🕯️ In labouring to be concise, I become obscure. 🕯️ Alchemist, sacred things, making things 🌜 The map is mostly water. gojs.net ✦ meetinghouse.cc
Amherst, NH
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Thread of projects and writing to pin
First is Flora Carta, a garden designer and compendium, very work-in-progress. Keep track of what you are growing
floracarta.com
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I have viewed maybe 200,000 historical photos from the 1800's to today, across all kinds of archives. The neoteny effect is very real and began probably around the 1920s for some people.
Interestingly historical men resemble modern men more (vs women) in a lot of ways.
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if this happened the man would mumble "I'll do my best" and then think about it for the next ten years
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Why *did* so many western nations seem to decide on a policy of infinity migration so suddenly, with seemingly no fanfare or public debate or even mention about it prior to backlash?
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truly believe that SSRIs or some unannounced ingredient in lacroix is making everyone colorblind
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Europeans tomorrow as they Select All > Delete a month of emails before going to lunch
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Is this color basically human catnip? Or catnip for men?
These are some of my most liked posts of all time
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MachinePix
this is a test to see if you'll be a good husband when she's nine months pregnant
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"cookies and cream" completely one shots the toddler mind. Once I've spoken the words they can't even listen to the other ice cream flavors. The concept is too powerful
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Adults tend to think of playing as frivolity, almost mindless time. But if you observe children playing, they often do so with a deep seriousness. It can be quite solemn.
I don't see this deep seriousness in adults very often, play or otherwise. But it is part of it.
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simon civilization scale
A: You can leave keys in your car
B: You can leave car unlocked
C: You have to lock car
D: You have to lock car and conceal any valuables
E: You cannot keep anything in your car
F: E + and you have to leave it unlocked so they don't smash the window
I still think it’s very funny Kardeshev came up with a scale to measure civilizational progress that literally excludes every civilization that has ever actually existed that we know of
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Tennis has some of the best aspirational aesthetics of any sport. Athleticism, calmness, atmosphere, sexuality, fashion. It's just perfect
for this reason I can never forgive the pickleballers
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I need to shadow someone like this for a week because I sincerely don't believe it. Something is being left out. Like when people self report calories and are off by thousands
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Why didn't Buffett build anything great? He's 94, he could have built any magnificent thing he wanted to. He could have tried to start a city. Instead he plays around in the market.
*BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY RAISES 90 BILLION YEN FROM BOND SALE.
Just wow. Buffett is loaded with cash and he's reaching into the margin account (borrowing) in yen. Next 12 months - he's going to buy this puke festival with both hands.
Thoughts?
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Recall one of the most insane graphs ever: After a decade men paid off ~30% of their loans and women paid off ~3%
Men pay down student debt and women don't. They have different expectations around college's use and different sensitivity to cost-benefit.
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It's a movie about the forces of evil, boredom, and aimlessness and what they do to an otherwise promising person. It's like a vampire movie without vampires. Also a very tight script, no line of dialogue is wasted.
And it has an accurate depiction...
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when I was a teen I asked this guy in his 70's if he would sell me the vintage Vespa that was rotting in his barn so I could fix it and ride it. He declined because he wanted to restore it "someday"
it is still rotting
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"Can the average house be maintained by the average person?" sounds like a nonsense question at first blush but I think it's an important one
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every child you add to your family adds much more than one new relationship
third child = four more relationships
fourth child = five more relationships
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I suspect we look younger today largely because of diet (in the best case, much better), pollution (again in the best case much better! Less lead, arsenic, etc), and disease load (massive gains in sanitation, mostly).
I think manual labor and sunlight are less likely changes.
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I think some of the birthrate decline can be attributed to two forces happening everywhere: increasing complexity, and decreasing hardship. Life is too complex and too 'good.' I'll try to explain
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too many observations to ever state but one funny one is that the zoomer perm was alive and well in the 1930s
1933, us national archive:
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if he doesn't leave out the window I'm going to have to leave my doors open and unplug the battery all afternoon and evening
but I better not come back to whole snake family
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need a "For Someone Else" tab where I get to look at what other people's feeds look like
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YES the cow gathers grass and puts it in the fermentation tank for 1-3 days and grows microbes, then eats the microbes. This is how cows get the majority of their protein, by farming tiny animals in their stomach. We're just cuter about it.
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believe it or not I created the /r/accidentalWesAnderson subreddit 8 years ago. It became one of the most popular subreddits
around reddit IPO time they scrubbed me from it and installed a bunch of random mods
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The only thing I'll say about the job discourse is that I run a very small tech company in New Hampshire and we hire literal high school interns from AP CS classes and train them and it works really really well.
*All* hires since the founders were interns out of high school.
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This is wildly, obviously true to the point where it's actually bizarre that a person would call themselves a "rationalist" and not try to improve their appearance and physique
And yet
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The fertility collapse is a mystery but the massive rise in single people that don't want to be single, of both genders, is a much bigger and stranger mystery
So many people cannot find love. Why?
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I found that *many* people in the late 1800s/early 1900s were not thin. *Lots* of people had poor diets and were portly by today's (ideal) standards.
eg famous actresses from the 1880s, E. J. Bellocq from 1912. Common male and fem body type at the time!
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Pretty much every problem with college would be solved by making it ten times harder
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in college I offhandedly said to a Russian friend that hunger is the best sauce. I didn't know it at first but he took it to heart, fasted for 2 or 3 days, fainted during his tennis match because of this, and at the end we went to his favorite pizza place to eat a whole pizza
Nothing makes food taste better than not eating for many days before. Yet how often do supposed "foodies" use this time-tested trick to achieve max food pleasure?
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The zero-interest-rate era is going to become lost history because people want to make up a narrative around AI. The white collar bloodbath didn't happen because of a chat app release, it happened because of the end of ZIRP which occurred rapidly in 2022.
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when I was young video games led me to believe that you would just walk into gyms or random schools or workshops and people would start talking to you, help you, feed you, give you quests
I thought it was disappointingly untrue for a long time. It turns out I was just shy
one reason being an introvert is a massive disadvantage is that almost all side quests start at parties and random chance meetings
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I believe labor and sunlight are less likely because many late 1800s photos are of more aristocratic families, and they still often look quite aged. (And since Roman times its been observed that peasant families often looked less sickly or more healthy, for many reasons.)
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Veganism is both the moral and nutritional equivalent of being a flat earther. It is a diet of deficiencies that is especially unhealthy for children.
But considering just the moral point for a moment, there are two implicit claims to address...
How is veganism not more popular among philosophers? I realise philosophers are disproportionately vegan, but still, only around 25% is so low, especially considering there isn't a single good objection to veganism.
Yeah, I said it. All the objections stink.
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lost history
future generations will think 2023 chatbots started the era rather than the highly obvious and more correctly lined up end of 0% interest rates in 2022
The zero-interest-rate era is going to become lost history because people want to make up a narrative around AI. The white collar bloodbath didn't happen because of a chat app release, it happened because of the end of ZIRP which occurred rapidly in 2022.
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pretty much all the arguing about careers and making a living is really due to cost of living which is due to this graph, and almost nothing else.
The red area is housing that doesn't exist. It's what 2008 caused us not to build. Solve this and you solve everything.
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the idea of a "honeymoon phase" in relationships is the fakest thing I've ever heard in my life. To believe it you would have to be a passive actor in your own life, things just "happen" to you. A television-brained phenomena
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I thought it strange - my parents never really gave me advice growing up. Nothing about career, finance, romance, even small things like what to read or how to dress. It was as if they felt it was not their place.
What I learned since is that this is absurdly common
I don’t mean to put you on the spot. But for one so interested in shaping the lives of his children, we hear so little about how your parents shaped you.
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these are Phthalo (RGB 18,53,36) and British Racing Green (5,88,34) respectively
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It should be more concerning that the most photographed street in America is illegal to build. It should keep politicians up at night. We should all walk around with a little bit of embarrassment until it is solved.
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It's even more insane than you think - the median pensioner in France has higher income than the median working age adult
Regular reminder France already spends the largest share of national income on pensions in the whole Eurozone. It feels like the domestic debate on fiscal issues is so detached from reality, it is hard for an outsider to begin to comprehend.
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wild how every world cuisine was invented by the Portuguese seemingly as a hobby in the 1600s. Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Irish, bananas in south America, everything in between. all of it was their meddling. Except salmon sushi that was invented by greedy Norwegians.
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this is a very common snake around here, in tall grassy fields you can practically step on them
(there are no dangerous snakes in NH so its never a problem)
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this is actually the triumph of an excellent *physical* system: perfectly flat surfaces, perfectly measured distances, perfect markings. Even the physical weighing of every single item to ensure error correction when things go wrong
makes the software easy
Thinking about software involved in making this happen makes my palms sweaty and my heart beat faster
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you should start many books and complete few
you should buy books on a whim, when possible
you shouldn't even know the whole contents of your own shelves. If you create a home library it should act as one: It is there for you to discover and rediscover, to get lost in.
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Kind of crazy that europe's biggest contribution to the internet in the last decade was passing a law that forced every site to add a pop-up
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Absolutely believe this. I was blisteringly shy as a child and it was purely negative. You gain nothing from being shy. You lose everything from avoiding the practice of pleasantries and charm.
I think the concept of "introversion" impeded my development as a young person, and I think we need to do away with the introvert/extrovert distinction. It made me feel like socializing and social graces were the province of a certain kind of person that I was not
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Anyone can do this with their baby but I promise there's a reason the video is 20x speed stop motion
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I think one of the hallmarks of the present is the complete denial of tradeoffs. Almost refusing to believe they exist. This is all over media but its implicated in a lot of real problems. The result is mass inertia.
2000s tycoon games were deep strategy games that really forced you manage tradeoffs and balance budgets/spend/revenue
2020s tycoon games are almost all pay-to-win waiting/idle games
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I've tried to talk about this with some older people and I found the even more shocking problem that most people simply don't believe in ingredients. The idea that food has inputs is just not there. "Pizza" is an element on their mental periodic table.
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"We have more fun than our daughter" is probably the most insane sentence published in the last decade. Encapsulates something completely tragic, avoidable, unbelievable, and leads directly to right screenshot
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its kind of weird how bad, in practice, it has been to break up some monopolies. It seems like one of the few ecosystems that actually generates slush fund situations for very smart people.
Bell Labs was the original skunkworks. They invented:
- Transistor
- Laser
- Solar cell
- UNIX
- C language
- Fiber optics
- Digital signal processing
- Touch-tone
- CCD (digital imaging)
- Cellular networks
and the model for lab-to-factory innovation pre-DFM
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I think almost(!) no one actually wants this, precisely. They want privacy + town common. Larger, more separate.
This has been done well but when I see "shared" spaces like this in condo developments they're almost always empty. It's kind of telling that it's a render
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I think lots of people are used to the idea that life has a script. School encourages this, many ppl follow script from 3-21. Once the script is finished, people can exist at a sorta end-of-history state without re-examining. Some get depressed by this.
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It's fascinating just how much of business and academia involves "reputation laundering" in one way or another. This is a great example.
Ivy grad can't work for Olive Garden corporate (ick). But he can work for McKinsey to bill Olive Garden for corporate services.
Management consulting firms exist largely as middlemen to supply Ivy League talent to boring firms that would otherwise be too low-prestige to attract them
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No one that gets on a plane today is trusting experts. They are trusting past performance data.
If eg 50% of planes crashed, almost none of the people flying today would take the next flight even if experts said it was going to be perfect. They would wait for the data.
People who think they no longer depend on trusting experts only survive because they're mistaken. Every time you get on a plane you trust experts implicitly about a million questions you're not even aware of.
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its crazy how for some things the $20 and $200 or even $2000 versions have pretty much no differences, and other things just get better and better in $50 increments to no end
well I don’t really know what I expected but turns out the expensive pack and plays are way nicer than the cheap ones
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every man remembers the last compliment he received from a woman, even if it was years ago
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There's something I find deeply disturbing in the modern world about the concept of jobs.
When people say "no one wants to work [hard] anymore" I actually do think they're on to something.
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"If he wanted to he would" is still some of the most clarifying relationship advice of all time
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