke had to shake his head. “It’s no mean trick. Be nice if we rushed it and passed right through a star or some other friendly spatial phenom like a black hole. That would end our trip real quick."
So the book was ghost written by Alan Dean Foster from the story by Lucas. I assume the only reason "star" and "black hole" are used here are because they're things in space, and "there's a lot of space out in space" (thanks, writers of Wall-E.)
Anyway as I say this point can be discussed at length and I am sure on reddit and other places it has been, but my point is it always made sense to me based on my viewings of the films and having read the book.
I am also sure that it never crossed Lucas' mind to have ships doing hyperspace kamikaze jumps, and that this decision by Rian Johnson or whoever wasn't great. But it wasn't a dealbreaker for me.
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It's the result of gradual demoralization, gaslighting and the normalization of garbage. The normies are so accustomed to shitty cultural content that they don't even recognize just how shitty such shitty content actually is.
Have you watched it?
No.
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Unofficial Motte Strawpoll: Tattoos on women yes/no
Apparently I am in the minority in liking them.
To me, they symbolize rebelliousness and counterculture, which I do like. Unfortunately, it turns out that many who were "counterculture" in the pre-2000s were actually just Blue Team warriors who were upset that they weren't on top right then. Not very many have adapted to conservatism as the new counterculture in the post-2010s. Many continue to have the delusion that they aren't "really" on top yet. That's life in this era I guess.
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Gandalf says no.
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For a one-night stand/fwb, they might make the woman in question more appealing; for a romantic partner, maybe less so. I think the question is underdefined.
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Presumptively against tattooing, likely to judge a woman harsher than a man.
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That's a very vague question, susceptible to a multitude of interpretations. ("Is your opinion of a woman reduced if you see that she has obtained a tattoo?" "Should women be frowned on by society for obtaining tattoos?" "Should women be forbidden by the government from obtaining tattoos?") (Inb4 the entire point of the vagueness is just to get a general idea of "the vibes".)
Also, no "I have no strong feelings one way or the other" option is offered. (Inb4 taking such an option would be a cop-out, as the original Political Compass poll's FAQ says.)
You seem to be aware of reasonable counterpoints to your objection. You can always simply opt out.
I voted "no", but I felt obligated to voice my objections anyway.
Fair enough!
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Maybe @gattsuru knows, or has written about it already, but what is the deal with Tim Peters and Python situation?
As a longtime user of Python, I've just dug into this topic. This looks useful.
The answer to "What's the deal" will highly depend on how much context you already have. Python was started by Guido van Rossum in the early 90s and Tim Peters has been another major figure who shaped the language from very early on (Even those who don't know him may have been influenced by his vibe that gave Python a whimsical and fun atmosphere as opposed to the corporate drudgery of Java for example. You may also know him from "Timsort", the sorting algorithm he invented for Python.)
Guido was the so-called BDFL (the tongue-in-cheek "benevolent dictator for life") of the Python project, but he stepped down in 2018 and handed the project leadership over to a Steering Council. Committees and councils certainly have a particular way of operating, and I'm not surprised this has happened and I wouldn't be surprised if Guido exited precisely because he felt "this" type of pressure already.
It looks like the latest thing was:
So my best effort Gestalt-perception is that there is a growing desire to wield the power of cancellation and to weed out undesirable figures from the top of the community if they have the wrong race and gender or are not fully on board with wokeness taking over everything.
I'm not sure if Tim Peters is just naive or is was genuinely trying to fight it but apparently he was quite inquisitive about the reasoning behind this power concentration step and in what kind of case it would be necessary that can't be solved with the current system. His questioning was deemed too rude and a flood of vague and emotional cloud of accusations was collected against him and he got suspended for 3 months, in effect for daring to question why the board needs more power concentration.
From here my subjective view.
When Guido gave up his BDFL status it was 2018, already well within the midst of the Great Awokening, and I remember thinking that this won't end well. Committees and councils have a certain way of operating and offer certain levers that the techie nerds are just too naive quokkas to comprehend. They never stood a chance. It's all about power accumulation, the successor ideology marching through the institutions. We've seen this in astrophysics, in geography, in open source software, in gaming, in movies, in sci-fi books, in knitting, in birdwatching, in hiking, or whatever. The playbook is extremely simple, but works again and again as there is no memetic antidote at hand. "It's just basic decency, we must protect victims from (micro)aggressions, this is harmful, the hidden dogwhistle implications of your words constitute violence, you are causing uncomfortable emotions, you are triggering, we must be more inclusive, you are the reason that black and brown people and women don't join us etc." Codes of conduct, culture war wedge issues shoved into technical discussions, every cause turning into the "Omnicause", accusations of racism, misogyny, calling everything white supremacy etc. I imagine that readers of the Motte are well familiar with this playbook.
I remember when the tech space was all about actual democracy and distributed decision making, decentralization in infrastructure and organization. But essentially all these scifi-reading revolutionary-larping techies got their asses handed to them and got infiltrated with essentially no resistance.
This may turn too ranty, but it just bursts out of me.
One needs to step back enough and see that it is most definitely the fault of van Rossum and Peters and the other nerds. They were naive and got outcompeted. The 90s and 00s are no more. The edginess was welcome when South Park wielded it against Bush and the bible thumpers, but now that the system is run by the "correct people" we need no more of it. The greybeard techie nerd thinks "whatever it's just some code of conduct, I'm a liberal and not racist, of course I support it", still stuck in the culture of 20 years ago. The wakeup is coming gradually, project by project, but there is no unified ability to push back, there is no workable answer to the crybully techniques. So people just turn their heads away and hope it won't show up at their doorstep. But each time we do that, more and more of this suffocating bureaucracy grows yet another tentacle. Yet another committee and department added whose only job is to grow itself and gather more power to purify itself even more and to cancel more and to create more committees with fat jobs and suck more money to workshops that are struggle sessions and to oust more experienced competent people who aren't in full service of this basilisk, if need be by questioning the whole concept of competence and meritocracy as constructs of patriarchal cishet white supremacy. Reading the reactions to the current debacle, many techies still seem to think this kind of thinking is conspiratorial, and it's Fox News misinformation or whatever. And they become surprised Pikachu when it happens to the nicest and kindest of people they know, because in every other instance when the accusation came from the Right Side of History they just believed that it must have been some horrible person, of course. Every single time when such a thing happens, the community members who previously never paid close attention believe it's something specific to their community. They seek to pinpoint how this happened but don't connect the dots, don't see the forest for the trees and start arguing the micro-mechanics of what happened.
The age of Tim Peterses, Guido van Rossums, Linus Torvaldses and Richard Stallmans has ended. Their spaces have been thoroughly conquered by the new corporate-HR ethics ideology using a feminine-coded slippery emotional bullying tactic that these men have no capability to deal with. It's all couched in apparently non-confrontational flowery language out of a nonviolent communication therapy book crossed with Machiavelli. They will readily gaslight you if you claim to have picked up on a pattern. But it's just decency! Unless you harbor crimethink, you got nothing to fear! I do believe that the kind of creativity displayed by these people, or those at Bell Labs before have certain cultural prerequisites and HR schoolmarms breathing down your neck, academic bean counter admins counting publications and their citations will suffocate the creativity. There was something special in the US, just look at how much even Europe has been behind, in the culture of innovation, or how hard and slow it has been for China to start truly innovative creative work despite the resources and work hours pumped into it. It's not automatic and not eternal.
Zooming out further, what happens once all of tech and science and academia and cultural production is taken over by the woke HR-pleasers? Does the US stand a chance long term? The lack of a viable alternative destination means that people can't really escape somewhere that would support their kind of thinking. I don't think China will become a viable refuge. When the Nazis cracked down on "Jewish Physics", those Jewish physicists emigrated to the US and built the bomb that won the war. Too many of us assumed that tech will automatically accelerate towards a libertarian utopia. Forever the year 2000, just with ever faster computers and better gadgets, better graphics in video games and higher-res movies downloaded with higher-speed internet. Turns out things do happen.
What can we as individuals do? I don't think it's worth taking on these fights one by one. That game is rigged, the cheat code has been figured out to turn liberalism against itself in pursuit of authoritarianism. Can one make new projects, communities and institutions? Not without coordination, which is close to impossible. What the next years will bring is more and more surveillance, the UK is already ramping up facial recognition capabilities. There will be more and more online censorship, LLM-driven moderation and flagging, including stylometry. More and more blocked bank accounts and journalistic hitpieces against anyone who tries to ramp up something outside the tentacles of this all-strangling thing.
But what we can and should do is think. And think deeply. Tune out the noise and read - ancient and medieval philosophy, the bible, the classics of fiction, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Shakespeare. Watch old movies, get out of the current-year narratives. Humans are the same as ever, we have been here before. Techies are caught with their pants down the moment a "wordcel" applies their verbal judo on them, as there is no foundation there, besides the axiomatic belief that Star Trek is the obvious default. Instead of the Family-Guy-like irony and post-irony there people have to figure out positive values to unironically stand behind and believe in.
I don't think any of this is the end of the world, the generations before us have been through much tougher times and power centers have shifted over the course of history. But I guess many of us never expected to be part of history. A lifetime is almost a century. A lot can happen in a century.
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I don't follow Python internals as much as I should (except to complain about dependency hells), given how spread out the language is.
From some quick searches, I'd guess you're talking about this official statement (w/ this article actually giving him as the banned coder), with pro-Tim and anti-Tim (maybe?) sample takes?
My gut-check, given this at the center of it all, it looks like it's the pretty standard Code of Conduct spiral, where once a Code of Conduct gets implemented, it becomes increasingly vital to use it early, often, and with steadily lowering bars. Peters is the first guy retired enough and not-autistic enough to pull aggro, but there's people seeing the writing on the wall, sometimes getting aggro at themselves.
But I don't know the community well enough to give more than a gutcheck.
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Has anyone run the numbers on what percentage of male-line preferred monarchs/rulers in history failed to produce a son?
By male-line preferred I mean to include not just pure primogeniture inheritance, but also cases like Imperial Rome where a son wasn't necessarily the heir, and one could have an heir without having a son, but if possible a son was preferred. In both cases one imagines that such a ruler tried very hard to produce a son.
I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but it varied wildly between dynasties. Notably, the Kings of France were extremely good at having male heirs (and, generally, having them young enough to succeed as adults), which was a huge part of their ability to centralize into a functioning state. The one time there was a really disputed succession, it kicked off the Hundred Years War. In Germany, on the other hand, comparable houses were much less fecund. The Ottonians died out quickly, in part thanks to their insistence on sending Imperial princesses to the Church, and the only eldest son of the Hohenstaufen to succeed directly was Frederick II, after a 17-year struggle and some minor miracles (Barbarossa was succeeded by first his third and then his tenth child). The Habsburgs did somewhat better, until they got too inbred...
Shower thought: "trying for an heir" was probably notably easier for some kings than others. Medieval kings moved around a lot, because of the need for personal rulership and the heavy demands the royal household placed on any given host. The Kings of France were mostly in and around the Paris area, having the closest thing to a settled capital. Except on Crusade, they were rarely far from their marital bed, their doctor's workshop, etc. The Holy Roman Emperors, by contrast, often spent most of their reigns on the move all across Germany/Italy, reducing fertility for two reasons - firstly, that military travel, particularly in the disease-ridden swamps of medieval Italy, was a terrible environment to have a healthy child in, and, secondly, that their wives often stayed somewhere else to act as regents or co-rulers. Poor relations with the Popes also meant that it was harder for German and English rulers to divorce wives who were infertile or refused to sleep with them, like Barbarossa's first wife. In the end, the difference between dynasties was probably a fair number of little things and a lot of luck.
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To give one data point: 18 out of 40 monarchs of England (I'm counting William and Mary as one and beginning with William the Conqueror because that's where the wikipedia article detailing the history of the succession I'm looking at starts. I'm also just kind of eyeballing this and wouldn't be surprised if my counts are one or two off) have been succeeded by someone other than their son. Though this includes situations such as where King Stephen was forced to pass over his own young son in favor of Henry of Blois, or when the throne passed to Edward III's grandson due to his son predeceasing him, as well as monarchs who would probably have passed the throne to an heir but for being deposed.
So, at least in terms of final results, amd at least for England, slightly under half. If you mean failed to produce a son period, including sons who died young and never inherited, the proportion drops down to around 10%. Most monarchs are capable of producing at least one son. It's just that, between the pre-modern era's abundance of infant mortaility and battlefields where princes were expected to actively participate, many didn't survive to inherit.
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Does watching TV recharge you?
Recently I've been taking breaks watching 20-45min* of TV in the middle of the day and I feel like like it gives me a jolt of energy getting me productive again. I work as a software engineer and can safely say my productivity is above average for all the teams I worked with. I wonder if this could be an illusion, and I'm starting an experiment to track this more closely. I barely watched any TV before other than every couple days to unwind after work so this is very surprising to me.
*Usually they're half or full Netflix episodes fo any given show — currently almost done with Travellers.
No, there's still a small mental drain.
Best thing is to go for a walk or other wise do a mundane thoughtless task.
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Generally, no, quite the opposite. What it’s good for is putting me to sleep because I’m more focused on the fictional conflicts than any problems irl. A coworkers recently told me he was surprised I could watch House of The Dragon to relax before bed, considering how violent it can get. But it works as a sort of reverse-escapism for me, my life seems so much more comforting when compared to medieval barbarism.
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I've never tried that sort of midday break. But I have noticed there have been times I've worked for hard and been unable to concentrate on activities like reading or video games, and TV is much easier to relax with until I've recovered a bit.
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Being "on one's phone" seems to be a fairly universal pastime these days.
Have you observed any cultural differences in what different types of people do on their phones? Like if you considered young vs. old, black vs. white vs. Asian vs. Hispanic, poor vs. middle-class vs. upper-class - who uses what apps? What activity are they actually spending their time on the phone doing?
Young people seem to universally be on TikTok. Old people on Facebook.
Then there’s my girlfriend, who watches TikTok ripoffs like Instagram reels and YouTube shorts. But then again, she identifies as a granny in a young woman’s body.
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Personally, I'm usually on instagram, twitter, substack, reddit, or reading a book on my phone. I think most of my friends are usually on reddit or instagram. Reddit is still more male coded but I have a vague sense it's become more gender neutral over the years.
It looks like it's 62-38. That does seem to be lower than in the past, after looking it up.
Interestingly there are a handful of subreddits like arr FauxMoi that can be quite large(3 mil subs!) that I get the impression are overwhelmingly female.
That's the only one that I've actually heard of an irl woman in my irl social circles actively using and reading routinely, but there are presumably others. Makeup subs and subs for certain varieties of reality TV are probably also big ones.
And then based on what's been happening over at rdrama lately, the redscarepod subs are at least somewhat comprised of women (female).
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”Serious” phone gaming is popular among poor populations and regions but less common among the middle class+ in America. Caribbean / Central Americans / South Americans play games like PUGB Mobile and CODM which have voice chat, cosmetics, clans, etc. I can confirm this is popular among: expatriat Albanians who all play with each other while living in different countries; Lakotas on reservations; Jamaicans, Guyanese, Trinidadians; Venezuelans; all of the above who have moved to America. There is nothing weird about this to them in the way it would be for a rich white American kid to forego PC gaming and console gaming. Genders are more mixed.
Yeah, mobile gaming in the US is typically either puzzle/distraction stuff like Wordle and Sudoku or GenX/Boomers addicted to Candy Crush. In a lot of the developing world, consoles don’t exist and PCs are only for work.
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In Japan these are the things I have seen on people's phones, keeping in mind that it's rude to observe other people's phone screens, that there are little sheets you can put on your phone to prevent anyone viewing it at an angle, and that I prefer when possible to avoid being rude. These are in no particular order of frequency.
Inane games. Battle games with little armies. Dragonball games where you wail on a computer opponent and then it wails on you. Candy Crush. That watermelon game that is similar to Tetris, probably. Other assorted time-sink mind-killing games.
LINE. That's like Whatsapp ot whatever it is you use wherever country you are. Females tend to have hundreds of unread message indicators. The most I have seen is 127 unread messages. Reading and texting, often with long nails in a way I think I could not do.
News sites with printed text.
Either Instagram or whatever shows little reels (TikTok and YouTube now also do this so I don't know.) Lots of swiping, smiling, expressionless gazing, swiping, swiping, swiping.
Twitter/X. It's still pretty big here I think. There was a recent kerfuffle about an Olympian (an athlete, not a god), I think an archer but maybe not, who suffered a bit of online bullying. Online bullying is a touchy subject here since the high profile suicide a few years ago of a television actress/talent who was sub tweeted relentlessly due to her performance on a reality show. You may know more about this than I do.
Music Spotify maybe People gaze blankly with earbuds in in a way that must keep Ray Bradbury spinning perpetually in his grave. They pause occasionally to adjust volume or fast fwd. Or whatever.
Cooking/recipe stuff. This may be specialized reels (see above). I do see lots of how-to cooking vids being viewed.
Rarely, sports. The people who do this are usually older, probably retired men who don't GAF and sometimes watch with the volume on. This is annoying. It's almost always baseball. If it's a young guy it will be soccer and through earbuds. I have never seen anyone watching sumo on their phone.
Dramas of some type. These days Korean dramas are big. In the old days Hollywood movies were much-beloved. Tom Cruise and maybe Tom Hiddleston (called Tomuhi here) may still stir the loins of some Japanese women, but these days the Koreans have definitely gained ascension in the movie/drama category.
Delivery Health sites. Translation, Call Girls. They will be laid out in a grid for you to choose which girl you want. Admittedly I have only seen two guys on their phones doing this, perhaps on their way to some paid assignation.
I did ten but I could probably write more. Anyway that's Japan. And as I say I don't look very often, truly. I make it a point not to. But sometimes the trains are congested to an improbable degree and one sees.
And yes all very anecdotal.
Edit: All of this on public trains/buses fwiw
Haha, the Japanese woman I watch for immersion practice is learning Korean precisely for K-dramas. What's up with that? What's good about K-dramas? Do you know of any good ones? Are there a lot of Japanese who are super into K-pop like there are in America?
I cannot say why they are popular but I suspect one reason they must be more popular than, say, Japanese dramas, of which there are many, is that as perhaps saccharine and sentimental the K dramas are, they are better acted, scripted, and directed, and have higher production values, than their Japanese equivalents.
Japanese dramas (with few exceptions), possibly never meant to cross the ocean to international viewers, are in my view not only vapid and wooden (cast, as they are, by domestically popular "talent-o" with no discernible talent in addition to career actors) but directed as if the viewers are subliterate cretins. Any emotional scene is cut so that you may clearly see the reaction of each actor (in case you are unsure how you are supposed to feel) subtlety is abandoned for over-the-top hysterics. The Japanese films that exhibit some degree of artistry and which make waves internationally (such as the Academy-award-winning Drive My Car in 2021) go relatively unseen in Japan (until they win an award). Think of the criticism of Marvel. Then take away the effects, the experience of the actors, the multicultural nods in terms of casting, any attempt at realism, and the humor. Then add back in hamfisted direction, overreacting by everyone (in ways that are the polar opposite of how the regular person would actually behave in Japan) a soundtrack seemingly composed for a children's show, a plot scripted so predictably that after the first ten minutes this same child-viewer could accurately write the outcome, and you've got the typical Japanese drama.
Korean dramas offer generally more complexity, even if it's just a love triangle. Having written out all that I really don't know what the deal is. They're mostly romances, if that is a clue. And populated by quite beautiful actors, though you suspect that if you were to actually meet any of them in real life they would seem oddly unreal, like a walking AI generated beautiful asian person. This is I suspect due to extensive cosmetic surgery. I see lots of Korean tourists regularly trying to achieve this same look but I suspect they have less-talented surgeons.)
Kpop is popular here, yes. Where once One Direction drove flocks of adolescent girls into NOVA English language schools, the present generation studies Hangul and holidays in Seoul and comes back disappointed with Korean toilets. I cannot keep up with which group is who and there always seem to be new ones.There was a thread about them here a while back.
(As an aside, I sat through the much-lauded Drive My Car on a plane once and at more than one point felt an almost physical boredom. And I do not bore easily. Maybe it was the long haul flight.)
Out of curiosity, have you discussed your opinion of Japanese dramas with local friends? I can't stand ドラマ either, and I don't know if it's because I have Westernised tastes that dramas offend (but anime doesn't somehow) or because Japanese drama is legitimately that bad. I lean towards the latter.
My wife used to enjoy watching Japanese dramas back in the day, then after having kids sort of didn't have time, but now watches Korean dramas. If she enjoys them I would feel pretty ungallant shitting on them for what well may be cultural biases. I have often heard Japanese people say they prefer Western media because Japanese media is so bad, but these have usually been bilinguals who like English so who knows what's going on there.
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Sad to hear that about Japanese dramas, I had hoped it would be a better paradigm than America's film industry with horrible writing and ridiculous plots. I know I like their pop music a lot better than ours.
All just my opinion. In general the films are better than the television dramas. I don't find the US film industry so bad separate the pandering to progressive mores. But then I don't see that many new releases and very rarely any streaming originals
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What is this? Watch?
I'm attempting to learn Japanese, and something to do while learning any language is to just sit there and listen to a native talk and try to make sense of it. Since I'm still a beginner I use the Comprehensible Japanese channel/site. That's the one I "watch".
Is she cute?
Pretty cute if you ask me, especially for someone in their late 30s. https://youtube.com/watch?v=NebtveWRFGM?si=r1c-ZxR98Olf3Y5V
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I was once sat in a cafe buried in alacritty terminals and neovim sessions. White tattooed hipster type sits next to me, and from what I could see peripherally he must have spent an hour rearranging icons on his home screen and mindlessly scrolling through some kind of picture-based social media, the "10 words per screenful" kind.
I suppose there is a reason this type pulls shots and pours pints instead of learning a command-line and how to sling code. Words and literacy are too difficult, just hunt and peck pictures with your thumbs.
Was this you, or the cafe decoration like some kind of cyberpunk cybercafe?
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What are the laziest healthy foods I can make. I'm fairly picky about what foods I like, but reasonably unpicky about what foods I'll tolerate. I don't have a clear concise way to list out all of them other than to say I have the palate of a five year old. Probably literally, I don't think my food preferences have changed substantially since I was a child other than an increased ability to tolerate foods I don't like.
I don't like cooking. I'm bad at it, it takes too long. I make simple things like soup or pizza, especially if I can make a bunch at once which increase the amount of food per effort, but foods which require less prep time are preferred. My go-to lazy healthy snack is raw vegetables. I will happily munch on whole tomatoes or baby carrots, which is just as easy as opening a bag of potato chips. But I need more variety, and something slightly fancier and slightly less lazy is acceptable. What are your thoughts and suggestions for maximizing health and taste per effort?
It depends on what tools you have or are willing to get.
Got a microwave? Literally stab a potato, put it in the microwave, and press the POTATO button. Baked potato comes out. Add whatever fixings are in your fridge.
If you like vegetables, get an air fryer. Toss your raw veggies in olive oil and seasoning, and then roast them in the air fryer.
Or, get a hand-powered food processor. Drop in some chunked tomatoes, onion, cilantro, peppers, garlic, salt, and lime juice, and process. Delicious salsa comes out.
Or, get a small rice cooker. Add rice and water, dump in other veg or meat as you feel like, and start. When it is done a little while later, you have a meal.
Or, get a countertop sandwich grill (i.e., George Foreman style). Grab a boneless chicken breast or pork chop, season, and put it on the grill for 5 or 6 minutes. Eat while hot.
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Combinations of chicken, fish, or lean ground beef with veggies and yogurt based sauces.
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Frozen vegetable mixes w/ rice or some other starch like quinoa paired with a protein, also frozen or refrigerated pre-prepared foods. Just heat in the microwave and eat. There are several all in one offerings in the frozen section as well. Minimal effort. Watch the sodium levels in some of them though, certain brands are particularly bad. You'll figure out which ones are the bad ones pretty quickly when reading labels.
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Ground beef with spices/sauces. Throw ground beef in the pan, add any spices/sauces you want. Eat with rice/pasta or put it in a tortilla.
Greek yogurt + honey + banana/any other fruit.
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Grilled cheese sandwich, sometimes with chicken, usually with some quick spices and sauces, was my go to in university.
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Spinach- you can buy spinach based salad mixes and snack on that the same as potato chips. Much less astringent than kale, much more nutritious than lettuce based. Speaking of which, dried fruits in small doses.
Frozen vegetables and ground beef with mashed potatoes on the top- easy cottage pie, makes multiple servings at once. Cook the ground beef in a pot, pour frozen veggies in and mix it well, then put mashed potatoes over the top and put the whole thing in the oven.
Oatmeal- literally cooks in the microwave or with a hot water kettle.
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Almost as lazy but much tastier, buy some humous to dip your carrots into. You can make baked potatoes in 10 minutes in the microwave too, slice them open once they're cooked and fill the hole with butter, cheese and pepper.
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Every time I see these posts, I'm tempted to go revive my dead food blog meant for lazy men who refuse to cook.
My suggestions:
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Hummus. Blend up a can of chickpeas with some garlic and tahini, then you'll have something to dip your raw vegetables and pizza crusts in.
Speaking of pizza crusts, flatbreads like pitta and naan are really quick and easy to make too.
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For ease of cooking and decent healthiness, you can't go wrong with chicken and rice. Takes 12 minutes from start to finish. Slice the chicken breast pre frying so that it's evenly thick. Add some spice powder once done.
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Get a baguette. Slice it lengthwise and observe the spreadable area. You'll need that much of the following.
Some butter. Some brown mushrooms. An avocado. A thing of garlic. Salt, pepper. Cheese, if you dare.
Chop the mushrooms so fine it's like they're no longer mushrooms. Chop the garlic almost as fine. Throw this into a pan of sizzling butter. Sauté. Not too terribly long.
Cut open the avocado into two halves. Depends on what kind you have but I have only ever really had Haas. Use a spoon to scoop out the halves into a bowl, where you then mash it all up. If the avocado is unripe or overripe, crack a beer and order Chinese. Otherwise continue.
Spread the avocado over the baguette flat parts. Spoon the sautéed mushroom mixture onto it, spreading evenly.
Put shredded cheese on if you want. I do.
Toast this under a broiler until the cheese is bubbly. If no cheese, wing it. Give it a few.
Salt and pepper it. If you have olive oil (which you should) drizzle some of that on.
Eat.
You said healthy and this isn't particularly healthy, arguably. But it's good even if you don't particularly like mushrooms, and I'm guessing you don't. Neither do I.
Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Like you, I don't like mushrooms (I hate them really) - it's a texture thing for me. There's this way they squish when you eat them that's just so off-putting. If you cut them super fine, do they still have that unpleasant texture?
I find chopping them to hell and back and sautéeing them with garlic in butter an effective strategy to banish all mushroom associations. There is still an earthy taste but in this medley it works.
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In addition to carrots, I like to keep a small reserve of butter and bread, apples, cans of tuna, eggs (just crack them in a pan and collect your slightly burned omelette 10 minutes later), beef if my wallet is healthy (just throw it in a pan and collect your rare pseudo-steak two minutes later), and maybe a sausage or little bit of ham or bacon. You can throw it in a pan with the aforementioned eggs or just eat it as-is.
Oh, and a favorite breakfast of mine is oats, microwave-thawed berry mix and water. A whole bowl of the stuff. Can be prepared in about 30 seconds.
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Rice + protein of choice, especially if you have a crockpot or rice cooker, probably tops the chart in terms of nutrition to effort ratio. Just add ingredients to pot and walk away, returning to stir occasionally.
The trick is finding a mix of spices, veggies etc. that you like, and making sure that you have it ready ahead of time.
Same principle also can be applied to beans.
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When you say you "make" soup or pizza do you mean that you make them or do you heat prepared meals, like canned soup and frozen pizza? Just wondering what we're dealing with.
If it's the first I would say that there is absolutely nothing wrong with soup and pizza.
It is actually making them (usually, though occasionally I get canned soup or takeout pizza). My issue is partly that doing those repeatedly gets repetitive and boring, and partly that that's too much effort to do on a whim for a snack if I haven't planned it ahead of time. Though I have been experimenting with freezing soup so I can make a whole bunch at once and then thaw some when hungry. But that only works for certain soups.
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We have a lot of tech workers here. What's your read on the current and future tech job market, specifically for SWEs? Now that the ZIRP money faucets have turned off, will there be permanently reduced demand for SWEs? What impact will AI have? What have you seen at your own company in terms of layoffs and hiring patterns?
I get the feeling it's not great right now. My job still seems to be fine, but I have several friends in different companies recently laid off and having trouble finding new jobs, which seems unusual IME.
I don't have any sources or proof or anything, but my feeling is that the field has been bloated for a while for various reasons, including startups powered by loose VC money and tech majors hiring heavily and paying big salaries in hopes of someone building something great. I think this may be an overdue contraction that isn't going away. I think the longer-term outcome is something like the bottom 20% or so finding other lines of work, much less demand for things like bootcamps, and the rest continuing to have steady employment, albeit at somewhat lower salaries closer to being inline with other types of engineers.
My current employer did do some layoffs a few months ago. Pretty small numbers for the most part. Everyone they let go that I personally knew of was pretty low on the list of overall productivity. Doesn't feel like anything to worry about.
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One thing no one has mentioned yet...
As an unintended consequence of the Trump tax cuts, there was a change in how software developments salaries must be expensed. Before, the entire value of a software dev's salary could be written off immediately. Now, the salary must be amortized over 5 years.
So, let's say you start a software company. Your first year, you pay $1 million in salaries and sell $500,000 in licenses. Not only did you lose $500,000 in cash but you have a paper "profit" of $300,000 which you now must pay taxes on.
This heavily penalizes startups and makes software devs just less valuable generally. In some ways though, it levels the playing field with brick and mortar businesses who often face similarly outrageous taxes on phantom profits.
Everyone expected this to be fixed by now as it was an unintended consequence. But the Democrats love taxes and control the government so we appear to be stuck with it for now.
That's actually really interesting, is there a name for the loophole?
I don't think so, this is all new since last year.
It's not really a loophole since the government is taxing profits that don't exist. What's the opposite of a loophole? A gotcha, perhaps?
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"Section 174"
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/
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I'm not entirely convinced that this is inappropriate. If you pay $1 million as a one time investment to develop a software, and then sell $500,000 in licenses every year for five years, you get a profit of 2.5 - 1 = 1.5 million. Over five years that's 300,000 profit per year. Similar to if a factory bought 5 years worth of materials up front for $1 million and then spent five years producing and selling stuff for $500,000 per year. I assume that's the logic behind this regulation. Now I understand it's not realistic for a startup company to have literally no costs during that five year period, presumably they'd be doing tech support and adding new features and whatnot, but it's probably less than what their initial costs.
Further, shouldn't this actually help them pay less taxes in the long run? Unless I'm misunderstanding how corporate taxes work (which is very possible) a corporation that reports a $500k loss followed by 4 years of 500k gain is going to pay taxes on 2 mil, while a corporation with amortized costs that reports five years of 300k profit is going to pay taxes on 1.5 mil (their actual profits).
I get that it'll hurt more the first year. And if a company does actually have constant software costs every year then this will hurt the first few years before the amortization has a chance to reach equilibrium. But for companies that invest in software inconsistently as upgrades it makes sense to treat them the same way as any other infrastructure investment, which I believe are similarly amortized.
Yes, the new regulations put software on the same footing as brick and mortar. It's extremely painful for brick and mortar too since it penalizes any capital investment. This is likely a contributing factor to why no one builds anything any more.
No. They will pay tax on 1.5 million. Losses offset future gains for tax purposes.
Exactly. This rewards incumbents at the expense of startups. It's bad for that reason alone.
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The market currently is godwaful.
When I was looking for my first job, things were good enough that you had recruiters advertising for jobs in batches. You would see things like "5x Node Developer" or "3x Python Developer" and substantially more jobs overall. You even saw junior jobs. None of that is true anymore. Jobs are much rarer across the board, almost always advertised at mid-senior or above. In the two months I've been following the market so far, I've seen about 3 junior jobs total. Granted, employers were already phasing out junior/graduate positions in favour of outsourcing or talent poaching pre covid, but recent events have expedited that massively.
Part of the cause is that, as one of few industries still permitted to operate during the Covid Response, all spending and attention went into tech, leading to a bloated sector extremely vulnerable to cutting off free money. My job was made possible only by magic investor money, the company did not make a profit for the entire time I was there. I cannot yet say whether this trend is permanent or will be better when the line go up types decide to lower interest rates. I fucking hope not. Making a computer do my bidding is the only thing I'm any good at ;_;
I do not think AI will have a substantial impact as other factors. I tried tools like Copilot back when they were first coming out. They were useful extremely intelligent, auto-completes but didn't replace the two important parts of software development: paring down what it is you need to make to a deliverable and saying no to things that aren't worth doing. I think its impact will still be noticable and people who don't integrate tools into their work will be outcompeted by people who do.
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I think that the ZIRP economy has not inflated the need for SWEs but the capacity for tech companies to magazine away tons of SWEs and having them essentially do no productive work.
The end of ZIRP will not mean SWEs will go without work but that some of them will filter out into the real economy, where there is both a need for them and where they can do real material good.
There will be some readjustment of compensation downwards and overall compensation will still be good but not astronomic.
AI as it exists today will increase productivity some but that will mostly just mean that more work is possible to do profitably, not unemployment.
As someone whose IT work has been all in the "real economy", this is something I'm eager to see. Non-IT fields have a decade of catch-up to do technology wise, maybe more, and the devs in those companies right now mostly specialize in CRUD apps and are not equipped to do that catch up. Some fresh blood coming in from the frontlines will help a lot.
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I'll go first. I work as an SRE. As far as predictions go, I'm not connected enough to make a strong one. ChatGPT handles mundane chores I would have handed off to newbies in the past, so that probably reduces the demand for junior devs. Certainly my dept has been pushing me to hire intermediate/senior even though the salary we're offering is kind of insulting.
Increased interest rates mean that borrowed money has to produce more, so there are likely fewer "throw shit at the wall" projects to staff now and thus less demand for SWE headcount.
My previous company had several rounds of layoffs, and I jumped ship in between one of the rounds when I saw the writing on the wall. My current company is trying to hire, but the strong dollar makes it really hard to attract folks, and the domestic (Japanese) market is mediocre. At the same time, hiring managers at other places seem really picky, so maybe my company is just doing a poor job attracting people. I also feel like I'm seeing even more Indian applicant/recruiter spam than usual.
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When it comes to the building of "parallel institutions" as a political strategy, what would a monarchist parallel institution in a modern, democratic society look like (other than either a 24/7 ren faire or a mafia syndicate)?
Aren't many corporations basically this?
A modern corporation in the liberal West, and even more so in illiberal parts of the world, is basically a highly hierarchical organization with military-style chains of command, and frequently strong top-down control and one key leader, that is embedded inside larger society.
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A stereotypical cult.
Monarchism worked historically by making it easier to get men on the battlefield. Stability, incentive structure, Divine Right—those are all post hoc, paling in comparison to the ability to coordinate violence.
It faded away as state capacity increased by other means. Monetary, communications, and logistics technologies lead to professional standing armies. Those have huge advantages over the feudal retinue-of-retinues.
I don’t think you can justify a monarchy without attempting to wrest back the monopoly on violence. But a straight fight really isn’t the goal of a parallel institution. That leaves engineering situations where the host state can’t or won’t leverage its advantage. Which, in turn, means distance and information control.
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Read Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire.
Now imagine if Trump had turned a little to the right and been shot through the temple on live TV. Then the GOP nominates some ghoul, who betrays the MAGA cause, betrays the MAGA faithful.
Baron Trump would in that moment, if he chose, be your parallel institution. Monarchy isn't about institutions, it's about sacred blood. About devotion to an individual and a bloodline as superior. That's the kind of drama needed.
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Buy land somewhere in the middle of nowhere and organize a town there. Never sell the land to your citizens, just "rent" at a pittance, but with rules attached. Maybe don't rent either--require buy-in to the company that owns the land. There are all sorts of rules against rent discrimination, but as far as I know no rules that you must not discriminate when seeking "private investment." So long as you retain ownership of the land it remains legally possible to control immigration (decide who you allow to live there), and when worst comes to worst you have a good enforcement mechanism to kick people out.
At this point your best defense is illegibility. Do really legally weird, technically complex things that judges won't understand and have no business ruling on. Use blockchain smart contracts as much as possible. Build tenuous chains of trusts managed by corporations owned by nonprofits owned by churches. Generally, make it quite difficult to classify what you're doing according to existing laws, thus forcing your enemies (and enemies will arise if you succeed) to either force strained interpretation of existing law or sponsor the creation of entirely new laws in order to target you. Ideally the whole thing takes place in a sympathetic jurisdiction (right now, Texas would be best, then probably Florida) where even explicit government rulings against you are not necessarily enforced.
Try to use dollars as little as possible (another reason to rely on crypto). They can be confiscated or inflated away.
The nice thing about such a circumspect strategy is that it's not coup-complete. Your resistance will generally scale with your organization. If you act fast you can have thousands of people living in your town before the federal government realizes anything must be done about it. Attract (and filter for) the right kind of people and the benefits of such a town will speak for themselves.
I'm no monarchist but I do think such "parallel" societies will become necessary soon. I want to raise my kids somewhere they'll have intelligent peers, an actually challenging primary school system, and no danger of state abduction if they say the wrong thing to a school therapist. I think many others feel the same and have reasonably resilient jobs or skills that can handle a move to the middle of nowhere to get such a community started.
Has there ever been a judge who said "I have no business ruling on this, therefore 'Not Guilty'?"
For 80 years it's been established precedent that growing wheat on your own fields for your own use still counts as interstate commerce, because not buying wheat reduces the prices that other people sell it for. "They can't get you by straining a legal interpretation" is not good advice.
What I have seen in crypto is the SEC creating legally unjustifiable rules that make life impossible for productive people until they're struck down by the courts. The SEC wants existing laws to apply to crypto when they don't, and will bend them to the breaking point to pretend that the laws say what they want them to say. Meanwhile Congress isn't super supportive of crypto but it's just not a top priority to make clear rules about it.
The point isn't actually to create something so complex a judge won't understand it. I'm not sure that's possible anyway; they can bring in experts to simplify or whatever. Ideally you force them to rely on experts rather than government cronies. A good expert is reluctant to oversimplify and, if you've done this correctly, probably sympathetic to your side by nature of the field he's chosen. A judge's job is to interpret existing law, not rewrite it to apply to new things.
In the end, unless you are literally hidden you can't really overpower the state, only force it to expend political capital that might be better spent elsewhere. That's the strategy. It's worked well for Uber and Starlink; you just have to build capital (in whatever form that takes--maybe gaining powerful allies, a sympathetic narrative, or just being fully "established" so that their crackdown looks more like eviction than prevention) faster than your enemies build a cohesive resistance.
Hiding is a good option if you have a very aligned group of people, but as soon as someone defects the jig is up.
Starlink is very much a traditional "ask permission first so you don't have to ask forgiveness later" project, and they didn't start making the big asks (of the FCC) until they were already in good with NASA. IIRC the worst incident I can think of where SpaceX strained its sympathy was a Starship hop test years ago, where the FAA claimed (albeit vaguely) that SpaceX had exceeded what was allowed by its launch license, but the fallout only delayed their next test launch by like 5 days.
Uber is a really good point. Start an axitay abcay service instead of a taxi cab service, then grow it fast enough that people will scream bloody murder if you take it away based on taxi cab regulations, and you're fine? (mostly; Austin kicked out Uber and Lyft for a year at one point) But Uber bought "grow fast enough" with $30 billion in investor cash; gaining power and sympathy more affordably might be a lot harder.
I could have sworn I heard about traditional internet companies lobbying against Starlink recently, but I can't find it anywhere. What I did find [1, 2] is somewhat unfavorable treatment by the government but as far as I can tell (which is not very far) not egregious.
Anyways, I do think there's naturally more sympathy for charter cities than for Big Business. People live in them. They're In in Silicon Valley. Going against them means potentially evicting thousands of people, angering just about everyone. You'd have to be ready to fight but I think it might be possible, especially if you're in Texas and federal action against you becomes a states' rights issue too.
Within a decade or two, if things continue as they have been, I expect a soft nullification crisis. No state will come out and directly nullify a law, but instead they will not only refuse to enforce the law, but do everything in their power to hamper federal enforcement. We saw this in Texas when they took border enforcement into their own hands; from what I can tell the feds backed off because it was a bad fight to pick. Kicking thousands out of their city has worse optics than that so I think there's a good chance a big enough city can survive the inevitable legal battles.
Traditional cell phone companies lobbied against the Starlink+T-Mobile service recently, if that's what you're thinking of?
I don't think "going after" a charter city means evicting everybody. It just means outnumbering the cops who want to enforce the charter city's laws with cops who want to enforce state/federal laws instead. The optics of that are going to very much depend on the specifics of the laws being enforced against nullification or rendered null against local enforcement, and are to some extent going to depend on surrounding culture and random chance. The Short Creek raid and the YFZ Ranch raid were superficially pretty similar, but the latter was a lot more effective long-term, in part because the wider culture had turned further against polygamy and much further against underage marriage and sexism in the interim. If your idea of local laws is (peeks back up thread) "intelligent peers, an actually challenging primary school system" then (assuming you can't fix every demographic gap yourselves) you're fine until/unless the surrounding culture turns much harder against the typical disparate impact of academic challenge. If it's "no danger of state abduction if they say the wrong thing to a school therapist" then you're fine until/unless the culture turns much harder ... in favor of childhood gender transition against parental wishes, I'm assuming?
And then on the other side, you have to worry about whether the culture is going to turn in the other direction and make your efforts moot. Are the "Wobblies" going to turn your current residence communist any time soon? (I read about them in now-70-year-old books!) Wouldn't you feel silly if you'd gone to found a new city in the middle of nowhere to avoid that, with a bunch of equally anti-communist fellows, to wait out a particular End of the World that never came? The other trouble with selecting for the most radically anti-anything people around is that radicals (including reactionaries - at least some other forms of radicals haven't already seen how their ideals fail...) tend to get weird in ways you don't like just as much as in ways you do. I respect the kids-must-have-intelligent peers crowd, but if you get the ones who are so extreme about it that they don't consider e.g. "move to Los Alamos" a solution (23 AP classes offered, because "kids in a small town full of nuclear physicists" is a sweet peer group), well, let's just say that I'm not sure they're going to be able to keep up with the nuclear physicists' kids even in that specific desideratum.
Good points.
Well, I don't think you'd really have cops enforcing your laws, or "laws" at all. There would just be a set of criteria determining citizen eligibility for housing, employment, etc. Your only enforcement mechanism is keeping people out (and maybe fining them for smaller infractions). Laws can be struck down easily as unconstitutional, tenancy rules and employment rules are different. Basically a parallel legal system not necessarily quite as beholden to the prevailing interpretation of the constitution.
For example, as far as I know i's not legal for towns to have immigration laws at all, but it is legal for them to restrict new housing, de facto ensuring that only rich people can live there. It's not legal to hire based on IQ, but it is (or at least, was until recently) legal to hire based on criminal record. If you own all the land you can legally create rules that mimic good law.
I don't have time to respond to the rest right now, sorry. It's a pretty half-baked idea to be sure. I would be extremely surprised to see some kind of conservative resurgence at this point. The best we can hope for is a national divorce.
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Yes to all. So my kid is in a carefully selected private school. In the suburbs of a major city. This is a service you could buy today.
Private schools' main benefit is selection effects, but they select based mostly on income. You're paying out the nose just to be among other people who can and are willing to pay out the nose. This is a problem because while income is correlated with IQ it's not a particularly strong correlation, and you'll still end up with plenty of slow kids in class who drag the rest of the class down.
To be clear, what I'm looking for is a school system that sorts people based on intelligence and allows the quick kids to actually move ahead. I expect you'd pretty quickly have elementary school kids doing college-level tasks (to the extent "college-level" means anything) if they're allowed to set the pace rather than letting it be set by the slowest rich kid in the neighborhood. Given a group of kids 2 standard deviations above average (so 5% of all classrooms) you should probably be entirely done with high school before 9th grade using only half-days.
Private schools are definitely the best existing solution, besides maybe one-on-one private tutoring, but they're insufficient. They don't get the outcomes they should be getting. And the things I mentioned (challenging education, intelligent peers, sensible mental health policies) aren't the only benefits of living in a sane jurisdiction, just the most salient.
I think this used to be called "Gifted and Talented" programs when I was in elementary/middle school. I don't know if they still exist.
Even if they don't explicitly point this out, language immersion programs have a similar functional effect for ensuring your kid has higher-than-average-quality peers (and, if your kid is legitimately over-performing, it's a great distraction). They're also less likely to be targeted by progressives because it's not a sciences/excellence thing.
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Yeah, I was in one and it was utterly insufficient. The peers, at least, were great, but the curriculum was still quite slow. Still better than nothing, but a long way from what's needed.
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Isn’t this just selective public schools like those in some big cities like NYC where the student body is like 75% Asian?
If it is I'd like to learn more about them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specialized_high_schools_in_New_York_City
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How much do you pay for that though? Seems like a humongous cost.
Cheaper than building your own Galt’s Gulch?
If everyone was paying private school tuition rates I think you could actually build a Galt's Gulch for no additional cost.
Possibly.
If true, that raises the question—why is private school so overpriced?
My understanding is that private schools are commonly cheaper per student than public schools. And somehow have smaller classes. Public schools are wild profligates with our tax dollars.
I have never found a serious source for this in aggregate (probably publication bias), but I have a suspicion that outcomes correlate negatively with funding. It's not hard to look and see that the districts that spend the most per student tend to also be the worst performing overall.
Some of this is higher costs in urban areas, and frequently bad districts can have some really good magnet schools. And I'm also not really of the opinion that this means cutting funding would improve outcomes.
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I mean, is it overpriced? Education is just expensive and we don’t see it up front with a public school because the government pays the bill. Indeed, Catholic schools typically cost less than public schools spend.
One of the Bernalillo County (where Albuquerque, NM is) Republican Party’s big talking points is that the Albuquerque Public Schools district’s total budget is poorly spent by government.
Divided by pupil, the cost is a few thousand dollars more per year than tuition at Albuquerque Academy, the swankiest of our two prep high schools and the one with the biggest, showiest campus. At that price, we should be turning out Silicon Valley/Harvard/MIT-level high school grads, but we’re not.
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If existing tuition could fund education plus Galt’s Gulch, but you aren’t getting the latter, then yes, it’s charging too much.
I agree that those public schools are probably also overpriced. Catholics probably aren’t the only ones delivering education at that price point, but I haven’t really looked into it.
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Gatekeeping through price is its main feature, so it's just following demand.
That seems likely. But then where does the money go? Higher salaries? Marginal improvements in materials?
You could imagine a private school which gets 90% of its performance from <90% of its dollars. In a public city, it has to spend the extra dollars on inefficient stuff to keep the poors out. In this gated community, the gatekeeping is done, so it’d be able to stop spending.
I suspect distinguishing which dollars are which is nontrivial.
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To a lesser extent this is true of housing in general. I think plenty of people would be happy living in much smaller houses/apartments if they were sure they could do so in a good neighborhood with other successful, like-minded people.
It makes me wonder about the legality of constructing some kind of "landshare" where people need to literally buy their way into the community. Most of the money would be going not towards the land they're buying, but some kind of community trust holding an index of stocks. This way you still get the price gatekeeping without the inflated land prices.
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Someone developing a cult following and convincing enough of their followers to move to a remote physical location where they can outvote the locals. Then they can vote for their own sheriff and government officials that will let them run things as the cult leader wishes. In Wild Wild Country they bussed in homeless to win county elections.
This isn't quite like a monarch because the cult members are always free to leave. It requires the cult leader maintaining a system of loyalty and devotion so that cult members will submit to the leader's rule.
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Orban's Hungary looks like a pretty decent first draft.
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So, what are you reading?
Still on This Star of England.
Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread starts off as a surprisingly typical communist screed, but it starts distinguishing itself after it denies the labour theory of value, saying that new forms of production must yield new forms of consumption. An interesting discussion of liberty soon follows. He has a keen eye to underappreciated people, which ameliorates his otherwise combative style.
I just recently read Empire of the Vampire which was... mm, decent verging on good. I've found myself drawn to the world-weary adult protagonist recently and this fit the bill. Unfortunately it felt like a rip off of too many things. A rip of Castlevania, a rip of Bloodborne, and a rip of Last of Us, all sandwiched together. I appreciated the French motif, but the back-and-forth storytelling style was jarring at times. The purported reasoning as to why the narrator was explaining certain subjects that would be common knowledge in universe was reasonably well done, but not enforced enough and there were several questions that were only answered in a more traditional storytelling manner. Which is fine, but it was annoying to have on one hand compelled explanations of in-universe commonalities, and then narrative-led discussions of other commonalities, while still trying to maintain a level of "well of course you don't know what that means it's an in-universe term you have to pick up through context clues."
Glad I picked it up on Kindle Unlimited, probably won't pay the $15 for the sequel.
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I am still going through my detective novels with female protagonists. Now on my second Carlotta Carlyle novel.
What’s the list so far? Any particular recs?
I haven’t read much detective fiction outside of original Holmes. Finding one of Lindsey Davis’ Marcus Didius Falco novels was good; I understand she went on to write a sequel series with a female protagonist. Then there was Max Gladstone’s Three Parts Dead. Great, but more of a legal drama than detective work. Plus, you know, necromancy.
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Just started Ruocchio’s Empire of Silence.
On one hand, it rubs me the wrong way: it feels like a sausage made of three parts Frank Herbert (brazenly stolen tropes: parallel backstory to the Butlerian Jihad with tech limitations and mentats, a galactic empire with rigid classes, personal shields against high velocity weapons, family atomics) to one part Gene Wolfe (first person with an overload of archaic vocabulary. Too early to tell, but I’m about certain that the narrator will turn out to be unreliable as well), with an epsilon of originality in the casing. Or maybe there’s a third influence I’ve never encountered that I’m mistaking for originality.
On the other hand, it is interesting and more accessible than either influence so far.
Edit: Maybe more Wolfe than I thought. The genetically engineered nobility reflects The Fifth Head of Cerberus and its clones.
I read Empire of Silence and had the same feelings you do. There's an extensive appendix and glossary at the back of the book, and I regret not reading them before I started. They provide a lot of much-needed context that made the book -- for me, when I was about 75% done -- more enjoyable.
For Howling Dark, I read the glossary and appendix, and, boy, I'm glad I did because there's a bit of a time jump with explanations of some major events that are mentioned in passing in the story.
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John McPhee’s Basin and Range. First in a series of essays in which the author crosses the country, searching each highway roadcut for evidence of the geologic history of our continent.
He’s an incredible prose stylist, but his options are constrained by the jargon of this particular field. When you’re in the right headspace for the awe of Deep Time, it works: a fantasy doorstopper, citing without irony its Ordovician Period and sending the protagonists after Zeolites or Unconformities. When you aren’t, well, you could probably do some clench racing. (If this describes you, but you’re curious about McPhee, start with Levels of the Game. I don’t even like tennis.) Fortunately, I’ve been in the correct frame of mind, so I’ve really enjoyed it.
Looking forward to the second essay, In Suspect Terrain, where he dives into the controversies of early plate tectonics. That means the mid-20th-century, because apparently what I assumed was settled 1800s science only really got started in the nuclear age. I predict this will be very validating for some of our resident contrarians.
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Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Picked it up because it is a "classic" and supposedly provides a view to pre-WW1 European civilization (from point of view post-WW1 disillusioned intellectual).
I have troubles reading it, it is superbly boring. Plot-wise, nothing interesting happens. Castorp, nominal protagonist, is both boring and detestable. Reading it has been a depressing affair: perhaps 5 pages at one go and I feel cravings to read anything else. Sometimes boring characters can be salvaged by inspired writing and humor or irony, but alas, I see no such redeeming qualities. Major disappointment after Buddenbrooks, which was quite readable with all the family drama.
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I got House of Leaves from the library a couple of weeks ago, which at my current rate I might be done with by Christmas. I can't think of any book that has killed my initial enthusiasm so thoroughly. The premise is quite compelling: our protagonist discovers among the belongings of a recently deceased eccentric man a strange manuscript, about a series of events at a spooky house. The house isn't spooky because there's a ghost in the attic, but because it has non-euclidean properties. The manuscript is the meat novel, with a B-side story running through the extremely lengthy footnotes. The footnotes frequently disrupt the flow whilst being insubstantial. The novel itself digresses with lengthy tangents that at one point the footnotes meta-suggest aren't actually even worth reading. I'm hoping this is just a brief slump, because I am not going to make it otherwise.
I also started reading Etidorhpa. I am a sucker for strange journeys, so despite generally bouncing off this era of proto-scifi I am giving it a shot.
I read House of Leaves during high school. I enjoyed The Navidson Record, but I didn't care for the Truant and Zampanò elements. I ended up skimming the footnotes.
Yeah, I had pretty much the same experience. The footnotes are boring, and Johnny Truant doesn't really have much of a story to him. The meat of the book is in the story of the house.
I also agree with @5434a that the book is kind of overindulgent. The author really wanted to play around with the structure of a book, but I didn't really find it added anything (with some rare exceptions). It's the sort of thing that appeals to college students who are like "this is so deep, maaaaan"*, but outside of that audience I think it falls kind of flat.
*I read the book in college so I'm not just being mean here, lol. I had some peers who were so enchanted by the book's gimmick that they thought we should be reading it for classes rather than classics of literature. It's pretty funny to me in hindsight.
I can see why younger readers might be impressed, it's a moderately clever conceit. It's less impressive if you've experienced any kind of meta-text before. Layering additional meta-texts on top only subtracted from the sum of its parts, which is ironic in the context of writing about a house that is larger than its external dimensions (with the extra irony that the book itself is physically larger than a typical fiction book). Less would have been more.
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House of Leaves is a decent enough idea that overindulges itself in itself. If you reach a point where you've had enough then you've probably had all the meat off the bones and won't miss much by carrying on.
That is unfortunate, I'll keep your comment in mind.
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Just started Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion. I came for the philosophical musings on pseudo-environments and manufactured consent, but I am staying for the detailed accounts of how the WWI propaganda sausage was made.
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Again I was given a book, this one fiction, called Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian, or the book the film is based on. I am 4 chapters in and I am already dreading the rest of it. The story, the plot itself, is fine-- interesting even. But the author's writing style sets my teeth on edge.
Example passage:
Ah. Dr. Grace. You look refreshed." She gestured to her left. "There's food on the credenza."
And there was! Rice, steamed buns, deep-fried dough sticks, and an urn of coffee. I rushed over and helped myself. I was hungry as heck."
The "hungry as heck" bug you? It does me. And he does this throughout the 1st person narrative. Now I don't need swear words to feel realism, but if you want to eliminate epithets, just go without. He doesn't. It's like reading a book written by a Sunday school teacher for ten-year olds, which might be fine if it weren't ostensibly a story based in science. The humor is equally twee and grating. I am rarely this annoyed by a writer's style. Ok that's not true I am often annoyed by writers' styles but rarely like this.
There is a maxim for writers: show, don't tell
show: I rushed over and helped myself.
The reader learns from the hurry that the person was hungry, just as though the reader had seen the unseemly haste himself and inferred the hunger.
tell: I was hungry as heck.
Aaargh! Don't "show then tell"
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Andy Weir writes like a Redditor, and it shows. Truly a shame.
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I think this is more the character he was trying to write, rather than a consistent issue with the author. He wanted to write a goofy two shoes who would rather be a teacher than a top researcher.
While I enjoyed the puzzle in Project Hail Mary, The Martian is a superior book.
Very well could be, I admittedly have not read any other Weir work. It's driving me nuts though.
Using this kind of voice is an iffy proposition. I happen to like Holden Caulfield but I understand now how some people viscerally dislike him and by extension Catcher in the Rye.
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To me the use of "heck" rather than a stronger epithet or swear word is indicating that the hunger is significant, but in a safe or comic way rather than a serious one. Similar, I'd view "scary as heck" as describing a safe scare that someone was comfortable with vs "scary as hell/fuck" where I'd be worried that someone was actually seriously scared and possibly in need of support.
I don't disagree. I just find the constant use of these terms unnecessarily childish. Why not say "I was ravenous"? "I was suddenly keenly aware of my own hunger" "I had reached the table and brought a bun to my mouth before I had even thought about it"? Or any of a dozen other ways to write the sentence?
I don't know if you have read Weir, but this book at least is replete with a goofy humor that for me at least falls very flat. He is a bestseller so maybe there's a wide audience for this type of writing. I'm not part of it.
The protagonist a scientist burnout who literally became a children's school teacher. His train of thought is not quite "Sunday School teacher for ten-year olds", because that's the sort of person who may just never start cursing to begin with, but it's pretty solid as "late-career-change teacher for eleven-year olds", because that's the sort of person who may find themselves at work saying "What the he ... ck" so often that the euphemisms replace the original habit.
To each their own, though. I didn't like his second book, Artemis, for what I thought of as an incoherence along those lines; the main plot could have come out of a 1950 Boy's Life sci-fi adventure, while one or two of the side plots were R-rated, so it didn't work for me as adult fiction or young adult.
But in Hail Mary the goofy humor is what keeps the whole thing tonally coherent for me; it bridges the gap between the very dark plot points (where it works as gallows humor) and the very lighthearted plot points (where it works straight).
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Dave Rubin's Don't Burn This Book. Mostly a familiar portrait of another "I didn't leave the Left, the Left left me" case, which once again illustrates that just because you've been kicked out for failing to keep up with the perpetual revolution, that doesn't actually make you "right wing." (Rubin drops the classic 'Nazis were actually from the left because socialist' argument, too, and at one point uses the phrase "the left's soft bigotry of low expectations.")
Is he necessarily wrong?
I don't think there's a coherent way to pass the Nazis off as left-wing. Yes they were the nSdap but the word "socialism" has forever and always held a flexibility which lets anyone and everyone use it as they please. Hitler's view of "socialism" as a concept was - and I'm only roughly paraphrasing - "if it's good for the Volk, it's socialist." To quote more directly the historian Richard Evans said that Nazism was akin and different to Bolshevism in that racial struggle held primacy instead of class struggle.
This is not appreciably different from Stalin's view of "socialism", or Mao's, or Pol Pot's, to my understanding. I've seen no historical examples where theory was actually load-bearing in any sort of grand sense. Like, there's nothing actually in Marx that requires lysenkoism or any other specific evolution. Stalin beats trotsky and bukharin not because he has a better understanding of Marxist theory, but because he's crueler, more paranoid, and more vicious, and these are in actual fact the traits that Marxism rewards. The theory is word-game Calvin-ball; you can get from Das Kapital to whatever arbitrary power-structure you prefer, there are no actual constraints beyond momentary, relative expedience.
"We know how to solve all our problems. Problems that aren't solved are the fault of specific people with names and addresses." It does not seem to me that "Class Struggle" is appreciably more real in any meaningful sense than "race struggle", and they both boil down to fixing everything by purging the bad people. That's the obvious commonality between the two, and between them and the French Revolution as well.
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The NSDAP were a socialist revolutionary vanguard party. To the degree that there is no "coherent way to pass the Nazis off as left-wing" it is even less coherent to pass them of as "right wing". Sure they were vaguely center-right with in the specific context of the Wiemar Rebulic but that's more an indication of how much of a basket-case German interwar period politics were rather than a commentary on the Nazis themselves.
Outside of the Wiemar Republic the various NSDAP-aligned bund groups tended to code as far left and would often caucus with and recruit from thier more explicity socialist/marx-inspired brethren.
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Yes, if you have a passing familiarity with Weimar-era politics. The Nazis' allies were right-wingers - primarily Hugenberg's DNVP, but also the right-wing faction of Zentrum that included Bruning and Papen (until he was kicked out for being too right-wing) and various right-coded figures in Hindenberg's inner circle (particularly Schleicher, who favoured a military government once it became clear that a DNVP-led government was never going to win a majority in the Reichstag). The Nazi's sworn enemies were left-wingers (both the SPD and the KPD, although the Nazis occasionally co-operated with the KPD on purely negative projects intended to weaken the Weimar Republic).
Nobody who was around at the time had the slightest shadow of a doubt that Hitler was right-wing. Some of the more perceptive liberals, and even a few perceptive democratic socialists (like Orwell) grokked that the difference between left-wing and right-wing totalitarianism was less important than it looked - but even Orwell writes from the perspective that the right-left and right-wrong axes are separate, and that Nazis were right-wrong and Communists were left-wrong.
The sheer buffoonery of the KPD is a constant source of amazement for me. From labeling every other party in the Weimar Republic fascist - including a multitude of other left-wing socialist parties - to declaring the Social Democrats their primary enemies and "social fascists" while begrudgingly cooperating with the literal fascist NDSAP.
My understanding is that they were acting on orders from Moscow in all those cases. So they only looked like buffoons.
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According to Communist doctrine, the dictatorship of the proletariat becomes possible when the capitalist regime is undone by its inherent internal contradictions and can no longer sustain itself. German Communists believed that the NSDAP are simply the goons of the capitalist class and will inexorably contribute to this process with their antics, so temporarily cooperating with them on certain matters* and egging them on in general was seen as acceptable, as it serves the final goal. "The worse, the better."
Again, I'm not making this up. The KPD leadership were actually convinced that the Nazis will be incapable of consolidating their rule once they seize power, because the revolution will certainly follow.
Also, the SocDems were the main political power in the Weimar regime, at least until its final years. Since the Communists wanted to topple this burgeois republic, they saw the SocDems as the main enemy, as they were the main political obstacle. They also, of course, saw them as the dirty traitors of the Revolution of 1918-19. In reality, of course, there was nothing for the SocDems to betray, as they never signed up for a violent revolution to overthrow the capitalist order in the first place.
*I remember finding in an otherwise forgettable history book pictures of a rent strike co-organized by the local NSDAP and KPD party leaders in November 1932 in Berlin, with their respective banners put up next to one another on the forefronts, to just give one example. I couldn't find anything about it online though.
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Finished playwright Neil Simon’s two-part autobiography earlier this week (Rewrites and The Play Goes On). I knew he had been prolific and successful, but the scale of his success from 1965-1995 was quite surprising to read about in detail; the reader comes away with the perception that Simon was perhaps the most influential figure in playwriting since Shakespeare… as a cultural icon, at least. Equally surprising is the observation that Simon’s work and influence has almost completely disappeared from the modern zeitgeist, both in the theatre and the culture at large. Contemporary satires with ethnic supporting characters that lampoon the male-female divide were once the default in plot writing (and perhaps made so by Simon’s early work), but now seem so dated that they feel more archaic and emblematic of a bygone age than the comedies that long preceded them (The Importance of Being Earnest, Blithe Spirit, Arsenic and Old Lace, etc.).
Now on to The Letters of Oscar Hammerstein II, an intimate personal glimpse into a time when a Republican could be the most beloved figure in the theatre industry. I have a tendency to map my own life progression onto the people I read about (I imagine this is a common habit, foolish as it is), and it’s encouraging that OH2 made his greatest work in his late 40s and early 50s (granted, he’d written about 30 Broadway shows by then, but in this case, ”it was a different time” is the understatement of the century).
Interesting (or maybe expected) that after reading a playwright's autobiography you'd come away with the impression that he was a modern-day Shakespeare. I have seen only film versions of a few of Simon's plays, and Biloxi Blues in particular annoyed me (mostly because no one on the production crew apparently knew how a Mississippian would pronounce "Biloxi.")
(Bih LUX ee, not Buh LOX ee.)
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A large portion of how the US federal governments get states to enforce various national-level rules and standards (despite the anti-commandeering doctrine) is by threatening to withhold various federal funds. So, how hard would it be for a state to basically say “screw it” and try going without federal funds? Or a county (or similar) to try going without federal or state funds?
(I ask because this was a proposal put forth by Auron MacIntyre with one of his guests in a video (IIRC) last month as part of a broader discussion the need to build “parallel institutions.” It might just be that I’m living in a state with one of the worst economies in the US, and that I’m receiving something like ~$3k per month in various forms of federal and state aid (the single largest component being Medicaid covering my meds), but this doesn’t seem very plausible to me. (In the video, there was mostly some vague acknowledgements that it would require “belt-tightening,” and the closest Auron got to addressing the disabled was a comment about convincing people “you don’t need welfare, the church will provide.”))
There are still states holding out on the Obamacare Medicaid expansion funds, which the states are only on the hook for 10-ish percent. And IIRC SCOTUS loosely capped the amount of allowed funding coercion. So it does happen, but nobody seems to be turning down highway funding these days.
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Alaska has a huge net taker rate.
Louisiana went without federal highway funding for years to have a lower drinking age, although that ended in the nineties. Texas also refuses some federal HHS dollars over something to do with contractor stances on abortion(it boils down to planned parenthood getting the money but the statement in the rule is different).
The real question is 'can states which are net payers on some tax or other stop paying the tax when refusing federal dollars', to which the answer is likely no- Louisiana didn't even try to stop paying the federal gas tax.
My understanding was that the argument is to keep paying federal taxes while getting nothing back, and figuring out how to make it work through "parallel institutions" and "belt-tightening," though I imagine they were mainly thinking of right-leaning states with better economies than Alaska's.
Texas could, in theory, simply go without federal highway money, given the size of our budget surplus. Giving up federal money en masse would require getting rid of popular services, like CHIPS, unless we figured out a way to wriggle out of federal taxes and collect them ourselves.
The situation is likely similar for states like Utah, Wyoming, Oklahoma, etc.
Again, the idea isn't that the state "wriggles out of federal taxes" — it's that they keep paying them, and then collect the taxes for the now-defunded popular services themselves — your "parallel" system — on top of those taxes. Or else, yes, cut the programs.
So, it seems that you're saying that even for the red states with the best economies, the requisite "belt-tightening" necessary would simply be far more than most anyone is willing to endure (yet). Is that right?
Yes. Texas has the biggest red state economy and is the second wealthiest per capita(behind Wyoming), and is both not a low tax state and dependent on federal block grants to maintain its budget(the federal block grants are less than federal tax receipts from Texas- an independent Texas with the same economy could maintain services with a lower taxation level than current day- but they also make up like 1/3 of the state budget).
Again, states can go without their highway funding or family planning money or other small potatoes for a while if they’re otherwise fiscally healthy. But rejecting all federal funding is a bridge too far; even a strong GOP trifecta with gerrymandering can’t get rid of CHIP and Medicaid and section 8 and food stamps and cut infrastructure spending and etc etc.
While there’s room for taxation to go up in most red states, there isn’t room for tax receipts to rise by a third without massive economic growth.
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Is there any way to tease apart the retention rate of the ultra-orthodox and modern orthodox in America? There seems like a lot of different possible elements at play:
Orthodox schooling
The narratives of the religion versus the action-prescriptions of the religion
The ethnic homogeneity of most orthodox (Eastern European Ashkenazi)
Ostracization for defectors
[Whatever I’m missing]
Just a note on (missing) context: it took me a moment to realize you were talking about Orthodox Jews, and not Eastern Orthodox Christians; it was ambiguous for me up until "Eastern European Ashkenazi."
My bad, “modern orthodox” is Jewish term of art but I forgot that’s not popular knowledge.
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@2rafa might have more insight, but my impression is that modern orthodox are basically normal people in the society in which they happen to be residents, who happen to have a bunch of extra rules to follow as a consequence of being religiously eccentric- little different from other high demand religions like Mormons or tradcaths- and ultra-orthodox are very much not, the the extent of many haredi groups refusing to allow their children to learn the local vernacular(they use Yiddish at home and Hebrew for religion) or participate in the secular economy. Groups which do this and aren’t Amish or haredi are called cults.
Right, but “modern orthodox” (a denomination name) still has a high retention rate (in a sense): 60% remain, but 30% leave to become ultra-orthodox (“Yeshiva Orthodox”), and only 10% leave to a non-orthodox flavor or apostasy. So it’s pretty much a 90% retention rate with a push toward ultra-orthodoxy. I agree that modern orthodox are approximately normal in terms of work, taxes, civic participation etc. They still send their kids to specific schools and camps however.
Modern Orthodox is a big range of observance. In the UK a lot of Jews are members of the United Synagogue, which is technically ‘Modern Orthodox’, but are otherwise pretty much secular, don’t keep kosher, aren’t particularly frum, the men don’t wear kippot, many of the kids go to secular (if usually private) school. Jewish summer camp (or secular summer camp that is like 80%+ Jewish, which is how it was for us in NYC and it’s similar in NJ) isn’t so much an orthodox-only or even primarily orthodox thing.
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First you'd have to define the difference between "orthodox" and "ultra-orthodox" and which denominations count as which.
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