He believes something incredibly toxic and nuts, but I’m not sure it’s exactly that Christianity is “true,” but rather that it’s just so incredibly useful that it might as well be, and therefore it’s not hypocritical to espouse it with gusto, regardless of what you personally think about the supernatural.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-stakes-real-story-peter-thiels-antichrist-obsession/

I don’t recall the link for now, but there was a fairly long piece a couple of weeks (months?) ago that went into the Thiel religious awakening. The short version is that he doesn’t necessarily believe in Jesus so much as he believes that organized religion is so important as a binding agent in society that you’re better off pretending to believe in it, advocating for it, and imposing it by force if it seems necessary, all to satisfy the human need for mimesis, or imitative desires and behaviors.

Society’s movement away from Christianity in particular as a uniquely humane and sophisticated global-ready religion means it’s okay to fall back on older “tribal” religious patterns like assertive scapegoating to reimpose the world order. There is room for regions of the world with independent traditions to impose them as a means of having a safe and orderly society, because it allows the Christian region to interact with a relatively small number of competing ideologies, which satisfy similar psychological needs for their populations, and therefore a balance can be maintained. It’s better for the system if most people hold sincere beliefs about the supernatural aspects, but it’s not utterly critical, particularly for elites, as long as folks legitimately buy into the societal repercussions of failing to rely on religion for social control. It’s like Pascal’s wager on meth, which is appropriate because a lot of it dates back to a German guy who was a Nazi apologist through most of the thirties until being discarded by them right before WW2. Some of this is strictly IIRC, so be on notice, LOL.

Conveniently, all this allows the Christianized advocates for this worldview to declare any systemic threat to the triumph of their vision for world peace to be accurately-enough referred to as the Antichrist, and the things you’re allowed to do to oppose the Antichrist are quite broad.

JD Vance is thought to be well-ensconced in the ideology.

EDIT: Found it, plus a couple of others that discuss the same thing. Thiel is absolutely nuts, but not quite the way he’s sometimes portrayed.

• https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-stakes-real-story-peter-thiels-antichrist-obsession/
• https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/desconstructing_thiel/
• https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/1176-from-philosophy-to-power

It’s still out there. For one that’s specifically what you describe try Keep the Wolves at Bay by Uncle Lucius.

This is interesting to consider. One of the reasons car centric countries make their peace with fatalities is that there is a regime and cultural expectations in place for assigning blame and imposing punishment, both criminal and civil. We know that other drivers are assholes and idiots, but there is the grim solace that if something happens they (or their insurers) will compensate us and that if it’s bad enough they may even go to jail. Furthermore, we presume that the assholes and idiots know that as well, and they will at least try not to do something stupid, especially since they could get hurt/killed too.

Given the available tech, a system relying on driverless cars is pretty much guaranteed to be safer overall, but people will resist it if there is a sense that no identifiable human is incentivized to minimize harm. If somebody gets killed in an accident and you just have Waymo (or whoever) stonewalling any efforts at compensation or justice, it becomes further dehumanizing and people will continue to prefer to take their chances with the assholes and idiots who might actually be held to account.

You come up with a regulatory regime that ensures proper insurance coverage with equal or preferably lesser friction (lord knows the American system has its issues), and also meaningful punishments to actual humans for reckless code/maintenance/routing/etc, then cultural acceptance will come.

Sounds like he’s made peace with its living on in forks as well. Nice to see he’s doing okay.

Ahhh, that makes some amount of sense. Jasmine is a breath of fresh air, and one way or another I do think we’ll be hearing from her for a long time, but yeah, “hopium” is probably the right notion for this run.

Why is this here? Crockett is one of the loudest voices on the left in Texas, and along with James Talarico the closest thing to rising stars we have here.

Crockett has come under fire from Republican members of Congress because of her often terse criticisms of President Donald Trump. Earlier this month, she called the president an “old white nepo baby” and a bully.

HTC had quite a run there. I still miss my HTC One X, back when it was actually interesting to get a new phone. These days I routinely forget which iPhone it is that I have.

Can’t contaminate the motor oil, soot, rubber, broken glass, microplastics, litter, and accidentally-spilled coffee with purposely-spilled coffee! I hope the enforcement officers didn’t damage their pearls, or let them slip into the drain, from all that clutching.

More seriously, this smacks of citation quotas to me.

This one is way below $100, but about ten years ago I bought a roll of twist tie wire at a dollar store. It’s fifty or a hundred feet, with a little guillotine cutter. It’s still just a bunch of twist tie, but it punches WAY above its weight with quality of life improvement. No more hunting for the one you dropped, or wondering how you’ll close up a veggie bag. Also good for (fairly light) pictures that use wire instead of sawtooth hardware, and I’ve used it in a pinch when I didn’t have cable ties. I dunno. It’s just an oddly useful substance to have lying in your junk drawer.

I wonder if this is just because it was made cheaply in Asia and not designed for the average heft of a trumpet.

I’m sure it’s this. Everything about this, down to the variable delays that different customers endure, screams out that this is a shady, shoestring operation stalling until they finally hit minimum order quantity with their drop-shipper in China.

Specifically for soccer, there’s O40 teams (and even beyond, up to “walking soccer/football”), and if you can change your headspace just a bit, you can drop down to a more recreational level and still enjoy the sport you love. Just be mindful that they’re not really the bad guys, and you can still try to stop them and shut out the rest of the world. As a chronic overthinker, that simple headspace can be a really healing place to be for a while.

I didn’t even start playing until I was already fat and almost thirty, but I had a good ten years of playing indoor off and on; yes… forty, but you almost certainly have much better fitness than I ever did, LOL. Speaking of indoor, it really limits the duration of your sprints and whether on offense or defense you can “manage” more of the field without the same physical strain. The consistent conditions are nice too, though many facilities smell like sweat at all times.

Older people however, were generally more disparaging and would openly scoff with “why would we need philosophy!” often followed by “[Science | religion | real life] tells us everything we need to know” depending on their particuar worldview.

Philosophy is just psychology. Psychology is just biology. Biology is just chemistry. Chemisty is just physics. Physics is just math. Math, though, math is just philosophy. Fun joke, but like many such jokes, there’s an element of truth there. While I have met some philosophy majors who find the exploration of logic so compelling that they forget to consider the humanity of their first principals, I deeply respect that Philosophy is ultimately the underpinning of how humans think about the universe in any meaningful way.

Somebvody posted a link from Australian ABC about this story, but it was American ABC.

Yup. I also liked this, but I’m trying hard not to just quote the whole thing back, because it’s all good.

Their wealth insulates them from friction so effectively there’s no incentive or pressure for them to develop an imagination, or diversify their knowledge to the point where an imagination might emerge on its own. I can’t think of a better argument for a humanities requirement than a billionaire being asked “how do we know what is real?” and responding with “cryptographic signatures.”

Agreed. I think this is more specifically it rather than the 50s.

• Unfettered domestic commerce devoid of worker protections.
• International trade viewed as zero-sum and managed using blunt instruments like tariffs.
• America as a rising manufacturing power.
• Nominally speaking there is no slavery, but Reconstruction is “done” and Southern elites have been rehabilitated and reintegrated without having to give up their power.
• Foreign policy built on late-stage colonialism where areas within a great power’s sphere of influence are silently allowed to be dominated so as not to antagonize other great powers. Relations handled by a stupid nest of ad-hoc limited-party treaties.
• No effort is given to contextualizing what the American experiment has meant, and who it has harmed, just literally a “manifest destiny” from god to fill the land.

Ignore that the era was laissez-faire with immigrants actually arriving (though of course the robber barons who were working their laborers to death were okay with this… until they began to unionize), and it’s a remarkably apt analogy. I’m pretty sure you can see Trump openly pining for The Gilded Age from time to time, though that may literally just be because he thinks gilding things is awesome.

So unlike apparently everyone else on these threads, I actually have a Model M. Okay, technically I have three Model Ms, but still…

What kind of PS/2 cable is it? permanent or modular?

Is it still working, even if it looks rough?

Are you comfortable soldering?

If not, are you at least comfortable following a simple wiring diagram?

And much cheaper, but the infrastructure is already there for normie golf if even walking the course would be a challenge. That reminds me that I need to see if my bag of 15 year old pastic still has anything usable in it and go to my local DG course.

But only play if the solenoid is working. A person has got to have standards.

It certainly doesn’t help that they shared a name with the Amiga digital camera/scanner perhipheral. I found a listing in the July 2000 issue of Computer Shopper where “Bay Micro Computers” out of Torrance California was selling the aforementioned “beige box” AMD PCs with Digiview keyboards. One of the keyboards was on eBay, and it seems like a bog standard rebadged OEM membrane keyboard of the era.