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Comment Re:cat & food (Score 1) 21

I'm not following this FP branch too well, but bash.org is gone so I can't check (or read the jokes).

My favorite from that source was just recovered by the AI. I find it depressing to get it that way, but it's still funny after all the years.

You are thinking of Bash.org Quote #835030, which features a person named Judge-Mental trying to help a user named Khassaki.The absolute classic text of the IRC chat log reads exactly like this:

<Khassaki> HI EVERYBODY!!!!!!!!!!
<Judge-Mental> try pressing the the Caps Lock key.
<Khassaki> O THANKS!!! ITS SO MUCH EASIER TO WRITE NOW!!!!!!!
<Judge-Mental> fuck me.

If you want to dig deeper into internet history, let me know:Do you want to see other famous text-case mishaps from old message boards?Are you looking for more legendary Bash.org / IRC quotes?

Comment Dimensional collapse is a good thing? (Score 2) 37

Now you've gone an put a fork in it. I feel like I have an excuse to try to clarify the dimensional thing a bit.

Mathematicians among us may fear the curse of dimensionality, but that's the way the world works. LOTS of dimensions. But we humans are not good at dealing with more than a few a a time, so we always try to prioritize one or a few of them. It's not that the other dimensions don't matter, but we ignore them and that often causes problems. Probably extinction if the Fermi Paradox isn't some kind of mistake or diversion from reality... The hilarious economists think time = money (for some conversion rate), but time >> money is more relevant. Profit uber alles leads to bad places. (Current priority book is Careless People: A story of where I used to work: Power. Greed. Madness by Sarah Winn-Williams on the evil that is Facebook. Only a few pages in, but quite funny so far.)

And it doesn't help that most of the abundant dimensions in the real world are not commensurable. It's not a matter of finding weights to make them comparable or convertible, but that the units are not related and that there are so many things we don't even know how to measure at all. How much love is too much? (That's a joke, but Ma Nature has a sick sense of humor. I bet you don't want to have four kids just so the two with less lucky rolls of the genetic dice can die before reproducing...)

Comment The Subject is a meaningles meta-diversion! (Score 1) 127

I think the Subject should reflect the comment. If the topic of the discussion or the focus has changed, then the Subject can help indicate where and why.

The best Subjects help readers understand the main point the author wants to focus on, but I also think it's reasonable to set up a joke with a Subject. I think the vacuous Subjects basically encourage people like you to devalue the entire idea of using Subjects in constructive ways to help readers. Call it a kind of lazy writing, though I think it's often a symptom of a lust for FP. However I think it's actually best to start with a Subject that will guide my writing and then look at it again after I'm done to see if I've lived up to the Subject. If I do have to change the Subject at the end, then I should think why.

I think the worst use of Subjects is as a kind of marker to "claim" ownership of a thread. Vacuous Subjects seem to work especially well for some identities and non-identities.

Then again, it depends on why you're writing. One of my reasons is to try to write better, and the results to date do not make me feel happy. However in terms of clarifying my own thinking about a topic I sometimes feel like I make a bit of progress as I struggle to get my thoughts in some semblance of proper order.

Comment Does a bear do something in the woods? (Score 4, Interesting) 37

Gosh, I hate to feel like I'm put in the position of trying to defend a corporate cancer, even if the fine people of Microsoft have tried a little to mend a few of their evil ways, but I cannot pass by the low hanging fruit. Of COURSE they did it. You know they did it, and some more besides. (With apologies to Flip...) But they had to do it or they would have been crushed or acquired or worse by some bigger and meaner, dare I say more evil, corporate cancer that did a better job of retaining its earnings by using tax dodges.

I think there may be a root of the problem: When any dimension becomes too dominant, then the system tends to collapse along that dimension. Profit uber alles destroys everything in its path.

Solutions? A progressive tax on monopoly profits? Naw, that trick will never work. (With apologies to Rocky...)

Comment Playing games with statistics will kill you! (Score 1) 127

If you have to feed the trolls/sock-puppets can't you at least resist propagating vacuous Subjects? May I even suggest going for Funny, though my Subject is only an example for extra unfunny values of funny.

But the actual problem with the clickbait headline was still the scope of the statistic. It's a local American record, not the world stage. I actually think that cost should be considered, so the joke is that in spite of spending so much more than Cuba, it is doubtful that this will push the American average above the Cuban average. Priority of healthcare in some countries is not on maximizing the profits of the insurance companies while paying the nurses as little as inhumanly possible.

Comment Re:LOL! (Score 0) 113

I hope you get the Funny, but on your sig I currently favor Rumplicans versus Dumbocrats. R is where their noses are for the orange-nosing cowardice, whereas D is for believing in various stripes of flying elephants, with or without feathers. (There's an old book by Woody Allen from back when he was funny...)

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