someone stole my motorcycle right out of my goddamn driveway

Bloggers Disappointed to Learn Area Man’s Post Description of Actual Crime, Not Performance Art Piece

no references to pinball, no insight into historical Americana, this isn’t the kontext I signed up for

u know the figure of the motorcycle thief has gone through a lot of changes starting with the original post-war

“when bad shit happens people mock me accurately” is the community I’ve been looking for my whole life so

@kontextmaschine is in a pretty bad way, I think. I'd only got to wondering but:

rip

pushing the 'no such thing as inborn talent' line seems downright cruel sometimes

oh, no, it's not that i had any advantages over you. i just put in more work. no don't look at people who are getting far better results than you with half the effort, they don't exist. just bang your head against the wall harder, you lazy piece of shit.

you can say 'your skills can and will improve with practice' without saying 'the amount of practice you put in is literally the only thing that matters'. and you should, because the second thing is a fucking lie.

I think the biggest part of why these are both true is that hard work and practice matter a lot more than natural talent for getting into the top 5% of ability at something. If you want to get "good enough" just to enjoy it for your own sake, hard work is the way to go. But you usually need inborn talent to get to the top 1% or 0.1% or 0.01%, and unfortunately power laws and the winner-take-all dynamics of many creative or athletic fields (which is usually what these conversations are about) mean that money and prestige only come to that 0.01%.

My doctor gave me phenetermine for appetite control as a "try this and see" before possibly trying Ozempic. It appears to actually be working: for the first time I am getting the "forgetting to eat" phenomenon that a bunch of people talk about but I've never experienced.

I could never get Ritaddervanse because I don't have ADHD and so I just had to get lapped by people on more drugs, but now that I've got an amphetamine derivative of my own, it's all over for you guys. So far you've seen a mere 10% of my power.

Oklahoma is working to determine how much water remains in its aquifers, information that state lawmakers could use to set limits on pumping. But Christopher Neel, the head of water rights for the Oklahoma Water Resources Board, said people might not necessarily welcome the government telling them that their land is running out of groundwater.

“If we start showing that kind of data, that kind of goes into your property values,” Mr. Neel said. “If we show an area may be depleted in, let’s say, two years, well, if someone tries to sell that property, they’re not going to be able to.” [...]

The National Association of Home Builders, asked about the wisdom of building houses where water is running out, said the industry was responding to the demands of homebuyers who want to live in those areas.

Susan Asmus, the association’s senior vice president for regulatory affairs, said builders follow the rules that local officials establish. She said it was up to governments to determine where and how it’s appropriate to build homes. The officials who approve those developments “obviously think they can manage the challenges,” Ms. Asmus said in a statement. [...]

Any effort to impose federal oversight would very likely face opposition from agricultural groups. The American Farm Bureau Federation, which represents farmers, said states were best suited to address groundwater problems. The federal government’s role should be to spend money on infrastructure projects and help farmers pay for new technology, according to Courtney Briggs, the federation’s senior director of government affairs.

@eightyonekilograms the ur-mistake

The one silver lining to "America's policy of encouraging people to store all their personal wealth in their homes ended up wrecking society" is that China did the exact same thing and it appears to be blowing up their face even harder.

There’s V-22 Ospreyposting on my dash rn so here’s a throwback to when I was working on a fusion reactor and there were constantly Ospreys flying overhead and I was low-key more worried about the things spontaneously falling out of the sky than the neutron radiation.

Quick question is it a bad sign if your aircraft has its own entire Wikipedia page about how often it crashes for no reason

Dick Cheney tried to kill this thing and couldn’t, and that was when he was at the height of his power as Shadow Emperor of America. Fucking Marine Corps obsessed with having a V/STOL aircraft even if it’s a deathtrap.

not the guy I was looking for but check out this dude's google scholar photograph he looks cool as hell. and at the "colorado school of mines"

One of my best friends in high school was a "trench coat mafia", knife-enjoying, "most-likely-to-be-a-school-shooter"-winning sketchy motherfucker, who ended up going to the Colorado School of Mines and said of it, "I've found my people".

Was Rome headed for something like the Empire regardless? Like, if Caesar hadn't been assassinated, sparking a civil war which enabled Octavian to consolidate power as his heir, would we simply remember him as Rome's first emperor instead, the guy who wrangled his way to the top of the hierarchy and accumulated enough power to re-enshrine a kind of monarchic rule, or would he be remembered as an outlier, and would things have reverted to something like the old status quo after his death or retirement?

With the usual disclaimers that history always seems fixed in retrospect and we should discount for that somewhat, I do think the Empire was inevitable by the time Caesar came around. The whole century prior to him was marked by an ever-increasing number of defections from and challenges to the norms of the Republic, culminating in several almost-dictators who got increasingly further along the process and saw the institutions opposing them getting weaker and less effectual. Arguably Caesar himself was "just another Sulla" and only got a few steps further than Sulla did, but if Octavian hadn't managed to become Emperor and just been "a third Sulla", there probably would've just been more and more Sullas until one of them managed to stick. Such were the conditions and incentives of the Republic at that time.

There were plenty of people noticing this process, but they didn't seem to have any good ideas on what to do about it— they kept thinking in terms of individual virtues instead of incentives and institutions— and so I doubt any of them would've had a shot at interrupting this process.

if you like multiple, pick your favorite for general notebook purposes.

rb for larger sample size etc etc