Glassnoser
21hr ago
I was describing my own experience, not that of others at my university. I actually didn't really make friends with anyone in university. My friends were all friends from high school and were mostly guys. Most of the women I knew were my friends girlfriends.
I was in engineering at a mid-sized school, so about 85% of my classmates were men. I didn't really know much about the dating life of my classmates, but among my friends, there wasn't a huge amount of hooking up that I was aware of. People mostly pursued relationships that would last about a year to a few years.
Glassnoser
2d ago
That reminds me of some useless (for me) advice I've read online, where people say that, to socialize more, you should start accepting any social invitations you get. I and many other people already do that. The hard part is getting the invitations in the first place.
Glassnoser
1d ago
In Canada at least, the indigenous fertility rate is 2.7. The Inuit have a fertility rate of 2.8. From what I've heard, they have a completely different attitude towards having children than the rest of the country does. Teenage pregnancy followed by single motherhood after a few years is common and many very young people really want to have babies.
Glassnoser
2d ago
I've noticed the best women I meet on dating apps downloaded it about a week ago, haven't been on a date yet, and are about to delete it because it's overwhelming.
Glassnoser
1d ago
Thankfully, I encountered very little of this sort of thing, maybe because I didn't know any geeky women. Good thing, because I was already shy enough as it was. I didn't need any more reasons to be afraid of approaching women.
Glassnoser
2d ago
I don't think that explains much of it. I don't find the women on there to be noticeably higher class on average than the ones on Hinge or Bumble, and despite there not being many East Asians here, most of the women on there are East Asian. The vast majority of educated upper middle class career having women here are white.
Glassnoser
2d ago
The girls on Coffee Meets Bagel a very disproportionately Asian in my experience.
Glassnoser
2d ago
These girls also have their preference profiles shaped by the most asinine Kdrama shit, and their expectations for male behavior are simultaneously low and ridiculously high.
As someone with zero familiarity with K-dramas, I'm interested to know what this means.
Glassnoser
2d ago
What do you mean it isn't wrong? My friend with by far the most successful love live in high school and university told me that getting a girlfriend is something that "just happens" and that you don't need to try. Is that what you're referring to? Because that doesn't work.
Glassnoser
2d ago
I think indigenous people have far more children than any of those groups.
Glassnoser
2d ago
I thought they'd wait longer than most people to ask that.
Glassnoser
2d ago
Can you elaborate on this behaviour?
Glassnoser
2d ago
I don't have much experience dating East Asians, but one did ask me to be her boyfriend on the third date before we'd even kissed. I thought that was odd.
Why is this more offensive than ranking people according to academic or athletic ability? Why is this considered offensive, but describing an individual woman's attractiveness is not? Why is putting multiple women onto a single list to compare them worse?
I find this somewhat baffling. There are numerous references to violence against women and sexual assault in the article as though the connection, which I cannot identify, were totally obvious. As fast as I can see, this list is totally innocent and their right to freedom of speech gives them the right to do this.
Glassnoser
21d ago
I think the same instinct drove people to attack mask wearers in the early COVID days. It's also why people are intolerant of cultural practices which don't obviously affect them, like women wearing hijabs. It's harder for something to become mandatory if it remains rare.
Glassnoser
22d ago
I'm not sure if I believe they really have that preference. Imagine a woman running into a hear in the woods. She's probably going to freak out. Now imagine her running in to a random man. She's probably going to feel relieved and ask him for help. Just, intuitively it seems obvious that women are not nearly as scared of men as they are of bears. I think the framing of the question causes people to think about how men can be dangerous and to answer in a way that doesn't actually comport with their true beliefs.
Scott Sumner has a whole series of posts about this phenomenon. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/05/theres_no_such_2.html
Glassnoser
24d ago
I'm guessing the first post is all real people and the second one is bots copying it. All the comments in the second post were posted within a very short period of time on a new post by accounts with usernames typically used by bots.
The Canadian government is increasing the capital gains tax for the relatively well off. They claim it only affects 0.13% of Canadians, but this is a lie, since capital gains are extremely lumpy, mostly affecting estates. A much larger share of the population will be in that 0.13% at some point in their lives. The tax will affect a lot of middle class people, distort the economy, and, as I'll explain at the end, redistribute wealth to foreigners.
Currently, 50% of capital gains count towards your taxable income and so you'd pay half the marginal rate, which tops out at between 44.5% and 54.8% depending on which province or territory you live in. The new rule would raise the portion of capital gains that is taxable from half to two thirds for capital gains over $250,000. Primary residences are exempt and it doesn't affect tax protected savings accounts like RRSP and the relatively new TFSA. Most people don't save enough to have savings outside of these accounts and their primary residences, but you certainly don't need to be rich to do so. You could be someone who chose never to own his primary residence and increased savings in the stock market instead. You could own a cottage, to which the capital gains tax applies when you either give it to your children or when you die. Lots of middle class people will be affected.
The capital gains tax is actually a very unfair and even absurd tax. You invest after-tax income from your salary and then when you realize a gain on those savings, even if it's just enough to keep up with inflation such that you have no real gain, you pay taxes again. Someone who is equally wealthy but doesn't save his income for as long would pay less tax. So it taxes savers more than spenders and discourages investment. There are further distortions due to the fact that primary residences are exempt, which incentivizes people to save by investing in their primary residences, inflating property values and making housing more expensive.
This brings me to my last point. The Liberals are far behind the Conservatives in the polls and an election is at most a year and a half away. The main issues tanking their popularity are housing and immigration, particularly for young people, who see a connection between those two issues. Older people don't care so much and are happy to see their property values rise (property values have risen far out of proportion to incomes in recent decades). However, this new tax rule is being promoted in the name of generational fairness.
This makes no sense. The Liberals have dramatically increased the immigration rate, which certainly has inflated property values. There are good arguments to defend this, among them that the higher property values are a net gain for Canada since the vast majority of property is owned by Canadians and most Canadians are homeowners. It really only hurts renters whose parents aren't homeonwers and therefore won't inherit that wealth. Most young Canadians, even if they rent, have parents who are benefiting from this and therefore shouldn't really complain (although they do). Now, the government is doing the one thing that messes this up: they're redistributing much of those gains to the younger generations who include, in very large and increasing numbers, immigrants and their children. What is the point of inflating asset prices with immigration if you're just going to redistirbute the gains to those immigrants? If your goal is to be maximally charitable to immigrants, fine, but this is not in the best interests of Canadians.
The tax increase does exempt primary residences, but not other assets like secondary residences, and the reason for this tax increase is to fund the enormous increase in spending on things like subsidies for new home buyers and affordable housing. The deficit has ballooned to $40 billion dollars under Trudeau and I think the government is actually starting to get desperate and trying to think of ways to raise revenue without spending political capital. Corporations and trusts will also pay this higher capital gains tax. This will reduce business investment. The tax seems calculated to actually raise a fair bit of money while minimizing the number of people who think they'll have to pay it.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
A sales tax is a tax on consumption. A capital gains tax is a tax on capital. Taxing capital is taxing savings. It is not really taxing wealth, because an equally rich person who spends his money right away avoids it. It is actually easier to just tax consumption with a sales tax and then you can tax extreme wealth but in a way that is fair and doesn't discourage saving and investing.
The capital gains tax is especially absurd (compared to other taxes on capital) because it not only penalizes saving but also penalizes frequently selling assets, and the tax is on the nominal returns, not the real returns. If you invest in government bonds, your real tax after-tax return will be negative.
Scott Sumner is excellent on this subject and has written many blog posts on it. It's hard to pick the best one, but you should read a few. Here are some:
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/a-consumption-tax-is-a-wealth-tax/
https://www.econlib.org/capital-gains-nonsense/
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/income-a-meaningless-misleading-and-pernicious-concept/
I used to argue with white nationalists a lot many years ago on /r/anarcho_capitalism and what I found very frustrating is they refused to properly defend their point of view, particularly on the point of who counted as white. The rare time they would say, it was usually strictly people born on the European continent, so Turks in East Thrace were white but not Turks on the other side of the Bosporus strait were not, I guess. Attempts to pin them down on definitions like this were taken as bad faith tricks to undermine their cause and there was not a lot of interest in having real intellectual discussion about the merits of white nationalism. I found I could get them to explain why they thought whites were superior to non-whites, but I could not get anywhere discussing the practicalities of how a white ethno-state would work.
I completely agree that it makes more sense to select immigrants by the traits that whites are claimed to possess. Selecting them based on race is extremely crude.
Walt seemed like he was participating in good faith, but I found he rambled on a lot and would have preferred to have him pinned down more on some of these issues. I think he reinforced my impression of the alt-right, which is not that they were a bunch of super intellectual misfits but that they actually had terrible epistemic habits and were white nationalists more for the vibes as the kids say rather than its intellectual merits. I've read some of Richard Spencer's stuff and seen interviews with him. He's not that smart. I haven't been impressed by anything from the alt-right as far as intellectual arguments go.
I think that's separate from believing in human biodiversity. It's the leap from human biodiversity to white nationalism that I have never found convincing. I think there is a parallel here with communists, who are extremely difficult to convince to enter into a serious debate. Attempts to debate communists are shot down as risking undermining class solidarity. Similarly, attempts to debate white nationalists are shot down (though not nearly as quickly and definitively) as risking undermining white racial solidarity.
Another parallel is how communists put a huge amount of effort into debating theory (though not at addressing the best counter-arguments to that theory as they mostly only debate other communists) and almost none in how a communist society would actually work.
In addition, it empowers Human Rights Tribunals to investigate complaints by individuals against other individuals and levee fines of up to $20,000.
It should be emphasized that Humans Rights Tribunals are not normal courts. For example, they don't have to follow any particular set of rules. It's up to the judges. The standard of proof is a balance of probabilities, not beyond all reasonable doubt. Defendants don't have the right to know who their accuser is. Anyone (not just the alleged victim) can file a complaint, get their legal fees paid for, and get a portion of the award if the defendant is found guilty.
See this article. Note that this article is about section 13 of the Human Rights Act, which was repealed in 2013, but which this bill would bring back. The best part of the short article is the sample of cases at the end.
One example:
In 1999, a Christian printer was fined $5,000 for refusing to print a series of pro-pedophilia essays. He spent $40,000 in legal fees trying to defend himself.
Glassnoser
17d ago
I'm Canadian and grew up in the central part of a mid-sized city. Only my high school had a cafeteria and I was far enough that I while I walked to school, I didn't have enough time to walk home, eat lunch, and walk back. So I would either eat a packed lunch or go somewhere else for lunch. Some people took the bus, but I think the vast majority walked, especially in elementary and junior high when people lived a closer on average. There were probably some cases, but I don't remember anyone being driven to school by their parents.
I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the concept of not being allowed to leave at lunchtime. Did this apply to the students who lived near the school? How do they even stop you or know what you're doing? What is even the point of this? Why do they care where you eat lunch?
I think the best freedom you have that I lack as a Canadian is the freedom to live in any climate. Our choices are between cold and extremely cold.
Glassnoser
17d ago
Are you saying it is typical in the US to restrict where students can eat lunch?
Glassnoser
15d ago
Canada is a less litigious country than the US, and awards for successful lawsuits are much smaller and often capped by law. But there are still a lot of rules due to people being afraid of liability. But my high school's solution to that was that you were not allowed to hang around the school when you weren't in class. You were free to leave the property though and once you did, they were not responsible for anything that happened.
By the way, 7am? Wtf? Our school started at around 8:30 (in high school) or 9?
What do you mean when you say they screened people going in like an airport? Is there some kind of security or someone watching the door? We had nothing like that in high school. You could come and go freely and no one was tracking who was in the building. In elementary school, it was a little different, in that you'd line up once the bell rang and the teacher would escort you in, and then once inside, they'd take attendance.
What struck me about this article was how completely different her university experience was to mine. I never had sex in university. I never even went on a date, though did occasionally get drunk at parties and make out with girls.
I never talked about sex with my parents and only very rarely with my friends, and certainly not in any detail. I didn't even watch porn. The university didn't lecture us about consent. I didn't read about it on the internet. I didn't have a well developed theory (sex positive or otherwise) about how consent, dating or sex were supposed to work. Most of what I knew came from TV and movies. I only had vague ideas about how things were supposed to work, and I struggled to form a coherent understanding of courtship by piecing together conflicting clues. The whole subject was a mystery to me, and seemed almost fantastical, something which on some level I didn't really believe would ever be relevant to my life.
I did start dating and having sex in my late twenties and tried to educate myself by reading the internet, but nothing like the craziness this girl describes took place. She is really describing an alien world to me. It might be because I am ten years older than her, but I wonder if something equally crazy was taking place at my alma mater while I focused on studying. I certainly would never have guessed that anything like this was happening.
Also, my friends who did date mostly had a series of monogamous relationships. There wasn't that much hooking up, at least that I knew of.
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