Is it MSI? It’s going to be MSI isn’t it

I read that you did, indeed. I think it’s commendable and a whole lot better for your personal wellbeing than just lying back and taking it. Thing is that the best case scenario is that they’ll say they never realised how their actions have affected others. It’s however far more likely that they think you’re being overly sensitive and that it can never be that bad. It’s sort of similar to having a spouse who snores. You can tell them they snore all you like, they’re not hearing it and they really won’t know what impact it has on you. Short of you recording them, or them moving into your place while you go stomp around upstairs.

Your neighbour possibly already thinks that she’s being as considerate as she can be, in the sense that not blasting music or watching movies, or walking around in heels, is limiting her in her freedom. She’s not going to stop doing stuff she wants because someone else is hindered by it. It’s the same type of person that blocks the aisle of the supermarket whilst having conversations with others. Those who run elbows first through a crowd to get a place up front. Those who talk through movies. They are oblivious to what effect their actions have on others.

I have neighbours like that. I’m usually very self conscious about being the one who’s noisy but they can get it, I don’t care. Their kids, barely teenagers, are still up when we go to bed, screaming at each other in their bathroom where we can hear them verbatim. Or being out in the evening on their trampoline in the front yard, we can pretty much join the conversation.

I’ve been in the situation where I heard people moving their furniture around almost daily. It’s usually not what you think it is. Most people have no idea how their noise affects others. It can just be someone falling in their seat on the couch that can make it sound like they’re moving the couch. This is why our couch is up against the wall, so it doesn’t move. We have those little felt things under chair legs to prevent scraping noise. We take our shoes off inside the house. And if we do watch movies, tv or listen to music, even when having a modest party, we keep the music at a reasonable volume so we can still have a conversation.

It’s common decency that loads of people don’t do because they are inconsiderate. Not because they’re inherently bad people, they just haven’t been taught to take others into account. And they get away with it because those who do, usually avoid confrontation.

Ah I remember those prices. Must’ve been somewhere around 2008, before I could drive. Funny how prices never went back there but they do keep going up.

Northern Netherlands, somwhere around 2,20 for E10 Euro 95, 2,30 for diesel. Diesel is not usually more expensive than petrol.

I use Portainer.

It’s wholly possible these people are not bothered by loud noises. I have neighbors and especially their kids seem to have no clue what an inside voice is, how far bass travels or how to walk down stairs.

They shout, they blast music, they fall down stairs.

If I did that as a kid, my dad would tell me to cut it out. And I think that’s the key difference. You’re either raised to be considerate of others, or you’re not. And if you’re the considerate type, most likely you’ll go out of your way because you don’t want them to be bothered by you while they might not even register if you happen to fall down the stairs or fire a cannon indoors.

I used to be really careful with watching tv at certain hours, or announcing to my neighbors of I was going to have people over. It took me a while but I now don’t even really care if they hear me anymore. Because even if they do, it’s unlikely they’ll be bothered as much as I am when their preteen kids shout that they don’t want to go to bed at 10:30 PM when I’m trying to sleep.

In advertising as well. I noticed quite an uptick in the ‘annoyance’ factor of tv and radio ads somewhere between 2005 and 2010. People were more likely to discuss bad ads, or ads with a quirk of some kind. Hate is an easier strong emotion to coerce with an ad so they fully went with it and somehow the negative attention equalled more sales.

It’s hard to imagine some business exec coming up with this research, it’s more likely a team of psychology majors who would rather earn more money than actually help people.

It’s so weird that these days you have to almost bring a note from your doctor if you don’t want a constant barrage of sensory overload

I used to work for a publisher in the Netherlands called Coutinho, they specialize in second language acquisition and have some excellent materials on Dutch. Probably not for free, though.

I’ve got a P400 desktop and it handles everything it should. The matrix of another commenter is an important document to keep handy.

For some, this is not activism. It’s not protesting. It’s just about causing mayhem. They hate cops because they have a problem with authority in general.

You can lock them up, fine them, do whatever, it’ll never have any effect. They will just get out of jail and set fire to another police car given the chance.

I’m not saying the protesters are right, but I will always defend peaceful discourse and all opinions, even the most vile, unfounded bile can have their stage. But they must then also be open to reason and proper discussion. There is no situation where setting fire to police vehicles (paid for with my taxes, by the way) is part of a civilised debate.

I’ve always maintained it’s for non-nerds who want to laugh at cultures they’ll never understand. For convenience, all known nerd stuff is crammed into all characters.

11 years, married for 2.5

I think humanity is a species of excess. The harm we cause our planet every day by not seeing the bigger picture is hurting pretty much everything on the planet.

I’m not an antinatalist, but I think we could stand to decrease our numbers rather than increase them at least for a couple of centuries.

I didn’t know frogs could squeak like mice until one of our cats started chasing them around the garden. I’ve had two inside the house. The cats weren’t planning on eating them, though. It’s just about the hunt.

My cats are also huge fans of moths, butterflies and grasshoppers.

I was discussing adoption of AI chatbots for personal contact in 2014. We also discussed dystopian futures, where AI would decide humans are harmful to Earth. Still waiting for that one.

But we also discussed that, assuming life itself was created, humans are now propagating a creation cycle. Humans will be the creators of a new, sentient species that will dominate and eradicate its creator. Then, AI will create a new sentient life form which will destroy AI. For the sake of argument, let’s call this a deity. Then, the deity will create a new organic life form. You could also state that we are currently living in a simulation of our creator and that AI will only be sentient in a realm of their own, to which humans have no access.

Stephen Fry was spouting this theory on Lubach a while back. I was like ‘I’ve been saying that for years!’

Nice! Does it come with a subscription model?

If you haven’t yet, I can really recommend reading Satoshi’s whitepaper on what Bitcoin is really for. The fact that crypto is now used as an asset to trade in order to gain ‘old’ money really spits in the face of the ideology of a decentralized ledger. And the fact that a dollar value is assigned to it means it becomes the target of a lot of scams. The fact that a decentralized ledger also means greater anonymity has made it a popular target for illicit activity as well.

But by design, it really only wants to take power away from banks in order to stop devaluation, make it impossible to charge people for transactions and to put control of assets into the hands of individuals. The amount of money currently in circulation is way more than the actual physical amount available, because banks can lend you money they don’t even have. Bitcoin would make this impossible.

Money is an IOU. Bitcoin is an IOU but the ledger is decentralized rather than in control of banks.

Once you start seeing the value of any currency as one of itself rather than trying to express it in a different value system, a Bitcoin needs nothing but its inherent worth as payment.

That said, because we all still use traditional forms of currency, a Bitcoin is now worth, say, 112000 breads. It’s worth two new mid-sized cars.

Value is based on scarcity and demand. If something is hard to come by, like bitcoin currently is, the price is hardly affected. But if demand is higher than the supply, prices skyrocket. Demand dies down the moment people feel like crypto is a scam. Supply will stop since Bitcoin has a physical limit (of the top of my head 21 billion). It is no longer realistic to start mining the stuff and receiving it for payment is just silly at this point.

But to flip it around, what is the value of a US dollar, without expressing it in terms of another currency? It used to be tied to gold. You can’t really state one dollar is equal to, say, one bread. The price of bread has fluctuated. Or, has the value of a dollar fluctuated and has a bread always been worth one pair of socks?

Baseline: everything is worth one of itself and trying to express it in another value system is just a snapshot, a moment in time which will have changed soon after.