AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
Interesting that you clicked on this...I hope your day is going well and you're at least finding our conversation stimulating, if you're not finding it pleasant. Looking to reinforce your beliefs about about me? Dig up some dirt? Have at it! Only cowards and scam artists make their profile private.
User ID: 2897
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
29d ago
My turning point was in 2017 when they had a guest on that was advocating that parents put their privileged kids in the worst schools possible to help out the poor black kids. She was supposedly doing that herself, I wonder how it worked out? I think I even found the story. It was a "driveway moment" for me just because I was amazed at what this woman was saying out loud. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/509325266
The world is warming and the climate is shifting. Not catastrophically, so far. They just bumped up all the growing season maps for the USA, farmers don't make shit like this up with money on the line. Here in Maine winters are becoming warm and wet, the bays don't freeze up in the winter anymore. Lobsters have all but disappeared from the NE States south of us and NY state and are slowly moving into slightly cooler Canadian waters. We've had more 100 year floods in the last few years than in the last 100. It IS changing, very rapidly on a geological time scale, it doesn't really matter if it is human caused or not; we should stop it.
I'm a big proponent of climate engineering or "geoengineering" . Our whole world is already shaped by humanity and our impact on it, I see no reason why altering the climate on purpose instead of on accident is so much worse. We should start with sulfur now, because it is cheap, we know it works, and how it works and that is is safe. Move on to space based shields later if it is still required. As many of you may have noted if you were in the path of the eclipse, no one would ever notice a 1% drop in sunlight.
Basically, climate change is a solved problem. If it ever gets bad enough we'll do something about it, I hope we do it sooner, I want my winters back.
It isn't religion, or a lack of it. It is trust. We are currently in the transitional phase from a generally high trust society to a generally low trust society. If you trust your neighbor or your mayor or your doctor to do right by you then you don't feel like a sucker for doing right by them.
This country wasn't founded by particularly devout leaders and most of the gentry took a much more rational and considered view of religion and the belief systems of various sects. They would have found 1950's southern baptists laughable superstitious bumpkins, not examples of what an ordered and high trust society should look like.
Regarding your injection of abortion politics into this subject. Benjamin Franklin even gave instructions on how to perform an at home abortion in "Every Man his own Doctor: OR, The Poor Planter's Physician" -- "For this Misfortune, you must purge with Highland Flagg, (commonly called Bellyach Root) a Week before you expect to be out of Order; and repeat the same two Days after; the next Morning drink a Quarter of Pint of Pennyroyal Water, or Decoction, with 12 Drops of Spirits of Harts-horn, and as much again at Night, when you go to Bed. Continue this 9 Days running; and after resting 3 Days, go on with it for 9 more."
Go back further and infanticide was common practice, even in religious societies, so we haven't always even thought of babies as precious, let alone a fetus. Crap, do we have to have a funeral for every missed period that doesn't result in a born child if we are true Christians? Most women have more miscarriages than born children.
Cultural homogeneity increases trust. So in that respect religion could help be one of many binders, but anything will do; a great civilization wide cause or mission, an actual visible existential threat (maybe), strong traditions, a founding idea or ideal, brainwashing and harsh punishments for deviation, material abundance and space to pursue success without harming your neighbor (perhaps America's greatest strength for the past 400 years). 96% of Pakistan portends to be devout Muslim. Does that seem like a high trust society to you?
Too many people and too few resources is what causes the death of prosocial behavior in a free society, not giving up on worshiping a deity of some type. It is easy to be kind if helping someone doesn't diminish your situation, especially if you can expect reciprocity because you know them, too many people make everyone a stranger. History is littered with the corpses of 1000 religious societies.
As George Costanza would say - "We're living in a society!"
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
28d ago
My brother and I have traveled to a number of 3rd worldly places and also just regular European cities etc... This guy is just traveling, people are nice to you if you're out traveling and have money to spend and time to kill. I've invited travelers on adventures to stay at my cabin instead of having to tent out when they are passing through our vacation spot, I'm excited to meet a different culture and make a new friend. I'm not worshiping a French Canadian a who is biking the east coast. They are also being recorded the whole time, which is always weird and I don't really see how any of these bloggers can have genuine interactions while recording all of it for profit.
It isn't radically different to have a night out in Lisbon or in shitty Mexican shantytown far outside of Tulum. People like travelers for the most part. Especially if they are buying beer and massages, why wouldn't they? I don't see anything more than people being kind to a traveling dude and curious and open. They aren't worshiping a godlike Aryan dude, they are just being kind and having a good time with a traveler. If you haven't traveled a lot or hosted, this is a super common dynamic. You make a meal, introduce your friends have some drinks and hey it is great. Breaking bread with strange folk passing through is a tradition as old as time.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
1mo ago
I agree. The thing is, Kulak craves a collapse, he yearns for it. I've seen this before 100 times on /r/collapse and many other places on the right and the left. They couch it in concerned terms but what they really want is total collapse quickly so they can step out of their boring lives and into whatever post apocalyptic power fantasy YA literature has lead them to believe.
All roads lead to collapse in Kulaks eyes, because that is what he wants to happen. Zerohedge and Michael Burry and Silverbear, peak oil, clathrate gun, rapture, global warming, hard core preppers -on and on and on; they all suffer from the same sickness.
Sometimes it is because they build their brand and their income on it, sometimes it is just a wish for a different more exciting life free of the normal drudgery, sometimes it is because, "My ideology will arise triumphant from the ashes of the old world". It never happens like they predict, even when things get shitty in this world, it happens slowly in a larger area or quickly in an isolated location like a war or natural disaster.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
2mo ago
Because there are a ton of quartz mines scattered all over the globe. Another mine would supply it if this one didn't. Just because one farm supplies grain to wagyu beef in japan doesn't mean another one can't do it if they stop. The cattle don't die.
There is also synthetic quartz, this is a solved problem.
Oh man I have sort of a dread reaction whenever someone mentions Haiti. I've listened to some wicked podcasts about the colonization of the Caribbean, oddly the best one was about Napoleon and the French revolution.
The conditions on the sugarcane plantations were basically the 9th circle of hell and the Tainos were not able to handle it and a good chunk of them were murdered straight up or died from disease, the rest made "poor slaves" and most died on the plantations.
The Spanish & French imported african labor as they could stand up to the harsh conditions a bit better. It was one of the most brutal places on earth at the time, it wasn't all race related, a lot of mixed race, Tanios and africans also became tied up in the terrible society that developed there.
"The inability to maintain slave numbers without constant resupply from Africa meant that at all times, a majority of slaves in the colony were African-born" It was so bad they couldn't even maintain the attrition rates without resupply. But it was worth it as vast fortunes were made and it was the jewel of the empire cash flow wise. Turning human pain into coin on a vast scale.
It isn't a puzzle to me that they have had problems ever since. Mississippi and other deep south states are still the lowest ranked in our country, and that is with the backing of the rest of the great US of A. It takes hundreds of years to recover from that type of shit human society.
Is there any way to give advice that I'm not aware of?
I have a good friend that should be doing well. He has a good job as a programmer working from home, his wife makes ok money as well, also working from home, and they have a healthy well behaved kid. They gross 230k. They rent a house because they have never saved enough to buy. They have one car despite the fact that it makes it difficult for either one of them to get away for a weekend to do something fun with friends.
When we first became friends I actually helped him discharge some medical debt and fixed his credit for him. I tried to get him a duplex in 2017 but he screwed up the loan application process and I lost interest.
They. Eat. Out. EVERY. MEAL! I think they probably spend 50k a year on it. When pressed he says, "neither one of us likes doing dishes." It is often a topic of fascination/conversation amongst our mutual acquaintances. We can't really understand how they never seem to have any money and this is the best reason we can come up with.
He also has a SERIOUS drinking problem that I have tried to talk to him about, and if I'm the one telling you you're drinking too much then it is a real problem. Our last 4 conversations this month have been about chess and about his drinking and that he should seriously think about going to rehab somewhere nice for a bit.
It finally caught up with him a few days ago and he got busted for a DUI. He passed the field sobriety test and then blew almost a .3... Shoot, a vampire could catch a pretty good buzz if he had encountered my friend on that particular evening. I hate to say something as cliché as "I hope this is a wakeup call" but I can't suppress that thought.
I've given him some advice on lawyering up and what to expect in that department, which he seems to be listening to. I can't help but think that there should have been some way to reach him before it got to this point. I think I'm a pretty persuasive guy, but it only seems to really work if I'm around someone 30 hours a week or more. I can't do that for him.
I suppose this turned into more of a venting session than I realized. Thanks for coming to my ted talk on the dangers of being a spendthrift drunk.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
17d ago
I see people say things like this. I seldom (never) see anyone do things like this. Tax exemptions are also not a panacea for creating a successful organization, the Satanic Temple and Universal Life Church are not exactly going gangbusters. I suppose you're thinking more along the lines of the Amish or Hassidic Jews and maybe a touch of Mormonism. But they were all well established without tax breaks.
American life (in general) continues on apace without much in the way of influence from these successful insular organizations, so I'm not sure how, even in success, this would help with @Capital_Room's question. I, however, given our previous interactions, am not surprised that your solution to almost any issue is more dakka religion.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
23d ago
I'm consistently impressed by the reasoning level of people I don't agree with. That is why I stick around.
For your consideration, you forgot one genre...The murder confessional.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=14WE3A0PwVs?si=SWV37NVjt9_6wEM3
I shot Darnell with a long ass gun and I tossed it in to the a-quar-ium.
Consider this my confession, admissible in court
I killed Darnell Simmons for Sport!
This is such a phenomenon that various legal systems have passed laws expressly accepting or forbidding the admission of rap lyrics as evidence. It is an ongoing legal hot spot https://www.americanbar.org/groups/young_lawyers/resources/tyl/practice-areas/rap-music-trial-art-or-confession/
Canada is having an immigration Crysis (the country can't run that many people on the hardware it has, it would need a huge upgrade to handle the influx). The people are noticing. Like many cities in the USA that are finally having to face up to the immigration policies they have supported and voted for, it is leaving a bad taste in everyone's mouth.
It may actually lead to replacing Castro's secret son this next election cycle.
The change in tone in the Canadian spaces that I frequent online and in person (being a border state and having family there) has been nothing short of unbelievable. Where I was called out as a stupid bigoted American (in less severe terms) for opposing open borders in my own country (while canada had a much more restrictive immigration policy going on I might add (am I including too many parenthetical asides?)), now Canadians are the ones telling me that no one speaks English/French anymore and that pretty soon their downtown is going to look like New Delhi at rush hour.
Wait times at medical clinics have gone from weeks to months to years, housing is 5x more out of whack than the US, and many expats once seeking a kinder Canadian way of life are returning home to the USA.
-Notes from a Canadian adjacent person
We don't "attempt" to play god. We are really really really good at it! You can chose to go live in a state of nature any time you wish. It is pretty terrible. Infanticide used to be pretty popular back then.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
23d ago
Have you heard any interviews with the guy that does the soft white underbelly series on YouTube? He basically says by the time he gets to these people they are so far gone they are beyond any kind of reintegration with society at large and can at best only be warehoused.
When asked about success stories, "basically none" is the answer, once you're on the street with multiple addictions and brain rot that is it for you. He has seen millions of medical resources spent on one patient over their lifetime etc... and that anything but warehousing is a resource suck without end. When asked about solutions to "fix" these people I believe the only one he offered was a time machine to go back and intervene in early early childhood.
Another scary AI is Becoming Racist article from the media.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/16/ai-racism-chatgpt-gemini-bias
The title is pretty comical. As AI tools get smarter, they’re growing more covertly racist, experts find
Hummm...seems problematic.
It goes on about how ebonics is judged harshly by the AI models. Without doing comparisons to other low status language markers such as WV dialects. The title implies that the smarter and more predictive the model becomes the more secretly racist it becomes.
There is also this gem-
"In response, groups like OpenAI developed guardrails, a set of ethical guidelines that regulate the content that language models like ChatGPT can communicate to users. As language models become larger, they also tend to become less overtly racist.
But Hoffman and his colleagues found that, as language models grow, covert racism increases. Ethical guardrails, they learned, simply teach language models to be more discreet about their racial biases.
“It doesn’t eliminate the underlying problem; the guardrails seem to emulate what educated people in the United States do,” said Avijit Ghosh, an AI ethics researcher at Hugging Face, whose work focuses on the intersection of public policy and technology.
“Once people cross a certain educational threshold, they won’t call you a slur to your face, but the racism is still there. It’s a similar thing in language models: garbage in, garbage out. These models don’t unlearn problematic things, they just get better at hiding it.”
It ends on this note from Avijit Ghosh https://evijit.io/assets/pdf/Avijit_CV.pdf
“Racist people exist all over the country; we don’t need to put them in jail, but we try to not allow them to be in charge of hiring and recruiting. Technology should be regulated in a similar way.”
He almost says the quiet part out loud. This is coming from someone that earned their phd LAST YEAR and moved to the USA in 2019. He is a quick learner, getting on that Gender Identity and Racial Equity grift right out of the gate! Much easier than working for a living.
His peer reviewed conference publications.
Perceptions in pixels: analyzing perceived gender and skin tone in real-world image search results WWW ’24
Bound by the Bounty: Collaboratively Shaping Evaluation Processes for Queer AI Harms AIES ’23
When Fair Classification Meets Noisy Protected Attributes AIES ’23
Queer In AI: A Case Study in Community-Led Participatory AI FAccT ’23
Subverting Fair Image Search with Generative Adversarial Perturbations FAccT ’22
FairCanary: Rapid Continuous Explainable Fairness AIES ’22
Algorithms that “Don’t See Color”: Comparing Biases in Lookalike and Special Ad Audiences AIES ’22
When Fair Ranking Meets Uncertain Inference SIGIR ’21
Building and Auditing Fair Algorithms: A Case Study in Candidate Screening FAccT ’21
Public Sphere 2.0: Targeted Commenting in Online News Media ECIR ’19
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
2mo ago
I've often thought we should bring back the idea of an outlaw. Literally a person with no legal protections that can be dealt with as the citizenry sees fit. There should be crimes that grant you that status, like rolling coal on a pedestrian in a modded diesel truck, or listening to loud music on public transport on a boombox instead of headphones. If you choose to act outside the law for no reason other than to antagonize your fellow man, the law should not protect you.
I think it is way too soon to hang a "mission accomplished" "AI is no big deal" banner on your virtual aircraft carrier. Doing so today is probably going to look foolish in a decade. Most tech takes a few decades to change the world. AI in the newest big data iteration is already moving much faster than that.
I have often fallen into the "overestimate the short term change and underestimate the long term change" trap, in my own life, and in my predictions. I've been working on that a lot and it is starting to pay dividends in my reasoning. I'm usually right but my timing has been desperately early in the past, switching my thinking like this is putting it a lot closer into alignment with future realities.
It is odd. I had a classmate (in the honors college no less) that was very open and bragged a lot about have fucked Fred Durst of all people (this was 2003 mind you). She was bragging about this mostly to men as far as I could tell. It was very off-putting and it was hard to take her (and the honors program) seriously after that.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
1mo ago
Your last paragraph touches deeply on what I picked up on watching a marathon while my knee heals up. The weird dichotomy between his brash world traveling wealthy lifestyle and his use of almost "poverty porn" to make a living.
You could see that both he and some of his hosts were sometimes visibly very uncomfortable due to the obvious wealth and status gap. I think we should maybe give him a little more credit for introspection due to that. Yeah now I can see how he was possibly boxed in by his own ego and it felt like there was no way out. Thanks for the writeup!
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
1mo ago
43% obesity prevalence in USA vs. 13% in Europe.
Obesity is the biggest factor in maternal mortality by f̶a̶t̶ far. It is pretty much the largest factor in most health outcomes.
It ain't the health care, it is the care about health/cheap food/culture, car culture etc...etc...
The fact that we do so well despite being fat as hell is an amazing testament to our robust healthcare system.
Seems hard to find the actual stats on their site besides that they received 22 dogs out of the ones seized.
Pitbulls were bred for fighting. In 2020 they accounted for 72% of dog attack deaths while making up about 6.2% of the total U.S. dog population. They are also the most likely to bite, period. The findings showed that dogs with short, wide heads who weighed between 66 and 100 pounds were the most likely to bite.
Pit bulls were responsible for the highest percentage of reported bites across all the studies (22.5%), followed by pit/mixed breeds (21.2%), and German shepherds (17.8%).
Pit bulls were found to have the highest relative risk of biting, as well as the highest average damage per bite.
The vast majority of his dogs went to a sanctuary. They say “adopted” and that is technically correct- but they went to the dog equivalent of a zoo. They also removed the teeth from some of them and Mr. Vick paid almost a million dollars for their rehab and future care. Most were never integrated into homes and lived out their days in a very nice kennel.
The fallout from all of this has been 15 years of pro-pitbull propaganda and an incredible increase in dog bite attacks, disfigurements, and deaths. We have plenty of dogs, put the bad ones down.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
1mo ago
I've noticed that in almost all modern media. They never let someone be "just a monster" there is always some kind of attempt to humanize them. I think that is why people loved to hate Joffrey so much, and why GOT was so popular, it had true bad people in it. It is rare to see a truly evil person on the screen that isn't some kind of tragic lost cause.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
1mo ago
Whew, you hit the nail on the head here. People generally like the way things are where they live, or they would move somewhere else (means available). Outsiders that want to come and fuck up the good thing they have going are going to be shunned, as they should be. The lack of awareness present in this fellow is staggering.
NPR just reported on a new study out that the CDC has been overcounting maternal mortality claiming it to be over 300% of actual deaths.
It seems there is a box on a form that you check if the person is pregnant, and they have been counting every single death of a pregnant person as a maternal death. Shoot, they included a lot of men in those stats too apparently. Even if the death didn't have anything to do with being pregnant or delivering a baby.
The article is an absolutely wild ride of excuses, doublespeak and backpedaling while still playing a hard game of oppression Olympics. They are trying to work some facts in, but it is just so against the narrative, they basically can't do it. Even when they address the fact that it isn't actual race but bad health going into pregnancy that is the issue, they can't quite ever just leave it at that.
Certainly reinforces my already staggering lack of faith in the CDC due to their bungling and lying about covid.
Guess the Euros will have to take this US bashing fact out of their quiver.
Article
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/03/13/1238269753/maternal-mortality-overestimate-deaths-births-health-disparities
The CDC's National Center for Health Statistics' most recent report put the U.S. maternal mortality rate at a whopping 32.9 deaths per 100,000 births. That number garnered a great deal of attention, including being covered by NPR and other news outlets.
A new study suggests the national U.S. maternal mortality rate is actually much lower than that: 10.4 deaths per 100,000 births.
The widely reported issue of racial disparities in U.S. maternal mortality persists, even with the lower overall rate. Black pregnant patients are still three times more likely to die than white patients, according to data in the study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology on Wednesday.
"We have to prevent these deaths," says K.S. Joseph, a physician and epidemiologist in the OB-GYN department of the University of British Columbia. Joseph is the lead author of the peer-reviewed paper. "Even if we say that the rate is 10 per 100,000 and not 30 per 100,000, it does not mean that we have to stop trying."
The fact that the rate of maternal mortality in the U.S. seems to have been significantly inflated may be disconcerting. Experts NPR spoke with about the data explain that measuring maternal deaths is complex, and that CDC was not intentionally misleading the public. They also emphasize that most maternal deaths are preventable.
Health department medical detectives find 84% of U.S. maternal deaths are preventable The trouble with the data started about 20 years ago, when the national death certificate was updated to include a pregnancy checkbox that the person certifying someone's death could tick. This checkbox created problems, which CDC analysts have acknowledged in their own papers, and changes were made in 2018 to CDC's methods for calculating maternal deaths. But Joseph and other researchers suspected the data was still not reliable.
"We felt that the pregnancy checkbox was misclassifying a lot of such deaths and adding them to maternal deaths," he explains.
In the new paper, Joseph and colleagues redid the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics analysis of data from 1999-2002 and 2018-2021, skipping over years when the data was in flux. Then they disregarded the deaths with only the pregnancy checkbox ticked. "We would only consider deaths to be a maternal death if there was a pregnancy-related cause mentioned by the physician who was certifying the death," he explains. "There are several lines in the certificate where a pregnancy-related cause can be mentioned, and if any of those lines mentioned a pregnancy-related cause, we would call it that."
That approach yielded a rate of 10.4 per 100,000. It also showed that the rate did not change much between 1999 and 2021. That rate is much closer to those reported in other wealthy countries, although Joseph warns that every country uses a different process and so international comparisons are unreliable.
"I think it's a very important study – I was happy to see it," says Steven L. Clark, an OB-GYN at Baylor College of Medicine who was not involved in the research. "It confirms statistically what most of us who actually deal with critically ill pregnant women on a regular basis thought for years. We are bombarded with these statistics saying how horrible maternal care is in the United States, and yet we just don't see it."
Clark does not blame the CDC for putting the maternal mortality rate so high. "They can only analyze the data that they're provided with, and that data starts at the individual hospitals and individual places in the United States," Clark says. "CDC gets these numbers, and I think they probably do a great job – I don't think there's any conspiracy here to hide anything from the public."
Joseph agrees. "The point I would like to make is that, yes, the [National Vital Statistics System] is overestimating rates and that's because of the pregnancy checkbox," Joseph says. "But this issue of assessing the actual maternal mortality rate is not a simple issue."
Deciding what time frame to consider, which conditions to include, and more, makes the task challenging. Joseph's study does not count suicides in the post-partum period, for instance.
The CDC's National Center for Health Statistics declined NPR's initial request for comment on the study. After publication, a spokesperson for the agency emailed a written statement. "CDC disagrees with the findings," the statement reads, and goes on to assert that the methods used by the researchers "are known to produce a substantial undercount of maternal mortality." The CDC declined to provide anyone for an interview.
Dr. Veronica Gillispie-Bell is an OB-GYN and the medical director of Louisiana's maternal mortality review committee. She also was not involved in the study. She says the findings do not surprise her – her committee finds checkbox errors all the time. "When we're validating the cases, it's very common that a 70 year old man – somebody checked the pregnancy checkbox and it will appear that that was a pregnancy-associated death when it was more of a clerical error."
She says in committees like hers in states all over the country – supported and funded by CDC – experts are looking closely at each of these maternal deaths and validating them. "We don't just look at the numbers," she says. "We review cases to determine, first of all, was this death pregnancy-related or not? Was this death preventable? And if so, what could we have done to prevent the death?"
She worries this new study will encourage some to dismiss the issue. "Anybody that was doubting is going to be like, 'I knew it wasn't that bad of a problem.'" She thinks the study should instead be a "call to action" to support state review committees like hers that validate the data and investigate each death.
Dr. Louise King, an OB-GYN and bioethicist at Harvard Medical School, agrees. "It's really important to dig down into this," she says. "Maternal deaths may be related to poor health coming into pregnancy, but that's still on us."
King notes that maternal mortality rates are still too high in the U.S., and the disproportionate effect on Black patients "is just plain scary," she says.
Joseph agrees that the racial disparities in the data make clear that there's a long way to go before the problem of maternal mortality is addressed. He adds, "this study does not mean that you can take your eye off the ball."
Study
https://www.ajog.org/article/S0002-9378(24)00005-X/fulltext
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