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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • It was weird to realize that the books and movies were about different things

    The movies are about the characters and their struggles to try and beat Sauron obviously

    But the books got a lot more interesting when I started looking at them as the stories of a world and its history and the way that that world handled to coming and going of another dark lord. The threats he posed to peaceful places, the peace broken simply by his presence, and also the people and places legitimately above and outside Sauron’s reach. The fact that Sam’s star or Tom Bombadil would look at this great and terrible evil, the worst ever known to so many in the world, and to them it would be but another passing of an era, the opening of a new story dated to end like all the rest.

    The scale and perspective of it all is just so dramatically different that I can’t help but feel like reaching that perspective is half the journey for the reader.





  • I imagine a realistic implementation would involve a system of progressive brackets and minimums/deductibles, modeled after the way income tax is. Ideally, things are modeled such that the tax is only full percents among those absurdly high brackets that can afford them

    Constitutionality is another matter though, and yeah it seems like it would be awful hard to get that through the current court



  • You ask me, it’s like the great quarantine to try and slow down covid

    The idealists were hoping to stamp it out entirely but the reality was that covid was everywhere, and would inevitably become part of life. Quarantining served to make sure hospitals weren’t overwhelmed (or rather, weren’t MORE overwhelmed) until a vaccine could be made to try and get things under control

    In the same vein, it makes sense to me to try and stifle AI stuff hopefully long enough to push for UBI and other social safety nets, so that when the lid comes completely off pandora’s box, the damage to people’s lives is mitigated and the benefits from the tech can be enjoyed in better conscience








  • Almost all the memes I have saved are pretty much void of any real statement or opinion, except maybe “this is humorously absurd”. Unfortunately they’re all images and I don’t want to go to the trouble of transcribing them

    In general if something appears to he trying to sway or convince me toward something, it isn’t a meme, it’s a political cartoon or an advertisement, even if it’s trying to be humorous.