eggsbenedict

2년 전discuss

Yup. This isn't news. This site has a hateful obsession with all things crypto. I think it's driven by a mixture of frustration at the irrationality of markets and bitterness about missing the boat.

eggsbenedict

4년 전discuss

Yeah, and McDonald's is one of the most popular restaurants. Doesn't say much about the quality of restaurants in general. There's a lot of a wildly good, life-changing fiction out there.

A couple hints:

Almost all fantasy is terrible.

Almost everything the internet likes is terrible.

Almost everything in a series format is terrible.

eggsbenedict

4년 전discuss

Nazi Russia? Not once, but twice?

eggsbenedict

4년 전discuss

And the war on privacy continues.

Legislators have a bad habit of creating intentionally vague laws that have almost unlimited discretionary scope.

“Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

eggsbenedict

4년 전discuss

Interesting story.

From the headline, I thought this was going to be a culture-war type of article. I wasn't expecting evidence of a real cult.

eggsbenedict

4년 전discuss

>A government that does not respect the bodily autonomy of women isn't going to respect privacy for too long if it enables the former.

For the record, I don't have a problem with abortion. Obviously I think it should be a last resort, but the impression I get is that most people who get abortions view it that way too.

That said, framing the debate around abortion purely as a question of bodily autonomy always seemed to be a very dishonest way of engaging with the debate. The issue at stake for most people(again, I don't care!) who oppose abortion is not that women are getting a medical procedure done to themselves, but that, in their view, a 2nd and entirely different person is killed as the result of this procedure.

But, many people who bring up the slogans of bodily autonomy already know this. By ignoring the core debate and taking this alternate tack, they get to:

    1.) Smear their opponents' position as purely misogynist and obfuscate the core of the debate, and

    2.) Signal their own loyalty to their political tribe, by demonstrating their unwillingness to even engage with the "other side."

The real question at the center of abortion rights legislation is not "should women be allowed to do what they want with their own bodies," it's "at what point does a fetus become a person, entitled to the same legal protections that other people have."

The inverse of this question is actually very interesting:

"What is it that makes a fetus NOT a person?" Maybe it's the lack of consciousnessness/low brain activity? Then, should we be allowed to kill braindead and comatose people arbitrarily? And anyway, we don't even know what consciousness is to begin with.

Or maybe, they just don't look like people, so we don't have to treat them that way? Well, that opens up a pretty ugly can of worms.

Or maybe it's the fact that the fetus is completely physically dependent on the mother's body? That's an interesting proposition, but then again, so is every baby until just days before it leaves the womb, and almost nobody is arguing the morality of ultra-late-stage abortions.

So you immediately end up with all these (admittedly) edge-cases that demonstrate some of the moral and legislative complexity of this issue, not to mention its entanglement with the federal-state-local American legal system, which is what Roe v. Wade really addresses to begin with. I'm not doing this as some kind of "gotcha!" or takedown of the whole concept of abortion. Just asking that on this forum we don't trick ourselves into believing the sound-bite version of things.

Yet again, I don't really care either way whether people get abortions or not. In general it seems like something that's impossible to legislate out of existence anyway. But I always fail to see how this is a simple question of women's bodies and evil government overreach.

eggsbenedict

4년 전discuss

That's terrible! Can this be allowed to continue?

eggsbenedict

4년 전discuss

So, to get this straight, the working definition here for "socially conservative" is anyone who steals things or exploits others, regardless of whether they support gay rights or vote democrat.

Yeah, in that light, these social conservatives do seem pretty bad.

eggsbenedict

4년 전discuss

>Somehow I find albini's version too toyed with (some instruments pops out at times)

I'm a professional record producer and songwriter. Here are my thoughts:

Very likely it's the other way around. Albini is notoriously hard-headed about refusing to use compression on tracks and mixes. He's gone on record about how compressors ruin the tone, expressivity, and micro-dynamics of recorded sounds.

Regardless of whether you agree with that, and he does have a point, compression performs one job admirably: it prevents dynamic sounds from unexpectedly popping out of a determined dynamic range.

This is a disagreement lots of people have had with Albini's method, and he's also a little prickly about these things. He has an artistic vision of "properly" recording bands and mixing them in a way that doesn't adulterate or modify their live sound. In other words, he tries to get the final sound just through exacting microphone placement while recording, and applies the absolute minimum of post-processing.

However, the consensus in commercial record production at this point is that signal processing such as compression, distortion, and equalization, even in dramatic quantity, can create a more compelling audio result. Albini certainly views this as leading to a decline in fidelity (in the etymological sense of truth), and possibly as leading to a decline in artistic integrity (heavily debated).

A couple final ideas:

- In a recorded-music world, what constitutes an "authentic" or "true" sound?

- Should a studio operator (recording/mixing) aim to respect the real-world sound of the artist, or the intentions of the artist? How do you identify the intentions of an artist?

eggsbenedict

4년 전discuss

Why is the terminology always that the US gets to "punish" everyone else? It reeks of American exceptionalism and misguided paternalism, not to mention dubiously claimed moral high ground.

Russia has clearly made a tragic error by violently and unjustly invading Ukraine. They've escalated the world into a new cold war and perhaps dealt a death blow to globalization in the process. But...

If the US wants to de-escalate towards peace and prosperity, maybe it's best to reframe foreign policy in terms of cooperation and negotiation rather than discipline. Or maybe Americans are just that much better and more right that it's their job to keep the kids in line.

Do people really think this "big stick" attitude doesn't breed widespread resentment?

eggsbenedict

4년 전discuss

No, I was specifically responding to the person who said that it was "cool" that governments used covid resstrictions as a pretext for running "social experiments." I am specifically quoting an individual, not creating a strawman. Read the comment thread I was taking part in carefully for evidence.

For what it's worth, I think many of the covid restrictions were at the time believed to be necessary measures, but that's actually not the debate that's taking place here.

eggsbenedict

4년 전discuss

>many countries took the opportunity to run large-scale social experiments under the guise of Covid Restrictions

Regardless of how you define tyranny, how can you be so blithely supportive of rule-by-decree in supposed democracies? Especially for the purpose of running "social experiments?"

Covid Restrictions gained the grudging mandate of the masses, and in many places only by a hair, due to legitimate public-health concerns. Even in that context the subversion of legislative processes should be concerning. Running "experiments" on a non-consenting populace is at least the definition of dictatorship or oligarchy, if the word tyranny doesn't work for you.

eggsbenedict

5년 전discuss

How do you explain the prices of Class-C shares which don't bestow voting rights to the holder? For example, GOOG trades for over 2000 a share. In fact, it even trades at a $50 premium over GOOGL, which offers voting rights. Strange.

eggsbenedict

6년 전discuss

This implementation produced almost no useful answers. One of the 'Friendly No' outputs contained this sentence:

"No, I'm sorry I can't attend the meeting because the topic is ridiculous"

Which is about as unfriendly as it gets.

eggsbenedict

6년 전discuss

Weird definition of uber successful. They'll probably have steady employment but their mental health/personal anguish is probably distributed similarly to the rest of the population

eggsbenedict

6년 전discuss

Same experience. What's the point of a message board where you can't read the posts?

eggsbenedict

6년 전discuss

So, as of this comment, all I know is that Simon Sinek has a book called The Infinite Game. This book has an interesting premise, about which I just read a short writeup and analysis. I have also been told that Sinek has excellent presentation skills.

Strangely, in the middle of these two comments, I was told that people should not take anything from Simon Sinek. Why?

eggsbenedict

7년 전discuss

I loved this book

It's not exactly science - but it's very stimulating.

It guides you through a wide variety of historical, scientific, and literary sources, painting a picture of contemporary human consciousness evolving right before your eyes.

eggsbenedict

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Polkadot: Blockchains, Rules, and Reciprocity

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