Glassnoser
8d 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
9d 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.
Your first link is broken.
I don't agree with your prediction. The trend over the last 50 years or so has been an increase in opposition to sexual relationships between children and adults. The age of consent has been going up. The penalties for sexually abusing minors have been increasing. The general concern over paedophilia has been increasing. Age gaps are becoming taboo. The gap in general expected behaviour between adults and children has been increasing while the age at which people are considered to be full adults is getting later and later.
The standard definition of a mental disorder is based on whether the behaviour causes harm. I don't see how paedophilia would not be considered a mental disorder in a society that considers sexual activity between a child and a much older person causes immense psychological harm.
Glassnoser
6mo ago
Maine was not one the original thirteen colonies as it was part of Massachussetts at the time.
A year ago, @Highlandclearances made some predictions. I made my own about a month later. I think I did pretty well, though I had an advantage.
@Highlandclearances' predictions are listed first, followed by mine.
Asset Markets will:
- 50%, 25% (FALSE) at some point in 2023, the SP500 will be 12%+ below its December 31st, 2022 value.
- 25%, 15% (FALSE) at some point in 2023, the SP500 will be 20%+ below its December 31st, 2022 value.
The Federal Reserve will:
- 80%, 95% (TRUE) raise interest rates by 50+ basis points.
- 80%, 85% (TRUE) not cut interest rates before July 1st, 2023.
- 50%, 50% (TRUE) raise interest rates by 100+ basis points.
The Bank of Canada will:
- 80%, 90% (TRUE) raise interest rates by 50+ basis points.
- 50%, 50% (FALSE) raise interest rates by 100+ basis points.
Canada will:
- 50%, 40% (FALSE) have a “moderate” recession which begins in 2023 defined as either of: (1) a cumulative decline in GDP of 2% across any number of quarters, (2) the unemployment rises to 7% at any point.
- 80%, 45% (FALSE) see detached house prices decline by 15%+ as measured by the December over December CREA national benchmark.
- 25%, 15% (FALSE) Canada will have an election in 2023 and … the Liberals will win a minority government.
- 50%, 20% (FALSE) Canada will have an election in 2023 and … the CPC will increase seats and win the most votes.
- 25%, 10% (FALSE) Have a constitutional or jurisdictional crisis over provincial / federal issues, probably related to guns, but possibly related to the Alberta Pension Plan, health care funding, or equalization. This is hard to define, but I would take any kind of Meech-Lake style conference, or Supreme Court decision on constitutional questions, the creation of the Alberta Pension Plan, or refusal by local police to enforce federal gun bans as positive evidence.
So, basically, I was correct in not thinking a big economic collapse was so likely. The stock market did very well, and while Canada's economy hasn't really recovered from the pandemic, nothing dramatic happened. The real GDP did not decline, though real GDP per capita did. Maybe the massive surge of immigration has kept the overall economy from shrinking, or maybe it's the reason real GDP per capita is falling.
I still don't know why @Highlandclearances was expecting an election. Something he did get right was the surging popularity of the Conservative Party at the expense of the Liberals, but as long as they continue to get a vote of confidence from the NDP, there doesn't need to be an election for another two years.
Any predictions for 2024?
Glassnoser
4mo ago
The Quebec daycare system that this is copied from has the exact same problem. It's $7 a day instead of $10 a day, but this is a textbook example of the consequences of a price ceiling. Why they would copy a system where people have to sign up their children for daycare when they're still in the womb, I cannot understand.
Glassnoser
23d 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/
Glassnoser
2mo ago
Yes. One of the crazier ones I've seen which is really popular is making it illegal to own an investment property unless it's a purpose built rental. So that's the only that renters would be allowed to live in. Another one is capping the price of food.
Glassnoser
3mo ago
Let's say Israel agrees to a two-state solution but Palestine just keeps attacking Israel over and over. What is Israel entitled to do in response? Do they just keep retaliating tit-for-tat? Are they allowed to invade, depose the government, but then must leave just to return when the new government does the same thing? Do they just have to improve their defences?
As is tradition, my sister and I got into a heated argument, this time about Israel and Palestine. The argument started as a disagreement about the meaning of "from the river to the sea" and then became about the conflict and history of the region generally.
Now, my sister, despite her strong feelings about the subject, knows almost nothing about the history of the region and seems to have gotten most of her information from TikTok. Nonetheless, she raised some points that I don't know as much about as I should, and I'm hoping someone can help me learn more about the following claims. These are all things she claims have been widely reported in the media (other than CNN et al.) and is absolutely certain are true.
- Israel has dropped white phosphorus on Gaza.
- No babies were killed. The video evidence was faked or actually of things done to Palestinians.
- Israel is bombing Northern Gaza indiscriminately.
- Hamas is has not been proven to be operating out of any hospitals.
- Israel has cut off all food, water, electricity aide (I know there was some of this, but has it continued and are they completely blockading it?)
- Israel killed the Palestinians when they tried to leave Northern Gaza. She denied there was any evidence Hamas actually did this.
- Israel bombed Palestinians as they left to go to Egypt.
- The UK and the US were allied with Israel from the beginning and supported the establishment of the country.
- Thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israelis during the occupation. EDIT: I mean during peacetime and not casualties. I'm not talking about the casualties killed during current war.
I'm most interested in any claims of war crimes. I understand Israel claims they are not collectively punishing Palestinians but are actually targetting military targets, but what I'm most unsure about is what is the actual evidence we have about how much they might have deviated from that.
By the way, these debates always remind how bad most people's epistemic habits are. She told me I had fallen for Israeli propaganda and that she was actually very well informed on the subject and had read a lot about it. You see, she had friends who were personally affected (they live in Canada but have family from there or something) and she cared a lot about it, which meant she was not biased. Whereas for me, it was just something fun to debate and I was thinking about it too coldly to form a correct opinion. This from someone who had never heard of Mandatory Palestine and didn't know what a pogrom was, and seemed to know little of even post-1948 Israeli/Palestinian history. She also thought it was the deadliest current conflict and was deadlier than the Iraq War.
EDIT: The purpose of this question wasn't just to get more unsubstantiated claims. If people could provide sources supporting their claims, that would be helpful.
Am I imagining it or are spelling, punctuation, and grammar rapidly getting worse? For example, it's become very common to put question marks at the ends of statements to indicate uncertainty. No one seems to know how to spell led, no one, all right, or its (my phone autocorrects it to it's every time, which may be the reason). And the past participle seems to be going extinct. People are saying things that sound, to my ear, utterly retarded, like "should have went". The only one I haven't heard yet is was instead of been. But I'm sure that's coming soon.
Is this just normal language evolution or is it an actual degradation? I think it's actual degradation because I actually am finding it increasingly difficult to parse these grammatically off sentences. For example, the situations in which you can use singular 'they' have expanded to include specific known people and I usually have to take a second to figure out that the speaker isn't referring to multiple people.
Spelling has been stable for a long time, but now people are pushing up against the limits of what their autocorrect will allow them to get away with. If an incorrect spelling is the correct spelling for a different word, it's going to be used and frequently. Are people just spelling at the level of third graders and their phones are saving them from looking like complete imbeciles?
But it seems to be getting worse. Is it because the average intelligence online is falling as it gets easier to use the internet? I don't think so, because I see otherwise intelligent people make a lot of these mistakes. Maybe it's because it used to be that most of what we read had been written (had was wrote for my future audience) by professional writers instead of average people.
There also seems to be a general decades long decline in the quality of even professional writing of unknown cause. Compare a newspaper article or even worse a scientific journal article from today versus 70 years. The fact that even proofreading for missing words, spelling mistakes, or the terrible grammar of a Chinese scientist seems to be a thing of the past, suggests that the problem is partly one of demand. We just don't care that what we read is well written anymore. Why is that?
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
6d 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
2mo ago
Reddit's economics takes are amazingly bad. It's common to have comment sections where easily more than 99% of the comments are saying things that are blatantly at odds with the most basic and established economic concepts.
Glassnoser
4mo ago
Yes, that's part of what I was referring to. In fact, most of the population was French when the loyalists came. The loyalists basically were the founding stock of English Canada, while the French had their own reasons for not joining the US in their rebellion.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
It seems like a dumb but honest mistake. Maybe they will learn to be more tolerant of much more understandable incidents like this one.
People's Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier posed for a photo with members of an organization described as a hate group in Calgary Sunday.
Normally, when such things happen, the subject of the scandal is accused of being secretly far-right, but few people have that reaction to the Liberal Party when it does something much worse.
There are 320 million Americans, which means it takes just 28 bits of information to uniquely identify someone. That's not a lot. I've found Reddit accounts of someone I know just because he expressed an opinion that sounded familiar, and I was able to quickly confirm it by looking at the post history and find posts on all the interests I knew this person had, posts to his city's subreddit, and details about his personal life. He thinks the account is anonymous.
There's even someone here who I won't name (I'm not sure if he's actually trying to be completely anonymous) who I found the real name of because he told one fact about himself that was way too specific to be more than one person.
Each of those matching stories is several bits of information. The overlap in interests and political opinions alone is also a huge amount of information. So is the mere fact that they're both writers. Then there's the matching first name. Each one of these things is probably seven or eight bits of information. That all is probably enough to identify him, but what seems like proof is the accounts made with his email addresses and website registered to his hometown. That should be enough on its own.
The only way it isn't him is if this is the result of a fifteen year long attempt to frame him. Even that would be very difficult to pull off.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
A lot of problems with the American healthcare system seem to be caused by the fact that so much of it is paid for with insurance. Insurance is for catastrophes that are unlikely to happen. Most people should never file an insurance claim in their lives. The fact that it's used for things like having a baby is absurd.
Glassnoser
4mo ago
/r/canada is not at all representative of the typical Canadian. It has the standard bias of most subreddits in being predominantly young, male, and left-wing, but it's also selected for being strongly anti-immigration. In fact, it's been absolutely obsessed with the issues of housing and immigration for the last few years. This goes back way before the pandemic or the housing crisis.
Years ago, it came out that one of the mods of /r/canada had some sympathy for white nationalism, and there was a big protest resulting in him and some other mods resigning and the creation of /r/onguardforthee, to which everyone who thought /r/canada was irredeemably racist fled, It's pretty popular and is now a more left-wing version of /r/canada that is much less opposed to immigration.
If you look at the top six posts there you have:
- Susan Delacourt: Justin Trudeau fears Pierre Poilievre is bringing Trump-style politics to Canada
- New Liberal ads in Prairie ridings target Conservatives over Ukraine trade deal
- Shrooms Helped Them Quit Booze and Fentanyl. Now They're Fighting for Legal Access.
- Ottawa youth charged in anti-Jewish terror plot had makings of bomb: police
- The Good Liar: Meet Toronto’s worst landlord
- Ontario's failure to provide health care to all is a moral failure as well
Only one about housing and not one about immigration. Some Canadians are definitely thinking about this, but that's not new for most of them, and as often as you see people on /r/canada blame immigrants, they'll blame things like foreign and corporate homebuyers and AirBnb.
If you look at the polls, the Conservative party has shot up to a clear projected majority starting in about September of this year.
The Conservatives have not said they would reduce immigration rate. Their support is due to something else. One cannot overstate how much of a bubble /r/canada is.
Glassnoser
4mo ago
Women care less about attractiveness than men do, but it's not this extreme. Very few 23 year old women want to date 38 year old men. Looks aren't the only thing that decline with age. So do energy, health, and sperm quality.
Glassnoser
6mo ago
There should be an email system where you have to pay $0.0005 per character per recipient.
Glassnoser
6mo ago
The people I've seen focusing most on the beheaded babies are the ones claiming that there were beheaded babies. I think it's fair to point out that we don't actually know that they actually beheaded babies.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
I think that if you want a ban, it would be better to just ask for one than to break the rules to get one.
Glassnoser
9mo ago
Being in the top 0.1% doesn't count as elite? I don't see why the people you described can't be elite. The most expensive house in my city, which is an actual mansion, was bought by a car dealership owner.
Reddit moderators are kind of like Reddit employees only instead of getting paid with money, they get paid with power. Another difference is the top moderators mostly weren't hired. They just showed up and started working and then hired their friends.
The power they get is not an amount that Reddit determined they needed to give up in order to get them as employees. It's not the market wage. The moderators just lucked into their positions. Consequently, they're overpaid, and now they're trying to strike when their employer can replace them with the click of a button and they weren't their first choice as employees anyway. For every striking moderator, there are thousands of potential scabs who would leap at the opportunity, and there's also nothing like any kind of labour law that could protect them in anyway.
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