Crowstep
1yr ago
Does anyone know if Memphis PD still uses affirmative action in their hiring? Google suggests that it was ruled unconstitutional in 1999, but I wonder if it continued in some obscured form.
It stands to reason that a PD that tips the scales in favour of black applicants would have more police brutality than a meritocratic hiring process which can weed out the more reckless hires.
Crowstep
8mo ago
I think part of rationality is assessing the reliability of your sources. If you don't have expert knowledge, then you need to defer to other people, and I don't blame do_something for being mistrustful of believing someone who spends most of his time on this site denying the most well documented mass killing in history.
Crowstep
6d ago
What's bizarre is the Western world asking Ukrainian men to bear nearly the entire brunt of this conflict as if their lives have no value.
The 'Western world' isn't asking anything of them. The Ukrainian people and government want to fight, and want the west to support them. If the Ukrainian government wanted to surrender, they could do so tomorrow without asking for anyone's permission.
Other countries have agency too.
Crowstep
8mo ago
It works for a tiny minority of people. For almost everyone else, long term fat loss through diet is impossible.
Which really shouldn't surprise us. The global obesity epidemic didn't start due to a global reduction in shame or increase in laziness. It affected every country and population on the planet that started consuming the modern industrialised country diet. There is clearly something in this diet (or some other environmental stressor) that is causing obesity. Personally, I think it's the vegetable oils, but whatever is causing it, approaching the subject moralistically is a pointless distraction.
Crowstep
5mo ago
'Selling her body' is a terribly misleading metaphor. Chattel slavery involves the selling of bodies, prostitution is more like selling labour for a fixed period. Of course, people use the 'selling her body' metaphor on purpose to frame the practice in a maximally negative way.
If our hypothetical 14 year old girl was selling her body, surely that would mean that Epstein owns her body after the transaction? If he doesn't, then he hasn't 'bought' anything.
Crowstep
8mo ago
Oh don't worry, I'm not posturing against the resident Holocaust denier for my own sake. I just think he degrades the quality of the conversation here by bringing every other conversation back to his own pet pseudohistoric topic.
I realise that a place like this is vulnerable to witches and is to some extent a necessary compromise we have to make, but damn is it annoying.
If getting people to stop overeating is impossible, and the only way to lose weight is to stop overeating, then yes, losing weight is impossible. I don't see why making that distinction helps apart from allowing us to cast moral aspersions on fat people.
Like sure, it's technically possible to lock someone in a cage and feed them the exact number of calories they need to lose weight. But then their bodies will fight back by reducing their metabolism, increasing their food cravings and generally making them miserable. Not only that, their reduced metabolisms won't even recover after the (inevitably) regain the weight back.
So I stand by my original point, weight loss through diet is impossible. Once weight is gained, it's essentially permanent. A more interesting question is why obesity came out of nowhere in the mid-20th century and exploded from the 1970s onwards. There's really only one likely culprit in my mind.
Crowstep
7mo ago
It's a shame you can't read the article, because yes, the accuser handed over her file from the rape crisis centre to the Times.
All the factual claims in the article (except the he said she said stuff obviously) has been verified by the journalists as far as I can tell.
Crowstep
5d ago
I wouldn't put too much stake on 'the realities of CICO'. No matter how much the public hears 'calories in, calories out' the obesity epidemic continues unabated. If it was as simple as choosing to eat less, we'd see far fewer fat people than we do. Nobody wants to be fat.
Maybe your wife will be able to reverse her expanding waistline, but if she does, it might be because she's started taking ozempic rather than through sheer force of will. Hoping that the latter will work has a good chance of disappointing both of you.
Crowstep
6mo ago
I wonder if part of the strategy is just making (remaining) Gaza even more densely populated. We know urban living reduces birth rates. A more densely populated strip should spend up the birth rate decline.
Crowstep
8mo ago
'Eat more and move less' doesn't actually work. We have almost a century of evidence showing that this advice does not work. If it did, people would successfully be able to lose weight long term. Just Google 'long term weight loss study' and you'll find pages and pages of evidence showing that even among the small number of people who successfully lose weight, almost all of them gain it back. Dieting and/or exercising for weight loss does not work. Cruelty is pretending that fat people lack the moral fiber necessary to lose weight when actually, nobody can do it (barring a tiny number of outliers).
We do not control our appetites, we do not control our metabolisms, we do not control how our body partitions nutrients. We can temporarily override our appetite and consciously try to burn more calories through exercise, but ultimately the body's lipostat wins. Fat people have disregulated metabolisms, not a lack of self control. If self-control were really the issue, then we would have to come to the baffling conclusion that the entire industrialised world started to decline in self-control in the 1970s.
Or, it could be because we introduced massive amounts of an agricultural waste product into our diet in the mid-20th century that doesn't have the same nutrient profile as anything humans have eaten in our evolutionary history.
Crowstep
1yr ago
If you're looking for right-wing examples, replace 'Nazi' with 'socialist' or 'communist'.
Crowstep
2mo ago
Putting on my lateral thinking hat, couldn't you just...cheat on her?
Obviously, breaking up with her would be dumb and you would regret it. But you also say that you're currently long distance. Some carefully planned infidelity could scratch your casual sex itch and hopefully make you realise how little you're missing out on.
Of course, you would be betraying your girlfriend's trust, and there is a risk that you get caught even if she doesn't live near you. I suspect that your 'sleepy conservative hometown' isn't overflowing with loose women, and if you are religious then, as you say, the Bible is pretty clear on infidelity.
It goes without saying that if you do listen to the suggestion from the devil on your shoulder some asshole on the internet, you should never tell her or anyone else.
Crowstep
6mo ago
I was speaking more in the HBD-sense. Hong Kong and Singapore have Chinese people, with an average IQ of ~110. Levant Arabs have average IQs in the low-80s. Maybe the Gazans would be able to carve out a niche like some of the Gulf states have, but they'd have to do it without oil and gas wealth to kickstart the process.
Crowstep
7mo ago
I think they're the cause of the obesity epidemic and the main cause of chronic disease.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I don't think your numbers on income tax are correct.
While someone on £40,000 may only pay about £5,000 on the tax called income tax, they also pay National Insurance, which is income tax by another name. In addition, someone earning £40,000 is probably a graduate, and therefore paying back their student loans (a graduate tax by another name, sort of), as well as their mandatory pension contributions, which are a minimum of 5%. That's without going into the National Insurance and pension contributions that their employer has to pay, which, if they were not required, would go to the employee's salary.
A recent graduate on £40,000 living in England, with minimum pension contributions would pay:
Income tax: £5,148
National Insurance (inc employer): £7,555
Student Loan (Plan 2): £1,104
Pension contributions (inc employer): £3,200
Giving them an effective tax rate of £17,000 or 42.5%.
Even if we take out the pension contributions and student loan, this still leaves us with a tax payment of approximately £12,700 or 31.75%.
I definitely agree that Business Rates are far too high and would quite happily shift that burden to homeowners, which could incentivise more efficient use of property, but I don't think you can argue that the UK is a low tax country for average earners.
Crowstep
1yr ago
The consensus among researchers is that non-celiac gluten sensitivity its a distinct, but closely related disease to celiac. Part of the reason there has been debate is because we didn't have any biomarkers for it, at least until 2020:
https://gut.bmj.com/content/69/11/1966
I would try and be more sympathetic to your friend. While 'feeling lethargic' is vague, the only celiac symptom I had was 'a weird rash', which I had for more than ten years before actually realising what the cause was. For a lot of diagnosed celiacs, symptoms can be as vague as lethargy, anxiety, mild depression, poor sleep, bloating etc. That doesn't mean that they are malingering, it just means that autoimmune diseases manifest in a large number of different ways.
Crowstep
1d ago
I believe there are malicious, intelligent, competent agents
Looks like the present tense to me. I assume that you're retreating from your original claim then? Unless you're willing to be even a tiny bit specific about who you're talking about I can't see how it is possible to have a meaningful discussion.
Crowstep
8mo ago
You're not really addressing the argument I'm making. If weight loss is simply a case of choosing to eat less and choosing to move more, why does all the literature show that dieters regain their weight in the long term? According to your model, they must be choosing to lose weight through dieting and then choosing to regain more than they lost? Why do people who lose significant weight have permanently lowered metabolisms, and burn fewer calories than we would expect for their size? Why did the entire planet suddenly start getting fat in the 70s?
Calories in, calories out isn't a prescription for weight gain or loss, it's a description of it. It's like someone asking why the bar gets full on Saturday night and responding with 'more people enter than leave'. You're describing weight gain, but you're not explaining why it happens.
Look at this chart, what do you think caused the massive inflection?
Crowstep
8mo ago
If you look at the chart Trends in Daily Calories from Major Food Groups on this article, you'll see that vegetable oil consumption per capita has almost tripled since the 1960s. There are dozens of other sources online saying the same thing. Literally nobody is arguing that vegetable oil consumption has fallen. The only debate is whether the gigantic increase in vegetable oil consumption has anything to do with the gigantic increase in obesity that happened at the exact same time.
Meanwhile both sugar and grain consumption has actually been falling since the late 90s.
Crowstep
1yr ago
The price of the shares can go up or down, which would bring the value of the fund up or down. But every quarter the dividend payments from the shares would be paid out to the fund holders. This is usually around 2% of the value of the fund, but obviously can be lower in a poor business environment.
An accumulation fund would just take these dividends and buy more shares with them.
Crowstep
1yr ago
'White is the minimum number of ethnic groups needed to do racial oppression' does not seem like it would pass the ideological Turing test, at all.
How about 'white' means 'assimilated into Anglo-American culture'?
Crowstep
1yr ago
Not related to the culture war angle, but did the animation not bother you at all? I found it so jerky as to be nauseating. I had to stop watching after five minutes.
Crowstep
1yr ago
Since I live in a university-town, all the dance scenes in the city trend fairly young, although there are definitely social differences. Salsa has more (continential) Europeans, Kizomba has more African men and 'curvy' women, the Lindy Hop scene is apparently a collection of polyamorous bisexuals, Forro has a lot of Brazilians and Portuguese.
The Latin scene is relatively drama-free, I would say.
Assuming that you're male, I can say that women love a man that can dance. Dance scenes are generally female-heavy as well so it's a great place to meet women if you can get reasonably competent (which does take time).
I wondered how long it would take for this to be about Jews. You never fail to disappoint.
As far as I can tell, you are upset that Rationalists regard high-IQ Jews as superior to Kurt, despite his noble physiognomy and the fact that they are 'short, weak, ugly nerds'. Am I getting that right?
I would worry about this being an uncharitable take, except for the fact that you cannot stop posting about how Jews are bad.
Have I misinterpreted the post? Could you summarise your thesis in a sentence?
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