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I just turned 42 last week, not finding my 40s all that different from my 30s yet.
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Sep 1, 2022 00:37
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NotJustANumber99 posted:what inspired your username? When I joined SA I was walking past the Tower of London every day to get into work.
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Sep 1, 2022 13:55
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Re folk music, Magpie Lane is pretty good (and how I learned that the Monkey Island music I remembered was actually a folk song, “Oh Brown Ale”). There’s a lot of good filk on youtube even if it appears to have all been recorded in the 1970s by the same like 3 people. Dawson’s Christian was my entry to the rabbit hole. If you like Mongolian throat singing, The Hu are very fun: link. The other one that YT keeps pushing into my playlist is Hrdza.
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Sep 2, 2022 23:53
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HopperUK posted:I've got a penguin book of English Folk Songs and they are all on three main themes, sometimes combined: This is fascinating. Here in China the themes are: 1) Let’s gently caress 2) I’ve been conscripted* and I hate it 3) I love my parents * For the military or corvee labour E: book of songs, a 2,000+ year old collection of folk songs, is here: you can translate into English from the classical Chinese by clicking on the double arrows to the left of each stanza. Don’t use google translate, that’s for modern chinese only. Beefeater1980 fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Sep 3, 2022 |
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Sep 3, 2022 02:06
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Diet Crack posted:Money Printer Go Brrrrrr Scrolling down that page and squinting at the article where a 22yo argues that only full citizens should have political rights because otherwise people might come from “all over the world”. Switzerland seems like a nice place.
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Sep 7, 2022 00:56
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I mean, she was a very old woman who died, as very old people tend to. Now her son gets to be king. I find the performative grief weird and the performative happiness a bit, idk, attention seeking? Like, adolescent edginess, dead baby joke kind of things. It feels like the culture wars have colonised every bit of public discourse, and what people say about this, on social media at least, is just another affirmation of what side they’re on.
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Sep 9, 2022 11:47
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Incidentally it’s the same day of the year that Mao died, and there are lots of ultranationalist / incel types (our version of the ERG/Brexit wing) here in China who are super super mad that lots of normal chinese people are posting and commenting on the death of the Queen, a FOREIGN ENEMY MONARCH, on this of all days.
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Sep 9, 2022 14:47
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It’s been interesting watching the accession; the first bit is very Game of Thrones with all the potential challengers in the country signing a bit of paper saying “yep we agree he’s King now”, including: *His son *Church *PM And then the army does its bit to show they’re not going to do a coup, then he formally signs away all the royal estates to the government to give back what they feel like from time to time. I’ve never had strong feelings about the monarchy one way or the other and this hasn’t changed that, but it does leave me with a vague sense that it’s nice to have an independent figurehead, preferably selected by lot or something. It really shouldn’t be someone who is elected because by definition they are the figurehead of whoever just won.
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Sep 10, 2022 11:31
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Guavanaut posted:If they kept the hat somewhere and formally invested it with all the power of the Crown then they wouldn't need to bother again. I could get behind Mr Punch / farting John Bull as the embodiment of the nation yeah.
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Sep 10, 2022 13:47
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I’m of the age where I am attending funerals of my parents’ generation regularly and it’s usually like this: there’s a ceremony (religious or not according to taste) where everyone gets a bit tearful and says goodbye to the deceased, then you stand around a bit, then you hit up the pub and all get drunk and open up about missing them and say nice things to more or less total strangers. Then at the end of it it’s a bit better.
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Sep 24, 2022 10:42
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Angepain posted:now they just accidentally tag some random named Liz Trussell who got @liztruss first She appears to be leaning into it anyway, good on her.
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Sep 24, 2022 13:04
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No Gods No Starmers.
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Sep 25, 2022 12:02
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I think a more likely result of PR is a splintering of the Tories and Labour into a mostly centrist rump and lots of little single or multi issue parties, who are all trying to be kingmakers. That’s what happened in other countries and I don’t see a compelling reason why here would be different. The main advantage of PR IMO is that the belief that “my vote doesn’t count” is absolute poison to the ideal of having a politically conscious public. Since everything the left* has ever wanted to achieve has been predicated on having a politically conscious public, this seems like it might be a problem. * except the authoritarian left obviously, for whom the job of the masses is to shut up and listen to the vanguard.
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Sep 25, 2022 12:56
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forkboy84 posted:I want to make a time machine so I could go back in time & show the people behind AI art nonsense how annoying their thing is & make them stop, & if they don't then kick them in the bum. This would make a great prompt tbh.
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Sep 25, 2022 13:47
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When you understand the theory of sticking to your bland message but can’t adjust to journalists actually doing their job.
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Oct 2, 2022 10:03
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Ius Prima Noctis for small business owners, you heard it here first.
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Oct 2, 2022 16:30
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Guavanaut posted:These days Steph, these days... Re this and the earlier Gary, I mean it’s not terribly insightful but it’s grimly predictable that people tend to talk their own book when it comes to what the problems in political economy are that need fixing. Which in a modern moderately prosperous society of say, 30k+ USD per capita translates into, for most people (you always get a few outliers): Top 0.1% the problem is the professionals and managers who work for us are stupid, lazy, unimaginative and not entrepreneurial otherwise they’d be where we are. The masses who work for us under them are sheeplike and not real people. Top 5% the problem is the parasites who own everything don’t and can’t do anything for themselves, we do everything and the 95% below us are lazy envious idiots who hate us coz we work hard. top 90%: the problem is the scumbag managers and the lazy scroungers who don’t want to work. Bottom 10%: gently caress you all. Virtually every public voice or political commentator is somewhere in the upper middle of that top 5% and it’s really striking to me how reliably over 30ish years of following the news the conclusion of thinkpieces has been “the wrong people are rich”, “the poor are lazy” or a mixture of the two.
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Oct 12, 2022 16:56
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I think it’s more subtle than that, thumbs up small and unobtrusive like when it’s a reaction to a MS Teams message is fine, but seeing a great honking 👍 on its own as a chat response can look kind of passive aggressive, depending on the context.
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Oct 13, 2022 10:38
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There is actually some consistency - although not really fairness - here. The sane conservative objection to the Corbyn government I along with most of this thread voted for was that it would result in exactly this collapse in market confidence. It’s the real-world reason to fear a radical government, because it will inevitably involve a substantial amount of misery for everyone in the short term. It’s a legitimate concern. I don’t think any of the “sensible” Tories expected that the radical government that tanked the economy would have been them. Fuckers. But if there is a straw of hope in all of this, it is that whatever situation we land in after this will be about the same as after a radical left wing budget. It may not matter because this is apparently hellworld and the electorate who actually vote don’t read the news and proceed ballistically on their own trajectory regardless. But if things happening mattered, it would severely discredit the threat of a radical left wing budget.
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Oct 16, 2022 16:15
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SirFozzie posted:Forgive the UK version of Clancychat (Ie, Wild-rear end speculation about future events).. at some point there's got to be enough folks like Charles Walker, who aren't going to stand for re-election saying "You know what, gently caress it. It's not worth standing around for two more years of this." and voting out the government, just to get a GE (and thus end their terms so they can do something productive, or try to get on wingnut welfare, etcetera), right? They don’t want it because they don’t want to be suddenly unemployed and unemployable. If the Tories are in power essentially eternally, then an ex-Tory MP is worth bunging a few quid to, if you’re a company that interacts with the government in any way, as a consultant or Non-Exec Director to try to get a friendly hearing. If the Tories just collapsed in a shambles, the ex-MPs just catapulted themselves into the masses, except with no marketable skills. That’s what he means by “nothing as ex- as an ex-MP.” No salary, no subsidies, no prospects.
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Oct 20, 2022 06:48
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I always thought Trevelyan was just a random Cornish name, never realised there was long standing Irish oppression at the hands of the Kerns specifically. So the government’s falling then, maybe.
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Oct 20, 2022 12:11
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Thing is it’s starscreams all the way down.
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Oct 21, 2022 05:19
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Brendan Rodgers posted:One of the fascinating things about historical events is that liberals who opposed them at the time pretend to have supported them after the fact. Everything from the Iraq war protests to the civil rights movement. I feel like “liberals” is doing a lot of heavy lifting for “people” in this comment. Where I live you had a lot of people who were mysteriously the only person in their town not to have informed on neighbours to take their stuff in the Cultural Revolution, and famously almost the entire Politburo was apparently on holiday when the Tiananmen decision was made (although with the current rewriting of history that Tiananmen was Good, Actually that may change again).
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Oct 23, 2022 09:44
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I mean judging by her facial expression in the whole thing the interviewer has heard that “well you’re not really one of us” poo poo enough times to have it make her very sympathetic to Rishi. Although it is a bit Laura K, I agree.
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Oct 23, 2022 10:51
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Guavanaut posted:
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Oct 23, 2022 17:19
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Almost certainly not. Boris dropping out should calm things down in the parliamentary party unless and until Rishi fucks something up Truss style. Even his partisans are shifting to try to be on the winning side (cf Zahawi, Nadhim). The wider party is going to go berserk, couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of arseholes. In terms of stuff actually affecting people, if Rishi looks adequately competent and in control, it’s likely the markets will stop shorting UK assets quite so heavily. Inflation will still be out of control and interest rates rising because that’s the world in 2022 and Brexit extremely doesn’t help, but the extra “gently caress you” to the UK that caused the death spiral will hopefully trail off.
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Oct 24, 2022 02:12
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Congrats on getting hitched!
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Oct 25, 2022 13:58
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Was thinking just now about that Pratchett quote he puts in the Patrician’s mouth about how most people mostly just want tomorrow to be mostly like today, after listening to a podcast with the latest scholarship on why revolts are so rare. Hypothesis: predictability is actually the thing people want most in life because you can’t plan for the future without it. The biggest barrier we face to getting people behind changes to make their lives better is that those changes make their lives less predictable. Nobody can actually function under conditions where chaos rules, you don’t know whether it’s better to be a hyper-capitalist hustler or a communist agitator and if you pick wrong it’s a death squad / gulag, your kids might get eaten at any time by a demon of Tzeentch etc. And people are reluctant to take a risk on publicly supporting a change until they have cover for doing it. So people really hate anything that increases uncertainty. They hate this more than they hate their standard of living decreasing predictably, in a way they can plan around. To cope with this without going mad, normal brains invent reasons why the status quo is actually cool and good. A few weirdos don’t do this but that capacity is equally likely to result in Jordan Peterson as it is Karl Marx or Galileo. Implications: - radical change can only happen if the government fucks up so badly that they create too much uncertainty over the future. Supplemental: this is why Lizzy T really got shanked. She reduced the relative risk of going socialist v sticking with Tories. - the main aim of any socialist party is to get the masses onside; the way to achieve this is to reduce the risk and uncertainty people the masses feel as a result of supporting socialists. I think this tracks for why running food banks etc is so effective, it makes us a known quantity with positive associations. It may also imply that politically you should never run a funding or benefit program unless you are so well resourced that you will never have to turn anyone down, because if users have only got a 50% chance of it working out in their favour, that’s scary uncertainty and they’ll be more pissed off if they ask and don’t get. But then that hits the moral barrier of, sometimes you just need to just help whoever you can. I suspect this is a big question for unions that haven’t got critical mass, for example. - accelerationists are focused on the wrong thing. People don’t revolt because of how badly oppressed they are in objective terms. People revolt because either they can’t figure out whether whatever they’re doing to try to survive will work or not, or because they are convinced it will not. Turns out we can accept an awful lot of predictable oppression (some of the research cited was on how enslaved people rationalised things, some was on how people in concentration camps survived)! But put us in a situation where live or die is 50/50 and we don’t understand why, and we will riot.
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Oct 25, 2022 18:32
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Cross posting this gem from the China thread. I hear this kind of thing a lot out here: https://twitter.com/geringtuvia/status/1585160127271038976?s=46&t=V7-JL6GEH83an4YQUzXrZQ thetoughestbean posted:
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Oct 27, 2022 09:34
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I heard it first at law school, as associate / partner. It works for any dynamic where the job you’re working requires precision and the person you’re working for is a total dick.
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Oct 27, 2022 14:09
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Contract drafting is about extreme precision on the basis that one day, some dickhead litigator will try to read it to mean the opposite of what you just wrote. (Also Tess’s reversal was quite good. It’s dicks all the way down, sorry)
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Oct 27, 2022 15:35
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Amazed the N Korean embassy is just around the corner from where I grew up. Jesus.
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Oct 28, 2022 13:48
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ThomasPaine posted:I haven't been in the thread much recently because deadlines but holy making GBS threads balls I'm going to be an actual published author with my name on a real life book, what a world. 15 year old me would have laughed in my face if I told him. It's not exactly going to go straight to the top of the new york times bestsellers but drat this is the first time I've felt genuinely unambiguously good about something in a long time. Nice! Congrats.
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Oct 29, 2022 14:38
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If the Brazil thread is to be believed, coups need US support and the US has told Bolso to get hosed. Hope he does, I enjoyed my time working in Brazil but wow they had a lovely government back then.
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Oct 31, 2022 02:01
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Is he very prominent these days? Because if not you’ve got your reason right there.
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Oct 31, 2022 10:42
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Rarity posted:Wonder what figures you'd get if you specified taxing the rich? Or just “someone else” because that’s what it comes down to really. It’s not like this is untested; California has repeatedly proven that populations given direct democracy will happily and repeatedly vote for increased spending and lower taxes at the same time until the state has a financial crisis. fuctifino posted:https://twitter.com/sdetsup/status/1587064177323040769 I was at SOAS, really happy to see the student body still doing good things.
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Nov 1, 2022 13:49
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The old die; it’s normal. For the past decade or so, boomers have as individuals had nothing to look forward to except frailty, irrelevance and death, which you’d think would make anyone a bit of a dick, but that’s been the case for every generation. Why are they so much more selfish and horrible to their kids than is usual?
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Nov 2, 2022 15:59
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Pistol_Pete posted:For over 40 years he's consistently held the position that war is bad, and peace is better, and you get peace by persuading the people who are fighting to talk to each other instead and he's spent much of that time being called a horrible traitor for maintaining it. It's very unlikely indeed that he's going to make an exception at this point and say: "Actually, THIS war is cool and good and I think we should have more of it." This is not entirely true. For over 40 years he has held the position that war is bad, peace is better, but if you are the good guys in a war (defined as whoever was relatively more oppressed at the start of it) you can be forgiven any violence committed by your side coz it’s justified and if you are the bad guys in a war your violence counts as prolonging the conflict and/or perpetuating injustice. This is pretty much the same view as every normal person holds and is not in itself special. The thing that made JC unusual was that he was willing to consider the good guys might not be who the BBC said they were. Often they’re not! He was right in Iraq! Unfortunately this time he backed the wrong foreigner.
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Nov 4, 2022 15:08
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I’m always surprised by these “how is humiliating someone offensive?” takes. Like, you know what you’re doing and why. Presumably you think it’s a good idea and a net positive.
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Nov 9, 2022 13:50
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Oh yeah the Singapore government was really into this too.
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Nov 18, 2022 05:05
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