philwelch

8 ms·

91.
by philwelch 8mo ago
Much like pirates and gangsters, Vikings are cool if you consider them from an aesthetic as opposed to moralistic perspective. Everyone has evil ancestors, but some of them were cool.
92.
by philwelch 8mo ago
This piece seems a little confused about what it’s actually reporting on. It’s well known, to the point of near-cliche, that the word “Viking” didn’t refer to a nationality or ethnicity. It meant something akin to “raider”. The ethnic group
93.
by philwelch 8mo ago
Every communist regime that collapsed was in the process of liberalizing, except Romania, which wasn’t overthrown peacefully. China didn’t collapse in 1989 because they were the only communist regime able and willing to massacre protestors.
94.
by philwelch 8mo ago
How many of those African regimes sponsor terrorism and piracy against Americans, or adopt “death to America” as a motto?
95.
by philwelch 8mo ago
Wikipedia describes it as a “a short-lived Kurdish self-governing unrecognized state in present-day Iran” and “a puppet state of the Soviet Union”. Doesn’t really count as a free and independent state.
96.
by philwelch 8mo ago
This works against relatively liberal governments. It didn’t work for the Tiananmen Square protestors in 1989 or for the intermittent Iranian protestors of the past couple decades because those regimes were willing to suppress those protest
97.
by philwelch 8mo ago
I have direct scientific evidence contrary to the claim that parachutes improve the safety of jumping out of airplanes. https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
98.
by philwelch 8mo ago
I thought red light was recommended for nighttime because it doesn’t interfere with natural night vision.
99.
by philwelch 8mo ago
That's actually a related issue. European governments routinely and sometimes illegally attempt to enforce their laws against American websites, so if you run a website it's easier to just block the entire continent than to deal w
100.
by philwelch 8mo ago
Of course, but it's best to do both if possible.
101.
by philwelch 8mo ago
I have no intention of spending my childrens' inheritance selfishly extending my own life, and I'm grateful to live somewhere I still have that choice. The people of New Zealand and the Netherlands have my sympathy and I hope they
102.
by philwelch 8mo ago
And if I was emperor, I would abolish payroll taxes and phase out Social Security. Unfortunately, we live in a democracy.
103.
by philwelch 8mo ago
Money can be passed down to your children and grandchildren though.
104.
by philwelch 8mo ago
The government doesn’t set the retirement age. You can retire whenever you want. There are no laws against a 50 year old retiring and living off his own savings, nor against a 70 year old continuing to work. There is a minimum age to collec
105.
by philwelch 8mo ago
The social security trust fund does buy government bonds.
106.
by philwelch 8mo ago
> The primary purpose of CPF is not a pension scheme. It is structured as a massive forced bond purchase scheme by citizens. Financially what happens is the 37% of citizen income buys a long term bond (till retirement age, on average dec
107.
by philwelch 8mo ago
In evaporative cooling, the warmer particles are more prone to evaporate and escape leaving the remaining substance cooler than it was. Likewise, as individuals with more of a libertarian or founder-sympathizing mindset stopped contributing
108.
by philwelch 8mo ago
My mistake, I knew he was aware of and commented on the parallel but I misremembered the details.
109.
by philwelch 8mo ago
They could, but it’s a tradeoff. Inventory costs money and if you cut production, that means laying off workers and possibly selling productive assets, at which point it becomes more expensive to scale production back up. Every business dec
110.
by philwelch 8mo ago
It didn’t use to be this way but through evaporative cooling, most of the founder types stopped posting here.
111.
by philwelch 8mo ago
That was a very conscious and deliberate homage.
112.
by philwelch 8mo ago
There’s no “typhon” in this thread. Did you mean “typon”? I did reread his comment; it expressed a negative view of a specific generational cohort rather than old people in general.
113.
by philwelch 8mo ago
> I don’t know what the fuck anyone means by bucket crabs. If you put one crab in a bucket, it might climb out. If you put many crabs in a bucket, they will actually stop each other from climbing out. This is an extremely common metaphor
114.
by philwelch 8mo ago
> I'd love to hear about your economical plan to extract resources and populate the rest of the solar system. A good starting point is Gerard O’Neill’s 1977 book The High Frontier . > It currently costs approximately $4,000 per
115.
by philwelch 8mo ago
Right, my point is that if they were men raping four and eight year old boys, they may very well have been convicted of sodomy rather than child rape like they would in some Western countries. The state law in Washington even had a similar
116.
by philwelch 8mo ago
Many traditional cultures don’t really distinguish between homosexuality and pedarasty. That distinction, or at least the cultural recognition of a distinction, is largely a distinctive artifact of the sexual revolution, a western phenomeno
117.
by philwelch 8mo ago
We have a whole damn solar system we’re barely even using. Overpopulation is a fake bugbear of small minded bucket crabs.
118.
by philwelch 8mo ago
It’s more generational-cohort-ism.
119.
by philwelch 8mo ago
Singapore is small enough to kick the can down the road, but it’s still not sustainable to depend on immigration from other places that also have below replacement TFR
120.
by philwelch 8mo ago
Nobody’s going to pay for a feasibility study in a regulatory climate with sufficient barriers to mining. Canada might have less of that thanks to its resource-extraction economy but it’s a huge problem in the US.

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