More Titan submersible stuff. Sad, but "my family did one of the most dangerous things plausible on planet Earth and died" seems weird as a subject to bother publishing.
“My family did something somewhat dangerous and died because it was made a zillion times more dangerous than it should have been by the choices of a foolish and greedy CEO” seems publication-worthy to me.
A lot of being Catholic is just receiving and producing words. Mass is basically an exchange of words. With a little music and a one-way flow of cash. Confession is, well, words. The profession of priesthood is basically one of words. Yes, there is day labor in some charitable activities, but those same activities are performed by non-Catholics and the irreligious as well.
Better to to tie education of words and numbers to their use. What happened to shop class?
Generation of parents who were ashamed of their kids having to swing a hammer for a living. See my comment below.
When I started working in the trades every single person said it would be hard on my body. Some days it’s hard on my body. But I honestly would break my knee again if it meant I could be assured that I’d never have the mental anguish of pretending like I cared about a computer screen for eight hours (…12 hours?). It ruined my friendships, hollowed out my family, and led me to addiction.
I don’t think that stuff happens with everybody but we all make trade-offs
They weren’t ashamed, they wanted their kids to have a higher quality of life. They looked around and saw themselves and most others who swung hammers to have a lower quality of life than they would have preferred for their kids compared to those in offices.
Everyone can swing a hammer after they get home from work if swinging the hammer is virtuous.
> They weren’t ashamed, they wanted their kids to have a higher quality of life. They looked around and saw themselves and most others who swung hammers to have a lower quality of life than they would have preferred for their kids compared to those in offices.
Is that true? I do not know about the US, but in the UK skilled people who work with their hands out earn many who work in offices, find it easier to be self employed, and have greater job security.
It was true. Probably started tilting back the other way after 2008. There is a lag in perception though, but it’s still very much boom and bust type work. Healthcare is probably the new dependable, decent paying, blue collar work.
Office work, however, lends itself to scaling, so earning potential is always more. Swinging hammers is great, but owning the business that hires the people who swings hammers is going to allow you to earn more, because it can scale. But you’re right back to office work.
> There is a lag in perception though, but it’s still very much boom and bust type work.
Boom and bust in something like construction, true, but what about something like plumbing? its not cyclical because so much of the work is repairs and maintenance. On the other hand there are lots of white collar jobs that are cyclical.
We have had a huge strike in the UK (specifically at the largest local authority in Europe) because bin men's pay (not basic pay - it was a bit more complex) was reduced to bring them in line with teaching assistants (because of a court ruling that it was discriminatory to pay mostly male bin men more than mostly female teaching assistant).
Lots of office jobs have been badly paid compared to skilled work well before 2008. The influx of East Europeans slowed it down, but did not reverse the trend.
>Lots of office jobs have been badly paid compared to skilled work
"Pay" is not a scalar measure, it is a vector with multiple components. Roughly speaking, pay is short for "pay to quality of life at work ratio". Which incorporates everything a person thinks about when choosing what to sell, including volatility of pay, what coworkers will be like, possibility of injury, commute time, the weather and conditions you will be working in, potential upward movement, potential for harassment at work, location of work, potential of finding a spouse with xyz characteristics, etc.
Swinging hammers or plumbing or whatever can strictly pay more, but not may not be sufficient to incentivize people to choose to do them over being paid less in an office. Pay someone 300,000 GBP per year to do 40 hours per week of plumbing working, and the UK would have plenty of plumbers, and parents would be recommending their kids to become plumbers. But if the differential is only 10,000 GBP? Maybe not worth it.
Given that construction is THE ONLY INDUSTRY that's had significant productivity backsliding over the last 40 years, I hope we wage spiritual warfare against the current crop in the construction industry. It's currently ontologically bankrupt and needs to be cleaned out and replaced with a new crop/generation of workers who actually care about what they do.
The double problem, is that groups who historically were lower class, successfully realized they could grift by building really low quality houses nationwide. Now, the atrophy in skills in literally any kind of blue collar work means that even garbage shit "plumbers" or "electricians", etc are successfully charging at least 150+ an hour in rural west virgina just to do very basic work. I got quoted 500 USD to change an ANODE ROD in my water heater. Every single fucking contractor I get ALWAYS goes to home depot and finds illegal immigrants to do the labor THEY should be doing for peanuts, is verbally abusive to them while they are doing the real work, and exploits them. All because the market allows and radically rewards this.
So unironically most workers in construction and many other trades have been a significant part of the decline in QoL in this country, and especially in causing housing inflation.
Catholic mass is arguably a form of programming in which people are hypnotized into hymnal verse/response in the hopes that by parroting the language the associated psychological changes will follow. Language is a means of programming other humans.
Hypocrisy is the shadow aspect of this in which the language is parroted while the language's opposite is practiced in actuality. This kind of practice is usually regarded as "demonic," whereas aligning representations with reality is usually ascribed to "divinity," its opposite.
It's not really clear to me to what extent merely manipulating language actuates reality, but it is important to note that the "Logos" is one of the central concepts of Christian and Western thought.
> Catholic mass is arguably a form of programming in which people are hypnotized into hymnal verse/response
Nobody can really blame you for the impression you got/get from the Novus Ordo Missae.
However, that’s not really what Mass was like for the laity for most of the past 1,000 years (much longer actually, but the history of Western Catholic liturgy is complex so I’ll leave it at that). It was mostly a context for silent mental prayer that, ideally, (1) is informed by the sanctoral/seasonal calendar, (2) prepares the worshippers to join themselves spiritually to the sacrifice offered on the altar by the priest, (3) prepares them to receive Jesus in Holy Communion.
You can experience the same today at the Traditional Latin Mass. The difference in atmosphere can be rather shocking if all you’ve ever experienced is the N.O. A lot of newcomers, who are also lifelong Catholics, relate a feeling of not knowing what to do with themselves throughout the liturgy — well, you’re supposed to cultivate your interior life, spend the 60-90 minutes actually praying instead of just rattling off verbal responses and warbling out bad hymns.
Even with vernacular liturgy, the goal is internal contemplation and ideally application. What's even the point of going if you're intending to just be talked to? No one is keeping attendance.
It’s not so much a matter of Latin versus vernacular, more the way it goes as a whole.
Let’s compare an average daily Mass (e.g. 8 AM on a ferial day at St. Joe’s, no music) in the Novus Ordo with a TLM Low Mass. Let’s assume that in either form it lasts about 45 minutes.
In the N.O., from start to finish, the priest is in a kind of dialogue with the people, accentuated by the versus populum arrangement that has become the universal norm. In between the responses of the laity and for a stretch of time surrounding the consecration, there is time for interior/silent prayer by the laity. The laity’s posture changes from sitting, to standing, to kneeling many times throughout. On the whole, the flow of the liturgy is marked by outward verbal and postural activity of the laity punctuating the span of 45 minutes. That is by design, and is supposed to be conducive to so called “active participation”. Now, and this is important, if that N.O. Mass was offered entirely in Latin and the laity in attendance knew and spoke all the responses in Latin, it really wouldn’t change “the way it goes”.
At TLM Low Mass for the same ferial day, the laity would kneel after the priest begins the prayers at the foot of the altar, and some might
change their posture to/from sitting a couple of times over the next 45 minutes, while others would kneel the entire time per their preference. No responses are offered by the laity, only by the altar server/s assisting the priest. The priest faces the same direction as the people the entire time, except when distributing Holy Communion to them, that is toward the altar, a.k.a. ad orientem because classically that would be eastward. Much of the text of the Mass is prayed sotto voce by the priest, i.e. it’s inaudible or barely audible by those in attendance. On the whole, the liturgy is marked by near silence and the laity in attendance joining their silent prayers to the quiet actions of the priest at the altar.
Apologies. I think there was a confusion of terms. There's only one church in my county I know of that even offers traditional mass, and it is in Latin. I admit to only having attended once, because I felt too disconnected.
My only point was that, in my mind, active participation is even more so mental than physical. I'm sure you understand this from your scare quotes around the same term. I appreciate your deeper understanding of these processes and your attempts to share such.
EDIT: I think graemep's first paragraph in this response does a much more eloquent job of making the same point as in my head.
The cost of shop class. The region where I grew up abandoned shop class and orchestra as the tax base declined due to industry moving to the South. Meanwhile, my mom taught CS at an extension campus of a state university, and her students were getting high paying jobs as programmers after one year of instruction.
Mass, music, confession etc. is supposed to have meaning. Just memorising and repeating the words is not supposed to be what happens. Mass is supposed to have real effects (transubstantiation) and like all prayer is supposed to encourage contemplation and the experience of God. Confession is supposed to give people a fresh start, and often helps people deal with problems and move on - you might as well say that therapy is just an exchange of words. What about things such as silent prayer?
> The profession of priesthood is basically one of words.
As above, a lot more to it. Lots of time spent on pastoral work.
> Yes, there is day labor in some charitable activities, but those same activities are performed by non-Catholics and the irreligious as well.
So? That does not prevent it from being a part of being a Catholic of being a priest.
Role of whites in ending slavery? Ok, sure, some had a hand in it after others incredibly enlarged it and all consumed from it. Role of whites in clearing out aboriginals from everywhere? Hmmm, not talking about that one.
We'll all buy Starlink because it makes life easier and send tax dollars to federally-mandated Grok because we have no real choice. We'll find out eventually what some of the Doge-style data theft was about.
In what world will the machines spit out enough good to lower the margins and profits of their owners? If there is not inflation, there is not profit growth, there is no longer a justification for equity value.
He's not going to spit out more cars for less money.
Food, housing, medicine, clothing will be unaffected by this machine stuff. No one's rent is going down. Food will not be cheaper unless it's Soylent gruel.
Service costs (power at Tesla chargers, internet bills whether Comcast or Starlink, TurboTax prep, Netflix subscription, Claude/Grok/ChatGPT, etc.) will all only rise because that's how the world works.
Instead, output of stuff will match the pace of people to afford it. Give everyone money, and prices will rise simply because better things will be rationed via higher prices, just as today. No different than accelerating inflation to the point where the poorest person gets $200k/year. Call that Utopia "Zimbabwe".
Palantir is not wrong that AI diminishes the power of Democrat and more-educater women voters. It will just diminish Republican and less-educated male voters too.
Unless it is being trained and applied to suppressing certain groups. Karp said a not-so-quiet goal out loud.
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