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lifg posted:https://aeon.co/essays/the-strange-and-turbulent-global-world-of-ant-geopolitics Thanks a lot, I'm feeling formication everywhere now
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Feb 18, 2024 18:14
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Something a bit different. [The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas[/b] is a classic SF / speculative fiction story by Ursula LeGuin. If you want to read it - it's short - you can find it here: https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf And the wiki page is here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas Naturally, this being the 21st century, some can't accept that it's an allegory and so a variety of response stories have been done, solving or resolving the metaphorical problem at the heart of the story. This long essay takes them apart: https://bloodknife.com/omelas-je-taime/ Although this is the one decent response story: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/ nonathlon has a new favorite as of 22:36 on Feb 20, 2024 |
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Feb 20, 2024 20:09
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Of course the President of Omelas is a child torturer, he has to be.
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Feb 20, 2024 20:12
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Remind me of how many people have tried to solve “The Cold Equations” short story.
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Feb 20, 2024 20:29
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lifg posted:Remind me of how many people have tried to solve “The Cold Equations” short story. Bingo - that was exactly my go-to thought. SF fans can't read anything except in the most literal way.
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Feb 20, 2024 22:35
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lifg posted:Remind me of how many people have tried to solve “The Cold Equations” short story. Notably including the original author, because he knew that the physics of the story didn't make sense. I mention this more as an amusing anecdote and not a condemnation of the story as published. Vincent Van Goatse has a new favorite as of 01:31 on Feb 21, 2024 |
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Feb 21, 2024 01:28
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Notably including the original author, because he knew that the physics of the story didn't make sense. I mention this more as an amusing anecdote and not a condemnation of the story as published. Even on the face of it, it is a pretty dumb story though. If I wanted to read about extremely preventable industrial accidents there are a lot more interesting and less-contrived real case reports. Many of them are even interesting longform articles!
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Feb 21, 2024 15:54
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A scorpion would never ride a frog!!!!!
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Feb 21, 2024 16:00
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uggy posted:A scorpion would never ride a frog!!!!! The original Persian story has it as a scorpion and a turtle. It's about the same except when the scorpion stings, the turtle looks him in the eye and says "By the grace of Allah i have been protected from the treachery of the unrighteous." And then submerges and drowns the scorpion
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Feb 21, 2024 16:35
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Tunicate posted:The original Persian story has it as a scorpion and a turtle. This is a far better telling than the frog thing
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Feb 21, 2024 21:50
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Scathach posted:This is a far better telling than the frog thing no it's not because it offers hope that "good" people can vote for the Leopards Eating Faces Party and come away with their face intact.
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Feb 21, 2024 23:17
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Gives me hope I can drown them in a river.
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Feb 21, 2024 23:20
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PharmerBoy posted:Gives me hope I can drown them in a river. Exactly
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Feb 21, 2024 23:29
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This piece about attending an F1 race was taken down because it eviscerates the circus surrounding the event. It's worth reading even if you have no interest in the "sport". https://web.archive.org/web/20240301170542/https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a46975496/behind-f1-velvet-curtain/
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Mar 6, 2024 16:20
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drat, it turns out the Kentucky Derby is still Decadent and Depraved.
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Mar 6, 2024 16:34
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Chas McGill posted:This piece about attending an F1 race was taken down because it eviscerates the circus surrounding the event. It's worth reading even if you have no interest in the "sport". I’m not sure why any publication actually familiar with Kate “McMansion Hell” Wagner’s work would send her to cover something like F1 and not expect an article like that.
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Mar 6, 2024 19:39
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The funny thing is that she’s openly in awe of the sport itself and devotes a good amount of space to discussing how magical it really was to be there. It’s just the everything else she justifiably slags on.
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Mar 6, 2024 19:55
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Mar 6, 2024 21:03
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Arivia posted:The funny thing is that she’s openly in awe of the sport itself and devotes a good amount of space to discussing how magical it really was to be there. It’s just the everything else she justifiably slags on. I mean honestly she could (should) have been way meaner.
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Mar 6, 2024 21:05
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The most striking part to me was the mention that Hamilton could get away with saying things that might upset his sponsors because the financial success of so utterly many people is riding on him. Just think of how many athletes would be dropped by their sponsors or even publicly shunned the moment they imply to press that they might not win.
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Mar 9, 2024 15:02
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Chas McGill posted:This piece about attending an F1 race was taken down because it eviscerates the circus surrounding the event. It's worth reading even if you have no interest in the "sport". A lot of the spectators from F1 are superyacht types. Having worked in that industry, everything she is saying here is about 30% accurate because she isn't seeing even half of it. I have never so viscerally hated a human being in my life as I did the people I worked for before I quit in disgust.
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Mar 10, 2024 07:21
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Call of the Void: Seven years on, what do we know about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370?
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Mar 10, 2024 23:59
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I think I've read over 100 of the good admiral's articles by now and they are all very well put together. She's got a real gift for explaining complicated technical issues.
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Mar 11, 2024 01:11
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coolusername posted:Call of the Void: Seven years on, what do we know about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370? “Extensive attempts by the investigators to get mangosteen juice to react with the batteries and trigger a fire were unsuccessful.” 
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Mar 11, 2024 01:12
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abbazabba posted:“Extensive attempts by the investigators to get mangosteen juice to react with the batteries and trigger a fire were unsuccessful.” So Lotax was responsible?
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Mar 11, 2024 12:41
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Report: 40 Percent of Managers Hope to Replace Some Workers With AI This Year Oops! Replacing Workers With AI Is Actually More Expensive, MIT Finds Comedy gold.
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Mar 27, 2024 15:51
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Something a little different, the blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, recommended somewhere else on SA. The author is an ancient history academic and regularly posts lengthy (perhaps exhaustive) multi-part essays on why the Spartans actually weren't that great, the "Fremen Mirage" of tough unsophsticated people over-whelming soft decadent civilizations, and insights into Roman history. To pick an interesting entry How it wasn't: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages quote:Why am I bothering? Isn’t this all a bunch of useless nitpicking? ... For a great many people, Westeros will become the face of the European Middle Ages, further reinforcing distorting preconceptions about the period. How we view the past has a tremendous influence on what we think about the present. In particular, the tendency to view the distant past as a time of unrestrained barbarism provides us with both an unearned sense of superiority and often a dangerous hubris – ‘we’re not like that anymore, that can’t happen anymore – people in the past were just stupid.‘ But they were not just stupid or just maniacs – they were people. People are people, no matter when they lived.
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Mar 31, 2024 17:40
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nonathlon posted:Something a little different, the blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, recommended somewhere else on SA. The author is an ancient history academic and regularly posts lengthy (perhaps exhaustive) multi-part essays on why the Spartans actually weren't that great, the "Fremen Mirage" of tough unsophsticated people over-whelming soft decadent civilizations, and insights into Roman history. It's weird that Game of Thrones mostly places itself in a 'no gunpowder Early Modern era' and all of that is consistent with itself but the author doesn't really look at it, only refuting over and over that it isn't medieval.
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Apr 1, 2024 07:25
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I mean it's based in part on the war of the roses, which is considered by some historians as the end of the medieval period in England. That and the devastation could be best compared to the 30 years war, a truly apocalyptic conflict that devestated whacking great chunks of central Europe.
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Apr 1, 2024 08:32
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nonathlon posted:the "Fremen Mirage" of tough unsophsticated people over-whelming soft decadent civilizations Wonder if it's different in the books, or if the different film/tv versions have significantly different takes on the Fremen. I've only seen the most recent films, but it seemed like they portrayed every faction fighting as tough and/or vicious fighters in some way. Also didn't get the feeling the Fremen were unsophisticated; lowered resourced overall, but every resource they had was adapted to the local environment while the higher resourced factions' gear and techniques weren't suited to the environment and limited their resource advantage.
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Apr 1, 2024 08:49
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PharmerBoy posted:Wonder if it's different in the books The books are pretty explicit about the Sadukar and the Freemen being superior troops because they come from harsh environments.
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Apr 1, 2024 09:42
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I'm like halfway through the book and I guessed Fremen are superior fighters cos constant spice exposure gives them split-second precognition. Even if that turns out to not be the case I'm still gonna headcanon it and Herbert can't stop me cos he's dead. ehehehe
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Apr 1, 2024 11:08
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“A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry” is a great blog with nothing but long form reads. My favorite is where he talks about why Tacitus’s Germania was a piece of propaganda and didn’t represent Germany at all. Unfortunately that is spread throughout a larger six part Fremen Mirage series, so I don’t have a single link. It’s somewhere in https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/
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Apr 1, 2024 14:25
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That blog ate up like six hours of my day yesterday. So much fun reading! Really liked the series on farming and mining from resource production to final product.
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Apr 1, 2024 16:00
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A New Zealand man, for no apparent reason, kidnapped his three children in 2022, and the family has been living as bandits in the wilderness since then, robbing gas stations occasionally to buy supplies
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Apr 11, 2024 07:28
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The Wicked ZOGA posted:I'm like halfway through the book and I guessed Fremen are superior fighters cos constant spice exposure gives them split-second precognition.
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Apr 11, 2024 14:42
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Mister Olympus posted:A New Zealand man, for no apparent reason, kidnapped his three children in 2022, and the family has been living as bandits in the wilderness since then, robbing gas stations occasionally to buy supplies Big mood
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Apr 11, 2024 14:55
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Mister Olympus posted:A New Zealand man, for no apparent reason, kidnapped his three children in 2022, and the family has been living as bandits in the wilderness since then, robbing gas stations occasionally to buy supplies the best thing about this article is that it points out that NZ is full of hillbilly libertarian idiots, something that may not be obvious to the outside world
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Apr 11, 2024 15:05
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https://redsails.org/friendly-feudalism/ Article about the mismatch between Tibet's feudal semi-recent past and the image of that time popular in the West
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Apr 11, 2024 19:03
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:the best thing about this article is that it points out that NZ is full of hillbilly libertarian idiots, something that may not be obvious to the outside world Coastals.
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Apr 11, 2024 19:47
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