I count myself fortunate to have work, but one of the consequences of the last week has been a lot of time spent scrambling to help people get moved to working from home. That said, it's been home cooked meals for the last couple weeks. I've gotten my inline skates working again. The hard part was tracking down a suitable brake replacement since Solomon hasn't sold skates in the US for over a decade, putting me in the position of "do I replace an otherwise perfectly fine $150 set of boots for th…
Firstly, I guess we'll see what actually will happen with the Wu Flu here in the states. I've been running around helping other people prepare to work from home. A few thoughts on the impact on our day to day lives so far [https://barbarianbookclub.com/2020/03/13/fear-shopping-corona/]... > It’s clear that many of us live day to day solely dependent on our massive globo-capitalist system. No spare food, no spare supplies, no safety net of any sort. We live in a fantasy that we will be taken c…
A long time before reading Taleb's Skin in the Game with his much broader application of the concept, I'd already realized that authority and responsibility had to match. Authority without consequence / responsibility for one's choices was the ultimate "power corrupts", and responsibility without any authority was to be a slave to the whims of others. One example of how some dodge consequence is by offloading the risks onto others. Take "companies too big to fail." They get the profits when do…
After Pournelle finished the first set of "There Will be War" anthologies, he started a series that ran for two books called "Imperial Stars" (because, he joked, "There Will be Government" was an awful title). Much like TWbW before it, it was a series of essays and fiction centered around how people would end up governing each other - which overlaps heavily with war. One essay that stuck out had as its premise that to the ideal tribesman, rooted in order and tradition and set place, the barbar…
Via Castalia house, an excellent post on how pop culture is more accurately, as Brian Neimeier puts it, Pop Kult (or "Cult"). > The Epistle of Captain America – The Pop Cult is Truly a Cult [https://dvspress.com/the-epistle-of-captain-america-the-pop-cult-is-truly-a-cult/] That said, I do think he's overlooked something: > When my viewers were upset about the corporate destruction of Star Wars, calling the franchise a cultural institution, I thought it a bit hyperbolic – after all, these are j…