domain:apollomindset.substack.com
CrispyFriedBarnacles
5m ago
Maybe some day... although I'm trying not to overshare too much here. A lot of the experiences were really specific, and interesting in large part because of how specific they were - I had a lot of "in the right place at the right time" in my 20s in addition to putting in a ton of hard work.
wqnm
5m ago
I have to say, We’re Finally Landing gives the MST3K credits song a run for coziest theme. I’ve woken up to both after nodding off many a time.
So yeah, love me some Summoning Salt videos; his stuff is, for my money, some of the best “videos to fall asleep to” content out there. Really nails that sweet spot of engaging enough to prevent your mind from racing/wandering (which I struggle with), but low stakes and “cozy” enough that it doesn’t really keep you up. Video melatonin, like lazy afternoon Golf for the YouTube generation.
That said, on the occasion that I am watching not before bed and/or legitimately interested in the game being discussed, I will admit I generally watch his videos at 1.5x speed. He has a very, say, deliberate, delivery.
Nevertheless, it is possible for one people to actually oppress another. Palestinians don't get to jury-vote their coethnics out of crimes in Israeli courts, there is/was no Palestinian president of Israel... they're actually being oppressed.
Sure, but why? Because they’ve engaged in a (so far) futile decades-long campaign to reverse the Jewish settlement of the levant that eventually angered the settlers enough that they imposed a series of escalating forms of oppression on them. Losing East Jerusalem, much of the West Bank, various other territories was the direct consequence of losing wars (just as it was for the Native Americans) many times in a row. The walls and checkpoints that prevent many Palestinians from living and working in Israel were likewise erected solely in response to terror attacks on Israeli civilians committed by these people and in their name. At every juncture, the noose tightened slowly because the Palestinians did not admit defeat and surrender, culturally and militarily, which is the route to survival for any conquered people.
Native Americans have reservations and affirmative action, sure, but many live on territory far removed from their ancestral homeland due to the westward forced migrations of the 19th century, and in total they have only a tiny percentage of their historical holdings (obviously), far less proportionally than the Palestinians have. Much of the Indian welfare and casino apparatus also only came into being a century or more after the great majority of the country was ethnically cleansed of most or all of its native population, so Israel has time yet.
Many on this forum are too accustomed to dismissing racism and oppression. Most of the time, the concept is used inappropriately. Blacks in America receive all kinds of special privileges, the US media and govt tries to sweep black anti-white terror attacks under the rug.
There has been no effective organized black nationalist movement in American history, and the last ineffective one fizzled out in the 1970s. Crime stats are one thing (almost no black-on-white crime is ‘terrorism’, that ascribes a political and ideological aspiration to the perpetrators that, as mentioned, they just don’t have), 300 armed and trained black men aren’t invading the country club to slaughter the men and rape the women as part of a race war against whites designed to drive them back to Europe, that isn’t something that happens in America.
There is a world in which the Palestinians accepted the reasonable 1967 borders (after already losing to Israel twice), kept a substantial proportion of their land, fortified their borders with the help of their Arab neighbors (such that no settlers would be coming in) and set up a relatively peaceful coexistence with Israel. As they did before and after, they chose otherwise. Gaza would not have been destroyed if Hamas hadn’t gambled on Hezbollah and West Bank Palestinians successfully joining a huge uprising on October 7th.
The Arabs are actually oppressed, certainly. But they are oppressed because they have continued to make very bad decisions in service of their pride over their comfort, liberty and life for so many years and show no sign of stopping. They had options and still do, if worse ones.
KMC
34m ago
Prose seemed fine, although difficult to judge because I was reading in Spanish.
What was the glyph Navani painted, and what is unit of value in the climactic trade?
The reason I love the book so much is because of those scenes, starting from when we see Syl full size.
I don't think he's written a better book since, but he's written plenty of good ones.
I actually haven't played much Victoria 3 either—I've just made mods and observed what the AI-controlled countries do with them in "hands-off" campaigns. But, from watching YouTubers play Victoria 3, I imagine that adding sea access to the interiors of North America and Europe would significantly increase those regions' economic output by alleviating infrastructure bottlenecks that otherwise cannot be overcome until railroads are constructed and expensively (due to the high cost of engines) maintained.
In the vanilla game, these navigable inland water bodies are represented with a flat +15 or +20 bonus to infrastructure. This is equivalent to getting a blockade-immune level 5 or level 7 port building for free, which IMO is a bit extreme.
Bartender_Venator
40m ago
Which, I'd guess, is also why when state politician #586 is killed, the resolution honouring her and condemning the killings gets passed unanimously.
I think a literal palletload of MREs dropped out of a C130 has a pretty high chance of being an accidental kinetic weapon. Probably possible to do a bit better though.
I was thinking more hot-glue two packs to a stick and see if you can get them to airfoil like a maple-seed, or even just dump the packs out loose from, say, 200 feet up. I've never seen one of these packs, I'm going off handling MRE packs before, which were relatively light and packaged in very tough plastic.
My assumption is that Israel is absolutely trying to put food pressure on Gaza; I think there was a link in the international thread that 10% of the gazan population is now dead, and I would expect that number to increase significantly before this is over.
wemptronics
46m ago
Very cool, is he still with us? Get'em on here! (But probably Friday Fun not on my Gaza polluted post)
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
51m ago
I think a literal palletload of MREs dropped out of a C130 has a pretty high chance of being an accidental kinetic weapon. Probably possible to do a bit better though.
Part of it, though, is that helicopters are just not that expensive in the grand scheme of things - I see $2400 / ton from the World Food Program for their program of doing very similar airdrops of food over South Sudan.
And yeah beans and rice are cheaper, but even if you cut the cost of the food itself to $0 you still need to ship about 1-1.5kg / person / day, which works out to 1M metric tons / year of food. At that point the cost of delivering the food by air is the strong limiting constraint.
Israel has already spent $30B on this war, so if getting costs down by 10x really is viable I am even more confused why they haven't done it, absent the obvious explanation of "they really are trying to put food pressure on Gaza".
vorpa-glavo
56m ago
But honestly, the best comparison is probably MLK as there are few instances to choose from. Would you hold a moment of silence for him?
I think the issue is that most of us, Left, Right or Radical Centrist, grew up in a world where we were told MLK was basically a saint our whole lives. It's trivial for somebody with that background to say they'd hold a moment of silence for him in 2025.
We're in a very different position from the people in 1963 who were watching things like the March on Washington with fresh eyes, and who might have validly feared that 250,000 black people marching on the nation's capitol was an implicit threat to anglo-American culture and values at the time, and not just in a straightforwardly racist or xenophobic way. Even if MLK himself was intentionally non-violent, I think a lot of people living through his rise to prominence were scared of the downstream effects of what he was advocating for.
The question of holding a moment of silence for him in 1968 would have been in a vastly different political context than asking the same question today.
Israel and friends did parachute pallets in late July/early August in coordination with the UAE and Jordan. Footage and image of a pallet. It was criticized for being a dangerous (probably untrue) and token (true) effort.
A big Berlin airlift that aims to feed everyone is doable if the US is supporting in a major way. Israel has maybe 15 Hercules. UAE/Jordan around the same between them. If everyone tries hard, and the US matches with airframes and maintenance support, you get 40 planes.
Running the numbers through the robot, bottleneck is space (only 6-8 pallets per flight) and available airframes. Somewhere between 200-400 flights to deliver one daily ration of ~2100 calories to 2 million mouths. The high numbers were when I tried to get a guesstimate on the GHF's 20kg 3-5 day rations. To get to the low end we need x5 sorties per day from our fleet of 40. If, however, you managed to fill the back of the plane with loose grains of rice until max load, you could cut that down to 60 flights. The robot tried really hard to convince me "you can’t pour loose grain in the cabin" because "loose bulk will shift during flight and create dangerous center-of-gravity," but I am not convinced.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
Machine-gunning and shelling people to avoid crowd crushes is obviously and inherently counter-productive.
If the IDF cared so much about how food was distributed in Gaza, they should try doing some food distributions themselves, win hearts and minds. Having food makes you popular amongst the hungry! US/British troops were very, very popular in Germany post-war since they controlled the food and treated the Germans with a very, very basic level of respect - even though they'd just bombed and blasted the country to ruins.
The IDF doesn't want to distribute food, they think it's too risky getting close to these guys? Then let some UN or NGOs do it.
But the IDF wants to starve the population as part of their campaign strategy and out of hatred, which is why they shoot people trying to get food and make it so extremely difficult to bring food in at all.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
Your “obviously unarmed” Palestinian might well be wearing a bomb
So the logical, rational thing to do is to go out, chase her down as she runs away and magdump her?
The captain didn't believe she had a bomb, he just wanted to kill this girl.
Dean
Flairless
1hr ago
Sounds like there could be an interesting effort post there to share. Something something how the early 2000s video game industry evolved?
Dean
Flairless
1hr ago
Greater (>10x), since you can pack a helicopter into the largest ones, and yes (mostly), but also not necessarily.
The larger issue is more the relative precision of drops. You can not only greatly increase the survival / receipt of food delivery when doing it via helicopter rather than plane, but you can also even manage a loose idea of who will receive it. Such as, say, a clan enclave that has defensible positions against a Hamas seizure/retaliation group, as opposed to airdropping into Israel or the Mediterranean. So you could absolutely carry X ration packages cheaper in the plane, but you'd also need to carry far more than X packages on Y planes to get the same effect.
High-air drops aren't really effective, and tend to assume you have relatively free mobility across the land area being dropped upon. There's a reason the Berlin Airbridge was overwhelmingly land-unloads while the airdrops were propaganda.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
that these were dispossessed people just trying to defend their land and doing what they could in protest
These narratives were justifying Palestinian hatred of Israel, which is different from saying 'They’re boys who try to storm the food distribution sites'. It's the same kind of difference between 'Yes the Palestinians attack Israeli civilians but that's OK because X' and 'actually, there is no such thing as an Israeli civilian, they're fighting-age men/women and due to conscription they're all military targets - anything is permitted'. The former is an attempt at some kind of moral argument excusing admitted hatred, the latter is a way to cover up actions that stem from hatred as practical necessity. If the Israelis were really so concerned about old men and women/children getting food, they wouldn't restrict food aid so much. There are many better ways to prevent crowd crush or rationalize food distribution besides machine-gun fire and artillery!
The whole concept is bizarre. Suppose the Palestinians somehow laid so many roadside bombs Israelis couldn't get food without being gruesomely maimed. Then the Palestinians say 'oh they were clearly trying to steal food, we were simply punishing thieves per age-old traditions - cutting a leg here or there with a landmine works wonders to prevent theft'. It's just adding insult to injury.
If some Native American terror movement rises out of the alcoholic emptiness of the reservations to start committing terror attacks against white American civilians
The key difference is that native Americans get all kinds of special privileges in America. Native Americans get special casino rights, scholarships and all kinds of affirmative action.
Many on this forum are too accustomed to dismissing racism and oppression. Most of the time, the concept is used inappropriately. Blacks in America receive all kinds of special privileges, the US media and govt tries to sweep black anti-white terror attacks under the rug. So the narrative that they're systemically oppressed doesn't hold. The US military doesn't set up 'if you come near our command post we will shoot you and then confirm the kill' zones in black neighbourhoods. If George Floyd was a 13 year old girl being shot at from long range, people here would likely have a different stance.
Nevertheless, it is possible for one people to actually oppress another. Palestinians don't get to jury-vote their coethnics out of crimes in Israeli courts, there is/was no Palestinian president of Israel... they're actually being oppressed.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
yeah, I see the skepticism over cost as a challenge. 4.70 per ratpack x 2 ratpacks x 2,050,000 inhabitants = $18.8 million, so obviously the large majority of the cost estimate here is delivery. I'm pretty sure cargo planes have <10x the capacity of a helicopter with significantly lower costs per flight hour.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
TIL Tucker Carlson eulogized Barger.
In July 2022, the Hells Angels made a request to hold a memorial service for Barger at the Oakland Coliseum in East Oakland the following month.[186] Instead, Barger's funeral was held at a motorsports racetrack in Stockton on September 24, 2022. An estimated 7,000 people attended, and the event was peaceful.[187] Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson spoke at the funeral. Carlson said that he had been a fan of Barger since his college years, quoted Barger as saying "stay loyal, remain free, and always value honor", and added: "I want to pay tribute to the man who spoke those words".[188] Barger was laid to rest at Sacramento Valley National Cemetery in Dixon.[2]
Dean
Flairless
1hr ago
I'm half tempted to ask you for the meanest cowboys jokes you can come up with, and half-worried that you'd deliver.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1hr ago
Seeing that phrase written instead of spoken and I imagine you checking your wrist.
Dean
Flairless
1hr ago
Unironically, you could probably also figure out a way to shoot them out of a canon. Or a literal trebuchet.
Wouldn't be the best way to do so, obviously, but if we're looking for cost-efficient airdrops, why not blimps and zepplins?
Maybe we could get steampunk zepplins after all.
But not an organic one. That one's pretty obviously top-down. That'll teach him to get along with the girls and choose the dollhouse or toy stove over the blocks and trucks in centers, I guess- or at least, it'll certainly teach him how idiot adults see those things. Certainly an important lesson, best learned early.
Nothing, or however you'd nominally handle the general form of "but his mom lets him X and Y" if and when your kid asks why he can't be a girl too. Your way of doing that may be productive, or it may not, but that's up to you.
As for "what's he called today?", well, you'll likely be sorting that out with him directly (as will your kids, in their own way). I'm sure you have enough social grace to figure out how to confirm someone's name if you forgot. Preferably when there's nobody to answer that question for him present, of course.
Ah, but kids also question each other, especially if it's about something particularly unusual. You might not find the answers to those questions satisfactory, but I assure you they do eventually get asked.
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