My interests: Journalism, Politics, International Relations.
1 - The New Yorker is the best magazine in the English-speaking world. They employ very good writers. If you like deep insightful long stories, try to get it.
2 - Without The Guardian, British democracy is utterly fucked. The Brits just don’t know it. Most UK papers are owned by shady characters such as Jonathan Harmsworth. The Brits even have a paper (The Independent) owned by a Russian mobster (Evgueni Lebedev). The Guardian’s non-profit structure gives it more freedom that most UK papers. They often investigate stories the rest of the UK press just won’t touch: Paradise Papers, Panama Papers, Cameron’s tax evasion, etc…
3 - The two best newspapers in France are Le Monde and Mediapart, hands down. Mediapart is a non-profit. Le Monde journalists have special rights and can’t be removed by shareholders. These 2 newspapers are more independent than the rest of the french press.
4 - The Financial Times is the favorite newspaper of elites worldwide. CEOs. Billionaires. Millionaires. Presidents. Prime Ministers. Everyone reads it. And honestly, it’s very solid. The information is always extremely reliable. The FT is also the most expensive newspaper on the planet. But they sometimes publish free stories.
5 - The editorial section of the Wall Street Journal is directly controlled by Billionaire Rupert Murdoch. The WSJ is the jewel of his global media empire. Fox News and the New York Post are for influencing the masses. WSJ editorials actually allow him to have influence over US high income readers.
6 - If you read WSJ editorials, Rupert Murdoch’s ideas are very simple. Labor unions must be crushed. Corporate concentration is good. Netanyahu is a brave man. US military spending is good. Unions should be restricted by tough laws. Environmental rules are bad. Slash taxes on large corporations. Of course, he doesn’t write it openly. But this what virtually most of the WSJ editorial content boils down to.
7 - Many talented reporters work for the Wall Street Journal and end up deeply ashamed of it. It feels like prostitution. Many would much rather work for The Financial Times, New York Times or ProPublica. Rupert Murdoch employs great reporters at the Wall Street Journal simply because he needs them to acquire credibility in order to influence readers through his WSJ editorials.
8 - The best coverage of Silicon Valley is an online newspaper called The Information. If you want to know what Meta or Microsoft are really up to, read The Information. Most of their readers are wealthy investors and tech executives who seek exclusive information.
9 - When it comes to television and radio, public media (PBS, BBC, NPR, CBC) is often more professional, more serious, than corporate media. PBS or CBC make outstanding documentaries. Stuff US/Canadian private networks just wouldn’t make.
10 - Generally speaking, journalism that you pay for is better than journalism you don’t pay for. This is a general rule, not a law of physics. There are exceptions. The Daily Mail has subscribers. It’s largely non-sense. I wouldn’t trust anything written in it. ProPublica is free. They do quality investigations.
11 - AIPAC is powerful. But there is limit to their power. There was an intense AIPAC campaign to stop the President Obama from signing a nuclear agreement with Iran. He defeated them .
12 - Most Trump tweets aren’t written by Donald Trump. They are written by a dude named Dan Scavino. He is behind 90% of his tweets. Most americans have no clue who Dan Scavino is. They wouldn’t know him if they met him in the supermarket.
13 - Having a lot of resources is a curse. Countries that have natural ressources (Iran, Algeria, Nigeria, Russia) tend to be highly corrupt and exploited by a small elite. It’s simple. The elite can take control of the oil fields, the gas fields, the mines. Just sell ressources. Shoot protesters. No need to invest in anything else. It’s much better to live a country with limited resources (Taiwan, Japan, Switzerland). Lack of resources force the elites to invest in science and education. The most unlucky country in Africa is Congo. It’s full of diamonds, forests, oil, gas, lithium, cobalt, rare earth. So Congo has suffered horribly because of that. In fact, it’s still being looted.
14 - If you want to transform an authoritarian regime into a democracy from within, the number 1 tool you need are powerful labor unions. Powerful unions can basically go on a general solidarity strike and shut down an entire economy.
15 - Everything Barack Obama predicted would happen if the US didn’t sign the nuclear agreement with Iran actually happened. Trump left the agreement. Iran started enriching nuclear fuel. Then a major war happened.
16 - Many Middle Easterners are very tribal. Most Israelis see themselves as Jewish first, Israeli second. Syrian druzes think of themselves as Druze first, Syrian second. Many lebanese Shias see themselves as Shia first, Lebanese a distant second. And so on. Their loyalty often lies more to their tribe than to the State they actually live in.
17 - Imperialism was bad. But imperialism didn’t actually cause instability in the Middle East. The most stable period was actually Ottoman Imperialism. For 5 centuries there was commerce and peace. Then, there was the British/French empire. Apart from some episodes of violence, it was stable. But when imperialism ended, it was basically a mess. Jews vs Arabs. Christians vs Sunnis. Arabs vs Persians. Jews vs Shias. Arabs vs Kurds. Alawis vs Sunnis. To this day, many of them have this tribal mindset.
18 - Saying “we don’t speak with terrorists” is completely dumb. Many terrorist organizations later became peaceful. Many terrorist leaders later became statesmen. It’s wrong to say “We can’t make any peace with those who hands are stained with blood”. Get out of here with that non-sense. If you truly want peace, seeking only decent leaders means you aren’t going to find anyone at all. Criminals make peace. This isn’t Scandinavia.
What are things you know because of your personal interests that most people have no idea about ?
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If you want to design and build large-scale industrial plant infrastructure like pressure vessels, piping, pumps, turbines, etc., most of the codes and standards you have to meet cost money to even see -and they are NOT cheap (in the tens of thousands of dollars for a full set).
In several jurisdictions, the standards are incorporated into law by reference. Most people think that you should have free access to read the text of the law that you’re beholden to, but what happens when a copyrighted work is incorporated into the law?
archive.org asserted the law should be free to access. However, they lost a copyright lawsuit brought by the American society of mechanical engineers because they were hosting copies of these standards.
So, to read the law you are beholden to in this sector of manufacturing, you must either pay a private organization ($$$) or memorize it (impossible); you cannot make copies for yourself to reference at your leisure
The standards for Normal, Utility, Aerobatic and Commuter category aircraft are codified in federal law, FAR part 23.
The standards for Special Light Sport Aircraft are ASTM standards referred to by law.
Holy crap. Everyday I’m surprised at what is legal.
Ahahah totally man. I dealt with a lot of this compliance, regulatory, quasi legal, bullshit too.
At one point to become an inspector of those huge oil storage tanks I had to basically study the specific building codes for those tanks back to front and upside down.
Cost hundreds to get the standards legally, thousands to take the tests, become registered, work with a qualified inspector etc.
That was 1 single standard, there are thousands. Tens of thousands when we’re talking industry generally, probably hundreds.
Then when you add international standards, everything is duplicated now per country. We make trade agreements and such to somewhat ease the shock of moving products and services across that Gulf of understanding.
Standards are trending in a good direction, we’re slowly moving towards more and more harmonized and universal standards but, we will never reach it, because we’re human, well always just be adapting to what comes next
In a related vein, the Washington Post was hot garbage long before it was acquired by Bezos. They gained their reputation by chance during the Watergate scandal because they received classified docs which put them on the same level as larger media outlets.
But when imperialism ended, it was basically a mess. Jews vs Arabs. Christians vs Sunnis. Arabs vs Persians. Jews vs Shias. Arabs vs Kurds. Alawis vs Sunnis. To this day, many of them have this tribal mindset.
Expanding on this, this was mainly exploited by the weakening British empire to create states that would be friendly in geopolitics and trade. Even the Pan Arab flag that many middle eastern countries share is actually a British design given to different uprising groups against the weakening Ottoman empire a couple of centuries prior.
Having a lot of resources is a curse. Countries that have natural ressources (Iran, Algeria, Nigeria, Russia) tend to be highly corrupt and exploited by a small elite.
Jokes on you, Pakistan has a ton of natural resources that the small elite chooses to shoot people for attempting to harvest/refine/sell, which is why they import literally everything on IMF loan money and simultaneously invest jack into education and science outside a few high level military projects which gave them the nuclear bomb.
Here’s another: the hot-rod/car-racing field is CRAMMED with snake-oil, & the best information is sooo shoddily converted into book-form, that is nearly useless.
David Vizard’s books, & the related books on the domain, are important-to-study, but DEAR G-D is there a RIPE market for anybody who wants to convert all that shit-publishing into quality publishing…
That’s a contributing-factor to why the entire internal-combustion-engine aftermarket is mostly snake-oil bullshit, unfortunately.
I bet the entire internal-combustion-engine industry could have made their engines 10% more efficient, average, had they studied what the inventors/racers had published, & used that information competently…
sigh
the same is true for the general-aviation industry, as a whole.
Notice that the 2 absolute innovators in these 2 domains, were Smokey Yunick & Burt Rutan: anarchists who did more research-engineering than … pretty-much the entire rest of the industry.
IF you want to become competent in sailboat-design, THEN you NEED:
- “The Principles of Yacht Design”, get the most-recent edition of it.
- ALL of Dave Gerr’s books.
- Fossatti’s Aero-Hydrodynamics of Sailing, or whatever that book is called
- probably Nigel Calder’s books, to understand what makes a lifelong sailor value a design-decision
- Tom Cunliffe’s books, to understand the difference between excellent captaining vs “good enough”, & the implications of that, on the design
- a book on windvanes, if you intend to impliment one, on your design ( for cruisers )
- “The Rigger’s Apprentice”, by Brion Toss
- “The Sailmaker’s Apprentice” or something like that, can’t remember, right now…
- the North Sails book on sails/sail-design/sailmaking
- look up the Sharrow propeller, on yt, for power-boats ( annular-box-wing prop, for outboards: no cavitation! )
- Harry Riblett’s book on General Aviation airfoils, available at the Experimental Aviation Association, if you are going to do ANYthing interesting with hydrofoiling ( he nailed the ATR-72 icing problem last-century, & that airfoil’s problem killed an airliner in 2024, with NASA still not admitting the truth about that foil )
- Julia, the programming-language, for doing your math: better than spreadsheets, can use real math symbols, & you aren’t touching any part of the code that you aren’t working-on ( in a spreadsheet, a stray typo can distort the entire sheet, & you can’t find what it is that is skewing everything unless you’re seeing the whole sheet’s equations: it’s the wrong paradigm: error-accumulation, instead of error-eradication. Julia has a learning-track on Exercism, & has a few good books. )
Getting that set of knowledge into one, will save you thousands of wasted dollars, chasing “wild geese”.
For aircraft-design, I’d say begin with Snorri Gudmundsson’s book, NOT Raymer’s.
( Raymer is careless, & you will save yourself much frustration if you avoid his books. Snorri’s is on its 2nd edition, so I’m presuming it to be the go-to book for the industry, nowadays: I can’t afford it, & may not ever, but I wish I’d got Gudmundsson’s book, instead of Raymers, now )
You’ll need Harry Riblett’s book on airfoils, as mentioned above. https://www.kitplanes.com/the-airfoil-adventures-of-harry-riblett/ Notice that the Bearhawk has his foil on it, and its reputation is awesome.
You’ll need this video-playlist, in order to understand just how AWEFUL the interference-drag is, on normal designs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZhyjYE4Le0&list=PLO-XZZWFTH5ELMG3CECqMPZoEFREgwkPn
( I think it was 67HP & 250mph, in level flight, for one of Mike Arnold’s birds. )
Once these things by Mike Arnold & Harry Riblett sink-in, then the normal designs you see in general-aviation … become unconscionable: all that wasted-opportunity, all the needless drag-inefficiency.
Harry Riblett was using Eppler’s simple software, simple simulations, & nowadays you’d HAVE TO use OpenFOAM to do your simulations, XFoil mis-represents stall-onset, apparently, & XFoil is vastly better than what Riblett was using, years ago.
You NEED to understand both Bernoulli’s principle & the Reynolds number, in aircraft-design.
There are sites with video-training for OpenFOAM: CFD/Computational-Fluid-Dynamics’s complicated, & I’d recommend that.
It is entirely possible to design an aircraft, nowadays, on your own, using X-Plane, OpenFOAM, & the choicest study-materials, & YEARS of thinking on it, until your own unconscious-mind groks that-specific-component in the problem, then get digging on the next one…
Further, IF you take into consideration what Riblett & Arnold gave us, THEN you can do better than what most of the new designs in general-aviation are doing.
There is a video, which I now can’t find, on changing Burt Rutan’s Vari-EZ or Long-EZ aircraft to have blended canards, & it noticeably reduced the drag.
That is exactly the sort of thing that Mike Arnold instinctively understood, & if you begin with that kind of instinct, then you … don’t waste the opportunity that the normal aircraft-designers are enforcing.
You need to consider Prandtl wings, too, as that’s beginning to become significant in modern designs.
All the stuff I’ve realized in both these domains is affects patentability, & therefore I’ll not give you that: I want to be able to create a not-for-profit keiretsu which makes both sailboats & aircraft ( a keiretsu is like Panasonic: an organism made of companies, not a single-company ), someday, & patent-protection’s required to break the for-profit monopoly in both industries.
Sorry I’m not just giving you a bunch of answers, instead pointing you at competent-learning-means…
but the world really is better when you learn your-own way, & others learn their-own way, & the results are more … exploring-evolution’s-potential.
Both of these domains will take you under a decade to get from beginning-learning to where you’re really knowing-what-you’re-doing enough to become able to begin competently inventing.
Don’t expect to get to that stage in less than 7y, though.
It took me 8, before everything suddenly fell-into-place, & the different fluid-dynamics-interactions fit together, for different kinds of design, etc…
But I’d rather the world have other-people doing it, … than me knowing, but not doing it, & others thinking that university-courses is the only valid way.
LibreTexts.org iirc is also a place with some good information on it, in the aircraft-design space…
Whatever: IF anybody cares to earn competence in either domain, THEN I hope this boosts you into it, more efficiently.
If not, then just ignore this.
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I feel like there’s some amount of this in every hobby, which sounds like I’m downplaying this take and racing but that’s not that case I promise you.
I can imagine how this would be amplified big time in a pretty expensive hobby/semi-pro/pro? I assume there must exist some amount of pros
But yeah as a collector of a couple to many more likely expensive hobbies, it’s crazy how much shit you see designed to just separate people from their money efficiently
in the open source multiplayer game Space Station 14, you can swab pollen from cannabis plants to egg-plants (as in, plants that grow eggs, distinct from eggplant) and have a chance to grow eggs full of pure THC
Everything I’ve heard about that game sounds insane
It’s outstanding. Easily the most fun I’ve had in any sort of multiplayer game in recent memory.
Definitely has learning curves stacked on learning curves, but starting out as a janitor is perfect for learning the ropes
Would I enjoy it if I like Rimworld? Or am I way off base as to what the game even is?
going to disagree with most of your takes on the media/journos. that entire industry is mostly corrupt for the past 20 years because the barriers to entry are so high that you have to be part of the elite to become a journalist, hence why journalism has become increasingly irrelevant and seems completely out of touch to anyone who isn’t part of the elite. Also i feel like a lot of your political claims are way over simplified and exaggerated, but there is some truth to what you are saying. I stopped reading most ‘elite’ publications because they really started showing their detachment from any greater reality around the late 2000s, and it got far worse in the mid 2010s.
I spent a decade studying/working/teaching philosophy, history, and political theory. Hardly anyone knows anything about these things… and often when you see them on media… the takes are horrible ignorant/bad/wrong and vastly oversimplified. So are the takes by most consumers of philosophy the podcasts/books/etc about them. And it’s sad frustrating how people think they know everything there is to know about Plato’s views because they listened to a 45m podcast about The Cave or read one of his books once. And the people who do know about these things? totally ignored both mainstream media and the social media types… but their insights when they are given the time/effort to shine is truly wonderful and insightful.
I also taught coursework in these areas… most of my students were not dumb or idiots… but only 5% actually gave a shit about learning. Most just wanted to be entertained or validated in their delusions and pre-existing beliefs about the world, and they got very frustrated when the course didn’t do that for them. At least when I taught 15 years ago they were not prone to violence, threats, and intimidation, like they are now.
Now I work in tech…and it’s astounding how horrible ignorant most technological ‘smart’ people are… and how much of their ‘intelligence’ is just… a quasi religious belief set. I think because tech is ‘mysterious’ to the general population the ‘techies’ now considered themselves the high priests of society… saw this going on 20 years ago and now we are reading the point where the corruption, idiocy, and delusions of grandeur have really started to show. I’m not a huge expert in most tech… but the amount of sheer ignorance perpetuated by overconfident idiots in the tech sector is just… mind blowing… and most ‘techies’ i know legit seem to feel an innate sense of superiority to non tech workers and if you challenge them they throw temper tantrums like children.
For someone interested in journalism it’s odd you don’t know about the Bylines network.
You left-out the critical resource of https://www.semiaccurate.com/ btw…
What a generally … outright-awesome post.
The Guardian changed-ownership recently, & cut their journalism-staff, savagely, ttbomk, AND they are now purged from DuckDuckGo??
searching for
kremlin papers trump site:theguardian.com
produces NOTHING at DuckDuckGo, now, & for the last few weeks, at-least?
& I’ve seen that FT definitely has anti-viability strategy in its pushing of distortion, in its stuff…
fscking-idiot webmastering at TheGuardian… WHERE’S THE SEARCH-FUNCTION??
https://www.theguardian.com/index/subjects/a
THAT page has a search-function.
??
WHEN I search on the keywords
kremlin papers
only-in-title, only-in-English, then click the button, then I get
So, TheGuardian IS BLOCKING DuckDuckGo for sake of kickbacks for Google-exclusivity??
Looks like it…
“Those who are ignorant of history, are damned to re-enact its disasters.” is true for our entire world, & especially true in the domain of journalism!
IF you keep disappearing historical key-information ( as for-profit, & for-institutional-status/importance, “journalisms” both do ), THEN you’re garrotting OUR WORLD’s viability!!
Scum…
The highest quality science-news is https://www.science.org/news
whereas the highest quantity of science-news is probably https://phys.org/latest-news/
( you have to fight with phys.org, as it keeps trying to prove one is just a bot, if one keeps digging into archives )
Salut, Namaste, Kaizen, & Gratitude for making this post!
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ITT: autism
I kid. Kind of.
Anyone remotely interested in Japanese music, J-pop, or rhythm games might have seen some music being labelled with something like “BOFU2017” or “BOF:NT” in song names, and a lot of these music have surprisingly high production value. This actually has some rather interesting history
So Beatmania was a DJ simulator rhythm game released by Konami in 1998 that was an inspiration for a lot of music games in the future. The Be-Music Source file format was developed for a community simulator of Beatmania. Later, BMS evolved into essentially its own rhythm game (which anyone can play btw, beatoraja is even available on AUR), and the community forbade players from playing official Konami charts (referred to as “illegal charts”)
In order to increase the amounts of content available for BMS, the community decided to host BMS creation competitions to encourage players to make more BMS… the flagship event is called “BMS of Fighters” (BOF), hosted annually starting from 2004. All music from the events are completely free and libre: as in, free as in both freedom and free beer. And the competition is fierce; a quick search on YouTube will show some top-ranking songs and their production values tend to be very high (… and there are some shitposts too, we don’t talk about Mopemope or that stupid Kirby song)
Obviously because of the libre nature of these competitions, a lot of these songs end up getting picked up by various rhythm games that are not BMS at all. The most popular rhythm games (like DDR, maimai) tend to have a generous collection of the top ranking BOF charts. The low-budget games even more so: when I was in China for two months and saw a lot of local arcade games (basically Chinese clones of maimai, DDR/PIU and Dancerush), guess what songs they have the most! Muse Dash which also started as a Chinese indie game also has a ton of BOF songs; in fact, Blackest Luxury Car, a song which I strongly associate with Muse Dash’s entire identity (they even have a stage modeled after the song), was in fact… a song from BOFU2017
It’s hard to tell but I wouldn’t be surprised if BMS have a wider societal impact on rhythm game music and even the entire Japanese music genre as a whole. A lot of the artists behind top-ranking charts probably got contracts with various rhythm games… or maybe even beyond those. One funny example I know is that one artist became the lead composer of a gacha game that grossed $18M last month; the game in question is almost universally praised for their good soundtracks
As for the BMS themselves… distribution is not centralized whatsoever, especially for less popular songs. Some are on Google Drive, some on OneDrive, some on certain hosting websites, some only in packaged archives that some people are thanklessly maintaining… but anyways it is rather fascinating
Also the 2025 BOF started on October 3rd and is ongoing now. The portal for all BOF events are here: https://bmsoffighters.net/
Animals are one of my special interests, so I have a lot of knowledge about keeping several types of animals (especially dogs and parrots). A lot of people that have pets don’t actually seem to look that deeply into keeping them, or even consider too much before getting them, which leads to a lot of problems and rehoming situations.
The most important thing is; before you get yourself any animal, look up and read about their needs first, there’s so much that has to be considered, since they’re living feeling beings and you will be responsible for them.
- What is the healthiest diet for them? How often do they eat? How much does feeding them cost? Where can you get their foods?
- How will you deal with their shitting/peeing, or the mess they’ll make? How will you have to protect your house so they don’t kill themselves or destroy everything?
- Do they need special lighting? Certain temperatures or humidity? What sort of cage/toys/other things they need, and how much will those cost?
- How much space do they need? (Never go with the recommended minimum!) Do they need to go outside every day, and how many times?
- Do you need to get multiple for them to have company and be healthy? Can you keep multiple of them or will they kill each other?
- What things should you teach them?
- How much time do you have to spend with them everyday? What will you do if you have to travel?
- How long lifespan do they have? What will happen to them if you die first?
- How will you take care of their fur/nails/beak/etc.?
- Do they need a specialist vet and are there any close by? Do you have enough funds to pay for their typical vet care and sudden emergencies?
- Where can you get this animal? Are they legal where you live? Are there any rescues for them, do you have to find a reputable breeder? How can you avoid getting scammed or supporting unethical practices? (Never buy anything wild-caught!)
- Etc…
I have had a crow visiting my balcony. I heard that cat food is somewhat more balanced that just peanuts, and since I have cats it was an easy switch. Are there other things I could offer to make visits more likely while not giving it avian diabetes?
They’re omnivores so good quality catfood is fine, it shouldn’t be your visitor’s full diet anyway. I bribe my neighbourhood corvids with dog kibble, since it’s what I always have in my pockets! You could try something like fruit or berries if you want to offer some variety, but the catfood and peanuts might be preferred over those. Going extra mile could be something like dried mealworms I guess, but it’s easiest to just use what you already have around.
If the visitor is not living nearby, it might come only when it happens to be close enough for other reasons, and sometimes they have seasonal things where they just go elsewhere and won’t show up for a while. Just be patient, it can take a long ass time to form trust with them, but once they learn you have food offerings regularly, they will keep visiting on their own terms. They also gossip, so you might get more visitors over time
Having a lot of resources is a curse. Countries that have natural ressources (Iran, Algeria, Nigeria, Russia) tend to be highly corrupt and exploited by a small elite. It’s simple. The elite can take control of the oil fields, the gas fields, the mines. Just sell ressources. Shoot protesters. No need to invest in anything else. It’s much better to live a country with limited resources (Taiwan, Japan, Switzerland). Lack of resources force the elites to invest in science and education. The most unlucky country in Africa is Congo. It’s full of diamonds, forests, oil, gas, lithium, cobalt, rare earth. So Congo has suffered horribly because of that. In fact, it’s still being looted.
This isn’t actually true. You can look at the Nordic countries which are very oil rich and owe a lot of their prosperity to that. The United States is pretty resource rich as well. What is a curse is imperialism, and having lots of resources attracts lots of imperialists. The “oil curse” or “resource curse” is a myth made up to whitewash imperialists and absolve them of guilt.
Strap in and let me tell you about my special interest, Iranian history. In the 1800s, before the discovery of oil, Iran was ruled by an extremely corrupt line of shahs who sold out every part of the impoverished country to fund their lavish lifestyles and massive harems - to the point that other countries had to step in and say that they weren’t allowed to sell out that much of the country. But the Iranian people were upset by this state of affairs, and staged a massive boycott, which set the stage for a mass movement in 1905 that established a democratic parliament and a constitution, with the support of an overwhelming majority, including the clergy (a fatwa was actually issued declaring violating the boycott to be haram). Iran was well on it’s way to becoming a peaceful, prosperous, democratic society - but then the Fire Nation attacked, in the form of the British and Russian Empires moving in, shelling the parliament building and dividing the nation between themselves, like a pack of wolves.
The Iranian people suffered tremendously in the following years, with major plagues, famines, and genocide conducted by the Ottoman Empire. Of course, the Russian Empire collapsed, the British took the opportunity to unify the country, propping up a shah of a new dynasty as their puppet. That shah proved uncooperative during WWII, and the Allies invaded to set up supply lines between the Eastern and Western fronts and to secure the Iranian oil (which had now been discovered), and the shah was forced to abdicate to his son, who the British found more amenable.
The British technically owned the rights to Iran’s oil, but the deal they had made was with the previous dynasty (Qajar). The one that had been selling out their country to an absurd degree, the one that had been overthrown by the people precisely because they were selling out the country, and so naturally the deal they had struck with the British regarding oil (which had been made before oil had even been discovered in Iran) gave them extremely lucrative terms. But it actually didn’t matter how lucrative the terms were because the British were just straight up stealing it. They falsified their records and forbid any kind of inspection of their facilities.
This led the Iranian people to once again mobilize in support of democracy and self-rule. As outrage over the exploitation grew, the shah, who had previously rubber-stamped anyone the British picked, began to fear his own people more than the British and appointed democratic reformer Mohammad Mossadegh as prime minister. After the Iranians had watched the British stonewall them for decades, Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry with overwhelming public support. Iran was once again on track to becoming a peaceful, democratic, independent country.
But the British set up a naval blockade that crippled their economy. Iranians, at this point, had a neutral to positive view of the US, and hoped that it would live up to its stated ideals and support them against the British. The British, meanwhile, expected the Americans to back up their “property rights.” President Truman threw up his hands in frustration, seeing both sides as intransigent. But Churchill simply waited him out, and offered his successor Eisenhower British support in Korea and NATO in exchange for the CIA launching a coup, and so Iran was passed around like a bargaining chip. Mossadegh’s commitment to democratic ideals allowed the CIA free reign, he didn’t crack down on the press despite the CIA controlling virtually all the newspapers, he didn’t crack down on protests while the CIA was hiring protesters on both sides, etc. Naturally, he was ousted (although the CIA denied it/covered it up for decades), and the shah was given much more power (which he used to hunt down and exterminate the Iranian left) and the oil kept flowing.
But after a few decades, once again, outrage over the exploitation came to a head, and the shah, seeking to appease his people, participated in a multinational oil boycott. But as a result, his foreign support was withdrawn, which set the stage for the Islamic Revolution. President Carter, against the advice of his state department, allowed the shah to take refuge in the US. Naturally, this outraged the Iranians, because the US had previously staged a coup to install the very same man as a dictator. In retaliation, some of the revolutionaries seized the US embassy and took hostages. This of course led to a breakdown in relations between the US and Iran.
And so, Iran is often held up as an example of this supposed “resource curse” that leads to political instability (not to mention the old line about “Islam is incompatible with democracy”), but the reality is that the country had multiple times in its history where it could’ve become stable, peaceful, democratic, and independent, but those chances were destroyed, not by Iranians, but by foreign imperialists, the vile colonial empires of the British and Americans. Had they simply been left alone, they would not have suffered from this supposed “resource curse.” If you look into the history of any similar country, you will find a similar story. But the history of these countries are simply not taught and not known in the imperial core, and so other explanations are invented.
Well said. I stopped reading after point 13 for this very reason!
Ah yes oil rich Finland
No, oil rich Norway.
There’s a documentary about the British and American involvement in the Iranian coup called ‘Coup 53’
There’s a really good book called “All the Shahs men” too which I really enjoyed
Thanks, I didn’t know about it and I’ll definitely check it out.
I didn’t source very well but a lot of my info comes from “All the Shah’s Men” by Stephen Kinzer, which I highly recommend.
As someone who’s into composting:
Some maggots (specifically of black soldier flies) can literally climb out of their buckets.
This feels well known but…
Adding split screen to games is actually a very funky process.
It changes how the UI works, input setup, how sounds are handled, how some effects are done, how optimizing is worked on, it significantly increases testing and QA time because split screen may have its own unique bugs, and other quirky problems due to either the game’s or engine’s design (most of the time split screen is not a high priority focus compared to other features)
All that for something a very small percentage of players will even look at.
I often see people lament the lack of split screen games, and I do wish there were more, but its a hard sell and I can see why many games abandon it completely.
(Save for a few that made it entirely their focus, like split fiction)
I love split fiction (even if we are currently stuck), and really enjoyed it takes two. Do you know of other co-op games that can support a serious gamer and someone who is terrible at gaming (I’m the one who is terrible at gaming)?
Super Mario Odyssey 2 player. 2p controls the cap I think.
Also Galaxy 1 and 2 I guess. Just recently re-released (and overpriced of course).
Depends how bad terrible is, but here are a few that are less intensive and should be pretty easy to pick up and ones I’ve generally liked (All on PC):
- Baldur’s Gate 3/Divinity Original Sin 1+2 (These are ‘serious’ games but they are turn based strategy so they’re more thinking than reflex)
- BattleBlock Theater
- Castle Crashers
- Cassette Beasts
- Crypt of the NecroDancer (If you don’t got rhythm then this ones hard)
- Guacamelee
- Human Fall Flat
- ibb & obb
- KeyWe
- Kingdom Two Crowns
- Pretty much any Lego game (They are forgiving if you make mistakes but also have more difficult collection hunting if you play it more seriously. They are all very similar though so I’d really only get one or two as you’ll get burned out on them quick)
- Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime
- Magicka (Is sometimes difficult but also hilarious)
- Octodad: Dadliest Catch
- Overcooked 1/2
- Resident Evil 5/6 (These can have difficult patches but they’re generally not very hard)
- Spiritfarer
- Trine series (I’ve generally liked them all)
There are probably more but I’m not looking at my whole collection right now.
If it gives you an idea of how I am, I can play it takes two and trine and I cannot play overcooked.
Overcooked is sort of a funky one because the levels are designed to have you tripping over other players. Depending on the other players, this can be a hilarious or infuriating experience.
It takes two has a huge variety of stuff like platforming and 3rd person shooting, so if you can handle that you can probably handle most of these.
tbf, nobody should ever have to play overcooked. Those games are way too much like having a job.
I’d say that for anyone wanting to understand the archetypes, the underlying-Patterns, the “skeleton” underlying games they NEED to hit Architect of Games yt-channel, too.
People not interested in understanding how such things work wouldn’t care about what he’s giving us, but … he cuts right through appearances, to get-into the underlying level…
https://www.youtube.com/@ArchitectofGames/videos
AND understanding what kind of gamers there are, you then need to understand what Nick Yee discovered:
The 2nd video, then the 1st, here:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Nick+Yee+gamer+motivations+gdc
AND understanding the 14 GENRES is required, too…
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/search?query=John+Truby&fclanguages=en
( anybody who disses that book needs their head examined: there may be 2 fundamental mistakes in it,
1 being the root of humor, which is surprising-violation-of-expectations, and NOT “the drop”, which is a UK & US specific thing ( other put-down cultures, too )…
Hofstadter’s “Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” explained that humor is simply a strange loop, ie a moebius-strip, where one walks around in a “circle”, but now one’s upside-down for some reason?!?
So, Hofstadter got MUCH deeper than Truby, on that point…
& the other being that the archetype-of-village is the Tribal Mother Village, and not the US’s Wild West village.
Other than those 2 cockups, though, his meanings are profound.
Each of the genres is human-unconscious-mind working at understanding, through imprinting, 1 kind of meaning.
Horror is unconscious-mind trying to get its handle on death.
Action is unconscious-mind trying to get its handle on “morality? morality’s irrelevant: ACTION decides everything.”, ie it’s trying to find its place between inertia & action…
Detective is unconscious-mind trying to convince itself completely-enough that intellect can conquer everything.
etc…
It’s stupendously important understanding, that book…
Anybody wanting to make either a story or story-game, they’d better understand BOTH Truby’s books, & Coyne’s “The Story Grid”, too!
( The Story Grid is THE book on editing. )
Yagoda’s book on Voice is important for people doing writing…
Weissman’s book “Presenting to Win” is absolutely crucial for anybody wanting to understand the fundamental-archetypes of presenting-information, & in stories, it can make-or-break one’s writing, too…
say one has a character who has to fail-to-communicate something, to make the story work right…
Well, if you don’t know th archetypes-of-presenting-information, then you’re likely to botch that, aren’t you?
But if you do know, then just pick from the archetypes which one suits the work, & impliment it!
There’s writing software in Linux called Manuskript or something like that, which is wonderful for helping one write structured stuff, simply because it sets the overall-structure 1st, then you are more filling it in…
not suited to all things, but sometimes it greases-the-wheels sooo good…
a good mind-mapper for always-on-one idea-capture is important, for anybody who is committed to publishing their work, later…
: p
Oh, & this insight was from when I was watching an AoG video, a few years ago?
There’s a game ( I’m not a gamer, at all: don’t feel any point in it ) called, iirc, Rainworld, where there are many creatures in this world one has got living in…
you go 'round exploring in this world…
the creatures have their own lives, so behaviors evolve, while you are playing, & local-ecologies can change while you are away
THAT is object-oriented programming.
Functional doesn’t work that way.
Emergent-complexity is something that OOP produces ( which is why it can be the enemy of managing-complexity ), & pure-functional-programming eradicates.
( I’m differentiating between Class-Hierarchy-Oriented-Programming, like Java, vs everything-is-an-object type programming, like Ruby/Crystal: the book on Object Oriented Programming in Ruby helped me understand the category-difference, though I never finished reading it.
CHOP is brittle, whereas true-OOP isn’t, the same way. )
So, each of those creatures had their own state, their interactions had their-own histories, etc…
That’s OOP.
Choose the tool that’s right for that job, see?
Character-engines need to be OOP!
: )
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( a litle context for people who see that I’ve jumped-in, in-depth, in multiple domains, in this post:
I’m autistic, retired-for-many-years, & fighting-off 3 waves ( in different decades ) of MASSIVE brain-injury, through thinking & forcing-healing … where the medical-profession ordered me to just drug myself into an acceptable psychiatric-zombie, on major-tranquilizers ( like Thorazine/Chlorpromazine ), & wait until I died.
I dig-into EVERYthing I care to understand, & am not satisfied until it makes sense to me, at the grass-roots level I want.
So, yeah: lots of stuff about competent-programming, philosophy sociology, speaker-building, science, space, religions, fluid-dynamics, engineering, functional-design, safety, management-processes, leadership, ALL kinds of stuff!
You get FAR when you spend a 1/2-century studying, while others are socializing, you know?
White medicine told me that me healing was just, itself, my psychiatric-delusion: “healing isn’t possible”, for the literal-brain-decimation I’d experienced as the 2nd wave of brain-injury…
I spent multiple-years much-of-the-time catatonic ( intermittently ), so I’ve been a human-rutabaga ( eyes-open, drooling, nobody-home, fighting-with-all-my-strength-to-EXIST-in-my-brain-for-hours ).
The reason I got better is because I finally decided that they were contradicting evidence-based-medicine, which they were, & set-about engineering healing into me.
I’ve had multiple-comments deleted from this site for “medical misinformation” when I describe the DOABLE EXPERIMENT that people with autism can do, to prove the mitigation that Walsh published, years ago, actually works, … so I’ll not bother trying again:
“evidence-based” medicine means authority-based medicine, as I linked-to with this: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25433 … & Lemmy.World stands absolutely behind authority-based-medicine-that-calls-itself-evidence-based-medicine, I’ve learned.
That article became a chapter in one of John Brockman’s books, btw, so it isn’t “just” a web-page: it’s properly published, in a book, which you can see here: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/this-idea-must-die
Anyways, digging into a subject to “sufficient” depth has very different meaning for students-seeking-passing-grade, than it does for an autistic who wants to understand & command a domain’s meanings/knowledge-functions.
Anyways, as I’ve stated on another of my comments, in this post: feel free to block me, site-wide, so you never see any “pollution” of mine, ever again, when logged-in, here.
: )
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Yeah, I feel like people are mainly confused/annoyed, because splitscreen multiplayer existed before online multiplayer, so seeing games ship with online multiplayer but no splitscreen, that just feels backwards…
I know more than I ever planned on knowing about audio equipment.
The first thing you need to know is that you cannot defeat physics with marketing hype. I don’t give a flying fuck how many wave guides Bose talks about or all the technology under the sun, you need a big speaker to make deep bass. There is nothing anyone can say or do to change this.
And when you look up audio equipment, ignore the “music power” because they will state what is the momentary maximum power the speaker can handle… but we don’t play micro seconds of MAX power music, we play steady audio… what you need to know is the RMS power the device can handle or output.
Furthermore, audio cables are a complete sham. You can take any power cable from a discarded vacuum, boom, you’ve got speaker cable. But but gold connectors… Yeah no.
John Carver torpedoed the “golden ear” self-deluded class, one time, purrfectly…
He had them appear to review/compare a pair of prototype amplifiers…
They did, eventually coming to the consensus that 1 was categorically better than the other.
Then John Carver removed the covers, & the ONLY difference between the amps, was the packaging they were in: the circuit-boards were identical.
He had ZERO respect for all the snake-oil bullshit stuff going on.
I’ve dug-into speaker-builder books enough to know that yes, waveguides do make difference in acoustics, & yes, you can hear that difference ( compared with plain-box speakers that are closed, all 'round ).
I have not paid-for any of the speaker-builder software ( & Linux has some FLOSS stuff, in that domain, anyways, now ),
but yes, it is actual-fact, that to make lower-frequencies of sound, you need bigger speaker-drivers.
For high-fidelity concert, I’d want 15" drivers, or pairs-of-12"-ones, on the sound-reinforcement speakers, if it were needing good quality bass. ( for a Liquid-Jungle genre concert, or something )
( I can’t hear low-enough to hear the lowest human-hearable frequencies, but others can: it’d matter for them, right? )
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Yeah, there’s a lot of snake oil in the audio world.
You’re spending five thousand dollars on solid gold cables that were soldered by blind monks then braided by trained gerbils, in an attempt to get the highest fidelity possible. Meanwhile, the album was recorded using the cheapest 10¢ per ft star-quad cable the studio could find, and $4.50 Neutrik connectors that were soldered by the studio’s unpaid intern.
There have been multiple instances where I have seen someone asking for advice on trying to track down an intermittent buzz in their system. They had people saying they needed to totally rethink their entire system, they had to buy thousands of dollars of new gear, completely change how they had everything routed… When all they needed was a 5¢ ferrite bead.
Chef’s kiss on this comment. I have been selling high-end audio gear for 2 years since I accidentally got good at it
I have never met a single person through this entire adventure who even knows what these are, and I’m continually laughed at and questioned why I would save them lol
They are inductors.
IF you put enough inductor 'round a cable, you can choke the change-in-current-flow in the cable, thereby removing frequencies from its transmission.
You will notice that inductors are used in power-supply-filtering circuits, along with capacitors, to reduce the changes in the supplied power…
Putting them on signal cables, means they have to be calibrated to what frequency they are trying to oppose, around that conductor…
People who just add them, for “magic” reasons, may have the right underlying idea, of trying to filter-out noise, but … you have to understand how noise is interacting with a specific signal, among specific conductors, to know how to stop it, right?
Same as when I was a boy & offered a tiny 9V battery to help start a car: I didn’t understand that the current required was thousands of times greater than what I was offering.
( this is for anyone who wants to know what those things are: they’re ferrites: iron-oxide inductors, that people put around cables, to choke harsh noise from them, for specific frequencies, for specific material-variations ( there are several kinds of ferrites ), for specific cables )
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Oh, for the people who say that waveguide-boxes for speakers are identical to closed-boxes for speakers, … the textbooks I’d read, years ago, had different equations for solving those 2 categories of speaker-box, so, no, I don’t buy that they are identical.
It’s entirely-possible that I’m wrong, but that is what the evidence I encountered in the domain gave me.
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Well, add one to the tally, what are those?
Ferrite beads for filtering out high frequency noise, particularly when cabling acts as a radio receiver.
When I was a cable guy a customer’s Monster Cable RG-6 fell off in my hand.
“Ah! My Monster Cable!”
“I’ll make you a better one.”
I knew they weren’t up to the hype, but fuck me, the shielding was single-wrap, made of Chinese whispers and toilet paper. The copper core could be bent with harsh words. The dialectric (white part) was some form of marshmallow. In my 3 years in the industry, Monster was the shittiest cable I ever encountered, a cut below the cheapest Walmart cable.
Made him a new one, cut to size, out of our standard quad-shielded, real coax. Quite a lesson for both of us.
Nice one! I’ll have to borrow that idea, and next time I scrap some coax I’ll coil up some for later. Good tip.
Yeah Monster is so bad they’re a dollar store item where I live. Not even kidding!
Cable hype is in every industry. You can buy hundred-dollar gold plated “Gaming” HDMI cables that are no better than any other HDMI cord
the one that kills me is some genius is selling TOSLINK cables with gold plated connectors.
TOSLINK is a fiber optic standard. The whole point of it is that the cable is non-conductive.
Be careful with that makeshift speaker cabling though. If you’re using small gauge power cables, you could easily melt those cables with a powerful enough audio signal.
You’d be hard-pressed to find an amplifier that could output so much power it would melt a vacuum power cable or lamp cord lol
Light-duty power cables can handle like 1,400-1,800W you’re never going to find anything that can output even close to that… unless you are the audio/hardware guy for outdoor concerts.
Of course, don’t use angel-hair wires
Would you use this as speaker wire?
https://www.amazon.com/Conductor-Electrical-Oxygen-free-Automotive-2AWG-32-8FT/dp/B093LCQQFY/
I wouldn’t.
I’m just saying be careful. Power cables aren’t all equal. Anyone doing this should understand what kind of wire they need, and make sure they’re not using one that’s too thin.
Stuff like this:
https://www.amazon.com/Cordless-Charger-XBCHGX140-Replacement-Charging/dp/B0BFDFXYR4/
Is unsafe, even though it’s for a (rechargeable) vacuum.
Use ANY shielded-cable which can handle the current, & has the right kind of connectors on the ends.
Period.
That’s the ONLY 3 criteria I care about, now.
That’s why I recommend Cat6A cable for the foil-shielding in it, to block alien-crosstalk, in ethernet setups: you don’t get speed-degradation-due-to-alien-crosstalk.
All the screaming that computer-speakers did, when a GSM phone was near them, that was due to lack-of-shielding.
Find any trustworthy site which lists AWG vs Amperage, & you’ll see what current you can put on that gauge of wire.
Match your current-carrying-capability, & don’t go overboard ( 2AWG for speakers for anything less than a DisasterArea concert, is stupid ).
Signal travels through copper at around 0.7 * speed-of-light ( impedance monkeys it, at higher-frequencies, audio’s functionally DC, for cables )
& the OP wasn’t talking about cordless-rechargeable vacuum-cleaners, but for normal vacuuming-the-whole-floor vacuum-cleaners, which have … 14AWG wire, roughly, in 'em.
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Yes, so, basically what I said. Be careful and understand what you need.
If you’re thinking from the mind of someone who understands current, of course you wouldn’t use 26 awg wire for speakers. When you’re giving advice online though, you have to think from the mind of someone who doesn’t have your same knowledge. OP telling someone “just use a vacuum cleaner power cable” isn’t specific enough, because they don’t have the knowledge OP has to understand what that means.
I completely agree with OP that speaker wire is generally a rip off, and using any suitable wire is fine. I just want OP to also say that you need to know what you’re doing, or you could start a fire.
I’ll give you an anecdote to hopefully illustrate my point. A while ago I was hanging out in a friend’s backyard on a chilly night. She wanted to provide some warmth for the guests, so she brought out two space heaters and a power strip. She plugged them in and turned them on and they ran for about 30 seconds, and the circuit breaker tripped. She went over to it and flipped it back on, and then about 30 seconds later it tripped again.
I’m not saying this to disparage her, but to illustrate that many people don’t understand current, and don’t realize what is and isn’t dangerous when it comes to electricity. It wasn’t unreasonable for her to assume that would work, and it wasn’t unreasonable for her not to understand why it wasn’t. The breaker is there for exactly that reason. When you’re talking about making your own wire, it’s too easy to get it wrong if you don’t know what you’re doing, and that could cause a fire.
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You can clean dirty/corroded electronic edge contacts with a pencil eraser. Also helps equally as cleaning preparation before soldering.
Go ahead and try it yourself on an old penny, it’ll clean up and look shiny as new. Same principle for electronics.
A good rubber eraser also takes sticker adhesive right off of most surfaces, safely.
Wait wait wait, for real? I’m 42, how did I not know this?
The real LPT is always in the comments.
Ha, yeah. Snap-On sells a 400$ tool that takes 30$ consumable rubber wheels. Or you could use a 99 cent pink pencil eraser.
Snap-On’s Snap-On: they are a BRAND-Identity, not an engineering-actual-solutions-to-acutal-problems company.
There’s a Project Farm, or something, yt-channel, where they guy just does comparative-tests of different products, to see what the truth is, & … it’s a resource all ought be knowing-about.
Ha I DID remember its name right! https://www.youtube.com/@ProjectFarm/videos
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So does fresh duct tape.
My dad taught me this!
Awesome!
Yeah, there’s one drawback though, if the edge contacts or whatever trace was originally gold plated, the pencil eraser trick will pretty quickly wear away the gold plating.
But… If you got corroded gold plated contacts, the gold plating itself is the least of your worries, you want clean metal…
Gold doesn’t corrode, Hoomin…
If it’s corroded where the gold wasn’t … that’s different.
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I’m well aware of that actually. But if the gold plating is already worn and/or pitted, then the copper underneath will corrode through and even on top of the gold.
Plus, if it counts for anything, I happen to have an open faced USB-A flash drive on my pocket keychain, that actually does still have its gold contact plating, but just looking at it right now, I’ll have to clean the contacts once again from pocket crud before I use it again.
In that case though, I usually just lick my thumb, wipe the contacts clean, and dry it off with my shirt. Gold itself might not inherently corrode, but it can and will still get dirty, plus that plating is super thin and just regular use will eventually wear it away down to the bare copper underneath.
I learned this when I was a kid, and the only problem is that nowadays, I haven’t seen a pencil nor its eraser and probably 15 years.
Still, a pretty great tip!
Normal people use alcohol or flux
I do a ton of electronics repair, would never in a million years think that an eraser is going to do anything but make my life harder
OK… But have you tried it?
Why would I do that? So I can fuck up my precision solders on expensive boards??? I need my electrical connections to be free of dirt and debris, and the way to accomplish that is by cleaning it with a solvent or flux. Using an eraser is the equivalent of rubbing it with your fingers… you’re not going to remove the small particulate or oils. Haven’t tried it; won’t. Its piss-poor advice.
Edit downvoters don’t seem to be aware that the last thing you need on a solder site is eraser particulate. Do yourself a favor, go rub a pencil eraser on two things and then try to solder them together without cleaning with flux or alcohol. Send pics lol
We who’ve done it blow the particles away to get them out of the area.
It’s a practice used when cleaning ( by sanding, grinding, etc ) throughout industry.
The removing-film & surface-dirt with an eraser is valid, but not cleanroom, obviously.
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