throwaway7312

hace 7 añosdiscuss

Not everyone in the US benefits equally by going down the paths the academics, politicians, business leaders, and pundits set out for us. The larger this group of the disaffected becomes (and it is becoming quite large), the more these people will rebel against what their betters instruct them to think and do.

throwaway7312

hace 8 añosdiscuss

[dead]

throwaway7312

hace 8 añosdiscuss

[flagged]

throwaway7312

hace 8 añosdiscuss

> Christians by and large make up every pillar of Western society

... except Hollywood, academia, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, K Street, much of the publishing industry, and the mainstream media. Fixed that for you.

And Merry Christmas!

throwaway7312

hace 8 añosdiscuss

> I thought I followed climate change issues but somehow did not know that in most people's lifetimes sea levels will rise multiple feet. I would've thought folks would be more... concerned?

According to Sir David King (head U.K. climate scientist) in 2004, all continents other than Antarctica will be uninhabitable by 2100 due to manmade global warming.[1]

I wouldn't be worried about New York. I'd be on the next ship down to Antarctica to go stake my land claim right now before it all gets gobbled up.

I mean, if this manmade global warming stuff is real, and it's as bad as they say it is.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20100817023019/http://www.indepen...

throwaway7312

hace 8 añosdiscuss

Our business was on MailChimp years ago.

We were on a paid tier. In 2012 we decided to try sending our own email via arpReach + SES. Once we set this up we asked MailChimp how to pause our paid account. We wanted to stop sending email and return to a free account until we needed MailChimp again.

Their response was that there was no way to do that... I recall it being something like "we do not like" or "do not allow" customers to return to free accounts. You could either keep paying, or delete your account and everything in it.

We'd already moved our MailChimp-collected emails over to arpReach (on our own server). At that point, I just opted to delete our MailChimp account.

Everything was fine while we used them. But that strange incident left a really bad taste in my mouth; it was one I never forgot.

throwaway7312

hace 8 añosdiscuss

Won't the term "person" unnecessarily alienate otherkin[1]?

Walter would appear to be safest with "thinking entity's game."

Then he has full coverage for men, women, intersex, asexual, androgynous, and non-human identities. His game will also still be relevant and inclusive once we've made contact with non-human extraterrestrials, and uplifted animals and machines to sentience.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherkin

throwaway7312

hace 8 añosdiscuss

Major General Smedley Butler on war profiteers back in 1935:

https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

throwaway7312

hace 8 añosdiscuss

My experience hiring women for our company has been 1.) they often don't want the job, 2.) when they get the job, they often balk at how demanding it is, then 3.) if they do stick around, regardless how much training we give them we end up having to let them go. This is not all female hires; we have women in customer service roles, for example, who outperformed our male hires; the females kept the job, the males did not. But for more technical roles, they have consistently either balked at the workload or underperformed and been quickly fired (we fire male workers who underperform just as quickly).

I would love to hire female employees who are every bit as driven, thorough, methodical, and accountable as our best male employees (the ones we don't fire), who are also cheaper. But they do not seem to exist.

The rare female prospective hires who are available and seem good are often priced so high I assume their rates are the result of Fortune 500 companies competing over them to have an effective female on the team. Good for them, but until effective females become cheaper than effective males it doesn't make sense for us to hire them from a value perspective (we don't need the social signaling points).

throwaway7312

hace 8 añosdiscuss

Censured in the U.S., but relevant:

http://www.magnitskyact.com/

throwaway7312

hace 8 añosdiscuss

"I have no sympathy for people who want to make a living by making things who then rent space in existing channels to tell users said things are for sale. At this point I'm rooting for anyone making bootstrapping and entrepreneurship less viable."

throwaway7312

hace 8 añosdiscuss

This memo?

http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/

Hadn't heard of it. Just read it. Interesting stuff.

It's very clearly a call-to-arms for business leaders against Marxists/communists. Not the working class.

Most Communists, at least in the West, spring from the middle- and upper-middle class, not the working class.

And Communist countries, historically, tend to make their working classes worse off, not better.

Equating a defense against communism with an attack on the working class would seem a stretch.

throwaway7312

hace 8 añosdiscuss

It's that, + "middle class going broke after being conned by Trump University & the gig economy."

throwaway7312

hace 8 añosdiscuss

Ever notice how Republican presidents are always portrayed by partisan liberals as blithering idiots (Bush II as a religious fundamentalist warmonger dunce; Trump as an narcissistic ADD loose cannon dunce)?

And how Democrat presidents are always portrayed by partisan conservatives as morally corrupt degenerates (Clinton as a murdering, philandering drug kingpin; Obama as a Kenyan-born Muslim homosexual on globalist puppet strings)?

Usually I just assume this is confirmation bias + partisans being partisan.

But sometimes I like to wonder, "What if it's all true?"

throwaway7312

hace 8 añosdiscuss

It sounds more like anti-natalism is your personal philosophy, and you make the same assumption the holders of most philosophical, ideological, and religious positions make: sooner or later, everyone else will realize to be true what I realize is true.

The history of man suggests otherwise. The more our civilization progresses, and the more the population swells, the broader the array of philosophical positions those within the civilization tend to hold. We have no evidence for everyone eventually coalescing around one 'right' belief set.

History is also littered with non-reproductive sects, like the Essenes, aesthetics, or, today's answer to these, anti-natalists and child-free individuals. These groups don't tend to be very good at passing their belief systems on to new generations however, as one might expect, and they don't tend to last particularly long once they've emerged on the civilization scene.

throwaway7312

hace 8 añosdiscuss

Uncontacted tribes in the Amazon likely wonder the same thing. It's such a big Earth, yet only a few hundred humans are known to exist.

Why are there no other detectable signs of human life, like smoke signals, territory markers, or emissaries from any more but a handful of other tribes? Surely if advanced humans existed, they would have contacted these tribes by now, to share technology, discoveries, and medicine. Yet they haven't.

How can the whole planet be so... silent?

throwaway7312

hace 8 añosdiscuss

>> China is based on communism

China is no longer about communism any more than the U.S. is about the Enlightenment. China today is about Gilded Age-type capitalism with a strain of collectivism running through it.

Every Chinese today is caught up in a mad scramble for personal enrichment, often at the expense of his fellow man. Most American Marxists would shrink back in horror at the capitalist fever that grips the average Chinese. Even most of those on America's political right do not have the stomach for the level of Gordon Gecko-ness that animates many Chinese. While many on the American right prefer to retreat to dens, family, and countryside, Chinese capitalists are busily trying to get rich any way they can (ethically or otherwise).

The Chinese Communist Party functions the same way Chinese government has functioned for thousands of years. Anyone can join, if he can pass the necessary tests. Passing tests to gain a coveted spot in the government has been a national priority since before Confucius's day, 2.5 millennia ago, and continues to be today.

China does not have legally enshrined freedom of speech. But at a societal level, the 'real' freedom of speech is greater than what I've experienced in America. In America, you must very carefully watch your words, lest you offend any of a number of easily offended groups. You won't go to jail for it (unlike certain parts of Western Europe - Germany and Britain, for instance), but you will lose friends and you may lose your job. The result is that while speech may be legal in America, it ends up stifled nevertheless. Large chunks of American society no longer value free speech, and there is actual debate in many corners of the country about whether certain speech ('hate speech') should be outlawed. In China, so long as you do not loudly criticize or subvert the Chinese government, you are free to speak your mind - and won't be harassed by the government OR be James Damore'd / Donglegate'd out of a job.

As for the "10s of millions dead", there's extremely good reason to be skeptical of these claims.[1] They become harder and harder to swallow the more older, Mao-era Chinese you talk with - most of whom, no matter where in the countryside they hail from, know of no one who died of starvation or malnutrition. The press is the propaganda arm of a nation's powerful - whether in China or America. Don't believe it just because they tell you to.

[1] http://www.unz.com/article/mao-reconsidered-part-two-whose-f...

throwaway7312

hace 8 añosdiscuss

It's extraordinarily worrying to me that the American Left uses 'science' as a shield for its ideological positions and the adherents of its ideology lap it up and repeat it.

I don't care so much about the ideological positions. What I care about is the constant, systemic undermining of science.

Take your comment, for instance. You throw about the notion of 'scientific truth', as if this is even a thing. Science does not deal in truth. Truth is for the priests and the philosophers. This 'Temple of Science' American Leftists have attempted to create, where all beliefs of the American Left (like climate change, organic food, socialism, tabula rasa, and Boasian anthropology) are enshrined as 'Science', unassailable to criticism (criticizing them means you are 'not educated' or 'don't understand science') regardless the flimsiness of the papers published to support those positions, makes science a partisan field.

The American Right has been trained to hate and distrust science. They hate it. They think scientists are all frauds. Why? Because 'scientists', they are told, again and again, support all these Leftist ideological bents that are not science, and that those on the Right know, at some level, are not science.

Anthropogenic global warming, as an example, is utter nonsense. Without NOAA, NASA, and GHCN doing heavy manipulation of the raw data before the thousands of scientists who work on it ever see that data, you don't have climate change.[1] Without concealing historical sea ice data, these agencies don't have anything abnormal to report on that front.[2]

Right now, you have a situation in America where a bunch of zealots have claimed science as their own, to push their decidedly non-scientific, partisan ideologies... and the other bunch of zealots on the other side of the aisle have disclaimed science as full of shills and charlatans hoaxing the public for tax dollars.

I don't know if you actually care about science. I suspect you don't - otherwise you wouldn't be using 'scientific truth' (no such thing) as a shield for your ideology.

But I do, and frankly, when I see one side of the most powerful nation on Earth using science as its meat shield and the other side concomitantly coming to view science with hostility and suspicion, when science used to be an apolitical source of wonderment for people from all ideological backgrounds in that same country half a century ago, I am deeply afraid for the future of real scientific investigation.

[1] https://realclimatescience.com/100-of-us-warming-is-due-to-n...

[2] https://realclimatescience.com/government-arctic-sea-ice-fra...

throwaway7312

hace 8 añosdiscuss

As an expatriate who has traveled through dozens of countries and lived long-term in a handful, let me assure you: different national personal characteristics are very real. Put an Englishman, a Norwegian, and an Italian in a room together and it is more than their accents that tells you who's whom. Or a Chinese, a Japanese, and a Korean for that matter.

Pick up your suitcase and get outside North America for a bit. The world's a lot more diverse and interesting than the education system might have you believe.

throwaway7312

hace 8 añosdiscuss

It would seem like the likeliest scenario for a future dark age is neighboring towns (or tribes, I suppose) tell tales about how everyone who goes into area X eventually dies not long after.

Every few generations some brave, ballsy kid shrugs off these old wives tales, goes and camps out in area X, and gets ill and dies not long after. The legends endure... at some cost.

Of course, it depends how strong the radioactivity/toxicity is. If it leads to cancer 30 years down the road, and no immediate signs, then it gets a lot messier.

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