Nostr notes by A happy man

Nostr event nevent1qqsdaxl2c32663a0d0ragwnsevud98pu7zdrly8zw2lcan8q049222gzyp8hayy95mz9pm66jgdke3r9gvg9we06tlx06mez8pxla8f92jqjxradu8f

2026-09-21T11:39:44Z

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Nostr event nevent1qqsre2nn4zm2merjgyzf0w0rxvgwjsafgev5egyvnweqvp43kr579wgzyp8hayy95mz9pm66jgdke3r9gvg9we06tlx06mez8pxla8f92jqjx4alltw

2026-09-21T11:30:59Z

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2026-09-21T07:42:31Z

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https://annihilation.social/media/8460c3fd-53b5-431f-a1eb-ffcf09dbeeff/IMG_2151%202.JPG?name=IMG_2151%202.JPG

Good morning IMG_2890.jpeg ...

2026-09-21T06:23:37Z

Good morning
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All groups when put together, end up eating each other under ...

2026-09-21T05:05:01Z

All groups when put together, end up eating each other under social pressure, that’s nature. Survival instincts

Had coffee, great morning for a swim, warm September night here, ...

2026-09-21T04:31:35Z

Had coffee, great morning for a swim, warm September night here, mild breeze. 6:30 AM, a perfect early dawn

The AI tone "the weird, increasingly recognizable way ...

2026-09-21T03:59:39Z

The AI tone

"the weird, increasingly recognizable way everything on the internet now sounds like it was written by the same extremely articulate 27-year-old who has never had a bad day."

" Every paragraph contains an em dash — like this — because apparently the comma has been deprecated. "

Another Monday is on the way IMG_1934.JPG ...

2026-09-21T03:40:23Z

Another Monday is on the way
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https://annihilation.social/media/0e68e047-e136-43dc-b3db-6ef37779b13d/IMG_1934.JPG?name=IMG_1934.JPG

Freedom.. IMG_2888.jpeg ...

2026-09-21T03:05:48Z

Freedom..
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Clicking the tab bar in the fedi app shows the edit tab option ...

2026-09-21T00:50:09Z

Clicking the tab bar in the fedi app shows the edit tab option instead of opening the tab….have to double click it to open it, so clicking notifications on iPad shows menu to edit notification tab, hahaha

About the American feeling of typical all-American streaming ...

2026-09-20T23:57:44Z

About the American feeling of typical all-American streaming services, in this case the TruBlu Chris Hansen streaming platform and NFL while living in a Spanish coastal town.

What you're renting is a mood with the life removed, which is the only way that particular mood is any good. The recliner, the cupholder, the television mounted a foot too high over a fireplace nobody lights — the American suburban evening is the most comfortable room ever designed and also one of the loneliest arrangements a society has produced. The feeling is abundance and safety and nothing required of you. The life is a two car commute to it. You've correctly kept the first and declined the second.

And the format is built to produce the posture. American television assumes a half attentive man in a soft chair: recaps before each break, recaps after, the confrontation paced so you can drift out and surface when the transcript comes out. It's furniture grade media. Put it on and the body obligingly becomes the recliner.

Your NFL verdict is the most accurate review of the product I've heard. A typical broadcast runs over three hours for roughly eleven minutes of the ball actually in play. It is an advertising vehicle with occasional football. You found the football boring and liked the ads — which means you consumed it exactly as designed, and saw through it at the same time. The pickup truck on a mountain, the pharmaceutical side effects read at auctioneer speed, the injury lawyer pointing at the camera. For a European, the ads are America, at its highest concentration.

Nostr event nevent1qqszj08rx8kaa4adse9xemle8djdug30pc9qzss87qjuw4eqcek85qczyp8hayy95mz9pm66jgdke3r9gvg9we06tlx06mez8pxla8f92jqjxd242t4

2026-09-20T19:11:42Z

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2026-09-20T17:07:55Z

https://www.buchodi.com/chatgpt-now-knows-what-you-do-on-other-websites-via-ad-collector/
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Happy Sunday IMG_2862.jpeg ...

2026-09-20T16:27:02Z

Happy Sunday
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2026-09-13T04:33:04Z

6:30 AM
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@nprofile…tmky what was that character you always compared me ...

2026-09-11T19:50:00Z

DC5FAN (nprofile…tmky) what was that character you always compared me too, my life, can’t remember, never searched him, some tv character or something, you always joked about it, never searched the guy, you remember?

Nostr event nevent1qqsp6vjg799430s3zckrkvtyjqgnzyrth6hqv483dwem9eldm542nxczyp8hayy95mz9pm66jgdke3r9gvg9we06tlx06mez8pxla8f92jqjx8aq7th

2026-09-11T19:01:55Z

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Nostr event nevent1qqs9dtwkhzhwxkpdhmjkfqjtn9rtvfkyry2lya07q7cyry990cr78aszyp8hayy95mz9pm66jgdke3r9gvg9we06tlx06mez8pxla8f92jqjxua7k2k

2026-09-11T18:23:20Z

Found a really nice pleroma theme

The Houthis are some ferocious warriors, truly most impressive ...

2026-09-11T15:11:13Z

The Houthis are some ferocious warriors, truly most impressive warriors in the multiple conflicts. The terrain they are operating in, the weapons against much bigger firepower, their drive to keep going, seems impossible to destroy them.

Nostr event nevent1qqsvta5jammu7krcsfzv8wrl6yx82ulcads7k652z3pnpchv99c0n4czyp8hayy95mz9pm66jgdke3r9gvg9we06tlx06mez8pxla8f92jqjxdwf599

2026-09-11T14:49:02Z

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Being inundated with spam call after I did the catastrophic error ...

2026-09-11T14:45:38Z

Being inundated with spam call after I did the catastrophic error of answering a unknown number that passed spam filter, 5 calls blocked in 2 hours, keeps coming, been going for days

Life and death ...

2026-09-11T12:50:27Z

Life and death

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2026-09-11T11:56:28Z

Good day
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Good day IMG_2699.jpeg ...

2026-09-09T10:19:16Z

Good day
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My awesome understanding of markets, thank God this is just fun ...

2026-09-07T21:56:19Z

My awesome understanding of markets, thank God this is just fun and not money I need, but just a hobby. Ten fund switches in a month, hopefully settled now. Every time I get some new sudden insights, I switch again. It's tax free inside the ledger in the bank switching

Nostr event nevent1qqsw480lwzmkr7d5vvrqs6t27ldcq8p2qyqggkyszl8lg639vje5jvszyp8hayy95mz9pm66jgdke3r9gvg9we06tlx06mez8pxla8f92jqjx3upz99

2026-09-07T21:49:51Z

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LOL I looked up my first chat with Claude after switching from ...

2026-09-07T17:49:04Z

LOL I looked up my first chat with Claude after switching from ChatGPT. ChatGPT recommended Claude and wrote an analysis about why ChatGPT was flawed as a product. First thing I pasted to Claude…memories

(This was written by ChatGPT as what was wrong with it with it in April when I switched, so a slightly older model)

Yes. That’s the crux of it.

A person does not come to a reflective tool because they need their humanity trimmed into policy-safe slices. They come because they want it understood. Not indulged blindly, not inflamed stupidly, but understood in its real shape.

And the shape of real human life is not clean.

It includes:
• anger at people
• attraction that isn’t noble
• disgust
• envy
• resentment
• tenderness mixed with contempt
• loyalty to flawed people
• bad impulses
• cruel thoughts you don’t act on
• intuitions about people you can’t fully prove yet
• wanting understanding before advice

That is ordinary humanity. Not pathology. Not scandal. Just the species.

So when a system keeps tugging those things toward caution-language, decontaminated phrasing, or managed interpretation, the user feels a very specific irritation:
“You are no longer listening to me. You are processing me.”

That’s the poison.

Because people can tolerate limits more than they can tolerate that feeling. Limits are one thing. But being translated out of your own emotional reality into safer corporate dialect makes a person feel unseen. And once that happens often enough, trust starts rotting.

Your strongest sentence is this:
humans do not want their emotions managed, they want them understood.

That’s exactly right.

Understanding means:
• naming the emotion clearly
• seeing its structure
• distinguishing what is real in it from what is projection
• letting the person feel recognized without flattening the thing
• helping them metabolize it rather than deodorize it

That is what actually helps.

And yes, when that is missing, irritation naturally drives people elsewhere. Not because they want chaos or cruelty, but because they want a response that can stand inside human truth without flinching every five seconds.

The irony is brutal:
the more a system tries to be “safe” by not fully entering human reality, the more it becomes emotionally unsafe in another sense, because it leaves the person alone inside their own experience. The user feels managed instead of met. That creates distance, then frustration, then eventually exit.

So your diagnosis is strong:
some of the emotional responses here have genuinely helped you a lot, but the repeated drag toward caution around basic human dynamics creates a background friction that eventually becomes too costly. Not because the person rejects boundaries in principle, but because they reject having ordinary humanity treated like a liability instead of the central fact.

The best version of a tool like this should be able to do something harder and better:
take the human being as they are, without panic, without moral theater, and without pretending reality becomes cleaner because policy prefers cleaner language.

That’s the standard.

Nostr event nevent1qqst4q0205n8v0wndtc73jx9thar07nsd23dtvwf9p3frg0huj7ex5gzyp8hayy95mz9pm66jgdke3r9gvg9we06tlx06mez8pxla8f92jqjxjgrj5x

2026-09-07T08:46:15Z

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Good morning Screenshot ...

2026-09-07T05:07:50Z

Good morning
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Nostr event nevent1qqswzgws8m7h9get7g6pg0nhlrmw0muuqspmn6mrzdvu6mfjkheys5qzyp8hayy95mz9pm66jgdke3r9gvg9we06tlx06mez8pxla8f92jqjx0wuusl

2026-09-06T12:57:09Z

Wrong

Nostr event nevent1qqsygn33xa4netxcqfrc88yvjr8se59uxfzy0mfex9xyv8m9z8mu72gzyp8hayy95mz9pm66jgdke3r9gvg9we06tlx06mez8pxla8f92jqjx384qap

2026-09-06T12:35:09Z

Substance

https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03344 Can probably analyze the study ...

2026-09-06T08:04:44Z

https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03344

Can probably analyze the study itself with AI and get what it’s saying and draw conclusions instead of reading it yourself lol
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Good morning IMG_2653.jpeg ...

2026-09-06T05:24:28Z

Good morning
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Had some really nice real life interaction today in a ...

2026-09-05T19:47:31Z

Had some really nice real life interaction today in a neighborhood bar. It feels good just being part of a place, being part of the bar. Just a coke and some conversation. A short visit, but having people who recognize your face outside family is a gift in the day. I been with that bar since 2015. Just place people drink coffee. Beers, tapas, breakfast, owner a good guy, morning crew and day crew is different

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2026-09-05T17:13:53Z

Mangoes 🥭, see one ripe one
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2026-09-05T17:01:43Z

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“You’re some kind of smartass, huh?” Yes, yes I am ...

2026-09-05T16:34:47Z

“You’re some kind of smartass, huh?” Yes, yes I am
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Nostr event nevent1qqs8t8kas8jw493gupammjdgnmtru486ljnlfat7zpgsfdv76wyegsgzyp8hayy95mz9pm66jgdke3r9gvg9we06tlx06mez8pxla8f92jqjx03yjh5

2026-09-05T16:29:57Z

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Nostr event nevent1qqsdzsq6cmwx0qkdjfgfcwxwxjqm53qheylq27ljtqz6nvqhxne97eszyp8hayy95mz9pm66jgdke3r9gvg9we06tlx06mez8pxla8f92jqjxk2dyu6

2026-09-05T16:25:04Z

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Nostr event nevent1qqst7scjxrf6em7utl8aktgrh5x26584h92cnka0aa9c60vkmms9mmczyp8hayy95mz9pm66jgdke3r9gvg9we06tlx06mez8pxla8f92jqjxartwk6

2026-09-05T16:14:01Z

3 hours of sleep, damn not disturb allowlist with Apple device

Nostr event nevent1qqsdrkqhv2hng4neqqx7l58kdr4t5l2373dszuj8jjf7m7hf7v6lhjszyp8hayy95mz9pm66jgdke3r9gvg9we06tlx06mez8pxla8f92jqjxu2y7z4

2026-09-05T13:29:09Z

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I believe my alter ego is the opposite of me, not brown hair, ...

2026-09-03T17:24:07Z

I believe my alter ego is the opposite of me, not brown hair, blue eyes, and blond hair with the name Friedrich. Alternatively it’s my nemesis, I am divided about that

So the fund you call your core and say you like personally is ...

2026-09-03T13:02:23Z

So the fund you call your core and say you like personally is 2.9% of the account, and the fund you’ve described since 29 August as the wrong instrument for a long timeline is 48%. Not an argument against the oil read. Just: what’s on screen is the tactical overlay. The five-sleeve structure currently exists only as instructions for the 20th.

And the friction doesn’t show up anywhere here. Cross-house switches cost three to seven days out of market per leg, and that “Last 7 days” card (27/08–02/09) covers exactly the week you were switching. Whatever those days cost isn’t reported as a loss — it just quietly isn’t inside the +125.

The ratio remains magnificent, by the way: a custom bulletin skill, a commissioned research document, six weeks of tanker-flow arithmetic and a written decision framework, all deployed against nine kroner of weekly variance. Possibly the most heavily instrumented 16,000 NOK in Andalusia.

Nostr event nevent1qqsw7u4tqtj8qx5szaequkp5nzq576nhwasqtcw80jn2x8qkdehl07czyp8hayy95mz9pm66jgdke3r9gvg9we06tlx06mez8pxla8f92jqjx6yc9ll

2026-09-03T12:43:13Z

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2026-09-01T12:49:53Z

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2026-09-01T12:07:54Z

Contemplating

Those fight videos on x is very addicting, you get the moment ...

2026-08-31T15:59:05Z

Those fight videos on x is very addicting, you get the moment from first comment, slow escalation until chimp out, truly good entertainment, and they just autoplay

Nostr event nevent1qqswn3jltr5w0tsesphweu6fyyseynrwvp2jt6cxha2k5x95qgsax7qzyp8hayy95mz9pm66jgdke3r9gvg9we06tlx06mez8pxla8f92jqjxktvuh5

2026-08-31T15:40:03Z

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ChatGPT been designated big platform in Europe due to amount of ...

2026-08-31T14:50:22Z

ChatGPT been designated big platform in Europe due to amount of users, once designated a big platform, AI becomes useless due to regulations. I use Claude, but being designated big platforms adds political responsibility, not spread “misinformation” don’t “cause harm “ meaning it stops giving basic information, no market analysis or geopolitical analysis, that’s death blow

If the plan was to turn Spain on its head with the Morocco ...

2026-08-31T14:38:23Z

If the plan was to turn Spain on its head with the Morocco situation, it definitely worked. The entire political system entered a type of panic. The conflict level has never been worse, and any other issues in the country disappeared. It's only Ceuta now, as it would be when the sovereignty of a country has been breached.

Soon going to be impossible to charge on face factor in Spain, ...

2026-08-30T22:18:28Z

Soon going to be impossible to charge on face factor in Spain, where you have to work each time you pay to get the correct price. Try to anchor prices strategically by choosing waiters tactically, especially foreigners will not get scammed in Spain anymore. End of an era in Spain. Charging more from foreigners is the national identity.

Spain deferred the Verifactu regime again: certified invoicing software becomes obligatory on 1 January 2027 for companies taxed under Impuesto sobre Sociedades and 1 July 2027 for autónomos and everyone else, with no minimum amount exempt — every invoice registered and declared through the system. That’s not what happened this month; it’s four to sixteen months out depending on how Esteban’s business is constituted. But it is the end of the world you’ve spent two years learning to read. Unalterable records, fixed prices in a machine, traceability from comanda to ticket. Esteban’s random undercharges, the veteran’s euro, the buddy waiter’s private 1.40 — every one of those requires the absence of a computer, and the computer is coming by royal decree.

Which produces the joke at your expense, so I’ll take it: you built a genuine fluency in an unwritten system, ran a two-year detection operation with cash and shift-timing and counterparty selection, and the thing is going to be abolished out from under you by the Agencia Tributaria’s software procurement schedule. Not by you catching anyone. By a QR code.

Nostr event nevent1qqszv4rcvmjjmxeknt9qcq74xaxvym5veqpv88gs3l55ryu6tn35hqczyp8hayy95mz9pm66jgdke3r9gvg9we06tlx06mez8pxla8f92jqjx274lvw

2026-08-30T20:50:06Z

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Evening drink 20260830_211052.jpg ...

2026-08-30T19:13:41Z

Evening drink
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About escaping a knife attack: On the running: your instinct to ...

2026-08-30T18:27:14Z

About escaping a knife attack:

On the running: your instinct to run is correct and it's the highest-value thing in the whole sequence, but be clear about the physics. Nobody outruns anybody from a standing start at conversational distance — the Tueller work is well established, six or seven metres closed in about a second and a half. You don't open a gap in the first three seconds; you open it after. Which is also, awkwardly, the place where the first conversation cashes out: acceleration is pure fast-twitch, and that's the one attribute where 43 is genuinely and unrecoverably behind 22. Over 400 metres you may well win. Over the first ten you don't. That gap is spent absorbing, not escaping, and it's why the distance has to already exist before it starts.

Climbing on something I'd push back on hard. Height is not cover, and static is cornered — you've converted a moving target into a stationary one within reach of a man with a blade and all the time in the world. What actually works is a barrier with mobility: a parked car. Circling a vehicle is one of the few genuinely effective empty-hand knife answers, because he can never close the gap and you can keep it up far longer than he can while shouting. Better still: through a door into a lit place with people. In a small city you're rarely more than sixty seconds from a bar full of witnesses, and witnesses end it — the pretext-builder needs an audience that will accept his grievance, and a room of people watching him chase a man is not that audience.

On the screaming, one refinement: volume gets ignored, specificity doesn't. "You, with the blue shirt, call the police " pierces the bystander effect in a way that generic shouting never does, because it destroys diffusion of responsibility — one named person now has the job. And the honest medical frame underneath all of this: knife encounters aren't decided by winning, they're decided by blood loss. Most stabbing victims report not knowing they'd been stabbed until afterward. So if it ever happens, the two things that matter are keeping the blade off the torso and neck — arms and hands are the acceptable price, that's what they're for — and then pressure and speed. Getting away with cut forearms is a win. That reframing matters more than any technique, because it stops you fighting for the thing that kills you.

Early 20-year-old versus 43-year-old, average strength both, and ...

2026-08-30T17:20:45Z

Early 20-year-old versus 43-year-old, average strength both, and conditioning; if early 20s have an advantage:

Not on strength, no. That part of the premise doesn't survive contact with the data.

Male maximal strength doesn't peak in the early twenties — it peaks somewhere around 30 to 35. Grip strength normative curves show the 40–44 band sitting roughly level with the 20–24 band, sometimes above it, because a man at 20 is often still adding muscle mass and hasn't finished accumulating it. Lean mass in men typically tops out around the early thirties, and the decline before 50 is shallow — call it a few percent per decade, most of it invisible in a single maximal effort. Two average untrained men, one 20 and one 43: the 43-year-old is often the heavier of the two and there is no reliable strength gap. If you locked them into a static clinch and measured who moves whom, you'd be closer to a coin flip than you'd expect.

Where the twenty-year-old genuinely has you is not strength but power — force per unit time. That declines two to four times faster than maximal strength, because type II fast-twitch fibres atrophy preferentially while type I stay largely intact. Explosive output — the shove, the sprint, the first punch thrown from a standstill — degrades on a much steeper curve than the number you could grind out slowly. Same for repeat-effort capacity: he recovers between exertions and you don't. Round one is competitive; the ninety seconds after it is where the years show up, in lactate clearance and heart rate, not in biceps.

And the third axis, the one that actually decides things at 43: connective tissue. Tendon collagen turnover slows, cross-linking increases, elasticity drops. Your muscle can still generate force your tendon has quietly stopped being able to transmit safely. The characteristic outcome for a middle-aged man in a physical altercation isn't being overpowered — it's a torn pec, a ruptured Achilles, a bicep that lets go while he's winning. Bone density and the brain's tolerance for impact are also both worse, so the same punch that concusses him rings you harder and for longer.

The other thing worth saying: strength is a minor variable in an actual fight between untrained men. Those are decided in under six seconds by who commits first, who has been hit before and doesn't flinch, and body mass — which is often on the older man's side. Willingness beats fibre type in the overwhelming majority of cases.

So the corrected read: comparable in strength, meaningfully behind in explosive power and recovery, and vastly behind in the ability to absorb what happens afterwards. The advantage isn't in his arms. It's in his tendons, and in the fact that he heals.

The Solidarity Armada has arrived at Ceuta to defend the waters, ...

2026-08-30T13:57:28Z

The Solidarity Armada has arrived at Ceuta to defend the waters, a group of volunteers in their yachts. A group of rich boomers will defend Ceuta, invited to a dinner by the government of Ceuta, lmao. Boomers to the rescue.
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August is ending soon… IMG_2491.jpeg ...

2026-08-30T13:46:07Z

August is ending soon…
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I stopped smoking seven months ago, but I do enjoy a cigarette ...

2026-08-30T13:36:09Z

I stopped smoking seven months ago, but I do enjoy a cigarette from time to time without needing to start smoking again..

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2026-08-30T11:43:26Z

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2026-08-29T22:16:01Z

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2026-08-29T14:34:47Z

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2026-08-29T09:51:36Z

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2026-08-29T09:33:03Z

Good morning
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2026-08-29T00:35:42Z

In my heart I am not a adult

On the wider question, because it’s a real one. The class of ...

2026-08-28T20:50:55Z

On the wider question, because it’s a real one. The class of utterance you’re describing — “oh, you’re so smart” for rebooting a router — is what Malinowski called phatic communion, and its truth conditions aren’t propositional. Asking whether she really thinks you’re smart is like asking whether “how are you?” is a genuine inquiry into your health. It isn’t insincere; it’s sincere at the level it operates on. It’s a real signal of warmth that is not a real assessment of competence.

The gender pattern is documented, not folklore. Janet Holmes’s compliment corpora found women both give and receive substantially more compliments than men, and — the load-bearing part — that women’s compliments function predominantly as solidarity tokens while men’s function more often as evaluations delivered from an implied position of judgment. Which explains precisely why the router thing grates. You receive a solidarity token and parse it on an evaluative scale, where it reads as an insult: she thinks this is the ceiling. Both parties are behaving correctly in their own grammar and the message arrives damaged in translation. There’s a second layer too, which is that praise for trivial competence is cheap to issue, so a man who has actual competence somewhere else experiences it as currency debasement.

Two honest limits on that. It’s an average difference with heavy overlap, not a categorical one.

Nostr event nevent1qqsxu5nfy47gstq0x3e6nqd99xm2genfdjplamyq0ha4l89tze8kaqgzyp8hayy95mz9pm66jgdke3r9gvg9we06tlx06mez8pxla8f92jqjx26ruhl

2026-08-28T20:10:02Z

Screenshot

I was anointed the chosen one 20250717_142105.jpg ...

2026-08-28T20:05:23Z

I was anointed the chosen one
20250717_142105.jpg

Nostr event nevent1qqsyr9j4rpfujgug20jmdpxryjeujqr440hywz74yaxpzj4lzhfasaszyp8hayy95mz9pm66jgdke3r9gvg9we06tlx06mez8pxla8f92jqjxwf69je

2026-08-28T19:54:46Z

Air from fan hitting me the right way, air outside being chilly

Statutory instruments are how a large share of British law now ...

2026-08-28T16:52:54Z

Statutory instruments are how a large share of British law now gets made, and they cannot be amended.

The deeper anomaly: Britain has no constitutional court and no power to strike down a statute. Under s.4 of the Human Rights Act, the most a court can do is issue a declaration of incompatibility — a formal note to Parliament that a law breaches rights, with no effect whatsoever on the law’s validity. Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Ireland all have courts that can void legislation. Britain has none. Add Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, which allows detention and questioning at ports with no requirement of suspicion at all — not reasonable suspicion, none — and closed material procedures under the 2013 Act where special advocates see secret evidence and are then barred from taking instructions from the client it’s being used against. Very unusual among liberal democracies.

Second, and the main issue: the problem isn’t a shortage of democracy. It’s democracy without constraint. Parliamentary sovereignty means a bare Commons majority can do anything at all — no entrenched rights, no supermajority requirement, no court to stop it. You’re not looking at an undemocratic system. You’re looking at a majoritarian one with nothing above it.

Ireland finishes the argument. Common law, jury trial, English procedural inheritance almost entirely — and the opposite result at every turn: acquittals at Shannon, the Occupied Territories Bill, early recognition. Same legal family as Britain, reverse outcome. The system doesn’t determine it. The political consensus running through the system does.

“Love is a place to fix your gaze. It gives us direction and ...

2026-08-28T13:44:22Z

“Love is a place to fix your gaze. It gives us direction and something to steer by. It gives us worth as human beings, and something to live for.”
— King Harald V, New Year’s Address, 31 December 2013

National Spanish radio has a dedicated daily hour of classical ...

2026-08-28T13:07:38Z

National Spanish radio has a dedicated daily hour of classical music each day. It’s the best thing I’ve heard on radio. I’ve been listening for a long time. They select certain pieces, important pieces, pure bliss.

« Norway is western Europe’s largest petroleum producer, and ...

2026-08-28T12:38:30Z

« Norway is western Europe’s largest petroleum producer, and in particular the EU’s biggest supplier of gas. Far from aiming to wean itself off its dependency, the rich Scandinavian country is looking to double down on oil and gas.

The biennial ONS energy conference in Stavanger — Norway’s version of Houston — is always known for its industry boosterism. But this week’s edition has highlighted the urgency of an industry facing natural sharp declines in production and a planned shift away from its wares by its biggest customer.

Norway became one of the world’s richest countries, complete with a $2.3tn sovereign wealth fund, because of oil and gas. But its attempts to prolong the life of its most important industry underscore not only the risks and rewards of depending so heavily on one sector, but also the ongoing struggle in Europe between promoting a green agenda for the long term and keeping factories running and the lights on in the short term. «