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Esperanza


				

				

				
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joined 2023 January 20 01:02:14 UTC

				

User ID: 2113

Esperanza


				
				
				

				
2 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2023 January 20 01:02:14 UTC

					

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User ID: 2113

Alternatively, an actress who refuses the casting couch does not really want the role, and will be trouble on set. The casting couch is a quick and reliable way to see if actresses are biddable. Can you think of a better test to see if an actress is willing to do what the director asks her to?

I wonder what the corresponding task you should set a man is? Perhaps very similar.

Those terms are meta-exclusionary. They only exclude people who try to exclude others. This is reminiscent of Popper's intolerance of intolerance.

I expect you can come up with new examples that are not meta in this way, but of course, offhand, I cannot.

This makes me question claims that homosexuality was widespread in ancient Greece and Rome.

I question it too, but the evidence seems pretty strong. In Rome, it was definitely socially normal to have penetrative gay sex with young boys. That suggests that their society was very different from ours and perhaps suggests that we have a lot further we could go in that direction.

You can't conclude much about unwillingness to do other things, which includes simulating sex, based on unwillingness to sleep her way into the job.

Girls who are willing to sleep with people for roles are usually willing to simulate sex on screen. At least, that is what I am told. To be honest, I find the idea that there would be a strong correlation between the two things plausible. They both involve sex.

Weinstein was the co-owner (with his brother) and founder of Miramax, the production company that made Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Pulp Fiction, Heavenly Creatures, Flirting with Disaster, and Shakespeare in Love. It was his money on the line.

One problem with suburbs is that they don't generate that much economic/tax revenue to support their infrastructure

That can be solved by raising property taxes. In California, prop 13 makes this difficult, as the old rich people are grandfathered in (or whatever the new term is supposed to be).

There is a difference between the Waters Of The United States and the navigable waters. The navigable ones are the ones that can be used for interstate commerce, and the ones connected are the WOTUS. "a relatively permanent body of water connected to traditional interstate navigable waters);"

The court did not claim that wetlands were navigable, just that the clean water act applied to them.

Let's say the ultra-elite in the US is something like 10,000 families. That's accounting for the roughly 700 billionaires, a larger number of 9-digit millionaires, some political elites, some cultural elites, and a few odds and ends. If 1/4 of those have a kid in college at any given time, that's say roughly 2500 ultra-elite students in college at any moment.

3% of Harvard are from the 0.1 percentile. That is 50 kids per grade. The threshold to get into the top 0.1% by income is supposedly $1.6M. These people are not rich or elite in a meaningful way. The top 0.01% have a threshold income of $7.5M, and these are comfortably well off. There are about 16k of these families. One thing worth remembering is that almost all very rich people are very, very old, so their grandkids are the ones going to college, not their kids. If there are 50 kids from the 0.1% then there are perhaps 5 to 10 from the 0.01 percentile, the people you would consider elite.

From personal experience, there are about that many actually rich American kids at these colleges, and perhaps the same number, or more, of rich foreign kids.

Also casual sex tends to be a mediocre experience for women

How do you compare the experience of the two sexes. Tiresias at least experienced both conditions and voted conclusively for being a women, though it cost him his sight. "Of ten parts a man enjoys one only."

I wonder which trans people prefer. Are there cases where transwomen feel that they have lost out in switching teams? Similarly, do trans men feel they are on to a good thing? My guess is that this effect is swamped by other issues.

Producers are the usual people to run a casting couch, and they normally own a large part of the production company.

The casting couch was more common under the studio system, but I do not know if the movie moguls were the ones on top at the time: They were Louis B. Mayer at MGM, Jack L. Warner at Warner Bros., Adolph Zukor at Paramount, William Fox and Darryl F. Zanuck (at 20th Century Fox from 1935), Carl Laemmle at Universal, and Harry Cohn at Columbia.

If someone has to have sex with the new young starlets, I imagine the job, like most difficult things, is past off to the guy in charge. If you want something done, ask a busy person.

a professional from the pornographic industry

Why is Weinstein not a professional at this? Allegedly he has been doing it for years. He is like the Robert Parker of actresses. Parker's big advantage in wine tasting was that he had tasted all these allegedly fabulous vintages that are no longer available. Who but Weinstein could compare the charms of actresses across the decades.

Since the casting couch is by its nature implicit rather than explicit, there's never any guarantee that satisfying the guy's demands will get the desired outcome.

It is common to pay people for attempts rather than for successes, as the former is more under their control. I can't see why it is wrong to pay an agent money to promote your book, even if the agent might not get you a book deal. I don't think you can claim book agents and Harvey Weinstein are wrong for the same reason. The same applies to most agents, sports included.

"Must perform sex acts on producer"

The requirement is that the actress must be able to plausibly fake being interested in having sex with Weinstein et al. That requires real talent and is an actual test of acting. Allegedly, most Hollywood actresses meet this bar.

Even when it does happen, there's rarely any explicit demand for sex;

Do you know this? My sources claim that people are very explicit about expectations. Actresses have agents who set these meetings up, and they explain in great detail, what is expected. For every John, there is a pimp.

Luckily all this will be made moot by AI. No-one, and I mean no-one, is going to ask the AI developer for sex, (except the sexbot that AI developer him(or her)self made).

The oppression was done by loyalists, but the specific atrocities, Balymurphy and Bloody Sunday, were done by the British Army and the Parachute Regiment in particular. Operation Demetrius, when 2000 men were interned, was a British Army operation, so is definitely the fault of Westminster.

did someone try breeding taller zebras, and failed even at that?

You can buy zebra semen, and the seller suggests that the stallion has qualities that are worth passing on:

Rarity is my 2004 Grant Zebra Stallion. Rarity has perfect big bold striping and very correct conformation. Rarity has a very rare temperament for a zebra stallion and is quiet with a sweet disposition. These are great qualities to pass onto his foals, making him the perfect stud for hybrid crossing.

They also control who gets to be bred:

Anyone who is interested in breeding both owner and mare must be approved first. I do NOT let just anyone breed to him.

They claim the stallion is particularly tame and that his temperament is hereditary.

This is the reason why we decided to breed with him, to create foals that also have his outstanding temperament. All our mares/jennies that we use for breeding to him have all been carefully chosen. They all have good temperaments and trainable minds.

All the people involved in horses are amazingly focused on the lineage of horses. This passes to zebra breeding, and people really care about which animal breeds with which, as they all believe fervently in selecting for traits.

I am guessing you are quite tall and like bicycling and ice skating on canals. In many parts of the world, the expectation is that one party pays for entertainment. Only in the Netherlands, and among horrible people elsewhere, is there an expectation that a bill will be split. This seems weird, but it possibly dates back to gift culture. I know that staying for dinner is a horrible faux pas in the Netherlands while it is utterly expected in other places. Many cultures make a huge effort to be hospitable to others, with crazy gift cultures, always bringing food to an event, always buying rounds of drinks, and other patterns like this. The Dutch really are out of step with most places, especially outside Hajnal line North Western Europe.

I know quite a few (often rowers etc recruited for sports).

St Paul's or Eton, is the question I suppose, as there are seven of one and five of the other. Heavyweight men's crew is the only sport like that, however. It has 27 white foreigners, which is probably more than all the other sports put together. The other sports with substantial numbers of white Europeans is women's Field Hockey, with 13, and Men's soccer with 11.

The rest of the sports have a few sprinkled here and there, such as the three Israeli women in Track and Field, Eden Finkelstein, Shaked Leibovitz, and Estel Valeanu. Skiing has 2 Scandanavians, both male. Women's soccer has 5 Europeans, but one is Black. As I mentioned, Men's soccer has 11, (Iceland, England, Germany, Serbia, Monoca, Slovakia (2), Finland, Norway, New Zealand, and Sweden). Men's heavyweight crew is the big outlier. The other three crew teams have 4 (+ 7 antipodeans) combined (including another boy from St. Pauls).

My guess is 7% are Jewish, and perhaps a fifth or sixth of that is non-white (ie. half-Asian or half-black) Jews, meaning only 5-6% of the ‘white’ bucket is Jewish.

Stanford has 550 Jewish undergraduates, down from 600. This is about 8%, and indeed, about 1 in three white kids are Jewish in my experience. When I was there last, Harvard seemed significantly more Jewish than that. If Harvard really is less Jewish than Stanford, that would be a very big turnaround.

It is also, for example, extremely unlikely that almost 1% of Harvard admits are fully or even half native, or that 3% are half or more native Hawaiian or Mormon Samoans. Most likely both groups, especially the latter, are predominantly white.

I would guess the Hawaiians are mostly Asian, as that is the plurality there. Native Americans are mostly white, but what matters is tribal affiliation, not blood quantum.

The Crimson’s stats also separate ‘mixed race’, which will largely be half-white, half-Asian

I agree but would guess that almost all are half white half Asian, as all other mixes choose the better choices for college admission (Hispanic, Black, Native, or Pacific Islander). 3% of 20-24 year olds are mixed race in the US, so this group is hugely over-represented.

Is there an archive of themotte from Reddit around anywhere? It would be nice to train an LLM to generate the response a given redditor would give to a post. I could probably make a model learn that if I could find 50k or so posts. Having a digital Deiseach around might fill the void her absence created, not to mention the other dearly departed.

The recent huge increase in the percentage of people who are LGBT suggests that at least bisexuality is a choice for 1 in 5 women. The number of gays is up 4x, and lesbians 11x since the silent generation.

The new narrative is that orientation is a spectrum. Perhaps this is true. Male homosexual acts were commonplace in Ancient Greece and Rome and I think this suggests that at least 50% of men would engage in homosexual acts if it were fully normalized. This seems very high bit I can't explain the ancient world without people being quite flexible.

Black and white are broad groupings of different peoples and histories.

In general, this is the case, and Black people, encompassing San, Pygmies, Bushmen, Ethiopians and West Africans are extremely genetically diverse. Two bushmen are further apart genetically than the average Asian is from a European. That said, when people talk about Black people in this context they generally mean the descendants of West African slaves which are a fairly homogenous group.

White people generally mean Anglo Germans, which again are a fairly tight group. When people point to a difference, they mean the difference between these two groups.

There is very little discussion of HBD here anymore, and I paid little attention when there was discussion. What I did take away from it was that the people involved had extensive theories, and had put in a lot of work.

I do not particularly believe in HBD, mostly because I live in an environment that is very selected so every one of every race seems very similar.

If post-op trans women prefer sex as a woman rather than a man, then I would consider this strong evidence that the woman's role is more enjoyable.

I agree that the sexual experience is probably very different, but my sense is that it would be better for natal women than trans women.

Similarly, if post-op trans men enjoy sex more as men, then that would be evidence the other way. Here are a bunch of transmen talking about sex. They seem hornier and more comfortable, but none claim that the sex is better. In contrast, a plurality of transwomen seem to enjoy sex post-op more.

real book agents do not charge you money to promote your book.

I would like to think this was true, and I am sure that reputable agents do not charge money, but I imagine there are a lot of disreputable agents out there.

In a similar vein, never give equity (or god forbid, cash) to someone who claims they will help you fundraise.

Parkinson suggested the following test to reduce the number of candidates for an attractive position:

Let us suppose that the qualities deemed essential are (i) Energy, (2) Courage, (3) Patriotism, (4) Experience, (5 )Popularity, and (6) Eloquence. Now, it will be observed that all these are general-qualities which all possible applicants would believe themselves to possess. The field could readily, of course, be narrowed by stipulating (4) Experience of lion-taming, or (6) Eloquence in Mandarin. But that is not the way in which we want to narrow the field. We do not want to stipulate aquality in a special form; rather, each quality in an exceptional degree. In other words, the successful candidate must be the most energetic,courageous, patriotic, experienced, popular, and eloquent man in thecountry. Only one man can answer to that description and his is the only application we want. The terms of the appointment must thus be phrased so as to exclude everyone else. We should therefore word the advertisement in some such way as follows:

Wanted– Prime Minister of Ruritania. Hours of work: 4 A.M. to 11.59 P.M. Candidates must be prepared to fight three rounds with the current heavyweight champion (regulation gloves to be worn). Candidates will die for their country, by painless means, on reaching the age of retirement (65). They will have to pass an examination in parliamentary procedure and will be liquidated should they fail to obtain 95% marks. They will also be liquidated if they fail to gain 75% votes in a popularity poll held under the Gallup Rules. They will finally be invited to try their eloquence on a Baptist Congress, the object being to induce those present to rock and roll. Those who fail will be liquidated. All candidates should present themselves at the Sporting Club (side entrance) at 11.15 A.M. on the morning of September 19. Gloves will be provided, but they should bring their own rubber-soled shoes, singlet, and shorts.

It is very hard to find a test that will distinguish the people who want the job from the people who really, really want the job. For an actress, the major issues that come up are a willingness to get naked on camera and pretending to engage in quite atypical actions (for some reason, this seems to be the sticking point for most actresses. They object to nude scenes, but not to killing people, defacing works of art, or jaywalking). How can you test if an actress is willing to do this? Some things come to mind but are significantly weirder than the casting couch.

Feminists will doubtless suggest that movies should not have gratuitous nudity. That raises the question as to whether the nudity is gratuitous or not. My guess is that Gwyneth Palthow's performance in Shakespeare in Love would have been received differently if she had worn more clothing, and thus Weinstein got the job done. Julia Roberts, who was supposed to get the role had a policy of keeping her top on. I could be completely wrong about this, but there certainly is a trend for more female nudity after a lull. We are now back to 70s-era levels of nudity in films, and especially in cable channels (or whatever they are called now), and possibly beyond that. Hollywood could be wrong, and perhaps more people would watch movies if there was less nudity, but "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." The same perhaps applies to morals.

Did they do everything but have sex, the Mormon way, or were they actually chaste?

Oral sex was practiced by those in the know, perhaps less than 5%, but the complete lack of sex education meant that most people learned about the mechanics of sex from farmers' kids. Farmers understand a lot about breeding but are focussed almost entirely on cattle in Ireland, and the insights do not transfer quite as easily as you might think.

I would guess that most girls did not understand the basic physics of sex when they graduated high school. I have witnessed people explaining to young grooms what was expected on their wedding night. It is possible that boys were even less adroit, but they at least knew about erections.

The girls were chaste for the most part out of fear. The guys were chaste out of a complete lack of options and strangely, religious reasons. John B. Keane has a play, the Chastitute, written in 1981, that captured the zeitgeist well:

'A Chastitute is a person without holy orders who has never lain down with a woman . . . rustic celibate by force of circumstance.' John Bosco, who 'hasn't the makings of a dacent sin in him', is a chastitute, a bachelor farmer and all he is searching for is a plain decent woman to share his life. He nearly got there a thousand times but nearly never bulled a cow'. This play tells of his many endeavours to find a mate and the end result.

But her legal point rests on an empirical claim, which is that almost everyone would consider the actions of the hypothetical babysitter to be unreasonable. And that empirical claim is called into question by the survey mentioned in the article.

I think her legal point is that there are circumstances where actions are unreasonable. The fact that her example is one that people disagree on does not establish that the argument generally fails.

Consider the following: My son asks if he can use my credit card to go to a ball game. I say yes. He asks can be by someone a drink if he meets someone special. I say yes. He buys not just everyone in the stadium a drink, but everyone in every baseball stadium, and sets up a system whereby all future drinks are paid for on my dime, indefinitely. I think this is unreasonable, and I doubt that more than 15% of people would consider his actions reasonable. Ok, maybe 20% of people would be ok with this.

Is this example more analogous to paying off everyone's student loan debt? I don't know, but I do know that there are unreasonable uses of permission.

I think the best metric is possibly that spending an order of magnitude (or possibly two orders, and definitely three) higher than intended is probably suspect. A babysitter who chartered a plane to Disneyland is probably unreasonable. One that hires Justin Bieber to sing the kids to sleep is even more unreasonable (I actually know someone who had Bieber sing their kids to sleep. Beiber did it for free as a favor.) The point of the example is that there are expenditures that are so much larger than the expected amounts that they require explicit permission.

I am not sure what the intended amount of loan forgiveness was in the bill in question. If the permission was expected to be applied on an individual case basis, then blanket forgiveness is perhaps 10 million times more expensive than was intended. This is close to buying everyone in every stadium a beer.

If the bill was intended to allow the forgiveness of 100k people (all active duty servicemen), then stretching it to less than 1 million is probably not objectively unreasonable, as it is within an order of magnitude. This is analogous to my son meeting up to ten girls and buying them drinks. This is excessive but not unreasonably so.

Perhaps I could have phrased this a little better. The point is that people who earn $2M a year are by no means "the elite." By the time you are in the 0.01% you are probably at least on first-name terms with a lot of actually elite people.

The modal person with an income of $2M probably owns some car dealerships. This might make him a big shot in his town, but it does not make him elite.