Thomas Brookside

@BlueBoxDave What’s crazy to me is that Thune doesn’t even seem smart enough to move the SAVE Act forward and let the Democrats filibuster it. If he did that he could then claim his hands were tied and it wasn’t his fault. But he seems to prefer to take the blame.

My Latest

@xwanyex When only property owners voted, the mental model was that the state was a commonwealth and that to be involved in its direction you naturally had to pay taxes to support it. James Madison would have thought that paying property taxes was what made him a voting citizen.

@VexedVortices "We've deliberately broken the connection between employment and income for the poor, because we said that connection was evil, but we're still going to claim that employment is a 'need'!"

This is obviously not true. It's only true if you think basic needs are just like... food and maybe shelter. If you want to minimize crime, we should aim to fulfill the bottom 2-3 rungs of this pyramid.

@VexedVortices "As long as the poors threaten each other physically in the towers where you pay for them to live for free, you haven't supplied 'security' so we get to continue to claim their needs aren't met!"

@memeticsisyphus They also claim that UBI will lead to a glorious cultural renaissance, when people are "free of the need to earn a living". Even though we've supported millions of people in the US with free food, shelter and medical care for decades without seeing even a hint of any of that.

Yeah this is what I mean. Saying things like crime is because I don’t have a state mandated friend.

@moultano So it's your position that of all the millions of immigrants that have swarmed into the US in the last thirty years, ALL of them are grateful, and ALL of them support the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the republic? Every last one?

If you see commentary from an immigrant that seems to you to be ungrateful, you should know that they are talking not to you but to the thousands of people telling them, "you couldn't possibly have earned your success because brown people have an 85 IQ."

@drterrysimpson The entire reason he was taken out of the police vehicle and held on the sidewalk where he could be seen and filmed was because he claimed to be in medical distress. Are you saying he was lying?

Yes odd he was fine before the police officer held him down -

@memeticsisyphus Remember that these people romanticize a primitive lifestyle they've never actually had to live. They think that without capitalism they'd live in a landscape painting; that's their definition of "valuing the human".

No the worker has way more the more productive he is. This has increased exponentially since Marx’s time. We’ve never valued human life more, we’ve invented standards for conducting war and made it almost impossible to execute even our worse criminals. wtf are you guys talking about?

Like that’s just obviously not true. How can you look at the world and think otherwise?

@CrisisFront @aakashgupta During the Republic and under the Judeo-Claudian emperors, work of this type was typically done by free labor. It was a jobs program undertaken to pay off political supporters and/or build political prestige, just like highway construction is for us.

@aakashgupta They had the luxury of double the water because half their population was enslaved and doing the actual work. It is easy to look like engineering geniuses when you have unlimited forced labor to build it.

That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video. Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments. The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times. Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it. Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone. The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.

@LundahlHorses I don't think this is ENTIRELY true. There was a "golden age of print" from around 1890 to maybe 1949 where many middle class and even working class people read three newspapers a day, read novels, and even patronized the theater. That period of mass literacy died with TV.

One of my spiciest ghost pepper takes is that literacy never actually improved. Yes, compared to ancient or medieval times, more people today can write their name or recite sounds mapped to memorized symbols. But in terms of actual comprehension? The percentages haven’t moved. This dovetails with my thesis about the normies’ and midwits’ dominant cognitive operation being “sorting”. Words are just labels to them. They don’t actually understand the meaning of anything, they’ve just been trained to shuffle particular symbols into particular predetermined boxes. They experience “sorting the labels” as “thinking”. Nobody talks about this because, for the most part, you can still coast through life on sorting alone. Reading (and by that I mean reading WELL; actually being able to converse with a book instead of scanning for bullet points) has always been an elite activity.

@avi_eisen @occultiscool @KrissBergTweets The people who thought it was over 1000 are still fucking morons, no matter how the haggling you're doing here plays out.

@occultiscool @KrissBergTweets Fatal encounter database doesn't code it for that year, but presumably at least some of them were, making the claim here incorrect. What is the fallacy?

A fact that has lived rent free in my head since the moment I read it

@HistoryBoomer @AnnieLowrey It's housing prices. Period. I have a top 1% income, and I absolutely, positively COULD NOT afford to move back to most places I have lived in my lifetime. That is fundamental impoverishment, and if it's that bad for me, how bad must it seem to people at the 50% mark? Or below?

By most measures, we're doing better than we ever have, and better than our European allies, but the vibes are off. Many Americans are sure that these are the worst of times. The Vibecession is real, and puzzling. From @AnnieLowrey

@Kindred_Creator @000000_Sheep @Fat_Electrician And you could still do that. You are just as free now to decide to seize resources by fighting for them as any human ever has been. You'd just face a better-organized team of opponents than you might have faced in 20000 BC.

@000000_Sheep @Fat_Electrician Our ancestors decided for themselves if it was worth fighting, and were only challenged by those directly impacted by their choices. Correct freedom is not safe… you’re not exactly helping your case with this.

I’m fascinated by people that think it’s deep and profound to point out you have to work for your own survival like it’s some man-made moral injustice and not the default setting of all life ever.

@GodzNpunks @xwanyex The internet was superior to printed yellow pages for just long enough to destroy them, and then turned into slop that no longer is superior to the former printed yellow pages. I hear LLMs will do the same to the internet - outperform it long enough to kill it, then enshittify.

@xwanyex Absolutely fucking amazing. I'm using Grok Superchat to guide me through being an executor on my mother's estate and it's proved invaluable. I remember how painful it was to research on google but now I chat with Grok and get it done.

@xwanyex I would go further and assign all "phone app" innovation TO the phone. So while I find DoorDash and Uber more impressive than you (apparently) do, I assign all "location-specific app" value that to the initial "computer in your pocket" innovation.

@DNLSHLR @byarsmike8 @ClayTravis @EndWokeness The 5th place finish is (incorrectly) sticking in your mind because Riley Gaines is often taunted by trans activists with her 5th place finish.

@byarsmike8 @ClayTravis @EndWokeness He finished tied to 5th.

What's a video that defines Peak Woke?

@LinkofSunshine It's housing costs, period. I have a top 1% income and there are entire cities and sections of the country I could not move to tomorrow, for employment or for any other reason. For people at the dead median, it has to look much, much worse. People have been enserfed by housing.

The permanent vibecession is here to stay

@mightydudbolt Oh, please. I would need about 500 more pages of worldbuilding before I could pick the right side in any trade dispute. What if Queen Amidala is acting on behalf of some Eurotrash dairy farmers or vintners?

Okay, here's where George Lucas went wrong: So first, he called the antagonist group the Trade Federation. The average viewer should immediately understand their function and role in the galaxy, right? This is what we call economical storytelling. They're the TRADE FEDERATION. Wrong. The average viewer is too stupid to understand this. And it gets worse from there. Because even if the average viewer WAS able to understand that the Trade Federation is, in fact, a powerful group controlling trade in the galaxy, they would then immediately become confused by the concept of the Trade Federation blocking the flow of trade to a planet. This is because the average person is too stupid to understand the concept of foregoing immediate gratification for the prospect of long-term gain. So the logical implications of what the Trade Federation is doing, which would be obvious to most of us intelligent viewers who understand bargaining leverage, would still be completely beyond the capacities of the average viewer. Basically, Lucas wildly overestimated the intelligence of the general audience, and left too many failure points where the average viewer would become completely lost. It's his own fault really. We cannot blame the stupid for their own incapacity. They can't help it.

@maxdaniellawton This is to let them keep more books "in print". Your other alternative would have been to crawl around a used book store for an old black cover Penguin with foxing so bad it was basically illegible.

The greatest harbinger of end times is not plague or war, but the sudden enormous proliferation of Xerox-quality POD editions (unmarked! no warning!) from houses like Penguin.

@ChristianHeiens The bell tolls for the Whigs

Zoomer Rockefeller Republicans devastated to learn about something that happened 40 years before they were born.