#5

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Why no one is asking questions about Spain’s mysterious missing nukes

Large scale blackouts happen all the time, but when they happen on a grid with a decent volume of wind and solar, a disinformation machines spins up within minutes to lay the blame solely, loudly and repeatedly on renewable energy. See: South Australia, 2016. UK, 2019. California, 2020. Texas, 2021. It’s a thing.

It was no different after a major blackout hit Spain last week. A narrative pushed by a few business columnists, nuclear power advocates, centre-right ecomodernists, very-right fossil fuel advocates and climate delay practitioners contributed to a widespread assumption that the blackout occurred thanks solely to Spain’s investments in wind and solar.

There has been no official detail on the sequence of events that led to the blackout, besides a few vague details on disconnected generation. That hasn’t sapped the vibrating excitement the people above have …

Kurt Vonnegut: The Sirens of Titan (Hardcover, 1971, Delta)

The Sirens of Titan is an outrageous romp through space, time, and morality. The richest, …

Vonnegut carries so much love, he cultivates compassion even to most despicable people

When I started reading this book, after Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse #5 which I read as a young person learning how fucked up the world is, I had a feeling of almost Adamsian lightness of talking about heavy social things. Oh how wrong I was!

So to those who want to venture into this book, a fair warning: expect soul-crushing stuff after every corner. Reading the book is like wandering the caves of Mercury.

The story is very layered and has some twists, so don't be too arrogant if you think you see where it's going. What's more, please think the book through from back to front after you complete it.

There is only one positive character in the book, but I felt so much compassion to another one, and another one later. Which, as I recover from the book hangover[1], I find slightly distressing, but it's a testament …

Ichirō Kishimi, Fumitake Koga: The courage to be disliked (2018, Atria Books)

"The Courage to Be Disliked, already an enormous bestseller in Asia with more than 3.5 …

A useful lens to approach some of your problems

Enough Adlerian psychology has filtered into the American mainstream that parts of this book just feel like generic self-help, but the core ideas are powerful and coherent. The main ideas (below, probably missed some) seem sensible to me -- although # 5 ignores e.g. health problems.

Some precepts: 1. Don't think about etiology, think about teleology. In other words, don't look into your past for causes of your problems -- think about your goals, both the ones you've consciously voiced and the ones you haven't acknowledged to yourself yet. 2. Etiology is deterministic, teleology is in your control. If you believe that your traumatic childhood caused your current behavior, you must believe that you cannot climb out of it. On the other hand, if you take a teleological approach, you can just change your goals. 3. If you have a problem, it is because it serves some future-oriented goal you …