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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: November 10th, 2023

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  • The palantiri (plural) were made by the elves during the First Age when they lived with the Valar (gods), so yes they were made during a golden age long ago. They were gifted to men of Numenor who remained loyal to the Valar and Iluvatar (The God) and kept friendship with the elves. This was during a time (Second Age) in which the rulers of Numenor were being hostile to the elves, disrespectful towards the Valar, and just generally being assholes. The elves gave the palantiri to the “Faithful” of Numenor so they could still communicate with each other despite the opressive politics on the island. Elendil, fore-father of Aragorn, took them (and a fruit that grew into the White Tree of Gondor) when he fled Numenor for Middle Earth. (Elendil’s son, Isildur, is the one that cut the ring from Sauron’s hand.)

    But the palantiri were not corruption artifacts. They are seeing stones. The “corruption” you see in the movies is not inherent in the stones. It is simply that Sauron has a stone also, and you really don’t want him to get inside your head.




  • Pull out your closest volume of Lord of the Rings and take a look. My copy at least has single-quotes for the speech text and double-quotes are used for nested speech. I guess it might be up to the publisher (eg: my copy of Harry Potter has been “Americanized” and thus uses double-quotes for the first level of speech text), but every copy of LotR i’ve run across uses single-quotes.







  • I use FiraCode Nerd Font Mono instead, but it also does not have a specific italic font. In my config, only the “normal” section is defined, but all my bold and/or italic text looks like it should. Apparently, alacritty will apply a heavier weight or slant to the “normal” type face if you simply omit the “bold” or “italic” sections. So, what you have right now should Just Work.

    Allegedly, you can omit the “style” specification in the “italic” section (ie: just add "italic": {"family": "FiraMono Nerd Font"}, to your config snippit above), but i haven’t actually tried doing it that way.



  • While i do think life exists elsewhere in the universe, I think the chances of extraterrestrial biological entities coming to our planet is exceedingly unlikely. Space is just too big, and there isn’t any hard evidence that faster-than-light travel is even possible.

    Although, the universe isn’t just big – it’s old. There could be some ancient civilization from an ancient planet that became uninhabitable long ago. If they were technologically advanced enough to escape their solar system before things went tits-up AND were able to live multiple generations fully in space AND they just so happened to set out in our direction, I guess it’s possible that they found us. Even then, i would expect any UFOs or whatever would merely be probes, not the actual biological entities themselves.





  • I do think governments should explore taxing unrealized capital gains too, though.

    Oh, boy do they ever.

    One big issue is that they can take out loans with stock as collateral. Yes, they eventually have to pay the loan back (and sell stock to do so, thus paying some capital gains), but they can still get around paying their fair share of captial gains (eg: sell the underperforming stocks to minimize capital gains, or just take out a new loan to repay the old one). While I can see the benefit of being able to use your stock as collateral for a loan, there needs to be changes to how capital gains are calculated in this case.

    Another issue is that when they die, the inheritor of their stocks gets them with the cost basis reset (stepped-up basis). Let’s say I have stock that I purchased for $10/share. I die when the price is $100 and leave it to my sister, and she sells it when the price is $110. She only has to pay capital gains on $10/share, not $100/share. If you combine this with a cycle of taking out a loan to repay your previous loan until you die, this means that your estate can settle the final outstanding loan with virtually no capital gains tax at all, since the stepped-up basis for your stock goes into effect once it goes to probate (ie: before being distributed to creditors and beneficiaries).