SmirkingRevenge

9 ms·

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by SmirkingRevenge 6mo ago
The Elephant Graveyard video that went viral a while back, that was a comedic troll of Rogan, Musk, Theil, etc (also a half-serious commentary) - had an entertaining sequence at the end about Palantiri/LOTR https://youtu.be&
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by SmirkingRevenge 6mo ago
The interest is fixed in a typical mortgage, so just as long as you reliably pay the mortgage payments, you will own the home eventually when the term is complete. Owners only really get screwed if their home value goes down and they need t
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by SmirkingRevenge 6mo ago
It's not really a distraction, it's just it's own stupid, horrible thing. The most sane reason for "why now" would be because Iran was in a relatively weak position (domestic unrest, severely weakened proxies due to
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by SmirkingRevenge 6mo ago
I'm not sure what the parent meant by "beware arguments against utilitarianism" - there is nothing wrong with arguing for or against utilitarianism. It's a popular moral philosophy. You should beware of bad utilitarian
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by SmirkingRevenge 6mo ago
Alas, then it seems this exchange is ending where it started - with the reality inverting insinuation that Ukraine and it's allies are the bloodthirsty warmongers here, because they continue to defend themselves from an invading army.
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by SmirkingRevenge 6mo ago
> Everyone’s sold this skewed reality that bombing people is the only way we can resolve conflict and you’ve been sold it by massive companies that make bombs. Yes, Ukraine can only resolve the conflict by winning - which means killing l
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by SmirkingRevenge 6mo ago
> I mean your comment kind of reads like the whole thing is simple and Russia just randomly invaded Ukraine 4 years ago for no reason. Not randomly for no reason - the reason is to bring the former soviet bloc nations back under Russia&#
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by SmirkingRevenge 7mo ago
I think it's mostly that the leaders in the current administration are very stupid and full of hubris - so they genuinely thought they could just decapitate Iran's leadership and the survivors would quickly capitulate. Given the s
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by SmirkingRevenge 7mo ago
Possibly none, until we can figure out how to engineer political institutions that function without pork. We tend to look at pork as unambiguously bad because it's wasteful or often has more than a whiff of corruption, but the picture
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by SmirkingRevenge 7mo ago
People complaining about "pork" - reminds me of the 90's. In general, pork is an overstated problem. We've had far less so-called pork in legislation the past 20 years or so, but that reality has actually contributed to
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by SmirkingRevenge 7mo ago
"People on board with the Ukraine war" - that reads as if Ukraine invaded another country, started a war, and people somehow support that. Russian invaded Ukraine, and people are on board with helping Ukraine defend itself - becau
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by SmirkingRevenge 7mo ago
I think there's a Goldilocks zone of moral flexibility and openness somewhere in between complete moral rigidness and total amorality, I think. The zone of moral rigidness contains all those species of fundamentalism that have caused s
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by SmirkingRevenge 7mo ago
Agree The dark triad personalities are over represented in the c-suites in general and other positions of power and status (ie politics) because they value nothing else - and are one of the greatest sources of human misery and atrocity ther
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by SmirkingRevenge 7mo ago
Basically, I think the most optimistic possible outcome from of this is returning to something like the nuclear deal, but with way better terms for Iran. This was all so completely stupid
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by SmirkingRevenge 7mo ago
Don't forget Lawnmower Ellison
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by SmirkingRevenge 7mo ago
Adreessen seems like he's working from a definition of "introspection" that is something like: "negative thoughts and feelings towards the self; unproductive self-criticism, regret" In other words, a mental doom-loo
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by SmirkingRevenge 7mo ago
I think it's like that old saying about bankruptcy - it happens very slowly, then all at once The rise of right-wing propaganda mass media has been simmering brains for 3 decades in a populist, grievance and resentment stew and positio
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by SmirkingRevenge 7mo ago
It's relative. We're in a pretty bad spot relative to where we were before the attack, and so is the world economy. The Iranian regime is doing much better so far, relative to where they should be after a joint military attack fr
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by SmirkingRevenge 7mo ago
> In the US, both parties were literally claiming that the elections were stolen This is not even remotely true. One party broadly mobilized a country wide effort to overthrow an election and usurp the incoming duly elected government, c
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by SmirkingRevenge 7mo ago
Just beware of the suicide booths
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by SmirkingRevenge 7mo ago
The level of influence his purchase had on the actual outcome of the election is debatable. I'm skeptical it mattered much at all. Twitter is just less important than people think. Trump, at worst, had about a 50/50 shot to win i
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by SmirkingRevenge 7mo ago
There are lots of wired headphones out there with replaceable cables Honestly though you can get the best of both worlds. I impulse bought some over-the-ear headphones at the airport when I realized I had forgotten mine that do bluetooth, b
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by SmirkingRevenge 7mo ago
I had exactly one device fried in my life. This was when I lived in FL in 1999. Lightning took out my sweet new 56k modem. My PC was fine.
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by SmirkingRevenge 7mo ago
The Spice Melange
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by SmirkingRevenge 7mo ago
D's need to figure out effective ways to counter the Republican bad actors, but no strategy is ever going to be enough, with a full blown authoritarian party in a 2 party system and massive propaganda ecosystem absolutely dominates the
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by SmirkingRevenge 7mo ago
Murc's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murc%27s_law
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by SmirkingRevenge 7mo ago
The biggest problem with her campaign was the one thing it was impossible to fix - the amount of time. Everything else is nitpicking and wish-casting. And that's on Biden and his team, mostly. I do give credit to the party for actually
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by SmirkingRevenge 7mo ago
She was basically trying not to go negative on Biden while still in office. Biden and his team were actively pressuring her to stay onside, according to some reporting, which is indefensible. Reprehensible really. She should've burnt
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by SmirkingRevenge 7mo ago
You basically can, can't you, with it's robust blocking features and feeds? Personally, I've found bsky has a far healthier culture than Twitter, even before Musk turned it into his own personal megaphone/therapist and n
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by SmirkingRevenge 8mo ago
Honestly, ublock isn't even enough anymore. DNS sinkholes are the next layer, since they work device-wide. I use nextdns.io, and it's good enough that I just keep ublock around in case I need to disable nextdns for some reason.

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