DelendaEst
No bio...
User ID: 1199
DelendaEst
2d ago
Briefly, I'd say my opinion is Yes to 1 and 2, no to the others, though in practice I only consistently do 1. I do think the speed limit should at least be used as a guide and if you are doing more than 15 over you should seriously rethink that. I can see why you would agree with 5, but that sort of thing seems likely to result in accidents more consistently than the other options. Someone being a dick does not give you the right to behave in dangerous ways, and the correct behavior is to slow down and merge behind them instead, and thinking otherwise frankly strikes me as the behavior of a petulant child.
IMO it was a combo of Bush I tax increases (the ones Clinton attacked him on to get elected), the dot com boom and post cold war growth creating a larger base for those taxes, and gridlock between Clinton and the GOP limiting new spending.
If Bush II would have used the surplus in his first year to pay down the debt instead of doing tax cuts and spent less by not going so hard on the War on Terror the debt would be in a much better place now.
DelendaEst
9d ago
Even if we accept that this is the case, doesn't it seem like moving from a system where all social media is biased the same way to having at least one site be biased in a different direction is still a net positive?
DelendaEst
9d ago
What he was doing before was very high value, so I certainly agree with you that even the rosiest view of his twitter acquisition is a lot lower value.
But from my POV it was a very good thing. At the time he bought it everything in the media, and social media especially, was so left wing it felt incredibly stifling and hostile. And as the desire for censoring anyone to the right steadily increased while people on the left chanted "its a private company if you don't like it make your own" it only got worse. The Hunter Laptop saga where twitter banned sharing a true story under the theory that it was bad for Democrats was more a fascism warning sign than anything Trump has done, and as I recall the proximate trigger for Elon looking into actually buying twitter was them banning The Babylon Bee for conservative satire.
In this environment having one of the more lefty new/social media sources suddenly become welcoming to me and no longer a threat was like a breath of fresh air. I do wish twitter had not gotten AS right wing as it has, I'd prefer balance, but that is more about lefties leaving because they can only handle sites that cater to them than anything else.
DelendaEst
10d ago
Nucleus Genomics just launched their "Nucleus Embryo" product yesterday, if you want to do IVF to get improved odds on the kid's genes. I'm not sure what their process is or how reliable it is, though.
That sounds pretty close to Gattaca unless I am missing something.
DelendaEst
10d ago
My wife has this, and I think it is a major (though certainly not the only) contributor to why she wanted to be one and done (my preference was for more).
DelendaEst
10d ago
I'd take "no MAGA" as a challenge
I wouldn't. I live in an area where a disproportionate number of the pretty young women on dating apps were liberal (at least a decade ago when I was single, probably even more true now) and I have liberal friends so I never thought it was anything worth filtering out. Two things have changed my mind.
One is that my wife is more liberal than me and this causes friction, both from her being annoyed that I am not more anti-Trump (I am not MAGA and do not like Trump but I remain a conservative and push back against TDS type stuff) and us not always being on the same page for child rearing.
The second comes from a young woman I met on OKCupid. We had a first date that went well, and then at the end of the second date after I kissed her she explained that she had seen I was a conservative and she was a liberal and she was looked for a long term relationship and didn't think it would work out. In hindsight I'd say this was very mature and correct of her (though waiting until AFTER I'd wasted my money and time on the date instead of canceling beforehand was pretty shitty), but at the time it was soul crushing. She was not the prettiest girl I'd met on the apps (due to shyness, confidence issues, and not liking to drink I had better luck on the apps than IRL though if I had it to do over again I'd work to change that) but she was up there and she was definitely the one I had the most in common with. And what is very clear to me is that after our first date she liked me a lot and happily accepted the second date and then went to look at my profile again and found the dreaded right wing thought. It is one thing to be filtered out up front by by blue haired harpies with problem glasses, having something with manifest promise cut off at the knees was a gut punch.
DelendaEst
1mo ago
Academics sound extremely lazy and whiny about trying out the most obvious solution: ditch all course-work based grading in favor of oral examinations and comprehensive graduation exams. This would immediately solve the whole problem (it would even align the incentives to get students to use LLMs for studying instead of cheating) and it is not even a "revolutionary" solution, just how universities used to work not that long ago. But obviously this would fail 90%+ of the current university students and likely destroy the entire industry as vast majority of the students providing their income stream are not nearly smart or conscientious enough to pass then.
It would also be a problem because of scale. Back in the day when they had a lot of oral exams they didn't also have 100 person 101 weed out lectures either, and while you can certainly have the in class exams be the entire grade with those you certainly are not doing oral exams. Without large classes its not just that 90% would fail its also that the would either have to hire a lot more professors or cut class sizes (not to mention path dependent legacy issues such as having built a bunch of large lecture halls and fewer 20 person class rooms.
DelendaEst
1mo ago
Southern food is popular in the north(often brought by black chefs).
Southern food being introduced into the north by blacks is nothing new, the only new thing is it being considered Southern instead of Black. Take the stereotype that black people like fried chicken. This is almost entirely a yankee stereotype. Rednecks love fried chicken, why would a group of people who all insist no one else's fried chicken is as good as what their momma used to make think it was a black thing? Same with collard greens, its a poor southern food not a black one.
But after the great migration of black people north in the early 20th century the only people yankees knew who ate fried chicken were black people so they considered it black culture, but it was really just that the blacks were the only southerners they knew so they coded southern culture as black.
DelendaEst
2mo ago
But the existing farmers don't make prospective farmers write a "why I love Trump and how my work will advance the cause of Trump" document in order to become a farmer. The left wing academia DOES make prospective new academics write DEI impact statements. If conservatives are so uninterested in being academics why did the academy need to put up so many walls and man their gates so firmly?
DelendaEst
2mo ago
I think she genuinely believed that a large number of the other young lawyers at the firm felt likewise but were afraid to say anything, that the whole thing was a coordination problem, and that if she got the ball rolling others would follow suit and that while losing one associate is no big deal losing double digit percentages would be. And who knows, 10 years ago when SJWism was riding high maybe the company would have dithered for a few days instead of firing her immediately and during that time others would have been emboldened to join.
I think the lower appetite of others to join is obviously a big deal, but the main issue is the decreased willingness of companies to bend the knee. They fired her quickly giving no time for others to join and no sign of weakness or uncertainty that would encourage them to do so. Mozilla buckled like a belt under employee pressure and that really kicked off the SJW movement of corporate pressure. This is a signal, though a small one, that those days are over. Mozilla booting Eich was a signal to others, they will capitulate to young employees throwing a temper tantrum so go throw one. This will hopefully be taken as the opposite signal, if you throw a tantrum you will get fired and put a big "Don't Hire Me" sign around your neck.
DelendaEst
2mo ago
Just because I am able to entertain the plausibility of a scheme of gender which includes trans women among women does not mean I am required to treat as a reasonable position if, after entertaining it, I find it to still be ridiculous. I am able to entertain the notion that the world is ruled by lizardmen as well, fairly consider the evidence on offer, and then conclude that everyone who thinks that is a loon.
I agree that being unable or unwilling to consider if ideas have merit is slop, but no one said the refused to consider if it might be wrong, they just stated it clearly was wrong, just as the lizardman theory clearly is. Declaring that anyone who thinks you are wrong, quite wrong indeed, must just be to stupid or mendacious to even have considered the issue is assuming the conclusion. Take THAT somewhere esle.
DelendaEst
2mo ago
In that case though wouldn't the "something wrong" that Europe did be violating their status as vassals? From refusing to stand with the coalition of the willing in the Bush administration to their frosty/hostile reactions to Trump to their overall attitude towards America they have been increasingly acting like independent states with their own priorities and not as vassals. And to be clear, I think that is a good thing. They are not vassals, they should not act like it. But if they do act like vassals then US aid is part of a deal and that's fine, if they don't then US aid is charity. And you are entitled to your side of a deal but not to charity.
DelendaEst
3mo ago
I don't have any expertise on this myself, but a movie analysis channel I really like (and which I think would appeal to most Motizens) did a few videos on oratory you may find helpful.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=2Ed5mFHaMkQ&pp=ygURbW92aWV3aXNlIG9yYXRvcnk%3D
https://youtube.com/watch?v=yxw5U_0HaHM&pp=ygURbW92aWV3aXNlIG9yYXRvcnk%3D
DelendaEst
6mo ago
My intuition is that 'shit this didn't work' is more common, but also that 'shit this didn't work' happens a lot earlier in the development life cycle and thus the total losses are less per drug in the category, where as the costs for 'excess regulatory burden' happen at the end of the life cycle and thus are more onerous overall.
What I REALLY want to see is the percentage of drugs that make it to FDA testing and THEN fail. As in if we only did the required 'does it work' testing and not the amount required by the FDA how much time/money would it save and what would the false positive rate actually be. My first guess is that the savings would be significant, the false positive rate would be very low, and the only real loss would be fewer side effects listed on the bottle.
DelendaEst
6mo ago
Would you even need to do that? Would a pre-paid card bought with cash not be able to do the trick?
DelendaEst
6mo ago
Affirmative Action is discrimination against jews, asians, and whites (in that order). Should someone who has contributed a few hundred bucks to the democratic party which works in favor of that ALSO not be allowed to be a CEO? Or does this just apply to causes lefties care about?
DelendaEst
6mo ago
Yeah, the defenestration of Brendan Eich was one of the first big moves of the Awokening. High level devs just tend to be lefties, it doesn't have to be all of them just enough to make it SEEM like its all of them and keep righties in the closet (and Damore the ones who don't), and the unaligned will mostly go along with whichever group seems to be in the majority.
DelendaEst
6mo ago
I am much more hostile to trans than I am to gay, and more than I used to be. I wouldn't say I don't care if someone is trans or not, I will judge them and wouldn't want to hang out, but I am not here to police every dumb thing people do. So then I should be in favor of trans people being left alone right? I guess, but only if they will agree to leave me alone, and they certainly have not.
Demanding that society redefine gender to suit them even though it flies in the face of objective reality, trying to get men into women's only spaces, and otherwise trying to force everyone else to join them in their delusions is a hostile act, and I return it with hostility. If they want to be left alone and treated with anything other than hostility I say they can go first.
DelendaEst
7mo ago
If you are in favor of ideals then Republican immigration policy sounds like it would be a better fit for you. In order for American Ideals to continue to be American Ideals we need to assimilate immigrants into them, and that means taking in a manageable flow, and preferably from all sorts of places. Too large a flow and the existing culture and ideals get diluted too quickly. Too much from a single source means they form enclaves which makes assimilation harder (I am especially thinking of the majority muslim areas of Michigan here). Republican policy preferences are the ones that will meet this goal the best.
DelendaEst
7mo ago
I'd kinda hope not. If you do 100 polls you will get roughly that is a 1% outlier, and those have wacky results. By itself it is damning, but aggregated with everything else it comes out in the wash. If people are constantly second guessing their polls to guess if its real or outlier and only releasing the "real" ones then not only is the data untrustworthy but what is the point of the statistical confidence levels in the first place?
DelendaEst
7mo ago
I think there is a very real chance that he knew very well who wrote the article but he didn't mention the name on purpose so as to not bring unwanted focus on Scott who he knew wouldn't want it.
DelendaEst
7mo ago
Hard agree. Everytime my liberal friends get annoyed at me for being less anti-Trump than they are I remind them that as a Republican I have votes against him more than they have. I voted third party in 2016 and held my nose and votes for Biden in 2020. But this time I might vote Trump, mostly because I actually kinda like JD Vance and I think Trump is sufficiently uninterested in actually governing that Vance will get to drive a lot of the actual agenda, and I think there is about a 50/50 chance that Trump drops dead in office and Vance becomes President anyway. If I could vote for any of the four of Trump, Vance, Harris, or Walz it would be Vance by far so that factor might decide the "who is less shitty" contest for me. But how sad is that....
DelendaEst
7mo ago
This is the good and the bad of AI art all wrapped up in one short post.
The Good: Low stakes things like rpg character art is now free to get quickly and at a pretty decent level of quality. Most people would never have paid for this and their having access to it is good. Even those who did pay for it before now get it cheaper, and with the ability to refine the prompts are more likely to get exactly what they want.
The Bad: Some people were paying for this, and it cuts the legs out from under those artists. I'd have more sympathy, but tons of people have gotten screwed by technological change or cheaper markets and this is special pleading. But at the same time, this is also the kind of thing people do when they are just getting into art. The first step to being good at something is being bad at it, and easy replacements which are superior to the Bad At It stage seem likely to demoralize/discourage people from working through this step cause why bother.
I also think this is why normies who are not artists and have only to gain from this change are still so rabidly anti-AI. Cause art is fun, and rewarding, and gives us a sense of accomplishment and helpfulness to the group even if its just a picture of our characters storming the castle. We always imagined the robots as mine labor, or housemaids, etc. because we wanted them to do the drudgery so we could all do art. Not have them take over all the art and leave us to do the manual labor.
Artists are engaged in special pleading, and they didn't care other people's ox got gored. But the reason people empathize more with them is that no one dreams of being a factory worker so who cares if the robots take those jobs. But if the robots take all the artist, novelist, musician, and philosopher jobs then what is there left for the post scarcity world except sitting on your ass watching netflix like those jerks in Wall-E?
I have seen 10 times more comments from the left mad that the Trump assassin missed than I have seem from leftists mad he tried in the first place. I think the only reason that guy has not be lionized is that he failed, a few inches to the right and the left would be trying to build statues of him.
More options
Context Copy link