atchoo

Joined 4 years ago

Karma
1,116
Submissions
221
Member since
Mar 15
The details of my life are quite inconsequential... very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical. Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we'd make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds- pretty standard really. At the age of twelve I received my first scribe. At the age of 14 a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum... it's breathtaking... I highly suggest you try it.
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Recent submissions

Comment · 3 years ago
Are you going to admonish the parent for contravening the flamebait and "ideological battle" guidelines? Treat the cause not the symptom!
Comment · 3 years ago
There is little surprise that if a brain is behaving differently, that we can see differences in neurotransmitters. Like the Serotonin Hypothesis, that doesn't mean the neurotransmitters themselves are part of the physical cause and not just a consequence.

It's like trying to diagnose and treat a political crisis by observing telephone connections. We see stark changes in telephone use in a crisis. If we meddle with the telephone exchanges we might improve or harm various types of event. It's not really about the telephone calls though, we are just hacking at the messaging of an external event we are ignorant of.

A conspiracy theory induced panic might be superficially "solved" but cutting all the the phone lines. We have not identified or solved the cause though and people don't find life without telephones (dopamine) worth living so they plug them back in (quit their anti-psychotics).

Comment · 3 years ago
Yes?

Forced labour camps and secret police organisations were pretty ubiquitous. The Tsars had The Okhrana, forced labour camps and political repression (Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin had all been exiled to Siberia). The Checka and Gulag were the Bolshevik versions of the same thing. Russia had the White Terror... and then the Red Terror. It all fucking sucks but the point remains, Stalin took things to new levels of psychopathic insanity where we start hitting 10s of millions of excess deaths.

If you don't like Gulags, then bear in mind they were created at roughly the same time the US setup forced labour camps in Haiti that led to 1000s of deaths and extra-judicial killings. Not something Americans talk about much. Should Woodrow Wilson be compared to Stalin too?

Comment · 3 years ago
> Ehhh...it's not like Lenin was much better.

No. Claiming this underplays how appalling Stalin was. Lenin purging Mensheviks AFAIK, meant losing party membership and maybe emigrating to continue your political project, whereas Stalin's Great Purge killed a million people. This isn't a defence of Lenin, it's just that Stalin was on a different level entirely.

> Their biggest effect was external: most welfare systems were started in the West in response to the observation that it was a bad look for capitalism

What? That's nonsense.

Comment · 3 years ago
It's worth bearing in mind that the West was pretty awful too with a vast quantity of appalling crimes that our rose-tinted spectacles might like to forget because the victims were "non-people". It was Imperial Britain with it's colonies, the US with it's viciously racist segregation, Leopold II of Belgium chopping of limbs in the Congo. Not cool.

It's not difficult to see that the early Soviet Union was actually better on a number of dimensions over both the Tsars and the West on basic equality and humanity when comparing against the life of an Indian or an African American. It had decriminalized homosexuality and was arguably less anti-Semitic than the West. The trajectory was utopian... but it nosedived into Stalinism which was, well..., a nightmare.

Comment · 3 years ago
For IoT the one actual pain-point is that if an episode generates online discussion then I can't participate but it's mainly a complaint about the user-hostile attempt to make the podcast feed an inferior second class citizen.

It's a shame because they were so forward looking in the digital and streaming game and this feels so regressive. Beeb aren't going to get more license fee out of me because I use their feckin' app. As you say, it's not killer so why would they even bother with the pettiness? Just makes me sad really.

Comment · 3 years ago
That's basically the UK and I haven't experienced a problem with indoor air drying. I would give some basic guidelines though. It's the sort of things that you don't think you need to tell people until you see what they do...

- ideally machine washed with a significant spin to remove water. Air drying hand washed items that are sopping wet is a lot harder - might take 4x longer

- hang in a room with decent ventilation and some active air flow. Trying to air dry in the equivalent of a cupboard would be doomed

- hang fully spread out with decent space between the clothes. Drying time will be significantly extended if densely scrunched together with pieces touching. Buy multiple racks to get enough hanging space.

- don't put used wet gym clothes in a laundry bin to fester. If you aren't washing them immediately, hang them up to dry first and put them in the bin later

Comment · 3 years ago
Hmm. My faith in the BBC's commitment to decentralisation and open standards has been damaged by the artificial month delay they added to their podcast feeds to try and drive traffic to their centralised Sounds app. I've been listening to the In Our Time podcast for 20 years and then they go and vandalise it as a growth hack. There is no way I am using multiple proprietary podcast apps so I end up listening to topical comedy a month out of date... which is just weird.
Comment · 3 years ago
Students are classic bourgeoisie - often from well off families and tend to be pretty comfortable and not preoccupied by their next meal. Most student uprisings are derided for being so privileged but such is always the way. They say the 1968 French student movement was diffused because they left Paris to spend national holidays at their parent's holiday homes :)

They are also indicative of two other key predictive factors: elite over production and a demographic youth bulge.

Their lack of success is perhaps the power issue. If they waited a few years to become army officers, administrators, judiciary and such they could be much more successful than doing another sit-in!

The two notable rebellions in the US were by land / slave owners. Students are limited to basically SDS / The Weather Underground that didn't go very far.

Comment · 3 years ago
As a mountaineer, you no doubt have a wonderfully ergonomic high volume backpack that is great for a week of shopping. Two if your diet is basic meat and veg not processed food in lots of packaging.

Same to the OP. You should own a decent feckin' shopping bag. It's basic adulting where I live. You have observed the problem yet not doing anything about which is just really weird.

Comment · 3 years ago
> the worse the cognitive load

Or maybe better the cognitive load? There are various studies that show removing white lines and navigation furniture to make junctions more of a puzzle, decreases speeds and increases attention and safety.

Comment · 3 years ago
Not really. The revolutionary class is fairly bourgeois. You basically need time, money, power and education to revolt. An oppressed underclass is already under the heel and just gets crushed when it steps mildly out line. Historically the most likely group to revolt has existing status/power/wealth and is in fear of losing it due to some type political/demographic change. You find professionals like lawyers leading revolutionary movements, not farm hands.

See "How Civil Wars Start" by Barbara F. Walter.

Comment · 3 years ago
> Now I don't even go there at all.

Sounds like you could do with learning something new!

My 30+ years experience doesn't matter for shit when I say... want to fix an annoyance in an open source tool using an unfamiliar language. I'm back to "how do you deserialise json" level query. Offical docs are typically either useless auto-generated placeholders or over-detailed rabbit warren not to mention there are usually five ways to do anything and I need to know the blessed approach not just any approach. I want a few lines of sample code and some confidence that it's the approapriate method and not 10 years out of date. It's what a QA site should excel at and exceed ChatRoulleteGPT answers given social proof from real people.

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