Ecgtheow
1yr ago
One of the big aspects of a Post-Elon Blue Check for a while, was that blue check replies would automatically get listed at the top of replies to a tweet. This significantly degraded user experience because instead of the top replies being whoever got the most likes it would be whoever paid $8. This is part of what sparked the mass blocking of blue checks because if you actually wanted to see the top replies without scrolling for a while it's what you had to do. Blue Checks now seem like a signal of a low-quality engagement bait, or someone who is trying to commercialize their content.
The original blue check system existed to solve the problem of people impersonating brands. celebrities and major newscasters, but the marginal journalist who got certified enjoyed an unearned credibility boost over random bloggers and posters which led to a lot of animosity towards blue checks from right-wing posters. Elon tried to turn the mild status boost into a subscription service, maybe it'll work out, but now we're in a period of weird experiments where it seems to have mostly damaged the average user experience while benefitting opportunistic engagement-baiters.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
It'd be pretty shocking for Russia to have a 4:1 casualty ratio in their favor and for the war to be going this poorly for them.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
From the linked NYT article
According to the lawsuit, the protesters arrested in the Bronx were surrounded by police officers before an 8 p.m. curfew and prevented from leaving
It does seem like the sort of technicality that could win you a lawsuit if you were arrested for failing to comply with a curfew you were prevented from complying with. That said I haven't carefully read the lawsuit and don't know how accurate the NYT's summary is.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I didn't think Carmy had a toxic personality at all. The issue is more that he's coming in to a low end environment as the new boss and trying to get everyone there to hold themselves to a higher standard and change the way they do things and that's always a recipe for conflict. They don't fight him cause he's a toxic man they fight him because he's trying to change things from how they've always been done. His cousin is the much more stereotypically toxic man. Carmy turned into a sex symbol because of his amazing hair and intensity so I don't think the public judgement of him was a 'toxic' man.
The meltdown scene was great. There are time when you can totally be 'in the right' and other people have fucked up but part of good leadership is just understanding it's more important to keep everyone else functional than take out your own stress on them. Sydney's had his back the whole time and believes in his vision more then anyone else but she creates this massive crisis because she doesn't toggle one setting in their online order system. He's understandably furious but it's not a reason to lose confidence in her as a chef and when he takes it out on her, she feels betrayed because she's had his back in all the internal conflicts. So she takes it out on the baker guy and then melts down. Carmy is totally in the right, it's just everyone involved is stressed out and at each others throats and it would take superhuman self-control to handle that situation calmly.
But that's the point of his season long arc. Their restaurant is this deeply dysfunctional mess of weird arrangements with loansharks, deals with low level mob dudes, and random family and friends who do odd jobs. Carmy can't let it go even though it's driving him nuts because of his relationship to his brother. He wants to avoid perpetuating the abusive work culture he encountered in high end kitchens, but the stress of running this thing is such that he's inevitably going to lash out at the people who work for him. He can't win because the business is fucked and he needs to move on and do his own thing.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I skimmed the paper and there's something I don't understand, I'm not an expert on this so hopefully someone can explain it to me.
Fisher has equations that describe how for a given intensity of a assortative mating and a given degree of relatedness how much phenotype correlation we should expect. Clark compares how different measures of social status correlate for each degree of relatedness (sibling, cousin, grandkids, second cousin etc) and finds that the correlation declines for each generational step in the way Fisher's equations describe. That genetic distance predicts the change in correlation in status metrics is strong evidence that there is a genetic component to status.
Clark says that because the rate at which status outcome correlation declines with genetic distance is constant over time there has been no change in social mobility, but doesn't the initial correlation matter? If I look at Table 2 Parent Child Higher Education status correlates at 0.53 from 1780-1860 and at 0.37 from 1860-1919. That looks like it could be a decline in the heritability of educational attainment but Clark says that the important thing is that the change between parent-child and cousin-cousin educational status correlation fits Fisher's equations in both data sets. He says that because social status measures decline with genetic distance at the same rate rate in all these different time periods there's been no change in social mobility. But wouldn't a society with a 0.8 correlation between say, siblings home values, have less social mobility than one with a 0.2 correlation even if they both declined at the same rate with genetic distance?
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
You know, the idiocy of Disney's "The Force is Female" push doesn't take a genius to figure out. I was talking to my wife about it, and I just asked:
"When we were kids, how many little boys did you know who liked Star Wars?"
"Tons."
"Did you know a single girl who liked Star Wars?"
"No."
It'd be nice to have some stats on this, and I'm not broadly in contact with teenage girls but interacting with the younger generation of women in my family (nieces and some considerably younger cousins) I was taken aback by the interest in "nerd culture". There was always a contingent of women into anime and they're into the cosplay scene a bit, but the rise of D&D youtube/podcasts seems to have gotten a couple of them playing 5th edition. The mainstreaming of nerd culture and a good representation of nerd IP like Dune means that a lot of them went out and gave Dune or Lord of the Rings a read even if none of them read the Silmarillion or the Dune sequels.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Wagner forces were seen entering Moscow Oblast a few hours ago. I think Pirghozin understands he has to win quickly and is rushing Moscow and betting that they can't coordinate a serious defense fast enough. I don't think either side is trying to mobilize the people to get in the streets like Erdogan did in Turkey. The public is assumed to be bystanders, the audience for communications is the other military commanders, everything will hinge on whether Pirghovin has support from any other factions of the millitary. Rosgvardia vehicles were seen with Wagner vehicles if Rostov but it's unclear if they were seized or collaborating.
I agree that the odds of the coup succeeding are small but the coup hasn't stalled yet.
We also have bio-mom's for women who give birth but put their children up for adoption.
I have a cousin who was adopted by my uncle, he divorced his first wife and she lost custody due for reasons he doesn't talk about but which must have been really bad since women don't usually lose custody. He married my aunt and they raised my cousin together since she was three. My cousin therefore has a bio-mom who isn't involved, an adoptive mom who she has occasional contact with, and a step-mom who has been her full time care-giver since age three. We can talk about the metaphysics of motherhood in circles but I can tell you which one she calls 'mom' and who gets the flowers on mother's day.
Page 15 of the indictment is worth a quick read. Trump is recorded with his knowledge and consent by an unnamed writer and a publisher working an upcoming book, at the time (July 2021) he was being critiqued in the press by a "Senior Military Official" (probably Mark Miley) who claimed he was concerned Trump was going to order him to attack [Country A] (probably Iran ) and he dissuaded Trump. Trump wants to convince the writer and publisher that this criticism is unwarranted, so he opens this recorded meeting by saying "Look What I found, this was [the Senior Military Official's] plan of attack, read it and just show... it's interesting". Later in the meeting, Trump says:
Trump: I just found, isn't that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. (*Here I am assuming he means the public disagreement not a legal case) *
Staffer: mm-hmm.
Trump: Except it is like, highly confidential.
Staffer: Yeah [Laughter]
Trump: Secret. This is Secret Information, Look, Look at this. You attack, and--
Further in the conversation
Trump: This was done by the military and given to me, Uh, I think we can probably right?
Staffer: I don't know, we'll, we'll have to seem Yeah, we'll have to try to--
Trump: Declassify it.
Staffer: Figure out a -- yeah.
TRUMP: See as president I could have declassified it.
Staffer: Yeah [laughter]
Trump: Now I can't, you know, but this is still a secret
Overclassification is definitely a problem, and every administration seems to have some sort of classified documents mishandling scandal, from Colin Powell, to Petraeus, to Clinton, to Nikki Haley and now Trump. That said, recording yourself showing some random writer a 'plan of attack' for a potential invasion of "Country A" while bemoaning that you forgot to declassify them while you were president is an astounding own goal. I just have trouble buying this is 'the Deep State' cleverly ensnaring Trump when he could have just returned the documents or not done ridiculous things like this. It can be true that they are out to get him, and that also he lied to his lawyers and blundered into putting himself in legal jeopardy over an easily resolvable document handling issue.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
It's a common left wing historian talking point that government support for civil rights wasn't pure benevolence but part of a propaganda war to win over African and Asian countries during the cold war. America became the global hegemon but its allies in Europe have all these colonial empires. Instead of strong arming Europe into giving up their colonies we'll just advance an ideology of racially egalitarian national determination where the emerging third world should be free to partake in a rules based international trade system that conveniently enough, we get to make the rules for.
If you read a left wing historian like Judith Stein her account of American deindustrialization is that foreign policy elites fucked over the American working class in order to build up allied economies so that they could resist communism. We let Japan and Korea dump steel in the American market while having massive tariff barriers so that they could build their own economies to ward off China. The seminal 'The Deindustrialization of America' by Bluestone and Harrison is full of examples of how tax and trade policy encouraged American companies to build factories in Europe rather than build them in America and export to Europe.
It's not just virtue signaling it was part of a broader strategy to win the cold war.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
How are people encountering Dylan Mulvaney ads? I have never organically encountered her content outside of culture war discussions about what it means that she's prominent/has brand partnerships. Is she huge on TikTok or something? Was this a targeted thing aimed at Gen Z or is she going to be in ads run during the NBA playoffs?
I don't know what's going on with Dylan Mulvaney but there were a bunch of articles on 'bimboificiation' and the 'rise of bimbos' a while back so cis women social influencers are also performing parodies of high femininity. I think it's kind of an Elle Woods thing where the idea is that you can act stereotypically hyper feminine and still be competent and agentic. I wonder if it's a way to respond to the pressure of always having to present an image or something. Chrissy Chlapeka is cited in a bunch of those essays and she recorded a song about being so hot she wants to fuck herself, which reeks of autogynephillia except she's cis (I think).
I can kind of see drag, and the way some trans women act as an insulting parody of femininity, but then the people I know who watch RuPaul's Drag Race are mostly straight women. I also thought Lana Del Rey was kind of performing a man's idea of a woman, but she has a huge female fan base so I don't know what's going on there.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
If you look at the decline of American unions it's not the case that we still have all the steel mills and auto plants only now they're worked by unionized immigrants. Plants being closed and moved to where there are large populations of low wage workers seems a much bigger factor. Automation also played a big role.
Germany of course still has a lot of unionized manufacturing but they have a sectoral bargaining system that's pretty different from America's.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
They even showed it in years past with a permission slip and just forgot to send out the slip this year. It's a paperwork mishap elevated to a firing offense because of the ongoing culture war over parental rights.
The fact that chronic pain is so well correlated with aging suggests that for the majority of people there is some underlying physical degeneration coupled with a culturally/psychologically mediated experience of pain. It's possible we're spreading cultural memes about aging that causes old people to hyperfixate on minor and aches and pains but the cultural universality of old people's body's hurting makes that seem iffy to me. It could be that technological advances of having pain treatments available primes people to fixate on total pain alleviation and medical treatments while past generations would simply learned to tolerate the unchangeable pain.
I know an old hippie lady who had chronic back pain that kept her in bed a lot. She loves to tell the story of how she 'cured' it by meditating intensely, talking to the pain in the form of a wol, and fully internalizing the idea that it was a part of her body trying to protect her not a sign she was being harmed. She's relatively mobile in day to day life and in some sense was healed, but she's still an old lady and moves gingerly and there's no way she could work in a warehouse or something. That's to say that there's substantial mobility and pain reduction to be gained through psychologically and culturally mediating pain like that but, not infinite improvement in most cases. Even when pain has identifiable biological causes there's still a lot of reduction that can be accomplished through psychological means.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
My anti AGI doom spiral thought is just; sometimes things grow exponentially, sometimes they're S-curves. Just cause you're in the vertical part doesn't mean it won't turn out to be an S-curve.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I just find it hard to take fear over self preservation seriously when the guy has a fleet of nuclear armed submarines. The fear is not that NATO tanks will roll through Ukraine and try to partition Russia, that would obviously end in global Armageddon and so will never happen. The fear is that Russia will not be able to determine the internal politics of neighbor former SSR's.
This is a predictable fear, states would rather be stronger than weaker, if Russia can boss around their neighbors they would like to continue doing that. NATO is a threat to reduce Russia from regional hegemon to irrelevancy and the EU/NATO bears responsibility in the sense that Russian aggression against it's neighbors was a predictable outcome of offering Ukraine self determination. But Russia bears responsibility in the moral sense because resolving to control your neighbors trade policies when you have less GDP than Brazil or Italy means you're going to have to resort to force or skullduggery because you can't compete economically.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
To switch to a sort of meta-discussion of media fairness and lying: I see this genre of post a lot where someone reads an article and "debunks" the framing/implied conclusion of the article with facts from the article and whether that is an indication of honesty or not. On one hand, the piece is clearly biased and wants you to take seriously the idea that this audit rate is a problem that reflects poorly on IRS practices, but it accurately reports that the system is totally race-blind and the obvious socioeconomic factor (EITC use) doesn't explain the disparity which allows you to draw the opposite conclusion.
This sort of biased headline and framing but with enough true facts critically thinking people can draw opposite conclusions is how a lot of media bias ends up. My favorite example of this was when Fox News published "BREAKING NEWS: Roy Moore accuser admits she forged part of yearbook inscription attributed to Alabama senate candidate" based on an ABC interview where the accuser stated that the date and location underneath Roy Moore's message was something she added. To me, that seems like an irrelevant detail, it's obvious from an image of the yearbook that the handwriting is different, Moore's message also contains the year, and she never explicitly stated before that he had written that part. Though once she read his message aloud and also read the part she added which may have implied he di. The purpose of characterizing this minor clarification as an admission of partial forgery the day before the election was obviously to cast her story in doubt so as to rally Republicans to Roy Moore and seems a clear-cut instance of bias. Yet, I cannot get too frustrated with Fox because I was able to read the article and find the same set of facts that lead me to believe it was an irrelevant clarification and not blatant forgery in the body of the article.
These biased articles with accurate facts that undermine the conclusion the author is pushing with the framing and headline seem fundamentally dishonest in some way, but it's not lying or information being withheld. If you read these articles closely and critically you end up with a lot of good information about the subjects at hand, but if you just skim the headlines you end up pretty misinformed.
P.S. I really don't want to relitigate Roy Moore.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Typically when people break into a home they're trying to rob or kill people, not interrogate them, as DePape confessed he intended to do with Nancy Pelosi. If someone's just trying to get your valuables and get out then yeah a conversation is unlikely.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Yeah I voted this was warning worthy because it was exceptionally rude but I 100% agreed with the basic point. We're forum posters and not professional writers and so most literary stuff is going to be not great but people should be allowed to experiment with writing style without extremely rude criticism.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Neely ran away from a residential care facility he was placed in as part of a plea deal and there was a warrant for his arrest at the time of his killing. He's a shining example of someone who should be institutionalized, but lowering barriers to instituionalization involves complex trade offs and reasoning about them from viral news clips seems like a bad idea.
It comes up a lot in discussions of homelessness that there are lots of low visibility functional temporarily homeless people, and then a smaller number of high visibility dysfunctional long term homeless people. I briefly worked with an otherwise functional middle aged adult who had been homeless for a couple months. Cheap flophouses would be a huge benefit to people who are temporarily in between relatives with couches to crash on, but it wouldn't do much for the guys screaming on the subway.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
An election with DeSantis it becomes about the issues.
And one of those issues is the six week Abortion ban he signed into law. If DeSantis had held the line at 15 weeks he would have had a really good shot but this will be the first post-Dobbs presidential election and there's no way for DeSantis to occupy a more popular middle ground position on abortion with any credibility after that.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Fox is an interesting case study because it is so clearly from top to bottom a media organization that exists to advance right wing politics in the United States but it's still driven powerfully by commercial interests and its audience. Rupert Murdoch is alleged by Dominion to have passed Biden campaign ads to Jared Kushner before they aired, the highest levels of the company have a strong political leaning. But if you read their internal communications they're not arguing whether promoting theories of a stolen election advance the long term goals of the American political right, but whether it will cost them audience share and stock price.
The big changes in political media have been unbundling and advances in user metrics. I don't subscribe to the local newspaper for sports news and the classifieds, you go to craigslist, /r/NFL and read substacks of the exact writers I like. I don't know if this is the case for Substack but NYT writers have said they can get metrics on exactly what point in the article most people stop reading. The upshot is that politics writers are now extremely responsive to small communities of political obsessives rather than broad constituencies. Even when corporate leadership is clearly aligned with one political party the audience's interests rather than strategic logic seems to drive their behavior.
The right has always complained about 'the media' and academia, but what has changed recently is not the ideological leanings of professors and reporters but the technologies of media distribution. The classic Burnham theory that management concedes to the political desires of in demand workers makes sense at tech companies where skilled programmers are scarce, but not as much digital media where writers aren't in great demand unless they can generate a personal following.
My guess is that the NYT trans open letter war is probably indicative of a genuine disagreement within the NYT's audience that falls along generational lines. Management is probably in conflict with the younger writers class on this, and I'm not sure how it'll play out. But I get the sense that management feels they conceded too much to staff during the Floyd summer and the firing of James Bennet after Tom Cotton's op-ed and they want to reel in the workforce. My guess is that this is a local maxima for coverage of the issue just because people lose interest, and there will be alignment against right wing anti-drag bills. But I don't think it's over and I expect continued coverage of the issue off an on over time because that division within the audience will persist.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Yeah but didn't the decline of the black family occur before the rise of gangster rap? The Moynihan report on the decline of the black family is from 1965 and gangster rap seems like a late 80's early 90's phenomenon.
Integration and the loss of the 'talented tenth' could be a piece of it but you just can't exclude deindustrialization. Small business wasn't the force that forged the black middle class, it was the desegregation of northern industry during WWII. The black family declines basically as soon as industry starts fleeing urban centers for greenfield sites and the sunbelt.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
If you make motherhood and career as incompatible as possible don't you run the obvious risk of lots of women choosing careers over motherhood? You'd end up with lots of educated women disincentivized from having kids since once they do their career is over/paused until their kids are teenagers since they can't hire a nanny affordably. Low education women are more willing to do that, but the issue is that people tend to marry people of similar education and you'd have to give pretty massive subsidy to young couples for a low education man to be able to support multiple dependents comfortably.
I'd be kind of worried about a society where all the high income/prestige careers are occupied by childless educated couples and low education married couples with multiple dependents where women can't divorce or else they're impoverished.
Those Prediction Markets are predicting the Republican nominee not the general election. It's totally plausible Trump is extremely popular with the Republican base and not popular with the general electorate.
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