daseiner1

I think the failing point with all(?) of the attempts in this space is that, to phrase it in a very handwavy pseudo graph way, “real world” social groups depend on people who are “hubs” with a disproportionately large number of links to individuals, the majority of whom have far fewer links comparatively. Communities are anchored by these “super friends”. Those are exactly the least likely people to ever consider using a site/app like the above, but the most important to have as they are the ones with the requisite initiative and/or social clout to actually "herd the cats".

Basically, the Friendship Paradox https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Friendship_paradox

Is your comment just in response to the falling testosterone levels point? Because that’s been an ongoing trend since I believe the 80s and has absolutely nothing to do with performance enhancing drugs. Testosterone levels being in healthy range is absolutely critical for men’s health for psychological as well as physical reasons and being in said healthy range is unrelated with sports culture. Whether meathead or whiz kid, physical activity, healthy food, good sleep, limited drugs & alcohol, and minimal or no pornography are all essential parts of reaching one’s peak.

Maybe I’m totally misinterpreting your comment but it kinda just seems like a diatribe unrelated to the comment you’re responding to.

Contempt prior to investigation ought not be a point of pride, I think.

"The Question Concerning Technology" [1] mentioned in this piece is dense but can be understood by the literate layman, I think, with patience and a bit of work.

Re: "call to action", part of Heidegger's project by my read is to interrogate such phrases. I think he would refute that "action" is what we need and that orienting ourselves towards the world in terms of "action" is obscuring the Question of Being. He himself offers no real way out. In his posthumously published Der Spiegel interview [2] he himself says "only a God can save us".

I assume you're making a snide reference to his involvement with Nazism, which I'm not going to attempt to downplay or respond to here. He himself in his later life, however, went and lived a humble life in the Black Forest. Can or should we all "return to the land"? No. But his writing certainly has expanded my view of the world and my "image of thought". He is a worthwhile study.

How to Read Heidegger [3] is a great primer for any who may be interested.

[1] https://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil394/The%20Quest...

[2] https://www.ditext.com/heidegger/interview.html

[3] https://a.co/d/dK5dp2t

P.S. just noticed/remembered that my username is a Heidegger reference. heh.

taking ideas and making them, i.e., translating said ideas and said "makes" into consumer-ready and profitable products at high quality and massive scale, is not exactly running a lemonade stand and certainly isn't just a flick of the magic wand.

sure, he wasn't John von Neumann. fine. certainly one hell of a visionary and one hell of an executive, though, and a sharp and insightful person. for anyone here who hasn't yet seen it, check out "steve jobs: the lost interview". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m68auPIPRk&t=1s

jobs wasn't a charlatan and he was certainly no slouch.

you and i certainly have very different ideas of what an "awful" human being looks like

and i hate to play mr. ceo defender but "a very good businessman who made a lot of money" is selling him rather short, i think. he developed several products that radically changed the paradigm of computing and consumer electronics. that deserves a certain degree of veneration, i think. he didn't get rich by jacking up the price of insulin or dumping chemical waste into rivers or selling petroleum products or developing a human psychology-hacking enterprise to sell ads.

Is this a point being made via absurdity or is this your sincere position? Buying a five pound bag of frozen nuggets and a bottle of ketchup isn’t climbing everest. Maintaining a shopping list takes no effort at all. Being depressed doesn’t get better by eating out of a carry out box.

Your whole comment is just infantilization, plain and simple.

Not going to presume your lifestyle, but many regular users of food delivery are paying a steep premium to eat junk for the convenience of not having to drive 10 minutes

Who do you think is delivering food?

your comment reminds me of when i interned at a large cloud services provider

i was very much infatuated by the idea of total reliability on a global scale and couldn't wait to talk about the CAP theorem with anyone who would listen. Read much of the research. I still love to flip through Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann occasionally.

As I was learning about said company's server racks there was a component that I asked an engineer on my team about – "Isn't that a single point of failure?"

He looked at me, exhausted and stressed out, and just said "Take it far enough, the Earth is a single point of failure."

I got the point.

that would be cool! sincerely. post it here if you do.

i feel like the above comment might come across as sarcastic but i genuinely find it super cool when a layman can master a new discipline with force of will and publicly available writings. much like vermeer's much speculated-upon clever use of technology ;)

I’ll allow that I have the misguided presumption that I’d’ve been so smart as to have pulled my money out of the market just before Black Monday in 1929. But I still stand by the belief that the “gamble”, if following the Vanguard model of DCA and prudently managing risk over time to gradually shift from stocks to more stable “receptacles of wealth” whether bonds/gold/cash, is only a gamble that the United States (and thereby the world economy) will not utterly collapse on the scale of world war.

Investing in the market at-large, though, is based on so many presuppositions of general global order that I struggle to understand what the entire market being “irrational” over an investing period of 30-40 years would look like short of a new world war. And I mean that sincerely and without hyperbole.

If the claims are true then Vermeer is absolutely exceptional, just in a different manner than is usually considered.

All painters must grapple with the technical nature of paint itself and its manipulation. Choice of type of paint, canvas, application, &c. is paramount. Rothko’s work, for instance, is only effective because he found a novel way to apply paint that lends his paintings a remarkable, nigh eerie depth of color. Spending roughly half an hour just staring at the Seagram murals in the “Rothko Room” at the Tate Modern is one of my all-time favorite experiences.

> Investing in a diversified index is NOT gambling, because it isn't a zero-sum game, where you have winners and losers. You are investing in the growth of the economy as a whole.

I’ve genuinely never understood why this is so unintuitive to many otherwise intelligent people I’ve known. Over a long enough time horizon (and with prudent management of risk as one ages/approaches retirement) serious increase in wealth is all but guaranteed short of the US absolutely collapsing. And if that happens, then we’d all have bigger fish to fry.

I agree. I equivocated to avoid the potential tedious series of replies about “innovation”, given the leanings of much of this site.

Capital is a destructive force just as much as it is a productive one.

Asking isn’t forcing. And people who are suicidal are often in an unhealthy state of mind that doesn’t persist over an extended period of time. And we obviously place limits on autonomy in all sorts of ways.

> When those on the fence see us getting up in arms about something where to all appearances the "victim" actually did break the law and is being given due process, we lose credibility. If we instead save our breath for the many many cases that actually have compelling facts, it's harder for them to tune us out.

those cases are the least important to the defense of due process rights. but i'll concede that you're likely correct at the level of the broader populace given that our civic education is an embarrassment and has been for decades.

> we have no reason to believe at this time that she didn't!

this is not the standard of guilt and i think you know that

i also think you know that this is merely the latest incident in an extended, obvious campaign to override the judiciary.

Yes, I would absolutely consider Zuckerberg as one of the top 5% most talented people in the world. Frankly, that isn’t a particularly high bar whatsoever. Haven't you ever been amongst the general populace?

You’ve committed the typical sin on this site of overrating technical prowess and underrating business acumen. There’s a reason so many founder CEOs from his era ended up getting sacked while he’s maintained control and Meta has become the behemoth it is. Next you're going to tell us how Steve Jobs was a charlatan and a cheat.

Is the act of buying a lottery ticket a "rounding error" when it comes to winning the powerball?

what music??

would citing lebron james explain away the obesity epidemic?

i think it’s consensus that yellow journalism directly led to the spanish-american war via hearst

i’d imagine food shelter and dignified employment rank just a little higher.

in terms of higher-order needs, meaningful connection and love are quite a bit more important to me.

USD remains the world’s reserve currency, and the primary currency of global trade. i.e., the exporter, paid in dollars, can also use those dollars to buy goods from other nations beside the US.

nicely done.

I'd presumed that that's been the standard "critical" take for educated people since at least Foucault.

Perhaps that's part of the rot in the soul of higher education in the United States. The infection of universities with an ideology of – I'll call – "Vocationalism" and the people who are full-throated believers in such Capital-driven worldview. See: the steady denigration of the liberal arts.

Side-note: I think the capture of universities by Leftist professors [outside of technical disciplines] exposes a profound failure in American letters and American thought – conservative thinkers have lost power of relevancy in the intellectual class. Where is our Leo Strauss?

And I’m not an “evil Leftists” guy. I respect the value of their methods, if not their conclusions.

Pardon the largely off-topic tangent. Mostly writing for myself and to flesh out my own thoughts.

Children of Dune is my favorite thus far (just finished God Emperor… and don’t intend to continue the series).

With that being said, Frank Herbert certainly (IMO) is a genius of pure vision and worldbuilding but he is a serviceable writer at best.

By the aforementioned fourth book, he no longer has anything to add to his consideration of prescience/fate and is increasingly focused on sexuality. And his writing on sexuality is about as un-sensual as I can imagine.

Yes, that's what the oh-so-wise commenter above us insinuated.

He evidently is late to receive the message that "being unoffensive" ranks remarkably low on the measure of a man.