Overheard at the local expensive cocktail bar tonight:
“I unfortunately bought a Tesla before I realized Elon Musk was a bigot.”
Overheard at the local dive bar tonight:
“During COVID, grandma said we all had to be vaccinated or she wouldn’t come to Thanksgiving… so we just lied and said we were.”
You learn a lot about human nature going to different types of bars at a weekday midnight. Learn to blend in and talk to everyone.
“I unfortunately bought a Tesla before I realized Elon Musk was a bigot.”
Overheard at the local dive bar tonight:
“During COVID, grandma said we all had to be vaccinated or she wouldn’t come to Thanksgiving… so we just lied and said we were.”
You learn a lot about human nature going to different types of bars at a weekday midnight. Learn to blend in and talk to everyone.
The next set of attacks against America will likely be AI-enhanced cyberattacks, as open source AI models and agents that can write code and run scripts proliferate.
Corollary: Any budding politician would do well to get in early about sounding the alarm for cyber attacks as an underrated threat. A major attack will happen before long, and you can position yourself as “taking it seriously” before your colleagues.
Corollary: Any budding politician would do well to get in early about sounding the alarm for cyber attacks as an underrated threat. A major attack will happen before long, and you can position yourself as “taking it seriously” before your colleagues.
Imagine a train where there was an AR layer between the window glass and the outside world, so when you fly to NYC and take the train in, your train windows show both the slums of Newark, NJ, and also dinosaurs infiltrating the city… real life windows with AR dinosaurs ftw. Make trains great again.
Your goal today is to become as useful to future time travelers as possible.
I’m currently reading Alfred Russel Wallace’s book / journal The Malay Archipelago.
He, a British naturalist, describes his journeys in Southeast Asia circa 1850s collecting bug and bird and ape specimens, and coming up with similar theories as Darwin.
The Dutch were the wealthy European colonizers there who set up governments, and the local native Malay villages and tribes lived off the land in huts, and had simple dirt roads, frequently trading with, and sometimes living amongst, the Europeans.
Wallace stays with a local village whenever he goes to a new Island or forest and has the locals help him catch butterflies and beetles for his collection back in Britain, which spurred great scientific research.
And the way he describes the locals is interesting, some might say racist.
He writes stuff like, “Their dances were clumsy but all you could expect from savages.”
or
“This local native village was less ugly than the others, and clearly bred with a superior race of people and had more refined features.”
But you know, the level of superstition existing amongst a primitive, native peoples, must have been jarring for a distinguished scholarly man from a post-enlightenment Britain.
In fact, in one example, he describes how the natives all made their huts with only vertical and horizontal logs and bamboo. He sarcastically asks himself why the local structural geniuses never figured out to just put a few diagonal logs. As in, a completely right angled house easily sways to and fro, and many were ready to collapse; but by simply adding a few diagonal beams the whole house doesn’t have to be rebuilt every two years.
And then he goes on to realize that some huts fell down less, and the local natives (circa 1856) realized that if they added some crooked logs to their structure, it tended to be sturdier.
But they attributed that to a superstitious benevolent force from crooked logs, never once realizing it was because it added some diagonal cross distribution of the load by being crooked.
Wallace is shocked. And when they live like this, and think like this, compared to the literature and knowledge and lifestyle he came from back in industrial, colonizing, dominating England, can you blame him for thinking less of them?
He, a British naturalist, describes his journeys in Southeast Asia circa 1850s collecting bug and bird and ape specimens, and coming up with similar theories as Darwin.
The Dutch were the wealthy European colonizers there who set up governments, and the local native Malay villages and tribes lived off the land in huts, and had simple dirt roads, frequently trading with, and sometimes living amongst, the Europeans.
Wallace stays with a local village whenever he goes to a new Island or forest and has the locals help him catch butterflies and beetles for his collection back in Britain, which spurred great scientific research.
And the way he describes the locals is interesting, some might say racist.
He writes stuff like, “Their dances were clumsy but all you could expect from savages.”
or
“This local native village was less ugly than the others, and clearly bred with a superior race of people and had more refined features.”
But you know, the level of superstition existing amongst a primitive, native peoples, must have been jarring for a distinguished scholarly man from a post-enlightenment Britain.
In fact, in one example, he describes how the natives all made their huts with only vertical and horizontal logs and bamboo. He sarcastically asks himself why the local structural geniuses never figured out to just put a few diagonal logs. As in, a completely right angled house easily sways to and fro, and many were ready to collapse; but by simply adding a few diagonal beams the whole house doesn’t have to be rebuilt every two years.
And then he goes on to realize that some huts fell down less, and the local natives (circa 1856) realized that if they added some crooked logs to their structure, it tended to be sturdier.
But they attributed that to a superstitious benevolent force from crooked logs, never once realizing it was because it added some diagonal cross distribution of the load by being crooked.
Wallace is shocked. And when they live like this, and think like this, compared to the literature and knowledge and lifestyle he came from back in industrial, colonizing, dominating England, can you blame him for thinking less of them?
I think the biggest takeaway from today’s security breach is that the top professionals in the United States government actually trust Signal’s encryption enough to use it.
Now don’t be a retard and invite the editor in chief of The Atlantic to your group chat about top secret military airstrikes, sure…
But honestly a stellar endorsement of Signal as the app to use… https://www.perplexity.ai/search/are-all-signal-chats-between-i-l.RaWnopQCeIWl6kjHskJg
Now don’t be a retard and invite the editor in chief of The Atlantic to your group chat about top secret military airstrikes, sure…
But honestly a stellar endorsement of Signal as the app to use… https://www.perplexity.ai/search/are-all-signal-chats-between-i-l.RaWnopQCeIWl6kjHskJg
Part of the ritual of determining if someone is fit to lead, is to knock them down a few pegs and see how they react.
I just finished the third book of the space drama sci-fi book series Hyperion Cantos from the 1990s.
It’s fascinating how nearly all space scifi books have to try to make space seem smaller via some mechanism of faster than light communication, if not travel.
In this series, “the void that binds” was the ftl substrate, and “time debt” for cryogenic hibernation was a nice way to handle Einsteins’s theories of time dilation.
Sci-fi authors have a way of making the enormous smaller, to logarithmically process our galaxy. Physics and the speed of light always gets in the way.
Read more sci-fi, anon! It expands your mind.
It’s fascinating how nearly all space scifi books have to try to make space seem smaller via some mechanism of faster than light communication, if not travel.
In this series, “the void that binds” was the ftl substrate, and “time debt” for cryogenic hibernation was a nice way to handle Einsteins’s theories of time dilation.
Sci-fi authors have a way of making the enormous smaller, to logarithmically process our galaxy. Physics and the speed of light always gets in the way.
Read more sci-fi, anon! It expands your mind.
I’m so happy DEI is on its way out of corporations.
All racial quotas are racist.
If a candidate for a job is the best for the job, hire them. If that means you end up with fewer or more persons from specific demographic groups, so be it.
Same with crime: punish people for the actions they take, and if some demographic groups end up disproportionately incarcerated so be it.
Same with college admissions.
Treat everyone equally (as in equal opportunity not equal outcome), and let the chips fall where they may.
If certain demographic groups don’t get evenly represented, so what?
Push for full meritocracy.
Treat everyone equally under the law.
No quotas. No trying to balance the scales. Remove barriers to entry instead of trying to tweak the numbers of the final distribution.
All racial quotas are racist.
If a candidate for a job is the best for the job, hire them. If that means you end up with fewer or more persons from specific demographic groups, so be it.
Same with crime: punish people for the actions they take, and if some demographic groups end up disproportionately incarcerated so be it.
Same with college admissions.
Treat everyone equally (as in equal opportunity not equal outcome), and let the chips fall where they may.
If certain demographic groups don’t get evenly represented, so what?
Push for full meritocracy.
Treat everyone equally under the law.
No quotas. No trying to balance the scales. Remove barriers to entry instead of trying to tweak the numbers of the final distribution.
Corporations who hired illegal immigrants because they wanted to skirt minimum wage laws should be sued into oblivion and bankrupted. If the companies cannot pay fair wages for work in America, instead of trying to find criminals who’d work under the table for cheap in order to maximize profit, fight against minimum wage laws. I for one love the cultural push to absolutely demolish the illegal immigration.