Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
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User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3d ago
I don't think it's evil so much as a combination of 'having seen a lot of dragged-out deaths' and sincerely wanting to be compassionate, plus eventually the stresses over "look, get Grampa out of that bed he's blocking" encourage them towards "let nature take its course".
Isn't that fairly reasonable, then? It's possible that your doctors have seen a hundred, or a thousand patients similar to your father and they suffered greatly in some large majority of cases. And, while nobody is perfect, the medical system (at least in North America, I can only imagine that it's much worse in the EU) already bends over backwards to the point of massive dysfunction to accommodate consent and the wishes of the patients.
I mean, I'm not wishing you had let your dad die, but it's not clear to me that having most of the public following the advice of doctors around euthanasia is a bad thing.
The really evil ones are the medical ethicists.
Again, why do you think this? And do you know many of them? I've probably met somewhere between 5-10 in my life and they're largely focused on arcane minutiae that you will almost certainly never hear or think about.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3d ago
In my experience, Canadians felt like that before Trump ran. It's less often expressed when a Democrat is president, but my impression is that Canadians feel like that all the time about Americans.
I can't speak for every Canadian, but I feel confident I've met probably an order of magnitude or two more than you. Most of the people I know would vacation in America (snowbirds, cape cod, skiing) and have been for decades. They've nearly all boycotted America since ~mid-2025. Seems to be borne out by the data.
I don't think they have any delusions about meaningfully hurting the US, but they're pissed and don't want to spend their money here.
Canadians will never be blamed if Iran gets a nuclear weapon and starts blasting everyone.
Nor will Americans. Arguably, the withdrawal from the JCPOA (supported by Europe) led to another war.
If Saddam actually had WMDs and detonated them, I dunno, in Europe.
Yeah, except he didn't, and America lied about it to justify a war.
We can sit pretty and always condemn "war" or "agression" or those silly Americans that put so much of their budget on their military instead of universal healthcare or whatever else we feel better than them about that day, safe in the knowledge that no one actually expects us to bear any responsability for the state of the world. The day Canadians will actually matter, then their complains about "warmongering" on the part of Americans will actually be deserving of more than a spit in the face.
I agree with this to some extent, but that isn't carte blanche for America to (as the realpolitikers are fond of saying) do as it wills while the rest of the world suffers as it must. And it isn't an actual rebuttal of their claims. Would an America with the same resources and economy coupled with the foreign policy of Canada be better or worse for the world on net?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3d ago
I used to think you guys were friendly enough, but in recent years I've had several Canadians tell me in no uncertain terms that they disdain me and other Americans.
Perhaps the repeated jokes from the POTUS about Canada being the 51st state and the tariffs had something to do with that. This isn't exactly an unprovoked response, so I'm a bit confused as to why you're surprised?
I don't think you guys conceive yourselves as world powers so hopefully I'm not bursting any bubbles when I say you're not. What does being "internationally respected" mean to you? What would it mean if you weren't internationally respected?
Canadians take pride in things like peacekeeping missions (see Rwanda), international aid/charity and supporting the UN/international order. Have a good reputation abroad may be a better way to put it than being respected. America might be respected abroad, but after the last 25 years of warmongering, there's a lot of people who dislike them.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3d ago
We the family smiled and muttered under our breaths "yeah you guys wanted to kill him off, we stopped you".
Why are doctors as a whole so evil, I wonder? Aside from the fact that they skew liberal and are probably less Catholic than the general population. Do you know many of them?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10d ago
Sorry to be pedantic
No worries.
It's a well paid field, but it's only paid slightly higher than the median SWE. Pretending that the LLM-ML Engineers pay is anything more than the top .1% of the field would be fallacious.
In my field, the 'data scientists' and ML engineers are a different breed and in much higher demand than the people who just write code. But thanks for the correction.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10d ago
I actually do know more about my own life than you, and didn't cite every possible hypothetical explainer for the sake of brevity and anonymity.
And I know more about my own life than you, but I don't share your absolute confidence in making flawless apples-to-apples comparisons between my parents economics situation 35 years ago to my experiences today. I believe that you know the dollar amount your dad made and the number on your paycheck. I don't believe your interpretation of the meaning of those data, and the broader implications.
What is your point?
Concisely:
- I disagree with the premise that '2026 burritos are unaffordable.' I'm not convinced that it's not true, but I don't believe that you (or the dozen vibecession posts when Biden was president) have conclusively made the point. Many others also seem to disagree with this premise.
- But granting this premise, or ignoring it if you prefer, I don't believe that you or anyone else has a pithy answer on improving affordability across the board. Railing at our politicians (and I'm sympathetic to both Trump and Biden here, modulo obvious self-owns) for not pressing the affordability button elides all the complexity of both the problem and potential solutions.
- Again granting this premise, where do you think the wealth has gone and why do you think things have gotten worse? Boomers? China? Socialism, immigrants, demographics? Lazy millennials? Or do you not have answers to these questions and your goal was just to start a discussion to see what people think?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11d ago
Just because an 85 IQ citizen decides they want to invite another random person from anywhere in the world into my country, their descendants get to be citizens forever and they can leech off the state for the rest of their lives consequence free (any thresholds for sponsorship are laughably low)? Seems dumb.
A rounding error compared to the 55 million Americans with IQs 85 or below who pump out babies year after year. Any policy that wants to restrict immigration due to IQ concerns without first sterilizing those individuals is pointless. Hell, in most states literal retards are allowed to have as many children as they want.
In parallel, a lack of policies that force high IQ women such as yourself to have at least four children with a high IQ partner is far more detrimental than immigration. IQmaxxers focused on immigration rather than pre-existing low human capital are either misguided or deficient emotional decouplers.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11d ago
Actually, no I know what my father did in the 90s and how much he made. He was working at IBM through a period of massive layoffs. But again. All these comments quibbling the complaint are just making my point and the point of the folks responding to the responses.
Yes, you can't be wrong, regardless of what people reply it just proves that you're more right. Disagreeing with you is pointless, only productive conversation can be had if we first agree with your premise.
Every response that tries to justify the current state as not real, is avoiding the actual discussion of political policy goals or visions of the good. Kamala LOST in part because 'inflation isn't real ackshully' was a losing message.
The point is not to justify the current state, the point is that, have you considered the tiny, infinitesimally small chance that maybe you're wrong in evaluating the current state? A lot to ask, I know. And much like Kamala, suggesting someone on the internet adopt humility is ever the losing message.
But anyways, setting all that aside and having a discussion on the level you want to discuss, I agree there's no reason we shouldn't push for making things more affordable. What's your populist plan for doing that? And what's your answer to the question I posed at the end of my post? I'll read whatever you write with an open mind, convince me that you actually understand why things have gotten worse, and what the fix would be. I don't believe that the MAGAs or the Bernie bros or whatever flavor of populist you identify as have the answers to those questions, nor do I believe that you'd actually improve things given power.
There is a populist movement that wants specific political goals, and one party is saying "yes! socialism", and the other is saying "no you suck! you're not allowed to have that. You can have high gas prices instead."
Perhaps next time they'll be able to elect the populist politician running on the 'Push the 10$ burrito button' platform, and then he'll actually push it instead of the retards in office now who just admire it on their way to the office every morning.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11d ago
I don't have an answer to your question and I confess to finding both the enshittification and 'life is better now, actually' arguments to be convincing on different days and depending who's making the argument, but consider:
In the 90s my parents moved us into a new construction. Today, I live in smaller a house, on a smaller lot built in the mid-70s. In realtive terms, I live in a house that is not only smaller, but nearly 50 years older than the one my father did.
In the 90s software dev was probably a more rarefied and in-demand skillset than in 2026 where we pump out over 100,000 CS degrees a year. On top of that, the barrier to entry for literally everything has plummeted as the internet disseminates information so efficiently. Used to be you had to actually go out and learn things from people or hunt them down in library stacks, whereas now I can instantly pull up dozens of videos on youtube teaching me to do literally anything known to man or ask an AI and get an expert-level answer in seconds. Relatedly, software dev has been outsourced to lower-income countries - my friend's (somewhat famous enterprise software) company does almost all their programming in the middle east or eastern Europe.
All that to say, you and your father could be equally talented and if he were working today he'd also be managing a team of 25. Or maybe he'd be an ML engineer and still easily affording his new construction house and herd of children, taking the kids out for 200$ worth of burritos every Sunday night.
The other angle of this argument is typically that our wealth was sent to China to enrich the elites. But if you look at everyday Chinese, their lives may be better than their parents generation but they definitely aren't good. The successful ones work crazy hours and there's a much larger precariat than here without a social safety net. If your father's generation was so much better off, where did the money go? Or did we just globally become less productive?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
24d ago
Boba tea. Women love it, I'm perplexed by the appeal.
Try Taro flavor, with white-people levels of sugar. It's like a mild, creamy slushy.
I mixed you up with Oracle, but so am I. I left as an adult.
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