Despite all my rage I’m still a rat refreshing this page.

I use arch btw

Credibly accused of being a fascist, liberal, commie, anarchist, child, boomer, pointlessly pedantic, a Russian psychological warfare operative, and db0’s sockpuppet.

Pronouns are she/her.

Vegan for the iron deficiency.

  • 4 Posts
  • 606 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • You should probably know that historically societies collapsing has typically resulted in improved health of the lower classes as judged by skeletons in the archeological record.

    We should not really understand societies collapsing as a violent or spectacular thing. It’s usually just growth slowing, people move away, the ability of states to enforce taxes and provide services weakens and people work out their own stuff.

    I’m not saying society is collapsing, just that if it does it’ll probably look more like declining birthrates and movement away from cities and advanced manufacturing to more agrarian lifestyle. Also that for the poor and downtrodden this will probably, on average, be an improvement.



  • Sometimes I’m blown away by the quality. Like a lot of the shit I’d buy locally is chinese made anyway.

    Often you get stuff like ‘premium’ retailers getting the stuff that QC passed to a higher standard or whatever but it’s worth minor decreases in quality for a 1000% discount or whatever absurd retail markup there is.

    The thing is, if you’re buying something for a dollar it’s gonna be about that quality. you need to know the brands that make good shit. Like some of the 40 dollar kitchen knives on aliexpress are amazing value, some are scams. Electronic components are similar. I can buy an esp32 there for 5 bucks, or locally for 45. Same product.

    Now would I trust a fruit bowl bought for 2 dollars to be good? lol no. There’s just material reality at the end of the day. No amount of genius engineering and dubious manufacturing conditions can make high quality material appear from thin air.


  • I would quibble here and say that torture is actually an incredibly civilised act. I mean this not as an endorsement, but rather in the sense that only highly ‘civilised’ societies appear to have every carried out systematic torture. It seems to require a great deal of centralised, bureaucratic control in order to prevent instincts like empathy from preventing it.

    It’s also worth pointing out that torture, as defined in a UN convention that is pretty broadly ratified is much broader than we normally think of it. It is defined as follows:

    For the purposes of this Convention, the term “torture” means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

    Which I think is food for thought. Portrail of torture is incredibly systemic in media, and I think we are numbed to it a great deal although I don’t know which way causality goes there. How many of you have seen cops handling someone roughly with the intent to hurt them or intimidating someone to make them pliable as routine ‘justice’? That is literally torture by a convention that it is highly likely the country they work for has ratified.



  • I’m in that bin and I’d say that a significant portion of my symptoms could be alleviated by making the world less of a horror show.

    We’ve made society inequitable to the extent that if you go outside you will see heartbreaking tragedy, you have to pay to exist basically anywhere and consequently you have zero freedom, basically all of life is dictatorial, your mind is constantly under assault by ads/propaganda, family and friends are destroyed by forcing everyone to move around to find work/shelter, and you’re constantly like 3 bad months from losing it all.

    TBH I’m shocked at how few people are depressed.



  • I never actually got through my PhD and it was in physics anyway but yeah. It always seemed to me that the messier fields had these New Exciting Techniques ™ where you could vacuum up absolutely insane amounts of data and then play with stats till it showed what you wanted.

    I don’t want to be like “Hur der they’re doing it wrong”. Studying anything to do with biology necessarily means you’re stuck with systems with trillions of variables and you have the awful problem of trying to design experiments where they hopefully average into background. I just thing that, consequently, until stuff replicates a few times (which, unfortunately, is almost never done because it’s not sexy. Anyway often papers are written so badly, and the universe so gloriously subtle, even mechanistic stuff like synthesis is a struggle to replicate) big headlines are irresponsible.