bbctol

I've always read Hamlet as very much about the gap between internal activities and the way they are recorded or remembered. The big joke of Hamlet is that from the outside, his story would have looked like a young prince going insane and impulsively murdering his uncle; it's only the audience that gets to hear Hamlet's soliloquies, and understand him as a sensitive, indecisive, deceptive, and patient person, who's been carefully building a case and means of revenge.

That's why his last lines are all about his fear that everyone will misinterpret what has happened, and regret that he doesn't have enough time to tell Horatio the truth. "O God, Horatio, what a wounded name,/Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!" and "So tell him, with th' occurrents, more and less,/Which have solicited. The rest is silence." and so on. (or, for that matter, his whole speech about "I know not “seems.”")

So I think it's less that we're meant to doubt Hamlet's sanity, and more that Shakespeare deliberately set up a weird scenario so that only the audience can understand that Hamlet is sane.

Fun fact: Dick, for his part, thought Lem was the alias for a committee of Communists dedicated to destroying science fiction.

https://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is...

I see. Did you read the article?

Of course there's a need to make that calculation. The military's calculation is based on people's willingness and reluctance to work for them, and they offer to pay because they have to. The military would be happy to have you work for them for free, if you think what they do is so important.

Your point is that working with the military is good, because being ruled by China would be worse than the current situation. So the moral benefit you're proposing extends insofar as we prevent China from taking over the US. How much do you think Silicon Valley needs to cooperate with the military to prevent replacement by the Chinese?

How much collaboration from private tech does the US military need to maintain global dominance? Where does this line of reasoning end? How much of your day, specifically, should you instead be spending supporting the armed forces?

It blew my mind when I first realized why pigments were so valuable in the ancient world: before modern mass-production of countless different mixable pigments (and now, digital displays that can render almost any color the eye can see) a person would literally not be able to see a certain shade their entire life except on a certain material. The distinct color of royal purple would have been an experience to see, in the same way we react to rare colors like Vantablack or International Klein Blue today.

de Grey seems like a great guy; he's a fantastic speaker, I generally agree with his vision of humanity, and this proof is impressive. I haven't attacked his character, nor do I plan to.

With respect to his work on resisting human aging, he hasn't produced anything of value.

There's also the tiny issue that he hasn't produced anything of value.

No large cities?

Unrelated, but it's fascinating to see an article from 2013 reference Andrew Auernheimer as a benign hacker. That's turned into a hell of a story on its own, huh.

He is neither.

Should be noted, on the subject of easily verifiable facts, that DeLong is not a leftist.

Sure, but you don't have to design your platform to incentivize making people angrier.

...unless it violates someone else's property rights. The point of capitalism is that people can own things, and you can do what you want as long as you don't violate that system of ownership. The point of anarchism is that you can basically do what you want.

Bitcoin's caused some hilarious lessons in what "decentralized" actually means. Bitcoin isn't controlled by some nasty evil central bank; it gets to be controlled by a mostly random collection of maybe intelligent and definitely lucky people with no oversight whatsoever.

This attitude was applied to the space race. What's funny is that it's being applied to getting people to click on memes.

It doesn't matter that it's nonsensical in providing actual security; it's here to provide security theater and justify arbitrary punishments.

But is this really a tradeoff we're making, or just two trends? It's pretty glib to say "well, inequality is worse, but that's the price of better technology"; inequality is worse and we have better technology. From 1880 to 1950 technology got better and inequality decreased. "Globalisation" becomes a grab-bag term for a lot of different trends and movements, and I wouldn't want to get paralyzed into saying "well, if we hired workers directly and not through contractors, we wouldn't be able to buy cheap consumer goods made in a newly industrialized China."

This has been posted around, and I always feel I should point out: this is a ludicrous headline and generally misleading framing of an idea that's actually pretty interesting and plausible. (It doesn't have much to do with quantum mechanics, for one.)

I've found this is usually more the paper-thin justification /b/ users employ to avoid noticing that a culture based entirely around judging others for being too hysterical quickly drives them hysterical.

The font doesn't really look anything like the wordmark (unless there's a condensed version?) so I'd assume they're separate.

That's a... nonstandard use of the word collusion.

People don't want to go to prison the first time, either.

What postmodernist books have you read?

It's so remarkable I'd almost think it's some kind of long performance art piece. There's a very surreal moment when you've read a bunch of Taleb's writing on the importance of honor and craft and the problems with detached, thin-skinned pseudo-intellectuals who get involved in fields they don't understand and constantly bullshit to prop up their egos... and then check out his twitter. It's the best lesson of all: no one wants to do the hard part, not even the ones telling you to do the hard part. Even writing a book about how important it is to have skin in the game doesn't cover up not having skin in the game.

Considering how many Icelanders speak English at quite a high level, they seem perfectly capable of contributing to large scale projects around the world. Conversely, diversifying languages, cultures, and geographic locations seems like a more stable strategy for ensuring long-term human survival, compared to a fragile monoculture.

There's a difference between what people want and the whole of "reality"; in a real universe, growth will never be limitless, no matter how much people want it to be.

http://www.osn.global/ sounds up your alley.

I really want to see an analysis of how they went from obscurity (no pun intended) to ubiquitous a few months ago. The site's been around for years, but it seems to have taken over my news feeds on multiple platforms overnight. I don't mind too much, but I'm sure there's something interesting going on there.

Don't Know What to Do with Your Life? Go to One of the World's Most Prestigious Universities, things will probably work out