xyzelement (u/xyzelement)

xyzelement commented on A brief history of the absurdities of the Soviet Union laurivahtre.ee/empire-of-... · Posted by u/Maro

xyzelement · 15 days ago

I was about 10 when the USSR has collapsed and have lived in the use for over 30 years yet I still see in my parents and even myself the remnants of dehumanizing ridiculousness that existed there. Eg my dad is instinctively terrified of dealing with anyone from the government even like the mailman because that person can wield their position against you even though that's not the case here at all.

Or for example I had to point out to my dad that his neighbor open carries. Like my dad is intellectually aware of the 2nd amendment but it didn't fit in his brain that people could actually exercise a freedom so his eyes were literally blind to it (obviously I drove him to the gun shop that evening)

xyzelement commented on Budget Car Buyers Want Automakers to K.I.S.S thedrive.com/news/budget-... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

loloquwowndueo · 17 days ago

Sedan or hatchback are enough for my family - it’s what we use when we need to, I’ve never used an suv or minivan unless I need to haul cargo.

xyzelement · 17 days ago

Of course, plenty of people do. But you may also have a neighbor who thinks that you having a car at all is excessive because they take public transport and walk and never needed a car.

My point is that any degree of "thing" can be enough if you accept its implications. So for example when you go on your family vacation, you make choices about what to take and what to leave. If your two year old daughter asks last minute if she can bring her scooter (and helmet), the answer might be "sorry honey no room" whereas with a larger car you could say "sure, toss it in." Or the grownup version of that, I tossed in my inflatable paddle-board, paddle, lifejackets and pump as a last minute decision for our last vacation "just in case" we want to get on the water before the kayak rental place opens up (ended up using it.) Again, the paddle-board or scooter are totally non essential - if I had a smaller car I wouldn't even consider bringing them at all and that would be totally fine, but it's nice that I can.

BTW, we got our SUV when our 1st kid was born, it was a larger car than I thought we needed but was still kinda helpful. By now we have 3 kids and the fact that "how are we gonna fit them and their stuff" isn't one of the many things we have to deal with as parents is very nice.

Again, if I couldn't afford it or was very anti-big-car, I'd find a way to make do with a smaller vehicle but it's nice to make the other choice and that's why many many many people do.

xyzelement commented on Budget Car Buyers Want Automakers to K.I.S.S thedrive.com/news/budget-... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

loloquwowndueo · 17 days ago

I can afford an suv. That’s not the issue - I just find it ridiculous to move that much metal for a small family or one person. A regular sedan would do.

xyzelement · 17 days ago

I used to think that way (small car is best) until I had a family. yes in theory you can fit a small family in a sedan but in reality - not being able to fit a suitcase + stroller + kids bike (or whatever) into the trunk at the same time, or having your wife strain her back bending down to strap the toddler into their seat - gets old quickly!

So in practice what happens if that if you have a family and can easily afford an SUV, you get the SUV to alleviate these painpoints,

xyzelement commented on How to configure X11 in a simple way eugene-andrienko.com/en/i... · Posted by u/speckx

DonHopkins · a month ago

At least I was able to keep it under 300 pages.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...

xyzelement · a month ago

Omg I literally stumbled upon the unix haters handbook off an old JWZ blog last night and was reading it till 2 in the morning. Thank you!

xyzelement commented on Everything Else newleftreview.org/sidecar... · Posted by u/speckx

xyzelement · a month ago

I went to Dubai and other Emirates around 2018 as part of a work related Mid-East trip. There are definitely problems but this woman has an ax to grind that's so large it makes her commentary unreliable.

First - Dubai is notable having grown from a fishing village to making money on oil to - wisely - finding a way to move beyond oil into something that's sustainable and beneficial. That's admirable even on its own.

It is notable that very few people you see in Dubai are "natives." Most people you see are either foreigners there on business/vacation, or imported labor. The author takes issue with something related to that in a weird way - the more straight forward story would be that without the opportunities created in Dubai, both the business folks and the laborers would be doing something else - in both case less appealing to them. So whatever judgement you have on it, in practice everyone involved is better off than they would have been.

The author then can't avoid but take a dig at Israel and Zionism - her point/connection is a bit hard to understand but also feels warped. The Emirates being part of the Abraham accords was one of the greatest signs of the possibility of cross-religious existence and cooperation in the region - symbolic that mutual benefit can be a stronger motivator than historical division. This should be celebrated.

xyzelement commented on What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another? derekthompson.org/p/what-... · Posted by u/mmcclure

xyzelement · a month ago

One thing is always missing from the analysis of collapsed fertility is the recognition that truly religious people seem immune to the problem. Religious Jews, mormons, muslims, etc are having as many kids as a hundred years ago, if not more thanks to modern medicine and things that made things easier (I know guys with 11 kids, imagine doing that before diapers.)

From that perspective, much of the analysis about the systematic causes seems bunk - the same forces (eg the economy, costs, etc.) affect everyone. An ultra-orthodox woman averages 6.6 kids, while an atheist - about 1, despite the fact that they might live in the same Brooklyn zip code for instance.

It's just that - somehow - religious people maintain the motivation and energy to do it while atheism somehow doesn't create the same inspiration and ability. To be clear, fertility rate of around 1 means that each generation of atheists will be half the size of the previous one. So in one sense, the fertility problem will "solve itself" as subsequent generations are dominated by children of those who haven't lost their faiths.

I suspect part of the problem here is that secular society fails to turn an inward look on itself and recognize that their "secularity" is at the very least co-morbid with this problem.

I don't really have a solution since it's not like someone's going to read this and go "oh shit better pray up if I want to be a dad" (though it seems like that's true) but just wanted to point out the obvious connection between religiosity and being immune from this infertility on average.

xyzelement commented on Are you the same person you used to be? (2022) newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/rbanffy

xyzelement · 4 months ago

If your family put good values into you, then hopefully you as an adult are a reasonable evolution from the child version of you - you are manifesting those values in your own ways, appropriate to your environment.

I recently was at a Gala for a Rabbi, who wasn't born religious. His secular parents were there, and he thanked them for teaching him to always seek truth and to priories that pursuit. The pursuit itself took him to a different area (they are secular, he found truth in Judaism) but he was still operating on their parameters, just took them to a logical conclusion for himself.

Similarly, I think a 5 year old version of myself would not be too disappointed with the 44 year old version of myself, because to a large extent I then and now share my family's core values.

At the same time, you evolve in response to where you are. So for example I always knew I wanted a family, but I had to "grow up/evolve" to be someone that my someone like my wife would marry, and evolve again was we had 1, 2, and now 3 kids. Am I a different person as a father than as a single guy in NYC? Yeah. Is it a natural evolution - perhaps a richer manifestation what was always potential? Doubly yeah.

The other thing is - we have a lot more room to evolve aspects of ourselves, even as adults. For example I've personally always been very upfront, very intense, very intolerant of fuckups. All these things have ameliorated as I became a father - not because I betrayed some aspect of my personality, but because underlying that intensity was a deep care about the outcome, and with little kids, something different is required to attain the outcomes.

So things you think are "you" - you zoom out and just see as tools, and then realize that other tools are more appropriate to pursue your actual values.

Analogously from fatherhood, being a leader of larger and larger organizations has similar effect. The deep intrinsic set of abilities and behaviors that made me a rockstar engineer IC, is not the same as what makes me successful as a product leader. So as I step into these different roles, I have to figure out what's not working - and to figure out if that's really "intrinsic parts of me" that are in the way, or is there a perspective that lets me change those things while remaining true to myself.

So again thinking back to my 5 year old self, did I have what it takes to be a good father/leader? Obviously not. But I had some value of "not sucking at those things when I become them, and evolving in response" somewhere in there. So when I encountered those things, it wasn't a betrayal of self to evolve.

My oldest kid is almost 5, and I am realizing how much you get to shape some of their values/ideas. For example if I don't let them watch TV/videos, I always say "it's because this stuff doesn't make you smarter. But we watch certain things because they do make you smarter." It's less to win an argument about a particular TV moment but more to create a life long memory "dad always cared that we did things that made us smarter" kind of thing. I am sure my kids will end up in plenty situations I can't possibly anticipate but there's hope that "which one will make me smarter" is one lens they'll use to decide in their own evolution.

xyzelement commented on New Mexico made childcare free. It lifted 120k people out of poverty theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/hanson108

pestatije · 4 months ago

and still birth rates are reasonably high...why would a state pay for childcare if it wasnt to rise birth rates?

xyzelement · 4 months ago

Birthrate in the US is extremely and unsustainably low.

1.62 births per woman in 2023.

Replacement rate is 2.1 or 2.2 depends on the source.

xyzelement commented on The new climate math on hurricanes nautil.us/the-new-climate... · Posted by u/dnetesn

CalRobert · 9 months ago

I didn’t want to. But my home was a mile+ away from anything and a terrible place to walk with no public transportation in large part thanks to the actions of oil and car companies

xyzelement · 9 months ago

I couldn't help but notice in your profile that you literally created a site to find homes based on attributes that are important to you, with the first example being "transport."

xyzelement commented on Does light have an infinite lifetime? bigthink.com/starts-with-... · Posted by u/robertn702

ClarityJones · a year ago

It wasn't exactly random. The topic of the article is that light is eternal, and the commenter shared a quote from over a thousand years ago stating the same thing. So, the idea of light having an infinite lifetime is apparently not new... even if the mechanics of light are better understood these days.

xyzelement · a year ago

This is in line for me with the moment of "creation." For most of the history of science as a thing, the scientific view held that the universe was infinitely old cosmos without a beginning or end. The greek model. It was only in 1900s that big bang was theorized (by a catholic priest) that science now views that there was a moment before which the universe didn't exist and after which it did.

The fact that someone reading Genesis would have had a more accurate conception of the origin of the universe, prior to big bang becoming popularized very recently in the grand scheme of things is noteworthy.