sigfig

gravity is a greater force than history

@default_friend though i am a little skeptical of the class dynamics characterization. the area i grew up in was more "already at the bottom" than it was "downwardly mobile" yet the split between normal and alternative lifestyle signifiers was still there

@default_friend i just read rob's article today and had basically the same reaction you've articulated here. the late 00s are pretty distant now but these cultural characterizations were all just as true back then. and i never got the impression it had changed much before

Collected thoughts on the dinergoth piece: default.blog/p/against-amer…

in an illiterate society, teaching people how to read is a very powerful tool to gain influence among the masses. it's unclear if this still applies to people who have simply forgotten how to read, but it may become very relevant again soon

"they say the iww is all about anarchy and destruction. i'm all about anarchy and destruction... but i just don't know about this union idea" killed me

learning about the 2007-2010 attempt to organize an iww branch against jimmy johns

@panickssery @grok there is some accessory evidence that suggests plato believed celestial mechanics as a discipline formed a stronger basis of knowledge than other modes of reasoning, and emphasized this in the academy, but this is not actually in any of the socratic dialogues

@panickssery @grok "horny" is an joking exaggeration but the reason given for teaching dialectics later is the inconsistency of younger men's values and their hedonistic tendency. in the text socrates says math is important for philosopher-kings but does not declare it a prerequisite to dialectics

this is a very odd misreading of republic vii. socrates does suggest that dialectic should only be studied after age 30, but the explicit rationale for this is that men in their 20s are too horny to seek the truth, no matter what you teach them

the line going down only resembles undergrad microeconomics for a brief moment

the number of people currently celebrating the return of supply and demand economics seems like a very bad omen

my notifications right now paint a very grim picture of the remaining userbase of this website

people misunderstand the icarus story. the problem was not that he flew too high. it's that the wings were made of beeswax, which offered very little resistance to heating. with modern materials he would have had no problems. we can fly as close to the sun as we want now

it doesn't have to be arbitrary. spaceflight is a largely predictable long-term civilizational restructuring and a sound ideological framework can be built on it. but the result is necessarily contrary to materialist economic reasoning and transgressive to liberal political norms

absent a substantive ideological basis for why you want to do this, the political dimension of spaceflight becomes a blank canvas onto which aspiring technocrats paint their antisocial fantasies. only the naive and deranged can organize around fully arbitrary goals like this

it doesn't matter today so it won't matter tomorrow. the temporality of consequence was left behind in the 1990s and there is now no reason to believe the past has any bearing over the present, let alone the future

the only surprising part of the white house threatening media outlets for negative reporting on the war is that any american news org is actually taking a negative stance on a war

feels like an important life event

just killed a mosquito on the ceiling with a rapier

@bryancsk i took one recently and it tried to barrel through a street closed off by the fire department to evacuate people from a burning building

My Robotaxi is ramming its way through alleys with known drug deals happening to get to me I'm watching the map very concerned it will be delayed

@7ohntitor wake up with the sun then take two shots of bourbon immediately after getting out of bed. works every time

if you have trouble keeping a day/night schedule, the fix may just be eating a large breakfast at a consistent time. your body has a metabolic clock; digesting food signals to your gut that you're awake and seeking nutrients. the later you eat, the later you're up. i've struggled with a wonky circadian rhythm for years, and i've also skipped breakfast for years. turns out studies show a pretty consistent link between the two. getting light exposure helps too (and this is the usual suggested fix), but that's a different system. and you really want these systems to align or you're liable for metabolic disease some reading has shown that historic diets (religious, dinner/supper, etc) back this up maybe worth reading into and trying out as an insomnia cure