domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9m ago
I saw the new Beetlejuice film today on a whim (an air-conditioned movie theater sounded more appealing than the 96-degree weather we’re suffering through in San Diego this week) and I thought it was solid! I haven’t seen the original film since I was a teenager, so I likely missed most of the nostalgia triggers, but as a standalone film it’s still enjoyable. Macabre and wryly funny, with the right level of restrained camp. For a woman in her fifties, Winona Ryder has aged fairly gracefully (although maybe I’m just biased because I believe that in her prime she’s arguably the most beautiful woman to have ever lived), and even Jenna Ortega, whose appeal has always more or less eluded me, is used well. I share the general opinion here that the era of recycled IP we’ve lived in for the last decade - endless sequels, prequels, reboots, and spinoffs - has made TV and film pretty unenjoyable, but as sequels go I think this one is a fun time, even for someone with little or no investment in the original film.
TIRM
20m ago
Yep. An American, a North Korean and a South Korean.
Enormous enough adversity degrades and permanently weakens people. A child of starvation and parasite infestations doesn't make for large tough adults.
SkoomaDentist
39m ago
Besides, what would you even need steam power for if you aren't trying to mine coal on a large scale anyway? And when you can always use slaves for what mining you do?
(The first use of steam power was in coal mining)
SkoomaDentist
44m ago
The ones I know grew up looking at parents and other older relatives crippled by polio
You don't even have to be a boomer for that. I'm a gen X'er and a childhood friend of mine got infected by polio as a young kid (luckily with no serious long term effects). In a western country.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
In some ways increased safety consciousness is bad, but my mother was breastfed in the front seat of the car; I don't think we should go back to that.
Eh, as long as her mother wasn't driving at the time.
But you see, in two generations we've gone from normies being OK with "toss 'em in the cargo area" to "disagreeable nonconformist types" refusing to so much as ignore an ill-fitting seat belt. That's an enormous amount of additional safetyism, and it may well have directly resulted in preventing more births than deaths.
No_one
2hr ago
I'm very much in agreement with this. Kids need stress, and not just of the exam kind.
One of my less pleasant but ultimately pretty beneficial childhood experience was attending a summer Scouts' camp at age 10. I was a member of the detachment but the summer camps weren't mandatory.
Anyway, it was somewhat unpleasant, mostly because the level of discipline demanded was fairly high, and as a very pre-pubertal kid* I didn't even have any machismo motivation that helped later with unpleasant things like bathing in very cold water.
And of course the labor, cut down dry trees, sawed them for firewood, cooked all the food, carted all the water and we built the camp ourselves. It was nothing dangerous or backbreaking, especially not for the smallest kids, but novel for bookish nerds.
The food wasn't the greatest usually, as you'd expect when the guy who is overseeing it is usually a teenager, and there's no real refrigeration apart from keeping stuff in a cool stream. We only ate meat once during the whole camp. Really helped with fixing my attitude to food too. I stopped being picky.
I remember I cried halfway through when the parents were visiting, but ultimately stayed.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Well yes, concern for the safety of the children themselves when it just looks like seatbelts don't fit right trumps not letting the government tell you what to do. In some ways increased safety consciousness is bad, but my mother was breastfed in the front seat of the car; I don't think we should go back to that.
No_one
2hr ago
raising paramilitary groups and murdering people in street fights was not very common
Entire Europe had a wave of revolutionary violence in the 19th century. There was a surely a number of coups. At the very least Serbia had a pretty nasty coup in which the monarch was killed, his wife too and the killers kept her severed breast, later dried, as a souvenir. Those nice guys who did the coup later were a proximate cause to WW1..
Napoleon was an absolute ruler and also almost united Europe.
one form (democracy) to another (dictatorship), I would think most people would call that "abnormal"
Greeks believed it's natural for democracies to decay into dictatorships, and when considering the fate of western liberal democracies - none are actually much democratic anymore insofar as voting doesn't help. (no one voted for immigration, no one voted for more war, Macron lost elections yet he gave the premiership to a party that got 39 seats, down 22 from their last result. Not to the victors - the left coalition, not to his party or to nationalist. The guys who came in fourth, somehow. How's that supposed to even work ? I guess they must have parliament unable to declare no confidence in the cabinet.
Considering the trend of the last hundred years, I'd call it 'normal'.
Democracy means less and less, people can vote on things but not on the things that matter.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
It's worth noting that those reports were accurate, but also that in the US(where age is not the principle political divisor as it is in the UK), opposition to lockdowns on the right was specifically driven by younger conservatives. Older conservatives often held views more similar to their liberal counterparts, although many of them now regret it.
Hieronymus
2hr ago
I think there are a modest but meaningful number of men online, whether they were successful cads or not, who are coming to realize that rejecting Christian sexual ethics has been bad for people of both sexes. I wonder if they'll be the one group of irreligious moderns who will find the natural law persuasive.
ChickenOverlord
2hr ago
See the Twilight Zone "I'M HITLER?!" meme
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
He's Finnish, so I doubt it has much to do with Southern US nutrient deficiencies(where, as with all Southern US problems, one must first control for race- the black population lived in third world level poverty for a long time when we were wealthy enough as a society that it didn't need to be).
No_one
2hr ago
True. I didn't mean to imply other media are good.
It's all so horribly lame at times I almost feel compelled to start translating some of the clever stuff I read into Czech. Not sure where one could post it where it wouldn't be entirely pointless.
No_one
2hr ago
Ultimate eugenic 'melange' is finding the very best genomes and mating these together. It'd probably be a mix of all these, yes.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2hr ago
I'm also not voting. I despise D and R candidates, and the 2016 election taught me that literally nothing will convince the voters in this country to consider voting for anyone else. So I'm done voting for President. I'll probably still vote for local offices and such.
roche
2hr ago
I'd class the suffering of the affluent as a different type of suffering. Because when you're starving, facing the possibility of homelessness, facing disease etc., there is a sense of realness and gravitas and urgency to what has befallen you, it is a genuine pain, whereas the suffering of the affluent is a reverse of this; it's not very painful or urgent but it's also completely meaningless, so it manifests as frustration. Put another way, a society that has largely eliminated the extreme negatives of life has flattened the spectrum of human experience, so that for an affluent person to feel any sense of meaning or depth to his life, he must obtain some extremely positive experience. Otherwise life will feel flat and empty. The vast majority of us though lack the means to get some extremely positive experience, so we're stuck living mundane, flat lives. Our pain is not exactly pain -- it's a vague, dull pang of awareness that life can be much more.
BahRamYou
3hr ago
This depended a lot on where you were living, no? Keynes describes pre-ww1 London as an oddly modern place:
“The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth ... he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world.”
They had most of the things we take for granted like electricity, flush toilets, fancy clothes, subways, cars (for the rich) or fast horse-drawn taxis for the not-so-rich, They also had things that would be considered luxurious even today, like multiple mail deliveries per day, or (briefly) an underground pneumatic tube delivery system . And of course, fastly higher trust and social capital than we have today.
SSCReader
3hr ago
It is, But given my ex-position and contacts I can confirm that Boris et al, really did not want to. Not that Boris is principled, just that he thought it was going to make him look bad, due to the financial hit. We even have access to many of his messages as part of the various probes into parties at Number Ten at the like, if you don't (understandably!) want to take some internet strangers word for it.
I am not saying that Boris and the Conservatives had a particularly ideological commitment against lockdowns, and mandates, particularly, just that most of the reports commissioned showed very little gain for considerable cost.
FD4280
3hr ago
Trump. After the tremendous bad faith of the Covid response, the summer of BLM, and the social media control shenanigans of the last election, I’d take Xi or MBS (or even Putin, if I had no connection to the war zone) over any Dem.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3hr ago
If you never have anything concrete and immediate to stress about (eg, periods of food scarcity), then your “stressful event” hedonistat doesn’t have a clear signal, and ends up calibrating in a more stochastic way to regard commonplace stimuli (eg someone being rude to you at the coffeeshop) as threatening.
I will observe that a number of successful youth development/leadership programs focus on (mostly-)safe, controlled "stressful events". Thinking of things like NOLS, JROTC, and various sporting and scouting-like organizations. It's usually pitched as building confidence, but dropping kids into the wilderness and showing them how to survive (and even thrive) in unpleasant or even hazardous conditions seems, from this angle, to be deliberately aimed to calibrate this hedonistat. I've been through things like this, and while it's not a controlled experiment, it didn't seem like it was Earth-changing at the time, I've come to appreciate those experiences more as I've gotten older.
If I were looking at data to reduce confounding with heredity, that might be a place to start.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
A genuine and reasonable question. I know psuedohistorians keep claiming classical/late antiquity transatlantic voyages, and real historians usually don't claim that Roman and Punic ships couldn't have made the voyage. I also know the vikings did it. I assume that means the ships could probably cross the Atlantic in good weather, although navigation technology might not have been up to snuff(I know the vikings had a few navigational techniques the Romans didn't). Hell, the Polynesians made lengthy voyages across the Pacific in the stone age, and there are a few recorded cases of Eskimos showing up in medieval Europe in kayaks.
My off the cuff opinion is that Romans who knew about trade winds and where the Americas were could have gotten here, assuming they had infrastructure built up to launch those expeditions at the right time of year. But they didn't have that kind of knowledge and they didn't try. It raises an interesting question about how the Algonquian Indians in Canada were more able to resist viking settlement than the natives of Ireland, Russia, etc.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
4hr ago
Eh, no. The effect of smoking is inconclusive, the effect of obesity is quite large. IIRC a 50 BMI (which is also quite large) bumps up your risk about the same as 10 years of age compared to a 21 BMI.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
4hr ago
And given the government didn't want to actually take the steps they ended up being forced to take
Pretending to be forced is a pretty common way authorities do what they want while avoiding taking responsibility for it.
gattsuru
4hr ago
It depends really heavily on the type of watch. Cheap watches usually don't even need kits, just a thin flathead jeweler's screwdriver or spadger to get the back plate off, or maybe a single weird screwdriver bit. Higher-end watches can be trickier: the most annoying tend to use either a threaded backplate that can require really annoying tools. But if you're only doing it once every few years, there are some cheap kits (not endorsed) that will handle almost all common watch types, albeit not very conveniently. If you know you have a screw-in caseback, getting a proper tool for that (with a handle and everything!) is a better bet than buying a kit.
For battery size, ideally look up the manual. Otherwise, just take it apart, check it, and order it. The size will be printed somewhere for almost all batteries, or you can just use a set of calipers to measure. The most common size is 1216 (12.5mmx1.6mm), but there's a lot of size charts, and you can get plastic digital calipers from Harbor Freight or the like for dirt cheap. Don't try to memorize the numbers, there's charts available. Do get the cheap plastic calipers; watch batteries have enough internal resistance and limited enough ampacity you're not going to light the house on fire, but it's still a stupid way to warp calipers.
Do keep to a compatible voltage: coin cells come in 1.5V, 3v, and 3.7v (nominal) voltages; using a lower voltage than the original usually won't work, while higher voltages may damage the electronics. Almost all modern watches use 1.5v silver-oxides (SR or SG prefix). While that's compatible with alkaline low-voltage (LR/AG prefix), zinc (PR/Z prefix) and and mercury (MR, no longer manufactured), silver-oxides are cheap and generally ideal for watches, especially mechanical watches. Lithium (CR/BR prefix), Lithium rechargable (LiR), and titanium (CTL prefix) are all higher voltage, and while lithium-titanium (MT) are technically the right nominal voltage they're basically never useful in watches due to high self-discharge and low total capacity. Again, battery type should be in the manual, and printed on the top of the battery.
For mechanical watches, the most common designs only use the crown to hold the balance wheel in place (or disengage it). There are designs where it will disable the motor or disengage the battery entirely, though. It might save some power, but I wouldn't swear on it being a big gain, since self-discharge makes up a pretty sizable part of watch battery life anyway. For digital watches, it will never disable the main circuit, because otherwise you can't set the time.
Big cautions I'll give:
- It is possible to damage the watch or even yourself. Usually just a matter of scratches on the sides, but I've seen people crack faceplates or pry out major mechanisms they misidentified as batteries. Stabbing yourself while trying to pry a backplate off is embarrassing, too.
- You don't and shouldn't touch them, but there's a ton of tiny parts involved. Most of them will be pretty well-secured, still, don't shake the thing or drop of off a table. Reassembly is a nightmare if you're lucky, and virtually impossible if you aren't (eg, balance springs are hilariously easy to bend or fold).
- Expect to see some loss in waterproofing for any previously water resistant watches. There's ways to work around it, some as simple as using some clear nail polish on the edge of the backplate, but it's definitely a thing.
- There is other maintenance that better watch shops will do, and that are harder for casuals to do. Watch lubrication is An Effort, and no mall shop is going to do, but even getting a couple of the bigger gears is useful for longevity... if it's done right. Same for a general-purpose cleaning. If you're just looking to have a watch you can use, rather than a heirloom, it's probably not worth learning, but be aware it is a thing. If you do want a heirloom, that guy has good info for everything from maintenance to serious repair, and he's good for better understanding mechanical watch functionality, but is vast overkill for just swapping a battery.
Well, 2.5 times worse is still not exactly "about as bad as COVID".
In any case, no matter what you think about COVID, in my opinion the right-wing reaction to it was bad politics. I can't blame right-wing politicians much for it because in this case it was really more of a grassroots thing from the right-wing base.
Old people vote more than any other age cohort. Old people are also the ones most in danger from COVID. And as someone else pointed out, old people tend to associate vaccines with good things.
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