Material Context

@Dominus_Tim @africanrhizome Politeness is a hedge against violence.

@africanrhizome Where please? Lmaooo That's hilarious 😆 🤣

i’m still laughing at the “apologizing is a social construct” post

@Exuos 2001, Chinatown, and Rear Window deserve every word of praise they've ever gotten

Most overrated films on Letterboxd.

Lindsey Graham’s main Mossad handler gives a wistful sigh as he erases two terabytes of blackmail material

@Bluebearmonkey @CaoHuangDi @michaelxpettis Neither of these graphs show that? Composition percentages and growth rates are not useful information without knowing the raw dollar amounts.

@CaoHuangDi @materialcontext @michaelxpettis I been in this bidness for decades… It’s all being driven by the global south.

1/5 Bloomberg: "Beijing has been open to exploring how to increase imports from the EU but less keen to find ways to tame its own exports. Both are key to the EU given the vast trade gap as well as China’s market barriers and moderate consumption levels." bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

@Bluebearmonkey @michaelxpettis That has nothing to do with what he wrote

@michaelxpettis No dude… exports to the EU is stagnant (~15% of total). Growth of China’s high value exports is almost entirely driven by the Global South. Do you ever check data or do you jess say things?

@Pointer1517446 @SonnyBunch You either didn't read them or have comprehensions skills so bad that you might as well not have.

@SonnyBunch Wtf you talking about? The Oscars have rules requiring diversity. Look it up. Take the phone in your hand, and look it up. Its true.

See, THIS is my favorite ODYSSEY backlash because it’s not *remotely* true, it’s just idiocy regurgitated by people who think Elon Musk knows what he’s talking g about.

economics and philosophy (ultimately the same thing) both err in ignoring/repressing the problem of weaponry. At Republic I, Socrates would have us look away from the sword, in order to ask "what good" it is. I recommend on the contrary that you keep your eye on the sword

@cathedralofligh @JPRay2024 @Alonso_GD War doesn't undermine social trust within a country? Have you never opened a single history book in your fucking life? Wars are among the most common destabilizers of internal cohesion throughout history.

@JPRay2024 @Alonso_GD War is not the same as murder. War is temporary, doesn't undermine social trust within a country, and actually spurs technological and economic growth. Crime is none of the three.

Literally exterminated each other by the millions for hundreds of years

@miglet35 @FormerlyCBM Not only am I correct, but it's gonna be very funny to come back to this and laugh at you when it crosses some very large number.

@materialcontext @FormerlyCBM Keep lying to yourself to justify being wrong.

I was surprised (not really) to learn today that this number is a total fabrication, an intentional lie. Amazing.

@Captain_Jedi Ain't neither one a top 5 much less the goat.

The thing about “greatest trilogy of all time” is that Theatrical Cut LOTR and Extended Edition LOTR have very different standings

@4SigmaSmarter @FormerlyCBM The only people who install this stuff are terminally online culture war obsessives.

@materialcontext @FormerlyCBM Fine, but what would cause the sample to be biased? Are people who wish for Odyssey to fail more likely install this. I installed it back when Google hid the counts on the dislike button 5 or 6 years ago. They switched to sampling when google killed the dislike API call.

Explained perfectly in the below video. These people dislike melanin so much they make up shit.

@miglet35 @FormerlyCBM That's not relevant. Only people terminally online and tuned into this culture war stuff have the extension in the first place.

@materialcontext @FormerlyCBM Except that it doesn't. Previous similar situations have often larger underreported the negative reaction to stuff like this.

@Jevaughn_Brown @markgranza The big problem is that the audience generly does not understand themselves.

@markgranza So it's about intra-industry sensibilities because F what the audience would like... sigh

The problem with this aesthetic is that it became heavily associated with advertising. Technicolor was initially very expensive and used only for high-budget productions like prestige epics and big musicals (Ben-Hur, The Wizard of Oz, etc.). Then technology made it cheap—by the 70s/80s, every billboard on earth had highly saturated colors, so "colorful and vivid" stopped meaning luxury and started signaling "mass-market" to industry insiders. By the 2000s, you had big-budget filmmakers visibly toning colors down (The Matrix, LOTR) for fear of coming across as unsophisticated. AI is now making it even worse by associating oversaturated fantasy images with ubiquitous slop, so expect filmmakers to retreat from colors even more. It's more likely that we'll see a return to the noir film aesthetic (see the recent Ripley series) than hypervivid.

@Alexanderofldn @markgranza The director is havign a conversation with the audience, his vision will not be achieved by showing audiences visuals they associate with slop no matter how right it might seem.

@markgranza How about we just make films that just use the right colour design to fit the directors vision and the character of the story, instead of a trend led polarity that fluctuates between lurid technicolor and depressing sepia tone. Right now we are definitely saturated by the latter.

@realLPBeria Not a failing on part of Catholicism as it explicitly says your moral intuitions are faulty.

A common bait-and-switch, seen everywhere from Catholicism to utilitarianism: Attracting people to an ideology by appealing to their preexisting moral intuitions, only to later tell them to abandon *the very moral intuitions that drew them to the ideology in the first place*.

Studying Economics at university today is similar to studying Theology in the 19th century.

@PeterJJ_ @FormerlyCBM The sample of users is self-selected primarily for people interested din these hate campaigns. It's a perfect example of a useless sample.

@FormerlyCBM So in other words they have a sample of millions of users and their preferences. That's the second best thing after having official data, right?

@4SigmaSmarter @FormerlyCBM Biased sample. Garbage in, garbage out.

@FormerlyCBM It is not made up data, it is sampled data. Why is there any reason to believe the extension users are not a representative sample of the whole population?

@miglet35 @FormerlyCBM When the sample self-selects for a specific outcome, yes.

@FormerlyCBM So, you reject all research that relies on sample sizes then? Sounds pretty fucking retarded.

People don’t actually believe you can learn subjects by reading books anymore. The popular model of learning is ‘learning by doing’ and video is second hand ‘learning by doing‘. Software developers (the first illiterate technical class) pioneered this worldview.