uploaded May 05, 2022
bitchute
archive.org
Okay, doing a stream today. I actually don't want to record this one; I will just let it stream. So I was going to do one last night, but ended up having some things come up that I had to get to. I guess I have a free day kind of in the morning today. Of course, everyone's at work in America, so all you wagies. No wagies allowed in the stream, but I guess it's ideal for people in India or something like that. I don't know. So let me pull up the chat. I will read donations as usual over there, wherever they are. I think I pinned the comment with them, and I'll talk about whatever else.
Let me pull this stuff up because the reason it took me so long to start this thing is because I branched out. I'm actually using two computers now, or at least I'm trying to use two computers because I usually use my laptop for everything when I do streams. It's difficult dealing with multiple computers. But I decided to bust out the old desktop. Theoretically, I do have two computers. I never use the desktop, but it is now streaming and I'm using the laptop for everything else. So I think I actually got a couple messages. I'll go ahead and read them.
Ryan donates $10:
Any recommendations on books on agriculture? I want to know this stuff like nitrogen, pH, pruning, and crop rotation. Doesn't have to be the Bible, but something to point me in the right direction.
I will say I actually did a blog post years ago back when I was about to move here. Where are those books? Okay, here they are. So, good books to check out: there's this guy named John Seymour. He has a series of books, or just different ones. I have two of them: The Self-Sufficient Gardener and The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency. It's also a good thing. It has gardening and other stuff as well — how to prepare animals, compost, can things, all this kind of stuff. So I recommend these books. They've been pretty good resources. They're not too technical if you're looking for something scientific, which you also don't really need. There are a couple I want to say I might have another book of his. Oh, yeah, and another one that people recommended to me a couple times is Illustrated Guide to Gardening. This is actually from Reader's Digest. It's a little more colorful. Actually, no, maybe it's not colorful; maybe it's black and white, but it does have a lot of images. Some of them do have color. So, for example, we're actually talking about pruning here and stuff like that.
Really, the thing with pruning is you have to feel like you're actually killing the plant. You have to, because most stuff — let's say grapes or figs or a lot of fruits — they will only grow fruits on new growth. So you have to cut back basically everything every year. Every year you have to totally annihilate stuff. The hard thing when you start out, if you don't know anything about it, is you kind of feel like, "Oh man, I'm cutting off too much," but that ain't the case. So yeah, those are the books that I would recommend, or at least that I have. There are probably many other good ones, but John Seymour in particular wrote a bunch of stuff, and it's pretty good. So that's what I would say.
Anonymous donates some Monero:
Thoughts on Libreboot and Coreboot in the current year?
I have not looked into Libreboot or Coreboot in a long time. Obviously I recommend everyone use a free BIOS. For people who don't know what that means, every single computer nowadays — basically every single computer has the Intel Management Engine if you have an Intel processor, or if you have AMD, it doesn't matter what it is. All major processing companies basically have microcomputers in the processors that can be exploited by companies or governments and all this kind of stuff. Basically, even if you're running Linux and all free software, you have a back door in your computer that can potentially be exploited. That's what the Intel Management Engine is. And of course, it's running non-free software anyway, right?
Libreboot and Coreboot and that kind of stuff: the goal of Libreboot is to basically just have a free BIOS, replace all of that with all free software that doesn't spy on you and stuff like that. So when I first started my YouTube channel, I did have this other ThinkPad, which I've since maybe broken. I had an X60 that I installed Libreboot on, and in terms of security that is superior because you don't have this theoretical back door that the government can spy on. If you can exploit it, I think you can look at stuff that's in the memory and other things like that on your computer, which could be basically anything. So that is something worrisome. Libreboot is a good idea.
Coreboot is kind of like middle of the road. It's free software, but it doesn't fully disable the Management Engine because it's actually really difficult to do. Well, it disables it; it doesn't remove it or something weird like that. It destroys its internet connectivity or something, but it doesn't delete all the software because the computer wouldn't be able to boot without it. These Intel CPUs don't just have a back door; you have to have the back door in order to even start the computer. Old Intel Core 2 Duos can be Librebooted. Anything that's like an i3, i5, i7 — maybe some of those can be Corebooted. Some computers have Coreboot for them. That's another reason why a lot of Libreboot development is done for ThinkPads. ThinkPads are basically the best, at least older ones; they're the most consistent brand of used computers if you want to get one. Libreboot development happens a lot for that.
Then there's all this other stuff that happened, and I want to say the guy who did Libreboot now has this other project that's like OSBoot or something; I forget exactly what it is, but I have not kept up with it in a long time. I kind of just — that really just because I got a Corebooted machine and I don't really think about it as much. There are other people who will actually show you how to Coreboot stuff or Libreboot it, but it usually requires opening your computer up, attaching a microcomputer, and running some scary-looking stuff. But yeah, it is recommended. There are companies that Coreboot computers and stuff like that so you don't have to worry about it. But yeah, I don't know anything about whether there's anything recent that's happened with Libreboot. I have no clue.
Marcio donates $5
Hi, Luke. Your influence was really transformative in my life. May God be with you.
Well, thank you. Thank you, Marcio. I think he's usually a super chatter, but he sent in a donation on my site.
Dan Dan:
Luke, don't you see the inconsistencies in orthodox theology? One small example, western Christianity has no wall separating the altar because it symbolizes the curtain in the temple being ripped. Whereas Orthodox...
I mean, that's a very — the symbolism in the liturgy is a... if you're really complaining about innovations, the West has innovated far more in terms of liturgical practices. They don't even have the... well, some Protestants and stuff will have both the bread and the wine. But the Council of Trent back in the day was the Catholics saying, "Oh, well, you don't actually need both. You can just have the bread and not the wine and stuff like that." I mean, that's not a theological inconsistency; that's a liturgical change, and the liturgical changes in the Western church are far more significant and really sacramental in nature. It's not like, "Oh, well, there's this minor difference." Of course, the Eastern church, in concert with the early church, still uses leavened bread, whereas the Western church doesn't.
Jifan donates 69 cents:
What do you think about natural law and the concept of objective morality? I like this version I came across of the seven deadly sins based on objective morality and descending order of seriousness of the offense: murder, assault, rape, theft, trespassing, extortion, and deceit.
I mean, those are not the seven deadly sins. Those are just seven bad things. Natural law: I'm okay with the idea of natural law. I refer to it a lot because I think the concept — it doesn't matter if you're religious or not. There's a difference between things that are just bad because it's the nature of the action or how the universe is constructed, and things that might be bad by fiat or by convention. In America, we drive on the right side of the road. If you drive on the left, that's bad. That's illegal. That is not necessarily a natural law; that's more like some kind of divine mandate. Either way, my view is I'm not against the idea. I definitely used to believe in it a whole lot. It was very influential on the Western church.
But the thing is, it does kind of take rationalism a little too far. In most moral domains, there are some commandments that you don't really want to think through whether they're natural law or not, because then you get to rationalizing at an individual basis whether you should follow this, that, or the other. That's kind of what happened in the Western church and then the Enlightenment and all this kind of stuff. The big issue with the Enlightenment is that it assumes that human reason is superior to the world around it, superior to reality. If there's a disjunct between reason — what I think is reasonable — and how things actually exist out there, maybe social conventions, it must be that the social conventions are wrong. I couldn't be wrong; I'm being reasonable, logical, rational. That's the central fallacy.
In reality, the opposite is the case. To be specific, let's say in linguistics as an example, there's this idea that there are two different kinds of linguistics: you can either describe how language is or you can prescribe what ways of saying things are good or bad. Same thing in economics: positive economics is supposed to be descriptive, and normative economics is supposed to be you making recommendations. The big issue is that if you divide morality up in that way, what people nowadays tend to do is they forget the positive side. People are no longer looking at societies as if they're organisms that exist for a reason; social convention exists for a reason. Instead, what people say is, "Oh, well, I see no rational reasons why there should be different social expectations for men and women. Therefore, they shouldn't exist." Whereas before that period, before that period of overthinking natural law and scholasticism and all this kind of stuff, people were content to say, "Well, there are these social conventions that I might not rationally understand, but there's a sense in which my reason is not sufficient. I'm not superior to tradition."
Natural law is kind of a way of... I'm not against it, but it does kind of sow the seeds of this kind of thinking, this kind of Enlightenment thinking. If you want to boil down the Enlightenment to just any one thing, it's basically that: it's taking reason and putting it above tradition. Of course, we can use reason to look at traditional practices. However, it's a very slow process and one that actually requires understanding why conventions exist. It's not this very lazy subjectivism that people have now or this kind of hyperliberalism where it's just like, "Oh, this seems mean to me, so it must be bad." You can't do something like that. But yeah, those aren't the seven deadly sins. You can look them up. I would recite them here, but I'm sure I'd forget one or get one wrong and look like an idiot.
Ryan donates $5:
Have you read Teaming with Microbes, Teaming with Nutrients, Teaming with Fungi? Great overview of the soil food web, which is the basis of regenerative pre-industrial agriculture. Also, recommendations on Libre language learning tools.
No, I haven't read that book. It seems interesting, but I can't say I've read it. When I grow stuff, I'm growing stuff this year. I'm trying to minimize usage of fertilizer. I'm trying to grow things in a naturalistic way — naturalistic meaning sometimes somewhat lazy. Using very little fertilizer, trying to position things in certain amounts of shade so that I don't have to water them too much. I really want to be in a position where fruits and stuff grow on my property as weeds. There's this thing I've tried to plant for the past couple years called Everglades tomatoes, and they're supposed to grow really well around where I live. They're supposed to just be really invasive, but I can't get them to grow. The sun is too hot or something like that. They're supposed to be able to grow in the Everglades. I'm not even close to the Everglades, but that would be a lot hotter than here. But yeah, I haven't heard of that book though.
Recommendations on Libre language learning tools: just don't use tools for learning language. That would be my recommendation. It's a great example of a domain where you shouldn't be using software to learn, frankly. I probably haven't written that. On my old website I used to have some writings on this, but that was years ago before I had an internet presence. I'm very much against any of these language learning tools. I don't care if it's Duolingo or Rosetta Stone. All those things are really just goofy games that have a language front end. Learning a language is a mental habit that you cannot fake. There's no way to learn it other than using, thinking in, and talking in the language. That's my issue with all software. Can they help you pound in vocabulary? Sure. But nowhere near as useful as real-life experience. Back in the day I tried to use all this tapes work is basically he guides people and you included through building up sentences, expressing yourself using the bare bones of language from the bottom up, and through the whole thing you might learn only like 50 words or something. It's not many, but that's kind of how it is.
I was going to say something. I forget what I was going to say. Sorry, give me a second. Ignore me for a second. I gotta... here it is. Okay. I was going to say something else about language. Anyway, I forgot what I was going to say. Let me check for more messages.
Norbetch, Norbby donates some XMR:
God King and Fatherland. Screw liberals. Cheers from the Basque country.
Thank you. And then it says something in Basque, I have no clue. I don't know where to bask. Yeah, I was going to say like in terms of vocabulary, you can use note cards a million times, but that's just not how the brain memorizes things. I remember this one time in college I went with a girlfriend to a French class wine tasting thing — the whole French class put on a wine tasting at the professor's house. I knew French then, enough to kind of converse at a very basic level. But I remember the professor asked me in French to give her a lime. There were some limes on the table and a bunch of other stuff, and I didn't know the word for lime. I was like, oh shoot, what is that? But after that awkwardness of not knowing it for like one second, now I know the French word for lime. A modicum of embarrassment will help you remember it far more than some stupid flashcard app. That was the only time I heard the word before then.
Joe donates $5:
Kombucha: I've never made it. The stuff in the store is also way too sugary. But yeah, I think it's a good idea. It's one of the few drinks that I'm okay with. One of the biggest issues with people nowadays is they drink calories. You basically should, unless you're drinking milk, not really be drinking calories. That's my view. Mostly because people just drink sugar. But kombucha is fine; it's just a kind of fermented tea for people who don't know. The stuff in the store is way too heavily sugared. I've actually thought about making it in the past. You just need some bacterial cultures and some other things, but I've never done it. I might know one or two people who know how to do it.
And on socks: I'm not wearing socks right now. I just have my shoes here. I'm not a big fan of them. I do wear them with tennis shoes, but I find them pretty... I'm really just against shoes in general. I pretty much walk out. When I record videos outside, I'm basically always barefoot unless there are some places I walk with shoes. In general I walk barefoot outside all the time. That's actually hard where I live because there are things like sand spurs — basically these absolutely demonic plants that have seeds that are just like wooden splinters. You step on them and they hurt so much. But I've basically cleaned out sand spurs from all around my property just manually ripping them up. They're usually a total blight. The places I walk usually, I don't wear shoes, and I don't walk around them. Those things grow most commonly on roads in places where woods have been artificially cut down. That's usually the problem. When I moved into my property here and bought it, they were just all over the place. They were actually right outside my window here. They were just all over. But I went out — there were days where I would spend hours just pulling them up so I didn't have to deal with them, just because I'm such a fan of being barefoot.
Einsteinium donates some XMR:
I'm 18 years old from Europe studying bioinformatics living at my parents house. My goal is to eventually live in the country and be independent but working in this branch. I feel school is very insufficient and cringe but I don't know what else to do. Any suggestions? What's your secret to studying?
So a couple questions in there. One thing when I do videos on like, "Oh, you should move to the country,"...
at this point in the livestream, Luke's mic cut out for ~ 15 minutes...😑
Oh, you wanted, you were talking about the guy who wanted to move to the country in bioinformatics. So, yeah, that was basically the last one. I just talked a long, long time about that. And then someone asked about the Weaguer genocide, quote unquote genocide. Well, I'll read that one out again.
Okay, so a Vietnamese person sends in some XMR. He says,
Thoughts on China? The US cries out Uyghurs genocide as he proceeds to bomb every country in the Middle East. He defends his hypocrisy by using whataboutism as an excuse to bash China while doing nothing to stop his country's own bombings. Also, glad you recognize that Taiwan belongs to China.
I mean, yeah. Obviously, any American, if you see stuff that they say about China or Russia and you take it at face value, you're just delusional. At the worst, China has these re-education camps for Uyghurs, but I don't know anything about it. It's none of my business. And basically everything I've heard about it, I've heard through the American media lens, so it's probably not true. I know that they're lying about this country. I know that they're lying about everything else they do, so I'm going to assume they're lying about that too. So, I think that's a good heuristic. It's none of my business. If the Uyghurs have a bad time in China, I feel bad for you, son. But I'm not going to take the American opinion-molding class's advice on that.
Anonymous says
Please do a video on Nitter, Bibliogram, Invidious, etc. They are good as a first step for moving away from social media
I mean, they are good as a first step, sure, maybe. No, I don't even want to say that. I'm not a big fan of those. For those people who don't know, these are software that you can run on your own servers that basically just talk to, you know, they're basically just a frontend for Twitter. So, you can install Nitter on your own server and people can go to it and basically browse Twitter through your site. So, it's privacy-respecting for them. And really, the real reason to use it is that Twitter and sites like that are so bad in terms of how poorly written they are, whereas Nitter is just a plain HTML site. No stupid crap flying across the screen or whatever. But I'm not a big fan of Bibliogram. I don't know what that's for. Invidious is for YouTube, I know. I'm not against them, but I'm not going to do a video on them. I would rather people not use social media in general.
$1 from, I guess this guy's DJ:
Luke, I just want to thank you for all your videos on Linux and free software. It's thanks to you that I learned to appreciate free software. Without your videos where you go over scripts that you wrote or how you configured a program where you showed something you discovered, I would probably never have used Linux seriously.
Yeah. Before I came to YouTube, there were very few people who did Linux channels. Actually, this is still kind of the case. Most Linux channels out there were really just people installing desktop environments and making comments about them. The only thing is, it's not like I was like, "Oh, let me change that." But I guess what I did is I started looking at, here are the configuration files I use and this is why I changed this, and this is the kind of stuff you can do. Because if you're just doing those desktop environment videos or whatever, you're just giving people a different graphical environment that functions the same as Windows or Mac or something like that.
My whole thing when I started my YouTube channel is, if I'm going to do videos on programs on Linux, I want to show people what they can do with them. What's the actual point of it? I think I did a video a couple years ago. I think I was standing on a dead tree when I talked about maybe, maybe it was that one. I'm trying to remember where I filmed this one. There are so many videos; I only barely remember. But I talked about the fact that a lot of people try to sell Linux to people as if it's so close to Microsoft Windows that it's going to be easy to use. No, people aren't going to switch for that. They're going to switch if it's something different and new and they can get something new out of it.
Anyway, thank you. Josh sends in $5 saying
Okay. Yeah, looks like I got a couple emails about that.
Einsteinium sends in some XMR.
Hey Luke, at the start of the previous question, you muted your mic. Could you answer it again?
So, bioinformatics, in case you didn't hear the rest of that: don't fixate on your degree. If you get a degree in bioinformatics, that's fine. I got degrees in stuff. Don't be like, "Oh, I have to have a job in this." Don't make that be something that keeps you from that. And as for studying, I basically do not. I've never done studying. I don't take notes in class. That's just how I am. I kind of feel like note-taking, that whole genre of behavior that we teach students, is kind of bad. I don't really think the human brain is fit for it. I think it's just something you tell students to do and it's kind of a convention.
I've never taken notes. I've never really studied. I think I said in my answer before that may have gotten cut off: I did my degree in economics and I learned literally nothing in my degree, and it seems like you say the same thing because I had already learned that stuff beforehand. Maybe I'm different from some people. Maybe some people need to have notes and things like that. But I kind of have the idea that most people, if they had more naturalistic ways of learning and memorizing things — or not even memorizing, because memorization is not really what I'm getting at — you have to look at the things you know as an interconnected web.
In linguistics, here's a little anecdote for you. If you put people in experimental circumstances and you're giving them information and seeing what they can recall and stuff like that, if you give them a sentence like this: the king died, then the queen died. Then you give them more information. Compare that with another group of people who are told the king died and then the queen died of grief. In both cases, the same factual information is happening except for in the second case, you actually have more information. The queen died specifically of grief. But in experimental circumstances, you actually find that the second people who are given the second stimulus, the more information that interrelates the two data points, that's actually easier to remember. Getting more information, if you remember information not as crap written on a note card, but interconnected with other things that you know, it will be easier to remember. That is just by definition how things work.
That is what I would say on that. And all of the way that we tell kids to take notes and all the stupid stuff and studying, it's basically learning things in the king died, the queen died sense. You're just learning information that has nothing to do with anything else. That's what note cards are. When I learn a language, let's say I want to learn Dutch, or maybe something more exotic, maybe some kind of Romance language, one of those languages in Switzerland, I'm going to be remembering words based on, okay, well, I know this word in Latin. I'm going to connect this; this comes from a Latin word, and oh, this one comes from some Germanic word. There's all these interrelations. Information is never just something out in the middle of nowhere. It's not just a random digit you get as a security code from some service. It's information that connects with other things, and it's the same thing in everything else. So that's my viewpoint. That's why I don't take notes. I don't do any of that kind of stuff. I've never done it.
Mark says,
Luke, you have muted your mic. Also, what watch are you wearing?
I don't know. This watch I got like 10 years ago. Croton, it says. It's not a fancy watch. It was maybe like $70 back then.
Your volume is off. It's been like 10 minutes and you don't look at YouTube chat.
No, I don't. I think we got through all of those. Okay.
Henry sends in some XMR.
How is the well going? Would you recommend getting one? Hard to find property with clean drinking water, even those near rivers are polluted. By the way, you are muted.
So the well, I mean my well is fine. What if you have an electric well? You just sit it until you eventually, you might be unlucky and run out of water where you're pulling it from, but my well was actually redrilled before I moved in. It was drilled at one place and then it ran out and then they just moved it 10 feet, and then it works fine. So that's sometimes how it is. Drilling a well is pretty expensive. It could be like $10,000. But yeah, I do want to get a hand well eventually. Maybe you're referring to that. I may have mentioned I wanted that.
Would you recommend getting one? If you're already using city water and you just want to branch out a little bit, it might be cheaper and easier to do a catchment system, like catching rain and purifying it or something like that. Purifying it might be an issue because you might be getting some kind of nasty rainwater depending on where it's touching or whatever. But for cleaning up well water, some people are lucky. I have neighbors who are lucky and just pull pure water out of the ground. I do have a water softener and that just gets rid of iron and stuff like that. My water is pretty white if I don't have the softener, but this purifies it up.
Whenever I'm in a city and I have to drink fluoridated water, I truly understand why urban people are so bluepilled on everything. I can just feel my pineal gland calcifying. Yeah. Yeah. Mike is muted.
Is Steve Google send $5.
Is Steven crash and bass?
I don't know who that is. No idea who that is.
Flair sends in $10.
Handmade leather sandals, based or gay? On a more serious note, thank you for your video rantings. They played a very big part in my conversion to the Catholic Church this Easter.
Great. Leather sandals? If you can make them and make them well, it's a good idea. I actually am thinking about getting some flip-flops at some time. One thing I've never had in my life is flip-flops. I've thought about getting some. Years ago I had these minimalistic faux-minimalistic sandals that cost like a hundred bucks, and they were kind of sucky. I kind of accidentally got a shoe size too big when I was growing up because I have pretty wide feet. I have bigger feet than most people, definitely on the wide side. Most tennis shoes in America, they just size everything up. So I was wearing like 13s or whatever. I think I got this minimalist sandal in like a 12 or 13 when I probably should have had an 11, but whatever. If you can make homemade leather sandals, they're good.
Any sends in $5. Fictional books, if any.
Very few fictional books. I've never been a fiction person. There are certain authors who I've read, mostly short story stuff. I got into Jorge Luis Borges probably when I was in college and I have maybe a couple books of his. He has basically short stories, and if you don't know his stuff, it's kind of hard to explain. It's all worth it. A lot of books are just long-winded. That's just my view. Novels especially. There are probably some other short story writers that I'm fine with. But those are the first two that come to my head: Borges and Lovecraft, which are totally different. I don't know, maybe there's a sense in which they have some similarities, but Lovecraft is all that ancient alien stuff. Really, ancient alien stuff comes from H. P. Lovecraft; that's ultimately where it comes from, even though he does things that are totally different.
There might be a one-off fiction book. Let me look at my fiction section. There honestly are just not many fiction books I've ever been big into. Earlier this year, or maybe it was last year, I reread Lord of the Rings for the first time since I was in eighth grade, but I wouldn't say I especially like Tolkien or anything like that.
Ryan sends in $10.
Your tree issue might be due to not having the right mycorrhizae in your soil.
How much did you factor in future climate predictions, including migration models for refugees, in your land choice? I'm in my early 20s and like where I live, but it's booming. Water is running out and the rest of the land I feel connected to is extremely expensive.
I don't know what tree issue you're talking about. Maybe I was talking about a tree issue last stream. I've never really looked into growing stuff like that seriously, to look into bacteria or even pH. I've never taken the pH of my soil. My soil is very sandy, so I think that... does that make it more alkaline or what? I don't know. Who cares? I don't think that much. These books will tell you all about that, but I don't have a kit for checking pH.
Now, in terms of future climate predictions, quote unquote, and migration models, yeah, that's definitely an issue. I had an uncle who moved, maybe 20 years ago, to a place that was super rural. It was south of Atlanta. There was nothing around. And now it's basically the height of suburbia. There are all these shopping centers and stuff all over the place. So yeah, that is a big issue. I would make your decision partially based on whether, if you are going to move to the country and then in 20 years it's not going to be the country, that's kind of an issue.
It might be less of an issue if you're talking about long-term living. I would really want to move to a place where there's no threat in the next 100 years that it's going to become some kind of suburban area or something like that. Cities are kind of evangelical hive minds: they're going to spread out. They're going to keep spreading out. So if you're within a metropolitan area, or if you can commute to a big city in 30 minutes, I would not trust that area. It might be fine to move there for a period and if it becomes really urban, sell it and make money. But if you're talking about wanting to live long-term and have a multigenerational household and pass this land down to your children, that's a little questionable.
DJ sends in a dollar:
Thoughts on homebrewing and distilling? You live in the woods in Georgia, so when in Rome. Thoughts on going to university and getting a degree compared to going to a trade school and getting a certification?
I have a still that I use for distilling. I've made essential oils before, but I've never done any kind of homebrewing or distilling of alcohol, which I forget what the legality of that even is in the United States, but I think it's something weird. I do have relatives who make beers and stuff. But I've never looked into it. I'm not an alcohol person. I'm not really into it. I do have enough grapes to probably make some wine, but never done it.
On going to university and getting a degree as opposed to getting a certification: getting a certification in something is obviously more solid. If your life plan is to do something like me and move into the country, a certification is probably infinitely better. Because yes, do degrees — just having a degree, even if you're not going to learn anything and you're just getting a degree to have that on your resume, which is why 99% of people do it — the purpose of having a degree is just having that box checked off. If you had to choose either or, it depends on the life you're going to live. Honestly, I think a certification is probably better.
I'm not going to give a full-throated recommendation for it because that's not what I did, because I didn't know better when I was a kid. My cousin, for example, got a degree in school, which he's not using, and then he decided to get certified as an electrician. So he has to do that. He did years of schooling and now he's doing years of this certification and journeyman-ness or something. Either way, you might think having a degree gets you really far in your career and stuff like that. Sure, that's true in some jobs, but there's even more scarcity in terms of these certifications. In our county, there are not many electricians. If you want electrical work done legally, that is a very difficult thing to do in this county. There's basically one guy, one or two guys doing it. So that's actually much more lucrative. You could easily make six figures depending on how you do it in a lot of trade jobs. So getting a certification is probably a better financial investment, and it's even more massive in the country where you have a lower cost of living.
My reflex would say to get a certification or go to some kind of trade school, as long as they're set on that. But it's not the end of the world. Getting a college degree, if you're just doing four years, that's not going to kill you. The most thing you're wasting is time. Well, if you're going into debt, that's going to kill you. But it isn't killing you to do a degree. And of course it still does matter. Getting a college degree nowadays is mattering less and less every day. More and more people are saying, "Oh, well, everyone has them. They don't really matter." But it still does make a difference. There are jobs that you will not be able to apply to unless you have a college degree. Everyone's backup job is just to be a school teacher, right? Because anyone can do it, right? You got to have a degree to do that. Some kind of degree. Well, actually there are places you could probably do it without a degree. You could probably get some kind of certification that doesn't even require that, but either way, whatever.
Anonymous sends in XMR and says,
Bibliogram is for Instagram. Sites allow you to subscribe by RSS, meaning you can subscribe to Twitter without having an account.
Yeah, I know that. That is one other benefit. I think in my RSS feed reader I do have RSS subscriptions to some Nitter instance so I can look at Twitter profiles.
By the way, try making sauerkraut. Easy to make and nice with meals.
Thoughts on meritocracy. Why is the cathedral turning against it?
There are two reasons. There's enough talent in the system that they don't need most people to be talented. They don't need to find high-IQ people because they have enough high-IQ people to keep the system going. Mostly what the cathedral is focused on is allying with people who don't have lives, who aren't functional in society. Destroying meritocracy: if you get people who are gender-confused bugmen, who have mental health problems, all that kind of stuff, those people are great assets for the opinion-molding class because they don't have another option. They're going to be very much tied to the system. If they don't have somewhere else to go, that is the best way of keeping them in check.
You want to have, in any good governing system, some competent people, and I think the cathedral definitely has enough. But it's also great to have inept people, incompetent people, because so long as you put them in kind of affirmative-action roles, so to speak, where it's just BS jobs... when I was in grad school, this is kind of what grad school has become. Universities are now a way of employing these psychologically unemployable people who don't do anything. A lot of younger graduate students are people who are just not all there together. They can't really hold down a job. They're very neurotic and egocentric. They don't necessarily function in traditional work well, and at the same time they're not more entrepreneurial either. They're just kind of bad; nothing is going for them. And that's what the system tries to do. The system does try to make people inept. They try to take them away from their families. They try to stigmatize doing work and being productive and getting rich. They want to stigmatize all these things because they want to have people who are tethered to doing nothing because they make the best functionaries.
Meritocracy was necessary in the earlier 20th century. You need some competent people to run the system. That's what book The Bell Curve is about. People erroneously think that book is about race or race and IQ or something like that. There's one chapter on racial stuff, but it's only as a proxy for class. The real point of The Bell Curve is that the American education system during that period started favoring kids who are just higher IQ or have higher cognitive abilities independent of their class origins. There was this intellectual sorting that happened in American life where you had these higher IQ people who live with higher IQ people, and then you have this growing middle and underclass that is disconnected from them. Now that they have enough of those competent people, they are littering it with allies. That's basically what's going on. That's how I would look at it. So yeah, meritocracy. Of course there will be a breaking point. There is a sense in which a lot of these institutions, like universities, there is a point where they will not be able to function. But there's still some time with that.
Costence sends in some XMR.
Luke, is it now more expensive to do a Monero donation than a YouTube super chat? Please reduce the Monero donation amount back to 0.005. Thank you. Also, do you have any thoughts on the Bronze Age Mindset?
The reason I increased the amount is that I'm getting enough donations that I can read them constantly. If I lowered it, that would be an issue. Although I did think about that before I started. I might actually lower it anyway because there is a... to be clear, with YouTube super chats, if you donate like $2 in a YouTube super chat, I'm getting like zero of that. I'm getting like 30 cents. So it's not like there's no system cost to it. I might lower the amount, but if I have time while I'm reading all these...
Bronze Age Mindset: I'm aware that that guy exists and that little movement or whatever, but I don't really know. I never read that book. I know it was a big meme. From what I hear, their memes and their lines on things seem all right. They seem pretty cool or whatever, but I don't know anything about them.
Based and turkey pill sends in $5.
Monero lets people more securely transact for bad things like prostitution and drugs, which governments try to control. How do you weigh these apparent drawbacks versus the broader freedoms Monero and systematic privacy in general bring? Is there a way to get the best of both worlds?
Monero is really just turning us back to a realm of cash. Doing bad things is possible under Monero, but it's possible with OPSEC, using other things, or using cash. So that's less of an issue. If we lived in a world where we had a perfect and honest government and a financial system that wasn't censoring people, would I be as enthusiastic about Monero? Probably not. It has, in our world, a much more important incidental use in that the people who are being financially censored and monitored are basically the good guys. The world is reversed.
That is a legitimate question, but I don't think that it will facilitate... it's like having guns. Having guns makes some types of crime or suicide easier. That is true. But when it comes down to it, I think individuals should have the right to... if the government has the right to defend you lethally, why shouldn't you? And I think it's the same thing with Monero. If bad people are going to wiggle around and use all this fancy OPSEC to get security and use this technology, of course normal people should be using the technology as well. I said in one of my articles on Monero that people have this idea that Monero is going to empower criminal organizations. You can already do that with Bitcoin if you use it wisely. There are ways of achieving private Bitcoin. But the big gains of privacy are the boomer normies who are going to be using this technology and they're not going to be thinking about it. So the main drawback for a public blockchain like Bitcoin or most cryptocurrencies is just the fact that normal people are going to get into it and they're going to end up stubbing their toes or really hurting themselves because they don't think about privacy in the way that criminals do. Whereas Monero actually kind of narrows that gap.
Most of these things, drugs and prostitution, people use cash for that kind of stuff. Will it become slightly easier to do with Monero? Yeah, I think it would, in the same way that suicide becomes easier with guns. But the gains are so much bigger, especially in our incidental case where it's the good people who are being censored. Those are the things we have to keep in mind.
Marcus sent in some XMR.
Have you watched JoJo's?
If it's the anime, I have seen that. Cringe, I know.
Anonymous sent in some XMR.
Pretty much everyone I know uses classical Christian education. Basically everyone. I don't know that much about it, but from what I hear it's pretty solid. They have everything; kids are learning Latin and stuff like that. The stuff I've seen from it is pretty solid, and I don't necessarily know all the justification behind it, but in real life, people I know, that is widely used. I know many homeschooling groups that are using it.
Education: I think most mildly intelligent people were not educated in school anyway. I really think if you think about it, most of your learning was done outside of formal schooling. I've had friends who have done this thing called unschooling, which is basically just legally telling the government, "Yeah, I'm homeschooling my children," but you really do no formal education whatsoever. It's much more naturalistic. I'm sympathetic to that. I don't know how workable that is. You really do need some kind of structure in some forms of education, like to get reading and things like that marked off. But when it comes down to it, I really don't think there's a big gap between your average high school graduate and someone who's raised in our literate culture without any kind of schooling whatsoever. I'm not convinced that there's a big difference. So I'm not very worried about lack of education or anything like that. Classical Christian stuff seems pretty good.
Of course now it's not even a debate. There used to be that period when I was younger where people used to say, "Oh, homeschool kids, they're not going to be properly educated or they're going to be weird." Well, now look at public school kids. I rest my case. If you want a normal child, you cannot send them to one of those grooming facilities. There are good schools in rural places. People say that the grade school near where I am is pretty good. There are still some good public schools in very rural places, but it's pretty rare and I wouldn't bet on it surviving 10 years. If you want proof of this, just look at education curricula in schools now, in universities, the kind of stuff they're teaching these girls, the social brainwashing that goes on there. I don't know. It's almost like I rest my case.
DJ sends in a dollar:
Thoughts on owning firearms, both in a hobby sense or a hunting self-protection sense? Are guns a meme?
You should definitely have a gun. I'm not really interested in gun culture or hunting. Hunting for food, yeah, that's fine. That's great. But hunting for entertainment, never been interested in it. Everyone should have guns, absolutely. Because, as I said before, if you trust the government to use lethal force to defend you, why wouldn't you self-host your lethal defense? It's one of those really basic things. It's crazy also that there are countries in the world, poor Europoors, where many of them, especially Bangistanis, basically don't have the right to... if someone comes into your house, you can't even fight them, let alone with a knife, let alone with a gun. It's probably not that bad. I just see some clickbait articles about that and it's sad.
A Vietnamese person sends in some more XMR.
I remember reading your article about nitpicking a long time ago. Could you bring back that article on your website?
I think I wrote it during a period where I was using some different system for my website and I didn't transfer it over. There are actually a bunch of articles I plan... well, I'm actually rewriting my website in Hugo, which I've been working on for a couple of years. I should probably just finish that up and put it up. The real thing is designing my main page; that's the hardest part. The rest of the site is fine, but designing the landing page — what links do I want to put up there? How big do I want them? Do I want pictures that you click? Those kinds of design choices, I actually have a lot of trouble thinking that through how I actually want it to be. Although I actually have it now so that there's no navbar on my website, or on the Hugo version that I'm going to put up. I don't know how I feel about that, but anyway. So yeah, if I think about the nitpicking article, I'll put it up.
Also, how much does gas cost in your area? Gas in Mississippi costs like $4 now right now.
Yeah, it's at least that here. In some parts of North Georgia, it's lower. I was at the BIES a little south of maybe north of Atlanta. There's one north of Atlanta and there's one south. I forget which one, but one of them had gas for like $3.30. But where I am, it's easily over four. Getting gas for $4 a gallon is a bargain here. You can probably go out of your way to get it for $4, but it's gone up like 20 or 30 cents in the past two weeks or so.
I looked at the YouTube chat. I see that there's a super chat. I've not been looking at YouTube super chats, but I'll read this one because I happen to see it. Martin says,
Thoughts on shared library tracking in package managers such as Void's VBP? It tracks shared libraries. Pacman doesn't, but it works since things are built and rebuilt.
I don't know how I feel about that. Realistically speaking, I would say I don't know. I probably don't want to have a comment about it. I'd have to think about how that actually is. Has VBP always been like that? I'm not quite sure. I don't have a strong opinion about it, so I'll just say that. There are probably reasons for doing it, but I'm just not familiar with it.
I'm going to log into that XMR thing and I will lower the donation amount. Let's see. Config, and I will half it. So it will be 0.01. That sounds good. So those of you who are poor and want to give smaller donations, I can.
DJ donates $1.
Thoughts on the different types of music?
I listen to so little music. Most of it is just not entertaining to me. A cappella is obviously best. I don't care. Obviously most pop music I'm not going to like. I'm going to think is stupid. Music is just not part of my life right now. Since I've been an adult, really even when I was a kid, I've never been a musical person. I kind of listen to bands just because, "Oh, I'm supposed to like certain bands, so I guess I'll pretend to like these even though I think they suck," that kind of stuff. But no, I've never been a big fan of music. I just don't find it interesting. I don't understand the identity that people put on music. It's weird. I feel that way about a bunch of stuff, though, so whatever.
I hope I didn't, when I restarted Shadow Chat, I hope I didn't screw up anyone's donation, or at least the message. All right. Oh, look at the YouTube chat for a second.
I only listen to Dungeon Synth.
HAHAHA
Packet loss is definitely from Starlink. It kind of sucks.
Well, I think it's partially where I... I still literally have my Starlink receiver on the ground. I've still not mounted it because I don't really have the materials to build a mount. And I could buy a Starlink mount for like 40 bucks, but I don't really want to do that. So it's still on the ground. Pathetic. Yeah, there is packet loss. Usually the packet loss is not too big. I don't know how it is on the stream. I've never watched through an entire stream of mine to see what it's actually like. But usually it's not long enough to persist.
I really do hate this webcam. I've probably complained about this before, but it gives you this weird distortion. It looks like my right arm is massively larger than my left. It's one of those fisheye-ish things. Look how small my left arm looks and my right arm is much bigger. Or if I put my feet up, it looks like my feet are enormous and the rest of my body is puny. I really just don't like that. That makes me self-conscious when I record a video. I'm not actually self-conscious about it, but it's like, ah, that looks so weird. But now I've made you aware of it, so I've actually made it worse.
I think we complained about that on some other stream. Okay, let's see. I think I finally got through all the donations. Yeah, okay, great. I have nothing to read right now.
Trying to decide whether to coreboot or just do a regular BIOS with whitelist removed.
If you're going to change it, you might as well coreboot it, because you want to disable that Intel Management Engine. That's the whole point. And I need to think more. This laptop right here actually still has its proprietary BIOS, which means you can spy on me. All of our Glow friends can spy on us. So now I actually don't know how processors and telephones work. Although I'm going to... you know, Shadow Chat just broke. Look at this. Look at this bad gateway. What is this crap? Got to fix that. What did I mess up? See if I ever decrease the money required to donate again. Let me check this.
Okay, there we go. There we go. All right, back to normal. Right.
Okay. So, Lock the Game Maker sends in $5.
My mother was into unschooling. I read better than most and write fine, but math has always been a little pain.
Yeah. I mean, one of the things whenever you have one of those homeschooling things where it's just like, especially if it's just one single family, there is a tendency for you to be biased in terms of what your mama knows or doesn't know. Now, I do know the normal thing around here is a lot of people will just have homeschooling groups, and actually I've had a homeschooling group that every once in a while they'll ask me, "Oh, do you want to help us with Latin?" Because none of them know Latin, but it's in the classical curriculum or whatever, the classical Christian stuff. So yeah, I mean, that's a big advantage of homeschooling as a group, because you're not going to have if your mom doesn't know calculus, you can still learn calculus.
Justin Murphy sends in 01 XMR.
Thank you for lowering the XMR dono threshold. Do you have any knowledge or interest in the theological thinker Simone Vile?
I don't know who that is. Never heard of that. Never heard of that person.
Hawk donates $1.
I've already sent this message on YouTube super chat. Have you read the Transerfing books by Vadim Zeland?
The number of things that people have asked me in this stream that I've never heard of is drastically increasing. I mean, I'm glad it's not constantly getting questions about Jordan Peterson, but no, I've never heard of this. I think the English version, the books are originally Russian, have only one book that summarizes all five. So, I can't really say that they are of the same value as the separate five books that were translated to French to be the most close to the real ones. Yeah, I've never heard of that. Trans surfing. Maybe that rings like a very distant bell. Is he lent? Yeah, but no, I've definitely never read those. I don't know. I don't know about that.
Anonymous sends in some Monero
thoughts on dating culture? What should a man look for in a woman before marriage?
I mean, dating culture is stupid, of course. Like the concept of dating is basically cucked by definition. Like this whole idea of having boyfriend and girlfriend, it's absolutely stupid. Yeah, I mean, it's just like a pseudo-marriage for cummers and stuff like this, and most of the time this is just nonsense. Avoiding it is good. I would not, even back in the day I had a tendency of not calling my girlfriends girlfriends, and I didn't think of things in those terms even if, you know, it's stupid. I will just say I think it's a bad idea. And I think people need to think less in terms of getting boyfriends or getting girlfriends or things like that. When you find someone who's a serious candidate for getting married to, then you can get married to them. You can skip that silly stage. That's my view of it. It's called engagement. If you don't want to get engaged with them, you shouldn't be doing it. In the same way, I look at all my ex-girlfriends and the reason I know dating is stupid is because basically only in my weakest would I have actually married any of those girls. They were all just like, "Oh, girl, I got to have a girlfriend, so I'll be with this girl." So that's the issue with people now that they want to do this dating culture thing, and it's dumb. It's dumb. It existed for maybe two generations, and now it's reaching levels of absurdity that make it totally odd.
Anyway, as for what a man should look for... a woman before marrying...
that should be obvious. The things that you are naturally attracted to. Is she a thought? If she's not, you don't marry her. It's not that difficult. This is like asking how do I eat food? That's just my opinion. If you're asking me what color hair should she be, it doesn't matter.
DJ sends in a dollar.
What webcam are you using? How much does rural land go for in Georgia, ballpark figures, and thoughts on Bohemianism?
You are really squeezing all these questions in to $1 donations over and over again. DJ, you could just do one where you give all the... Well, I guess I do have a character limit or something on that, but whatever. What webcam am I using? I don't know. It says the brand is AUKEIY. How much does rural land go for in Georgia? Land, especially in rural areas, there are massive variations. You can go to one county in one area and you will see houses going for crazy different prices. Cheap enough. You can go out there and you can find a place even if you don't have that much money. Thoughts on Bohemianism? I don't know what you mean by Bohemia, like the Czech Republic. I don't know. Don't know about that one.
Valsel sends in Monero.
Congrats on getting married. Is it all it was cracked up to be?
Oh, yeah.
Mus Hussein sends in a dollar.
Luke, I'd say you're very gifted. I thoroughly enjoy your reviews of heterodox/red-pilling books are not related. Any advice on finding meaning? Ever since I lost my faith, I find it hard to be happy even though I'm materially more fortunate. In our tradition, we have a prayer denoting that one gains nothing in losing God and loses nothing in believing.
Yeah. Well, Pascal's wager as we call it here. Well, you could become Orthodox. That would be the ideal, but depends on your life situation what is in store for you. Of course, I don't feel there are many heterodox books I actually talk about are not related. If anything, I talk about very academic books that are very kind of mainstream, or at least the ones I've been doing recently. I did the population growth books on that episode, which I still haven't released on YouTube, but it's on notrelated.xyz down there. I'm trying to make it look like I'm pointing down there, right? It's on the notrelated website, but it's not on YouTube. But yeah, you've become Orthodox. That's my actual... And you said something in Arabic, but I think the text got all messed up. I'm pretty sure that's what it is. Or is that Persian? I can't tell because the letters are all screwed up. I can't read it because it's inverted and all this weird stuff. And the letters are not connected. And of course, my knowledge of Arabic is very primitive.
Keith sends in $5.
Hey Luke, thoughts on the Buffalo shooting, skitso or fed boy plant.
I don't know. Someone mentioned that that happened to me in real life. I don't keep up with this internet stuff. Shootings are always fake. They're always... He's probably a skitsoid and a fed boy. I don't know anything about this and I don't care.
DJ sends in 69 cents.
THOUGHTS ON JORDAN PETERSON?????
ha-ha-ha
Tom sends in some XMR.
Hey Luke, would you ever be open to moving past the Q&A format for live streams? It'd be cool to see live conversation like a call on Jitsy, like a Jitsy call or something.
Like talking with someone else or like Q&A with random people who call in. I don't know. If you're talking about interviews, I'm not a big fan of doing things with people on the internet like collabs and stuff like that. I have done stuff, like I did something with Kevin Wad the other month. I think in June some guy asked me to be on some podcast that I'm not even familiar with. But I think I'll go on it. But in general, I don't want to make it a habit to do things with other people because I think that's kind of... I don't know. You guys know this entire channel is just me when I feel like doing it, I'm going to do it. It's not like an official YouTube channel. I just want to be clear. I just do this stuff. I get bored. Last night I was bored, so it's like I'll do a live stream. I didn't end up having time so I put it off for now, which I also have time. But I'm not a planner. I feel like that would require planning unless you're asking me to do Jity calls with people, like you guys call in or something. I also feel like I would need a call screener for that and some other stuff. So I don't know. I just kind of do it. The thing is, I've always just... My live streams, the first live stream I did was literally just a test and people just asked me questions so I answered them. And I've really never changed the format. I have thought about doing longer-winded videos where I talk about something or live streams and then answer questions. I did that once for an episode of not related. But I don't know. It's kind of hard to... It's easy to sit here and talk at the live stream for a while, but to have something more organized might be a little more difficult. I've probably gotten better at it now because I usually do not related episodes in basically one sitting, maybe one or two. So I could probably do it, but...
Flare Flareium sends in $5.
Is it reasonable to hold out hope for a more 2016-esque Trump campaign in 2024? Or is that election going to be a wash? I'm mostly apathetic to national politics, but that SCOTUS abortion leak a few months ago has got me a little excited.
Yeah, I mean, well, that's not necessarily politics, but if the Supreme Court Wade, not only is that good news, but it means even more good news could be in the ropes in terms of good decisions and maybe kind of acceleration in the sense that liberals start to lose hope that they own the system entirely, the matrix starts collapsing. So either way, it's probably a good thing. But as for the presidential election in 2024, this time around, because I think when he first became president, he definitely had this idea that when he was president, it's just going to be like being CEO of the country and he's going to be able to change all these things and fix all these things. And of course, he ran into nonstop fake ops from the beginning and the whole Russia hoax investigation and all this kind of stuff, just a big annoyance. But I think now he kind of understands how that stuff works. He understands that this is much more of a political game that he's playing, right? So I think he will be better a second time around. And if you look at prediction markets, I looked at PredictIt maybe last night and the most likely president in 2024 at maybe 20-something, 30-something percent is Trump. Second is Ron DeSantis and third is Joe Brandon. So I think this... And I do think there's a pretty poor chance of him winning re-election considering he didn't really win the first election anyway. But we'll see what happens. I don't put hope in politics. Definitely don't do that. You can act on a political level while at the same time making decisions that put yourself in a position that make you less likely to be damaged by it. When I... I should say the period of my life where I finally decided to move into the country was actually when I lost hope in politics. And this was right before the 2016 election. The entire runup to the 2016 election, I was like, "Oh yeah, Trump is going to win. No problem. It's not going to be an issue. Polls are fake, of course." But then maybe a week or two before I was like, "Ah, shoot. I don't know. Maybe he's not going to do it. Maybe Hillary is going to win. Maybe things are going to get bad." It was in that darkest moment that I was like, you know, I should probably, yeah, I really do need to act on moving into the country. I really do need to leave the university. I really do need to do all this kind of stuff, right? And so at that point I was like, okay, I'm going to do this. This has to happen. Things are only going to get worse. And Trump got elected, right? So we basically bought four more years kind of. I mean, things got really bad still during Trump's years anyways. But what I'm trying to say is you can hope for the best in politics and you can act on a political level, but don't put your neck out. You need to constantly be making decisions assuming the worst-case scenario. That's what I do. And in the era of the internet you can play both sides. I remember back when Var was on YouTube, Var would have these really frankly stupid takes because he would tell people to move out into the country and all this kind of stuff. But then he would say if you ever even vote or if you ever even think about or if you show any preference for any political candidate, you're like a shill or you're compromised or something. I think that's just so stupid because you can do both. You can act as if the worst-case scenario is happening, prepare for the worst-case scenario, but also you still... It's not hard to vote. Just take two seconds to do it.
Garzit says,
Thoughts on insurance? Aren't they scams? Because people that decide if they give money give you money are the same people...aren't they a scam? Because people that decide if they will give you money are the same people that should give you money.
I mean, there are ways of adjudicating insurance contracts. There's a court system that does that. Of all the reasons to think insurance is a scam, I'm surprised you think that is a reason. But I mean health insurance is definitely a scam. I don't know. Insurance in general, I think, unless you're extremely wealthy or extremely well propertied, insurance probably is not as necessary as people think it is. Now, I can understand where there are systemic risks. I kind of understand the purpose of there being required car insurance, for example. There are reasons to do that if you get hit by someone who's uninsured or something like that. I can kind of understand that logic. But yeah, health insurance and things like that are just pretty crazy. Well, it's really like health insurance exists in the United States as an artifact of wage and price controls in the New Deal and then in the '70s because companies weren't allowed to pay their workers more to reduce inflation. So they started offering them health insurance, and the United States became just a thing that everyone just has all this health insurance. And then of course it just bids up the price of medicine and stuff like that.
Brain sends in some XMR
thoughts on Jim's blog. Yes, that one.
I legitimately do not know a Jim who has a blog, so yeah, more things I don't know about. Great.
DJ says,
Have you tried Pipewire? I found that if you don't do anything fancy, it's basically a direct upgrade from PulseAudio.
Yeah, I use PipeWire on everything. I use PipeWire on this laptop now. I use it on my computers actually. It now installs by default if you install LARBS. If you install my dotfiles, PipeWire is now default. So yeah, I've used it and I don't really know the big advantages over PulseAudio. I've had some fewer bugs, but I guess it's kind of the wave of the future and it's worked out for me, so I don't have to think about it. And it works with everything that runs with PulseAudio, so everything made for PulseAudio, it runs as well.
Matt donates a single dollar.
Recently changed careers, working a lot with Linux, but I have to use Windows for some parts of my job. I just want to say I have all Apple products currently and in just four weeks I've started to hate Mac OS more and more every day.
Yeah. Well, the more you use it the more you'll hate it. Apple is really the worst tech company in the world by far. There's not even a debate as far as I'm concerned. Other companies will have a little planned obsolescence here or they'll get rid of something or do something on their own standard here, but Apple is truly the worst company in the universe in everything they do because their whole mindset is, "Oh, we're big enough that we're going to do things our way. We are going to force our own standards on things." And it's affected everything. It affects... Because Apple thinks people are stupid. If you download my podcast, I will get emails every other week: I can't download your podcast. My podcasts are in OGG files, which is a standard free, open-source codec that's been around for decades. Every machine is compatible with it except for Apple because they refuse to. And they also refuse to use FLAC for years and years.
Back in the day when it came to iPods, this is the first thing that actually pissed me off about Apple stuff. If you have an iPod, iPods can only sort things in preordained categories. So, it used to be you tagged songs for artists and then album artists, and those are two different things. Why are those two different things? An album artist is the person whose album it belongs to. Whereas if you have a track which is a collab, if you have a rap song with five different rappers, you have five different rappers in the artist tag and only one in the album artist, whoever's album that is. So Apple decided, however, very early on that they would not use that standard. They would make up their own standard. They would only use the artist tag. So that means that you can't sort things by artist anymore, or at least in the traditional way. So people have to totally re... They basically deprecated the album artist tag and now the convention is to put everything in the title of the video. So you say here's the title of my song featuring blah blah blah blah blah, right? You feature the other four artists there and the normal album artist is now the artist.
That sounds like a minor nitpick, but because of how Apple decided to construct to enforce this standard on everyone, we have ugly tagged music because of that, because of just them. They couldn't use the tags that existed for a particular reason. It's like whoever wrote... In all the development of iPods, they didn't think to check that up. Like, what do people use these standards for? You know what I mean? And they're the same way with email. They're the same way with texting. They have to do texting their own ways. They want to have liking that uses SMS protocol doing things weird ways. They have to reformat emails. They have to do everything themselves.
And the worst part is, if you have an Apple cultist who's living in this Apple environment, this Apple cocoon of fragile software that breaks the instant you use a real standard, they get mad at everyone else. Oh, you don't... You can't be a member of my Apple chat. Oh, you do things... Oh, these things are tagged. Why doesn't this work on Apple? This sucks. You suck. No, it's Apple that sucks. They do everything their own way and they are big enough that they can just say screw you to everyone and now of course hardware... They screwed up everything. You don't even have audio jacks in phones anymore thanks to Apple, okay? In any phones because everyone just imitates Apple crap because they're like, "Oh, Apple wants to get rid of these ports. I guess we better get rid of these ports, right?" That's how people think.
It's insane. And of course, what's the result? You have an entire generation of people who are beyond ignorant about technology because that is what Apple hardware and software is about. It's about keeping you stupid when it comes to technology, right? You don't want to have something that you can change. You can tinker with this a little bit. You want to have this very fragile system that just gives you this one homogeneous user interface that does everything its own way. They can't use normal protocols that transfer music to an iPad or sync things up. They have to do everything their own way. And they do everything wrong. They do everything inefficiently. And then they force it on everyone else. They screw up everyone's standards. They make crappy hardware that is planned to be obsolete. You can't even take parts out of it without disassembling everything. And because they are so big and because they can rip people off with planned obsolescence, all these other companies have realized, oh well, we better do the same thing. That's what consumers want. Consumers don't want to be able to plug things in. They want simplicity. They want to have like five lightning ports instead of actual ports, right? It's just so stupid. It's ridiculous. Oh, we don't need Ethernet anymore. We don't need audio jacks. We don't need any of this kind of stuff.
Apple is demonic. It truly is the worst company in the world. And everything they touch just turns to something bad. Okay, it's awful. So yeah, to the original comment, yes, I can understand being infuriated at Mac stuff because the more you use it, it's not just the angrier you get at it, it's like you feel bad for Mac users for having to put up with the stuff, but it's like they don't even realize that they're being abused. It's like in their mind again, it's like everyone else is wrong except for me. That's their way of thinking. It's a cult. It's a cult. That's all it is. That's all I have to say about that.
Caner sends in some XMR.
Appreciate your content.
Thank you.
A curious mind sent in some XMR.
Could you talk more about your experience with the Orthodox Church? You've said several times that you believe that they get things right, where many others today get things so wrong. Could you elaborate more specifically on what you mean by that? And what lessons you see as valuable today.
Well, I should probably do a separate video on this because people ask me the same questions. I thought about doing a video on why specifically I didn't become a Catholic because a lot of people ask me about that. I would say in general, like the elevator speech, in generalities, what separates the Orthodox Church from the western church is the western church kind of... It does what we were talking about before that the Enlightenment does. It takes human reason and puts it too far ahead of everything, too far above everything else.
The Orthodox are content to receive mysteries via tradition, the mystery of baptism and the mystery of communion, all these kind of things, and they don't want to intellectualize things and they don't want to put the fingerprints of human reason on it and create some systematic theology in the way that the scholastics and the Catholics and then the Protestants did. So what that means is that in the west people will end up innovating.
So you'll add on doctrine, you'll develop doctrine in the Newman sense of the word, which of course he meant it to mean a good thing. As time goes on, the Catholic Church invents, they develop more doctrine. They basically discover it, in like a Rothbardian natural law sense, whereas that's not what the Orthodox view is.
The view of Orthodoxy is to cling to the traditions of the apostles and to keep things conservatively at that. So what is exactly the mechanisms of salvation? What exactly is a mechanism? How is the bread and wine the body and blood of Christ and all this kind of stuff? These are mysteries. These are unanswered questions. We can philosophize about them, but that is different from the objective of the church.
So what you get with the Catholic Church is you have people intellectualizing, making all of these distinctions and all these kind of things that don't apply, and Protestantism is this reaction against it. Oh, here are these things about Catholic doctrine that are unsound. And instead of returning to Orthodoxy, Protestantism is really just a branch of Catholicism. They reject the pope. They're not in communion with the pope. But instead of... They see that issue and kind of diminish the value of tradition altogether because they say, oh look, the Roman tradition is bad. So let's have this... Let's basically look at the Bible and interpret it without context.
They don't say they do that, but they do. So that's why Protestantism is not even a thing. It's like a million different things. But they're all based on the same idea: this elevation of reason above divine mysteries, above tradition. So now if you want to create a Protestant church, you read the Bible, you squint your eyes, you find what you want it to say or what you think it says, and you create your own church. That has no connection to the apostolic church. That's just how it is. So there are lots of issues. I'll just say on any individual issue, this principle applies. You know, where there's all this innovation in the west and the Orthodox Church is just the Orthodox Church. It's just what it is. So there are many other things about it that originally I was unfamiliar with when I first went to a physical Orthodox church, but those are like cultural details.
Mr.Based42069 sends in some XMR.
Aloha snack bar. Why are you streaming so early? I should be working, but I'm here. Is remote work unironically based?
Yeah, it is unironically based. I was going to do a stream last night, but it was too late and I had some things to work on, so I figured I'd do one now because I have some time now. There's no reason, I guess. Let's see what time is everywhere. I actually have a script that makes... Wait, no, let's see. Okay, so it's a little past midnight in China. I guess it's a good time. Europoor and Pajeets can probably watch right now. Yeah, no reason though.
Yeah, remote work is unironically based. I want to do a video on the very concept of employment and why it's bad. A lot of people, one of the most common questions I'm surprised I haven't gotten in this live stream is all these freaking kids asking me how do I get a job? Oh, I'm in software development. How do I get a job? Am I a proponent of employment? The way people think about things now is they think about jobs as being this scarce commodity that they need to fight for or something like that. As if the idea of mass employment, the idea that no one works for themselves, everyone works for a company, that is very much a boomer thing.
Before then, especially when people were more agricultural, people were basically self-employed. Of course many people did subsistence farming and bartering and had simple crafts and stuff like that. But it's much more common to have... You can look at self-employment stats and you will see basically the norm in 1900 was self-employment. Or maybe you have to go a little further before that. I'm not quite sure. A lot of that would have been agricultural workers too. But after the world war, wage becomes the norm. Everyone has to just get a job. And now, of course, at least you have the reprieve of having online work becoming more common, and yes, it is an improvement.
But the real solution is self-employment or having a business or all of that kind of stuff. So when people are coming to me like, "Oh, how do I get a job?" Especially if you're in computers, if you're in technology, you should not be thinking about what kind of job am I going to get. That is the last thing on your mind. You have this literally magical ability to create new things that... I mean, this isn't like carpentry where you have to pay for wood. Your raw material is clicks on a keyboard. They are free. You know what I mean? You can literally perform digital magic. So the idea that, oh, how can I... I really just want to be a peg and knocked into a hole. No, that's stupid. Why do you want to get a job? You shouldn't want to get a job. Is it okay to get a job in software? Of course it is. It's fine to get a job in software. But that should always be your side hustle. Especially if you're in computers, if you get a job somewhere even if they're paying very well, you should always think about that in terms of this is what I'm doing on my day job. I'm actually working on these projects. That is my view. Because we have, by having digital technology, by having the internet, we have a very unique ability to be independent in a way that no one in the past has been able to do because this isn't an independence of sweaty brow, subsistence farming or even craftsmanship or things like that. This is a much more powerful kind of self-employment. So I think people that, if you are into computers, that should be your primary goal paying for your... I don't know what you're going to do, like individual tasks for people, consulting, affiliate links, anything. There's so many ways of making money via computers that you shouldn't really be drop shipping things like that.
My book-selling business, we're right there, LindyPress.net. I actually do more work for that because I actually typeset the books and stuff like that. But how easy is it to start a drop-shipping business where you just sell stupid merch? Oh, I like Monero as a cryptocurrency. I'm going to start my own drop-shipping site where I sell Monero stuff. You know how easy that is? You can probably do it with free software that's out there already and hook it up with some print-on-demand service and print that. What I'm getting at is we have so much ability to do so much and you should not be focused on getting a job. So this is not actually an answer to this guy's question. It's an answer to the question that I get all the time anyway that actually gets at the deeper point.
Drop shipping is scummy.
Well, yeah, there are many kinds of drop shipping that is scummy. You can't sell junk, but there is this sense in which even if you are just hooking up a print-on-demand service to a website you are doing an important service. If you're writing that kind of stuff, it's not like that counts. That's a real thing. There's nothing wrong with it.
Depends on what you're drop shipping, but it can be done.
Is crypto dead? No, you better be slurping the hecking dipperino.
You know, actually, I don't know. I slurped some dip a little bit ago. I might slurp some more dip, but I think I might fall a little more. I've talked to multiple people right now who are thinking about buying whole bitcoins because it's so cheap right now.
Christian sends in $5.
Luke, come to Romania, the country with the biggest Orthodox church in the world. Let me know if you want to. I'll email you my details and can arrange visits and monasteries around the country. Okay?
If you email my main email, I will write that down. If you're inviting me and I'll contact it. Now, there's a low chance that I'll be out there, but hypothetically, if it happens, I will put it in my Vim Wiki notes.
Tux_loves_you sends in $5.
Thoughts on Ethan Ralph. I made a game about him at this URL at his site tuxloves...meostgunt. Also, look forward to seeing you on the Break the Rules podcast.
Oh, yeah. That was it. That was the podcast that I said that I was going to do. Ethan Ralph, I know that he exists. I think he's like a streamer. I don't know. He's fat. That's what I know about him. I don't know. I think he interviews people. I don't know. I want to say like years ago he may have emailed or someone from his team may have emailed me to do something and I was like I think I said yes and I ended up not doing it, but I forget. There are many people who ask me to do stuff and it just gets lost in the emails like one of us doesn't respond or something like that. That's a very normal thing. The only time I regret that is when someone...
I have never done a product review on my channel. I'm not against them. Now, obviously 99% of products are absolute trash, but occasionally I will have a manufacturer of like free... People who like Libreboot ThinkPads or coreboot them or something else, or like do free phones or something like that, every once in a while have someone like that say, "Oh, I'll mail you a free sample if you review this." And that's actually, you know, and I've kind of, oh, maybe I'll do this, but I've never actually gotten a free computer out of it. I kind of wish I had. I really want another corebooted or liberated computer so I don't have to coreboot this thing myself. And you know, I could probably use it for something else. But so if anyone has a company where you do that, tell me about that.
Robert sends in $5.
Love you, Mr. Smith. You used to have a blog article called Only Mediocre Minds Nitpick. Where did it go? Is one of my favorite.
Yeah, I someone asked me earlier on the stream about that. Yeah, that was I was doing my website a different way. I think it's in a different folder and I didn't transfer it over to the new one. I'm actually rewriting my whole website in Hugo.
Could you talk about nitpicking and what makes someone a nitpicker? Thank you. May our Lord bless you.
So, what a nitpicker? Is this someone who's detail oriented in a bad way? Like they want to... I don't know, like they can't come out. Really what I was getting at in that article is like people who miss the forest for the trees, kind of stuff like that, who miss the point of things and then will argue some autistic and unimportant detail as if it matters. I should bring back that article because it makes a good point.
BasedAndTurkeyPilled sends in $1. I noticed that everyone is sending in $1 now. I thought I used to have like a minimum donation on my FOSSPAY thing. I used to think it was like $3, but whatever, you know. So $1:
a constructed language based novel art. Is it a based and novel art form or cringe bugman hobby?
It's definitely a cringe bugman hobby, or at least in 99% of the time. I mean, yeah, it's basically a cringe bugman hobby. I don't want to call Tolkien a cringe bugman; his context is a little different, but yeah, constructed language... Well, he was like the original guy to do that. Every other constructed language now is literally retarded and just like a silly intellectual enterprise where you could just actually learn a real language that's much more interesting and useful aside from that.
Keon said,
Have you read Father Far Sarapin Rose's books yet? Do you know about Saraphim Bailey? Glad you are becoming Orthodox. Christ is risen. Truly, he's risen.
I have read bits and pieces of Sarapin Rose's stuff. I've read some of Genesis, Creation, and Early Man. Maybe something else of his. I'm not quite sure, but I wouldn't say I've read his books in the sense that I've had a long, wide, and deep reading of him or anything. I don't know anything about Father Sarapim Bailey. We've heard of him, but I'm not quite sure.
So, as you can tell, I'm kind of getting tired. I might just recline in my chair. See, I can't say I'm going to bed soon because I'm obviously not. But I might make up some other... Well, I do need to eat lunch eventually.
Annie sends in $5.
Hi, do you have any thoughts on the Roman Empire?
... to do an episode of not related on this? Okay, this is not on the Roman Empire. This is like... Well, it's related enough. I meant to do an episode of not related on this. I probably eventually will, but a couple months ago or maybe last year at this point on UNZ.com, like the news aggregator, they had this guy posting a chronological revisionist series of articles, and what they argued was like Gunnar Heinsohn's revised chronology and his view. So his crazy view is that the Roman Empire, like the classical age, but also the later Roman Empire around the time of Diocletian and also the Carolingian Empire in northern Europe, or at least central Europe, actually all occurred at the same period and they all happened at the same time. And in fact, a lot of the histories we have written of classical Rome are actually the same as histories of Rome in the post-classical era, the early Byzantine period. And of course, the Carolingian Empire, like all of this was the same cultural sphere, the same empire, just different cultures and different historians writing.
Now the argument is actually very empirical in the sense that it is reliant on stratigraphy, so because there's no... These three eras, the so-called classical era, the post-antiquity, and then early Middle Ages, in stratigraphy those are all the same. There's no difference. There's no archaeological site that has one and then the other and then the other.
His way of putting it is like we have that period in his view is basically 300 years, and we have that 300 years. We look at the classical era where the spotlight is on one region where it's a dark age in everywhere else, and then we look at the Byzantine era, and then everything else is in a dark age, and then we look to Charlemagne's empire and then everything else is in a dark age there. So his idea is basically it's all the same thing, and then in the Gregorian reform around the year 1000, which really is around the year 300 in the revised chronology, they kind of rewrote things. They kind of systematized history and wrote all this stuff as if it were a sequence and all this kind of stuff.
So anyway, that is the first interesting idea that came up with the Roman Empire to my head. So that's what I'll leave you with there. So yeah, I should put the links to those somewhere. If someone has the links, put them in the channel chat.
Okay, so yeah, if I actually have to pick a favorite emperor, who do I want to pick? I don't know. I don't want to be boring and say Constantine, but that might have to be it. How about Constantine the 12th, the emperor that will eventually reclaim the throne and reinstate the empire? That's my favorite emperor.
I did do that video talking about Dante's view of the Roman Empire. It was the one titled “Who's in the Deepest Pits of Hell?” It talks about Dante's theological view of the Roman Empire, where the Roman Empire exists because Christ had to be crucified under a universal jurisdiction and all this kind of stuff. It's an interesting theory; you can check out that video of mine again.
Matt donates $1.01:
I'm very new to using Linux and love it. Currently running Ubuntu and working on using my keyboard less and less every day. Practicing using Vim, would you recommend switching to an Arch-based distro at this point? What would you recommend focusing on to increase my skills as fast as possible?
If you're trying to increase your skills as fast as possible, switch to Arch or switch to Artix. I use Artix, and make sure to install one without a desktop environment at the beginning. If you want to increase your skills, figure out how to install all of that. It's not difficult; it might take a day or two. If you have an extra machine, that may make it easier. That would be the next jump. That was the big jump for me when I was like, “Okay, now I understand how all this works.” So that's my recommendation.
Tom donates $1:
Thanks for streaming for us Europeans. What's your opinion on James Burnham in particular?
I've never read The Managerial Revolution. I probably heard people talk about it, but I don't know enough about it to pontificate about it, so I won't. I might take a note of that and get it next time it pops up. I'm actually trying to buy fewer books. I have way more books than I can store. All my shelves here are totally full, and over here this shelf is full as well. Then I have boxes of stuff outside. I need to downsize on books probably. There are actually some books I should burn.
I was practicing how to make dashed lines on a chalkboard. There are people who can make lines on a chalkboard that are dashed, and you have to practice it to do it. I kind of mastered it, I think. You have to hold it a certain way, and if you do it with just the right amount of pressure, it will make a dashed line. It'll just kind of skirt across the board. You just have to hold it really well; you don't want to hold it tight. It's hard to explain. If you try it, you will figure it out. That's why I have all those marks on the board.
Eric sends in some Monero. He says,
Consider asking for a cozy.tv channel. Not Foss, but it's Christian and basically no terms of service.
I thought about it. To be honest, I kind of don't want to have to worry about another platform. The only thing I'd really like to do is stream to PureTube and YouTube at the same time, but there's an issue with a module they use that doesn't interface right with the Nginx restream setup. That's why I only stream on YouTube now. Ideally, I'd like to be able to stream to multiple platforms. A lot of people have asked me to go on Cozy TV. I'm just a little reticent until I can stream to all these places at once. It's just an extra thing I have to worry about. I might follow up on that.
Flare donates $5.
I appreciate your take on Orange Boomer. One last donation: as I mentioned before, I'm a neophyte and respectfully disagree with you on the Catholic Church. You should check out Speczo. He's basically based and strongly Catholic. Hard to find online. Even if he doesn't convince you on the one true church, it might at least expand your take on Catholicism. Bless you.
I considered Catholicism for a couple years before Orthodoxy. I was pretty serious about it, but there just isn't a solid foundation there. It's not as bad as being most kinds of Protestants, but that's all I can say.
Adar sends in $3.
Do you think it is better to learn Latin or ancient Greek in university if my time is limited? I know university is cringe, but I'm here so...
Second, actually, I'll read the first one. You should learn both. Everyone should learn both. The long-standing tradition of learning Latin first and then Greek works. For everyone in Western Europe or who knows a Western European language, that is the ideal because you learn how Indo-European grammar works when you learn Latin. Then Greek has some extra difficulties: it's written in a different script, it has words that are more alien. But it's easier to do that once you already know Latin because Latin grammar and Greek grammar are nearly identical. You learn the concepts when you're doing Latin, and it's much easier because Latin vocabulary isn't a big problem; basically every Latin word has some English word it's related to and you can use it as a mnemonic device. So I think you should definitely take both. If you can only take one class, maybe start learning Latin by yourself now and then take a Greek class.
Second, he says,
...before you've expressed distrust in physics as a physics student, I have to say I don't really believe in astrophysics, but relativity and quantum mechanics are very solid. I'm at uni to learn the subject, not for my career, so I don't think it's a waste for me. Any thoughts?
I've never said I distrust physics. I do have an article on my website called “Physics Is Fragile,” but I'm not actually talking about physics in that article. I'm making a point about epistemology. When people talk about relativity, they mean two different things. There's the idea of relativity in the sense of a Doppler shift writ large, which I have no problem with. A lot of people say relativity has been proven because we need GPS and all that, but that's basically Doppler shift stuff. A lot of times when people say relativity, they really mean time dilation. Einsteinian relativity is usually conflated with time dilation. Time dilation is one of those things in physics that can be questioned. I think you can question the logic of the original thought experiments, like the twin paradox, and you can also question the empirical observations. Those observations are highly rarified, and theoretically there could be any number of theories to explain them. It doesn't have to specifically mean that time changes because you're moving at a different rate from some stationary observer. There are a lot of people who have questioned time dilation pretty legitimately. I don't stick my neck out on it because I'm not totally sold on it being nonsensical, but a lot of the time when people say “relativity works,” they're not talking about time dilation; they're talking about the Doppler effect. I think there is a case to be made that time dilation is not a coherent concept. Quantum mechanics, meanwhile, has some interpretations that are obviously stupid, but I have nothing against the observations. You need a theory of them, but I don't really think about quantum mechanics that much.
DJ says,
Have you recently found any cool programs that you haven't covered in a video?
I basically have not added any programs to my repertoire in years. That's why I don't do more Linux videos. When I started doing videos on Linux programs, I'm not going to switch anytime soon. I was going to turn on a light because I felt like I closed the windows and the light was overexposed, but now I kind of feel like I need some light. I don't trust the natural light this time of day.
His second question is whether the services under the other donation methods section of my donation page also notify me of a donation message, specifically PayPal. If they send me an email, I'll probably get it. I think I did get a PayPal message a second ago.
Epho sends in $1. He asks,
What's your take on RISC-V?
I don't know that much about them. They keep pushing them as open hardware, but it's just the architecture. I can't find a single RISC-V microcontroller with its design files open. I don't know enough about it to tell you. I want to look into stuff like that just to optimize some things at my house, but I don't know. Maybe it's against my principles. Maybe it's too much. I should be more anti-technology than that, but I really just don't want to spend the money.
Farsenf says,
I do data analysis for clients on Fiverr and Upwork. I'd prefer to be platform independent with my own website, but what steps could I take to get traffic to my website? I'm not a YouTube celebrity.
If I could go back in time and redo my YouTube channel, I would probably be anonymous. That's not for privacy reasons; it's more that I don't know how good it is to have a personality and an ego in front of people. People on the internet have a tendency to become very cultish, and I've never liked that. However, it is probably a good asset. You should probably start some kind of social media thing. If you want to do YouTube videos on random stuff, I wasn't born a YouTuber; I just started randomly doing videos on things. I think it's a good idea. I'm against platform dependence, but there are reasons you might want to make a social media profile on YouTube or Twitter just to get a following independent of your specific clients. I've leveraged that myself. Some of my traffic comes from my YouTube channel, probably most of it. So I would contemplate putting your feelers out there, maybe creating a social media thing, maybe just putting up videos of what you do on YouTube. It could be instructional, could be things for clients, it doesn't matter. Just put stuff out there and maybe you'll get 20 subscribers, maybe you'll get a million, maybe you'll get zero. In terms of getting traffic, that's the difficult thing because you basically have to start with social media and move from there.
John Venoyman sent in some Monero. He says
you don't understand relativity: GPS works because the speed of light is irrelevant in all reference frames, not because of the Doppler shift. The satellite is going toward or away from you but the speed of light is the same. As soon as you have invariant speed of light, time dilation is mathematically necessary.
I know what you mean, but that's not what I was talking about. I was talking about how people make arguments for relativity from Doppler effects. Either way, how big is the Earth in light terms? How long does it take for light to reach the other side of the Earth? I was under the impression that the Earth is close enough not to have to factor in any time dilation. Someone in chat said the Earth's diameter is 0.425 light seconds, allegedly. That's actually a lot bigger than I thought it'd be. If that is the case, you would have to factor in time dilation. Of course, you also have to factor in normal movement and Doppler effects anyway. It's nearly certainly a bigger effect.
Anonymous sends in some Monero.
Walking barefoot in nature, based or cringe?
I do it all the time. You should be walking barefoot. I don't know why you wouldn't.
Sam Smith sends in Monero:
Does it pain you that the Orthodox Church doesn't use Latin? I'm conflicted because I like the idea of carrying on the 10,000-year institution, but also most of our institutions we've inherited seem to have degraded.
There are Orthodox churches you can go to that use Latin in the Western Rite, but they pretty much always had the idea of doing things in vernacular languages. The continuity across time is supposed to be theological and liturgical, not superficial. Language changes. At the time when Latin was used in the West, it was used because it was a commonality, a uniting factor. Now no one speaks Latin. The division between Latin and vernacular languages is too great, and people aren't taught that stuff anyway, so they don't even learn it.
Luke, are you checking YouTube super chats?
No, I usually don't unless I happen to look at them.
Never heard of that person.
Why have you stopped shilling for Brave and went back to Firefox?
I've literally never shilled for Brave. That was one of the worst forced memes ever. I started using Brave in 2019 and people asked me to do videos on it for a year because they saw me using it. Then I did a video on it and people were like, “Oh, you're shilling Brave.” Once I got a good Firefox configuration, I switched back and now people are like, “Oh, he's shilling.” I still have Brave installed with Lars because it's hard to deploy Firefox with a bunch of add-ons and sensible settings automatically. I don't want normie-tier people installing my dotfiles and then opening a browser whose default search engine is Google and has no ad blocker. Brave is the one normie-friendly browser that actually has sensible settings when it's installed. There is no reason ever to view an ad on any site, so every browser should have an ad blocker by default. Brave is above the rest in that respect, even if they keep adding stupid widgets. If I can get Firefox deployed automatically with my settings, I'll probably uninstall Brave.
Librewolf comes with uBlock by default.
I'm not interested in using Firefox clones because they go 90% of the way there and still have stupid default settings that are bad. If they're installing ad blockers, that's great, but I want to be able to deploy Firefox with add-ons and settings automatically. If you install Firefox with Arkenfox and easy-to-install settings through a user.js file, it's just as easy as setting up Librewolf and fixing it.
Will you upload the Patreon videos on your other platforms?
I guess those are still there. I don't even know if my Patreon is still up. I think it is, because every month I'll get a message saying I just received $30 from Patreon or something. I used it for like two months and thought it was stupid because the very concept of paywalling videos is kind of dumb. I did put up videos there, but they were more like bloggy videos from a while ago. I don't think there's any reason to put them up elsewhere. I'm still thinking of doing a video on how to budget buying a house and how I bought mine, because I don't do mortgage crap. Some people think they own their house because they owe a bank $100,000, but I do not consider that owning.
What's your take on MGTOW?
The same take I always have when people ask me about it.
Anonymous sent in Monero.
Have you looked into Christian reconstructionalism? Writers like Peter Leithart, James Jordan, RJ Rushdoony, Cornelius Van Til.
I've heard of some of those. What is reconstructionalism? I've never heard of that word. Is it like Protestants trying to recreate the early church when they could just join the real Orthodox Church? I heard of Leithart and James Jordan. Van Til is the presuppositionalist guy. These are all Protestant people; I'm not interested in that. When I was talking in West Virginia, the priest was talking about some group of Protestants who were like, “We have to recreate the early church and research how they actually did stuff.” Then eventually they realized, “Oh wait, that still exists. It's called the Orthodox Church,” and they converted as a group. Many such cases.
The Orthodox Church doesn't count because it's influenced by Greek philosophy?
The influence of Greek philosophy is much larger on the Western Church than the Eastern Church. The Western Church lives and breathes Aristotelianism; that's what scholasticism was. Some people say the Eastern Church is more akin to Plato, but you won't hear about Plato in the same way. It's not important in the way Aristotelianism is for the Western Church.
WhereCamel says,
Can I get a Lindy Press book PDF?
If you want the texts of the books, most of them are public domain. You can go out and get them. The point of the PDF is for printing. But no, I don't think I do that. I think I canceled that. I might eventually put up the LaTeX source for some of the books, but you can compile it yourself. Selling a digital project or product feels absolutely fake. The goal of the business is to reprint books or whatever. If you want the texts and don't want to buy the books, they're literally free on the internet.
Epho sends in $5... I really need to ban all questions that start with “thoughts on blank” or “red pill me on blank.”
Thoughts on Islam?
No, I don't really have any thoughts on Islam right now.
Adar says,
Time dilation and length contraction are two sides of the same coin. The magnetic field is actually the electrical field plus special relativity. The existence of magnetism can only be explained through this theory and it is well confirmed. No need to rely on shady astro-Doppler effects. There are good mathematical and experimental explanations of these effects. One can show that there must be a maximum speed without the notion of light, using the principle of equivalence and the idea that any direction you look in is no better than any other...
I'll look into that article you mentioned, “Relativity Without Light.”
Have you read Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude?
No, I haven't.
Luke, did you ever read the structured atom model? It's the missing link to your relativity debunking.
No, I've never heard of that. Oh, sweetie. That's been debunked. Try to keep up.
Let me think about that. Let me think about what he said about time dilation and length contraction are the same thing. I got to think about that. Yeah, I don't want to think about that in front of a hundred people. I'll do it on my own time.
Philip sends in $5.
How do or did you make the money for the land? I'm a 21-year-old Balkan boy studying in Denmark. Thinking to get a job here to save up for a few years and then buy land back at home where it's cheap. Cheers, Luke.
So, I think I said in a video a bit ago that my property I bought for like $85,000. So, that was before land prices went up a good bit. I mean, you could probably buy it for twice as much now, but I'm an extreme saver. I guess that's an easy way to put it. I never really tried to save money, okay? I'm just one of those people. Everything I earn, I'm not going to spend it. You know what I mean? Unless it's on a necessity. Unless it's food. The biggest splurge I do in spending is, I don't know, go out to eat with people maybe once a week. So, I don't spend that much money on that much. And during graduate school, it's not like I was making that much money, but I was saving enough that when I thought about moving to the country, I basically had enough for a massive down payment. I could have gotten a mortgage, but I ended up working something out where I did a rent-to-own agreement where every month I would give this guy rent and it would go to the price of the house, and then at the end I agreed to pay the rest in one big lump sum. So, that's how I did it. Rent-to-own things, if you can trust the guy you're doing it with and you trust the property and you intend to actually have it, they're probably a good idea. So, the end result is I have a house without ever having debt, and it cost, again, $85,000, which is pretty cheap. Don't expect to get a price that good given the market now. Maybe after a year or so if the market collapses, you can get something like that. Maybe some good foreclosures, you might be able to get some stuff even cheaper. But in the grand scheme of things, if you're saving like $20,000 a year, that adds up really fast. Really, more than that. If you're saving like $30,000 a year, it's easy to have a house paid off by the time you're 30 or something like that. At that point, your view on life is going to be very different once you have that settled. Once you have your living expenses settled, you're kind of like, "Oh, I need a job, but I don't need a job." You know what I mean? I just pay for the things that I buy, which can be significantly lower. And everything else is saving for the kids, inheritance, which I think is very important to leave your children lots of inheritance. That's basically the goal, because one thing that the boomer economy has kind of tried to destroy is the idea that people no longer aspire to leave things to their children. They don't want to have generational wealth. It's like that's a bad thing to have for many people. That's like, oh, you want your kids to be bratty rich kids. No, I want my kids to have land that they can use. I want that ability to be there even if they are doing something else. That's basically a requirement.
Zachir sends in $5:
Do you believe in the rapture and tribulation?
No. Only extremely weird Protestants believe in the rapture. That is something made up. It was made up like 150 years ago by this guy named John Darby. No, that is not a thing. The rapture is not a real thing. I remember you saying that the book of Revelations was a reference to the time of New York. The interpretation of the Orthodox Church, and really most sensible Protestants and most sensible Catholics, of the book of Revelation is yes, the book of Revelation refers to the time that it was written. It refers to Nero and all the stuff going on with Rome, but also you should interpret it as if it has an idealistic interpretation where we should still be on guard for repetitions of it in the future. And also the Orthodox do believe that there will be an Antichrist, one big one at the end of time or whatever. Not end of time, that's maybe the wrong way to put it, but either way, this rapture tribulation stuff is Protestant fanfiction, this Left Behind stuff. That's not a real thing.
Silish says:
You seem to believe that science is about discovering truth, not creating models of the world. But how do you reconcile that with the idea that the theoretical framework of a scientist works in will influence his theories even when there may be other valid theoretical scientific frameworks? If there is an element of arbitrariness in theoretical frameworks, then how can scientific discoveries ever discover truth per se?
I don't see how that is a problem at all. I'm very confused. There are some domains where you just have totally different scientific frameworks and they can still work. In linguistics is a good example. In the academic discipline of linguistics in the United States right now, it is actually multipolar. There are totally different frameworks all looking at the same problems, and they have their own theory-internal ways of solving them. So what do you get out of that? How are you getting closer to truth? Truth is not about models. Your issue is you're thinking about science as being about models. It isn't. Truth is about getting incrementally closer to the actual model that is the universe, the actual occurrences of what we're seeing. We have a series of models that are ever getting closer to reality. That actually has a structure to it that we have to discover. At the same time, what theoretical frameworks give us is that eventually, if they're just masturbation, if they're just rewarding things in some new way, they are useless. Absolutely useless. That's my main complaint about generative linguistics. What matters is a phenomenology. You have different theoretical frameworks and, due to the way that they may look at particular issues, they might clue you into different relationships between data points that you did not notice before. What survives after those theoretical frameworks is the acknowledgment of those data relations. You don't need a theory to interpret that. Let's say there have been people who have said that there are some human cultures where people do not understand that sex creates children. They don't understand that relationship. They just know children come out sometimes and, oh, well, there's also sex, but it's a different thing. Most human cultures understand that relationship, but allegedly there have been several that don't have that relationship. Now suppose some culture discovers that that is the case. They have some kind of experimental structure. They realize something. They have some certain theoretical framework for looking at what semen is or whatever. It doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be anything related to how we scientifically look at gametes and stuff like that. It could be just in terms of spiritual energies. It doesn't matter. Once you notice that sex causes children, that is a data generalization that you can have different interpretations of. You can have different scientific reasons for why it happens or different theories of how it happens. But once you've noticed that data relation, you are now closer to understanding reality. That is not a theory-internal reason. Suppose this tribe has this idea, "Oh yes, sex seems to cause children, but maybe it's because of pubic hair rubbing together." Who knows? It doesn't matter. What I'm getting at is once you understand the phenomenology, the actual relationship between data, once you've realized new things, you have now learned things. You have now gotten closer to truth. Making models to rewrite things that we already know, that is useless. That is not even... it's just a waste. It's a waste unless it will lead you to even more data that you can bring into your theory, or really if it clues you into stuff you didn't realize beforehand. The problem with, again, generative linguistics, and it's a good example of positivistic science, is that they take given data that everyone already knows and then make some formalism to describe the data we already know. And whenever they are confronted with new information, they don't actually find new stuff, and if they do it's by accident, and if they do they can't actually accommodate it, but they ignore it because their framework is not fit to deal with it. That is most of positivistic science. It's, let me start with some priors of how things have to work and then I will fit things into my model except for the things that can't fit into my model. I will change the little variables in the model and tinker it a little bit, but I'm not going to step too far away from that. There's no, "Oh, I can't change my general framework because that would be pseudoscience or something like that." They have a very silly way of looking at things. And I think my theory of science is the same theory of science basically everyone throughout all history, including all normies, have. This whole models are the goal of science is this insane and incoherent view that only makes sense in institutionalized positivistic science within the 20th century. And it's basically just a way to get grant proposals approved for people you like. That's about it. It doesn't function as a scientific theory.
McKenzie says:
I know you hate giving advice, but in spite of...
I don't hate giving advice. I hate giving the same advice over and over again to the same people.
I know you hate giving life advice, but in spite of that, do you have any advice for a first-year economics undergrad going into their second year?
Well, if you have something to do, school to me is kind of a last thing on the list if you don't have anything. So I don't think there's anything wrong in persisting in it so long as you're not going deep into debt. And again, the benefit of a degree is fine. Don't expect to learn anything in school, right? My one regret in my undergrad is that I did not skip more classes. But yeah, don't expect to get anything out of it, but if you can do it cheaply and get out of it unscathed and unbrainwashed and undestroyed, that's probably fine. And you can leverage a degree to get you a job. Having an undergraduate degree is almost required just to have some kinds of jobs. So it's not the end of it. I would just make sure if you're going to stay in school, make sure it is as stress-free as possible. Take your classes based on what is easiest for you. Basically, don't take all these classes now that make you want to do all this work all the time. The first week of classes, you should always be going into every class you could theoretically take and say, "Which one involves the least amount of work? Which class can I skip the most often?" That is my actual view of how you should be looking at things. Or even if you're not an intelligent person, if you're not an intelligent person, going to sit in class is probably not going to make a big difference. So that is what I would say, and if you're interested in economics, you will learn about it on your own time if you care about it.
And someone said if you actually are a girl because I think her name was Miss McKenzie, you should think about getting married. People do ask. I kind of thought about doing a video on girl advice because a lot of girls will watch my channel and they will think that everything automatically transfers over to the life of girls, which is absolutely not the case. Girls really should, if you have this magical out of getting married, if you can get married to a guy who's further along in life than you, which is what women want to do anyway, they just get brainwashed out of it because, oh, you got to get a degree so you can make PowerPoints for corporate America. Most girls, if given the choice, would jump at that opportunity. And that is what most of them should do.
I think the stream pooped out for a second. I'm not quite sure. No, it's gone. Okay, I haven't gotten donations in a minute. So, I will look at the chat.
I'm desperately trying to get my girlfriend to not become a teacher. We don't plan on having kids due to genetic issues. And she does like teaching and kids, but it's an awful system.
There are places where she can teach that aren't going to be awful. If you're in a city, yeah, sure, it's going to be awful, but there are public schools out there that are okay. You got to go out of the city. There are places out there that are fine. And there are private schools, you know.
Evo sends in $5:
Hey, Luke. Do you know about Project Xanadu and other hypertext projects? Learned about it recently and found it interesting.
No, I've never heard of that. Is that like Gemini or something? I don't know. Hypertext. I'm not quite sure. Some HTTP equivalent.
Adar says:
To understand what I said about relativity in my donation, a better resource than the article is the book It's About Time by David Mermin.
Okay, i can LIBGEN it. I'll go ahead and link it because I'm not reading donations. I never heard of him. I read some physicist crap, but let's see. Here it is. It might be that all the people who have explained relativity to me are mentally retarded because I've never heard that way of looking at it. But I will read this and see if I understood you right because it makes sense in my brain. I just want to make sure that's what I'm talking about.
Jim says:
What do you think of crypto mining? I think it's a good way of generating passive income without being dependent on any form of employer.
Well, it's just an issue of how much can you generate? I've never mind. I have some friends who have mined. Actually, when I was in West Virginia, the priest there mined Ethereum and he said there was a period where he was making a huge amount of money from it, like a couple hundred bucks a day or something, I forget. He's not making as much now, but yeah, I don't know. If you can do it, if it's profitable. I know at least Monero, I mean the only cryptos I care about are Bitcoin and Monero realistically speaking, and I don't think Bitcoin is kind of out of my league. I don't have the material to mine it, and I don't think Monero mining, anyone can do it because you can just use your normal computer with an Intel processor, but I don't think it's very profitable.
Sorry to divert the topic. We've been diverting topics all the time, but I just wanted to say how much my perspective on the job market as a whole changed thanks to you. I unfortunately had to endure a year and a half of working for an Alzheimer patients hospital which was entirely set up as a scheme to launder donations from the government. Best part is that it's fully legal according to our own government. Well, that's pretty screwed up if that's true. A lot of stuff's just kind of sad to even think about. At least you can say if they're taking care of people, someone's got to do it, right? Maybe they are scamming the government for a bunch of money or whatever, but at least they're doing something.
There are a lot of charities out there. I trust zero charities. Absolutely zero charities. I cannot think of a single one that I trust or I would give money to. Actually, well, that would be some doxing information. I was going to say there's one that I would trust, but what was I going to say? Are there any good charities? It's just how the system works now. Charities are primarily, when you understand what they actually do, how they work, the benefits of having a charity, you will understand why they're so rife with corruption because here's what you do. There's a good video someone showed me months ago that you can look up on your own time. It's on YouTube. You can pull up a guy who does a tax firm where it's how to pay no taxes on cryptocurrency. He talks about CRTs, charitable remainder trusts. If you search CRT Bitcoin or something, it'll probably come up. It's actually interesting on your own time, but he tells you basically how you can have this charity more or less donate money kind of to yourself and get it back in an annuity to avoid paying capital gains tax.
And that's cool. I'm not against taxation. That's fantastic. But the thing you have to remember is when you have rich people, if you have the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or all these big NGOs, the reason they exist is for money laundering and tax avoidance because what Bill Gates does, well, you can watch this video for money that you're not paying capital gains on and eventually the charity gets the money, but you can also get an insurance policy on it, like a life insurance, extremely expensive life insurance on it. So you end up getting your money anyway. That's cool for individual use, but when you think about it, most charities actually function like this. It's for rich people to have this way of avoiding taxation and stuff like that. So all this stuff about, "Oh, he's a philanthropist. Oh, blah blah blah," it's just silly. It's just silly because it's self-serving. You can use this kind of stuff for your own benefit. And people use normal charities the same way.
ThoughtCrime sends in $1:
What kind of desktop computer specs would you recommend for getting for someone who wants a base Linux machine but can perform well with mug games? Windows. Also, what are your thoughts on ketamine? Ever try?
No, of course I'm not trying ketamine. What am I freaking retarded? No, I don't care about gaming. I don't know. Just get a computer. I don't care about gaming. I don't know what year of games you're playing. I have no idea. The last games I ever played on a computer were made back in 2012 or something like that. So, I have no idea. I don't care. My eyes glaze over whenever I hear about graphics cards and all this kind of stuff. I just could not care less. I recommend just getting a low-resources computer so you don't have to, you know, and just not playing games.
Zach sends in $5:
Why do so many modern Christian women also believe in astrology and the like?
I've never actually met even a girl who pretends to be Christian who is not a Christian say that she believes in astrology. I have not seen that. That's kind of like a new-agey thing. There are many of those girls that are faux spiritual, but I feel like the ones who pretend to be Christians are different from the...
My internet is kind of poopy right now. Oh yep. Totally out. Totally out. Are we back? Okay, I think we're back.
Torless says
The ultimate working machine is an old ThinkPad with 2 GB of RAM, so you can work in the terminal without being able to fire up a browser and get distracted. Don't thank me.
It's actually good advice. When I had my ThinkPad X200, that was kind of how it was. It could run a browser fine, but if you did too many things, it would get a little slow. The thing about any kind of processing power for normal use is there's just no need for anything fancy nowadays for doing normal stuff. The only reason that crap exists is, well, it's really twofold. One is playing games and two is browsers and stuff that run in them are so bloated and so terrible that you need all this processing power to do all this JavaScript.
All right. Well, guys, my nose is starting to itch, so it's about time for me to end this stream. So, if you have any last donations, go ahead and send them in because I've been going for way too long. I didn't mean to be going this long. I wanted to stop a little afternoon, but now it's 1:30 here. So, last donation's going...
I'm actually extremely hungry. I usually only eat once a day. I might eat twice today though.
Should you leave your red pill?
I actually thought about mentioning that in my last video where it's like, oh, living in the country versus living in the city. The real red pill, if you're in your younger 20s, before you're married, just live with your parents. That is the actual answer, and it's more... in every sane country in the world, people do that too. Everywhere except for the United States, where there's this bizarre consumerist idea: "Oh, I'm 19. Oh, I have to spend $1,000 a month on a house for no reason and rebuy all the stuff my parents have. Oh, I got to be able to have a living room to myself for some reason. Wow, this is really important. Wow, all the cool kids say that I won't be able to coom if I don't have my own apartment."
Yeah, living at your parents is absolutely based if you're mid-20s, lower 20s, and unmarried. Actually, even if you're married, there are good reasons to live with your parents too. If you're starting off, you're saving money, stuff like that. So, yeah, this whole nuclear family thing, when it's just mom and dad and the kids, that is very boomer. You got to be able to live with grandparents, live with older unmarried children. Absolutely. I endorse that. Of course, I say that I'll probably be eating those words eventually. I'm like, when are my kids getting out of my house? I just want to consume product and whatever. I probably won't actually say that. I will stick to that.
Thanks for validating my lifestyle, Luke.
Yes. Great. It's great that you're saving money. You better have a job, though. I don't endorse just living at your parents' house. You have to be stacking sats, so to speak.
David says:
Almost all charities are garbage, even the ones that are extensively well-intentioned. However, I like the approach to charity evaluation present at organizations like GiveWell, which requires certain standards of financial transparency and demonstrated cost effectiveness before recommending. This allows one to find the needles in a haystack that are actually doing good works.
I mean, the other thing is even that, frankly, once you get to a bureaucratic level, charities do not... charities just naturally become corrupt. That's my view. I've never seen a charity, and I know people who deal with charities, and it is almost impossible to like you're sitting on all this money and you can do what you want with it. All you have to do is find some flimsy justification to give it to people you want or do tit for tat. It is so easy, and it's not like there's a rigid line between things that are bad and things that are good.
The unessential nature says:
You do not know true pain until you have been in a workplace where 90% of management are women.
I've experienced pain like that. I haven't had 90%; I've had a high percentage though. Most of my time in universities, not everything, like there were lots of things that were run by women, but we didn't have a separate managerial class. It was just inept professors or something like that. There were good female professors actually. When I did my master's, my major professor was a female and there was also someone else on my committee who was a female. They were fine. At least my major professor was. The other woman I just had because I needed some extra. There were not very many people in that department. But yeah, things got more bureaucratic the worse it is. Everyone just needs oversight all the time, especially women. Women don't function well in bureaucracy. Or maybe that's the thing. Maybe they do function well in bureaucracy. That's the problem. They enjoy it too much. Men have this sense of revolt and disgust at bureaucracy. "Oh, wow. We're sitting in another meeting where we're talking about literally nothing for no reason for 30 minutes, which is really just a thinly veiled excuse to humble brag and complain about things that don't matter." Men don't like that. But that is the direction that bureaucracy gravitates. Low-T men like that. I will say that if you're low-T, if you're...
Yeah. I mean, I would just say one more passing remark. I'm getting physically tired of sitting here and talking out loud. It's been like 3 hours. I was going to say one thing that I wish I thought was going to happen when you had the lockdown hoax. I thought people were just going to be like, "Oh, let's abandon the formality of having stupid meetings since we have to do them remotely. Let's abandon the formality of all these silly jobs and trim the system of fat and get rid of a bunch of bureaucracy." And it all happened. Maybe it happened in a couple businesses, but things are back and bloated. It's nothing. People learn nothing.
It's red again. It's red again. All right. I'm probably going to turn this off. So the CPU I was using... Oh my goodness. I can't say goodbye while the thing is red and not actually transferring data. Look at this packet loss. Crazy. There it... Okay, it's coming back. It's coming back. So, oh, I already read that one. So, yeah, I will probably sign off now. I will, let's see, there are a couple videos I want to do more like me talking outside videos. One thing that pisses me... You might ask, "Oh, Luke, why haven't you been doing as many screencasts?" YouTube screwed something up, and this has been going on for a couple months. I'll complain about this. This is going to be on my last complaining thing. But this is a big one actually. And the crazy thing is I haven't found anyone else this happens to. I think YouTube has cursed my channel because I haven't found anyone else this happens to, but recently every screencast I record on my computer, and I can then re-encode it in something else or put it in a different container. Doesn't matter what it is. Whenever I record a screencast on my computer, I upload it. I use different browsers. It's not a browser problem either. I upload it to YouTube and then YouTube will have this weird error where it will play the first 15 seconds. It will upload the whole thing. It will play 15 seconds and then all the colors go gray in the video. And this has been going on for months. This is one of the reasons I've been doing less videos and I've tried to figure out what it is. I assumed it was my fault at the beginning. I assumed, oh well, maybe ffmpeg is screwed up. Maybe I'll use a different version of it or I'll encode in a different container or use a different encoding or use a different container. And the only thing that works is if I upload them to PeerTube first and download them from my PeerTube and then re-upload them to YouTube, which is weird because I will re-encode them in different ways and it still won't work. It's crazy. So I don't know what's going on. That's why I've been kind of disincentivized to do more screencasts. But there is right now a video on Shadow Chat. Shadow Chat is the thing that I use for Monero donations. That is on PeerTube. I will probably upload that to YouTube once I get that figured out. And then I have some other videos I want to do. But oh yeah, I might be going to Linux Fest this year, LinuxFest Southeast in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can look that up. You can look up Southeast LinuxFest and it'll be there if you want to go. So there's a chance that I will be there. So I got to, if you have any ideas of what you want me to present on, you can give me some suggestions because I need to figure that out today. All right. See if I'm not leaving any donation out because I don't want no donation left behind. Okay, great. I got them all. All right, I'm signing off now. Signing off.