Zompist Bboard Again

plus i'm too cynical to believe that the medieval nobility's obsession with fame and honour wasn't marketing for some business model or other. It was. Feudalism arose in a time when there wasn't a lot of money in circulation, not much of an administration, so everything had to be mediated through p...

Ah, you're right, China! dynasty changes seem to have been, at least in part, about tax and land reform. ah, may the suit-and-tie dynasty soon lose the mandate of heaven.

In some parts of Latin America, it's apparently been mostly the same people running the show for all the time since the initial Spanish and Portuguese conquest. And that was a long time ago. i mean... truth, but in fairness in europe they literally have kings with lineages dating back to charles th...

I wonder if feudal lords used enshittification: like the first decade it was all "come to my fiefdom, you'll get land and you can keep *half* of your crop, and the lord keeps the church nice and clean, pretty frescoes in the town, safe roads, good irrigation" and then in the twelfth year i...

sigh... I hate to defend musk. yes, Tesla is kind of a scam, boring company is kind of a scam, hyperloop is definitely a scam. but SpaceX is a legit company. this is probably the merit of somebody else, like the chief of engineering or whoever, but still. those things made putting kilos in orbit a l...

in local news, most of the polling companies are saying the "reject" option will win by a comfortable margin. some analysts predict there will not be a vote on december. the document is not finished, but it already has the republicanos (the alt-right party) program all over it.

i quite like having each document in its own font or combo of fonts. just like making them different colours, it helps with remembering what they're about, to sort of make a mental place for each thing. the conlang in currently playing around with is going to be in Raleway, i think.

we people can tell fiction from reality like we can survive a three meter fall: that is to say, for the most part. at the end of the day stories are, besides the things that we naturally tell ourselves and that give meaning to life blabla, powerful tools for powerful people to play around with. the ...

as i understood it we were on the frequency of such behavior as compared to today, i.e. that in the past it was much less frequent. on the whole I think for a moderate value of 'much' (say, 10 to 100 times) this is probably true... i must have subbed in my head 'much more rare' with something like '...

every year? is this... dareisay... the norm in the first world?

Traditionally, Marxists prided themselves on being "scientific". Recently, Marxism has been co-opted by the Frankfurt School, which is closer to Hegelian idealism than Marxist social science. it has to be considered that what marx thought of as 'science' is hardly what we think of as scie...

Yeah and, by contrast, moving house per person per annum was probably much higher in the fifth century in germany than it is today.

I don't think i know that that was the case: we know goods moving across vast distances wasn't rare in the ancient world, the byzantines had mostly danish royal guard, christianity spread pretty fast... I don't know whether people migrate more now or whether they did so more back in the day (for any...

sure it was, what do you mean? it just takes long... weeks or months instead of one or two days. but i know peruvians who take a *bus* to Lima from Santiago, three days of sitting down, to spend christmas with their peeps, and that's when a one-day alternative is relatively easy to access for three ...

honestly it feels like having christmas and new years in winter is probably quite harsh, indoorsy and even somewhat claustrophobic ? Winter is harsh and makes you want to be indoors-- that's why Northern Europeans have the big holidays then. (I say Northern because so far as I know it's Germans and...

used to be march, when the school year begins. these days it doesn't feel like anything cause there's not been a lot of yearly shape to my life, just the succession of the seasons, and there's no beggining or ending there. also, i'm southern and i feel like if anything, summer is the first one cause...

yeah, it's most likely a predefined text with replacements for your name and so on

he read his godfather, or watched his star trek. served cold blabla

pretty sure beautyfulsoup works fine with selenium, which in turn can run in headless mode. I don't know other scraping tools in python for this purpose, but they should be indifferent: still, i suppose it would be easier to ask zomp to give you the files in a pendrive and store it however you were ...

mñeh. i don't buy it. it's very romantic and might sound deep, but i think in practice art doesn't mean that, and that that's not what we care about when we say art is a worthwhile thing: people don't like asimov's foundation, chopin's nocturnes etcetera because they give them a glimpse into the sou...