Disqus - Friends of Zarathustra

Re: A.I. Old-Timers

Shane Hoversten — Sat, 31 May 2008 20:55:43 -0000

You mis-spelled "Schank."

Re: Yes, everything is different.

Shane Hoversten — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 11:10:59 -0000

I'm probably going to be fucking around theming this thing. I might even dip into adding some custom code, which I've been avoiding because I already know enough languages that learning php seems rather barbaric.

And change is all around, DDB. Might as well get used to it.

Re: Test

Shane Hoversten — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:05:48 -0000

Why does Disqus eat comments when you re-set themes? Hmm.

Re: Cringe Inducing

Shane Hoversten — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:47:33 -0000

Jesus, that first interview is ugly. Pretty obvious that the McCain campaign is encouraging the use of "hell-bent" in its rhetoric.

I tell you one thing, I'm as excited to watch the debates this year as I used to be for the Timberwolves.

Re: Entertainment Tidbits

Shane Hoversten — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 15:07:15 -0000

Ditto on having heard good things about Blood Meridian, though I also heard it will make you want to kill yourself. Then again, much of the stuff I like makes me feel that way. The very best stuff somehow combines the wanting-to-kill-yourself feeling with somehow feeling redeemed; the epitome of this would be Kellman's "How Late it Was, How Late" and Saramago's "Blindness" which, now that I think about it, is also being made into a movie.

Re: Shit for Honor

Shane Hoversten — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 11:55:29 -0000

No way, LSH is better than the paper.

The thesis of this argument reminds me of something Daniel used to rant about to me. Remember those old Ron Paul newsletters? And how bunches of them made loads of racist and generally fuckholish remarks? And about how Ron Paul said something like: hey, I didn't know about it. Don't blame me.

It seems to me that if somebody is distributing the official Shane F. Hoversten newsletter, and the newsletter makes a habit about disparaging (say) Jews, that it's reasonable to assume I tacitly approve of these disparagements. And if I make the case that I don't know about them, then I'm either a) an idiot, b) a dupe, or c) completele irresponsible. None of which are particularly good qualities for a presidential candidate.

I bring this up because I think this is what's going on in McCain land. I think he's ceded control of himself to people who are telling him how to win the campaign; but like Peaches I don't think this can be an excuse. After a while the distinction evaporates between what you yourself believe, in your heart, and what other people do in your name. Whatever kind of man McCain actually is, whoever he has been in the past, he's made his deal with the devil.

FWIW I retain the (perhaps unfounded) belief that if he does get elected, that his actual policy will not be as blighted as all his campaigning would seem to imply. But what a world to live in: where your best chance of getting elected is to act like a complete fucktard, and promise more of the same ruin the government has been delivering for eight years.

Sigh.

Re: Shit for Honor

Shane Hoversten — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:01:07 -0000

I suppose I could, except then I'd have to buy another domain name, and that's ten bucks I could spend on crack.

Re: Shit for Honor

Shane Hoversten — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:56:45 -0000

The "it doesn't matter who wins, politicians are corrupt, people are stupid" attitude is both misguided and tired, and that's even more true this year than usual. And while it's true that the planet probably will not tilt off its axis if a crappy regime gets elected, it's equally true that the different attitudes of the different regimes will have pretty profound effects on us, and on everyone else in the world. Evidence of that is all around us.

Certainly it's worth talking about, especially when it's talked about intelligently.

Re: David Foster Wallace

Shane Hoversten — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:05:15 -0000

The iconic work is Infinite Jest. It's DFW's answer to the massive
post-modern epics like Gravity's Rainbow, Underworld, and Ulysses, though
it's somewhat different from these in that it's intended that people
actually READ it. But there's no doubt it's his magnum opus.

If you don't want to invest that time, his first novel is called The Broom
of the System and it's also supposed to be super mighty.

Re: David Foster Wallace

Shane Hoversten — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 10:08:51 -0000

Eggers' latest is the new It book. It's called "What is the What?" and it's garnered huge acclaim. My impression is that it's his rejection of naval gazing and showing that he can be A Serious Author writing about Big Issues outside his own immediate experience. But I haven't read it. I do own it, though.

I didn't particularly like HWoSG, for reasons you can probably intuit, but I like Eggers. He's been good for literature, I think. Made it okay to be interested in stuff that real people are interested in (see The Best American Non-Required Reading for examples) like comics and offbeat literary fiction. He has own his press, which just published a book that's nothing more than the collected names of every Heavy Metal band in the world, for fuck's sake!

Anyway.

Re: There should be a word

Shane Hoversten — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:40:02 -0000

Possibly. But after reading your comment, the word "choad" is looming large in my head for some reason.

Re: Understanding the Bailout

Shane Hoversten — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:12:26 -0000

What's annoying about all of this is that I think we're at a point where even pretty educated and interested people really don't have the tools to understand wtf is going on anymore, or what's sensible and what's not. When there's so much disagreement at even the highest levels, disagreements about quantifiable issues - what's good for the economy vs. whether abortion should be legal - then it's a tough damn row for the wanna-be reasonable voter.

I don't even know what's FUD anymore. That is fucking scary.

Although here's something I'd like answered - is anybody, anywhere, making a compelling argument for why executive compensation should not be deleted entirely in these bailouts? Why the government (and, by extension, I) should be paying for some assfaces to make 40 million dollars for running their institutions into the ground?

Re: There should be a word

Shane Hoversten — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:22:45 -0000

I feel a deep entitlement to a host of things. My table at Cafe Tempo is the least of them.

Re: Private: Scott Bakker and Neurology

Shane Hoversten — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:16:33 -0000

It's funny that in this conversation, you're with Morgan and I'm with Bakker. Dwelling on this topic nearly drove me fucking bonkers when I was a kid. I sort of came to my own "clockwork universe" intuition, and was horrified at the implication that we're all just going about our pre-determined destinies. Or not "pre-determined" exactly, since pre-determination assumes that the outcomes of everything are known in advance, which isn't the case. But the notion that my conscious self lacks the power of self-determination, even if what's going to happen is irreducibly complex and cannot be known beforehand, is a terrifying thought.

I can't speak for Bakker, but the most fundamental notion about what life is, and what it means to engage in it, is that "you" have a real agency; that there are choices to be made, and not the illusion of choices. The reductionist stance, whether it's reductionism to Newtonian physics or to a more complicated neural analogue takes away that illusion. Bakker probably doesn't want to be a puppet, even if he doesn't feel like a puppet. Scratch that: not a puppet, because that would imply a puppeteer, but instead a machine, blindly cranking away, saddled with the curious operational reality that it "feels" like it's in control of itself, but isn't.

Re: Understanding the Bailout

Shane Hoversten — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:20:39 -0000

That's something, at least.

The more I go back and forth reading about this fucking thing, the less I think I know what the right thing to do is. I know I said that before, but it keeps getting truer.

Re: Sorry

Shane Hoversten — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 22:00:26 -0000

Will this stupidass thing show up?

Re: Healthcare - Too much or not enough?

Shane Hoversten — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 22:20:11 -0000

Re: Drugs

Shane Hoversten — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 10:36:22 -0000

Yeah, I couldn't get too smug without reading the actual methodology. It's hard to figure how inhalants, which melt your brain, are less bad than pot. But the social harm of pot doesn't seem that bad, either. Unless they count the social harm of how fucking annoying those guys are.

Re: Healthcare - Too much or not enough?

Shane Hoversten — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:26:23 -0000

What's weird about this whole thread, aside from what appears to me to be unwarranted incivility, is the all-or-nothing thinking. The assumption that if the United States cannot be transformed into a Utopia in one fell swoop that the only fitting response is either revolution or apathy. Or, right, "changing it from within" which as Peaches already mentioned is a rather confusing inconsistency, since if the system is so utterly non-functional I'm not clear on how it *could* be changed from within. Or changed at all, from any direction, without bloody purges and massacre, which have never, so far as I am aware, ushered in the enlightened new era you seem to crave.

The beautiful thing, Pat, is that Obama doesn't have to be the answer to all our hopes. I join you in the suspicion that even if he's as clever and as decent as he appears to be, that the cleverness and decency of one man will be insufficient to re-render two and a quarter centuries of American governance, let alone 2500 years of more-or-less Western democracy. I get the idea that if you were transported back to the age of Pericles the tenor of your critique would be much the same.

Which is a good thing to note, and an important thing to keep in mind. I have been recently been made aware of this quote, by Yitzhak Rabin:

"If you have the same problem for a long time, maybe it's not a problem; maybe it's a fact."

A lot of the problems plaguing the USA are problems that have plagued mankind for the entirety of its history. Dropping out, or else advocating the overthrow of, a political system that cannot redress them in the form of a single man elected president seems pretty harsh, and if you can't find a way to see value in baby steps - in moving a little bit closer to sanity and a more equitable compromise - then I shudder for your prospects, not just of finding satisfaction in governance, but in finding satisfaction anywhere, with respect to anything.

Re: Renting vs. owning

Shane Hoversten — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 01:14:41 -0000

Holy Christ, what a comment.

I almost feel bad refuting it.

The point isn't that investing in property is a bad idea, necessarily. And yes, the article is framed wrt the guy's personal experience, as a renter vs. a buyer. But the takeaway point is simply that when it comes to real estate investing vs. equity investing, taken overall - using exchange indices as a proxy for the market as a whole - stocks return seven percent annually. Property returns less. So if you had 10k to invest a hundred years ago, you should have invested it in stocks, all else being equal. In the long run, stocks trump property.

Plus investing in pre-ipo businesses is no way a "far better option" unless you have some secret oracular predictive powers. Most businesses never get to IPO. Those are highly risky waters to swim in unless you know EXACTLY what you're doing, and pretty much the only people who do are angel investors, who are already rich, banks, or VC firms.

Mainly my point is to quit trying to ruin my good feelings.

Re: Voting Reform

Shane Hoversten — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:24:19 -0000

This whole thing seems so clearly sensible, so obviously good for the country, so explicably simple that it boffles my mind that we don't have it. And not only don't we have it, but I'm willing to bet that 90% of Americans don't even think that anything's wrong. For their entire lifetimes they've had a choice between one of two candidates, and this just seems like How Things Are.

This strikes me as one of the most tangible and clear-cut things someone could tackle if they wanted to Make A Difference. Though I'm not sure what one could do, other than talk about it, and thereby demonstrate that there are other possible realities than the one we currently inhabit.

Re: Renting vs. owning

Shane Hoversten — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:06:55 -0000

Awww. I've been waiting and waiting to get some Hairbucks praise. It makes me feel warm and gooey inside.

Regarding the comment from your ass: seems like a tough one to get data for, since, at high levels, how do we differentiate the two? I suspect that the lion's share of investment dollars spent by most Americans is via mutual funds (source: ass) and mutual funds, especially the big ones, will invariably have bunches of real-estate holdings in the mix.

I would certainly agree that pure-play real estate has created more millionaires that you hear about; as in, people who bought something, and then became rich because of that. I have friends of this sort, which prompted the original post. But I have to think there's a lot of dark matter floating around. Somebody bought those shares of Google in 2004, to say nothing of the zillions of dollars generated in the cataclysm of 2000-2001.

Do you want to do a guest post on the opportunities of the post-sub-prime crash, now that the crash is even more extreme than before?

Re: It strikes me

Shane Hoversten — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 12:58:47 -0000

Appears you've answered your own question, although it also appears that you're perilously close to the "Everybody is smart!" attitude. While I agree that I've never met someone who was completely lacking in a quality that I'd call "intelligence", I'm not sure that finding creative ways to arrange closet space is what is called for in an important executive role in the United States government.

Although, it must be admitted, that half the country seems to persistently disagree.

Re: It strikes me

Shane Hoversten — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:30:34 -0000

I've said it before, and I probably won't say it again because I'm tired of repeatedly saying it. But I've given you absolutely zero evidence that my support of a candidate has eroded my critical faculties; and I find it comical to the point of absurdity that I'm being repeatedly told that the world is a complicated place, and people are complicated and not caricatures. Yes, Dave, I know these things. If you've been struck on the head and have forgotten these aspects of my character, there are four years of archives I invite you to read. You can probably remember the old URL.

So. Yes, surprise surprise, I'm an Obama supporter, and as such take some special partisan delight in pointing out idiotic gaffes by his opponent. If you've been assuming this means I think the man is the new baby Jesus, or Justice incarnate, then you're mistaken. Do you want an admission that all politicians warp the truth for vote-harvesting purposes? I admit it readily. The example I hate particularly is the sort of coddling Democrats always do to labor unions. Globalization can't, shouldn't, and won't be de-railed, which means that lifetime jobbers doing unskilled jobs are gonna get hurt. If you want the crazy growth you've been seeing for the last twenty years then this is the dirty little truth labor unions don't want to hear, and don't have to hear, because Democrats keep blowing smoke up their ass.

So. Being smart doesn't make you a better human; Democrats aren't gods. Obama is not Joe Mauer. Republicans are not evil. Campaign promises are full of deceit. So far as I can tell, nobody posting here has come within a hundred miles of denying any of this, any more than you're insulting my mom when you talk good about your mom. But if it reasserts your faith in my sanity to hear those things, I state them happily.

Finally: I'm disappointed that you think LSH has devolved. I think it's better, by a lot, and will be better still going forward. And I'm posting shit here for a variety of reasons, but nobody likes to be shouting in the wilderness. So if you want less political talk, let's hear from you on other topics, too.

Re: It strikes me

Shane Hoversten — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 11:08:29 -0000

Did I really say that Republicans were evil?

What I really meant was that Republicans like _you_ are evil, you money-grubbing bastard. I mean, fuck's sake, serving an apertif of the left arms of poor inner city youth who sold their limbs to culinary prospectors for a few bucks?

I know you're a market apologist, but to me that's excessive.