metallic_z3r0

What a coincidence, I'm drinking mead and installing Gentoo. Currently compiling gcc, always takes forever, maybe I should've gone with the recompiled binary for that one lol.

No ragrets.

I've always wanted to try both of those.

Yep, I drink mead, i.e. honey wine. It's really good, doesn't give me as much of a headache as beer these days. Sometimes it's too sweet, I haven't found a good dry one around here though.

I played around with Gentoo a few years ago, got it working but then got annoyed with some binaries taking too long. Wanted to build a machine I couldn't hack though, and now there's a repo with precompiled bins if you ask portage nicely, so I figured I'd give it a shot again. Maybe it was the mead but I forgot to do that for gcc though. oops

I mean, good, but was it really only kept together by a closeted bisexual and only started collapsing after she was outed?

(I am ignorant)

Done.

The whole release was early access in my opinion, they just weren't honest about it. Eventually it was a really good game, but even then it didn't have everything they'd advertised.

It's the commenter's username.

Change my mind.

Sure. Even regularly installing a new OS doesn't necessarily keep you secure if someone wanted to discreetly install malware on your device. In addition to firmware-level rootkits that re-install themselves on fresh OSs (even platform-agnostic ones), it's possible that someone might interdict whatever hardware is bought and implant it with additional small hardware that compromises it in some way.

You're thinking of CO, increased CO2 in the blood (which when dissolved becomes CO3+) causes increased anxiety and too much triggers suffocation panic. That's why you can breathe in basically any other gas and just shut down calmly, but CO2 will have you scrambling.

I just don't understand why these little details are a big deal. If people want things and it doesn't hurt anybody then let them have it, who cares? If you want to label yourself trans because it communicates that you'd rather be something other than the gender assigned at birth, sounds good to me. The subsets of that are mostly details that explain how you're trans to someone curious. Why does it need to be more complicated than that?

37 is my favorite, because 3x7x37=777 (three sevens), and I think that's neat.

For someone not trusting their gut, that guy sure seems super trusting that their eyes are going to be ok.

One must imagine Sisyphus annoyed.

Future etymologists will conjecture that it has something to do with the popularization of an obscure lichen meme combined with a contraction of the word "submissive" within the BDSM context, and only started being used as an ironic punctuation to statements after another popular meme, similar to the origin of how "F" is used as a common, brief response to a tragedy.

We're not just eating tons per day, we're eating about 430-ish metric kilotons per day.

I like the word 'umami', but it's weird to me that they don't just use 'savory' which is the same thing. Cool that it's been figured out receptor-wise.

I mean, at that level the positions are legally bound to certain ranks, meaning that high-level, strategic positions that determine strategy are unable to be filled except on a temporary basis, which means that decision-making is more tenuous. The military is still a monster, and it'll fulfill its functions as it normally does, and will for some time, but the longer this goes on, the more headless the military becomes.

So is the "phrase" of Chat GPT therefore akin to "queef"?

I think a high score might mean fibrillation depending on the runner, so please be choosy with your scare victim.

Possums are like the common internet gremlin's spirit animal: awkward, eats garbage, plays dead when someone attempts to socialize, generally nocturnal, not a huge fan of cars, etc. This makes them inherently relatable, but also cute enough and distant enough to be a good candidate for a meme.

It's been almost a quarter century since the last century. Might as well get used to it.

The term was around before this war, and doesn't even refer to peace as much as it refers to protected trade routes, with America doing the protecting. The idea is that America enables global trade by ensuring that trade isn't plundered or threatened by neighboring countries, unstable regimes, or pirates by patrolling those trade routes with massive aircraft carriers to make sure everyone's following international rules. It also sometimes refers to trade effectively being brokered globally through American channels (effectively the case regardless of agreement so long as the American dollar is also the exchange currency, as it used to be the near-exclusive reserve currency for the IMF), which massively, disproportionately benefits America, but also benefits global trade. Before the Pax Americana was the Pax Brittanica, largely in the same way and for the same reasons. The original term (what the Pax Brittanica referred to, before the sun started setting on the British Empire) was the Pax Romana.

Fortunately, our much closer mammalian cousins were brave enough to swim back, and now some of them tip over boats for fun.

'E pluribus unum' was pretty good, but I liked 'mind your business' too.

It's not enough to reign in assholes, the system has to be designed in such a way that carriers of "dark triad" traits (i.e. the usual bad faith actors in a system) are still incentivized to contribute to or improve society without gradually dismantling it to increase their wealth/power/status. That's a hard problem to solve.

USD $1,000,000 in 1914 would be worth about $31,000,000 today.

Sure, but I don't think increased deficit spending necessarily implies "financial collapse" as long as it's reinvested in infrastructure/research projects or allows people the financial freedom to spend more, if anything it'd be the opposite. The thing really hastening a collapse would be pooling all the money in very few places where it doesn't get spent. You know, like some sort of oligarchical wealth transfer.

This is why you further develop your internal dialogue to include representation from law (disciplined) vs chaos (impulsive) as well as good and evil. You can go even further with a third axis on a scale of blue to orange if you wish, but that's a bit ill-defined and I don't always recommend it (if you must define it, I go with blue being the impassive, uncaring, alien universe/nature perspective, and orange being implicitly meaningful from a human perspective).

Jerboa (the mobile app) also doesn't hide the downvote, regardless of instance.

Thanks KC Green, may the memory of your work live much longer than you do (he is very much still alive, as far as I know).

I hadn't heard about that, what a shame.

As Kochevnik81 wrote 10 months ago:

I just wanted to speak a bit towards that website. I think that specifically what it is trying to argue (with extremely varying degrees of good arguments) is that all these social and economic changes can be traced back to the United States ending gold convertibility in 1971. I say the arguments are of extremely varying degrees because as has been pointed out here, some things like crime are trends that stretched back into the 1960s, some things like deregulation more properly start around the 1980s, and even something like inflation is complicated by the fact that it was already rising in the 1960s, and was drastically impacted by things like the 1973 and 1979 Oil Shocks.

The decision on August 15, 1971 is often referred to in this context as removing the US dollar from the gold standard, and that's true to a certain extent, but a very specific one. It was the end of the Bretton Woods system, which had been established in 1944, with 44 countries among the Allied powers being the original participants. This system essentially created a network of fixed exchange rates between currencies, with member currencies pegged to the dollar and allowed a 1% variation from those pegs. The US dollar in turn was pegged to $35 per gold ounce. At the time the US owned something like 80% of the world's gold reserves (today it's a little over 25%).

The mechanics of this system meant that other countries essentially were tying their monetary policies to US monetary policy (as well as exchange rate policy obviously, which often meant that US exports were privileged over other countries'). The very long and short is that domestic US government spending plus the high costs of the Vietnam War meant that the US massively increased the supply of dollars in this fixed system, which meant that for other countries, the US dollar was overvalued compared to its fixed price in gold. Since US dollars were convertible to gold, these other countries decided to cash out, meaning that the US gold reserves decreased basically by half in the decade leading up to 1971. This just wasn't sustainable - there were runs on the dollar as foreign exchange markets expected that eventually it would have to be devalued against gold.

This all meant that after two days of meeting with Treasury Secretary John Connally and Budget Director George Schultz (but noticeably not Secretary of State William Rogers nor Presidential Advisor Henry Kissinger), President Richard Nixon ordered a sweeping "New Economic Policy" on August 15, 1971, stating:

"“We must create more and better jobs; we must stop the rise in the cost of living [note: the domestic annual inflation rate had already risen from under 2% in the early 1960s to almost 6% in the late 1960s]; we must protect the dollar from the attacks of international money speculators.”"

To this effect, Nixon requested tax cuts, ordered a 90-day price and wage freeze, a 10% tariff on imports (which was to encourage US trading partners to revalue their own currencies to the favor of US exports), and a suspension on the convertibility of US dollars to gold. The impact was an international shock, but a group of G-10 countries agreed to new fixed exchange rates against a devalued dollar ($38 to the gold ounce) in the December 1971 Smithsonian Agreement. Speculators in forex markets however kept trying to push foreign currencies up to their upper limits against the dollar, and the US unilaterally devalued the dollar in February 1973 to $42 to the gold ounce. By later in the year, the major world currencies had moved to floating exchange rates, ie rates set by forex markets and not by pegs, and in October the (unrelated, but massively important) oil shock hit.

So what 1971 meant: it was the end of US dollar convertability to gold, ie the US "temporarily" suspended payments of gold to other countries that wanted to exchange their dollars for it. What it didn't mean: it wasn't the end of the gold standard for private US citizens, which had effectively ended in 1933 (and for good measure, the exchange of silver for US silver certificates had ended in the 1960s). It also wasn't really the end of the pegged rates of the Bretton Woods system, which hobbled on for almost two more years. It also wasn't the cause of inflation, which had been rising in the 1960s, and would be massively influenced by the 1970s energy crisis, which sadly needs less explaining in 2022 than it would have just a few years ago.

It also really doesn't have much to do with social factors like rising crime rates, or female participation in the workforce. And it deceptively doesn't really have anything to do with trends like the US trade deficit or increases in income disparity, where the changes more obviously happen around 1980.

Also, just to draw out the 1973 Oil Shock a little more - a lot of the trends around economic stagnation, price inflation, and falls in productivity really are from this, not the 1971-1973 forex devaluations, although as mentioned the strain and collapse of Bretton Woods meant that US exports were less competitive than they had been previously. But the post 1945 world economy had been predicated on being fueled by cheap oil, and this pretty much ended overnight in October 1973: even when adjusted for inflation, the price essentially immediately tripled that month, and then doubled again in 1979. The fact that the economies of the postwar industrial world had been built around this cheap oil essentially meant that without major changes, industrial economies were vastly more expensive in their output (ie, productivity massively suffered), and many of the changes to make industries competitive meant long term moves towards things like automation or relocating to countries with cheaper input costs, which hurt industrial areas in North America and Western Europe (the Eastern Bloc, with its fossil fuel subsidies to its heavy industries, avoided this until the 1990s, when it hit even faster and harder).

" I know the gold standard is not generally regarded as a good thing among mainstream economists,"

I just want to be clear here that no serious economist considers a gold standard a good thing. This is one of the few areas where there is near universal agreement among economists. The opinion of economists on the gold standard is effectively the equivalent of biologists' opinions on intelligent design.

I've never been a fan of this idea, it doesn't go far enough and further makes things less symmetric/divisible. I say we use 6-day weeks, 5 weeks per month, 12 months per year, and an inter-calary holiday week of 5-6 days. A six day week means 4 days working, 2 days rest, and that can be staggered more easily/equitably assuming work needs full coverage in a week. We start the new year on the Spring Equinox because it's generally more pleasant.

For bonus points, we switch to base-12 (or dozenal) in our numbering system because after the transition it's a much easier system to deal with as far as division and multiplication is concerned (e.g. 1/4 would be .3 instead of .25, 1/3 is .4 instead of .333..., 1/2 is .6, etc.).

This is the reason I've taken to carrying a small magnet with me (combined with a flashlight/blacklight/laser pointer), so I can easily pick up those little bits that get lost (my wife cross stitches too, and sometimes her needles fall into the carpet, so it's nice to find those before our feet do).

Jazz has the same etymology, comes from jasm (meaning the same as jism, i.e. semen). At the time it also meant spirit/energy; spunk, or spunky, also had this dual meaning.

I don't care what he thinks, but I care that he has a platform that others in his class listen to and may respect. It's not a position you hear often from those with a lot of wealth. I'm ok with progress coming from any direction, even if it's self-serving in some form, and I do think it's self-serving.

They never get the faces right.

If nothing matters, then you can choose what matters to you, and if I choose to care about something, then it matters because it matters to me, even if it doesn't to other people.

Could be stroking it. Might be a jurisprudence fetishist and get off on technicalities.

If you go by 3.5e, they're hardly immobile, and are more like demi-gods than temporarily inconvenienced liches.