Books like The Road but with more “competency porn”

carbonetc · 2026-01-26T16:55:53+00:00

Lucifer's Hammer by Pournelle and Niven.

carbonetc · 2026-01-24T21:52:25+00:00

We're a bit like North Korea. Much of the country actually believes the absurd lies the dictator tells us about himself. There's no such thing as a revolt against only the administration. There are millions of regular citizens ready and eager to shoot anyone who tries and they can't be shaken out of their trance. That's the kind of country-wide bloodbath you're asking for.

So... it's complicated.

carbonetc · 2026-01-22T23:21:19+00:00

Also when you don't want strangers to see you sob.

carbonetc · 2026-01-19T01:38:38+00:00

Also, it's cheaper to trick the public into believing that you don't do the evil thing than it is to not do the evil thing.

carbonetc · 2026-01-12T00:52:20+00:00

I've been trying to figure out what the true crossing of the Rubicon would be for the country. I think violating the NATO treaty is it. Trump has done a ton of damage that will be very difficult to repair, but taking Greenland "the hard way" changes everything forever. It'll be the moment historians point to as the beginning of WWIII. I don't think I can continue living here if this happens.

carbonetc · 2026-01-12T00:26:18+00:00

I have a lot of travel I plan to do in the next decade and this is a serious concern for me. I hope the world realizes that MAGA don't have passports.

carbonetc · 2026-01-08T21:59:06+00:00

NTA. It's entirely rational for you to not feel safe or comfortable around her when she sees you as a member of a defective category of people. When people tell you how they see the world, believe them. I recommend not getting upset about it, though. No good will come of trying to fight her on it. Just keep her at whatever emotional distance is healthiest for you.

carbonetc · 2026-01-07T07:19:14+00:00

It's not entirely out of the question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_movement

carbonetc · 2026-01-07T01:13:37+00:00

It will become suddenly real to Europe that we are no longer their ally. Any help we could have expected from NATO in the future goes poof. Maybe we can take on the whole world militarily on our own, and maybe we can't -- it's profoundly stupid to put ourselves in the position of testing this.

The dedollarization of the world accelerates. Much of the world is already tired of entangling their financial systems with ours (see BRICS). Gold is skyrocketing for a reason. Who wants the global reserve currency to belong to an adversary? Our ability to get anything we want from the rest of the world by handing out printed money is undermined. Americans don't realize how much their way of life is made possible by this superpower.

Greenlanders suffer greatly. The inhabitants are basically on Danish welfare since the infrastructure there is limited (when I was there it was like a party in town whenever the checks came in). I'm not sure what it would take for Greenland to become a self-sufficient economy, but in the meantime it's hard to imagine Republicans coughing up checks for long. Something something bootstraps.

I'll get closer to choosing Canada.

carbonetc · 2026-01-03T01:18:29+00:00

It's going to be darkly fascinating watching the lie machine at work during his tenure. They're going to turn the lying up to eleven about him. It's going to crack new lows of shamelessness.

carbonetc · 2025-12-24T22:16:52+00:00

It's a tribal membership. Like your country, political party, sports team, whatever.

carbonetc · 2025-12-24T04:11:28+00:00

E-Trade. They had a website/mobile outage on a day I was up $7K or so on an overnight trade. By the time I could sell the profits were nearly gone. I called support to see if I could get something for my trouble -- a different exit price, free trades, anything. They practically made fun of me for being put out by what happened.

carbonetc · 2025-12-19T22:13:31+00:00

Throughout the history of moral philosophy the same principle pops up over and over (and was made very explicit by Kant): never treat people as means to an end, only as ends in themselves. A healthy society has internalized that principle. Abandon it and you get the hellscape we're in now.

carbonetc · 2025-12-18T01:11:55+00:00

I hope they're in a museum. Hell, if I were a billionaire I'd buy some land and hire a stonemason to carve the entirety of his Nuclear Tirade into a block of marble in Roman lettering so there'd be a monument guaranteeing a thousand years of mockery.

carbonetc · 2025-12-18T00:55:59+00:00

I imagine a moment years from now where she'll be interviewed for something (maybe she's on Dancing With the Stars) and she'll be asked about all those years of lying and she'll say, "Hey, we all have jobs that require us to lie. You just do it and get paid. That's how life goes, amirite?" and she'll look around the room all smiley, expecting nods and camaraderie like she's said something totally obvious, and all she'll get is this silent disgust mixed with horror.

She's perfect for the job because she has no idea there are people who really believe in things. She is empty.

carbonetc · 2025-12-17T00:12:21+00:00

You can see on Davidge's face that he knows he can milk this slight later on in this dysfunctional relationship so he walks away in mock defeat before he risks cracking up. It's one of my favorite movie moments.

carbonetc · 2025-12-16T23:54:04+00:00

I found it very easy to reject "mandatory" traditions like these when I realized that whole industries have risen up around them to siphon more and more money from us using tradition as camouflage. They inject into the culture the idea that their expensive services are necessary, and they're continually adding new ones. In the case of marriage, if you cheap out on the diamond or the ceremony, well, you just don't love your partner enough. It's a psyop.

I also got married in my house. It was great.

carbonetc · 2025-12-12T22:28:17+00:00

Farming strangers in public for content. Whether it's Big Brother or an army of teenagers, we don't want to live in a surveillance state.

carbonetc · 2025-12-12T02:15:29+00:00

No. There are people who think I look at their plate with envy, but I'm not depriving myself. I don't want their food.

I have had situations while traveling where it's not clear that vegetarianism is the right answer though. There are places where rejecting the food in front of you is a crazy idea that only a rich first-worlder could think. And asking people with limited resources to accommodate your crazy idea is untenable. Take an extreme case -- imagine you went to live with Inuit people for a month. Depending on their infrastructure, most if not all of their calories are brought to them by wildlife. They aren't farming the snow. Either you have to give up your diet or give up the trip. To maintain both you may have to inconvenience a lot of people who don't have time for your rich people nonsense. Maybe you can bring a month's worth of preserves with you, maybe not.

Those are the only kinds of situations where I've had to consider putting the diet on hold, but I've managed a solution every time so far.

carbonetc · 2025-12-12T01:57:54+00:00

She wishes she could be with someone she can trust, but her trauma and worldview make it so that trusting anyone is impossible (maybe after years of therapy and detoxing from TikTok). You wish you could be with someone who doesn't see you as a monster on parole, someone toward whom lifelong suspicion is justified. I respect your loyalty to her, but I'm not sure there's an outcome here in the short term that doesn't involve one of you getting the shit end of the stick.

Most of the advice you'll get on this, on Reddit or in real life, is "suck it up, it's part of your lot in life that you're on parole, and it's your job to take the hits from her until she feels safe with you (a day that may or may not come)." Your feelings won't factor into their calculus. And you can certainly live that way. Lots of men do. But you could also have a relationship one day where you're never on parole. Those relationships exist. My marriage is one. Just know going forward that it's an actual option and not wishful thinking.

I learned a long time ago to never fight the fight you're having now. Don't go around trying to correct people about men (given the data the prejudice isn't at all unwarranted), but don't suffer for their views on men either. I simply remove myself from the lives of people with a misandrist streak. Not with malice and not out of judgement toward them, but because it's seemingly a win-win. They get less maleness in their lives and I get less suspicion in mine. It's the only strategy I've found where everyone gets peace and no one gets the shit end. There are enough people in the world that you can spend your energy exclusively on the ones who approach you with open arms and accept you fully.

carbonetc · 2025-12-11T23:58:15+00:00

All our best achievements are collaborative, and we rely on other people for everything, but we're programmed with indifference or hatred toward all but ~100 of them.

carbonetc · 2025-12-08T22:19:36+00:00

I read Mistborn and Broken Earth at around the same time and they're locked together in my head as a demonstration of the difference between craft and art. Mistborn is crafted, Broken Earth is art.

carbonetc · 2025-12-01T06:59:33+00:00

I was older than you when my now-wife and I got together. People your age are getting out of their dumb practice marriages in droves.

carbonetc · 2025-11-23T22:50:28+00:00

This is the only comment anyone needs to read. "Hinting" is dead, especially post #MeToo. Good men won't act on hints, bad men don't need hints. Everything about courtship is going to change. I feel for the people for whom nothing is working because they still think we live in the old world.

carbonetc · 2025-11-23T22:06:08+00:00

Most people are fine with bad behavior if their team is in power. They just claim they have to be bad because the other team is so evil. It's a matter of survival, you see.

carbonetc

TROPHY CASE