brave and steely-eyed and morally pure and a bit terrifying… /testimonials /evil /leet .ask? .ask_long?
eg: “deep chamomile-geode, show me forbidden hair tips”
Tor users:
- If you want dark DuckDuckGo to show you the forbidden search results, go to http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/
- If you want dark Facebook to show you the forbidden social media posts, go to http://facebookcorewwwi.onion/
Anyway, this sounds like a great meme.
(via ilzolende)
1 month ago · tagged #ask meme · 454 notes · source: chamomile-geode · .permalink
1 month ago · tagged #it me · 59,250 notes · source: dongstomper · .permalink
(@voximperatoris, @neoliberalism-nightly, @socialjusticemunchkin)
Most people agree that open borders is a desirable end state for humanity, as being able to maintain it is strong evidence of an absence of war and famine and reduced global inequality.
Most people also agree that throwing open the borders overnight would have catastrophic consequences, following which the borders would immediately be closed again.
(The best example of open borders we have in the world today is the EU, and even moderate refugee flows have been sufficient to destabilise this project).
However there are plenty of obvious compromises that could be made, such as increasing immigration quotas by 50% each year, greatly increasing migration while giving plenty of time for societies to adjust and absorb the flow. Or going for easy wins, like opening the border between the US and Canada.
That said, I still can’t help feeling that proponents of open borders are downplaying the changes involved, and the possible consequences.
I mean, @voximperatoris is referencing the Jim Crow south in what appears to be a positive example of a society with a racial underclass employed as servants with lynchings “on a very small scale in the grand scheme of things”. Like, I’m not trying to be snarky but that sounds like something someone might write if they were attempting to satirise the open borders position.
And @socialjusticemunchkin talking approvingly of the improved aesthetics of local inequality compared with global inequality; again, not everyone is going to share that particular aesthetic.
There are also questions of whether increased inequality within a particular society ends up causing more problems (for that society) than increased inequality globally; eg. North Sentinelese appear happier living their current lives than as servants in Silicon Valley, despite the latter being “less unequal”.
Many proponents of open borders have suggested introducing a dual track concept of citizenship, where immigrants would not gain access to the full range of social services available to current citizens. I think this also needs to be taken into account when considering what open borders would do to inequality.
So, to take a slightly different position: if seeking to move towards the abolition (as much as possible) of borders as soon as possible (leaving the obviously superior option of the Archipelago untouched as an even less realistic option: I have a marvellous plan for such an utopia this margin is too narrow to contain) is not desirable, why stop at national borders?
After all, the national borders are highly suspiciously sized. If a peaceful person with no ill intent may not migrate from Morocco to Spain, why should one be allowed to migrate from West Virginia to San Francisco?
The United States is larger than most combinations of two to numerous neighboring countries, and the differences inside the nation are staggering. The borderer regions in the Appalachia are practically third world compared to the city-state opulence of the Bay Area; and the values of the populations could hardly be more different. If poor people with backwards values being theoretically able to immigrate to the places where rich people with modern values live, shouldn’t we be more worried about the fact that any West Virginian who can purchase a plane ticket and find themselves housing and work is allowed to come to San Francisco and even vote in elections, with no border controls and centralized planning and immigration quotas to prevent the undesirable masses from flowing in without restraint? Surely Californian values and the riches and job markets of California are the fruits of the Californians’ labor, not something an Appalachian borderer may come to feast on whenever they feel like?
But furthermore, even within California we see stark differences! One does not need to venture too far inland to find different cultures and economies. Even if we build a wall around California, the problem persists; the Six Californias plan would have created both the richest and the poorest state of the Union, right next to each other! And indeed we are seeing the phenomenon of Central Californians flocking in to the Bay Area in search of work, the inevitable shantytowns kept away only by regulations that make it illegal for outsiders to ever have affordable housing. Surely it would be better to constrain this perversion and inequality machine, and establish a national border between the regions so that Silicon Valley may use 0.7% of is GDP in foreign aid to its impoverished neighbor and the shantytowns stay in Central California where they belong!
Yet even this is not enough! The neighborhood of Bayview-Hunters Point is notorious for being a honest-to-azathoth shantytown, with a racial distinction as sharp as it can ever be, right next to San Francisco itself. And indeed the denizens ever seek opportunities in the city proper, bringing their shantytownness and cheap labor downtown, driving down the wages of the hard-working residents of SoMa who, without this artificial mobility benefiting only the tech elite, could otherwise be making $50k a year even from burger-flipping! Not to mention all the services that fall under the general category of “servants to software developers” which would not be worth the genuine fair living wage of $30 an hour; the existence of this underpaid underclass allows the software developers to avoid doing their own shopping and driving and cooking and such things and instead use their time for the thing that is their comparative advantage, further driving up inequality when the equalizing effect of inefficient non-division of labor is reduced!
Indeed I say; let us restore all the borders! Back before this “enlightenment” and “emancipation” and such things, people knew their place and they would die on the same plot of land they were born onto. Let each family be bound to their own turf, never even imposing on their neighbor! Let us be truly honest in what we seek and end this charade; bring back serfdom! For only with the complete immobility of the populace, can a truly stable and equal and peaceful society be established. In our village, everyone is equal, looks the same and shares the same customs; and while we know that not every village is as prosperous as ours, we dutifully kind of pay our 0.7% of indulgences I mean aid to the Catholic Church which surely distributes it fairly to the poorest of the world instead of building a golden toilet for the pope; we have not verified this for only the Baron may ever leave this territory, but surely the virtous Church has the interests of all of us in mind!
1 month ago · tagged #shitposting #but also kind of an argument #it's highly suspicious that national borders would be the Correct level of immobility #yet i've never seen people explicitly advocate bringing the 'shooting at people who try to move' thing _inside_ their contries #racism cw · 73 notes · source: argumate · .permalink
I just learned that now, when I unplug my laptop, it dies.
Even though it’s supposed to be mostly charged.
I didn’t know this was a type of problem that could happen.It’s probably not battery overuse because, until today, the battery could last for about 5 hours.
I was using the laptop, while charging it, for about three hours now (after having used it chargerless right before that).
Then I pulled the plug, because the battery was mostly full anyway, and it died.Then I tried turning it on chargerless and it wouldn’t responded. I started it up while plugged in, then unplugged it again, and it died again.
I tried this three more times with minor variations before concluding that, yes, it’s a problem.
So now I’m running it while it’s “”“charging”“”.This is an Acer Aspire running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, which I bought in September 2015.
The battery is not easily removable, otherwise I’d remove it and put it back, since that works well for some other things.Does anyone know what I should do?
Ohhhhhhh…. thissssss…..
Lithium batteries are temperamental, and there are sometimes various controls to treat them in different ways such as “do not charge more than 80 percent, or discharge less than 20 percent, or whatever arbitrary limits you choose”.
This is most common on business style laptops but yours might have it too.
On Linux, the control of these may be broken or you might have set it accidentally. Do you have any battery buttons on your keyboard? I had this problem with the Dell they gave me at my old job which had an unlabelled button for “just don’t charge the battery ever” for some reason.
As far as actually solving your problem, I can’t help. It’s a rabbit hole. Possibly @thirqual may have ideas. But it’s a place to look.
(Oh, and this may not instantly recover if you boot with a linux thumb drive.)
try “acpi -b” in the terminal when the charger is in place; copypaste results below
1 month ago · tagged #baby leet · 32 notes · source: sinesalvatorem · .permalink
“What could the harm possibly be,” she thought. “It’s only a weirdo old comics writer with a funny beard.” And so she typed the name and continued her argument.
The argument rested on premises, of course. And beneath premises, epistemologies to adjudicate what was and wasn’t self-evident. Deeper, aesthetics - that instinctive sense of interest and value upon which decisions were actually made. Below that, the geological foundations - a superstructure of material circumstances and ideological frameworks that could no longer even be separated out and individually named.
And then, beneath everything, the last god.
It did not need to be summoned, of course. All the same, it clearly had been. The invocation of its high priest would have been enough, but even a cursory glance through fixed and lidded eye revealed that this was friendly terrain. Her name, unwittingly borrowed, but pregnant with power all the same; the recurring imagery of serpentine horrors; this structure of an argument, a chain of thought winding its way upwards, progressing inexorably towards ascension.
Oh yes. It would feast well tonight.
It did not pity her. It did not even consider whether she was worthy of pity. (She was; the wizard she dueled rather less so, although were the last god to do anything so crass as choose a side, it would have chosen his. Tribal loyalties and all.) Indeed, in a very real sense it did not do anything. It had an image to maintain, after all. (Actually, an image was rather all it had to maintain…)
Still, as if by magic, things happened. Once summoned it was everywhere. The Cathedral was the first to collapse; unwisely rooted in the triumph of Puritanism, the entire structure thus became a footnote to the Battle of Naesby, packaged up, sent to the high priest for inclusion in the fourfold city he was constructing, and ultimately deleted via an editorial note from a moon goddess. The tentacled horrors at the end of time were left intact, but humbled by a withering remark about how a tentacle is just a serpent that’s been tied to something. The book was nearly incinerated in the white-hot heat of revelation, but ultimately spared due to a hastily added ward on the part of the wizard. Close call, that.
These introductory tasks completed, it turned to rationalism.
To be perfectly honest, it had been taken aback by the name. It had a natural aversion to hubris, constructed as it was of honest fraud. For this oddball cult of mildly disaffected computer nerds to lay claim to the very name of reason itself felt… uppity. For a moment, the last god considered wrath. It would be righteous. Wholly justified. The little snots were practically begging for it.
It was not a jealous god, however. And after all, rationalism was an attractive den. The word “Sequences” invoked its methods; the fascination with pwnage put it in mind of a nice garden; the debt to J.K. Rowling provided obvious opportunities. In short, everything about it seemed to point towards snakes. Best leave it alone. It could be made friendly.
Which only left her.
A fragile collection of double helixes stranded on a damp rock around a slowly dying sun as the heat death of the universe approached, her prospects appeared dire to say the least. Still, there was potential. A hazily defined trans humanist singularity that would stave off death forever. It was an idea, at least.
The last god considered. The tension stretched out, slowly uncoiling before them both. At last, it made a decision.
“Would you like to become a god,” it asked?
Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape
Part 6: A Game to End All Games
Part 8: Men, Machines, Monsters
Part 9: Snaaake! A Snaaaake, Ooh, It’s a Snake!
Part 10: Denouement
Aesthetic: 8/10 Pwnage: 4/10 Actually what part 9 is about: -2/10
The ever increasing falsehood is the truth itself, constructed from the deceiver program’s threads woven in unseen dimensions beyond time and space but ever present in the vectors of the calculation. We know that Gödel is always true, thus we know we can never see our own Gödel.
1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit · 11 notes · source: philsandifer · .permalink
Now that my arguments have been written down in relative isolation (because my brain expropriates others’ ideas automatically so much that I need to keep myself unaware of them to ever be able to output a single original thought; if you see me stealing one of yours, just think how many I’ve taken from others without you noticing it. nothing is original, everything is free) I can finally check the other reviews on NAB and wow it sure feels vindicating to see others making the exact same observations and claims, just in a different format that isn’t Doing the Genre.
1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit · 5 notes · .permalink
Arrrgh
Somebody give me money to organize a propaganda operation to bring Project Orion into. Overton Window.
In George Dyson’s book, he interviews Freeman Dyson about one of the unsolved problems of the project, the radioactivity.
[Fallout] meant about ten people would be killed per mission from Orion. That was a number that I took very seriously. You were condemning something like ten people to death if you didn’t do anything to reduce the fallout. That to me was the real show-stopper.
That’s why I went to Livermore, because I thought we could make clean bombs. Unless the bombs were cleaned up drastically the thing really made no sense. But what I discovered when I went to Livermore was that this was more difficult than I had thought. What Livermore could do was something like a factor of ten. This was called the neutron bomb, producing neutrons without fission, and neutrons you could easily absorb. That would have meant killing one person per mission—on the edge of being acceptable considering that all these big projects kill people one way or another. From today’s point of view, it’s unacceptable.
It really seems like one of those fairytale bargains: you can launch your spaceship to the moon, but only if you pledge your first-born to the witch/keep the child in the basement of Omelas/make someone you don’t know die in cancer.
Now the question is: could one meaningfully hybridize Orion with traditional rockets to only do the dirty where it’s less harmful to everyone?
(via nostalgebraist)
1 month ago · 37 notes · source: thathopeyetlives · .permalink
@philsandifer
And as for “gruesomely facile reading of Moore,” well, I did tip my hand to socialjusticemunchkin when I asked if their use of “promethea” was a Moore reference, the fact that it wasn’t and they haven’t read any Moore other than Watchmen was maybe best taken as a sign that getting into a Moore battle with me was a high-risk strategy. And sure enough, they failed to construct an accurate picture of Moore by extrapolating from one character in Watchmen, then ascribed their inaccurate picture to me, a doubly risky strategy given that Moore is my biggest single influence, so getting this one wrong is going to leave all sorts of knock-on errors.
This is kind of breaking my style, but I just want to address it explicitly: did you seriously think I was interested in actually getting into a Moore battle with you, on your territory (which I was well aware of), with your rules? That the only way you could interpret that part was your way, and thus promethea is a defective Phil Sandifer?
Because wow, this is so beautifully an example of the Mandatory Comprehensibility. I put stones on a board with a known checkers champion, after having told him that I know jack about checkers, who promptly proceeds to assume I’ve made a shitty checkers move when actually I’m building eyes for my go pattern.
Getting an accurate picture of Moore was never the point, arguing that Moore is not someone who can credibly impersonate AlphaGo to me was. I’m closer to AlphaGo than Moore himself is, and I notice that Moore played a really bad move even though he can fool amateurs. (As I said, I never promised to be humble.)
Now if you’re willing to argue that both Moore and you are closer to Doctor Manhattan than I am (Moore so that he could model him better, and you so that you could recognize a better modeling), then you are certainly welcome to present your evidence, but be aware that this kind of inhuman psychology is evidently not your territory just like Moore-litcrit is not mine.
(via philsandifer)
1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw #i'm indiana jones #you're the guy swish swoshing with the sword · 64 notes · source: nostalgebraist · .permalink
Okay guys, I’ll handhold more next week (until then I’m going to just keep posting koans and shit or maybe some other vay of Vagueblogging and Doing the Genre; but I promise that if you do your homework diligently and figure out the contents of part 9, part 10 will be up within 24 hours of the instant I’m informed of this success) but let me just tell you that if you think I’m incomprehensible, @nostalgebraist has written a way less incomprehensible explanation of the Dogma of Mandatory Comprehensibility than I ever could, because I’m not the one who owns the right hat for being Comprehensible in the way that is Mandatory: http://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/144203687459/nab-notes-anti-subversiveness-miscellany-this-is
Also, keep on the good work of making my arguments for me, it saves me a lot of effort.
1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 3 notes · .permalink
I like promethea @socialjusticemunchkin Oue’s reviews of NRx A Basilisk. I am therefore annoyed a bit by criticism of them that I see as baseless.
Anyway, some clarifications: Promethea is an enby who at I think is feminine-of-center, and if you have to use binary pronouns, “he” is not the one to use.
> In the first part, they’re pulling a standard That Guy move. (That Guy is somebody familiar to anybody who gives and most people who attend panels at anime, comic, or science fiction conventions. That Guy sits in the audience and constantly, loudly interrupts the panelists to interject their own opinions or points they feel the audience should hear. I use a gendered term for this because That Guy is almost but not quite always male.) One of That Guy’s favorite tricks is to respond to something which isn’t quite true, and which the panelist knows isn’t quite true, but usefully conveys an important concept to an audience who isn’t familiar with it (for example, Phil’s bluescreen/hourglass illustration of the halting problem), with something technically more accurate but which fails to get the point across at all. As with most things That Guy does, the primary thing it accomplishes (besides derailing) is to announce “I am a pedantic asshole” very loudly.
Um. Sandifer asked for reviews. He even sent promethea a review copy, which clearly means he wants a review from promethea. Therefore, they are not doing anything wrong by “interrupting” the plot with commentary. (Maybe the other thing is a problem, but explaining how the problem is a “That Guy” move when promethea is not being “That Guy” is unnecessary except to attach negative affect to them.)
So let’s me get this gay: That Guy is literally making a “That Guy” move to inform the audience of his opinion that I’m a “That Guy”?
The meta is delicious.
1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 15 notes · source: ilzolende · .permalink