ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
No bio...
User ID: 1098
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
3d ago
Not OP but his reputation was destroyed, and for someone like him what does he have left?
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1mo ago
I knew what video this was before I clicked on it. It's a classic.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1mo ago
- Yes
- Yes
- No, mainly because speed limits are inappropriately low in most cases.
- Left lane is for passing only, but cutting drivers off and tailgating are wrong too.
- No, it's not okay to break the law. However, see 7.
- No, everyone follows the same rules.
- There should be a new law on merging: if another vehicle ahead is signaling to change into your lane, you must slow down to let them in. This would encourage drivers to use the whole roadway instead of lining up a mile back to get into a specific lane. In most cases this would lead to more efficient use of road space, and it would make driving a lot less stressful for people who are not assertive. It's painful to ride with a driver who has no guts and can't assertively merge.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
6mo ago
With modern technology, the biological parent doesn't have to bear her own children. As a society we can use surrogacy to avoid the worst tradeoffs.
The root of the problem is that high-value people should be rewarded for creating biological children, because most of their high value is genetic. But no one of any status in society is willing to publicize the science and build consensus around genetics being real. If we could solve this problem then everything else becomes easy.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1mo ago
Cars should abide by the "Gentleman's Agreement" to stick around 300hp, and anything larger than that should be heavily taxed. 300hp is plenty to have a quick mid size sedan, a very fast small car, or a reasonably drivable large SUV/pickup truck. Capping horsepower on most cars would encourage people who want to drive fast sporty cars to buy small cars, and discourage people from driving giant SUVs and pickup trucks they can't handle too fast.
This is a great idea. Another idea along these lines is to have a momentum limit so that any individual vehicle is limited in how much damage it can do to another. Lighter vehicles could go faster and heavier vehicles would be limited to a lower speed. Speed limits could be raised in many cases if there was a momentum limit.
Scaling liability with momentum would help too, by increasing insurance premiums for large dangerous vehicles.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
4mo ago
Being a subject of a state is different from being subject to its laws. The purpose of the 14th was to make it clear that former slaves were citizens. In this context "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" means something more like "a subject of the government thereof", in the same way one might be a subject of one's King. It expresses a subject-sovereign relationship.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
10mo ago
This is a good definition. Other commenters have mentioned that punishment being disproportionate is a key aspect of cancel culture, but I don't think it's necessarily bad. Punishment being disproportionate is how people build moral systems that are effective in keeping people from breaking them all the time. 'Cancel culture' is a pejorative term for this process, used when the speaker doesn't like the moral system being developed. But the same process is responsible for creating the morals we all take for granted.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
4mo ago
The 14th just says you can't have people who are subjects but not citizens. If you want to make someone a subject then they're a citizen.
A concrete test sounds like the kind of thing for which a law is required. We have some of those, describing the process through which a non-citizen can become naturalized as a citizen. It seems obvious to me that an immigrant, legal or otherwise, is not a subject of the U.S. until they are granted that status through the law. But this is the whole debate. To other people it will seem obvious that someone is a subject unless the law explicitly says otherwise.
The way people immigrate has changed over the last two hundred years, and the 14th Amendment wasn't written to disambiguate modern questions. Congress could answer them if it dared. In the absence of legislation, it seems reasonable for the President to direct the government using his interpretation of the amendment.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1mo ago
AP is reporting on it now: Israel attacks Iran’s capital with explosions booming across Tehran
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
11mo ago
There's a difference between consequences from the state and consequences from private actors. The jail term is just the least-common-denominator solution society has agreed on for punishing his crime. Any private person can also form their own independent opinion of what consequences he should face, and share their opinion.
From the perspective of private actors, it is deeply unfair to expect them to treat someone who has served a sentence for a crime the same as someone who never committed the crime. Clearly the fact that someone committed a crime predicts their future behavior in a Bayesian sense. People should be allowed to use that information to inform how they treat the perpetrator. Imagine the state, for reasons, fines criminals just $1 for committing, say, date rape. This is the right balance of deterrence, justice, incapacitation, and bureaucracy that meets the state's needs. If you're a woman considering having a drink with a man who's paid out $200 in such fines over the past year, you should be allowed to know and to act on the man's criminal history! Your own judgment of the severity of his crime can be wildly different from the state's.
However, I also believe in rehabilitation. I see no reason to report on this any more than if he had served a year for insurance fraud in 2016.
I assume that any competitive male athlete has a higher level of sexual aggression than average, so this article doesn't shift my judgment of him by much. But it's reasonable for other people to get value out of learning this part of his history. It's also reasonable to want to strike fear in the hearts of future statutory rapists to prevent them from acting. So I can't condemn this article; people have a right to know.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
19d ago
The "can't remember the name of their medication" test is a frustratingly close mirror to the Obama administration's 'fiduciary' test, which was quite broadly applied to people whose sole sin was having difficultly dealing with a checkbook.
Could you give some more context on what this is, for those unfamiliar? All I can find is a rule about financial professionals having to act in their clients' best interests.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
10mo ago
Secret data but more importantly secret code (any programs, algorithms, statistical techniques, data cleaning, etc.), would never cut it in the professional world. If you're a data scientist or a product manager proposing a change to a company's business processes you need to have your work in source control and reviewable by other people. There's no reason academics can't do the same. Make the PI responsible by default unless they can show fraud in the work their underling did. If they didn't review their underling's work then the PI is fully responsible. This would have the added benefit that researchers would learn useful skills (how to present work for review) for working in industry.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
11mo ago
one has to register as Democrat or Republican to be able to vote in the primaries? Is that open information ?
It is, at least in my state. Keep in mind that people sometimes register in one party to influence the primary, then vote for the other party in the general election. So you can't tell someone's true allegiance just by seeing which party they're registered under.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
5mo ago
For HSV-2 in the U.S., the rate varies a lot by race, from 3.8% for Asian to 34.6% (!) for black.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
8mo ago
Time, on October 22nd: "Don’t Trust the Political Prediction Markets". Oops.
When it comes to accuracy, these prediction markets have an even poorer historical track record than political polling– not to mention these companies come and go with startling transience.
the reality is that the Circuit Court could well rule that these platforms are illegal and shut them down in merely a few weeks’ time.
Maybe they would last longer if Time wasn't writing hit pieces on them.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
8mo ago
This is an interesting analogy and lends itself to more elaboration.
In aviation, there have been autopilots for many years. But always the human pilot is in command, and uses the autopilot as a tool that has to be managed and overseen. Autonomous vehicles, at least in some companies' visions, have no way to control them manually. An airplane pilot enters waypoints into the navigation system to plan out a route; an autonomous car routes itself. The biggest difference is in who is responsible for the vehicle; is it the human operator or the vehicle's manufacturer?
I could see a kind of autonomous vehicle that works more like an airplane autopilot - you wouldn't necessarily need a steering wheel, but if you had control over the different high-level choices in route planning and execution (do I try to make this yellow light? Should I play chicken at this merge or play it safe?) then the human could be considered responsible in a way that a fully autonomous, sit-back-and-relax mode doesn't allow.
I am revolted by the idea of relying on a company akin to an airline for my day-to-day mobility. There are too many failure modes that leave one stuck. What if there's a natural disaster and all the phone networks are down? Or the car company has a de facto local monopoly, but then withdraws from this market or goes out of business? What if the company starts blacklisting customers for things that shouldn't be related to transportation, like their political affiliation or their credit score?
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
9mo ago
I thought unions were like some kind of trade association where all workers join and they collectively bargain with employers if they want access to their skilled labor pool.
That's what they should be. In reality the NLRB and labor law make them more like a local Mafia. Pay us for protection or we'll destroy your business. This is but one example of why libertarians want less regulation: any government power is always corrupted to enrich whoever can get their hands on it.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1mo ago
Those things are all bad in the same way that prostitution is, just less so. I'd add to the list: giving resources without even getting sex (simping), consumption of pornography, and divorce are all degenerate forms of relationships that in the ideal would be marriage.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1mo ago
It seems like you don't like cycling.
there's no need for this medium speed, low-safety, exhausting means of transport
How about
- Getting some default amount of exercise every day just from running errands and commuting. This is mainly a benefit to the cyclist, but in countries with more socialized medicine, it's a public good too.
- Saving money. For people who live in denser areas, much of the cost of a car is the capital expense and fixed maintenance.
- Saving time. For short trips in dense areas where it's hard to park, a bike beats driving.
- Combining all three. Even if cycling takes longer and doesn't save much money, the fact that it's combining exercise, travel, relaxation, and thrift makes it pretty good use of time for a lot of people.
- Reducing traffic. Where I live, due to traffic it takes about as long to commute 20 miles by bike as by car. Believe it or not most of the time a cyclist is on the road they are not in conflict with any cars; they're using shoulders or bike paths. A car on the freeway is taking up that much extra space the whole time.
This is all completely orthogonal to whether cyclists obey traffic laws. I'm all for ticketing cyclists and making their movements more legible to the law. I think this would go a long way towards cycling becoming more normalized so that people can have discussions based on tradeoffs rather than emotions.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
10mo ago
The solution to violent crime is easy: incapacitate criminals. The hardcore crackdown on violent crime that does not take away pro-social people's guns is possible right now in most places but doesn't happen, I think largely because of prosecutorial discretion by progressive prosecutors. Maybe the solution is something out of left field like allowing any citizen to press charges, in the same way that civil rights law works. Take the discretion away from public officials.
I am much more of a 2nd Amendment maximalist (private fighter jets? Yes.). However, I think the real goal of preventing tyranny can't be achieved by the 2nd amendment alone, as you've argued. What must be possible is alternate centers of power and the real possibility of them becoming autonomous, of seceding from the authority of the federal government. What would make alternative centers of power a more realistic possibility is making self-determination an explicit right. It should be one of the unenumerated rights that the founders didn't think necessary to put in the Constitution, but the modern interpretation of rights (at least post-1860) requires listing it explicitly. I'm not sure whether it needs to be about secession specifically vs. a more generic right to self-determination, but the specter of the federal fist coming down on any group that wants to go their own way makes it practically impossible without the right to do so.
If there was a right to self-determination or secession, then the threat of a group leaving the union would force the federal government to accommodate individual groups more. As things are, tyranny of the majority keeps ratcheting up.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
5mo ago
I'm not going to read an AI-generated post. But I did ask an AI to summarize it in a few sentences, so I get the gist. Maybe next time just post your thoughts so others don't have to do this extra round-trip through an AI.
These are my unfiltered thoughts on the object-level issue:
It's not Communism. It's opaque and centralized but historical Communist systems are not unique in those respects.
The credit scoring system is a result of many conflicting interests who all place constraints on how businesses make decisions. Consider what would happen if a business used their own method for evaluating credit risk:
- They might accidentally use a forbidden input, such as race, or a proxy for one, such as zip code. This exposes the business to substantial legal risk. Figuring out the set of inputs that are both predictive and allowed takes a lot of specialized knowledge of the laws in the jurisdiction in which the business operates. This is expensive. It's cheaper to outsource this work and risk to specialized companies.
- They might make a mistake in predicting credit risk. To take your example, the fact that a customer has a history of on-time rent payments doesn't necessarily mean they're low enough risk for what the business is evaluating them for. If it's for a new rental agreement, maybe the customer's income has disappeared recently. If it's for a credit card, maybe paying rent doesn't predict paying off credit cards. Using a specialized company for evaluating risk ensures that the weaknesses of the score are at least well-known and understood.
- If they try to make the process more transparent, they might make a mistake with privacy and PII. The opacity of the current system allows credit bureaus to launder private information into a less-private score that's still useful to businesses.
- Also if they try to make the process more transparent, they open themselves up to gaming.
The real question is, what is the alternative, and does it live within the constraints we've placed on how businesses make decisions?
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
11mo ago
If it were not true that most of the people who voted Democrat before Reagan vote Republican now, then where did all those Democratic voters go and where did all the Republican voters come from?
Exactly. People change their party affiliations over time. Parties change their platforms over time. Ascribing a consistent principled philosophy to a political party, a group that is a Ship of Theseus in both membership and in ideas, is a fool's errand. It would be more accurate to treat the parties as brand new groups every election. Republicans_1984 is not Republicans_2024. And criticizing a party based on the platforms of past parties that share the same name is invalid. It was different people and a different platform.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
3mo ago
I'll miss your commentary but I support this choice. Good luck with your project, and please succeed or fail quickly so you can get back here sooner.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
3mo ago
I took this opportunity to do some media bias comparisons on how this story is being reported. There's a combination of editorializing, credulous repetition of claims without explicitly editorializing, and some neutral reporting (Kudos to Global Legal Post which was the best on this). I found no Right-leaning sources reporting on this story. This is typical of news that has partisan slant: most of the bias shows up in what stories get reported, not how they're reported.
GroundNews summary and news source comparison: Skadden Associate Resigns Over Big Law's Tepid Response to Trump Pressure
Business Insider, considered "leans Left", quotes the associate extensively without skepticism, but doesn't editorialize in the article itself:
She asked her colleagues to sign an open letter from law firm associates condemning Trump's "all-out attack aimed at dismantling rule-of-law norms."
Law.com, considered Center, editorializes a bit:
Rachel Cohen, the third-year finance associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom who'd been one of the rare voices in Big Law to attach her name to criticism of firms' quiescence in the face of an unprecedented assault from the Trump administration, had a sharp reaction to the deal Paul, Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton & Garrison negotiated with the president on Thursday.
And Above the Law unabashedly editorializes:
One brave Biglaw associate has quite frankly had enough of this, and she’s once again sounding off — not just before her firm, but before the entire legal profession — to make clear just how important it is not to bow down before the Trump administration.
Other sources I found through Web search:
- Mother Jones (Left)
- Global Legal Post) (appears Center and quite helpfully includes context like
Democrat-leaning Paul Weiss) - PBS (Lean Left according to GroundNews) has an interview with the associate. The summary uses the phrase "latest in a series" and the interviewer doesn't challenge wild statements like
I think that my concern is that the coup that is ongoing will be done. - New Republic (Left)
- AOL (Lean Left)
The costs are not symmetric, and the woman bears costs no matter which option is taken.
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