2rafa
1d ago
On the other hand Kavanaugh and ACB have already indicated that beyond core tradcath issues like abortion they aren’t actually as conservative as Alito and Thomas, and often favor the status quo. The risk with ‘conservative’ Catholics is that they’re ‘conservative’ because they want to ban abortion rather than because they’re actually conservative, in the same way, say, Sheldon Adelson was conservative because he was a Zionist rather than out of particular principle.
2rafa
1d ago
Milan 2015 was good, so was Dubai despite the issues. It’s a shame the US doesn’t do world’s fairs anymore. The US rejoined the bureau of expositions in 2017 so maybe it will happen eventually. I really like them, if anyone reading this hasn’t visited one you should, it’s like Epcot but huge and more real (and more weird).
2rafa
1d ago
The Project 2025 says that an incoming Republican administration should aggressively enforce the Comstock Act (which is prsumptively constitutional post-Dobbs) against pharmacies posting mifepristone to patients. This would render this litigation irrelevant.
Trump is at least aware enough to realize that hardcore prolife is very much a minority position in American politics. Some on the right seem to have run away with their own personal copium on this subject because polling shows most people don’t support unlimited abortion on demand until birth, but that doesn’t mean these pills used until the 10 week point are widely opposed at all.
The best thing the next GOP president can do on abortion is say it’s not federal business and let the states handle it. Getting trapped into promising federal / congressional restrictions would be a big mistake and highly unpopular.
2rafa
2d ago
The base models will do it. There isn’t a separate word processor for accountants, one for lawyers, one for bankers, and one for doctors. Everyone uses Microsoft Word. A handful of foundational models which are largely interchangeable will eventually be tuned on all common scenarios and available as part of your (or your employer’s) $20 a month per person MS/Google/Apple subscription.
The only reason a lot of the current SaaS market exists is that the 90s made conglomerates unfashionable and big techs didn’t want to hire 500,000 engineers to make software for every business when they were already facing antitrust scrutiny. But LLMs offer the ability to build more general products capable of fulfilling business needs without major workforce expansion or other costs.
2rafa
2d ago
GPT4.5 incrementally improved, with higher quality data, better fine tuning, and LLMs trained to engineer effective prompts for specific tasks/subject areas is already capable - with multimodal ability and integration with other tools and models - of automating huge amounts of currently extant labor.
Even if the ‘apocalyptic’ human extinction or paperclip maximizer Yudkowsky scenarios aren’t likely (and they never were), the significant economic effects of current-generation models are still only beginning to percolate.
2rafa
2d ago
Your friend annoys you so you call her a whore in front of your other mutual friend, exaggerating some relatively tame story in the process, expecting that this will remain a minor anecdote that will do no real harm to her reputation. Then said mutual friend decides for her own purposes to spread this news far and wide, without any context, with some embellishments (you said she fucked her boyfriend in a club bathroom, the rumor is now that she does this with many men all the time) and then your friend calls you crying telling you you ruined her life and you’re evil.
Change the scenario and most people have been in some version of this situation.
2rafa
2d ago
I don’t think it’s hard to see what happened. The writer included the comment about porn because it was salacious and because he knew it would be reprinted, and what journalists want above else is for their writing to be read. On the other hand, after it went viral, he received a lot of angry and upset messages (no doubt delivered via Starlink) from the villagers he had been staying with for a month and who had trusted him to report on them complaining that they were being humiliated in the Brazilian press (which, again, they can now read and watch) because of his article. So he felt bad and wrote this follow-up.
2rafa
2d ago
Unless the girls are complete recluses they’ll just end up with the guy who they’d have shacked up with anyway (depending on looks, class, social circle and personality) and then either keep their politics to themselves or slowly drift towards their man’s politics in time.
2rafa
2d ago
I doubt your average communist in Russia in 1900 was much of anything other than a loser, same with your average German far rightist in 1920.
I mean the average Russian communist in 1900 was likely some kind of urban intellectual or other educated or semi-educated young man with big plans. The average German far rightist in 1920 was in the Freikorps if he was a younger fellow maybe, but they spanned a wide range of social classes and status categories.
2rafa
2d ago
I don’t think it’s really coping about being ‘ugly’, looks aren’t negatively correlated with intelligence (and are likely somewhat positively correlated with it given obesity and class etc). 2 is more true. I’ve heard beautiful women complain about men not liking them because they’re “smart”, and some even were very smart! It’s more of a cope around personality, especially because many type A people have great difficulty realizing they have a repulsive or standoffish personality. A relatively attractive young(ish) woman has no issues getting male attention, so if she gets dumped it can either be because of ill treatment (of her) or her own personality, and the latter is much harder to stomach.
Men have their own equivalents. “Women just don’t like [immutable feature about me]” is an easier cope than admitting you’re boring or have a bad personality.
2rafa
3d ago
I think it is very normal (and obviously understandable) for some women to be scared of pregnancy again after a tough time with the first child. Are you sure she can’t be convinced? My dad convinced my mom to have a third child and she still brings it up as one of the best things he’s done.
2rafa
3d ago
Yeah, kind of. There have been societies in the past where men without wives were a rounding error (and often were true lunatics, though with even many true lunatics still having wives too), so it's not impossible.
Which societies? In the US in 1900 apparently 39% of adults were unmarried, and that was certainly a society in which sex outside marriage was universally discouraged and certainly much more rare than it is today.
2rafa
3d ago
It is true that people can get radicalized and ‘trapped’ in the internet if very online. But yeah, once in the real world and very regularly interacting with the opposite sex socially, biology is going to take over.
2rafa
3d ago
Coping and thus seething are universal human realities. It gets much harder to date as a woman over 60 for relatively obvious reasons (the men start dying off faster, date their age or younger while for women the reverse is true etc) so those who can’t get, cope. It’s not really all that different to claiming the women who don’t want to date you are sluts or bitches anyway.
2rafa
3d ago
Crazy that he’s making $35m a year (assuming the $3m rate is usual) with this grift, given the margin on the supplements and clothes that’s a huge profit. What he said is vulgar, but something reasonable like $200,000 per parent(s) and then any additional claims if they could prove in court that they suffered additional financial burden due to the allegations (paying for security, being fired by their Jones-fan boss etc) would be fair.
2rafa
4d ago
Is there any real counter evidence to the argument that infanticide both historically and today is mostly, in most societies, of female children? That is the way it is in modernity from rural South Africa to one child policy China.
2rafa
4d ago
A federal government program that pays off law school after 10 years as a full-time public defender (and covers most interest in the meantime) seems reasonable. Or just a scholarship for people with high LSAT scores that covers full tuition in exchange for x years of service, with clawback provisions.
2rafa
4d ago
In every society with widespread infanticide (most of them), the gender ratios of surviving infants almost always skew towards boys.
Indeed, and we might add that in historic times of famine food is often reserved for (male) warriors, but almost never for (non elite) women, and women often miscarry or cannot conceive during famines so this has appreciable effects on communal strength. Women are just as disposable as men, it merely doesn’t make sense for them to be warriors given basic biological differences. That doesn’t really make women ‘advantaged’ in any significant way.
2rafa
5d ago
A lot of Japanese food is extremely mid and bland, though. Dining in Tokyo is great but that’s because chefs have adopted all the best French methods and cook with rare precision (compared to the rest of the world). The best, most flavorful ramen is available outside of Japan reinvented by others who wanted more from it. Japanese curries are more bland than Currywurst. A lot of bland deep fried food, almost Dutch in character.
Sushi and wagyu are good but stand out because of the ingredients (and the same is true for other Northern Euro cuisines, one could say the same about British wild game or Dover sole or oysters for example). Eating in Japan is great but it is only rarely so because Japanese cuisine is.
2rafa
5d ago
Because at least I would expect that people interested in politics, even if they primarily sought power for its own sake, had a more-than-average passing interest in ideology. This is because people with a strong interest in ideology who also like power are probably more likely to go into politics than people with a weak interest in ideology who like power (who might go into finance or something else where money is more readily available).
2rafa
5d ago
Only the top politicians get access to the high paying speaker opportunities. Even your average representative isn’t being paid $5,000 for a 20 minute speech, let alone $500k to show up to a conference.
2rafa
5d ago
You’ve gotten it a little confused. You’re completely correct that politicians are largely motivated by power accumulation, but that isn’t the surprising thing. That a politician should want to achieve power should be no less surprising than that a corporate climber should want to be CEO or that a star athlete should want to win gold. The surprising thing is that most of these people are essentially ideologically neutral or ambivalent. At most, largely by osmosis, they have absorbed some version of the general views of their class and peer circle. What is surprising is that it’s power without real purpose.
Sure, but this misunderstands the reason for the Azov nazi LARP, which is that they hate Russians and Nazis fought Russians. Finnish neonazis are likewise primarily motivated by anti-Russian and anti-Communist sentiment. Again, almost all are actually antisemitic, but antisemitism isn’t incompatible with serving under a Jewish President provided you agree with his war aims. The Azov position is that Zelensky wavered on Russia but was strong-armed into his current position by (ethnic) Ukrainian patriots. Plus, it’s not as if Putin isn’t also very close to many powerful Jewish oligarchs and friends (and Russia to Israel), so the war can’t really be described as some kind of antisemitic struggle in any case. If Ukraine wins, Zelensky can always be replaced; if it loses, no Ukrainian is going to be in charge.
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