Someone tell these guys I am consciously taking aesthetic inspiration from Justine Tunney et al.
Or maybe not, it’s more funny when they think I’m completely unaware of the thing I’m actually doing deliberately.
Gee, what an astute observation that when you take such things and change some words it sounds like such a thing with some words changed. I mean, those guys must be geniuses to recognize the influences.
do you have a “religion” class in your school system
germany: youp, though it becomes nonmandatory at some point pretty early on (i wouldn’t know when because i went to a catholic school with religion classes all the way) and you can elect sth like “ethics” or “philosophy” instead.
In Bavaria it’s mandatory until you graduate. There’s an “ethics” class if you’re not catholic or protestant and some schools offer an islam class as well.
Well, it is the same here, it is also ethics/philosophy or catholic/protestant/sometimes muslim religious classes, you have to go to one of these.
Yes. Belgium has this. Technically not mandatory, but I went to a Catholic school that offered no other options.
Nope to American public schools. Not even as an elective for my (poor, small, and rural) school.
Public schools (usually the wealthier ones) will occasionally have religious studies/history of religion classes, but the law frowns pretty seriously on anything that appears to be favoring or attacking any particular religion. In private schools it’s pretty much anything goes as long as they meet certain basic educational standards.
I had one in Denmark. It was mostly Protestant, IIRC? I was in the 6th whatever and it seemed mandatory.
Finland, yes, it’s either religion or ethics and members of the Church aren’t allowed to take ethics instead of religion even though it’s way more Actually Useful.
In addition, iirc they’re going to make it so that in high school the only class of a certain category that must be offered to people is religion; everything else is optional. Yes, screw things like history, psychology, economics and government, etc. because ~religion~ is the one that’s vital to know!
listen. i know jk rowling knows absolutely nothing about america but for the entire country to only have a single wizarding school there must be either 200 professors working at this place or you get to your first potions class and it’s held in a fucking baseball stadium.
SO A FRIEND AND I ACTUALLY JUST DID THE MATH ON THIS.
Between 1972-1979 there were 5,802,282 live births in the United Kingdom. These live births account for the roughly 600 Hogwarts students during Harry’s first year, and would make the birth rate of Wizards approximately 0.01% of the population.
The population of the United States in 2014 was 318.9 million -
23.1% of which were children 0-17. That would mean there were 73,665,900 children in 2014. Checking live births from a time period of 1997-2003 (which would account for children aged 11-17) gives us 27,978,287 children. If 0.01% of them were magical, we’re left with 27,978 school age magical children in the United States in 2014.
If we wanted school sizes similar to Hogwarts - 600 children to a school - we would need at minimum 47 magical schools. If we wanted it more comparable to our own schooling - with an average student body size of roughly 1,430 students combined between middle school and high school during the 2009-2010 school years - we’re down to a minimum of 20 magical schools.
So, long story short. It is statistically impossible for there to be a single magical school in the United States.
It’s far more likely there is at least one school in each state, possibly more than one in much larger states like Alaska, Texas, and California while a single school could feasibly serve the clustered smaller states like Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.
HUNDREDS OF WIZARDING SCHOOLS IN THE VAST STRETCHES OF UNPOPULATED WESTERN AMERICAN WILDERNESS
PUT THEM ALL IN ALASKA! THEY’D FIT!!!!
Magic is heritable. While spontaneous Muggleborns might have the same prevalence everywhere, I see no reason why that would hold for other wizard types.
Off by an order of magnitude, even if assuming the same prevalence of magic (although, by historical patterns, one could argue that magic-users could be extra-likely to emigrate to the colony/country that isn’t chock full of nosy muggles poking into things they shouldn’t be poking into, and thus the prevalence of magic would be, if anything, higher in the US (especially if muggleborns were to flee discrimination to the frontier, knowing that it’s the place where magic-users are disproportionately other muggleborns and even the purerbloods would be less likely to have a stick in their posterior)).
The US would actually need only 5 Hogwartses or 2 average-sized schools, or one which is way smaller than a reasonably-sized university.
Assuming 2 times higher number of wizards per capita because immigrants, that would be one school ten times the size of Hogwarts which is only implausible culturally, not demographically. The problem is not that there would be too many people, but that the people would be scattered all over.
I find it utterly absurd that a single institution would be able to monopolize everything. Sure, The Big School would be bigger than Hogwarts, but the ~american way~ would be to also have numerous small schools scattered all around, people teaching their children, etc. (I’m assuming no Federal Agency of Magic tracking unauthorized sorcery either, stuff being dealt with in a far more ad hoc fashion when something actually comes up) and probably entire communities with their own culturally distinct traditions and knowledge.
If I were officially made Queen of Social Engineering tomorrow I would designate one accessory that men aren’t allowed to wear (ribbons in hair?) and one that women aren’t allowed to wear (skullcaps?) and make it very clear that violating the rule is not done and basically amounts to forfeiting your gender.
Then I would walk around in public with hair ties and everyone would unambiguously read me as female.
petition: can you add one that only nonbinary people are allowed to wear
maybe we can be the only ones allowed to have undercuts?
Well, actually this would end up being freedom-maximizing in the pragmatic sense because the outcome of having one quite thoroughly consensual and relatively strongly gender-correlating signal would be objectively far less bullshitty than the current state of affairs where people care about gender a lot but refuse to have an unambiguous protocol for positioning oneself within it and thus end up having massive systems of bullshit instead.
It’d be very effective gender harm-reduction.
(Also, is wearing a skullcap with ribbons in your undercut the one which you use to signal “agender” because you’d be forfeiting all genders?)
It was as I was doing these four interviews that I realised how professional politicians and celebrities do it. As you get the same questions all of the time, you develop your patter to tell anecdotes with certain soundbites and phrases. Everyone does this. If you watch multiple interviews with a film star plugging the same film, they’ll tell the same stories every time. If you watch any interviews with the Leave campaign from before the referendum, they’d relentlessly repeat the phrase “Take Back Control”, to make their point.
I ended up doing the same. When asked if I really thought London should be independent, I’d always joke that I can’t envisage passport control on the M25. And if the broadcaster were an international broadcaster, I’d then add “ - that’s the road that rings London” to make sure everyone understood.
…
I wasn’t feeling very nervous as by this point I’d given approximately a million interviews, which more or less all had same fairly soft questions. But with about ten seconds to go before we went live on air the presenter said to me “So the first question is going to be asking why you want to overturn a democratic decision”. Wait, what? Agh! I just started a jokey petition and now I was plotting against democracy?! Had my revolution gone too far?
Amazingly, it was at this point I realised that all of these interviews had trained me for this exact sort of hostile questioning, and I had learned another trick the real politicians use: the pivot. This is where politicians take a question and somehow end up answering a very different question - the question they would have preferred to have been asked.
…
Though I’ve enjoyed the media attention this week, there is one niggling problem: I’ve now started this thing that is now beyond my control, and there are now thousands of people looking to me to tell them what to do next. It feels inevitable that I’m going to end up disappointing them.
Over the last week I’ve learned a lot. I’ve become the accidental leader of an independence movement, I’ve accidentally trained myself to become a savvy political operative, and I’ve accidentally won the genuine support of a surprisingly large number of people for a cause that might actually be quite unwise.
Honestly I think I support their idea more seriously than they do. I mean, it’s worth a try, and separate residency rules and citizenship and market access and maybe even other laws for London vs the rest of the UK might actually work well even if the two stayed heavily bound together.
Downside: I’d have to move to London, which would be damned expensive.
Well I for one am certainly available for the position of the leader of the Londependence movement if nobody else wants it…
These dudes are fucking legit. They don’t just show up one day in court, either, they actually make friends with the kids and let them know they have a support system and that there are people in the world who care about them and will always have their back. And less important, but also cool, is that the few times a couple of them have come into my cafe, they’ve been super friendly and polite and when I told one of the guys that I noticed his Bikers Against Child Abuse patch and wanted him to know how awesome I thought he was because of it, he got kind of shy and blushed and said, “The kids are the awesome ones, we just let them know they’re allowed to be brave.”
The source is long, but so, so good. These men and women are available in 36 states, 24 hours a day to stand guard at home, in court, at school, even if the child has a nightmare. Many of them are survivors of childhood abuse as well, and know what it’s like to feel scared and alone.
In court that day, the judge asked the boy, “Are you afraid?” No, the boy said.
Pipes says the judge seemed surprised, and asked, “Why not?”
The boy glanced at Pipes and the other bikers sitting in the front row, two more standing on each side of the courtroom door, and told the judge, “Because my friends are scarier than he is.”
Actual tears.. hnngh
Show me more of people like this, world. I give up on humans too easily.
where do i sign up for this,i want to be in this gang
This is fucking amazing. It may be out of character for me to say this but rock on
Bikers Against Child Abuse was founded in 1995 by a Native American child psychologist whose ride name is Chief, when he came across a young boy who had been subjected to extreme abuse and was too afraid to leave his house. He called the boy to reach out to him, but the only thing that seemed to interest the child was Chief’s bike. Soon, some 20 bikers went to the boy’s neighborhood and were able to draw him out of his house for the first time in weeks.
Chief’s thesis was that a child who has been abused by an adult can benefit psychologically from the presence of even more intimidating adults that they know are on their side. “When we tell a child they don’t have to be afraid, they believe us,” Arizona biker Pipes told azcentral.com. “When we tell them we will be there for them, they believe us.” ( Article)
My parents are a part of this organization and they are metal af
They go on runs to protect the child if they feel even the slightest threatened no matter where. If the child needs them to go on vacation with them, they do. Bikers come from across the nation to watch over and take shifts for these kids. And the best part is once you’re adopted into this family as a BACA kid, you’re always one. Even when you’re 40 and the perp gets released from jail, they’ll come meet with you and find your best options for avoiding the person and maintaining the life you’ve built for yourself. Once a BACA child, always a BACA child. In Florida, there’s 100% rate for identifying the perp based on the child’s testimony. Why? Because BACA stands with the child and supports the child so they feel comfortable enough to point out their attacker.
What’s better than a badass biker gang being on your side???
NATIVE AMERICAN CHILD PSYCHOLOGIST WHO IS A BIKER AND NAMED HIMSELF CHIEF HELL YES I’M HERE FOR THAT AND BIKERS BEING BAD ASS TO PROTECT KIDS. HELL YEAH.
it’s back! I will always reblog BACA
I need to join this organization.
Oh look, a non-governmental security organization actually doing its job properly; I’m surprisingly unsurprised. The cops won’t help; all too often people have to do it themselves and it’s very nice to see them actually doing it.
thathopeyetlives asked: Promethea, do you have any interesting comments on what to do about stuff like the FAA?
This is an interesting question. The Full Anarchist ™ solution would obviously be that the FAA would be a private voluntary organization with zero coercive power, just their social position as providers of useful services (comparable to eg. the linux kernel or bitcoin devs).
However, that relies on the absence of PoliceMob and laws, as people who don’t follow FAA recommendations and do it in a way that actually endangers others would be liable to getting their asses kicked by the people they would endanger or people acting on the behalf of those people, and thus their Dia Paying Groups would be incentivized to negotiate agreements that minimize the asskickedgettingness while maximizing the utility to people who want to do things that are very non-dangerous to innocent people yet b& by the current regulatory regime.
In the presence of PoliceMob and a sclerotic regime of laws where avenues for retaliation towards people who do cause harm are shut off while the avenues for causing harm themselves aren’t, the situation is more complex. I suspect there’s an uncanny valley in minarchism where the absence of counter-distortions in other directions amplifies the distortive effects of the structures that would remain (so if people’s right to fly unmolested is ironclad, but their responsibility to not endanger others isn’t, either de jure or de facto via eg. the practical limits of one person’s responsibility being their net worth or even less if it’s done through a corporation and there is no mandatory liability insurance to cover the costs, it would end up oversupplying the “endanger others with your flying” product, and information problems and moral hazards and principal-agent problems would probably be significant).
Thus, I believe that in the current environment the question of the FAA is complicated enough to warrant a hands-off policy on commenting on it as expressing an informed opinion that isn’t just “abolish everything we have now (eventually, through gradual substitution of coercive authorities with voluntary win-win structures), fight tha power (nonviolently)” would require information and expertise I don’t have. It’s trivial to say that the FAA has been regulatory-captured and is most likely simultaneously over- and under-regulating and overall serving the interests of established players against smaller ones and new technologies, but given everything else we also have “just abolish it” isn’t likely to be a workable solution in this particular instance, and specifying what would be is not something I have the competence to answer.
One interesting possibility would be to make liability insurance mandatory and replace criminal law with pure torts (”I don’t care why or how it happened, but you touched the thing and hurt someone so you will pay, that’s what the insurance is for after all”) which would mean that eg. airlines would pay the reasonable amount for the accidents that are expected to happen and thus could reduce their insurance premiums by reducing accident risks, and people fucking around unsafely with drones would also pay and be incentivized to not do it while people fucking around not-unsafely wouldn’t have extra premiums or onerous regulations, and thus the FAA could be reduced to advisory instead of coercive status, but even then the actual effects and “how to implement this so it would be actually better than what we have now” is something someone else would be more qualified to answer.
These are the final minutes of my time here in Turku - I am downloading the podcast I’ll be listening to as I drive back to Helsinki - and I just want to put a few words into text before I forget them
The overall trip went great - I met @socialjusticemunchkin who shall henceforth be my #1 goto guide in Finland, and together we visited some of the sights of TuFun By The Sea 2016rku which, it turns out, is a great city. Unfortunately, the very first thing I suggested doing was a walking trip through the town and oh look, my shoes were not nearly as good for walking as I remembered so blisters, blisters everywhere. This put a slight damper on the rest of the trip but not so much as to ruin it. I write as I sit here, nursing my feet.
But Promethea put up with my foot-related complaints and we visited the botanical gardens right outside of town, then today an…. alternative? cafe and after that the Aboa Vetus & Ars Novu museum where I shot the previous picture - an interesting place, built on top of an archeological dig into old TurkFun By The Sea 2016u and contrasting it with an exhibition of modern art - some of which I did not particularly enjoy, other pieces of which were excellent.
Also in between that, meals and talking. And now I know what Promethea is like when not interacting through text so that’s new.
All in all A++ experience**, can recommend to others that you try visiting tumblr friends when you have time.
**Well the actual trip was terrible, I got stuck in 1½ hours of completely unprecedented traffic on a bridge that is normally free. I ended up hitting the airport - not the gate, the airport - three minutes before boarding started so that was nice. I am not looking forward to seeing what the final cost of parking has been, what with my car being stuck for 3 days in an airport “priced for short term parking” spot :O
The study on “is promethea able to convince programmers to fly around Europe to buy them food” has been replicated and the results are once again: positive.
This suggests that the revealed value of promethea-company is consistently greater than the cost of flying around Europe to spend a couple of days in the corner promethea is still unfortunately mostly stuck in (YGM) and buying them some excellent food, and that people of a certain level of financial means are probably likely to be erring on the side of not trying it out compared to the rationally optimal amount of flying around Europe and buying promethea food.
Further research is absolutely necessary.
You joke, but I was actually heavily inspired by Timothy Ferris by way of Yudkowsky:
Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all. When people suggest you follow your “passion” or your “bliss,” I propose that they are, in fact, referring to the same singular concept: excitement.
This brings us full circle. The question you should be asking isn’t “What do I want?” or “What are my goals?” but “What would excite me?”
And oh look, it turns the rationally optimal thing was doing as the Caliph tells us - seek new and interesting experiences.
In fact I am not joking at all and simply expressing things in an exquisitely idiosyncratic way!
I do sincerely believe people should do the “fly to finland and buy a promethea some foods” thing more often, and out of their own best interests, not just because it would be convenient for me. I mean, it obviously would be very convenient to me, but that’s not the main point.
These are the final minutes of my time here in Turku - I am downloading the podcast I’ll be listening to as I drive back to Helsinki - and I just want to put a few words into text before I forget them
The overall trip went great - I met @socialjusticemunchkin who shall henceforth be my #1 goto guide in Finland, and together we visited some of the sights of TuFun By The Sea 2016rku which, it turns out, is a great city. Unfortunately, the very first thing I suggested doing was a walking trip through the town and oh look, my shoes were not nearly as good for walking as I remembered so blisters, blisters everywhere. This put a slight damper on the rest of the trip but not so much as to ruin it. I write as I sit here, nursing my feet.
But Promethea put up with my foot-related complaints and we visited the botanical gardens right outside of town, then today an…. alternative? cafe and after that the Aboa Vetus & Ars Novu museum where I shot the previous picture - an interesting place, built on top of an archeological dig into old TurkFun By The Sea 2016u and contrasting it with an exhibition of modern art - some of which I did not particularly enjoy, other pieces of which were excellent.
Also in between that, meals and talking. And now I know what Promethea is like when not interacting through text so that’s new.
All in all A++ experience**, can recommend to others that you try visiting tumblr friends when you have time.
**Well the actual trip was terrible, I got stuck in 1½ hours of completely unprecedented traffic on a bridge that is normally free. I ended up hitting the airport - not the gate, the airport - three minutes before boarding started so that was nice. I am not looking forward to seeing what the final cost of parking has been, what with my car being stuck for 3 days in an airport “priced for short term parking” spot :O
The study on “is promethea able to convince programmers to fly around Europe to buy them food” has been replicated and the results are once again: positive.
This suggests that the revealed value of promethea-company is consistently greater than the cost of flying around Europe to spend a couple of days in the corner promethea is still unfortunately mostly stuck in (YGM) and buying them some excellent food, and that people of a certain level of financial means are probably likely to be erring on the side of not trying it out compared to the rationally optimal amount of flying around Europe and buying promethea food.
