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Another one from :

“What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the Creator of the universe.”

tripu  
Keep this verbatim quote from #Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” at hand for the next time someone suggests that the #nazis did what they did in the name of #a...

Allow me to quote myself:

“This isn’t about [Sam] Harris, [Jordan] Peterson, or Twitter — it’s a more general point about the quality and usefulness of online discussions, and the accuracy and traceability of . As I said: when someone takes a screenshot, they have the right there, at hand, to share with the world (in addition to the image itself, if necessary). Even if the cost for another person of looking for the source were equal to the cost of sharing the URL in the first place (which it is not), if one multiplies by the number of people who might be curious, or sceptical, or might want to reply to the tweet or boost it (all of whom will have to look it up on their own) it’s much more efficient for the OP to provide the link in the first place. It’s not like we’re imposing an unreasonable burden with this rule. I am always amazed when people disagree with this recommendation.”

Toying with Docusaurus to resurrect my (which I started back in 2006 but has been AWOL for the last few years) in time for the new year.

What I want now is a static site generator with simple set-up and maintenance; a decent number of themes, plugins, etc (eg, to be able to import my old posts, to set up redirections); and that is good for blogs (eg, I need RSS feeds). Preferably JS or Python. Good to have: a free, open comment system that I can own.

Any thoughts about before I get too deep into it?

tripu boosted
Quick #sketch of #BreakerOfHorses on the #reMarkable2.

A test for an idea I had: I saved a photo on my phone as PDF, imported it onto the #reMarkable cloud, opened it up on the device, and started #drawing on a new layer. I hid the base layer (the PDF) and this is the result.

This feels a lot like “cheating”: I would never be able to sketch so accurately without “tracing” with “onion skin paper” in this way… Anyway, I wonder if it'd be a good exercise to learn and memorise measurements…

This time of the year I like to reflect on all the great new I’ve discovered and enjoyed, and on the classics that I keep on playing on loop and dancing to.

I’m talking wonderful tracks such as “The Wheels on the Bus”, “Five Little Ducks” or “The Potty Song”.

Keep this verbatim quote from ’s “Mein Kampf” at hand for the next time someone suggests that the did what they did in the name of :

“I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord. […] For the political leader the religious doctrines and institutions of his people trust always remain inviolable.”

I love because its basic principles are so powerful and generalisable (ie, it’s not just “about ”).

I started using Greg ’s very popular textbook “Principles of Economics” as a reference a few years ago, and since then I find myself applying its “ten principles of economics” often in everyday life.

This week I learnt that David has been teaching his own “ten pillars of economic wisdom” for decades. Those seem good, too.

So I decided to merge both!

Hereby I present the main insights of economics condensed in fourteen principles of economics. Even if you don’t like econ as a subject, you’d do well to heed these ideas:

👉 In common (Mankiw ≃ Henderson):

  • Rational people think at the margin. ≃ Economic thinking is thinking on the margin.
  • People respond to incentives. ≃ Incentives matter; incentives affect behavior.
  • Trade can make everyone better off. ≃ The only way to create wealth is to move resources from a lower-valued to a higher-valued use. Corollary: both sides gain from exchange.
  • A country’s standard of living depends on its ability to produce goods and services. ≃ The only way to increase a nation’s real income is to increase its real output.
  • Markets are usually a good way to organize economic activity. ≃ Competition is a hardy weed, not a delicate flower.
  • Society faces a short-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment. ≃ Creating jobs is not the same as creating wealth.

👉 Mankiw’s:

  • People face trade-offs.
  • The cost of something is what you give up to get it.
  • Governments can sometimes improve market outcomes.
  • Prices rise when the government prints too much money.

👉 Henderson’s:

  • TANSTAAFL: There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
  • Information is valuable and costly, and most information that’s valuable is inherently decentralized.
  • Every action has unintended consequences; you can never do only one thing.
  • The value of a good or a service is subjective.
tripu boosted

@tripu Of course these round allocations are not the optimum strategy, it's an oversimplification so people get the main idea: diversifying reduces risk. Those who want to dive deeper can tweak the allocations towards their risk tolerance (e.g. more crypto and stocks for higher risk but also higher upside).

Best strategy, according to Harry :

  • ¼ in precious metals (protection against inflation)
  • ¼ in stocks (performance during bullish times)
  • ¼ in bonds (performance during bearish times)
  • ¼ in cash (protection against deflation)

(Disclaimer: don’t trust him, don’t trust me; quite old: eg didn’t even exist back then.)

tripu boosted
tripu boosted

Thomas Sowell nails it on the head again.

'Too much of what is called "education" is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.'

Hear, hear.

platforms were quick to shut down the hypothesis. For instance, in February 2020 censored a New York Post article by the social scientist Steven Mosher arguing that the virus may have leaked from a lab, and a few months later suspended the account of the virologist Li-Meng Yan for claiming the virus was made in a lab. Meanwhile, ensured that typing terms like ‘ lab leak into its search bar didn’t autocomplete (so users wouldn’t be led ‘down pathways’), and that searches for the terms would always yield statements by the WHO and other consensus-upholders as the top results. However, these measures were not enough for many liberal journalists and politicians, who demanded more be done, and so, in February 2021 Facebook issued a blanket ban on all posts suggesting the virus was ‘man-made or manufactured,’ a policy it awkwardly reversed four months later when the consensus began to change.”

rabbitholemag.com/how-can-we-k

“The idea that the [] lab-leak hypothesis was a was more of a conspiracy theory than the lab leak hypothesis.”

rabbitholemag.com/how-can-we-k

Another article that’s golden to help with this epistemic dizziness.

I decided that these merry days leading to Christmas, when we’re infused with positive sentiments and hope for humanity, are as good as any other to read… ’s Mein Kampf.

😲

Not really! In fact, I’m a bit embarrassed to leave my e-book reader lying around so that others can see what I’m reading… But my Theory of Reading actually supports and encourages reading anything that has been very influential (for good or for ill) regardless of its literary merits, its veracity, its applicability today, or its moral qualities.

Not to put them all necessarily in the same bucket, but I have read The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Communist Manifesto and Atlas Shrugged — and I would read The Bible and The Quran too: all of them that are ( in a way or another) wrong, false, corrosive, harmful, evil, racist, sexist, pro-violence, or pro-war — or even all of those things at the same time!

Granted: may well be the wrongest among the wrong books… And in a way, that contributes to making it “useful” as a reading.

goodreads.com/review/list/6493

That was about 📚 ().

Related, about the 📰 :

“I don’t know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie – not a writer, not a composer, mathematician, physician, scientist, musician, designer, architect or painter. On the other hand, I know a whole bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs.”

gwern.net/docs/culture/2010-do

tripu  
“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t #read all the time — none, zero. You’d be amazed a...
tripu boosted

@tripu I share your feeling about this manifesto, I think all the cussing is a marketing move to attract attention. The spirit of the old web is still alive if you look for it, like the IndieWeb that you mentioned.

Nowadays I try to focus on the parts of the web that I like, and ignore most of the rest, I think it's making me happier. I'm very surprised when I see what people consume out of Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Tik Tok, the TV... Thank you, no, thank you.

tripu boosted
@tripu It seems like a really long way of saying "I'm nostalgic for old geocities sites". Was it really worth setting up a whole domain for this blog post?

thewebisfucked.com/

👎

Too long, and too histrionic, to say many things that the good folks at IndieWeb, the EFF, etc have been saying for a decade or two now.

Not to mention incoherent (if “the is fucked and there’s nothing we can do about it”, why should I care about it, bother to read the post, or try to change anything at all?), inaccurate (“web 1.0 […] was better”… there are few breaking changes in the development of the : that web the author misses didn’t go anywhere; anyone can still create and browse sites like those) and naïve (have fun using alternatives to Gmail, Google Maps, Wikipedia, many kinds of streaming, collaborative editing of online docs, some kinds of feeds or syndication, sites with 3D capabilities, microblogging, etc!).

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