[oh, wait, according to LC the W and L are supposed to be different legs of an antisymmetric vertical, not a symmetric horizontal, relationship. So that's probably not appropriate at all?]

Re: H&A, I guess we could update GKC: "The Enlightenment ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried."

We all love LLMs; would their advice be even more likely to be followed if there was a hardware device to issue smoke ("bells and smells") alongside their pronouncements? https://www.ancientsculpturegallery.com/wp-content/uploads/2...

Out of an abundance of caution, I'd wildly guess PH ("dyadically")

-Doesn't want to let us see him sweat (usage his)

-is still consulting the I-Ching^W Copilot on how to proceed

[0] tangential to the "last word on combinators", I'd note that the source-glyph for [virtuosity-]zero --"xin" in the Chinese^W 搜狐 moral compass-- has a possibly negative emotional valence. At least according to an unreliable "guru" of mine, it depicts a mute with a pipe shoved down his throat (~south indian communal version of modern Slavic phallic graffiti :)

So thoroughly vibing Kohut or Leucippus, that'd be bootstrapping (hallucinating?) one from zero? "A cut from no-cut"? To what extent is noncommutativity relevant here in your opinion? (Prepping ourselves for a Woah)

https://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/MathEd/index.php/2022/08/25/the...

Your greeks under the influence of hallucinogenic ethylene (what boffins understand today as the smoke of Delphic bongs) however... Speak like PH would like to..?

Another tactic would be to redirect your question about death to PH in another Newish stub ( as he certainly has vastly more rubs with Death than I)

("Welfare & Steering": JH's 1973 "relative success of the welfare-state compromise" may be a bit dated? I get the impression that ever since 1980, and distinctly accelerating since 1992, the Old Country's politics has, on average, been reducing both outputs: welfare and steering)

For CH, I think https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjlT4BME2aE and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgYJ5V2HYy4 captured the difference in vibe well. (one detail SwissBloke didn't go into the weeds on: the army asks dozens of people to leave each year, on grounds largely ranging from far left extremism through fundamentalist islamic extremism to far right extremism, and a consequence of that is that one has to return one's service rifle. Part of having a hunting license[1] is being a member of a hunting club, and presumably they too will kick you out should you start to seem too crazy to associate with)

[0] it'd be a bit more difficult to game, but as far as gun ownership by foreigners is concerned, it's max(home country, CH), so there could be up to 195 potential venues involved, and I have the distinct impression that, having come from the States, I would have only hit the limit at local[2] law.

[1] another example of difference in vibe: in the US, folks complain bitterly if the exam for a hunting license takes more than 1 day; in my old part of CH, the process took 2 years, involving classroom time, community service, and practical, written, and oral tests.

[2] the cantonal police got a call about an old nutter in my first few years here. I was impressed, because apparently they just went out, talked with him, and left him all his legal weaponry, but took the full auto weapons, grenades, and other explosives with them when they left. I imagine in the Old Country that kind of visit might've been closer to a Waco?

Reflection: there's the societal vibe difference, and then there's not having an expansively interpreted 2A. Our constitution dates all the way back to 1999, because we believe in cleaning up the legacy cruft.

I had a notion that, compared to the US military, it was the Civilian Enforcers that practise apartheid-- ~a decade ago, not sure about now, they forced a black admiral to retire weeks back? Then again I was surprised that I was surprised at the inflation in NYC since the start of the pandemic

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/us/politics/admiral-alvin...

(I do wonder at, say, Hunter S. Thompson's skill level, which is where I'd guess the median gun rights vocalist would be at --to ask Gemini later)

am myself curious at how PH would answer your death / Kohut questions, amen on squatting.

I guess:

- (a) propaganda/psyop/marketing/engagement farming may not be as old as the hills, but it's close: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39994449 (Cyrus cylinder ca. 540 BC has it fully formed; no doubt there was a preceding oral tradition but we're never going to know what the ontogeny may have been)

- (b) everyone uses the same tricks, because they learn them from their enemies (in an adjacent field the KGB's precursor learned all their dirty tricks from the Okhrana, probably in a nearly unbroken line going back to the first chimps who put together a coalition to overthrow the alpha chimp before the alpha sniffed it out. 100W is pretty expensive for a neural net; how else are you going to justify that calorie expenditure without scheming and plotting?)

- (c) telling truths that might hurt is more effective than lying (judging by XXI standards, maybe that's why he's been dropped from the curriculum?)

PS the US Navy (although its final cause is instrument of empire) is one of the easier ways for a young man with little cultural capital and even less economic capital to find himself in an organisation that not only values lifetime learning but even goes out of its way to support it.

(because (a) crampons mean you get to study the ice and make your holds, instead of rapidly making use of what's there, and (b) the process of making them takes time... I was very pleasantly surprised; I'd expected it to be more thrilling and above all „Besonders Im Winter Arsch-Kalt“ but it was actually relatively low-adrenaline and high-activity)