Hegar

Swallowing gum.

This is Russia targeting the core alliances of the US.

Sorry I engineered a system that extracts wealth from the poorest and filters it to the wealthiest in a self-reinforcing cycle to emiserate everyone outside my peer group.

Oops-i-doodle! My bad.

It was always so satisfying to get it off in one single strip

Sorry but sometimes racism seems like the truth to racists.

Both English and Chinese speaking people have both English and Chinese tattoos. It’s fine.

From my experience far more Chinese people were against tattoos of any kind, rather than caring about what the tattoo is.

One vaccinated and well nourished 21stC individual won’t bring back the level of disease of boatloads of sick, unhealthy, unwashed 15thC european sailors.

What’s been the most stable written language over time?

The best possible combo of far back and wide reach is probably Akkadian cuneiform. Maybe you could get further back with Sumerian cuneiform and trust that it’ll get translated once Akkadian becomes the lingua franca.

Oracle bone script which becomes Chinese characters probably doesn’t get you as far back and maybe not as wide an area, but definitely much longer in time since it’s basically still in use.

The only problem is those are both languages of imperial systems and giving them greater power is probably a net loss for humanity.

state is, ideally, composed of elected representatives

oligarch-led private armies oppressing people.

They’re the same picture.

Elections are a venue for competiting oligarchs - US elections are largely just a wealth check - with the bonus that afterwards people feel they’ve chosen their oligarchs and are less likely to notice that 90%+ of elected representatives only represent the interest of elites.

I do the same thing at work when I need mentally ill people to do what I say. “You can do what I want version A, or do what I want version B, which one?” always works better than “Do what I want!”

I agree that violence management is a very difficult problem with no easy solution. But I don’t think giving full control of legitimate violence to the rich is the best solution, which is what a state of elected representatives does.

The state is nothing but a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. To a hammer, everything is a nail. To a state, everything is a target for violence.

While there are millions of patients across the country who would have loved to pull the trigger, successful assassinations are usually rich people defending their interests from other rich people.

A new hope was only good to the extent that a mediocre remake of a Kurosawa film is still good. Empire was slightly downhill from that (sad ending =/= good movie). Everything after that struggles to remain watchable.

I get the urge to protect cocaine from journalists but machine guns during a photo shoot is unnecessary. Calm down AFP, you’re not ISIS.

• A fire extinguisher to the library of Alexandria.
• A small pox variolation kit to ~13thC somewhere in the Americas. Probably the PNW to preserve the linguistic diversity there, maybe the amazon river, the Tlaxcala or the groups who would go on the confederate into the Haudenosaunee.
• Vials of horse-plague to the cucteni trypillians, see if we can’t blunt that Indo-European expansion somewhat. If it’s virulent enough, maybe we get lucky and weaken the power of aristocrats across Eurasia for millenia to come. (Sorry horses!).
• Just for me, some magic mushrooms to shangqiu, henan ~325 BCE ish. See if I can’t convince Zhuang Zhou to trip with me.

Variable.

In general my working memory is shocking, and my long term memory is very good. I presume it’s an ADHD neuroplasticity thing - my brain probably had to over rely on long term memory due to major short term memory deficiencies.

But it depends on topic as well. One of my coworkers pointed out that I had 4 rough guesses when asked how long my wife and I have been together but answered immediately and at length when asked about say, the Indo-European language family or bronze age societies.

His one flaw is he forgot to be white.

It’s not outside capital that leads to enshittification, it’s leverage that enshittifies a service.

A VC that understands that they can force you to wreck your users’ lives is always in danger of doing so. A VC who understands that doing this will make your service into an empty – and thus worthless – server is far less likely to do so (and if they do, at least your users can escape).

Incredibly clear article pointing out that no individuals will ever be able to resist enshittifaction pressures indefinitely.

The only way to prevent people with power from emiserating others is to structurally remove any benefit to doing so.

I hate people who wear cold weather gear in warm/heated places

Schizophrenic people are very likely to do this. I work in mental health and this was mentioned in our training. At my location maybe 1/3-1/2 of folks wore one or more puffy jackets all summer long.

Remember when Silvio Berlusconi lied, cheated, raped and stole his way through public life, gaining wealth and fame, dying at the ripe age of 86 without facing justice and after having set the stage for even more extreme fascists to take over?

History shows that often, very often, the baddies just win.

Go running.

You know when you build something up in your head to be really awful, then you try it and it’s exactly that awful?