Brendinooo

The local "castle" on the map is Fort Duquesne, which is listed as "ruins" but in fact has no ruins to visit. It says "The site of both forts is now occupied by Point State Park, where the outlines of the two forts have been laid in granite slabs" - which is true, but...there are no ruins here!

If forts count as castles, at least do Fort Pitt, which has the blockhouse functional.

Anyways - this is a fun project and it should continue!

There's an episode called "Digital Estate Planning" where his dad mocks him for his lack of business acumen: "In 1980, you said that video games, not moist towelettes, were the business of the future. Today, moist towelettes are stocked in every supermarket, while arcade after arcade closes."

Pierce Hawthorne, is that you?!?

(Given that he audited classes for years, this very much strikes me as a class project based on his interests...)

Armchair historian AT BEST but...a lot of grassroots social institutions formed in the period between the Industrial Revolution (mass migration to the cities) and the invention of the radio. There were all of a sudden a LOT of people close together, some were even starting to get newfangled leisure time, and there wasn't a ton to do. On top of that, a lot of the institutions were ethnic because of the mass immigration that was happening at the time.

From there, the track downhill is death by a thousand cuts: radio, melting pot, television, suburbs, Internet, etc.

So in a sense one might mourn the loss, but I think it seems worth pointing out that they were enabled in the first place by a particular set of conditions that weren't some baked-in human default.

The person you replied to did not mention a specific leader's policy.

Having been around enough houses (in the US) to have a balanced opinion - I personally prefer older houses but

- older houses tend to be a lot more inefficient in their use of square footage

- the rooms inside tend to be a lot less open, and one man's "fun/quirky layout" is another man's "why do I have to go down a step then immediately go up a step to cross a hallway"

- and, I begrudgingly admit (as I don't like how they wreck house aesthetics) people really like big, attached garages

My overall suspicion is that when a lot of people say they like old houses, what they really mean is that they like buildings that look beautiful on the outside and, to a lesser extent, have a sense of being rooted in some kind of context.

okay, so like...7x that $433 figure? $3000 a month? If a mortgage + escrow payment on a 400k house is around $2500/month, a comparable rent is $5500 a month?

Where do you live, if I may ask? I live in a reasonably sane market which might be why this isn't clicking for me.

Yeah, I can't explain it but the headings feel very AI. And there are a bunch of things in the text that remind me of chats I have with Claude during the day job

and it is worth being clear about why

The emotional mechanism the scam exploits is not a gap in knowledge that a leaflet can fill; it is the love a person has for their grandchild, weaponised

These are not the numbers of a credulous minority being separated from pocket money. They are the numbers of a generation's accumulated savings being drained

that a fraud requiring the absolute frontier of machine learning can be perpetrated against an ordinary grandmother in her kitchen, at scale, for the price of nothing

(To be clear this isn't automatically disqualifying to me. But I am interested in LLM writing patterns and my ability to detect them. And in the case of this article I sense the kind of linguistic padding that has made Claude a little harder to work with in the more recent Opus point releases because it obscures the most important bits of information.)

Not sure what the intent behind this reply is but - I guess it's strictly true and I think we're agreeing in some sense, but to be clear I think it is totally fine to say that scalpers are doing things I don't like with money, and I'd like to see their excesses curbed.

I mean, you saying that landlords don't do much is the exactly what I meant when I said "arguing about what 'adding economic value' means"

typical rent is many, many times the value of someone looking after the maintenance and building insurance for you

I'm curious about this.

I'm not sure if there's a universal rule of thumb, but it's something like "expect 1-4% of the home's value in maintenance every year" - $4,000 to $16,000 on a $400,000 home. Take the lowest end of that - $333/month in expected maintenance a year. Add $100/month for home insurance.

You're claiming "many, many times" $433 a month in that scenario? Given more recent interest rates and the uptick in "maybe you should rent for awhile, actually" articles/videos I've seen, this doesn't strike me as plausible...

I think that if you poke at the term "rent-seeking" with the definition of "middle men who add no economic value yet inject themselves into transactions", you'll just end up arguing about what "adding economic value" means.

That said...if you can do that, you'll probably find that some additions of economic value are far more defensible than others, so it shouldn't all be flattened in the manner you're suggesting.

I mean, scalpers add economic value, right?! They allow (wealthier) people who didn't stand in line at the right time to have a chance to purchase a ticket!

This makes sense, but I'd contend it's all the more reason for outrage: not only are scalpers doing what they're doing anyways, but they're destroying the (totally legitimate and sympathetic!) reason for "artificially" lowering the price to begin with.

I should note that outrage doesn't seem to land on the people who buy from scalpers, which is...probably correct? Seems easier to say "don't break the contract" to scalpers instead of fans who are just able to pay more.

Unfalsifiable claims are not truth

My favorite color is orange.

Is a retailer that buys things and sells them with a markup a scalper?

If you bought all of the food then offered the food at 10x the prices, we'd be outraged with you, yes.

Stakes are lower because it's a luxury good, not food, but it's the same idea.

If you have no documentation for it or supporting evidence then you've got nothing to work with

Sure, but I think 1) a lot of objections in this thread come because people seem to conflate "nothing to work with" and "so obviously it didn't happen" and 2) there's not no documentation for anything people have argued about in here.

A big disagreement that's probably been unsaid in this thread has more to do what counts as corroboration. Speaking abstractly, I think that if a group of people from 500 years ago strongly attest to something that happened 1000 years ago, that is not definitive proof in and of itself, but it is absolutely a form of supporting evidence.

there's no reason to believe that one particular story is more likely than others

Sure there is. I could tell you that I am a mostly-anon web developer; I could also tell you I am President of the United States, or a founder of a prominent company that came out of YCombinator. For practical purposes you would evaluate my claims based on your wits and perhaps my comment history, and you would believe that one story is more likely than the others.

All are equally possible but not all are equally plausible.

I'm guessing you'd agree with that, but you'd disagree with what counts as credible evidence. Which I can understand. But the idea that you'd see "random guy on HN makes up a theory involving a fictional wormhole from a 90s television show" as no different from Biblical claims is troubling to me, most notably because the narrative itself doesn't make any claim that could be remotely construed to align with that.

My epistemology admits that "the Universe sprang into existence last Thursday" could be true even if we might have no way of proving it; to me this is obviously far more correct than saying that it must not be true because we cannot prove it.

Doesn't mean I believe it's true, though: I think the point is more being willing to admit that humans might not be the pinnacle of existence, fully able to comprehend every mystery of the universe.

So this is, at best, an argument that scientific models are incomplete (which no one would disagree with) but not that scientific models are invalid, or that the supernatural is real.

One could imagine God parting a sea with scientific mechanisms we know nothing about.

Claims alone don't prove anything

You can be convicted for murder "beyond a reasonable doubt" on claims alone.

First, demonstrate that two dimensional people exist, otherwise it's a nonsense question.

Okay, I respect that. Thought of a better one later.

How would you explain what it means to be human to an ant? How would you get it to understand thermodynamics or whatever?

I dunno, it just seems like your overall thrust here is that humanity came out of the ooze through natural selection with everything that it needs to understand the mysteries of the universe. If we cannot see, touch, taste, smell, hear, or think it, either directly or through our instruments, it is impossible, and therefore it cannot happen.

This is articulating some of my thoughts in a far more cogent way than I could do on my own. Thank you.

for those of us who don't presuppose divine authorship.

There's a lot I could say in response to your comment (most notably, I think we literates underrate the ability of oral cultures to transmit information) but I just want to highlight that merely acknowledging your presupposition as a presupposition removes one of the biggest things that riles me up when I get into discussions like this. It's very much appreciated.

Impossible things by definition didn't happen.

Can things happen that are possible via mechanisms you don't understand, or are incapable of grasping because of your sensory/intellectual limitations?

You're just asking people to assume what the Bible says about the supernatural is real

I don't think that's what happened there.

offering the lack of scientific evidence as supporting evidence for the Bible

No, the point is that the scientific method is not the only way to prove that things in the past happened.

to people who don't already operate under the theistic model of reality that you do

How would you explain yourself to a two-dimensional person, and reveal yourself to its world?

modern day scholars

Everyone, including you, me, and the most expert of scholars, brings their own biases, assumptions, evidentiary standards that will allow us to accept something as truth.

I actually got more dialed into this while listening to Bart Ehrman on a NYT podcast recently. I was interested in him: an atheist who ascribes historicity to certain bits of the Bible, Jesus in particular. But ultimately I wasn't really impressed: If a detail is wrong, that's proof that everything is suspect; if a detail is right, sometimes that means "if I wanted to invent a credible story, of course I'd say that" and sometimes that means "I think it's obviously credible", and there didn't seem to be any meaningful heuristic to distinguish.

And, when he talked about his journey away from faith, all of that had nothing to do with it - it was him getting hung up on the problem of evil. In other words, the underlying value changed, then his interpretation of historical claims changed as a result.

I can live with the idea that one might look at the body of evidence and draw a different conclusion than I do; I just don't like the conceit that one conclusion is somehow objectively correct, especially because of some broad appeal to authority. I can live with "Troy may have existed but we haven't found any archaeological evidence", but I greatly dislike "we haven't found any archaeological evidence, therefore Troy didn't exist", which is what a lot of the replies under my first comment seem to be speaking. (There's be a lot of "we would expect to find..." as well: even if that's true, sometimes we just haven't found it yet! And surely we'll never find everything!)

That's not to say that scholars can't know more or contribute more work: in a case like Jericho, scholarly work seems to have settled the question of whether or not a city named Jericho exists, having walls that were destroyed suddenly. Now, we dispute when exactly that might have happened and how that compares to Biblical chronology, but just because one person gives a date that aligns with my priors or your priors doesn't mean the matter is settled.

I've sat on this tab for too long haha, just gonna send it and step out for a bit.

The kingdom of Israel was a regional player with a lot of manpower, but compared to its neighbors of Aram-Damascus and the Sidonians, it didn't really amount to much in the grand scheme of things.

Not sure if you mean it this way but: I don't think the Tanakh itself claims otherwise. Its portrayal is basically an ~80-year run of David and Solomon accumulating a ton of land, wealth, and prestige; then the kingdom splits, and it's a directionally downward spiral from there, with near-constant pressure and incursion from greater powers.

Yeah.

witness something that defies all natural explanation

write about it

people say it cannot have happened because it was a supernatural element

You see this too with stuff like "anything that predicted the destruction of the temple must have been written after because no one can predict the future."

Like, the whole point of huge chunks of the Bible is that world-altering supernatural events actually happened, and the authors want people to know about them.

I don't think it's terribly unreasonable to stake out a position of "supernatural elements cannot happen" and there are absolutely cogent responses to what I just did rhetorically, I just don't like that people who think that way try to assume the center; it's worth pointing out that it's the tail that wags the dog in big chunks of historicity debates.

archaeologist, taking off his glasses: well actually the physical evidence suggests the ancient Israelites worshiped multiple deities

Jeremiah, weeping and sighing: yes I know

(That's a tweet that pops up from time to time when exchanges like this happen.)

the historical evidence suggests that it was part of the main religion of these people for a long time

I mean...yes, this is thoroughly documented throughout all of Judges/Kings/Chronicles/etc. Elijah is the one who stands against 450 prophets of Baal, and when he feels totally alone later on, God tells him that 7,000 haven't bent the knee - big enough to be reassuring, but certainly not a huge percentage of the northern kingdom's population.

The destruction of pharaoh's army

Given what we know about how the Egyptians recorded history, we would definitely not expect to find them writing about stuff that would have embarrassed them.

Records of ancient hebrew slaves

Look up Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446 - it shows that Egypt held slaves with Semitic names in roughly the correct time period.

They were also surrounded by other civilizations that also left a decent bit of documentation

Israel being one of them!

I tried to word my original comment in a way that allows a broad range of opinions to make a narrow point; I don't think anything you've said here refutes anything I said. I'm not really here to kick off a serious apologetics fight, though if you want me to engage on your thoughts I could.

(And of the things I mentioned, the Exodus is less likely to line up with the Bronze Age Collapse's chronology anyways. But personally, I think the book of Judges very much feels set in the kind of post-apocalyptic world that the Collapse would have created.)

It injects some really interesting color into the Tanakh/Old Testament - I'm not sure anyone has definitively lined up the Bronze Age Collapse with Biblical events, but it sure seems to have happened somewhere between the Exodus and King David.

One can easily see the events leading to the Exodus being enabled by (or causing, depending on who you ask!) the weakening of Egypt, and the period in Joshua and Judges describes a power vacuum: no centralized king over the area, lots of back-and-forth struggles for control; as the Philistines, sometimes referred to by historians as an actual group of the Sea Peoples, often impose their will with instruments of iron.

It's stored there so I don't have to think about managing it.

What do you mean?