FlailingAce
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User ID: 1084
FlailingAce
4d ago
I'm with you that having kids can lead to responsibility, in the right circumstances (i.e. where the people involved have the right mentality about it). But I also know a young couple where the woman had a baby with the man (his second) in order to lock him down and maybe grow him up, but he has remained a deadbeat and has also convinced her to quit her own career. They now live in her grandmother's basement and don't pay rent. So I would caution about a blanket recommendation to have kids early - it should be applied to those who are already ideologically and mentally prepared, and those kinds of people will likely be okay with or without the kids.
FlailingAce
15d ago
Our understanding of insurgency is pretty developed at this point, and applying more violence is not the answer.
The problem in Afghanistan was lack of clarity from the very top about America's goals, which is why the military couldn't build a coherent insurgency or counter-insurgency plan. Instead they just applied violence to whoever happened to be looking funny at the US at any given moment. More of that would have been disastrous.
FlailingAce
15d ago
I didn't say anything of the sort. I said he most likely saw the girl brandishing those weapons and tried to document it. I think this is consistent with both his and her actions in the clip.
FlailingAce
15d ago
Having finally watched the video, I am so confused at people's takes on this. The guy filming is clearly trying to do one thing - get a video of the preteen open carrying a knife and an axe. She's not 'intimidating him', she's cracking under the pressure and revealing her illegal behavior. And he's not a 'creep' (the most plausible reason people might think that is because he has a foreign accent and doesn't clearly articulate what he's about) but it's absolutely obvious from the video that his concern is documenting the armed children hanging out in the park.
I'm generally opposed to the excessive levels of immigration in western countries, but this video makes me more sympathetic to the immigrants. Poor guy was probably just walking in the park when the psychotic natives started brandishing weapons at him.
I guess I don't have much else substantive to add, except to note that the whole story seemed much more interesting to me until I finally got around to watching the video myself. I wonder how many culture warriors out there also haven't even bothered to watch the video, or already had their minds made up by 2nd and 3rd hand commentaries so that they couldn't take in the primary source objectively.
FlailingAce
17d ago
It seems to me that you're conflating pricing and insurance.
You can imagine a world where prices factor in the expected cost, but we're not in that world. If I have a complication in a routine procedure, they will charge extra to handle the complication. Then my insurance spreads that extra cost between a pool of policy holders. The pricing for the procedure doesn't spread the cost, and doesn't need to, because that's the purpose of the insurance. Instead, insurance will pay the minimum it can get away with for a specific procedure. They sure as hell aren't paying $2000 for a $1000 cost procedure because sometimes things go wrong - they pay $1000 and then upcharge when things go wrong.
FlailingAce
18d ago
I mean in the sense that doesn't match the meaning of 'price'. Conceptually a price is a fixed value that you will pay, not a variable. If you come in my store and ask the price of a sandwich, and I tell you $10, and then when you check out you're expected to pay $15, you would rightfully tell me I lied about the price.
FlailingAce
18d ago
Many don't like this but you can't really function in our system without having insurance
If you were to attempt to function in the system without insurance, how would you go about it? Asking for myself.
When I was younger I went uninsured for a few years, and a few more on a catastrophic plan, and happily didn't have any issues. Now I'm older and married and my wife has a lot of worries about not being insured (I currently have full health care coverage from my job but I'm about to leave that career). Conceptually I think 'health insurance' is a misnomer the way it's typically used, that only high cap catastrophic plans actually constitute insurance, and frankly that I'd much prefer saving and investing my money instead of giving it to an insurance company.
However, anecdotally I've heard it's a real pain to get medical care if you show up and say you don't have insurance, and that you'll just pay for everything yourself. So, do you have any advice on how to do that effectively?
FlailingAce
18d ago
Major complications of surgery are 1%-10% depending what we are talking about, certainly orders of magnitude more (yes I know I'm missing some things about car insurance for the sake of simplicity)
As long as these are reasonably predictable, you can calculate a price.
I don't think that's true at all. You can calculate an expected value, but 90%+ of patients won't understand that. If you tell them the price of a procedure is $2000 dollars, but the typical/median price is $1000 and the max is a million, how are they supposed to use that information?
FlailingAce
21d ago
Thank goodness the government is finally diversifying its investment holdings. Do you know that most of our money is in low yield Treasury bonds? It's no wonder USG is nearly bankrupt. As a stakeholder myself I'm a big fan of this move, though I would still prefer a more balanced portfolio.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
Suicidal, no. Willing to sacrifice for a higher good, potentially to the point of giving your own life? That's what every society has tried to inculcate, typically in the military but often in other areas too.
Anyway, the question to ask is - altruistic towards whom? Depending on how you want to define it, 'true altruism' might require equal altruism towards all humans, or even towards all animals/living things/etc. You can always be more even-handed and unbiased in your charity. Or, alternatively, maybe it's more altruistic to help those you hate or who are different from you. Either way you define it, though, the concept seems meaningless to me because you can always be more 'true', so asking whether 'true altruism' exists is just a game of drawing arbitrary lines.
In reality, charity begins at home - and this is psychologically sensible, generally beneficial to societies, corresponds to our conceptions of responsibility and duty, and therefore is what we actually teach people.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
Isn't it the case that as a society we want people to be altruistic, so we teach them to feel good/get a positive reinforcement from what they perceive as good acts? The ethical question of 'purity' is interesting if you're a philosopher but doesn't seem practically useful. Even martyrs hold to their faith because they have a belief in a higher/eternal good that outweighs the temporal loss. Indeed, anyone who trades good for bad is making an error - I don't think anyone does so deliberately.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
I actually really like that theory. It's so obscure as to be pretty clearly false but would be a hoot to advocates for at dinner parties.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
Yeah I've shot the M9 before as well. The Sig is definitely better but it's still not great.
The Sig safety has several problems: it is not particularly easy to hit (especially to put it on fire from safe), its action is in a non-intuitive direction relative to the safeties on most other Army weapons, and it's not actually marked which direction is safe, so guys who don't use it a lot will accidentally have it on safe/fire when they meant the opposite.
You can mock my experience if you like but I sure as hell don't know any direct action guys who use the Sig, most have a personal sidearm they use instead, and some units will have a few random Glocks or other pistols in the arms room that they use on the range to qualify.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
Yes it does, it's one of few handguns that I know of with an on/off safety switch, and it's quite annoying. One of a reasons why military people I know who are issued the M17/M18 don't actually use it, and prefer a Glock.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
Can I ask, what do you think is so bad about prison? If you're a homeless guy who goes to prison, you get a roof over your head, a bed to sleep in, three meals a day, and a certain amount of access to a gym, a library, and healthcare. If you're thinking 'freedom', well, there's negative and positive freedom, and a homeless, mentally ill person isn't positively free because they lack the resources and probably the wherewithall to actually do almost all activities, and are forced to spend much of their time scrounging for the basic necessities of life - in my opinion they may be more free in prison because their basic needs are met.
Can I also ask, on a totally different tack, in what sense is it unjust to send a law-breaker to prison? Why would you be morally 'bad' to do so?
FlailingAce
1mo ago
Congrats! I got interested in the financial independence/retire early (FIRE) movement after I left college (because I really didn't enjoy my job). I'm much less strict about it these days since I'm married and have a new career I love - for instance, we just purchased an unnecessarily large dream house - but I'm still looking to retire in the next ten years or so.
the last several years my investments have appreciated more than my yearly income
tantalizing close
My man you have already arrived. A while ago in fact! Relevant post from my favorite FIRE blogger.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
The solution is to do a modified hokey pokey. You're signaling to your ingroup your resistance while refusing to let the outgroup dictate your actions. One perhaps silly example is that I will still draw a rainbow, despite opposing gender ideology, but will draw it in the classical style using just red, yellow, and blue.
I think this puts me on the side of using 'Fentanyl Floyd' at least directionally. I think I just disagree with that phrase in particular. It seems uncouth and disrespectful. You don't modify the hokey pokey by twerking in the middle of it because you make an even bigger fool of yourself.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
The 'urban poor' is a pretty broad stroke. Plenty of cultures have a solid foundation in frugal cooking (e.g. 'rice and beans'). I lived near a fairly poor urban neighborhood for my first job after college, and the supermercado was bustling.
Also, anecdotally, meat theft can be a big problem. I know a junkie who used to shoplift steaks by the stack. It's relatively high value for resale, and cooking a steak is not that hard vs the payoff in deliciousness.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
This has always been the reason for 'food deserts' - not that grocery stores maliciously avoid urban zones, but that they are forced out by crime. The margins on produce are razor thin and cannot handle a significant burden from shoplifting. This is not a symptom of urban areas in general - there are major cities in the US and around the world with perfectly healthy and reasonably priced groceries, I used to live in one - this is caused by bad policy from soft-hearted politicians who don't take crime seriously. Mamdani is a case in point here, not because he wants government-run grocery stores to fix the food desert problem (which in my opinion isn't a totally crazy idea, I've got no problem in theory with government subsidizing or managing a business even though it will likely suffer from red tape and overhead) - he's a case in point because he's openly soft on crime and yet doesn't see the connection to the other problems in his city.
FlailingAce
10mo ago
You're just clearly factually wrong about this. The fact is that there have been no major wars in Europe since the creation of the rules-based order. In other words, when those countries played by the rules they've seen exactly the results they wanted: reduction in war, economic prosperity, global trade.
I think you'll find that we and our allies do all that stuff in spades.
This to me is proof that you're not arguing in good faith. Anyone who's given even a cursory look at the war crimes committed by Russia could never say something so ridiculous. It's just cynicism for cynicism's sake, untethered to reality.
There are ways to sort of move it from one column into another on the ledger book but basically, given resource scarcity, this is just how things work.
This is also obviously not true. International relations is not a zero-sum game. The global international order has decreased global poverty from 50% to about 10% in the last century. Who did they steal that prosperity from? Western countries, despite not going to war with each other, have grown wealth exponentially and raised the standard of living to the point where we no longer have extreme poverty at all. This myth of resource scarcity is not only foolish, it's dangerous, because it leads to bad ideas about policy.
I think you're just fundamentally incorrect about all these issues. Not meant as an attack, but you don't happen to be a communist do you?
FlailingAce
10mo ago
Definitely an interesting philosophical framing. The moral framework for me is something of a practical one - how can different nations live in the world with a minimum of morally despicable things taking place. Things like: war, slavery, poverty, oppression.
The goal of the 'rules-based international order' was to create rules for the game of international competition and cooperation where the morally worst actions are taken off the table. We don't go to war to settle disputes over who gets to control land and peoples (especially nuclear war) because it's something everyone wants to avoid. It's morally bad and it's practically bad, especially for those lands and peoples.
Russia is the clear bad actor in this framing. They are signed on to a ton of agreements that say 'we will not invade other countries to take their land' - the most fundamental being the UN charter, which says any UN member will respect the borders of the existing countries. This may seem arbitrary under your system, but it serves the very basic purpose of preventing war. It's not a complicated moral stance. If Russia hadn't invaded another country, there wouldn't be a war.
Hell, if Russian troops weren't blatantly and constantly committing war crimes, targeting civilians, indoctrinating the people of territories they've conquered... then maybe we in the West could ignore this as just another border dispute, like the other times in the 21st century Russia has invaded its neighbors. But, Russia is doing all these morally despicable things. They are the clear moral bad agent in almost every way, and are simply flaunting the fact that they can break international rules and norms, essentially do whatever the hell they please, because they have nuclear weapons so nobody will stop them. But whether this deserves punishment from the international community on a moral level is beside the point. This needs to be punished so that every other aggressive authoritarian government with delusions of grandeur doesn't do the same thing, and the whole world devolve back into war.
FlailingAce
10mo ago
This is the sort of perspective I've heard from some of the 'end the war now' people in e.g. Trump's entourage, and I find it incredibly annoying, because it treats Ukraine as just some pawn instead of an independent country. It's the same perspective Putin has.
Simply look at what Ukrainian leaders are saying. They are the ones who will not accept a cease-fire without security guarantees, who have been pushing to take back their land and insisting on an eventual return to their internationally recognized borders. Do you honestly think they're just saying these things because Biden told them to? It's so demeaning to the Ukrainian people who are fighting for the independence of their country.
I hear people like Vivek Ramaswamy say things like "we need to come to a peace agreement that's good for both Russia and the United States" and I get so frustrated - the parties to the war are Russia and Ukraine! Ukrainians are the ones who will determine how far they are willing to go to protect their homeland and their people. If Western countries decide to withdraw support, that will affect the calculus of the Ukrainians as to what they can accomplish, but the decision is still theirs whether to keep fighting.
FlailingAce
10mo ago
The USSR died a very slow death and the 'balkanization' that took place was primarily revolutionary independence movements. There were no radical idealogues seizing power, rather the people essentially rose up to throw off Russian rule. This would not be the case if Russia collapsed into civil war. Some regions (see Chechnya) are essentially run by warlords who are kept in check by Moscow giving them money. And Putin's cronies include many who have called for offensive use of tactical nuclear weapons, and in a civil war scenario they could easily come out on top.
The question, if you're the West, is to what extent you want to risk the literal end of humanity. At least that's how some people see it.
FlailingAce
10mo ago
Good question. Basically Russia has a war economy right now, and all the military production counts as GDP, which gives the impression of growth. This hides the issues in the economy.
Russia is facing down stagflation. Wages have been artificially inflated because military industries are being propped up, with the consequence that other industries have to match those salaries in order to find workers. This has led to acute labor shortages in many industries. Meanwhile the Ruble is facing serious inflation. The central bank has raised the key rate to 21%, the highest in modern history, but nominal inflation remains at 8-9%. Russia's trading partners are no longer as willing to accept payments in Rubles, for a while now the majority of trade with China has been in the Yuan and it's getting worse. Nobody wants to hold Rubles.
Though, I'm not an expert on the economic side of this problem. One of the sources I trust most on Russia-Ukraine is Anders Puck Nielsen, and he has a good breakdown here: https://www.logicofwar.com/russias-war-economy-is-unsustainable/
It's not clear what you mean by traditionalism here. Do you mean the bells and whistles of e.g. traditional Christian religion? Tradcaths going to latin mass? Or do you mean eschewing modern ways of life, like the Amish? Because both those kinds of people exist.
More sensible to me would be the idea of traditionalism as a set of values, I can at least imagine you think it's not possible to really believe, say, that society should be paternalistic, because we're so inculcated with Western society's propaganda. But you haven't made this claim explicit, or provided any evidence for it. I would in fact argue the opposite, that paternalistic societies are on the rise - see most of the 'right-leaning' countries e.g. Hungary or Poland, as well as autocratic ones like Russia and China - and that far from LARPing, people including these retvrners are actively seeking and finding different ways of organizing society that are competing with the liberals/progressives.
I also disagree with your idea that we should argue people into traditional values. Most people don't respond to arguments like you apparently did. What they respond to is seeing a better way of living. "In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven."
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