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Ahistorical Marxist "analysis" on HN?

War has existed since the dawn of humanity, thousands of years prior to the advent of capitalism, and has been fought by societies with every kind of socioeconomic and political configuration. War is a human institution and not contingent upon a particular economic arrangement.


> Unless the nation is physically under attack, the president's day-to-day job is probably physically less demanding than that of pilots.

Having worked in the White House, this is 110% wrong. The Presidency is an extraordinarily demanding job. The cognitive demands and the and physical toll it takes on you is tremendous.


> Wikipedia is as good as anything else.

Encyclopedias – including Wikipedia – are not acceptable sources for college-level work certainly. They are tertiary literature, which can provide an overview to someone trying to get a toehold into a subject, and which can hopefully point them toward primary and secondary sources. But tertiary sources are not typically allowable citations for college research.


Yes, you are right that Wikipedia is inappropriate in academic settings.

But, this thread has discussed the reliability of Wikipedia.


Creatine increases levels of DHT in the body: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19741313/

DHT appears to drive hair-loss in genetically-predisposed men: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK278957/

Propecia's mechanism of action to stop/reverse male pattern baldness is to block the conversion of testosterone into DHT: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK513329/

There is not a proven pathway from creatine to hairloss, but if you are genetically predisposed to male pattern baldness then increasing the amount of DHT in your system via creatine supplementation may contribute to further hair loss insofar as DHT drives hair loss for certain men.


Thanks for the info. Sounds like a contra-indication for me.


I will second IINA. It's not the swiss army knife that VLC is, but it seems to stream videos from a NAS with better/smoother performance than VLC, and its interface is more mac-native.


Don't forget full HDR support of IINA that VLC and most other alternatives on Apple Silicon don't have.

However, VLC still provides the best subtitle style customizations.


> > Premodern agriculture was characterized primarily as being low-surplus and high-labor, it takes a lot of people a lot of time to produce enough food for everyone to eat

I think this is the crux of all the other socio-economic superstructure arguments the article's author makes. The assertion is that Tolkien's fantasy world of wizards, wraiths, walking trees, dragons, invisibility rings, dwarves, elves, etc would have a realistic medieval material production culture.

In order to imagine an idealized/fantasy bucolic shire, wouldn't Tolkien just imagine soil that's more fertile and nutritional crops with higher yield? Would this be the furthest he asks the reader to stretch their imagination?


We already have a real-world example of that[1], which is in medieval times in China, the land was a lot more fertile than in Europe, and with a crop also more nutrition dense (rice). So what happened there is that, instead of achieving something similar to the Shire, the plots of land became smaller per family, to achieve again an equilibrium where each family had enough to eat for themselves, but not a lot to spare. So more fertile/nutritional crops, while it would def help the Shire, would not be the whole answer without some sort of population management.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/09/04/collections-bread-how-did-they...


Yes, that's one example, but it's not the only way that species adapt to resource availability.

Ecologists have hypothesized r-selected and K-selected species as differing responses to resources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

Homo sapiens may be r-selected. Different cultures of homo sapiens may lean more toward r- or more towards K- (this is part of the thesis of Eric Jones's The European Miracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_European_Miracle).

Insofar as Tolkien's work is a fantasy and Hobbits are not real, would it strain our credulity to imagine that they are K-selected?


The "worst sleep" map is just two demographics: African Americans and Appalachians.

https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/charts/22

https://artsandsciences.sc.edu/appalachianenglish/node/783


Astra is not private yet. The SEC is still reviewing the take-private offer that Astra's board accepted from the group of investors. The take-private move is essentially an acquisition.


When I was young, I would go down to Front Street in Philly on weekend nights. It's an industrial area so the street is real wide to allow for 18-wheelers to turn in and out of the warehouses and factories. This made it ideal for drag racing and showing off souped-up cars. It would get really crowded with folks showing off their cars and participating in the races.

One weekend after my buddy and I went down there, I saw on the news that the police intervened finally to stop the drag racing. It was a very big operation to quickly and simultaneously pull enough cops cars out to block both ends of Front Street entirely to corral all of the racers and spectators in. Helicopters were also deployed in case someone wanted to try to speed through the city to escape. In the end, all the cars they managed to corral got impounded. I don't know what the long term effect was on the drag racers.

I imagine that if you're going to do it right – and not just set up a bunch of reckless high speed chases through neighborhoods/cities – it actually has to be a fairly large operation, pulling in a lot of resources for a substantial amount of time. And I don't know if it ultimately stops drag racing or just pauses it for a while, nor do I know what the opportunity cost is of pulling all the resources away from other policing tasks.

While I'm generally for impounding drag racers and ATV swarms, I do think there are tradeoffs and risks that the police department leadership has to take into account.


Johns Hopkins started out that way. Only grad students, no undergrads, pure research university. When they first admitted undergrads they had no separate courses, they just had to backbench the grad courses and listen.


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