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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Why not both?

    Clearly some people are attracted to far-right ideals without being in the petite bourgeoisie and some people who are in it are even repelled by such ideals, plus there is the whole domain of the “highly educated” who tend to be less attracted to far-right ideals and yet are often generally more prosperous than most shop keepers and similar and some even work in similar business structures (such as Architects with their own Studios or Lawyers with their own small Legal Practices) hence would count a that kind of petit burgeouisie.

    I would say that it’s a mix of what you point out (so people’s petit burgeouis status or, as I would put it: “people who have just enough material wealth to think they’re wealthy but without the education and worldliness to understand that they’re nowhere close to real wealth”), certain character traits such as one’s level of Empathy and Self-awareness, one’s breadth of life experience (not in term of years but of how many different things one has done and seen and kinds of people one has met, which would explain why city people are less likely be attracted to the far-right that more provincial types) and one’s style of thinking and practice with things like analysing real world situations and trying to solve real world problems (which would partly explain the effect of Education, the other part falling into breath of experience, specifically in the form of how much information one has the tools to understand).

    This is without even going into the environment one grew up in and lives in: sometimes that kind of thinking is so widespread in one’s family and were one lives that showing the social cues of far-right belief and even believing it is a natural element of fitting in if only for one’s own protection, similarly to how people tend to be religious when coming from a religious family and living in a religious community.


  • Compassion is a natural result of Empathy: those who feel as if their own a bit of other people’s emotions don’t want others to be unhappy if only because that makes them feel a bit unhappy themselves.

    This also applies to positive emotions, so those with higher Empathy are more likely to want others to feel good as that makes them feel good hence their notion of A Better World also includes what’s good for other people rather than purely what’s good for they themselves.




  • Indeed.

    60 years ago we were supposed to having to work very little by now thanks to automation, then automation came and instead of the productivity gains of it ending up spread across society, what happenned instead was that the extra productivity went just pushed up dividend and CxO pay higher and due to the reduced need for workers due to automation the purchasing power of salaries actually went down (for example, in the US the percentage of corporate revenues that went to pay salaries fell from 23% in the 70s down to 7% by 2014).

    Expecting that, under the exact system that’s been moving us more and more towards Dystopia with each wave of automation, AI would somehow end up making things better for most people rather than better just for the Owner Class and worse for part or most of the rest, is pretty ill-informed and naive.


  • If you’re getting back pain from an office chair then your arse is likely too far forward when you’re sitting and you’re putting pressure on your spine due it being at an angle other than 90 degrees from the seat, or your table is too low, lowering your arms, so you’re bending forward.

    You’re suppose to feel your arse pushing against the back of the chair not leaving enough of a hole between the chair and your lower back that you can fit an arm in it, and when your arms are resting on the table (which they should be pretty much all the time if your keyboard and mouse are sufficiently forward) you should feel no pressure either downwards or upwards on your shoulders

    I’ve been coding for over 3 decades, often for massive long hours (to the point that by the age of 17 I had RSI due to how my wrists were resting at the edge of the table and some years later when already doing it professionally went to the doctor with chest pain - which I feared were due to a hearth condition - which turned out to be work posture related) and at some point in my mid 20s I moved to The Netherlands and to a company which had its own Ergonomics Consultant (this was back in the peak of the 90s Tech boom so there was lots of money sloshing around) who would come around when you joined and adjust everything for you (they even had tables with adjustable height) and explain you all about the correct work posture.

    Been following that advice and haven’t had posture related problems since then whilst always using pretty standard office chairs (always with adjustable height, tough).

    I have however seen plenty of people doing the lazy (and stupid) posture of being all the way forward on their chair and quite a lot with arms too low or too high (which is more understandable since most cheap office tables don’t have adjustable height).



  • What the US politicians think, decide and legislate is irrelevant: the US actually targetting EU nations would directly yield counter-sanctions from the whole of the EU because that’s a core part of the EU Membership Treaties (so, not the kind of thing that can just be blocked by a veto from a US-friendly EU member nation), and those would seriously impact the US Economy, not to mention the indirect impact on the US’ broader geostrategical influence from treating the EU as an adversary.

    For the EU it would be something like Brexit - even if the EU loses from a hard posture, it cannot afford to let the other side get away with it without very painful consequences because that would result in them doing even worst things later and would incentivise others to do the same - only in this case the EU would suffer way less from playing hardball with the US than it did from doing it with Brexiting Britain.

    For the US it would basically be comitting Trade Suicide at the feet of China.

    If the US Congress and Senate are too stupid and actually pass those laws and POTOS too is too stupid and actually uses it, all without the companies that are going to get screwed the most by counter-sanctions (mainly Tech) lobbying that proposal away into nothing, thats a lot more a US problem than an EU problem and there is no way at all that the upsides are close to even just begin to justify the downsides.

    (Sure it would hurt the EU, just a lot less than doing nothing about it would).

    Personally I would love for the US policians to try it and find out.


  • If I remember it correctly, it’s not just the overall capacity but also the how much the voltage drops as the current being drawn goes up (i.e. their internal resistance).

    You can pull several Amps out of an AA without its voltage dropping significativelly though it does accelerate depletion quite a lot if you do it in a sustained way (the volage curve of alkaline batteries actually depends on how much current you draw so if you just draw at say 100mA the “knee” in the curve were the voltage drops down from around 1.5V to a value too low to be useful is a lot sharper whilst if you draw 1A it’s a lot softer with the voltage starting to sinking much sooner for the same fraction of total charge drawn).

    Or in other words, the 9V battery might no be able supply enough peak current whilst still remaining close enough to 9V.

    (It was actually quite a commonly reported problem in Arduino forums that people used 9V batteries for things like motors and then had weird power drops or the motors didn’t actually work as expected even though theoretically everything seems to be in spec for them)

    You should probably test the device under “in use” conditions with a 9V battery rather than just in standby before you replace the current setup with a single 9V battery.





  • I think you mean Cronyism, which unlike Nepotism isn’t limited to family.

    Looking at my own country, which has a massive culture of Cronyism, some years ago I concluded that Corruption is really just Cronyism in exchange for money hence why it’s so easy for it to develop in countries with a culture of friends using the power and money entrusted to them by others to help their friends.

    It seems to me this also applies to the US were “campaign contributions” facilitate the buying of active politicians in a way which is not legally treated as Corruption, just things like the “speech circuit”, non-executive board memberships, funding of foundations and gold-plated “consultancy” are used to reward “friendly” policians after they retire from Politics in ways that completely obscure any Qui Pro Quo involved hence do get treated as Corruption even when they most definitelly are that (i.e. when a politician has explicitly agreed to use their power in a specific way when given a overt promise of such a reward at a later stage).

    Want to see who politicians benefit, start by looking at whose parties they go to and which people do they socialize with.


  • The problem in the European Union is called Germany, whose politicians seem to have never leaved the whole “We support any Holocaust as long as it’s a ´good´ race ´solving the problem’ of a ´bad´ race” mindset.

    If the US tries to hit any EU country with any commercial sanction the EU as whole is Treaty bound to impose counter-sanctions on the US and America doesn’t really want to see its access to a market of 470 million people cut and its tacit support from the biggest trade block around to it’s Guerrilla Trade War with China to dissapear completelly.

    One of the main reason why the EU exists (the other being to incentivise Peace in Europe through tight trade ties) is exactly because whilst large nations like the US can indeed bully small and even medium sized nations via trade and sanctions, they can’t bully a tightly integrated association of nations adding up to a larger Economy with a larger Market than the US.

    The US trying that shit on EU nations would just result in a Trade War and a significant acceleration of the current post-Imperial decay stage the US is in.