Hemingways_Shotgun

  • 12 Posts
  • 639 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 7th, 2023

help-circle




  • They didn’t ban weapons. They banned generals leading independent armies.

    Roman military was, at that time at least, privatised. The generals were the elites and the rich who would often pay for their own armies. When Caesar for example wanted to go campaigning in Gaul, he’d pay for a lot of the cost or of his own pocket. This resulted in armies that were generally more loyal to their general than to Rome.

    That could naturally be a problem, so to prevent a general from getting ideas, the law mandated that they would have to disband their armies before crossing into Italy proper (or at least leaving their army encamped outside the territory)

    That point was traditionally just before the army would cross the Rubicon river, hence the phrase “crossing the Rubicon” denoting a kind of “red line” or “point of no return”.

    When Caesar made the decision to March on Rome and incite a civil war, his army “crossed the Rubicon”.








  • I’m not saying this isn’t what needs to happen. Shut everything down, for sure.

    But the reality is that Trump and his Gestapo don’t give a shit if a blue state slows to a crawl from a walkout. Their not smart enough to grasp that blue states actually contribute more.

    In their brains, blue state walkouts just means blue state chaos, which they love.

    Until it starts hitting GOP states, the assholes in charge won’t pay attention.

    The US is already in a civil war. But only one side is actually fighting it.


  • I’ll give my smart-ass answer first before deliving into my serious answer.

    Smart-ass: Yes…tangible literally means “possible to touch”. So yeah…digital stuff isn’t, by definition “tangible” in the way that records, cds, etc… are. You’ve never “touched” an mp3 file. You’ve never “touched” a streaming movie like you handle a DVD or a VHS tape.

    Now…to my serious answer: I’ve long been working on what started as an article, became a treatise, and is now morphing into a non-fiction book about that very concept. Still a very long way to go, and with my stop-and-start creative blocks, it may never get done, but I felt it was important to write it all down while I still have a functioning brain. (I’m not getting any younger)

    I’ve added to it for years every time a new thought about it comes to me, talking about what I call “Patina” (the tendency for mechanical things like typewriters and camera lenses to age individually, almost developing a personality as they age) and equating it with the Japanese concept of Tsukomogami (the idea that physical things gain a soul after 100 years)


  • they release a subpar product, and then it fizzles.

    I’m disappointed they’re jumping on AI bullshit. But I have to wholeheartedly disagree with you about the “sub par product”.

    • My Asus desktop has been chugging along for a decade.
    • My Asus Chromebook Flip has been going with no issues for at least four or five (though it’s long since been flipped to Linux)
    • The Asus laptop I had before THAT is older than the desktop and quite happily living it’s retirement as a home-theatre PC connected to my television.

    I have quite literally never had Asus hardware break down on me.