[-] Paragone@lemmy.ml 2 points 8 months ago

Read Paul Fussell's books on the North American Class system:

the difference between Middle-Class & Working-Class is cultural, not income, and it's rather indellible, too.

I'd now have Upper-Middle-Class, Financial-Class, Middle-Class, as distinct groups/cultures.

Middle-class judge you by your job-position.

Working-class judge you by your money.

The cultural-difference is profound.

Try getting an Upper-Middle-Class person to honestly accept you as valid, when you're a homeless person ( despicable/inherently-nonvalid, human-garbage ) and they're addicted to clawing all the Upper-Middle-Class status they can..

That can be quite educating.

Class-identity is as ancient as hierarchy in our society, so at least as old as agriculture, but I'd say it's as old as village-chief, so .. perhaps 0.5 million years, min.


Books that I find profounder, importanter, include Kegan & Lahey's "Immunity to Change", on our unconscious-mind's automatic-fighting-off of growing-up, protecting entrenched-dysfunction, and how to correct/dismantle that sabotage.

Halvorson's little, and important, "The 8 Motivational Challenges".

Logan, King, & Fischer-Wright's book condensing their research into something readable for us, "Tribal Leadership", on the 5 cultural-process levels ( they wrongly identify them as "stages", but stages, like Kegan-3, Kegan-4, etc, are irreversible ).

Moneyarchy has been crushing more & more & more lives into level-1 & level-2 culture, and there are consequences of that.

Level-1 is where mass-shootings arise from, and in 2023 the US had over 600 of them.

Level-2 is where conspiracism grows.

Not understanding that book should be considered criminal-negligence, for government-authority, nowadays.

Lanier's "Foreign to Familiar", and then Hofstede's "Exploring Culture" show how the climate, the civilization, the culture, that we are born into, fundamentally-alter our "personality" in predictable ways.

John Truby's "The Anatomy of Genres" and "The Anatomy of Story" should be considred required-reading for anybody who unconsciously uses story to form the story of their own meaning ( which is all of us ).

He's got a couple of mistakes, as many profound books do, his concept of Village is insane, being Wild West Village, instead of the dozens-of-millenia old Tribal Mother Village, and his concept of humor is wrong, too, being based on "the drop", which is a US thing, and not the core of humor, at all. The real core of humor, is being surprised by the improbable. Creative-misinterpretation humor shows this.

Hofstadter's "Godel Escher Bach: and Eternal Golden Braid" is the core competence in all of Western Philosophy. All the Western Philosophers who reject, ignore, or don't-understand, the core points in that book, are not competent in philosophy, period.

These books all outclass many of the books he's recommending.

[-] Paragone@lemmy.ml 2 points 8 months ago

Zillions of other things crowded-it-out from your awareness, is all..

I defy you to count all the things you've had to remember, or think-on, since you created that community, Hoomin..

As one gets older, it happens more: more things-in-the-bin, harder-to-find-a-particular-thing.

Consider, though, that now your community has got other people interested, and it wasn't done through shilling, but through accidental-forgetfulness.

Karma provides lessons, we only have to be honest-enough to earn their essence, you know?

_ /\ _

[-] Paragone@lemmy.ml 3 points 9 months ago

IF you want Steam, THEN please consider every variant in the official Ubuntu family.

Steam-support told me in their system, iirc in early 2023, that they ONLY support the Ubuntu family ( directly ).

As Linus Torvalds noted, it isn't possible to release software that is going to work on all distros.

Even glibc has been broken by one, in that talk of his, and it wasn't a niche distro, either, iirc.


Pick which subset you CAN afford to support, and do not add to that subset until you're rolling in money, from your linux-customerbase.

( slight sarcasm on the last line, but business is business: destroying-resources costs, and if there is no benefit, it isn't sane to continue doing it. )


Decide which capabilities/functions/apps you NEED, and then don't even consider distros that break your required-set on you.

_ /\ _

[-] Paragone@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 months ago

Read Hofstede's "Exploring Culture", and consider that a person in a high-collectivity culture, which also is a high-power-distance culture, may well answer the survey with what "face" requires them to say, instead of answering with what they, themselves, feel.

If you aren't correcting for that, you're doing propaganda, not science.

Different cultures REQUIRE different subjectivities be taken-into-account.

I think it would be more valid to dig into specific dimensions of happiness, & make some of those objective ( cortisol-blood-levels, for measuring stress, e.g. )

WHEN you ask people in individualistic cultures a question, and THEN you ask people in collectivist cultures the SAME question, they are not answering the same question, they are answering the social-pressure question, instead.

It makes complete mincemeat of cross-cultural measuring of "objective" things.

Try reading Lanier's "Foreign to Familiar" book, & understand just HOW different warm-vs-nordic cultures are, in instinct/reactions,

then it should be more obvious how such surveys are disinformation, not information.

[-] Paragone@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 months ago

I'm Buddhist, so I'm answering this question from my real-life standpoint:

Authentic Realization of one's Ultimate ( original awareness ) Nature.

What could be more precious?

Given that ALL of one's unconscious-mind's mechanisms exist to block that from happening, to protect unconsciousness's Eternal unbroken dominion, what could be more difficult to earn/obtain?

All the distractions in the world, "helping" one to NOT earn one's deepest profoundest Truth...

All the profits that cease, should one get anywhere in self-realization...

You simply don't need any external resource, for there to be a most-precious-resource, you know?

[-] Paragone@lemmy.ml 3 points 11 months ago

and if you consider that "economic barrier to entry" can make any bigger company, who is able to scoop a startup's code & sell the use of it, can extinguish the startup who created the code ...

then, yes, there are definitely situations where protection-against-competitors, some of whom have DEEP pockets, could be an actual requirement, for opensourcing one's code.

"Coopetition" Bill Gates coined, where you "cooperate" with your competitors, but, being Microsoft, you do it so you can snuff them, soon.

I can definitely see why a company would want to be able to allow limited use of their code, globally, but to legally-prohibit using it to destroy them.

[-] Paragone@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 months ago

I've been told that to start a fight in Francophones, just demand to know whether grapefruit ( pamplemousse, iirc ), is male or female...

: P

The book "The Alphabet Versus The Goddess" by Leonard Shlain, makes the point that women's-rights simply don't progress as quickly, in countries which have gendered languages...

So, Anglo cultures pushed women's-rights, whereas Latin cultures .. won't, don't, drag their heels, etc...

That book is now a couple ?decades? old?

It's still true.

Conditioning an entire population's System-1 ( Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast & Slow", the System-1 is the default-instinct & the trained-now-automatic-expertise system, it also is the system that is both addiction & prejudice ) into gendering everything, automatically, may well prevent equal-validity from ever having place...

Mind you, I now want to see which Nordic/Scandi languages are gendered, & which Middle-East languages are gendered, to see if that holds in those parts of the world, not just in the Americas...

... digging ...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender

( that isn't a quick read... may come back to it some day... )

Bingo!

"The grammatical gender of nouns is one of two: a noun may be masculine or it may be feminine, and there is no neutral option. Moreover, masculinity is the default grammatical gender in Arabic and a word does not have to have anything special in order to reflect this. Femininity, on the other hand, is not default and a noun would have to have something special to reflect this gender in Arabic."

from

https://www.learnarabiconline.com/gender/

So, there is ZERO hope of equal-validity in Arabic culture, because the language programs Arabic people's System-1 into 2 exclusive validity-categories, with male being inherently more-valid, by established language-habit.

What about Hebrew?

https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-an-increasingly-nonbinary-world-is-gendered-hebrew-willing-to-adapt/

No wonder women can't get equal-validity in Jewish culture...

( I read a Jewess's writing ~ Nobody EVERY celebrated the birth of a Jewish girl: only boys are celebrated ~ .. which explains the damage in the stereotypical "Jewish mother", a woman whose validity has been contempted by all in her culture, until the damage is her most defining feature... )

So, it looks like equal-rights/equal-validity for women is .. baseless, in some/many cultures...

Interesting, but depressing.

: \

[-] Paragone@lemmy.ml 3 points 11 months ago

Go read McMoneagle's book of predictions: it is awefully wrong.

Remote Viewing is a modified kind of dreaming:

Remote Viewers are in dreams, and their ( very primitive brain, it seems ) ESP is patching-in pieces of what it perceives, but .. it is patching those things into a dream, so the result is .. rather groundless, with fragments of truth in it.

I trust the hard photos from NASA & ESA more than I trust McMoneable's dreams..

Yes, the youtube vid of him being interviewed about his helping Japan find sites that archaeology says did have to do with an early royal of theirs ( an Empress? ) is convincing, but I've not fact-checked it.

It may well be spot-on: ancient Japanese history isn't my interest.

https://youtu.be/2PxK6M9GbZE

If he was predicting people living on Mars, the same Mars that sometimes comes up to warm-enough to melt water, but has dry-ice on the ground, in the winters at the poles, and planet-scale dust-storms, and CO2 lasering in its atmosphere, and an atmosphere that is 1/1000th as thick ( from the aviation perspective ) as ours, with nearly-no oxygen loose in it...

I'm sticking with the machines that map & photograph the things.

[-] Paragone@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

There was an item in New Scientist, perhaps last century, of an experiment done at a hospital's ICU ( UK, iirc, the hospital had some kind of religious name, like St (somethingorother) ),

and that experiment tested whether patient-to-patient infections were affected by ionizers ( which charge the air, making particles in the air stick to surfaces, like walls, objects, whatever )...

That experiment had no effect in the control condition, but the ionizer-test condition reduced those infections down to ZERO.

No hospital with any reputation would dare use such "New Age woo", of course, no matter that evidence, combined with the Hippocratic Oath ( 1st do no harm! ), should oblige its use.

Bah.

I couldn't find much of anything through DuckDuckGo.com

and Scholar.Google.com had stuff that wasn't what I was trying to find,

and normal google had this

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22ionizer%22%20%22icu%22%20%22hospital%22%20%22infection%22%20reduce%20patient&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-m#ip=1

Anyways, according to the NO cases of inter-patient infection that was reported in the study I remember, it should have been made globally normal.

Notice that the things are called, by many, "air cleaners".

I'm disputing that air cleaners have no effect on health ( put a box-fan with a 20"-square furnace-filter on the suction-side of it, and it'll reduce the amount of dust, without any expensive products, and in some areas, in industrial or desert zones, e.g. it'll likely reduce the harm done to one's lungs by that air ), and pointing-out that different definitions of "air cleaner" are valid, though not about the same thing.

[-] Paragone@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

What are the security-recommendations you have for Linux, Wine, & Proton users,

that we simply wouldn't, or don't commonly, think of, given your abnormal expertise/view?

Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, eh?

_/_

[-] Paragone@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Wikipedia has an ISB# search system, but the only way I know-of to use it,

is to bash around on wikipedia until one succeeds in finding a link that uses that search-system, in some page's References section,

...and then when I get to that system, then change the ISB# to the book I'm trying to find...

I WISH that Lemmy had an inbuilt facility for giving it a book, and it would produce the wikipedia-book-search link that is required for that book,

because then the viewer gets ALL venues for the thing, plain as day.

: )

Here's seconding your vote for OpenLibrary, btw: they showed me that a couple of textbooks weren't skippable or replaceable ( "Principles of Yacht Design", e.g. )

As for links to Amazon: I do that, specifically because the reviews for the books are so important to deciding what the worth of the book is, for any individual reader!

You need to read the sample AND the reviews, often, to decide if it's worth that amount of money.

I wish I could provide both the Amazon link AND the Wikipedia ISB# link ( for the paper version, obviously, as every ebook platform has its own ISB#'s ), and then people could see the sample, the reviews, AND could see all the options for getting it, laid-out before their eyes.

( :

[-] Paragone@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Possibly due to each discovery being some bacteria that eat exactly 1 chemistry of plastic.

: )

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Paragone

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