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Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 5, 2025

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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Any recommendations for "brain off" YouTube channels?

I find all TV / Netflix is insufferable nowadays. Sports, of course, being the exception.

I'm looking for YouTube channels that are entertaining / mildly interesting that Mottizens enjoy.

I really enjoyed listening to the elder scrolls lore podcast

https://youtube.com/@imperialknowledge?si=qfNilNJUaUAtsjQn

It's not as much of a watching thing.

For truly mindless I go for wood spinning and epoxy pours.

I like this guy Bright Sun Travels who reviews cruises and resorts. I have no idea why, but it’s very relaxing to listen to someone with plausible-autism explain amenities calmly for 40 minutes. It’s truly brain-off because it has no impact on anything I will ever do.

  • YMS, and specifically his watch-along videos: either by himself (last night my girlfriend and I watched the highlights of him watching The Weeknd's vanity project The Idol and laughed ourselves silly) or with his pals (their watch-along of seasons 3 and 4 of 13 Reasons Why was great comfort telly during Covid and I watched the whole thing several times).
  • Errant Signal. His long rambling videos about video games are very comfy watches, even if his woke left opinions occasionally disrupt the vibe. I've watched his System Shock 2 review two or three times.
  • Super Bunnyhop, as above (but without any wokeness or leftism). I've watched his reviews of Resident Evil 4 and the RE 1 remake more times than I can count.
  • The Internet Historian. I've watched The Cost of Concordia at least ten times.

Are you me? Errant Signal and Super Bunnyhop are classics, I've watched a bunch of SBH's videos a million times. It's kinda sad that he stopped doing mainstream game review/analyses and did more passion project topics and then everyone stopped watching his videos.

Gundam Battle Operation 2 gameplay: 42-Year-Old Gamer and Spider-Chieftain

I never got the appeal of Mecha. What’s good about it?

Do you get the appeal of tanks, warships, planes, and similar military vehicles?

Yeah!

Is it gundam-style mecha that seem unappealing, or legged war machines generally?

I'm not much of a gundam fan myself, but I really love giant robots and grittier mechs, for basically the same reasons I love more realistic war machines. They're big and complicated high-tech amalgamations of concentrated power, and the extra complexity of arms and legs just enhances their appeal.

You know that "big machine is like an extension of my body" thing? This, but taken as literally as possible.

It’s like construction equipment, but without the boring limitations of reality.

Well, you just watch the cool-looking giant robots zoom around with reactionless thrusters, swing energy swords, and shoot giant guns, interspersed with some human-focused drama. (Note that different series can have vastly different appeal. For example, I enjoyed Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam and Mobile Fighter G Gundam, but was not able to enjoy Mobile Suit Gundam (ugly animation) or Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ (overwhelmingly stupid characters).)

My personal favorite mecha to look at probably are Zeta Gundam (sleek and with a cool fold-out thruster on its back), Delta Gundam (sleek (unlike its overly edgy child Delta Plus) and with a cool shield (unlike its parent Hyaku-Shiki)), and Kshatriya (four shields and two free arms, without an ugly backpack contraption like Full Armor Gundam's).

ryukahr streams Mario Maker and Kaizo Mario gameplay. low-key, mildly amusing fluff.

The Creepcast is two youtubers reading creepypasta, and reacting to/critiquing the quality. I usually listen to a straight recording of the story in question, and then listen to their version as a sort of commentary track.

At the risk of oversharing, I lost my mother over the weekend and while I give my wife the advice that she shouldn't feel guilty for not forcing herself to be somber and mournful every single moment, I myself can't escape feeling like people would think me callous or unfeeling if my actions and demeanor didn't match their perception of what someone mourning their mother should be, so I do ultimately force myself to act differently just to not cause any unease. Am I overthinking this?

I don't think I cried at all when my mother died, due to a combination of:

  1. She had been ill with a terminal neurodegenerative disease for a few years at that point, so we all saw it coming.
  2. I had moved across the country over a decade earlier, and since then had only seen her for a week or two so every year, so we'd grown apart.
  3. Honestly, I just didn't enjoy being around her much in the years leading up to her diagnosis. She wasn't mean or anything, but she was much more negative and complained a lot more than she had before. In retrospect, I think it's likely that this was a preclinical effect of the neurodegeneration.

I was sad, but in a sort of abstract, detached way, and not in a way that was deeply painful.

I'm very sorry for your loss. Everyone processes grief differently, it probably hasn't really hit you yet. Don't let anyone tell you you're doing it wrong, my cousins gave me a complex about that when I was six or seven years old and it sent me on a shame spiral for years.

My sincere condolences, something like this would have scarred me for life. You not showing excessive emotions isn't wrong, it's ok to grieve, don't overthink it. Take care.

Sorry for your loss, firstly.

Second: yes, you're overthinking it. But here's a reassuring (under-compressed) metaphor - recreational drugs differ in how fucked up you actually are versus how fucked up you feel. Some match closely (eg booze), others don't.

The first and only time I ever used a strong opioid off-label, I was surprised by how sober I felt internally versus how intoxicated those around me perceived me to be. I thought I had been essentially fine, until my wife helpfully explained in mortifying detail after how completely out of it I'd been.

This is pretty much how my experience of close bereavement went. In the days and weeks immediately afterward, I thought guiltily that I was feeling less bad than I ought to. I felt bad about indecent flashes of feeling okay.

And the funny thing is of course, with the benefit of almost a decade's hindsight, I had been a mess. I really was impacted well over the minimum decent bereavement threshold. I was by no means at all some indifferent icicle, though a diary I kept at the time is (almost) funny in how much I kept returning to that question "I'm not grieving enough, am I, why not, what's this thorn in the flesh, etc".

My experience was that it took at least 6 months before I could do my job competently and about 2 years to where I was generally at baseline. And still a decade on I think of that family member no less than 4ish times a day, often more.

And importantly, I really just had no insight into how affected I was at the time

Nominated for AAQC.

I keep thinking of this observation I once saw that when you're drunk, you don't realise how drunk you are (but it's instantly obvious to everyone else), but when you're high on weed, you become paranoid that everyone around you will notice (but in reality most people don't).

Sorry to hear about your mother. Make sure to be very kind to yourself and don't be surprised if emotions come out of nowhere.

Anyone with any mature experience of death understands that people process it in different ways. I've never seen anyone judged for not performing grief in the 'right way' (except for obvious rude or garish behaviour at the funeral/wake).

Consider at least trying to not be performative (which is to say; be yourself) and see how it goes. If you get several people disapprove then you can always change back to the 'right way'.

I'm sorry for your loss.

Everyone reacts differently, based on temperament, life circumstances, etc.. When my mother lost a parent suddenly, she was cheerful-ish and busy with funeral arrangements right up until she suddenly burst into tears. When my father, nearing old age himself, lost a parent after a long period of decline, his only particular wish was this people didn't push him to have strong emotional reactions to an event he'd known was coming for 20 years.

I think @FiveHourMarathon is right and that outwardly adopting a version of your set cultural expectations for mourning is probably a good thing and will allow you to mark the moment emotionally without constantly second-guessing yourself, but there's no gain from forcing yourself to feel otherwise than you do, or from over-analysing.

Condolences. Yes you are overthinking it. When my mother died, I was in such a shock that I was actually trying to tell jokes and cheer my friends that were grieving for her at the funeral. My grief came in full force probably two weeks after the funeral, but I was incapacitated for a couple of days. It is pretty individual.

You're probably overthinking it, but I'm familiar enough with it. The best thing you can do is find someone you respect and trust, and put them in charge. Traditions for mourning, though often ultimately excessive, were good in that they have you a set process to work on. Try and find your set process.

Recommendations for True Crime books?

I got violently ill over the holidays, and in my mix of delirium and tedium I re-listened to Tom.O'Neill's Chaos about the Manson family murders, and really enjoyed it. Now I'm in the mood for more in the genre, but I'm having trouble finding ones that don't completely blow. Tom did a great job in Chaos of blending the lurid with the Nancy Drew with solid reporting. I'd want something just like that if it exists.

A bit niche, but having read several books about the OJ trial, here are my evaluations:

The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson by Jeffrey Toobin. This is the "official account" of the trial, such that one can exist, and it's pretty good, but not great. Toobin starts with the premise that OJ is guilty and paints the entire case in the light that the defense was acting borderline unethically and the prosecution and judiciary incompetently, and that the jury were all idiots. While this all may be true, Toobin is a journalist, not an attorney, and nothing in the books suggests he did the kind of research necessary to justify his snarky tone. B+

Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O.J. Simpson Case by Alan Dershowitz. Easily the best book about the case, though it's not so much a blow by blow account as it is a series of meditations on what it says about the criminal justice system. Dersh takes no stance on guilt or innocence (despite being an appellate advisor for Simpson) and explains why most of the criticisms from various media commentators are off base. A

The Search for Justice: A Defense Attorney's Brief on the O.J. Simpson Case by Robert Shapiro. Shapiro was OJ's lead attorney before he was informally elbowed out by Johnny Cochran, and he spends most of the book explaining the case from the defense side. While he doesn't apologize for anything, he doesn't really make the case for Simpson's innocence that well, and he doesn't really give any insight into how the defense strategy led to the acquittal. It's adequate, but that's about it. C

O.J. the Last Word by Gerry Spence. Spence is one of those criminal defense attorneys who handled three slam dunk cases in his life and acts like he's some kind of genius for having never lost. After starting this book I'm certain I wouldn't want him defending me if I were ever in trouble. He was actually approached about defending OJ but backed out after Shapiro made it clear he'd be part of a team and not acting solo. I actually only made it about 50 pages in as it was unreadable. F

Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O. J. Simpson Got Away with Murder by Vincent Bugliosi. I didn't actually read this, but I watched the 7 hour video supplement that includes interviews with the key players and clips from the actual trial and news reports. I don't imagine that the book covers anything that isn't covered in the video, so I'm counting it. Anyway, Bugliosi was so outraged by the verdict he had to go on a whinge about how everybody involved with the trial fucked up royally, and second-guesses the prosecutions entire strategy by saying that they should have spent more time pursuing the domestic abuse angle that clearly wasn't playing with the jury, whom he only just falls short of calling complete morons. It's entertaining, but if Bugliosi thinks he would have won the case had he still been with the Los Angeles DA at the time, he's dreaming. The video is more entertaining because you get the full dose of Bugliosi's sanctimonious ire. He also uses logically fallacious arguments, and he left the DA's office so he could be a defense attorney, but didn't get much work since he only defended people whom he thought were innocent. He's a prick, and if I were on the jury I would have voted to acquit just to piss him off. C+ for content, but recommended for unintentional hilarity.

Without a Doubt by Marcia Clark. Clark spends 300 pages blaming everyone but the prosecutor's office for the acquittal, and doesn't pull punches when it comes to Chris Darden's mistakes, though she insists they're still friends. She mostly blames Lance Ito for letting the defense run wild, but she's at least entertaining enough that she comes across as a cool lady rather than the icy bitch she was portrayed as in the media. She also gives actual insight into the prosecution's strategy and why she thinks it didn't work. Bonus points for admitting up front she wrote the book for the money. A-

Obviously you should start with In Cold Blood, arguably the first of the genre. Unless you've already read it. Helter Skelter by Bugliosi offers what was the contemporary take on the Manson family, though folks like Lynette Fromme and Sandra Goode say Bugliosi was making up his own narrative.

A couple recent releases:

Say Anything by Patrick Radden Keefe

Dark Wire by Joseph Cox

The Art Thief by Michael Finkel

It's not a book, but I love the First 48 for my true crime. Each episode follows 1 or 2 murders ver the first 48 hours of the investigation under the theory that murders without a leadafter 48 hours have a terrible clearance rate!

What I like is that each episode follows evidence collection, research, and interrogation. But you also get the detectives thinking in between those. They often have enough time between filming and publication to write up the court casem.

Here's my comment on Hunt For The Green River Killer from this June

I don't know if it would meet your requirements for sheer writing quality and story telling. This one is almost dry in its "this happened, then this happened, then this happened" narrative style. The good news is there's no politicization of the case, and there's no histrionic hagiography of the victims ("Susan always loved to laugh").

The specific reason I recommend it (as my comment states) is that it does an exceptional job of demonstrating how fucked up a investigation can get by seemingly doing "the right thing." So, if you have an interest in how police solve crimes, I think it offers an interesting and unique perspective.

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets is one one the all time greats

Colin Wilson, A Criminal History of Mankind. I expected it to be a general book on criminology, but Wilson was only interested in pathological murderers, which should be right up your alley.

violently ill

Norovirus?

Might have been, might have just been a wicked case of COVID or flu.

Regardless, poor outcomes resulted.

Is there an AI currently available to the public that can do a good job of producing a text in English from translating spoken audio in other languages?

Hmm.. Your best bet would be OpenAI Whisper, which can transcribe other languages. It's mostly used real-time, but I believe there are services that let you upload recorded audio. You can even run it locally if you're tech-savvy. You can also consider signing up to Google AI Studio, the new Gemini models should be able to ingest audio files and translate them.

If you're willing to just playback the audio into an open mic, you can just use ChatGPT (the mic button uses Whisper, and you can open the Voice mode that's meant for conversations and play the audio to it live).

Hm. Cheers!

What's a good book about TCP/IP networking? I am currently redoing my home network setup and I've realized my knowledge of networking is very fragmented. I know the right incantations, but I have no idea what they actually do.

  • what does "default gateway" actually do? What happens when it's the "wrong" IP? When it's blank?
  • what happens when two machines claim to have the same IP?
  • how exactly does DHCP work?
  • how does UDP go through NAT?
  • what are VLANs?

I know you asked specifically for a book, but https://learn.cantrill.io/p/tech-fundamentals is a pretty good free course about the various layers of the networking stack. If you want to go deep on the protocol-level stuff then maybe Stevens' TCP/IP Illustrated could be what you're after? It might be too TCP-focused, since you also have questions about VLANs and UDP.

Beej's guide is fairly concise but still covers all the important technical details. The sections about network programming in python can be skipped or skimmed through without missing much.

Default gateway does what it literally says. A gateway, in IP routing, is a term meaning "traffic for X network should be sent to the router at Y destination IP address". You can have potentially many routes on a system specifying what traffic goes where. The default gateway, then, is the gateway which your traffic will use when no other routing rule matches.

I'm not certain about what happens when two machines claim to have the same IP, actually. But I can take an educated guess. When you try to reach out to an IP address, your machine first needs to figure out which Ethernet MAC address it should send that traffic to (it does this using a protocol called ARP). Most likely, what would happen is you would start to see traffic for that one IP address go to both machines sporadically, depending on which is responding to ARP requests first. I'm not certain but that's what I would imagine.

DHCP works by sending out a broadcast on Ethernet asking for a DHCP server. When the server replies, it will give the client an IP address to use. That's the gist, though I don't know the exact details of the DHCP communication (I couldn't write my own software or anything).

UDP goes through NAT the same as TCP does. If you're making an outbound connection, the router will pick a port to listen for reply traffic, and forward replies to your client machine. If you're making an inbound connection, you need a port forwarded to the destination at the router level in advance.

A VLAN is a way to isolate Ethernet networks even if they are plugged into the same physical hardware. The switch you are plugged into lets you configure which ports are part of which VLAN, and only ports which are part of the same VLAN can talk to each other using Ethernet. You can also configure a port so that multiple VLANs are allowed, in which case the device plugged into the port must add a tag to any traffic it sends specifying which VLAN it is for (and it is only allowed to send traffic on the VLANs you configured on the switch).

I'm not certain about what happens when two machines claim to have the same IP, actually

Depends on the IP. If it's so called "local" IP (starts with 10., 192.168 or 172.16.) and they are not on the same local network, then nothing bad, since these addresses specifically designed for such use. If they are on the same local network, there would be trouble, not sure about the exact nature but likely both computers sharing an IP won't be able to properly use it. Usually your OS would scream at you in some way when such thing is detected. Using DHCP server is one of the ways to ensure this thing never happens.

If you have two hosts that have same IP and those are not local IPs then weird things would happen. In general, if you have NAT (which most home users for now should and would have) then outgoing connections should work fine (then again, there's no real reason for a machine used by home user to even have a non-local IP at all) but it's better to avoid that situation completely because things get weird. There are special organizations and protocols aimed at segregating IP space so nobody steps on each other's toes there. As a home user, you probably don't need any of that as the standard setup is to use local IPs for everything inside the home network and only use non-local IP for the main router egress address.

Yeah, I meant two machines on the local network. I've never tried that one before. I unfortunately have first-hand experience with machines on different networks using the same IP addresses, as one of my old employers was too cheap to buy new IPv4 subnets and we squatted on the DoD 22.0.0.0/8 subnet. Our network team had a very fun day when the DoD started using that subnet publicly, or so I heard from my old coworkers (I had left by that time).

DHCP server restarts can cause IP conflicts pretty often, especially if you're running the DHCP server on a small home/office router that doesn't persist state. Windows will specifically warn about the IP conflict, and newer (Win7+) will often try to automatically reregister with your DHCP server if you're not running in static modes; Linux has some optional standards-complaint IP conflict notifiers.

If not corrected, the usual results are inconsistent communication and higher network utilization: network switches will resolve the IP address to physical multiple ports, and this causes packets to be sent many more places than they need, and can sometimes cause TCP connections to go wonky.

((There are exceptions and sometimes even cases where you could use this behavior, but they were always rare and increasingly have been replaced by better solutions.))

DHCP server restarts can cause IP conflicts pretty often, especially if you're running the DHCP server on a small home/office router that doesn't persist state

More fun can be had if there's a rogue DHCP server on the network. Back in the days I did network admining work (a long time ago) I had to deal with such a case - turned out to be a new printer with helpful on-by-default DHCP server, but it took me a lot of frustration to figure it out because I never thought before a printer could do that to me.

What idiot thought it was a good idea to add a DHCP server to a printer? That is peak anti-social.

In an office setting, I know it would take me so much time to try to figure that out. At least in a home setting, it's far easier to remember the answer to "what was the last thing that I (or spouse or kids) attached to the network in the past day or two?"

Yeah that was my question exactly when I finally discovered what happened - who even thought it was a good idea to do this? Thankfully, haven't heard about someone doing that for a long while now.

What idiot thought it was a good idea to add a DHCP server to a printer?

It's probably so you can connect directly to the printer, without needing a router. Of course, it might be smarter to first try to acquire a DHCP lease before starting a DHCP server...

Yeah I think it was some kind of "smart" home solution when not everybody had routers on home network. A bit fuzzy on details now but that might be the idea at least. It had a normal "play nice" mode too, just for some reason it wasn't enabled by default... or maybe somebody switched it for some reason, impossible to know now.

Oh yeah that's a good time too. When I was in college, I worked in the IT department and every so often we had to deal with a student who brought in a router and plugged one of their LAN ports into the campus network. That got your port shut off by the school pretty quickly, and iirc you had to come in and promise to stop using your router to get it turned back on.

Students are something else. I am still ashamed of some of the shenanigans I did as a student, especially after eventually finding myself on the other side (not in an university, thankfully). It's a tough job to run IT in such places.

Questions like this are pretty much in the wheelhouse of things like ChatGPT. It's really good at answering these high-level questions and providing good direction with the ability to dive deeper into each of the topics.

I asked on your behalf and everything looks pretty much like I would've written. https://chatgpt.com/share/677bd93a-310c-8004-9dcc-9b36c30fde8c

My take:

For home networking, unless you're setting up a homelab, you can probably ignore VLANs. Honestly, most of these are pretty much ignorable for what I'm expecting your use case of home network are concerned.

Anything vaguely modern in terms of a home router should handle all of these pretty transparently. Without getting into packet-level stuff, DHCP from the router will configure the clients and configure the default gateway to itself as well as prevent duplicate IPs (unless you're configuring them manually). DHCP itself tends to just work out of the box. UDP NATing, similarly, tends to just work. VLANs, at what I'm expecting is your scale, should likely just be ignored.

In my case, I have a small server rack that has a couple of NASes living in it along with a few switches (1GbE and 10GbE). The switches support VLANs, but even for what I'm doing, I'm far from needing any of the functionality it would provide. The router I'm using are a set of Eeros -- they can provide a mesh network, but for me all of them are hardwired to the switch.

If you're looking to experiment from a homelab perspective, that's another story. But it could be a really fun story. A common way of getting started there to get a solid grounding on the fundamentals is doing something like setting up a Raspberry Pi cluster and playing with those. It's a cheap and approachable way to learn these concepts.

I can already set up my home network (which is currently an x86 router, a custom-built NAS, a router working as a wireless AP and another router working as a wireless extender plus all the end-user devices), I want to understand why I am doing the things I am doing. I am sorry, but your ChatGPT log didn't exactly help with that. I'll see if asking it for a more textbook explanation from the ground up will work.

Much of this is really building on many decades worth of tech and it's hard to understand the why until you understand much of the whole stack.

Here's some of the whys, from my perspective in the order I would talk about them:

DHCP: when a device joins a network, it can broadcast on the network and ask for how it should configure it's network stack. Implicit in the request is the MAC (Media Access Control) address of the interface itself which provides the physical address of the interface. The DHCP server (in a home setting, usually in the router) assigns an IP from a block it manages and gives the rest of the networking details (gateway, subnet, etc) to the client. DHCP isn't strictly needed as the clients can be configured manually in many cases. Cheap IoT devices tend to rely on it.

Default Gateway: When you're sending any packet to something outside your local network, you send the packet to the gateway and it figures out how to get the packet to the destination. In a home setting, this will just be forwarding the packet upstream to your ISP. In a larger scale setting, it's going to consult things like BGP routing to figure out where to send things to. The beauty of IP is that the client doesn't need to worry about it and it's completely abstracted into the gateway itself.

Duplicate IPs: As mentioned before, every interface has a MAC address. When you're sending a packet on the network to another machine (i.e. not broadcast), you send the packet to the MAC address. But we're dealing with IP, not MACs. To translate from an IP address to a MAC address we send out a broadcast ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) request asking basically "will the device with IP xxx respond?" Broadcasts are received by all the machines on the network. The machine with the requested IP will respond. If there are multiple machines that are configured with the same IP, they'll all respond. What happens here is usually the first one wins. This is complicated by modern switches because they learn what IPs/MACs are on each of their ports. They'll likely assume there are two routes to the same host and weird things may happen. Lesson: don't do it, things break.

VLANs: From a switch perspective, it just controls what ports can talk to which other ports. If you have an 24-port switch, you can configure multiple VLANs such that, say, ports 1-12 can talk to each other, and 13-24 can talk to each other. It's setting up two "Virtual LANs." You can have a router that attaches to both of the VLANs to handle routing between them if you want. These are typically used to prioritize certain network traffic, or for security (e.g. a guest network can't talk to your servers).

UDP and NAT: Since there's no connection in UDP, the NAT device just remembers things like "when device XX using port YY sends a packet to internet address AA port BB, I sent the packet on my port PP. Later, if I get a packet from AA:BB on port PP, I'll look that up and forward the packet to XX:YY." The key here is that all IP packets have the source IP and port and destination IP and port. When it's doing NATing, it replaces the local IP (which isn't going to be publically routable) with it's own address and port. On the way back, it just does the reverse and replaces the destination IP/port (which is how the packet got to it in the first place) with the local network's addresses and ports and forwards.

Thanks, that was helpful!

DHCP: when a device joins a network, it can broadcast on the network and ask for how it should configure it's network stack. Implicit in the request is the MAC (Media Access Control) address of the interface itself which provides the physical address of the interface. The DHCP server (in a home setting, usually in the router) assigns an IP from a block it manages and gives the rest of the networking details (gateway, subnet, etc) to the client. DHCP isn't strictly needed as the clients can be configured manually in many cases. Cheap IoT devices tend to rely on it.

How does it broadcast its request if it doesn't have an IP address?

Default Gateway: When you're sending any packet to something outside your local network, you send the packet to the gateway and it figures out how to get the packet to the destination. In a home setting, this will just be forwarding the packet upstream to your ISP. In a larger scale setting, it's going to consult things like BGP routing to figure out where to send things to. The beauty of IP is that the client doesn't need to worry about it and it's completely abstracted into the gateway itself.

The local network is defined by the network mask, right? So with 255.255.255.0 if I send something from 192.168.1.2 192.168.1.3 there's no need for the gateway to be set up, but 192.168.2.3 is outside the network and the packets will be routed to the gateway?

This makes me wonder how the packets are routed within the local network, actually. Let's say I'm sending a request from my PC (192.168.1.5) to my NAS (192.168.1.2). The PC is connected to my wireless switch/AP (192.168.1.4), and both the switch/AP and the NAS are connected to the wired router (192.168.1.1). How does the switch/AP know it should send the request to the wired router and not to one of its other LAN ports?

How does it broadcast its request if it doesn't have an IP address?

DHCP requests are transmitted over UDP with a target destination of the broadcast address, usually 255.255.255.255. The standard says that this packet should have a source address of 0.0.0.0, but in my experience most DHCP servers aren't very picky about that. This packet is just a message going across a wire to every receiver on the local network (ie, up until the gateway), so the ethernet card doesn't need to have an IP address at that time. EDIT: for clarity, it uses the MAC address to identify itself and so the server can properly respond to just the correct machine. This is one of many reasons that getting DHCP to run across network boundaries is an absolute nightmare. /EDIT

The local network is defined by the network mask, right?

For the purposes of TCP/IP, the local network is defined by the netmask. Physical networks (eg, having multiple routers with different subnets plugged into the same big switch) and logical networks (VLANs) can and often are different. This is a space with a lot of namespace collision, so be wary of it.

So with 255.255.255.0 if I send something from 192.168.1.2 192.168.1.3 there's no need for the gateway to be set up...

At the risk of going too deep into the (lies-to-children!) OSI model:

Before doing anything else, the sending computer looks at its ARP table, which converts IP addresses to MAC addresses. If the destination IP address is not on the ARP table, it will send an ARP request, which is a broadcast message to the local network asking if any devices have that IP address (or, if not on the local network, it sends an ARP request for the local gateway). Once it finds the address, it inserts that IP-MAC pair into the ARP table, and uses it as part of the packet and frame shaping.

The computer forms a packet, with a source IP address of 192.168.1.2/24 and a destination of 192.168.1.3/24, at the TCP/IP network layer, or layer three. The ethernet card breaks this into one or more "frames" with a maximum size called the MTU (historically 1500 bytes, but can be larger where hardware supports it), aka the ethernet/MAC data link layer or layer two. It then transmits these frames as signals to the network switch, aka the ethernet physical layer or layer one.

This switch will receive the signals, and convert them into the layer two frame. On older hubs, it would simply echo the frame out every port. On modern switches, it then inspects the frame for a destination MAC address. If the switch has records of receiving frames with a source MAC address matching that destination, it only sends the frame to that specific physical port or ports. If it has no record, it floods the frame out every port, and it's up to the receiving device to filter whether it's address properly. But the switch tables get filed with records pretty quickly

((For older computers, there was a physical layer conversion issue; this is why crossover cables existed. But almost every modern device can automatically switch over.))

but 192.168.2.3 is outside the network and the packets will be routed to the gateway?

In that case, the frame would be configured with a destination MAC of the local gateway, so the switch would look in its MAC table for the MAC of the local gateway, and usually only send the packet to the physical ports of the local gateway. This is layer two switching, not layer three routing.

It's only when the frame gets to the gateway, which reassembles the frame into a packet to inspect the destination IP address, that the gateway examines what the target IP address is, and then routes it by checking its own routing tables and own default gateway.

How does the switch/AP know it should send the request to the wired router and not to one of its other LAN ports?

There are two kinds of network switches/hubs (well, there are more, but at least two). The dumb one just essentially pretend everybody is on the same bus, and so every port gets all the traffic from other ports. This of course is only good for very simple small networks. Smarter switch would remember which IPs and MAC addresses live on which ports and forward the packets accordingly. Of course, smarter switches are more expensive than the dumb ones. For bigger networks you'd have configuration capacity in the switch to tell it which networks live on which ports.

I don't think you'll see a true 'dumb switch' (technical term 'hub') in ethernet from a major store; I haven't seen a new one since back when 10/100mbps switches were just phasing in. But they definitely existed, and it wasn't uncommon for one person to be able to bog down an entire intranet.

In the modern day, the distinction between 'dumb' and 'smart' switches is usually going to emphasize 'smart' switches as having optional routing functionality, (aka 'layer 3 switching'). This technically means that the layer 3 switch has one or more ports that can be configured into a router mode, though in practice it'll be missing a lot of other functionality you'd expect from a small home or office router (almost always missing NAT/PAT, usually not having DHCP or DNS).

How does it broadcast its request if it doesn't have an IP address?

This is where IP and ethernet get a bit blurry. ARP is operating at the raw ethernet level and it's sending out the raw ethernet packet to the ethernet broadcast address. In the packet it has it's IP and the requested IP. Implicit in the packet is the MAC address of the requesting machine. (Deeper dive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_frame)

In most cases you think "I'm IP xxx sending something to IP yyy," the reality is at the ethernet level, the IP stuff is all payload the network really doesn't care about. Internally, everything on the actual network level is working with MAC addresses. IPs are just a really convenient abstraction on top of it. (in this case "network" is the layer 2 of the entire stack -- the data link layer)

The local network is defined by the network mask, right? So with 255.255.255.0 if I send something from 192.168.1.2 192.168.1.3 there's no need for the gateway to be set up, but 192.168.2.3 is outside the network and the packets will be routed to the gateway?

That's correct. Anything on the local subnet stays on your local network. Anything outside gets punted to the gateway to deal with.

This makes me wonder how the packets are routed within the local network, actually. Let's say I'm sending a request from my PC (192.168.1.5) to my NAS (192.168.1.2). The PC is connected to my wireless switch/AP (192.168.1.4), and both the switch/AP and the NAS are connected to the wired router (192.168.1.1). How does the switch/AP know it should send the request to the wired router and not to one of its other LAN ports?

I'm going to cavalierly ignore WiFi in this because it muddies things up and deal with layer 2 of the stack and up and just treat it as a switch. This is what's in my mental model of what's happening in some detail.

  1. You try to access "nas.orthoxerox.com"
  2. DNS lookup for that. Oops, we only have the IP of the DNS server: 192.168.1.254 (making something up)
  3. ARP on ethernet to get the MAC for ...254.
  4. This gets to the switch. It'll broadcast this packet to all its ports. (Once the switch knows that a certain MAC is on a port it remembers it. Most home-grade switches can remember a few thousand MAC addresses)
  5. NAS responds and then the switch and your machine know the MAC of the DNS.
  6. DNS lookup (several round-trips to do this) -- you now know the IP of the NAS. (Since the switch now knows the IP of the DNS, it sends it directly to the port it knows it's on)
  7. ARP for the IP of the NAS. (same as before)
  8. Finally, send an ethernet packet from your machine to the NAS. (Again, from the ethernet perspective, this is sending from your machine to the NAS based on it's MAC address when we're at the low level)

If there are multiple switches between you and the destination, the broadcast just keeps going.

If you want to have some "fun," look up "ARP storm." It's likely one of the few times most networking folks (I'm a programmer) even think about things at that level.

Thanks a lot! How does Ethernet deal with someone pulling a Spartacus and spoofing MAC addresses of existing nodes?

By default, absolutely nothing... you've found one of the common attack surfaces of ethernet! You can use this to do all sorts of malicious things. You can overload the switches by just spamming them with new MAC addresses. You can intercept traffic. General denial of service attacks. Circumventing security. All sorts of mayhem.

So, ways of dealing with this... you can have switches that are configured to only allow an interface with a certain MAC to connect to certain ports. Or you can have softer ways of dealing with this by feeding information from the switch to some variety of intrusion detection system. Similarly, a switch can be configured to ensure that a device DHCPing for an address can't suddenly start using a different MAC.

There's a host of enterprise-y tech being built in this arms race if you want to fund some hardcore security-focused teams. That said, I don't think I've ever encountered (maybe because I'm not an attacker) these in the run-of-the-mill office environments. This is including working at Amazon, which is a bit persnickety on security. I'm quite sure that they're running these things in the data centers though. For something like AWS, they have segregated networks for control-plane traffic (the back-end of the services and how they are configured) and customer traffic. And for customer traffic, everything is on its own VLAN to ensure that I can't make a malicious service that would attack neighboring instances on the same machine or subnet. They also have a bunch of security in place to ensure only trusted clients can connect to services and verify the servers' authenticity.

This is one of the underlying reasons that having good physical security is essential. Once you have access to a network you want to attack, you have a lot more surface area that you can use to attack it while (preferably from the attacker's perspective) remaining undetected.

There are an annoying number of shops that used to love Cisco's port security option, which will lock down an interface on a switch to a certain segmentation of MAC addresses (usually configured in adaptive modes). It's... not as unmanagable as it sounds, though it is very unmanageable and very much something that's usually only helpful against very specific threat models and when paired with a lot of other stuff.

How does it broadcast its request if it doesn't have an IP address?

Because network communication doesn't always require an IP. Think of the network as different technologies arranged in a stack, each building on the last. Specifically, the stack generally looks like:

Ethernet

IP

TCP/UDP

Other protocols on top that (e.g. HTTP)

For DHCP, your machine broadcasts at the Ethernet level which works based on the MAC addresses baked into every network interface. It receives a reply in the same way. And even once you have an IP address, those IP packets will be riding on top of Ethernet frames which are sent out to the local network in much the same way as DHCP traffic is.

For what you're looking for, I would pick up a cheap CompTIA Net+ book and maybe a Cisco CCENT book and read through the chapters you're interested in. They're written to provide the practical understanding that a junior IT tech would need to perform basic network-related tasks and they got me through the first few years of my tech career. You can probably find a ton of them on libgen. I would steer clear of single-topic books (e g. just TCP/IP) since they go into way more depth and detail than you'll ever need (though they are extremely interesting IMO).

There was discussion here in the culture war thread on the position of black women in the US mating market. There was also a different discussion yesterday on interracial marriages.

One aspect of all of this that seems rather important or at least non-trivial to me is that there seems to be a marked difference between the obesity rates of black men and women, which seems to be something peculiar to blacks. Can anyone offer an explanation?

There have been some attempts to investigate this further academically. This study found that the difference is minimal among those with high parental education, but extreme among those with the lowest parental education (16% of men, 45% of women). Initially I thought it might be due to family formation differences, but the divergence exists beyond the US. In South Africa, the richest major African country, 2/3 of women but only 1/3 of men are obese. Strongly indicative of a genetic explanation, especially since we know some populations like Pacific Islanders are already genetically more prone to obesity.

In South Africa, the richest major African country, 2/3 of women but only 1/3 of men are obese. Strongly indicative of a genetic explanation

The entire thing can also just be explained by culture. Obese women in SA are considered attractive, while obese men are not. Both act accordingly, which is easier in SA because they don't yet eat as much highly processed food as people in the West do (and so they have a little more control over their weight, i.e. just deciding not to get fat is easier there).

This is in large part true re: South African sexual preferences. However, poor urban South Africans eat an extremely unhealthy and fattening diet, consisting mostly of the cheapest carbs available fried in the cheapest oil. Township food will fatten you up fast if you can afford it, and it's so nutritionally unsatisfying I'd guess even those with a little cash eat a lot of it. I suspect the men are significantly likely to do high-calorie-burning manual labour or be alcoholics/drug addicts, which probably explains a lot of the obesity gap in the urban poor.

The black women considered most attractive in SA are probably overweight by white standards, but not to the extent of being extremely obese the way the fattest Americans are. You can see this in SA media that has a primarily black audience and among the black elite, where obesity rates are lower.

Thanks. It makes sense. 16% of men, 45% of women is indeed rather extreme.

Is there any evidence of black people in Europe prior to the Age of Discovery in anything other than essentially zero? I don't mean non-white people such as Berbers or Arabs. I mean sub-Saharan blacks. From everything I've read by experts, there were basically none. Due to the Saharan desert being a massive barrier, there was almost zero gene flow, especially into Northern Europe which have close to 0 sub-Saharan African DNA. The British Isles are slightly higher at like 0.1% due to some North African traders (almost exclusively not black) during the Roman Empire.

On top of the genetic evidence, there's the fact that most of Europe was 99% plus white within living memory. It wasn't until after WW2 and the Windrush generation in England that they saw significant non-white people move in. But even in 1950, it was over 99% white.

Yet anytime someone chud complains online about black people in Medieval England in video games or film, you'll get academics coming out saying that it was actually more diverse than we thought and that black people have always been present in England. I can't really find any evidence of this. Even sources that want to tell this story will say something like there were 15,000 black people in England during the height of the African slave trade out of a population of 8 million and they were mostly in port cities.

Are these people just straight up lying? Are they so influenced by ideology they can't see what is obviously true or false? I honestly don't know what evidence they are looking at that makes them think what they think. And just for reference, in 1991, the UK did its first racial census. It was less than 1% black then after 40 years of mass immigration. I think England had the highest at 1.5%, but again, that's where the Windrush generation settled as opposed to Scotland or Wales. But you play BG3, and 15% of it is black and if you say this is kind of ridiculous you're a chud. Is there any even remotely convincing argument for this kind of representation?

We do have multiple letters from Queen Elizabeth I to the Lord Mayor of London complaining about the large numbers of “negars and blackmoores” in London and demanding that they be deported (they weren’t). I’m not sure if the people she is referring to would be what are now considered black people, or if they were more northern African.

That is post Age of Discovery though. The Atlantic Slave Trade had started by then and the Medieval ages ended over 100 years ago by then.

Sure, and iirc there was allegedly a substantial population of black people in Lisbon by perhaps 1510, which is not wholly unbelievable given the already substantial Portuguese trade with West Africa around that time. But that’s well into the “age of discovery”, so not really applicable to the question.

There’s a few scattered references to ‘Ethiopians’ or some other description of clearly ‘black’ people in Europe before the age of discovery, but definitely no reason to think they were a major presence.

My guess is that the sight wouldn’t have been shocking in a port town, although it might be unusual, but they would have been in random villages.

Just to point out BG3 is a bad example. The RPG setting it is based on: the Forgotten Realms is explicitly designed to be much more diverse than Europe at the same rough time frame would be, which is called out in universe in the setting, outside of BG3 itself.

"There was a time when any fool could have told you where the folk of this land or that came from, but now we sail or ride so far and often that we’re all from everywhere. Even the most isolated villages hold folk who hail from they know not where. Yet you can still tell something of where someone hails from by their hair and build and skin and manner, though any traveler knows not to assume too much from a quick glance. Remember that, and hearken"

This is from a Doylist perspective so that DnD players who want to play a Chultan halfling shaman or a Kozakuran samurai or whatever on the Sword Coast (the Europe equivalent and most popular part of the setting) don't have to have convoluted back stories to justify it. From a Watsonian perspective the historical presence of portals from the Realms to different areas of Earth plus being a high magic setting with fairly easy access to teleportation, flying ships and even spacecraft to visit different worlds is a justification. Bits of the planet were also exchanged with nations on an entirely (but not really, it's complicated) world which led to random cultures popping up elsewhere as well.

On top of all that Baldur's Gate and environs is called out explicitly as being the most multi-cultural place on a very multi-cultural world due to being the biggest and most cosmopolitan city (no matter what Waterdhavians might say). And had absorbed several huge waves of refugees from various nations in the prior several hundred years.

"Baldurians took great pride in the inclusiveness of their city. It was a place anyone could call home, or start a new life within, regardless of race, creed or personal history."

Something like The Witcher or similar may be a better example.

As for the rationale? It's simple (which doesn't mean correct of course!) games and books and movies are made to entertain people as they are at the time they are created. A deliberate choice can be made to portray historical (or pseudo-historical) situations with more modern demographics to make it more palatable or relatable or attractive to a modern audience. My wife greatly prefers shows or games which have (or allow to be created) a black woman character, In RPGs I am almost always a white man with red hair. Even outside of any social engineering one might want to do, having the broadest set of characters is probably the way to go unless you are appealing specifically to the accuracy of your historical setting as a specific selling point.

My wife loves Bridgerton, she is aware it is not historically accurate but it allows her to watch and enjoy people like her in pretty dresses dealing with English high society in a way that really never happened. Then she buys Bridgerton themed coffee creamer (which is quite good actually), and so on and wants to attend a fancy tea party in costume, so buys corsets and lace and learns to sew. It creates an aspirational fantasy of a sort.

Europe is a bad unit of analysis that lends itself to Motte and Bailey play by your opponents. Specific to the interior of England the number is probably zero, specific to east-Mediterranean port towns it probably isn't.

Ditto "black", there plenty of references to Nubians and Moores in the Eastern Roman Empire and wider mederteranian but the fact that the op specifically excluded Berbers makes me think they're ones planning the motte and bailey rather than opening themselves up to it.

That's the nature of any motte and bailey argument.

And all arguments about race are inevitably motte and bailey arguments. Just ones, taking ethnonationalism seriously, with horrible consequences for those in the bailey.

Berbers weren’t and aren’t black sub Saharans. You have the motte and bailey reversed. The bailey is there were black Africans in Europe when the motte is that they were North African Berbers, Phoenicians, and Arabs for the most part. But they use the fact that they are “African” to make them black Africans. Obviously there would be Mediterranean people in the Mediterranean. I said black specifically as in Black sub Saharan Africans, not non white people period.

the fact that the op specifically excluded Berbers makes me think they're ones planning the motte and bailey rather than opening themselves up to it.

What does this mean? Berbers are not black. As far as I can tell, none of the major Berber tribal groups have major Sub-Saharan admixture; whatever admixture they do have comes through their interbreeding with Gulf Arabs, who themselves have some African ancestry via the history of the slave trade. Ancient depictions of Berbers, and medieval depictions of groups like the Guanches, consistently show them as fair-skinned with pale hair and beards. Arguably the most famous modern person of Berber ancestry, soccer player Zinedine Zidane, could pass for a white Italian guy.

Yeah this is an example of what people will do. There were Berbers in Europe who are African. Yes, and? Berbers aren’t black sub Saharan Africans so you didn’t show anything. It’s irrelevant. They are completely different genetically and culturally.

The argument is dull. The likelihood is that a handful of sub-Saharan people made their way to Northern Europe before the age of discovery for various reasons at various times. Certainly educated people were aware that black skinned people existed and lived far south of the Mediterranean, which makes sense because they participated in the trans-Saharan trade with places like Mali and therefore would have been present as a small minority in some North African port towns which European merchants also on occasion visited. There would have been people in Northern European ports in 1400 who would have seen black people, for sure.

Anything beyond that is (pointless) speculation.

Why is it pointless speculation when there is overwhelming evidence against how it’s represented today? It seems pretty clear to me there is an agenda behind pushed and people are distorting the facts. If people accepted what you said is true then that would be one thing, but there are people who want to open up this debate so if they want to open it up then we should have it. It seems to me there is essentially a conspiracy to prove places like England were always diverse. And that’s just obviously not true. We know which groups migrated there in large numbers, and those people weren’t black. This should be settled, but there’s a lot of people who are lying and they should be called out for it and have their reputations destroyed as serious academics.

Of course there’s an agenda behind it. But that agenda has nothing to do with any actual academic question on this subject and so can’t be disproved by it. It would be like disproving BLM with real research on police brutality, or disproving communism with basic economics. It isn’t going to convince anyone who believes this stuff.

Most people who believe that stuff believe because people who are considered experts say it’s true. Then that gets pushed downstream. It’s actually an extremely small group of people pushing this revisionism. If some extremely motivated people cared about this, the only response they would have is why do care and to call them weird. I’ve actually gotten people who pretend to believe it admit it’s not true by saying that a multicultural black England with a large black upper class would mean that blacks were largely responsible for the European side of the Atlantic slave trade. There’s just not a will to call people out on obvious bullshit.

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They're not above lying and some of them are clearly aware that's what they're doing.

Others give themselves more plausible deniability because maintaining credibility serves their allies' goals.

But it's all in service of the goals Moffat laid out, not truth.

Are these people just straight up lying? Are they so influenced by ideology they can't see what is obviously true or false? I honestly don't know what evidence they are looking at that makes them think what they think

My understanding is that it goes something like

MOTTE: There were a nonzero number of black people in England and so we should represent them. Look, here's a document from the 16th century that says "Lord Featherstonhaugh's goode and faithfull servant, Thomas, was a manne of darke complexion hailing fromm the distant continents" which clearly means that there was at least one person who was quite possibly a sub-Saharan African living on the island of Great Britain in the last 500 years.

BAILEY: There were probably lots of black people toiling away in England but the bigoted white English whitewashed them or refused to record them in history so we don't have any evidence, but we do know that's just the sort of thing the racist English would do, so we're justified in additing a lot of extra black characters to media. And even if that turns out not to be true, it's the right thing to do, because English history is the story of racist colonialists who abused the rest of nonwhite world, and so we should dilute, subvert, and erase history in revenge and to ensure that Never Again will whites threaten innocent POCs.

Or, more likely, they don't have an explicit theory, but think the more black people the better, and so use your motte as an excuse.

There were certainly a few black slaves and freedmen in imperial Rome. Most were probably Nubian, as travel along the Nile is easier than across the Sahara. I would not take lack of genetic traces in modern populations as clear evidence of absence, as modern Italians bear essentially no imprint of the cosmopolitan population of the classical Mediterranean. Parts of Europe under Muslim rule such as Sicily and Iberia would have continued to host some number of sub-Saharan African slaves into the medieval period and I'm sure some made their way to Constantinople as well. I have also come across the claim that Lisbon was 10% black just a few decades after the Reconquista.

If we are limiting our scope to say northern European states under Catholic rule between 550 and 1400, then I think the presence of even a single black individual there would be highly unusual and noteworthy, but the argument that some part of Europe has been inhabited by a non-zero number of individuals we would call black at most points within the last two thousand years forms a motte from which the bailey of "here are some black vikings or knights in medieval England" can be defended. I won't pretend to know the motivation of everyone making these claims, but I imagine the most informed and introspective among them believe that they are presenting scenarios from within the realm of possibility that, while not the most likely, are the ones with the greatest expected social utility in the present day.

This is the correct answer. The Almoravids were mostly Arab/North African, but had a significant number of sub-Saharan soldiers with them, and North Africa was historically the diversity region Pre-Colonialism, but this was still rare. IIRC, a black worker was among those working on Hadrian's wall (which we know because it freaked out the emperor who thought black people were bad luck). And there was Saint Maurice. And these are the motte to the "therefore, blackwash European history" bailey.

To the American users of this sub, does anyone use a HealthShare plan?

Here's an example: https://altruahealthshare.org/how-it-works/memberships/

This would, in theory, allow one to have access to health care at less than half of the cost of comparable Obamacare plans. Presumably, a large part of the difference is not getting grouped together with the drug addicts, mentally ill, and extremely fat that make up a sizeable percentage of the American public.

But what are the practical elements of the plan? When I go to the doctor, are they going to give me a hard time?

If you're healthy and actually can't afford regular insurance, it might be worth looking into. If you have health conditions or can otherwise afford real insurance, steer clear. You are effectively uninsured and won't get insurance negotiated rates, and will get a bill that the company may or may not pay. As frustrating as health insurance can be, it's a highly regulated industry with consumer protections in place. Health shares are the wild West and they aren't required to actually pay for anything.

Quite the opposite. I'm healthy but am rich enough to not worry about any reasonable health care cost I will ever have to bear.

But I don't want to support a corrupt system and pay for other people's self-inflicted lifestyle disorders.

My concern is convenience and fairness. The fact that they deny claims without recourse is a positive, since I am very unlikely to have claims denied. My worry is that I will go to the doctor, show them my healthshare card, and be denied care or have to spend hours explaining my situation to dimwitted and exasperated bureaucrats.

I guess I'll probably just have to try the HealthShare to see how it works.

No, you just tell them to ring you up as cash pay if they don’t know how to process the medishare card.

but am rich enough to not worry about any reasonable health care cost I will ever have to bear.

I don't need or want to know your specific number, but what is the number - in terms of liquid net worth - that must be reached in order to simply pay out of pocket for all reasonable medical care.

This came up for me over the holidays when my mother and father (early and mid 80s, respectively) and I were discussing healthcare costs in the U.S. My father stated that after a lifetime of diligent having-of medical insurance, things would've ended up being more cost-effective with paying out of pocket. What's curious about this is that my mother has been on variety of prescriptions for decades, my father has had surgery twice, and one of my siblings required quite intensive multiple rounds of surgery about 15 years ago. We did not grow up wealthy, but in that even more rare economic zone of "comfortably middle class" (the kind of thing that only baby boomers will ever know).

Is my father's advanced age perhaps playing tricks on his financial memory?

I don't know. 500,000? 1 million? It's definitely a number that a significant percent of Americans have exceeded. Of course, these are the exact people most likely to have generous government or corporate health plans so it's kind of a moot point.

The actual cost of most care is quite low when you strip away the layers of bullshit. Even complicated surgeries like gastic bypass should only cost around $20,000. Routine surgery is more like $5,000. Pretty cheap when compared to the astronomical cost of Obamacare-era health insurance.

I'd gladly forgo insurance except that I'm afraid that I'd either be refused care or charged astronomical sums for routine stuff. Aspirin? That will be $500. Since there appears to be no enforced regulation against unreasonable profiteering, they could theoretically charge me $1 million for an office visit. I suppose I could negotiate and simply refuse to pay unreasonable bills. The question is, how much hassle do I want to deal with.

I'll probably end up dropping insurance for the same reason I've dropped accountants and lawyers from my life: a strong preference to not pay the Danegeld even when it's easier just to do it.

I just want to say, from significant near-to-me experience- it’s very, very easy to call a medical provider and get large markdowns on the bill. They don’t fight you at all.

Thanks. That's helpful. I might just go commando and do it for my family next year. "Honey, hear me out".

But, seriously, yeah I will probably do it. No more paying for fatties, addicts, and gay orgies for this family!

I do not use a healthshare plan, but it remains a possibility for the future. I have many friends who do.

  • Doctors do not hassle about the use of the plan, but you do have to pay for many things which would be covered by an insurance plan. This would include checkups, vaccines, etc. It does not cover birth control and this is explained to me as intentional. These plans are most popular among very conservative Christians who object to paying for prep on moral as well as financial reasons, as well as a few hippies, and this demographic oddity is reflected by the leadership.
  • You will get a bill after care and have to submit it to healthshare for reimbursement/payment yourself. I'm not sure whether they give you the money and you pay the bill, or they pay the bill for you. They definitely expect you to negotiate the bill down and price shop but I don't know how much enforcement there is. Either way, this is significantly more navigating paperwork than a conventional insurance plan.
  • Not covering the obese, drug addicts, alcoholics and heavy smokers, homosexuals, etc is probably a large part of the cost saving, but members in these plans tend to really believe in the mission and I believe that they save money by price shopping a lot as well, or by expecting members to pay for certain things themselves. Prescription coverage in particular is very bad and you should see this as similar to a high deductible plan, but with no network requirements.
  • A lot of the people using these plans have hippy-ish attitudes and the doctors most used to these are the ones that are willing to see antivaxxers, or who have unusual views on nutrition, or whatever.

For context for those not in the know, prep is a drug that allows for participation in gay orgies without contracting HIV. Your US insurance is legally required to provide it at no cost (thanks Congress). It is not especially cheap to your insurer, and those costs are covered by elevated prices for users in general.

I don’t believe the orgy is required.

You know what else isn’t cheap to your insurer? Anything on this list. Those drugs reach about 30x as many people as Prep (circa 2021), and most of them cost more per month.

If you’d like to complain about healthcare spending, there are plenty of better targets that don’t rely on baiting a disgust reaction.

I too am very smart and can't think of any difference between a drug that treats blood cancer and one that treats a lifestyle choice.

The comparison between the drugs that treat type 2 diabetes/cardiac issues and those in question is left for the reader.

I don’t believe the orgy is required.

I haven't run the numbers, but I've been friends with a decent amount of gay men in my life, and my impression is that this particular virus would have no chance to spread among the non-drug-addict population, if gay men had about the same amount of sexual partners as straight men.

Eh, sodomy is just much much riskier than having sex the proper way.

I don’t believe the orgy is required.

Sure, it doesn't have to be orgies, but doing a lot of sleeping around with partners you don't know well is the main use case. Rates of HIV transmission for PIV sex are less than one per 1000 instances of sleeping with an infected partner. Even the highest risk forms of sex are about 1 in 72 chance, though I get that that's certainly high enough that you wouldn't want to cavort with a person known to be infected without prophylaxis. Meanwhile, drugs to suppress viral load in an infected individual, which should be done anyway to prevent the deleterious health effects, also prevent HIV transmission, so if this is with someone you know has HIV, it isn't needed, provided they just use that. The chief use case, then, is if you're often sleeping with people (especially men with men) whom you don't trust or don't know whether they have it.

That said, I agree that in general, it should be possible to buy insurance with fewer mandated things, especially along hydroacetylene's take-responsibility-for-yourself lines.

If you’d like to complain about healthcare spending, there are plenty of better targets that don’t rely on baiting a disgust reaction.

I have no issue with baiting a disgust reaction here. Taxpayer money to enable behavior that I find reprehensible is more distasteful than taxpayer money wasted.

I mean, a health insurance plan with an ‘on your own head be it’ provision so it doesn’t cover type-2 diabetes or HIV treatment is a major market blind spot which healthshare partly exists to solve.

I believe the generic drugs (now available in the US) are much cheaper:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9341201/

The list price of PrEP medication and its impact on the ability to scale up use to have public health benefit was described in research literature as early as 2008, four years before the drug was approved. A study published that year assessed the cost effectiveness of implementing a PrEP program targeting men who have sex with men in New York City. The model to determine cost-effectiveness used the 2007 wholesale list price of TDF/FTC, which the authors note was $31USD per pill, making the monthly supply $930USD.

On May 16, 2019, Gilead Sciences CEO Daniel O’ Day testified in front of Congress on the pharmaceutical company’s reasoning for keeping the price of TDF/FTC at approximately $1800 for a 30-day supply. O’Day offered that despite the high cost of the medication, it did not impede access, stating, “We offer a wide range of programs to help ensure that people have access to Truvada when they need it. For example, 98% of people who use our copay Assistance Program have no out-of-pocket costs.

Luckily, several structural changes recently have helped turn the tide on some of these upstream structural barriers to PrEP access. The U.S. Services and Preventative Task Force A grade rating for PrEP in 201911 helped reduce or eliminate cost sharing for PrEP. In 2021 as generic TDF/FTC became more widely manufactured and reduced the price of a 30-day supply from $1800 for brand name PrEP down to $40 for a generic, many of these restrictive payer and clinical guideline policies have been removed.

Mentioned this a few weeks ago, iirc it's $20,000 a year. Something like 10x my entire lifetime of medical expenses, but I end up paying for it anyway.

@self_made_human’s source suggests that it’s dropped to $40/month, better than most of these Medicare prescriptions. Probably fewer users, too.

So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, the central text of the Baháʼí. Still a bunch of other stuff to go through.

I'm most of the way through Kenneth Anger's legendary Hollywood Babylon, a gossip page of ancient scandals from sober l silent era to WW2 Hollywood. The Fatty Arbuckle rape trial, William Randolph Hearst shooting a film producer on his yacht, various homosexual orgies, Conde Nast being a person rather than a company. It's amazing.

I can't recommend it enough. It's raising so many questions for me, despite the fact that I'm aware (from having previously listened to the You Must Remember This podcast series dismissing Anger as inaccurate) that it's wildly inflated. Anger writes in such a fun way, and the material is so fascinating, and I'm filled with new questions about morals and society. A masterpiece.

It's in lazy audiobook form so I can rest my eyes before sleep, but I've started the Aubrey/Maturin series (Master and Commander). I enjoy stories set in the Age of Sail/Napoleonic era and it hasn't disappointed so far with lots of detail about how the Royal Navy operated during that period. I've also got the Hornblower series lined up after that (I enjoyed the tv film series), but if I get sick of naval I could always switch to Sharpe.

Currently starting Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

Not sure where I heard about this book, but it was fairly recently. I burn through these lightly-technical nonfiction books really quickly. Similar books that I have read in the past few years include Energy: A Human History (Rhodes), Structures (Gordon), The Box (Levinson), Living on the Grid (Thompson)

The author’s blog was linked on the subreddit recently.

Currently reading Prit Buttar's two-part history of the siege of Leningrad. I now have many tragic anecdotes about people starving to death. Also have several very funny anecdotes about people starving to death.

Anything interesting in there?

Too early to tell. So far it looks like a law-book, which is not the most interesting genre. It's also very Arabic.

I'm honestly reading it because I saw the phrase "excellence in all things" in the video game War Wind's manual, which is apparently also the name of a book of Baháʼí excerpts (no actual relation seems likely).

About two-thirds of the way through The Unbearable Lightness of Being. When it comes to marital fidelity, this makes the Czechs sound worse than the French.

Yesterday I read a passage that I've been thinking about all day, may be good fodder for a top-level post.

What happened with or to KulakRevolt/FromKulak? I never checked out the culture war threads since I got my fix from nrx blogs and Hindu Twitter, though I wish I switched out the latter with the CW here. This isn't an attempt to gossip or concern troll, he's clearly a very skilled writer and fairly smart, I don't have much context as to how he went from his motte post of the year to a much more cynical attitude.

I wish him well.

He’s not totally gone, he posted in this week’s culture war thread.

I’m pretty sure that indicated he was totally gone.

He graduated college.

I feel a bit of Catholic guilt engaging in this kind of ad-hominem and psychoanalysis, but then again I'm a cuck/faggot/race traitor/jew-lover so whatever.

I might have some timing/details wrong, I'm not as long-tenured as some around here and I haven't read every word Kulak ever wrote. But when he started writing he wrote as though he were either still in college or a very recent grad. He talked regularly about classes he'd taken and his degree and education. Most of the changes in his writing are pretty easily explained when you figure he's gone from a university kid taking English classes and being a touch edgy around campus, to a recent grad on an ill-fated motorcycle trip, to a hot-take artist trying to hustle a living on the internet.

When he was in college, radical libertarianism made sense. Libertarianism is often a rhetorical shelter for rightists in universities and other leftist spaces, though it's increasingly been discredited for that purpose by Mises-Caucus types. It has the advantage of being philosophically consistent, and thus easy to defend, and of offering easy "outs" from getting into the tough identity convos that are difficult to navigate politely with other right wing intellectual sets.

There's also the Libertine aspects of Libertarianism, which is very convenient for a college student. Being a Christian Nationalist requires certain sacrifices in the "sluts, drugs, and beer" departments during uni, which Libertarianism doesn't ask of you. Kulak's older stuff was leavened by this kind of fun, which has been largely absent from his more extreme recent works, though it's hard to see how it would fit in anyway.

Then he graduates, goes on a big motorcycle walkabout like his idol Clayton Atreus, and just like his idol Clayton gets into an accident which he stated crippled him pretty significantly though presumably not to the point where suicide was required by honor. Since then, he's stated that he lives off of his substack subscribers, and possibly other online monetization, and to my recollection has not mentioned any other remunerative labor as part of his life.

You've gone from reading naughty thoughts from an erudite college kid, to reading the thoughts of a somewhat crippled professional hot-take artist dependent upon the goodwill of the kind of people who pay to read the latest in esoteric hitlerism and think it's fun to put "dark" or "warlord" in front of assorted things.

though it's increasingly been discredited for that purpose by Mises-Caucus types

What are "Mises-Caucus types"?

I'm using the term broadly (types) rather than specifically (the actual org) to refer to Right-Libertarians who are more right wing than they are libertarian.

The historical dynamic circa Obama era college campuses (when Dennis was a punchline) was for right wingers to claim to be fiscally conservative (sane) but socially liberal (live and let live) in order to avoid being treated poorly by left wingers of the time. Libertarianism offers an intellectual framework to argue against the Civil Rights Act without having to argue against black people, and argue against legal protections for homosexuals without arguing against homosexuality.

Over time that cover has worn thin, as it has been overused by people who WANT to argue against black people and homosexuality, and are willing to sacrifice a lot of legacy libertarian intellectual priorities (anti police, anti death penalty, anti government regulations of private sexual or pharmaceutical life) to do so.

The mises caucus itself has largely been a small and weird group concerned with trying to hijack the libertarian party and tie it as a junior branch of MAGA, in hopes of getting some libertarian priorities passed by Team Trump. This may be a shrewd move as sausage making weather vane politics, and reflects a broader feeling that the greater threat to personal liberty is no longer PATRIOT Act Republicans but woke Democrats.

But the point of the reference is basically that as the people using Libertarian as code for"not left" have increasingly used it as code for "right wing," the rhetorical gambit for young men has lost its value as cover.

For a comparison: American Catholics who gesture vaguely at Liberation Theology as a defense when leftists attack the Church.

They are the "pragmatists" who caused the Libertarian Party to effectively endorse Trump rather than supporting its own candidate, Oliver.

Article

To be honest, I consider myself a libertarian, but never had any desire to support any of the LP candidates. Oliver personally checks too many woke boxes for me (no, it's not about him being gay, that part doesn't bother me at all). And in practical terms, between woke takeover and compromising on some libertarian principles to stop the woke takeover, I think it is prudent to choose the latter. When the choice is between Hamas-supporting racist trantifa totalitarian marxists and somewhat-bigger-government conservatives, I think a practical thing for a libertarian would be to vote for the lesser evil. If the woke threat ever goes away, we can go back to the discussion about making somewhat-bigger-government into smaller-government, but I personally think positioning it as "both are equally impure and there's no difference" to me is childish and silly.

What happened is kind of a sad story. Kulak, you see, unsuccessfully attempted the hock… and the rest is as it is.

The irony is that this is arguably a more true explanation than not.

Lol

The hock?

Hock my balls.

In all seriousness: this guy. I don’t normally share mod notes, but in this case, his final note says “unban him if he survives.”

I love this place.

IIRC (I probably don't): A while ago, a user on this site kept posting about how he was going to be dropped off by helicopter with nothing but a knife in an isolated location as a way to forge himself into a real man or die trying. The isolated location was Hock Mountain, so he called this escapade "the Hock". The moderators eventually banned him for being a single-issue poster, since he kept talking about it but never actually did it.

The isolated location was Hock Mountain,

That mountain would have been a sensible choice -- as I recall his actual goal was a winter crossing of the Brooks range in Northern Alaska, which is much more ambitious.

I forget why he wants to call it The Hock, he may have been coy on this point...

"Hock" in this context means to throw; he intended to "Hock" himself out into the wilderness to survive by his grit.

It doesn't though -- "huck" means "throw"; "hock" is something the guy just kind of made up. (ironically there's also kind of snowshoe/ski hybrid called "Hok", that would have been a better equipment choice for his quest than what I recall him considering -- I don't think he knows about them though)

Pretty much. His hope was that completing The Hock would make him attractive to women, who he thought were picking up on the fact that he hadn't done anything tough in his life.

https://manifold.markets/BenjaminIkuta/will-skookumtree-pinetree-successfu

Specifically, he believed women weren't interested in him because they want (and can magically sense) a man who has overcome mortal danger. Thus the Hock.

I think this position is true in principle. Women are attracted to men on a mission. That user's solution seemed extreme. But if he had directed his energies into making meaningful strides in his chosen passion (such as, say, hiking) then I think there would be a lot to commend in it. And, as a happy side effect, he may well have become more attractive, or at least more fulfilled.

Women are attracted to men on a mission

He is/was an American med student. If he'd toughed it out a few years longer, I think his difficulties in getting laid would have been greatly ameliorated. I'm sure some nurse would have snatched him up regardless of his weapons-grade autism!

I think there's definitely something to what you say: women are attracted to men who have drive, who are capable of doing things, etc. I just don't think that SkookumTree's position was defensible. He believed that it was specifically overcoming mortal peril that women valued, and that they only wanted men who had done this. That was going too far, but he refused to listen to the many people trying to point that out to him.

It’s a leviathan shaped hole.

There is a really good Chris McCandless/Grizzly-man joke in there somewhere in there but im not smart enough to make it.

I'm embarrassed how much I giggled.

Consider it another piece of evidence that NTR is the mind-killer. His meltdown looked like a fairly common instance of how men go down a negative thought spiral about their tribe's women being taken by the ethnic outgroup. (Using the anime culture term here might seem a tad basic, but that subculture still tends to produce some of the most unhinged demonstrations of these thought patterns in action. Though see also the legendary American obsession with the putative virility of black men.)
I'd reckon the same thousands of White British girls from low-human-capital backgrounds were sex-trafficked by old men who look like the cast of Top Gear long before the Pakistanis came along, but this would never inspire an emotional reaction from halfway across the internet. (One individual was seemingly single-handedly about 1/3 as prolific as the entire Rotherham gang, but who is fedposting about the BBC now?)

I continue to not understand why his fans assess him as a "very skilled writer and fairly smart". I was willing to grant that perhaps I was being distracted by the rambling/malapropisms/formatting and higher-IQ readers could see past the style (which he always claimed was a deliberate choice to... throw off writing analysis?) and see some spark of brilliance in the substance behind it, but the circumstance that, in what was by all accounts a parting shot in which he could no longer contain his righteous fury, he did not for a moment break with the style even as he went through an emotional outburst made me update in favour of it being genuine and him really being somewhat confused and verbally challenged.

I won't defend Kulak, but c'mon man.

I hope you can see how gangs of men raping tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of girls in horrific ways is bad.

Your crime stop is trying to justify or contextualize this disgusting abuse and dismissing it as racism. That's the exact reason why the crimes kept happening, how the victims' cries for help were ignored, and how the perpetrators were given comically low sentences (when they were tried at all). The smug attitude of people like you directly led to thousands of children being raped. No, these "low human capital" girls were not going to get raped anyway. What an insane thing to think.

Furthermore, you seem to have no awareness of the scope of the problem. For one, it wasn't just Rotherham.

Being jealous of your tribe's women is not exactly racism - it does not require ascribing any particular qualities to the people who take them other than that they are outsiders. Racism could then be used to rationalise why you find it bad that they get with a member of the outgroup rather than a member of the ingroup you have no particular relation to, but that's not what I was insinuating or talking about.

Furthermore, you seem to have no awareness of the scope of the problem. For one, it wasn't just Rotherham.

He was the one who started to talk about Rotherham. I'll admit I did not know about the number of other similar cases (I had only heard of one smaller one) until looking just now, though "hundreds of thousands" still seems unrealistic. (I'd guess maybe 50k as an upper bound for the last 40 years, which seems to be the time window over which the published counts run. Adding up numbers from all the cases I could find on Wikipedia gives about 10k total.)

Meanwhile, in the Savile case, Wikipedia cites the police as talking about 450 alleged sexual abuse victims, and allegations and semi-open discussion of it date back to the '90s. A particular paragraph goes

In 2007, Savile was interviewed under caution by police investigating an allegation of indecent assault at the now-closed Duncroft Approved School for Girls near Staines, Surrey, in the 1970s, when he was a regular visitor. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) advised there was insufficient evidence to take any further action and no charges were brought.[11] In 2012, it was reported that staff at the school had not been questioned about the allegations at the time.[28] A former headmistress of the school said she had been "hoodwinked" by Savile,[29] but described some of those who had brought the allegations as "delinquents".[30][31]

which really sounds quite similar - and this was apparently going on for some 50 years and only was made part of the public record after his death. Between the circumstance that apparently a single person can perpetrate abuses of this scale unreported, the Epstein/royalty connections, other European high society cases such as Dutroux in Belgium, and the little contacts I had into the chav stratum of British society (back when I was a kid making friends in MMORPGs) and stories of sugar-daddy dating I heard from there, I can absolutely believe that a big portion of those teenagers and kids would have just been groomed by somebody else.

He was the one who started to talk about Rotherham.

No he was not. Elon Musk made it the topic du jour and we had a top level post about it before Kulak posted his screed.

We had a couple users who would bring it up every couple months long before that. Kulak might have been one of them.

It happened in large parts of north England and for over two decades, to the point where there are books about it. Every sane person would want a lot more than just mass deportations here. My reply also clarifies how this is worse than the the Jimmy saville issue.

The people doing thus are explicitly doing it out of racial and religious angst. Islam allows subcontinent dwellers to get away with crime. Even today, most news media won't touch it, most politicians simply pretend to ignore it and pajeet mullahs from a country that's pajeet even for India are ether gloating about it or diverting attention if they are simply not quiet so that this passes over.

Kulaks not wrong to want violence, he's wrong to call for it as the state just wants a way to simply label you as a stereotype. Jim of Jim's blog has some good takes, some psychopathic ones, I earlier commented on how women don't always enjoy rape (surprise surprise) as they purposefully don't visit unsafe places, India lost tourists because it has a rapey image, Pakistan has no tourists at all compared to Thailand for the same reasons. It's not just ntr or criminals being hot, it's simply the state telling people "fuck you, you can't do much and if you fight, we'll do you even worse".

After all, if you can justify reperations, why should policing and then by extension women not be left unchecked? You've had similar calls for women as reperations in my nation so my point is brought up so elucidate that such trains of thought do exist within many. I might be wrong and may regret writing this however. Double standards are universal, they don't stop just at uni admissions.

I don't want to be culture war ish but this is where we are at. Richard Spencer regrets his alt right time because one bad incident was enough, it took him 8 years to see similar memes come back to life due to a thermidor. The central nation states ability to conduct violence and the civilians being toothless with a police and armed forces ready to shoot you isn't a pretty situation.

Small correction: "reperations" should be "reparations".

not wrong to want violence, he's wrong to call for it

Ideally it would happen organically.

The men of 1915 Atlanta organized a "Vigilance Committee" for the rape and murder of one girl, to see the perpetrator hanged.

Vigilante hangings were really having a cultural moment in that time period.

This is not a good thing.

Uh, vigilante hangings in the south had been a big thing for a while, and ended because the law managed to crack down on criminals enough that it wasn’t viewed as needed. It wasn’t some sort of fad; the republic of Texas had a civil war over the practice, although it gets lost in the history books for ‘also being at war with the commanches and Mexico simultaneously’ reasons.

There was a bit of a spike circa 1915. Noisy, yes, but there are a couple obvious suspects. I think it’s fair to describe the Second Klan as a cultural moment.

For reasons discussed previously, I think OP’s choice of Leo Frank is pretty disingenuous.

I concurrently believe that 1) Leo Frank was a pedophile who deserved to hang, and the actions of the klan in defending an innocent black man are a rare mark in their favor and 2) wanting to talk about Frank all the time is probably not motivated by sincere interest in justice practices in 1910's Georgia. So no disagreement about that.

Lynching was definitely A Thing which has been a feature of the south since there was a cultural region identifiable as the south; describing the second klan as a cultural moment is fair, referring to a bump in lynchings concurrently with the great war is probably fair, but referring to lynchings as a cultural moment is not.

No?

I'd think it serves to both punish the wicked and level set expectations for prosecutions.

If corruption is preventing the administration of justice the city needs a Vigilance Committee.

I both agree with you about the seriousness of this particular crime (or category of crime) and disagree about Kulak’s sincerity. As others noted, he was demanding rivers of blood for causes as diverse as vaccine mandates, kids required to go to school, the existence of the state and various other things for years before this. It’s easy to conclude that it’s not about the issue, it’s about the guy.

Cuckoldry is a subject and an insult I try to stay away intuitively, nothing good comes from even knowing about it

Though see also the legendary American obsession with the putative virility of black men

Which never made any sense to me, not a surprise that people who actually believe this stuff are usually wierdo outcasts who pay internet domme mommies money.

I'd reckon the same thousands of White British girls from low-human-capital backgrounds were sex-trafficked by old men who look like the cast of Top Gear long before the Pakistanis came along,

I disagree, Jimmy abused hundreds, and maybe thousands but it's very difficult to claim the numbers would be the same. The targeted rapes are targeted, Jimmy was just a creep, thus is you treating host girls as war brides and state supplicating to your demands due to the cathedral having set the consensus. His reactions align with sanity, the suggestions don't.

I'm surprised to know if he did fedpost on reddit, I cannot imagine even using cuss words there unless they're targeted towards non bioleninsts.

I am assuming you are asking why he did the big rant post a few days ago. The answer is "that's normal for him". Kulak has always been posting about how the solution to our problems is murder. It's like, his whole thing. He just stopped fedposting around here because he found a bunch of people who wanted to see him fedpost on Substack. I don't think he's particularly smart (except insofar as it takes some amount of brains to cultivate a blog), and I definitely don't think he's a good writer. He's all heat, no light.

Even criminals need a competent defense. I mean, you and I might not agree that murdering everyone who disagrees is an optimal strategy (or at least not a Nash equilibrium) but is it so bad for someone to take the other side and at least have the discussion?

Bad as in "it should be disallowed by the rules"? No, not really. But it's bad in the sense that it's not interesting or adding anything of value to the forum.

On the one hand, it‘s likely clickbait. By itself that would be morally irresponsible.

On the other hand, imagine this: a foaming-at-the-mouth crazy person with a gun keeps saying how much he hates his discussion group, wants to kill people, and doesn‘t believe in discussion; and most of the group‘s responses are completely ignoring his main point, tone, and the reality of the situation, instead showing off how not-insulted, and what great decouplers they are, by using the ramblings as a jumping off point for a purely academic when-is-violence-legitimate discussion. Meanwhile, he puts cartridges in the chambers.

I did adderess the point and have similar sentiments but different suggestions, I hope that helps me with kulak's basilisk

I do think there was a clear political shift from some kind of ultra-ancap anti-state position in which all government power is illegitimate and the absolute imperative is to destroy the state because it is the state (rather than what it stands for or does, necessarily) to a more generic Twitter far right position in which a supremely powerful reactionary dictator or movement has to come to power to make the world the way it should be.

How much of that was driven by his X following / paying audience on Substack and how much is organic is the relevant question, I guess. But the number of true ancaps is clearly a tiny percentage of the number of mainstream far-rightists.

He seems like he’s still kind of anti-state, like maybe a more racist and less coherent version of Hoppe.

I'm unaware of what he was like before, I didn't surf the culture war threads. I have similar views somewhat, at least anti police and judiciary ones from reading Aidan Maclear but calls for violence on the daily basis does not seem very high percentage.

Kulak isn’t very intelligent and isn’t a very good writer. This has nothing to do with his ideology; there are people with ideas I find far more repellent here and elsewhere who I would freely admit are clearly intelligent, compelling writers. I think he has a kind of sincere autistic charm to him, but he’s not even 50th percentile smarts among regular contributors here.

To this point the two kulak posts I most rememeber from the Reddit days are one where he had a foaming diatribe against sales as evil and soul sucking, but a humorous unawareness that sales as a field was more than cold calling. He had worked one soul sucking sales jobs and blindly extrapolated a nonsensical point out of his narrow angst.

The other was an incoherent unworkable point of view about living on boats. Something like a suggestion that everyone should.

Either way, the guy has always been extremely narrow in his point of view and very bad at scaling or extrapolation, which is why the default to fed posting is his sweet spot

Who are some you recommend. I don't read much of the culture war stuff, I should now and check out the quality contributions thread too. I was told to read your takes btw so do recommend some by yourself too.

I don't think anything happened that I'm not just about on the same page with, to be honest. The only difference is the inclination to articulate it rather than sticking to norms. As mentioned in a couple of my recent posts about the death penalty, I am really having trouble sticking with politeness around certain issues, and things like Rotherham and Islamist bullshit pretty well top that list.

I more or less fedpost around rotherham too; I may phrase it more politely but the basic inclination of ‘this is when the britons should have started to kill people’ is not that different. I don’t think kulak having the same idea is him going off the rails; lots of people do.

Why is the cat fedposting?

  1. why wouldn't the cat fedpost
  2. if you were smart, you'd be doing the same thing

My reactions and sentiments, what I would think would ideally happen to such people is medieval, modern judicial process is too kind even if it's carried out properly on all which it can never be. My question was for him asking for more violence publicly, if anyone who's not related to the kids or even is goes out and does what Cain Velasques did, the UK will find a good way to spin the story around.

Bad political action is worse than no political action, having the sentiments and calling for them to be carried out are different things. Jan 6 didn't kill millions of bioleninists, neither did charlottesville yet people are spending years behind bars for both.

For clarity - I truly think the kind of punishments that you see via Islamic nations like public humiliation, mass deportations and inclusion of everyone Complicit alongside state actors is the minimum. I subscribe to the idea of not not having formal police and judiciary at the city level or rather a much weaker one because in such a scanrio, you can get justice and tell people to leave your part of the land alone.

That does not happen unfortunately, we live in far more cucked times, any calls for violence will make it worse. I'm not calling for down votes or a ban.

So I'm boycotting Microsoft, due to user-hostility in the newer versions of Windows, and due to bankrolling the apocalypse OpenAI. The former reason means I'm basically looking at Linux. Recommendations for a noob-friendly distro and "Linux noob manual"? Particular needs include ability to run Wine well and high stability (i.e. few OS crashes), although those sound pretty basic. Low power use would also be nice, although my needs in that regard are quite modest (like, if the OS's hogging over 10% of a current-gen processor, that's bad).

Ubuntu & Linux Mint are the most frequently mentioned as newbie-friendly. Hardware is important - choose hardware config that is reported to work with Linux. Otherwise there might be a lot on non-newbie-friendly dances involved to get things to work. If that's not a problem I found modern Linuxes to be pretty newbie-friendly to the point you don't really need to even touch command-line for most common tasks (I love command line, but I am speaking from a newbie perspective).

For the most part, modern Linux problems with power management, regardless of distro, tend to revolve around putting the computer into the right sleep states, or powering down newer CPUs to just their e-Cores, rather than high idle utilization. Fancy systems like hypr will have more idle cpu utilization than minimalist ones like DSLinux, but on a mainstream processor from the last ten years it's going to be a wash.

As in the post KingOfTheBailey linked, I'll usually point to Linux Mint to most newer users. It's not hyperoptimized at any one thing, but it'll give you the most reliable on-boarding experience. Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, and just plain Debian are all other good options for most cases, and for people attached to the Windows/Mac UI paradigms, Elementary or Zorin will work.

Ubuntu and its derivatives have already been recommended, and they arent bad, so I won’t dwell on them too much. Instead, I’ll focus on what I see as two other options, depending on your goals.

If You Want to Learn and Master Linux: Arch Linux

If your goal is to truly understand Linux and become proficient, rather than spending years googling obscure errors with "Ubuntu" tacked onto the search query, I’d recommend Arch Linux. Not necessarily the "vanilla" version—you could start with more accessible Arch-based distributions like EndeavourOS—but going through the Arch installation process step by step has immense educational value. It’s essentially a hands-on way to build your own Linux system, teaching you the fundamentals as you go.

The main reason I recommend Arch is its outstanding documentation, which is second to none. While it’s possible to use Ubuntu and reference Arch’s wiki, Ubuntu often runs outdated software versions and introduces important differences that can leave you even more confused unless you’re already familiar with both systems. With Arch, the documentation is directly applicable, helping you bootstrap your knowledge in a structured and effective way. In my opinion, it’s the closest thing Linux has to a “manual.”

If You Just Want to Be an End User: Bazzite

If your goal is to simply use Linux as an end user—especially if your interest in Wine is related to gaming—then I’d recommend Bazzite. It’s essentially a more generalized, open-source equivalent of Valve’s SteamOS (used on the Steam Deck) but designed for broader compatibility with PCs.

Bazzite offers a curated experience, pre-configured for gaming and multimedia use, with support for features like VRR/G-Sync and potentially HDR (assuming you opt for the KDE-based version). Its architecture makes it harder to break and easier to recover from issues if you do manage to run into problems. This makes it an excellent choice for a seamless gaming setup.

The main downside is that Bazzite can feel limiting. It follows its own designs and workflows, which aren’t easily transferable to other Linux distributions. If you decide to move to a different distro later, you may have to re-learn certain concepts or configurations

The base Arch install has gotten a lot better these days: if you're considering something like Manjaro or EndeavourOS, I'd really recommend just going straight to Arch with a list of desired programs. And it will teach you a lot about what's actually going on. But that's less because archinstall is superhumanly easy to use, and more EndeavourOS/Manjaro will let you get really far over your head if you can't or don't want to get into the real nitty-gritty of things.

It's a lot better as an option after you've already gotten enough experience with a more placid distro to know what you need to run first, though, so I really can't recommend it for new Linux users unless they've got a very specific use case.

The normiest answer is certainly Ubuntu. Go with whichever long term support (LTS) is most recent. There will be the most stability/google results for this approach.

Just start with mint. I use the xfce version on old hardware, but it doesn't get as much dev attention as the shinier enviros.

Linux often has a problem with not clocking down and putting accessories to sleep, causing high idle power use. This is something you can fix (I use the xfce cpufreq plugin that gets my old laptop down to .8ghz and <15w), but they really need basic windows power management settings out of the box.

Did you see @gattsuru's megapost? The bottom chunk has a very thorough answer to the "which distro?" question, though not so much on the "noob manual" side.