america saved communism by feeding russia through its massive post-civil-war famine in 1921-22. USA #1 baby

Hello, I am Kontextmaschine. I am 27 and not entirely happy with my life.

I had a livejournal, got it way back when I was the kind of person who had a livejournal. Now I see the people still there still are, and I seem to have become the kind of person who has a tumblr. Maybe I’ll still keep it up, split topics between them, we’ll see.

I will write about history, modern society, and my life. I will often write as if these things are indistinguishable.

Also sometimes there will be happy hardcore.

The title comes from an idea I once had to write a column tracing the history and precedents of events in the news, like some sort of “context machine”. But we all know the story of modern journalism, and I guess this is the place for that, now.

I made it Kontextmaschine because a machine dedicated to historicism is obviously German.

"This event ends the moment you write us a check, and it better not bounce, or you're a dead motherfucker" -- Big Bill Hell

There was a time when you'd see little old ladies paying for the groceries with a hand-written personal check, holding up the line, causing an immediately-forgiven slight sense of annoyance with those behind her. Buddy. Those days are over. They've been over. What, did you think you were going to just pop a couple extra zeroes on the end of your paycheck there? Maybe scan your paycheck, open it in photoshop, make a template, print em out all nice? You think you're the first to think of that, dipshit?

It takes the law a long time to catch up with the state of the art. You're reading this on the internet, which means you never use checks. The law has caught up. Your ass will be going to prison immediately and you will see zero return.

You can't even kite checks anymore, and hell, nobody under 40 will even know what that means, due to the blazing fast, two day settlement on all ACH transactions. Let me paint you a picture.

You get paid on Friday, but it is Monday, and bills are due on Tuesday. And you're broke: $0 in the bank. Goose egg. Pop open your checkbook, go to a store, "buy" some things, write a check for the amount. The cashier takes it!

Now take those things you "bought", across town, to another store location, and return them for cold hard cash. Sweet. Bills paid. Friday rolls around, and you just make it to the bank to deposit your paycheck before it closes. After the weekend, the checks you wrote finally post, and they don't bounce! You've kited a check. You've surreptitiously taken a zero-interest loan. And we know your broke ass. The interest rate on that short-term payday loan should have been straight up usurious. We're talking 29%. That makes predatory fuckers like us horny for sex. We're so mad. Now you are going to Federal Prison. For a good minute. Fuckface.

COST: $0.10 (With banks offering free checking accounts + Bic pen)

"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor sleet, if you fuck with the mail, we'll rip your nuts off" -- Ronald Mail (Inventor of Mail)

Many people have this misnomer that the most powerful people in politics are democratically elected. The president, of the United States, of America, is a stupid cartoon hotdog. All of them, I don't care. Way less clout than you'd think. Brilliantly, it is the people that the hotdog president appoints who are actually doing anything significant. The director of the CIA. The fucking chairman of the Federal Reserve. Probably the, like, most senior, uh, general of the military, and shit too. I don't know, we don't "do" army here at Bloomberg. You probably don't even know their names! I don't! These are the ones you should be seeing in your sleep.

There's another position like that. Appointed directly by the hotdog. The Postmaster General. That's a real title. He's the CEO of the mail, and buddy, what he may lack in political power relative to the director of the CEO, he makes up in raw sexual energy. Total Tom Selleck energy. Like an airline pilot. We're talking Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I'm tentpoling in my black business slacks just writing this, and all my Bloomberg newsroom bros are peering over my shoulder and also tent-poling. We're not gay though, and especially me, I'm probably the least gay, but sometimes I just lay awake for hours at night what that mustache would feel like pressed against my lips, the unbelievable and utter, total sense of security I'd feel burying my head into his hard chest.

You get it. He's your dad. And if you fuck with the mail, you've fucked with the tools in your dad's garage. And dad's been drinking. You're in for it, bucko, you are in trouble. Do you think the United States Postal Service actually makes any money? Hell no. It costs like five bucks to mail a box basically anywhere I can think of and they give you the boxes for free. You can just walk in the post office and take them. I do that, and then just throw them away, I don't know why, some kind of compulsion. Being able to move shit around like this, quickly, cheaply -- Jesus H, I've got a huge amount of money in my bank account, probably tens of trillions of dollars (due to financial knowledge gained from reading Bloomberg articles) and I could probably mail every single person ever something and still come out in the black.

No way pal. They've thought of that already. The Postmaster General is going to know every time, and he's going to grab you by the shirt collar, wearing his cool as fuck hat, and you're going to get your pants pulled down, and your bare ass spanke...I need to go use the restroom real quick.

We rely on the mail system to get important shit done. It's not something to be taken lightly, and it isn't. Trust me. This is why, like almost every other person who receives mail in this year 2023, I just fucking put a wastebasket under my mail slot. I don't even shred that shit anymore. I just burn it. Takes less time.

COST: $0.63 (Postal stamp)

"Can call all you want, but there's no one home // And you're not gonna reach my telephone // Out in the club, and I'm sipping that bubb // And you're not gonna reach my telephone" -- Lady Gaga

I read something wild that the children of today do not know what a dial tone is, because of how fucked up and stupid they are. Isn't that super fucked up?

While it's not really our style, allow me to fill you in on some ancient, arcane knowledge about the telephone. You can turn it on, and then you can punch in numbers. Any numbers. Random ones, or maybe not random ones. If the ten numbers you punch in are the same as the numbers in someone else's telephone number, their phone will ring, and then you are talking to them. This is called "Phreaking".

Here's the kicker: You can tell that jackass anything you want. "Oh, Hi, Yes, I am Reginald Sumpter calling from Avalon Consulting LLC, we are just following up on the invoice we sent you. Please remit to ###### routing ###### account."

BOOM! Your name isn't Reginald whatever and that company doesn't exist, but you just received a deposit. It's fucking beautiful. What have you done wrong? It isn't your responsibility to handle who your business' clients/etc are, it's their's. If they want to just pay you money for no real reason, well, that's kind of on them, isn't it? I haven't stuck a pistol in your face and demanded everything in the register.

Well, it's too clever. It's too slick. This is the United States of America. It's one thing to commit a felony like armed robbery, it's another thing to piss off someone in charge of the accounting division who uses a special bathroom you need a key to get into.

You can do it on the computer too, I use a PC Computer at work and send email, so you can see how it'd work there. You can make a document that is indifferentiable from a real invoice and, straight up, 1/3 of the time they will pay that shit. Lmfao.

It's called wire fraud because, uhh, duhhhh, there's wires. What do you think that thing is strung between the telephone receiver and the dialer? And computers? Give me a break. There's so many wires with those.

COST: $0.25 (Coin for payphone)

"People calculate too much and think too little." -- Charlie Munger

It is insane how dumb the common man can be when it comes to our world of expertise. I hear this same sentiment, like, ALL THE TIME:

"Durr hurr I will buy an insurance policy for my car or house or whatever so that in case something happens to it I will get money". And then that same person proceeds to drive safely or not burn their house down. Dumbest crap imaginable.

Let me break it down for you. Insurance is a two player competitive game. There is a winner and there is a loser. Go take out an expensive insurance policy on your American sports car. Buy a neck brace, a football helmet, and pack that bitch with throw pillows. Then get in the left lane of a major highway at like noonish, let it rip and then SLAM on your brakes. Hit from behind! Your fault! Congratulations. You have won insurance. How this gets past people is beyond me.

You can only do this once or twice before the insurance companies catch on. Then they don't want to fuck with you. It is also..I don't know man...something feels off about taking a car or a house, which like, some guy had to build and just destroying it, but that is only a weird emotional thing, since you're making money, more than whatever the destroyed thing is worth, so in reality you've built that house plus some extra. You've contributed.

COST: $106.00 (Average monthly car insurance payment)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

SUBSCRIBE TO MY WHATEVER FOR PART TWO, COMING SOON. i'll post it later today probably. whatever time frame will juice the numbers. have a sneaky peaky

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Tag yourself as this list of “bad art” features, according to a twitter fascist

Im so fucking pissed off you have no idea. An unfortunately that would make this art

One of these is a lazy low-effort pisspot, provocatively clamoring for rage and engagement around the question "what is art", and the other is DuChamp's masterpiece The Fountain.

I have no idea why the coffe article has been added ... but sure ... I'll reblog that XD

It's because the guy used Bulletproof Coffee as the "good art" drug metaphor!

I've tried coffee with grassfed butter and MCT just to see why the hell people had been talking about it. It was very weird. I'll stick with cocoa.

1. Does anyone have the full screenshot

2. W...why are people putting butter in coffee

natural coffee adaptation of tibetan butter tea, the main selling point of the many tibetan restaurants in cambridge, a city better known for containing harvard and MIT + fat neutralizes tannins + health food hype cycles adopting paleo as a paradigm

it's not terrible, but if you're going to whisk solid fats into your coffee, coconut oil is better

Also coffee on an empty stomach is a great ticket to indigestion, butter helps it go down better.

theyfab prefab acab rehab, kayfabe beyblade twitch stream fan made. he-man, zealand, i'm aboutta pre, man. tiktokers party rockers 2012 milf giant knockers yeah we didn't start the fire,

Gifsets, stimboards, energy and normal swords,

Types of girl, types of guy, and the color of the sky

Onceler porn, shark myths, Goncharov, Cybersmith,

Castiel, Superhell, what else do I have to tell?

Ok, so, how much immigration is driven by economic factors, vs. how much is driven by other stuff? Economic factors have gotta drive the vast majority of it, right? Like there are people who move to Japan or France or whatever just because they're enthusiastic about the culture, but it seems like this is just a tiny proportion of all immigration. Most of it seems to be about seeking better material conditions.

Are there estimates of this? I'm not sure how exactly you'd get this kind of data reliably, but I'd really like numbers on this.

This is a big field. Migration studies is quite multidisciplinary and there's a lot of research that's been done over the last 50-70 years from both an economics/statistical/"bird's eye" perspective and from a more sociologist/case study perspective.

Have a look at the paper Theories of International Migration by Massey et. Al (1993) to get a feel for the different theories that have been proposed. It's an old paper but the best accessible summary of the field I'm aware of. If you google it there are free PDFs available.

The very high level tl;dr is that yes economic factors seem to be very important, but "economic factors" is a poorly defined concept and can refer to a few different things (and ignore some very important things!). The extent to which international wage differentials specifically drive migration varies by the type of migration (eg. low skilled vs high skilled vs forced displacement eg. refugees/asylum seekers) and many other factors. Inter-country demographic networks ("diasporas"), political and economic institutions, national immigration policies, trade patterns and many other variables also shape migration decisions at the individual/household level and at the aggregrate/statistical level.

If you're looking into numbers specifically and quantitative estimates take a look at the work of Michel Beine. Diasporas (2011) is an accessible paper that will give you a feel for the complexities involved.

Source/Credentials: I did an Econ Master's thesis on the extent to which professional networks drive international "high skilled" migration

"going out would be more fun if it sucked ass"

i think this would be very enjoyable and enriching for a pet 1980s businessman, or Jerma

My university’s student bar did this at the end of our term, it was called “stocks and shares night” and it was fucking spectacular.

Every tv was set up with screens listing the prices, and it would update with every sale, and the goal was to clear out the bars stock by the end of the night.

It wasn’t just beer, it was every spirit, wine and cider they had in stock. It was beautiful chaos. You’d start off ordering rank shit you’d never had before (tequila rose wtf) and within an hour you had groups working together to strategically tank or raise prices.

At one point everyone had stopped ordering jäger until It was like 50p a shot and then one person would go up and order 30 shots for £15, thus triggering it skyrocketing to £3 a shot. Ive never seen such impressive organisation and teamwork in a bar before. I have never had a worse hangover in my life.

the comments are even better

there was no reason a a priori to expect the cosmological constant to have any specific value, and thus no particular surprise that it's not zero.

Sabine Hossenfelder says this, right? I wouldn't feel confident if it was just me, I would think I'm just overlooking some fact that all physicists know. I'm just basing it on like, when you're introducing a model with free parameters, and those free parameters have no meaning outside the context of the model, you use a jeffreys prior. But if Sabine Hossenfelder says the same thing maybe I'm not missing anything. Like, it's another constant, it will be a great victory for any theory that relates to other constants, we always hope to have unified theories that leave us with fewer constants. But there was no reason to expect it to be specifically zero.

@youzicha said:

i mean, we don't experience light as having a speed either. We know c has to be very high, and the cosmological constant has to be very small. But for it to be precisely zero would be a coincidence with no explanation for it.

Weinberg goes into this (here, and i think here)—we can expect simplicity of principles, but not simplicity in formulas. General covariance is a simple principle which could underly the observed equivalence of gravity and inertia. That gets us (I think?) the form of the field equations. But there's no physical principle that determines the free parameters in that formula, including to say they should be zero.

i also forgot that I have no ordinary experience of the pressure of a vacuum, but I trust that if people in laboratories had found some "minimum achievable pressure" when they make vacuums i would have heard about it. Instead, it took a universe sized experiment.

looked for sabine hossenfelder comments. There's a post where she gives judgments of whats good or bad theoretical physics problems to work on.

relatedly,

so, yeah! The one physicist i've heard saying what i would have expected to hear on these issues. When there's no prior knowledge, there's no... prior! Or an improper uniform prior or a jeffreys prior. You don't have "pre-data" expectations about free parameters that have no meaning outside the theory, that were introduced as part of the theory.

if i was doing bayesian statistics i would do a jeffreys prior. If I add some prior expectation that parameters are around the same size, i think they sometimes call that a "hyperprior", and then i have a prior over that size.... it's a different, correlated prior for the parameters. But I'd only do that if the parameters had some meaning such that it makes sense.

this isn't as clear as im making it sound. I found it very confusing in grad school, why is this guy using a hyperprior, and this other guy not.

Red pill/blue pill discourse meta-poll

I think I've found a sticking point and I want to know what assumptions people are making when they vote in those red pill/blue pill polls.

I think there's a lot of variance with how people are approaching the thought experiment as a thought experiment, and how applicable the usual social and human forces are or aren't, within the thought experiment's bounds. This meta-poll is an attempt to clear some of that up. It's kind of convoluted so I'm trying to lay it out as explicitly and clearly as possible. Sorry, it's kind of long.

The three questions are:

1. Which pill are you generally inclined to pick?

2. How do you interpret the specifics of the red pill/blue pill thought experiment?

3. Would you change your answer if you were operating under the opposite interpretation?

what? oh. yes. you see, one of the Incidents from my schoolboy days—Piss Fencing, they called it. a band of miscreants—of a type with which i'm sure you're familiar—had got hold of some anarcho-primitivist literature, about the spiritual health of dueling, of accepting one's embodiment, the repressive force of civilization and all that rot, and reasoned, as any bright young mind of the empire would do—the, ah, ringleader is in ceylon now, i believe—some manner of officer—that what could be more civilized than indoor plumbing? so one day, in the bathrooms—which were quite crowded at the time—he whipped out his todger, whooped a mighty en-garde, and let loose at the boy next to him, who, of course, retaliated in kind. a number of others joined in, wielding their members as if they were sabers; by the end of the incident, half the class appeared to have lost a fight with the fountains of trafalgar square. the schoolmaster broke three canes that day! so, young man, when you announced your intention to challenge me to a duel—

figured out a way you can search for posts that are tagged TWO things on a blog!!! feeling clever

for anyone else who didn’t know, this is the format!:

https://[blogURL].tumblr.com/search/%23[tag1]%2C%20%23[tag2]

remove the [brackets] when using it!

mods are asleep, share hacks that make the site usable against its will

Unfortunately this misses many posts. For instance, https://uesp.tumblr.com/search/%23skyrim%2C%20%23oblivion does not find https://uesp.tumblr.com/post/722394754980184064/