Lawler suggests that he’s getting around $5000 per piece and there were three pieces, so that’s around $15k going to the local skating rink.

Decommissioned mines can be used as gravity batteries.

I think the topic is less about largesse and more about being badass at really, actually literally like totally, super fucking important work.

The irony is overbearing: an article about the fog of war, in a publication whose slogan is “Fighting Israel’s media war.”

They tell you right in the header that it is propaganda.

Hmmm, what would Krishnamurti do?

It’s worth contemplating how absolutism influences our various cultures. Genocide feeds on it.

“Specific hatred” does not equal “don’t like”.

People are so touchy about being judged, so ready to be insulted. It all works in favour of the authoritarians.

Sure, we need to talk out the terms and agree on things, but that only works when people have open minds and critical thinking. In the meantime the epic struggle is between those who work, and those who own.

All the quibbles about left and right, about borders and morality, about identity, is distraction from solving the problems of fundamental disparity.

Basically, living in a kleptocracy sucks. Owners vs workers, authoritarians vs egalitarians: these are the real battles.

Well sure most lexicon discussions can turn into hair-splitting, but I would like to make a special case for the word ‘silence’ as a term with more than an average amount of emotional weight and semantic specificity.

Its use is often quite subjective while myopically considered obvious by the user, because it is intrinsically confusing. It can be very politically loaded when referring to reticence or censorship. In physics it’s a problem of absolutes, and in psychology a phenomenological conundrum.

Then there’s zen, sufism, and mystic shit like that. Rabbit holes and silent all the way down.

To the naked ear, silence is always relative to a previous soundscape, since even at the quietest moments you will still hear your heartbeat, breath, digestion. It’s neurophysiology and psychology and philosophy and more when talking about silence to the naked ear, all using different definitions of the word.

‘Silence’ is a highly contextually defined word, with many social, physical, and metaphorical uses, each of which shifts, depending on your intent.

Three versions of the word are running through the recordist’s mind at this point: silence as in hold your tongue and twitches, as an artifact captured as ‘room tone’, and as the absence of unwanted electromagnetic signals in the toolset.

If you want to be fussy about usage of the word, you really have to pin down the intent of both speaker and audience.

To be fair, a simple word like ‘set’ is similar in complexity of usage. ‘Silence’, however, carries a lot of baggage wherever it is used.

It’s used in a number of different situations, but its most common use is as fill during dialogue cuts: let’s say you want to put two different pieces of dialogue together, but have a natural pause between them, room tone is necessary to maintain continuity.

In a study during World War II regarding comprehensibility in radio communications, radio static was less destructive to understanding an interrupted statement than no sound at all.

Since capital inevitably pools in the hands of the wealthy without invasive centralized regulation, “anarcho-capitalism” is an oxymoron designed to distract you from its inherent fascism.

Yes, it is, psychologically. You only need a few thousand to be highly accurate.

Individuals can drop attachments to organized religion. The example given, if true, can be seen as evidence. If you are making an anthropological argument that there’s a fundamental and practically immutable psychological difference between societies, you should say so, and address the occasional rapid shifts in social structures evident in modern history.

So far, you merely assert, with no explanation about your terms of reference.

Is it a fact because you want it to be, or are you some kind of statistics savant? It doesn’t represent the planet anthropologically, but it does psychologically, and whether it is possible for a population to drop organized religion is about brains not tradition.

Why not? What are your assumptions about diversity in the context of the range of emotions and political tendencies?

Millions of people is a pretty good dataset for statistical reliability. That country can be considered a useful example of what’s possible.

The main suppliers of inexpensive EV’s are Chinese manufacturers. Most solar equipment is Chinese made. Watch the upcoming trade deals. It will be interesting to see if joint chinese-ethiopian manufacturing agreements pop up in Ethiopia, due to labour rate arbitrage.