Bombadil
2mo ago
The issue is that Trump is siphoning money to himself. Siphoning money to your voters is arguably part of what a politician is supposed to do. The leftist interest groups supported things that were part of Biden's political program. This is what he is supposed to spend money on. Fulfilling campaign promises and furthering the political agenda of his party.
Using your presidential authority to funnel public money to yourself and your family is clearly different, and much more corrupt. This seems to clearly be what Trump is doing with this.
Bombadil
2mo ago
For a murder mystery to be a mystery you need the murderer to be competent enough to hide their crime. I think this excludes drug addicts and the feral teenagers who would probably commit the crime out of impulse, leave tons of evidence at the scene, and already be suspected by the police.
This is hardly an interesting story. For that you need a villain with the foresight to plan the murder, the intelligence and knowledge to do a competent cover-up, and the self-control to stick to the plan. It seems very unlikely that such a person would not be either middle-to-upper-class or in a position of power in the criminal underworld. Especially if the crime requires an accomplice who must necessarily be loyal to the murderer.
Bombadil
2mo ago
That is a matter of definition. Many would absolutely say something like "I spent my youth seducing women, but my wife convinced me to settle down". I see promiscuity as a lifestyle where you have sexual relations with multiple people within relatively short timeframes. This lifestyle can change over time. What you describe sounds more like a sin that cannot be undone.
Bombadil
2mo ago
One thing to note is that people generally have less sex as they age, which makes them less promiscuous. Promiscuity being limited to a small subset of the population, could actually mean that promiscuity is limited to young people. Assuming this population pyramid from Wikipedia is correct, people aged 20 to 30 (where I would assume most promiscuity happens) contain just north of 10% of the entire population.
So theoretically two statements could be true at the same time:
- Young people are generally very promiscuous.
- Only a small subset of the population is promiscuous (because people tend to settle down as they age).
My recollection is there's strong empirical evidence that comparable cash awards for actual child birth have barely done anything at all, though I don't have the time to go digging right now
I honestly think this makes sense. There very much seems to be a fantasy where you can spend most of your 20s partying, travelling, and getting educated, and postpone children to later. Having a child early significantly interferes with your freedom to do whatever you want when you are young. In other words, the fantasy of extending your adolescence for as long as possible is worth much more than the state is willing to pay you to have a kid. $10k surely wouldn't cut it. You would need life-altering amounts of money to convince the average 21-year old middle class woman to give it up and pursue a family instead.
The state could pay for every expense associated with child rearing, from diapers to education to the sports they play in their free time. And young people would likely still not consider themselves ready to have kids.
Bombadil
2mo ago
Plenty of young women want children though. They just postpone it as they want to focus their early and mid twenties on partying, travelling, and education. Only to realise too late that finding a lover worth starting a family with is much harder than expected and can easily take years. Suddenly they find themselves in their mid thirties where pregnancy and childbirth is much more risky and their fertility lowers year by year.
I imagine this is the group @self_made_human is trying to cater to. Pay them to freeze their eggs while they are still young, so that they are more likely to still be able to get pregnant once they feel ready to start a family.
Considering that children is something they actually want, and supposing that this makes it significantly more likely, I could easily imagine that a lot of young women would actually be okay with this.
Bombadil
2mo ago
Likening the invasion of a sovereign nation to ordinary law enforcement seems incredibly bad faith. It is more like if a gang was trying to force you to join it under threat of stealing your belongings and killing you if you refuse. Depending on how you expect them to treat you should you accept, "Keep fighting!" is not unreasonable here. Especially if you have already managed to keep them at a stalemate for four years and the terms for surrender boil down to "give us all your stuff".
Bombadil
2mo ago
Subnautica 2 just released into early access. The early game seems basically feature complete, and it really nails the feelings of exploration from the first game. Your spaceship crashed on an ocean planet which is incredibly hostile to human life. The circumstances of the crash and what happened to the ones you were traveling with, is a mystery that you slowly piece together as you explore.
I like that. Having the story be a mystery suites the game really well. It is a survival game where you explore an alien world, learn to exploit the natural resources to construct advanced technology, which allows you to explore even more, find rarer resources, and build even more advanced tech. Rinse and repeat until there is nothing left to find. I am the type who likes looking for secrets, and as such this game loop really appeals to me. Since the story is told through logs spread around the world, uncovering the truth blends really well with exploring and looking for resources.
Finally, the game is just beautiful. The fauna is of course inspired by what we have on earth, but is suitably new and alien. Different biomes feature different color palettes, but nothing feels out of place. Subnautica 1 was a game that many people would come back to just to admire the game world, and I suspect this one will be similar. The art really does tie everything together. The game can be beautiful but also scary when necessary. After all, the ocean is deadly and some of the creatures lurking in the deep are absolutely deadly.
Bombadil
2mo ago
Neuroticism specifically has some pretty clear advantages when it comes to surviving in times of adversity when those around you are untrustworthy or dangerous. This makes it pretty hard to select against; Once the neurotics find out what you are doing, they are going to hide away and work hard to minimize it showing.
I guess modern society and social media is kind of doing it though. The neurotics can seek safety in their room bathed in light from their screens whilst minimizing interaction with the outside world. Meanwhile, the western world is safe enough that most risk takers are likely to survive and will have many opportunities for procreation if that is what they desire. Caution may have been a winning strategy a hundred years ago, but now it seems like taking risks is the way to go, as you can bank on modern medicine saving your life if something goes wrong. If the modern west continues unimpeded for a thousand years, perhaps neuroticism will be considered a weird mental illness, and our descendants will all be men of action. I wonder what kind of society they would create.
Bombadil
2mo ago
If Mississippi consistently produces better educated people than other states that sounds like a pretty huge advantage. I can imagine parents would want to move there to secure a better future for their kids, and companies would like to recruit the people living there.
That seems like a pretty good incentive for other states to follow suit.
Bombadil
2mo ago
exclusively based on merit.
Merit is just very limited when it comes to kids. They don't have as much agency as adults, so their abilities are often a reflection of how involved their parents are. If my parents help me with my homework and feed me healthy meals, I will obviously have a natural advantage over kids for whom this isn't the case. It seems really hard to solve this with extra funding. Sure you can provide free meals and expertly educated teachers to level the playing field. But good parents is not something that you reasonably buy with money.
So I think any kind of merit based education will run into complains about it favoring kids from good socioeconomic backgrounds. Overall, these children are just going to do better, so granting merit-based benefits will in a way always be a "rich get richer" policy.
Not that this is necessarily disqualifying though. I personally believe that society should encourage skills and hard work in children more than it currently does, so to some extent I am very much in favor of incentives to support these values.
Bombadil
2mo ago
I am skeptical of the whole "encouraging children's natural interests instead of formal education" part, but I do like the idea of segregating students into different groups based on their abilities or how they act in the classroom. I am biased due to being the kind of kid who would have greatly benefitted from the bottom half of the class being shifted into different grades though. I think it would still be a hard pill to swallow for broader society.
At the end of the day, this system will benefit the best students the most, and it seems likely that the students would form cliques based on whether they are in the good or the bad class. The best students are usually from good socioeconomic backgrounds, so this will easily be spun as discrimination and enforcement of the existing social order. Limiting social mobility, putting disadvantaged groups further behind, etc.
On the other hand, the new system only needs to be better than what we currently have. Having the school environment be destroyed by a handful of kids that obviously have no business being there, seems overall worse than excluding said students from normal teaching.
Bombadil
2mo ago
You need a special ed teacher for the special ed kids. If you pretend that no kids are special ed, you only need the normal teacher and no extra help for all the normal kids. In other words, you save money on the teacher but sacrifice the quality of education that the majority of the class receives. This is bad for the kids and society, but seems good for the school budget in the short term.
I obviously don't know if there are additional costs to having difficult children in a normal classroom. But it seems logical to me that mixing all the kids together lets you save on teachers, meaning that having separate classes for special ed kids would be more expensive.
Why do you expect it to be cheaper?
Bombadil
2mo ago
I imagine "kicking out the kids" would in practice mean "moving them to special ed" or something similar where they can stay for the day (so the parents have time to work) and hopefully learn the skills they need to function in a classroom (or at least not make the day a nightmare for the other kids). In that case money would not be saved, merely moved around. Not providing them with a chance for an education at all due to factors outside their control (mental disabilities, parental neglect, etc.) seems contrary to modern values.
I guess you could maybe do it when they are older though. Expelling a teenager is very different than expelling a 6-year-old. An argument could be made that if a kid is still unwilling to put in effort and constantly disruptive by around age 14 or so, society has done all that could reasonably be expected of it, and from now on the duty is on the parent.
Bombadil
2mo ago
It's a hard sell, emotionally and ideologically speaking. Education is meant to be for everyone, and the entire point of making it mandatory and free is so the children from the weakest backgrounds get a level playing field with the rich kids. Not educating the very weakest is counterproductive to this ideal.
Besides, you run into the problem that society is structured around school taking care of the kids for the majority of the workday. Forcing the kid out of school likely means the family has to take care of it, and a lot of parents simply won't be able to do this while also holding down a job. There just aren't enough hours in the day.
Bombadil
2mo ago
If it really is just alarmism, it just seems so irresponsible to me. I understand that the incentive of a capitalist society is to profit at any cost. But I also believe that journalists have a duty to accurately inform the population and not poke at their anxieties for no good reason. If they go too far into sensationalism and making baseless claim, they lose their purpose and reason for existing. The value they provide to society will degrade until it is completely gone.
Bombadil
2mo ago
Our feeds must be very different. I have seen zero discussion about the virus on The Motte, but stories keep popping up in my news feed while I have seen various subreddits bringg it up over the last few days, including today. And of course, the WHO currently has multiple articles about the virus on their front page. This seems like a lot, but it could of course just be the algorithms screwing with me.
Why do people care so much about the hantavirus outbreak? The ship is still all over the news and social media. The WHO director-general went to the ship personally, which further indicates that this is a really important matter. It is constantly being compared to covid. Officials keep telling people to calm down, but the way this is covered, the warnings have the opposite effect. The public response seems frantic and only serves to create more uncertainty.
And yet, it just doesn't seem that serious. Sure it can be deadly if you are infected. But from what I understand, Hantavirus mostly spreads to humans through ingestion or inhalation of fluids from rodents. There seems to be no evidence that human to human infection is something the virus is really capable of, and even if this is a strain that mutated to do that, it also doesn't spread through the air.
The most likely scenario in my mind is that hygiene issues on the ship led to a rodent infestation which infected the passengers, and that there is basically no chance that this spreads to the rest of society. It seems about as serious as a hotel giving its residents food poisoning. Terrible for those involved, but irrelevant to the broader world.
But the constant coverage makes me wonder if I am missing something important. Or is this really just a case of the media selling news by appealing to pandemic trauma?
Bombadil
2mo ago
Well yeah. That and the adoption system is pretty good evidence in my eyes that giving the state more power over children is not a good thing.
Bombadil
2mo ago
the chump who got played
But that's the trick right there. Without DNA tests or another man to claim fatherhood, there is no way to conclusively prove you did get played. With the test being unavailable, we maintain the convenient narrative that the "chump" is in fact the father, and should take responsibility as such.
Bombadil
2mo ago
You don't know who the biological father is, so you would have to find him first. You don't know how wealthy he is, so there is no guarantee he is even capable of paying child support in the first place. You will have to take him to court to find out. During this process as you locate and sue the bio dad, who pays for the kid? And what if he is just too poor to pay anything? It seems to me that the incentives, at least in the short term, favor the assumption that the boyfriend/husband is also that goes out the window if you do a test and find out it isn't the case.
That sad, I personally still believe the injustice of paying for another man's kid when doing so is easily avoidable is too great an injustice to be justified by this. But it is the best explanation I can come up with, and I do think it is logically coherent.
Bombadil
2mo ago
Why a father should be forced to pay child support without a paternity test
The best argument I can think of is that someone needs to pay for the kid. The state will do whatever possible to avoid taking that task. Partly due to the economic expense, partly for the sake of the kid. If the state starts paying child support, odds are the state will also want a say in how the child should be raised. I believe having such a large faceless entity be directly responsible for any individual leaves a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong. So while it is unjust to demand child support while denying a paternity test, there is a decent argument it is helpful to the kid.
As for why it is not the woman who pays, that is tradition. The law has not caught up to gender equality in the labor market, and I imagine feminist activists will work hard to keep things that way, considering this is something that disproportionately benefits women to the detriment of men.
I also think it is partly due to cheap DNA testing being a relatively new thing. It has not been that long since sequencing was an expensive, time consuming task mostly done as academic research. While mandatory DNA testing may well be a reasonable demand today, 20 years ago it would have been ridiculous.
Bombadil
2mo ago
One would generally expect that people who are attracted to little girls will flock to a game centered around a little girl. That does not mean the game was designed to appeal to pedophiles though, just like a game with dogs is not designed to appeal to zoophiles.
Bombadil
2mo ago
Agreed. The character looks like a prepubescent girl. A pretty girl to be sure, and somewhat stylized. She is a bit doll like, which is fitting given that she is supposed to be an android.
I hope we are not reaching a point where anything feminine, cute, or pretty is immediately seen as sexy. But it seems like an unfortunate side effect of internet memes that anything that can be sexualised will be, leading to weird situations like this one.
One could also make the argument that any war requiring a mandatory draft is unjust. If the citizens are unwilling to fight for their country unless threatened with imprisonment or death, then you should allow them to surrender instead.
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