It’s going to end up being a bipolar world (America, China) at least partly because other countries insist on just voluntarily fucking themselves over. What Germany is doing is pure goddamn insanity.
Day: August 17, 2024, 7:06 PM
NIMBY Blowback
From what I can tell, most of the hate directed toward Kamala Harris over “price controls1” is actually because she wants to streamline permitting and smack down NIMBYs, thus making housing easier to build.
The NIMBYs are doing all they can to fabricate whatever petty calumnies they can to make sure this doesn’t happen. For many, their entire politics is based on the price of their house and nothing else. That’s a lot of what we’re seeing now.
The Usual Con
We’ve never used DoorDash or anything like that and our grocery costs have roughly doubled1 since 2019. And we buy about the same things. Why do econs try so very hard to con us about this?
Policy
Even though we have been kinda shit at it and in many ways doing it from a Machiavellian mindset, providing arms so that Ukraine doesn’t get overrun is the best thing the US has done in a long while. If we allow enough to permit Ukraine to win, it’ll be an insurance policy against 100,000 American deaths in Poland in 2030.
Well Met
He’d been single all his life. Then he fell in love with a stranger on vacation.
In the Gen Z mindset, this is an invalid way to meet someone as it was not algorithmically mediated. If this sort of initial encounter isn’t harassment (to them), it borders on it1.
But seems ideal to me. We need more of this, and less of our lives ordered by corporations who do not have our best interests in mind.
Flagrant Reality Violation
To people who claim there is no good music made now and are stuck worshiping the crap you listened to when you were 19: WHAT IS YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT?
Settled
I don’t settle for people who settle for me. If you do that, you’re hurting yourself and the other person too. Simple as that.
Prog Shock
Because I don’t want to monkey with the PHP that runs this site, I’m sort of using CSS as a full-ass programming language. And that’s been weird but kinda fun. I would never, ever (as mentioned) want to do it as a job, though.
But it’s been enough, despite the huge limitations of doing it that way.
Jeanne Bonjour – Cabeza (reprise Oboy)
Une reprise parfait.
Go Co
The US Government Has Abandoned Us to Endless COVID. We Can Do Better.
Lord, no one cares. No one cares at all. It’s over and done.
Character 80
What was the first PC game you ever played? Mine was Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0.
Not sure what counts as a PC here, but my first game was probably a ski game on the TRS-80 that had no graphics but was character-based. I don’t think that it’s any of the ones I can find on the internet, either. This would’ve been some time in 1980.
Before that, I played the original Pong console (which was of course not a PC).
Gisèle – Tes mains
J’aime la structure étrange de la chanson.
The locution “nothing but” is frequently used when philosophers discuss appearances. The appearances are said to be “nothing but” particles or corpuscles, for example, or structured brain events. Even Thomas Hobbes, who recognized and honored the appearances, employed the “nothing but” locution frequently. That locution did not mean he denied the appearances or reduced them to matter and motion. Hobbes’s materialism is at best an explanatory one, not an ontological one. He was very firm: there are appearances (phantasms) and reality (matter and motion). Our contemporary materialists are not so clear about what they are affirming or denying. Often, they seem to me to confuse two claims: (a) all phenomena, all seemings or appearings, can be explained in terms of or by reference to, e.g., brain events, and (b) there are only brain events (and other physical events in the environment). The recent vogue for talking about supervenience may be an attempt to have it both ways, somehow to combine (a) and (b). Perhaps the appeals to supervenience are a genuine recognition that phenomena, qualia and mental events are also real, also exist.
To follow claim (a) rigidly may eliminate the need for any causal explanation of appearances, qualia or awareness. Whether supervenience is a causal relation, I am unclear. Most often, it seems to be treated as an explanatory relation: awareness or consciousness arises from, or emerges out of, a specific organization and structure of brain processes. But whatever the relation is, to talk of supervenience would seem to lead to the recognition that what supervenes, what arises from, differs in some ways from that from which it has emerged, or what it supervenes on: the supervenee and the supervened would seem to differ, at least numerically. With perceptual qualia or phenomenal properties, the difference cannot just be numerical. There is a kind difference between seen color or heard sound and the physical and neural events that precede our experience of color or sound. Similarly, being aware of tables, computers, or coffee differs in kind from the physical and neural processes that correlate with such awareness.
John W. Yolton, Realism and Appearances: An Essay in Ontology
Vana
It’s hard to believe that Nirvana is now considered “classic rock” since I recall when Nirvana and Kurt Cobain were seen as the great threats that imperiled all of civilization. But the same span of time separates us now from Nirvana as I was from the the Beatles when I was in high school.
The passage of time is relentless.