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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • For some of us at some times in our lives, having a relationship with two people is less work. It requires much more communication, better scheduling, and much more attention to your partners’ feelings … but that might be a good investment of time anyhow, and often gets overlooked.

    I find that having multiple partners helps me appreciate each partner much more, for themselves – it’s easy to mix up how much you love just having a partner and being loved, with how you actually feel about that person. Poly gives you the distance and contrast to see your partners clearly, and that can be really special.








  • So teeeeechnically, a salad is a dish composed of mixed ingredients. You could make the argument that you mix any two set of chopped ingredients and bingo bongo, it’s a salad.

    However, I like to think that dishes’ ingredients aren’t a taxonomic thing, they’re a probabilistic thing. In other words, there’s no such thing as “not salad” or “salad”, only shades of saladness.

    • Serve it cold? Ok it’s saladier

    • It’s made up of chopped ingredients? Saladier still

    • Those ingredients are mostly vegetables? Getting pretty saladish

    • They’re mixed together? Even more salad like

    • They’ve got some sort of dressing mixed in? Now it’s very likely a salad!

    … and so on. To me, your SO’a dish has a pretty high Salad Probability^tm





  • It’s potentially worse than useful and actively confusing.

    Welcome to philosophy! I’d recommend reading Spinoza, he lays it out very intelligently.

    It’s simultaneously a way of disproving the existence of God (he was kicked out of his Jewish community and hounded around Europe by the Catholics for his atheism), and a way of replacing it with the concept of the infinite / of the universe. Lends itself to meditation and contemplation, but not to any kind of religious dogma.

    BTW, the concept has nothing to do with love, or the fundamental aspect of humanity, etc. It’s just infinite extension, which encompasses every aspect of humanity, and of everything else.


  • I have a more complicated answer these days than I used to… the short answer is “no,” but the caveats make it longer.

    I don’t believe in a god in the sense of an all knowing human type being that has thoughts and wishes and passes down commandments – basically, not the religious kind of God.

    At the same time, I appreciate a lot of the Jewish traditions I grew up with, and Judaism has a lot more lassitude around what “God” means to you. To me, it’s Baruch Spinoza’s conception of God … basically, just “the universe,” of which each person is an integral part.

    So in a “college freshman on acid feeling one with the universe,” kind of way, sure I believe in God. In a, “He got upset I masturbated way,” then no, not at all.





  • It’s a good objective, but it would take a lot to make it happen. It’s significantly more challenging for tech workers to effectively unionize en masse for several reasons:

    • Tech isn’t monopsonistic, or even close to it; there isn’t a single large employer… even the biggest tech companies employ only a relatively small fraction of the tech workforce. That means separate unionization efforts at thousands of big companies, not at one.

    • Tech job functions are much more widely varied than “delivery driver”; job responsibilities differ greatly, complexity and education requirements differ greatly, workplace expectations differ greatly … think of the difference between help desk, front end dev, network security engineering, data science and DBA. Collective bargaining is harder the more varied the needs of the collective are.

    • Job mobility is really high in the tech sector … in other words, tech employees (by and large) have access to many prospective employers (especially with the prevalence of remote work), and tech employers to a wide geographic pool of talent. That means if your San Francisco office seems on the path to unionization, you can shift work to your Chennai office.

    • It also means that, when the working conditions at a tech company suck, a lot of tech workers can easily jump ship. It’s hard to get a union going when your voters can easily quit and go work someplace nicer, rather than take the more difficult path of staying and trying to force your employer to improve.

    Again, I think highly of unions and would really like to see more effective unionization efforts in tech – I just want folks to go into it eyes wide open and intelligently, vs throwing up their hands and saying, “Why don’t tech workers unionize?”




  • The tablet is written in proto cuneiform, the earliest format of real writing – its basically got numbers, nouns and a limited list of verbs, but no grammatical elements… so we don’t know that it was past tense, it’s just a guess – but a reasonable one:

    • We know Kushim signed about a dozen other tablets listing various transactions, which were always either receiving, or disbursing grain. Proto debits and credits, if you will.

    • The distribution of grain has a recipient and a purpose (e.g., to four different people to make beer), and usually does not have a time frame.

    • The receipts have a time frame, and sometimes a source (sort of a “tax receipt”).

    The thought is that basically, when the grain came in it’d be tallied, then tablets would be added noting recipients and purpose until it had been disbursed.

    It’s also worth noting that clay tablets are challenging to date, and there’s an (as far as I know, ongoing) debate about whether “kushim” was an individual, or an office (e.g., “grain wrangler”).