The WTF? Thread

[Lang Spoon]

Vampire stories exist in a lot of cultures.
I don't recall why Stoker chose to attach the vampire lore to Vlad Dracul.

The weirdest thing is a terrible hack writer and his terrible hack tale captured the imagination so much. Carmilla, which he certainly eagerly mined for inspiration, is a far better vampire story.

[Janik]

Vlad the Impaler might have been a vegan
https://www.newyorker.com/news/lette...a-vegan-really

(to be honest the wtf part of his story is the scientific ability to analyse his diet from something he wrote)

Agree about the WTF part - I think the phrases signal-to-noise, vast potential for cross-contamination and wild-overclaiming over jogging merrily up to this fellas claimed techniques.

That said, most diets of the time probably would have been very substantially vegan. Unlikely for the nobility, though. Eating meat, dairy and sugar would have been obvious status symbols for them.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Vlad the Impaler might have been a vegan
https://www.newyorker.com/news/lette...a-vegan-really

(to be honest the wtf part of his story is the scientific ability to analyse his diet from something he wrote)

Well was it a letter to John hunyadi imploring him to give a plant based diet a try?

[Hot Pepsi]

Vlad the Impaler might have been a vegan
https://www.newyorker.com/news/lette...a-vegan-really

(to be honest the wtf part of his story is the scientific ability to analyse his diet from something he wrote)

Vampire stories exist in a lot of cultures.
I don't recall why Stoker chose to attach the vampire lore to Vlad Dracul.

[Satchmo Distel]

My students today told me about someone called Eugenia Cooney who has become an Internet celebrity due to having a body image that celebrates being skeletal; not just Kate Moss thin but with her ribs exposed and barely any flesh on her bones. I won't link because I find her impossible to look at but the phenomenon of her celebrity is disturbing.

[ad hoc]

Vlad the Impaler might have been a vegan
https://www.newyorker.com/news/lette...a-vegan-really

(to be honest the wtf part of his story is the scientific ability to analyse his diet from something he wrote)

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

ha ha, that is hilarious!

[Nocturnal Submission]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-67204915

[ursus arctos]

https://twitter.com/phil_lewis_/status/1715504635581018567?s=12&t=xvOireV8JOIS_CpbTtDBow

[Hot Pepsi]

Somewhere along the line, “controversial” has become a euphemism for “hated.”

[Plodder]

Cromwell may well be the least controversial figure in Irish estimation.

[Hot Pepsi]

The suggestion that we should just let the smart people be in charge is very old and it never works.

John Dewey had a lot to say about it. There was a Simpsons about it too.

Because the smart people in charge become a class of their own, with their own interests that they will protect. .

There was an anime film - probably many, but one I saw - which imagined an AI that could order all of human affairs and it would be served by a bunch of androids sprinkled about society who could help prevent conflicts by always being calm and selfless.

I can’t recall the title. It’s an intriguing idea for sci fi. Needless to say, all does not go as planned.

[scratchmonkey]

The US has enough "barren" land that if that kind of value proposition was realistic, the question is why then do we still have all this open land/why aren't people like Musk doing more of this sort of thing.

We also have a fine and lengthy history of people losing their shirts on speculative land deals as well as people assuming that a singular technocratic "genius" will solve all the problems that are largely, being created by a society built around coddling technocratic geniuses.

[Lang Spoon]

Assuming the Scottish education system is less forelock tugging obsessed with 1066 and other barely relevant bits of ye olde England than when I were a lad, someone who was schooled in Scotland (or Wales) would be at a serious disadvantage if applying for citizenship.

[Fussbudget]

Lol. Hashtag problematic.

They might have updated it but when I studied for my test a few years back the history of the UK section could more accurately have been called "history of England" as there was nothing about the other countries pre-unification. Really long section about Henry VIII though and I had two separate questions about him in my test and one about Elizabeth I

[ad hoc]

The Life in the UK book, which is the thing you have to study to take the citizenship test, has the following paragraph (which is the only one on the subject)
"Cromwell was successful in establishing the authority of the English Parliament but did this with such violence that even today Cromwell remains a controversial figure in Ireland."

"controversial"

[Amor de Cosmos]

Ah yeah, I do remember that from reading John Dos Passos eons ago.

[ursus arctos]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%...ia?wprov=sfti1

[Amor de Cosmos]

It would end up like that rubber city Henry Ford wanted to build.

Wha...?! Was that like 100,000 bouncy castles glued together?

[Hot Pepsi]

Those are defensible in the English context, but not in the context of the original poster's experience (though one has to take into account the idiosyncratic English definition of "city").

I don't think we actually disagree.

What bothered me was the implied certainty of your original post.

And we haven't even gotten to the idea that Musk would be an idiot not to increase its value 100X in ten years.

Spectacular failures have always been a feature of real estate speculation in this country and I believe that Musk is particularly ill-suited to develop a new city.

I can’t think of anyone less well-suited to that job. He has no idea how normal humans function or what they value. But he is supremely overconfident.

It would end up like that rubber city Henry Ford wanted to build.

[ursus arctos]

Very much so

As you are no doubt aware, this is playing out again in Solano County with some Thiel-adjacent techbros who have been buying up farmland on the sly, and I think it rather more likely than not that the original tweet was implicitly arguing that the phalanx of residents, local officials and regulators who have expressed horror at that idea should get with the programme and out of the way.

[S. aureus]

For me, it's as much the implication that what's stopping Elon doing something like this is that nobody's letting him do it, as anything else.
"Let him" buy this land, and "give him" control of it.

[ursus arctos]

A particularly notable attempt to do this not far from Elmo's current base

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/...unbuilt-suburb

and another

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/...harecount=MQ==

And again, the WTF aspect for me is not that he would make money (though I maintain that is not certain (see, e.g., California City and Solano Integrated Farms), but that he would increase the value 100X in ten years.

[Janik]

Yeah, I similarly can see all sorts of way someone with cash could develop a parcel of barren land and leave it worth 100x what he paid for it. I would trust Musk's abiity to spend 1000x what he originally paid for the land to successfully increase it's value by 100x. Wasting vast amounts of money on an investment and claiming that as a success because there is still some residual value afterwards is something he has proven form for.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The quickest way to 100x the value of that sort of piece of land would be to Bury a suitcase full of cash on it. Depending on where the barren land was, the suitcase could be very small