AreaSIX

“What’s with all the surgery Cathy? Lord! You’ve been stitched up thousands of times but you’re still sad to look at … You’re like the AIDS-quilt!”

Kind of reminds me of this beautiful poem:

"…And I will leave. but the birds will stay, singing:

and my garden will stay, with its green tree,

and its white water well…

Many afternoons the skies will be calm and blue,

and the bells in the belfry will chime,

like they’re chiming this very afternoon.

The people who have loved me will die,

and the town will burst anew every year.

And in the corner of my green, flowering whitewashed garden,

my spirit will wander nostalgic from tree to well.

And I will leave,

and I’ll be lonely, without a home,

without a green tree, without a white water well,

without calm and blue skies…

And the birds will stay, singing."

-“El viaje definitivo”, Juan Ramón Jiménez

Going through the comments, it’s mostly Trump being an agent of China, of the Saudis, the Israelis, and mostly a Russian agent.

I unfortunately don’t think there’s a way out of this for the US population unless people start to accept that Trump is a very distinctly American character, the culmination of what the right wing in the US has been working towards forever. And that the problem the US has is an internal one. Trump is an inevitable consequence of the US political environment, and he or someone like him would’ve come to power sooner or later, even if Russia didn’t exist as an external factor. Unless people accept that, I don’t think there’s any coming back from this for the US population. It’s just going to get worse. And it unfortunately will also bring chunks of the rest of World down with it in the process.

Don’t know if it’s still what’s recommended, but I use foobar2000 for ripping CDs to FLAC.

Go through a list of the biggest festivals worldwide and check out all artists in their line up each year. The best festivals tend to have a solid and varied list of artists with current releases worth checking out. If you’re into a particular genre, there are reputable festivals for specific genres to check out.

But don’t forget that a lot of music is not new but new to you. I listen to a lot of stuff that’s new to me, but very little of it has been released more recently than the early eighties :⁠-⁠)

I DNA tested my adopted dog, and it turned out that one of his grandparents was a chihuahua-husky mix. That’s one larger than life chihuahua.

That is my all time favorite too. It just fits my hand perfectly, and I can’t live without the programmable buttons anymore. So I bought two brand new ones on the used market when I found out they’d been discontinued. Still haven’t found anything comparable on the market. The Razer Naga Pro comes close though.

Then your mind will literally explode if you listen to “Computer Love” by Zapp & Roger, released in… 1985!

I don’t know, I’ve never met anyone who actually prefers the stick. I know that the stick is a necessary measure in a lot of policy making to improve efficiency, but I’ve never seen the receiver preferring it to the carrot. Not trying to attack you or anything, just wanted to share my thoughts since you wrote that your intent was to induce a moment of self reflection. In my experience, that’s far easier to achieve with the carrot, particularly when strangers discuss stuff online. Anyway, I’ll stop talking now, have a good day.

It’s not the same, but that doesn’t mean you give it up, you just adjust your consumption. It’s saddening to hear that you gave them up willingly really. I’m old too, but hey, I’ll listen to music for as long as my mind functions somewhat normally. And have sex if I can!

He does sound unhappy, but come on, taunting him for it seems a bit unnecessarily cruel I think. I genuinely feel bad when I hear people excluding themselves from life’s pleasures because of age. I mean, sure, I’m old so I don’t have sex or consume music in the same way I used to. But I don’t have any plans to give up and stop listening, it’s one of the things that makes life worth living I feel. If anything, it means more to me now than it ever has. Hearing people willingly give these things up makes me pretty sad honestly. So I’m gonna listen to a song that vibes with my sadness right now :-)

“An nuclear engineer”? That’s suspicious grammar for a nuclear engineer.

So, at what age do you intend to stop having sex, and even stop listening to music?

Clearly a Sasquatch

It’s barely making a dent in the bigger picture.

This is the silliest argument of all, it’s just a recipe for feeling completely helpless and perhaps turning into a total nihilist. Almost nothing you do as an individual will make a dent in the bigger picture, you being one individual and the bigger picture being the bigger picture. Going after big industry? You think you as an individual have a chance of making a dent in the bigger picture if you “go after big industry”, whatever that means? No, no dent, bigger picture remains. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try though, because trying is all you as a single individual can do. If the only things worth doing are the things that “make a dent in the bigger picture”, then you as a single individual would be absolutely irrelevant. Nothing you do would be worth doing. That’s no way to live.

“Whatever you do in life will be insignificant but it is very important that you do it, because you can’t know.” -Gandhi

Is that why Apple has got the US by the balls because people want to avoid the dreaded green bubble in iMessage? I’m not from the US so that might be me misunderstanding the situation, but I’ve been told that even many adults in the US view that as a valid reason to avoid anything that’s not an iphone, because of some social stigma attached to the green bubble.

Bless you trying to be sensible, but most in the US seem to have internalized violence as a virtue. Their feelings being hurt seems to mean someone has to get physically hurt to pay.

So the guy being paranoid because they were pick pocketed above somehow feels like he would avoid the impact if he gets to physically hurt the thief. He can’t see how normal people don’t really enjoy physically hurting others, and want to avoid it. They’re not normal in his eyes, they’re ‘pussies’ smdh.

And no one would feel bad when the police in a country with reasonable laws takes you to jail for assaulting someone because of petty theft.

What is this Judge Dredd garbage people from the US often seem so proud of? That stand your ground thinking is only accepted in the violent bubble you guys seem to live in and accept as normal. It’s not normal anywhere else. This is why your police can kill unarmed people on video every week with zero consequences, and with no one batting an eye. Even in the most repressive societies, the security forces have the good sense of killing people in secret, not on video every week. This level of violence is not normal, and you as a regular person don’t benefit by internalizing it as your personal life philosophy.

I think Americans have a somewhat distorted view of what trains do.

I live in Sweden’s second biggest city, and visit Stockholm the capital regularly as I have family there. I can tell you that the price for flying often is cheaper than the train, and the train takes about 4 times as long to arrive to Stockholm. But I can’t think of a single person I know that doesn’t take the train to Stockholm from here.

There’s more to travel than the number of minutes on the mode of transport. There’s getting yourself to the airport here, and from the airport in Stockholm. There are security checks in airports that take time and are often frustrating. There’s the crammed space where you sit very uncomfortably. There’s the bad air in the plane itself. Planes are just a frustrating exoerience. The train takes me from the train station at the center of my city to the center of the destination, it’s spacious, it’s comfortable, you can move around in a train, you can even do a lot of work during the trip if you want to. Trains are a pleasure to ride, planes are a pain. So just looking at the ticket cost and travel time on the transport mode itself ignores the many advantages trains have over planes. Hell, even my dog is always with me on the train, while he’d be staying at home if I was flying.

Do you have an example of another serious company working on the problem that also has concluded that lidar is unnecessary? Because I don’t.

I’m not an expert, but as I understand it, the consensus (excluding Musk of course) seems to be that lidar is necessary for proper functioning and safety in poor visibility situations, like in rain, fog or general darkness. I think the odds are good that the judgment of an overwhelming majority of companies is more correct than the judgment of Musk alone. Particularly considering Musk’s proven track record of cost cutting that puts users’ lives in danger, for example not being able to manually open the doors of burning Teslas.