sp3ctr4l

A whole lot of poorly configured or cheaply made electroninc appliances or chargers … yeah I can often literally hear when you’ve plugged something in wrong, it makes a high pitched whine, because it is overamping.

Also, if you’re near high tension power lines?

You have to be pretty darn close to be in danger from actual electromagnetic effects.

But… that hum? The buzz?

Turns out that that is actually what causes a lot of long term health problems in people sensitive to it.

Literally the sound, not the EM field, makes you agitated, stressed, on edge, and if that is just your baseline for 20 years, that constant stress accumulates and basically ages you faster, and can cause mental health problems.

Well I’m glad you have/had a supportive family instead of a dysfunctional awful one like me.

I’ve been forced through an ever evolving series of mental health diagnoses by my family until after 20 years of the wrong meds for misdiagnosis… yeah turns out I am autistic and have ptsd/cptsd from my insanely narcissistic and manipulative and mentally unstable family.

Turns out once I get the fuck away from them, I can actually manage fairly well on my own. Oh and theres the whole got two bachelors degrees simultaneously and am very good at a multitude of tech/programming/db admin/data analysis type stuff, and I was making more money than my entire immediate family combined until their most recent attempt to declare me insane for disagreeing with their (objectively wrong) econonomic and political opinions (my degreees are in econ and poli sci, none of them have any degrees).

… Anyway, there’s much more to an autism diagnosis than just the heightened hearing/seeing/touch sensations, but that is a fairly significant component of it.

There are some decent, long form, like 200+ question tests you can take online from actual medically endorsed autism awareness organizations… if you think you may actually have it, take one of those and then take your results to a psychologist.

I used to be able to do this as well until I got into my 30s and my vision naturally degraded.

Was quite good at FPS games, paintballing… the first time I went to a rifle range for an introductory shooting class, the instructor suggested i look into a shooting scholarship due to my exceptional fine motor control and visual acuity… I had very fast reaction times in martial arts (Karate), but being naturally timid and having a skinny twink build kind of cancelled that out.

The reality is most people think you are delusional, and if your family/friends are authoritarian, they’ll try to get you mentally evaluated as seeing hallucinations.

Its less Superman and more Xmen being persecuted for being different.

I too have significantly more sensitive hearing than seemingly just most people, and can hear and often get annoyed by high pitched but low decibel sounds, very often caused by electronics, off balance high speed fans, etc.

Got gaslit about it by my family as well.

You may wanna look into an autism diagnosis, autists often have this kind of thing going on.

You’d think it would be called super hearing, but instead its often everyone without heigtened senses calling you delusional.

Same thing happened to me when I described seeing the entoptic blue field phenomenon to my family, but not knowing the fancy name for it because I was 11. Family got very concerned I was hallucinating, the reality is I am just more attentive to reality than they are.

All these fucking idiots spent at least 4 years scouring the globe to find the world’s best shit sandwich chefs, to source premium, wagyu quality bullshit from the finest international suppliers…

And now they don’t enjoy eating the sandwich.

Gulp it down fuckos, yum yum yum, you wanted this.

I’ll also throw Aiden Ross into this group. Actual sub room temp IQ idiot zoomer streamer, MAGA cultist/propigandist, who rose to fame by quite literally sniffing Andrew Tate’s farts …

(I am not joking, he did a video with Tate where at one point Tate gets up from his chair and leaves the shot, Aiden sneakily gets up and huffs the seat of the chair)

… yeah this dumb fuck had a stream in the last 24 hrs where he said he has taken an 8 figure loss on presumably his stocks and crypto from this Trump crash.

That is at least 10 million dollars, bare minimum.

For what its worth, CyberPunk 2077 is … an alt history that diverges from our own … at some point in the 1960s I think?

Like… the Soviet Union still exists. In 2077.

Point being: The ‘Japanese megacorps taking over much of the American economy’ fear of our own 1980s is very, very much a big part of the lore/universe.

Pondsmith published the first version of the lore in 1988 as the TTRPG ‘Cyberpunk’, originally set in 2013, and this kept getting added to and expanded with subsequent editions.

Arasaka is… well hopefully without spoiling too much, Arasaka corp is basically run by a Japanese fighter pilot ace who pretty much swore eternal vengeance on America after Japan got nuked and lost the war, and his idea of how to do this includes figuring out how to become immortal, so that he can continue to run a megacorp that ultimately usurps American sovereignty and turns the country into his neo-corpo-feudal subjects.

You can get almost all of that by playing through the Corpo intro character path and actually watching the informative slideshow thing in the elevator and on walls/screens in the … megalobby, so hopefully thats not too spoilery.

Also in Die Hard it is Nakatomi Plaza iirc, Nakatomi being the name of the fictional Japanese corp.

Anyway woo random trivia.

I regularly encounter, and have for the last at least 5 years have encountered, many, many people, who use the term … whatever stupid number of D Chess move phrase… to genuienly, earnestly describe something they think actually is an extremely intelligent strategy.

… Especially when it comes to large scale economic/political/business strategy.

Yes, a lot of people also use the term sarcastically as well.

… Which is why I asked you to clarify what you mean.

You then replied with further explanation.

You could have just said you were joking at that point, but you did not.

… Now that I have taken your explanation at face value, now you just say you are joking.

Thanks for wasting my time with a schrodingers shit post.

I mean… I may be wrong about this, but I think its just a gigantic pile of cash.

Its a revenue budget surplus, not like a … state version of a soverign wealth fund.

Can’t be legally ‘invested’ in anything. It’s just locked in as giant pile of cash, with no interest rate, no ability to invest it in one thing or another. Only either do nothing, or spend it on government costs.

You are basically saying ‘spend all the money now, because prices will be much higher later’.

But uh… if they just… you know…didn’t wipe out a progressive income tax source of funds… that is you know, ongoing, a flow, not a static total…

The state would yes, still have to cope with rising general costs… but this would be augmented by that flow of rising amounts of tax revenue.

If your scenario is agnostic massive inflation, that the dollar goes down in value generally, then it would be much better to keep the flow going, as that will be balanced on both the spending and revenue side by whatever the inflation is.

The inflation would increase both state budget costs and state budget revenues from taxes, as both incomes and sales prices would rise, thus so would income and sales tax revenue.

And then in that scenario, yes, still use the static pool of reserve cash to shore up irregularities in that flow, maybe to help subsizide at a state level some of the rising consumer price burden, or maybe sure, spend it all at once to try to build some kind of massive infrastructure project that generally supports economic activity, or start giving it out as small business grants, or start a state backed entity to provide some kind of locally sourceable vital staple consumer good.

But you can do all that without massively destabilzing your state budget flows by cutting out the income tax revenues.

It is not a 5D move to stop inhaling a third of the oxygen you normally breathe before you use your reserve of calories from eating breakfast to fuel you to go run a mile.

You could… just use those deposited breakfast calories to run a mile… and keep breathing normally the whole time. That’ll probably result in a better mile time.

Yeah, asterisk to indicate multiplication is much, much more common amongst coders.

… And script kiddie DOGE interns.

Sorry, I only inhabit 3 dimensions and change through time, can you explain this 5D logic to me?

I am not a degenerate memestock/crypto gambler so I didn’t follow any of this…

https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2022/08/18/why-do-stocks-get-halted-bbby-stock-is-a-modern-example/

But yes, apparently this did actually happen, circuit breakers got triggered on BBBY when Cohen did some fuckery a few years back.

But on this blessed day… we are all meme stocks.

praise be to the godking and his delicate, small, guiding hands

Washington state is basically a wonderland for giant megacorps hiding under a trench coat that’s made of rainbows and gentrification.

MSFTs main campus just literally is the size of a city.

They literally have their own private bus system that gets employees all around the Seattle/Bellevue/Redmond region to and from their main , city sized campus, if not other campuses as well by now.

Boeing cannot be allowed to fail or even held accountable no matter how much and how hard they fuck up… because manufacturing jobs and national defense.

Amazon just bought a huge chunk of Seattle, basically downtown Seattle, and owns nearly every building in… something like an 6 block by 6 block foot print.

The most actually progressive thing about the state’s economic structure is that it gets a huge amount of its power generation from dams, actual renewable energy, has very good water management, and comparatively good public transit for the population size of its cities, at least compared to other states. Yay light rail, but also Seattle is one of the hilliest cities in the country with extreme grades and elevation changes, so uh, good luck commuter bikers.

But uh yeah, cost of living is insane, housing prices are insane, and so far nobody seems to have any actual plan to address that beyond subsidizing a few extra hundred apartment units a year in Seattle such that they’d be affordable to a family making 90k a year, when they’d normally only be affordable to family making 140k a year.

When Seattle says they’re making ‘affordable housing’, that means affordable to median wage workers… not affordable to the … something like 40% of the population that is moderately to significantly poor.

You could completely solve homelessness in the state with something like a 0.5% tax on revenues of the top 100 corps by revenue in the state.

No one has ever even proposed anything like this, to my knowledge.

Is ‘Own your vote’ a sufficiently snappy analog to ‘Act your wage’?

I mean collectively by collectively.

Different groups with different specific membership criteria, different descriptive attributes… often, in general, tend to behave differently.

Try writing a history book involving dynamics and differences between groups that doesn’t involve this. Or a medical study. Or a psychological study.

Statistics is the art of going from an unfounded stereotype or complete guess to an actually valid characterization of specified groups according to descriptive parameters.

Of course… these are general descriptors of a group, and do not accurately and perfectly describe every member of a group.

No, I wouldn’t personally accept responsibility for something a bunch of people my age did… but I would accept that it would be reasonable for other people who didn’t know me personally but just knew my age group to make certain reasonable assumptions about me that are actually borne out my the data.

Of course, one should always just have that as a kind of background knowledge and not judge every single book you meet by its cover, you should read the contents of their character if you want to really know them.

But at the same time, that is very time consuming to do with… literally everyone, so it is useful to have basic guidelines for what to expect from certain kinds of people, but not actually judge them or act toward them in a prejudiced way untill they specifically, individually confirm or disconfirm their sameness or difference from your preconceived notion.

Like uh… I am a millenial, and I know it is statistically valid for me to assume myself and other millenials have actual, comprehensive computer troubleshooting skills than boomers or zoomers.

I know a boomer is more likely to be a big Led Zeppelin fan, and a zoomer is more likely to be a fan of whateve is on Lo-fi girl… and I know that millenials are more likely to still be using the term ‘doggo’ and ‘chonker’ unironically, as well as think that the dialogue in the Borderlands games is cool.

Do I use doggo and chonker? Yeah, you got me, I still do sometimes.

Do I think Borderlands style, ‘Millenial writing’ is good? Fuck no, I hate that shit, bounced off those games half for the bullet spongy gameplay I just didn’t like (Im much more of a realism/tac shooter/milsim kinda guy when it comes to gunplay) and half for the character writing that I found to be just fucking awful, rude, crass, annoying, self-important, cringe inducing.

I did like the art style though.

But anyway: I would not be surprised if someone just knew my age, that I like video games and am a dork, didn’t know me beyond that, and then kinda assumed I was into Borderlands for the writing. I would be miffed if they were 100% convinced of this and acted as if it was true without ever actually asking me, but if they did ask, I wouldn’t be offended by the question.

… The boomers have majority supported Republicans … for the last 20 years.

Which I specifically mentioned.

Your own source shows:

50-64 at a 56 to 43 for Trump
65+ tied at 49 to 49

Wonderful, great, a few of them finally realized that maybe now that they actually need Social Security and they want to actually draw from their 401ks… after majority supporting 401ks over unions+pensions for 20 years.

How typical. A few of them finally figured out maybe spending 20 years supporting corporate profligacy and then betting their retirements on the stock market … is bad, when the obvious problem with a stock market based retirement plan… actually looks like/is actually happening, to them, personally.

You are bringing race into this. I did not.

If you purely go by age alone, which is how you actually define a Boomer…

30-39 (16%) is 50 to 46, Harris.

40-49 (16%) is 48 to 50, Trump.

They are neatly both 16% of the total sample, so…

30-49 is 49 to 48, Harris.

Wonderful, younger Millenials to younger to mid GenX went for Harris by a point.

But I am not talking about them, I am talking about Boomers, over the last 20 years of their existence.

A tiny bit of the older ones shifted course after it was too late to undo what their disproportionately large, wealthy, and influential generational cohort has supported for 20 years.

I guess ‘they’ll be sorry/regret their decisions when they’re older’, another common boomerism often directed toward anyone younger than them that makes a life choice or holds a worldview they disagree with.

This is a perfect time to laugh at Boomers collectively.

They got what they said they wanted, and only now, after its all too late, did they almost, but not quite, flip over to ‘this is not what i wanted.’

If this isn’t clear, obviously not all boomers individually deserve this scorn, but uh, collectively… they do.

Kentucky’s bourbon industry is now utterly fucked from inevitable or already declared retaliatory tariffs…

Time to lower the state’s tax revenue even more!

Half of Kentucky’s bourbon is exported, and Kentucky makes 95% of the bourbon in the world.

It is a major segment of their economy, and now half of it is in extreme danger.

So of course, with that ongoing disaster… it is now time to eliminate income taxes… and presumably make up the difference with sales and/or property taxes?

… Roughly 35% of Kentucky State Government inflows come from its income tax, about 5% comes from property taxes, most of the rest is sales tax.

If they just removed the income tax, they’d blow through their entire state savings/trust fund thing in 2 or 3 quarters, if they didn’t pull in additional revenue from elsewhere or just lop off about a third of their spending… which mostly goes to funding schools, paying teachers, and funding medicaid.

Just a bunch of geniuses over there.

‘Man of Constant Sorrow’ indeed, fuck.

What will be extremely funny is if the market drops so fast that the ‘circuit breakers’ get triggered.

Basically, the SP500, the DJIA… most modern exhanges have rulesets that say if a particular stock… or entire market… drop too much, too fast, trading on them is then just ended, for the rest of the day… I think there are some theoretical scenarios where the trading pauses can last more than a day.

If that manages to happen… Trump will have literally broken the markets.

Seeing as I don’t have a 401k: This would be extremely funny.

Even if the markets don’t crash that fast…

We are looking like we will have such massive drops in so many stocks over… the past few months, and likely next week…

Well… a lot of companies … finance a lot of their operations with debt. Debt based on their shares as collateral. So… when your stock goes down enough… now the lenders want … more stocks, more money, a higher interest rate, whatever is built in to their exact contracts.

Basically, we’re probably gonna start to see a bunch of people and companies get margin called.

And that will further intensify panic and general chaos.

(Elon Musk in particular is extremely likely to be utterly fucked by this kind of scenario)

Platitudes do protect the poor from thugs if platitudes are embodied by people of courage and moral character willing to meaningfully advocate for them and protect them with force if necessary.

If your society does not do this, your society is of low moral character.

Actually acting in line with your expressed morality is the bare minimum, first threshold of your supposed, proclaimed, performed morals being… things you are actually willing to promote in the world.

If your morals do not actually guide your actions, you are merely cosplaying them, and are just a pedantic preening poser… with low moral character.

Socrates disagreed with the reasoning behind his assigned fate, but accepted it nonetheless, in accordance with his conviction to his principles.

A morality that is not built on responsibility and duty to others is no morality at all.

How to actually do games preservation:

Reform IP laws.

Mandate open sourcing of hardware and software architectures after some period of time. 10 years? 5 years after no more of that hardware/software is sold? Yes texhnicalities are insanely complicated but you get the idea.

Oh, how about government funding for emulator development? We fund libraries that preserve books, and movies, and other stuff.