What I find even more impressive than the awesome Four Chords is Rob Paravonian's Pachabel Rant, which shows how those same four chords show up in everything from classical music to punk rock over a span of hundreds of years.

I don't know about any later intent of Tolkien to finally publish the Silmarillion alongside the LOTR, but the bulk of the material that was eventually published posthumously as "The Silmarillion" was written long before Tolkien ever scribbled down "in a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit", much less wrote a whole book around that phrase, much less the obligatory sequel that got so big it became a trilogy connected to his old mythopoeia about the Eldar and their history.

Also, the LOTR is internally structured into six "books". Each published volume contains two of them. I'm not sure how many volumes Tolkien intended it to be published as, but at first glance that would suggest six.

I don't know how it does it (except that it doesn't involve Startup Items), but it works for apps that don't use installers (which is most of them), so an installer isn't needed just for that.

As a Mac user, I don't trust installers at all. Why the fuck do I need to run another program to get a program onto my system when it could just be the app bundle in the archive? What else is this installer doing to do besides copy that app bundle into the Applications folder, which I can happily do myself if I want?

The airlock thing was a reference to the story, for the treatment of people who do not get along cooperatively with other people but act in selfish destructive manners that jeopardize the wellbeing of the whole society. Nobody was forced to participate in anything, but the whole society looked down harshly on those who would positively interfere with those who did choose to participate voluntarily in the cooperative tasks necessary to protect the whole of society. Sick kids don't go out airlocks. Violent criminals do.

Libertarianism says nothing against teamwork. Only that such teamwork has to be voluntary and not coerced. If it's necessary to keep every individual from dying a sudden and terrible death at any moment in the harshness of space, you betcha there will be a lot of voluntary teamwork.

And anyone who jeopardizes that gets thrown out an airlock.

That's not how you use "QED". You have to say what you're going to argue, then make an argument (list propositions then show a conclusion that follows from them), then you get to say "QED", which means "which is what was to be demonstrated", i.e. "which is the point I'm arguing for". You just listed two propositions. There's no argument. What exactly was to be demonstrated then?

Regarding damaging relationships...

Say some woman comes on to me in a bar, and comes back to my place an we sleep together. Afterward, I learn that she is married, and I tell her husband, out of concern for him. The husband is rightfully upset, and all of their friends hear about her actions, and a bunch of relationships are damaged.

Who damaged those relationships? The cheater, who betrayed her husband's trust and is rightly reviled for that in the eyes of her friends; or me, who unwittingly facilitated it and then informed the betrayed party at the earliest convenience?

It is a big fucking deal because there are long running threads of economic thought which oppose capitalism yet support free markets, and to conflate the two (and equivalently to conflate socialism with a command economy) creates a false dichotomy between capitalist free markets and statist socialism, ignoring and erasing the possibilities of non-capitalist free markets and non-statist socialism.

Adam Smith wrote about free markets. Capitalism is something above and beyond a free market, first written about by Marx, who argued it was an inevitable consequence of free market and used that to criticize free markets.

When you conflate free markets with capitalism you're buying into a little bit of Marxist ideology.

Do you have reading comprehension problems? I'm replying to someone bitching about the reactive moderation being not good enough by pointing out what the only alternative would be (and implicitly, how absurd that would be).

Thanks! That's very interesting.

The whole point of my post was that the person I was responding to was an idiot for his complaint, because the only alternative to what he's complaining about would be completely absurd.

The alternative would be that nobody is allowed to post ANYTHING until someone has verified that it is either (1) not nudity/pornography, or else (2) that it comes accompanied with some kind of proof of permission.

I'm not talking about SF and places like that. Those are even more ridiculous. I just mean the median housing price across the entire state, which is about twice that of the country in general. I live (and always have lived and want to continue living forever) in an area with median-priced housing for the state. I make about twice the national median income, which (my income) is not much less than twice the California median income, and I have no debts (besides rent), so you'd think median-priced California housing should be affordable to me, but as it is, it would be a stretch for me just to afford the national median housing prices, and the California median is about twice that still. And the majority of other people in the state are even worse off than I am, both in terms of income and in terms of other debts.

It still seems unfathomable to be that in most of the rest of the country mortgage payments could possibly be less than rents. Can you show me some examples?