@Glassnoser's banner p

Glassnoser


				

				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users  
joined 2022 October 30 03:04:38 UTC

				

User ID: 1765

Glassnoser


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 October 30 03:04:38 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 1765

I don't think there's anything at all wrong with what she did. If they really needed the bike, they could have paid for it, including paying her to give up the bike she rightfully rented. They were deliberately circumventing the intention of the free period limit - why is there any free period at all by the way? - so I don't see why they should feel entitled to the bikes. They're trying to do something the system is clearly designed to not allow them to do.

I don't think we need to play sympathy games to figure out who deserves the bike more based on pregnancy status, sex, age, race, tiredness, or who got there first. We have a system for allocating the bikes and she followed that system to get the bike over someone who was trying to exploit the system to get something for free. We also have an even older and better established system for getting something that legally belongs to someone else. It's called trade. You can pay for something with money.

I agree that the narrative that they ganged up on her to take a bike that was already in her possession is false, but she is still completely in the right.

Steve Sailer has been suspended from Twitter for allegedly violating their rules against hateful conduct.

His tweet said

Blacks suffer and perpetrate the majority of homicides/murders in the U.S., so anytime there's a sizable change in the national trend, it's usually driven by changes in black behavior. During the BLM Eras, black homicides [and] black traffic fatalities have trended together.

He appealed and the decision was upheld.

This is yet another way in which Elon Musk is going back on what he said in April.

By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law.

I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.

If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect.

Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.

It's starting to look like his attitude towards free speech isn't that different from his predecessors'.

This is politically impossible. Canadians have a very strong national identity which is based at its core - and on little else - on not being American. Remember, it's the only country in the world that was actually founded in direct opposition to the principles on which the US was founded. The entire point of Canada, for its entire history, has been to not be part of the United States. Furthermore, the Canadian population has been heavily selected over 250 years for people who don't want to be Americans. So despite the cultural similarities, most Canadians very much don't want to be part of the United States.

Most Canadians don't appreciate how much richer the US is, and those who do, mostly think it's only the very richest who are better off. They falsely believe that the average person is richer in Canada.

There are also constitutional issues. Quebec's language laws would violate the first amendment, and nothing is more important to French speaking Quebeckers than protecting their language. They would far sooner become independent than give up control over what language speak in order to join the US.

Our gun control laws would violate the second amendment, and most Canadians have no interest in giving up their safety in order to have that right. There are lots of Canadians who like to hunt and are upset and some of the recent changes to the gun laws, but there is nothing like the broad support that the second amendment has among American conservatives. The gun situation in the US is seen by most Canadians as crazy. and it would be top of mind in any discussion about joining the US.

Canada's talented engineers (who also conveniently speak English) can easily move to the US and find jobs, instead of trying to kickstart some mini Canadian engineering industry that competes with Silicon Valley

Most Canadians wouldn't see this as a good thing and would prefer to keep them here where they can support our local industry.

American Oil companies can help develop Canada's massive oil deposits and other natural resources, which cost a lot to develop and would benefit from economics of scale

Is there something preventing them from doing this now? The environmentalist movement is very strong in Canada, and outside Alberta, most people don't actually want the oil industry to be further developed.

Quebec would fit in nicely as yet another ethnic/language minority in the US, instead of being this one persecuted minority in Canada with a chip on its shoulder

Quebec isn't persecuted in any way and has much more autonomy than it would as part of the United States, in particular, regarding laws on language usage and immigration. It would also face more pressure to assimilate into anglophone culture. Canada has a lot of federal laws enforcing bilingualism in the rest of the country. These wouldn't exist if it were part of the US, and Quebec's exposure to anglophone culture would increase. Quebec also receives large subsidies from the richer parts of the country as part of Canada's equalization payment system, which the US doesn't have.

It would also lose its ability to separate. US states don't have the right to secede, whereas in Canada, it is not clear, but they likely can if there is enough support among the province's residents. Quebec separatism may be dormant, but francophone Quebeckers do not really see themselves as Canadian and it's quite possible Quebec will try to separate again in the future if it's relationship with the rest of Canada worsens. It would not want to give up that option.

It's worth pointing out that Canada doesn't have separation of church and state. The constitution recognizes the supremacy of God and the head of state is also the head of the established church. It also guarantees the funding of demoninational schools. We even had a law against blasphemy until 2018.

The Cancel-Culture Troll with a Neo-Nazi Past. This is an exposé on the RationalWiki editor behind several cancellations of intelligence researchers including Bo Winegard and Noah Carl.

He used to be a white nationalist on Stormfront before flipping to the other extreme and attacking the reputations and destroying the careers of academics by writing defamatory articles under multiple pseudonyms.

He was later banned from RationalWiki for, among other things, writing articles about and doxxing other editors. Although he was easily able to ban evade and continued to use RationalWiki to attack academics.

This overall situation has created a climate of fear among intelligence researchers. Two prominent and tenured academics, who had not previously been attacked by Smith, initially offered to write this article; both later reneged out of concern over what Smith might do to their careers in retaliation. I ultimately agreed to write it because as someone outside academia, my career is less vulnerable than theirs to these types of attacks.

It reminds me of the Louis C.K. incident in that he asked to do something most think is totally fine if the person wants to do it. But there is a norm about not asking people to do weird sexual things unless you have already broken that social barrier.

Redditors have oddly unusual but also weirdly consistent opinions. There was a post a few years ago where someone was asking if he did something wrong when he slept with a girl who was relying on him for a ride home. It sounded perfectly consensual to me, but no exaggeration, about 99% of the commenters were adamant he had raped her.

The hive mind is real. They often are in near universal agreement on opinions that are, at best, controversial in the real world, if not in the distinct minority.

Another element of this is that people don't understand how cut throat social social interaction is. On the surface, people seem nice, but deep down, they only really care about their social status. This is not just about enforcing rules so as to maximize everyone's well being. A huge amount of shaming behaviour is just opportunistic social climbing. Many rules exist only to give socially adept people the ability to rise in relative status. The rules that exist to enforce niceness are arbitrary in what they allow and don't allow and should never be generalized.

A common mistake young men make is that they see sympathy being given out to people for having problems, so they think their problems will give them sympathy, but the opposite happens. Being socially awkward in a way that gives people permission to attack you will result in them enthusiastically attacking you. It doesn't matter if you aren't causing people harm or are deserving of sympathy. If you have a non-protected character flaw, you will be published for it.

Sam Bankman-Fried has been arrested.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested by Bahamian authorities this evening after the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York shared a sealed indictment with the Bahamian government, setting the stage for extradition and U.S. trial for the onetime crypto billionaire at the heart of the crypto exchange’s collapse.

Bankman-Fried was expected to testify before the House Financial Services Committee on Tuesday. His arrest is the first concrete move by regulators to hold individuals accountable for the multi-billion dollar implosion of FTX last month.

There had been some speculation on when and even whether he would be arrested. Just yesterday someone told me to expect it to take two years. So, why right before tomorrow's hearing? And why not wait for him to give more interviews and provide more evidence?

I have observed that city-specific subs tend to be more right-leaning compared to the broader subs and reddit overall.

Really? Maybe this is specific to Canada, but I find the opposite. Almost all city-specific subreddits are very left-wing.

The part that is most confusing to me is the truly astounding size of the awards. They seem to be several orders of magnitude larger than the actual alleged harm. How is being fired from one job as bad as losing several lifetimes' worth of income in one of the highest cost of living areas in the world? How is a single person not being demoted worth the lifetime earnings of a small village?

Under British law, the primary issue in such cases is whether a proposed treatment is in the best interests of the child. Judges have repeatedly upheld doctors’ decisions to end life support even when that conflicts with the parents’ wishes.

So, for some reason, it is up to the doctors and judges whether the baby should receive life support, and not the parents, and furthermore, somehow that means they can prevent a child from leaving the country if they're going to get medical treatment they consider to not be in the best interests of the child, which in this case is undergoing painful treatment instead of letting her die? Do I have that right?

Why isn't it up to the parents why can't they take their child out of the country? What's the legal basis for this?

It makes a little more sense in custody disputes where the parents can't decide something so then a judge intervenes and picks a side, but in this case, both parents want the child treated. So why don't they get to make the decision?

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.

The government of Quebec will cut funding for out-of-province students to study at English language universities in Quebec. The justification being that these students are a threat to the French language and that they leave after graduation (if you see a contradiction there, you're not alone).

Tuition at McGill (one of the top universities in Canada) will increase from $8,992 to $17,000 a year, making it much harder to compete with the likes of the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto. Bishop's University expects to lose a third of its students possibly not to survive.

In Canada, every province subsidizes about half the cost of Canadian students attending its universities, regardless of their province of origin. The result is that, while international students pay full price, Canadians can attend university anywhere in the country and pay similar tuition rates. These subsidies are funded in large part with unconditional Social Transfers, that can be spent on other programs, but they are intended to benefit all Canadians equally. Quebec differs from the other provinces in that it funds about three quarters of the cost for Quebec residents and half for French citizens and Canadians from other provinces.

In my view, this is just the latest in the government's attempt to ethnically cleanse Quebec of anglophones. What is not well understood outside Quebec is that it has long had a large anglophone minority which has been shrinking for almost two hundred years (since the Great Migration from the British Isles). Places like the Ottawa valley and the Eastern Townships were originally settled by anglophones. Quebec City, Montreal (which was a majority English speaking city for a good part of the 19th century), and the Gaspé have long had very large anglophone minorities.

This history is attested to by placenames like Hull, Sherbrooke, Granby, and Drummondville, and by street names like Saint James Street and Dorchester Boulevard (renamed to René-Levesque). The three English language universities are located in these originally English speaking areas: two are in Montreal's traditionally anglophone western downtown and one is in Lennoxville, the last remaining predominantly English speaking community in the Eastern Townships.

At the time of the British conquest, French Canadians were concentrated in a narrow strip along the Saint Lawrence River. Other areas were immediately settled by an influx of immigrants from the US and Great Britain, but would later be swamped by the rapidly expanding French Canadians, who would eventually win enough political power to enforce its culture on the anglophones who didn't leave.

Since the 60s, the government has enforced the use of French and suppressed the use of English in almost all areas of public life, but recently, some misleading statistics have been used to stir up fear among francophones that their language is on the decline. It's been noticed that the number of people who speak French at home has very slightly declined in recent years. This is obviously because of the large number of immigrants who are making up a larger and larger share of the population every year. The number speaking English at home has declined even more. It is therefore absurd to suggest that French is in any meaningful sense on the decline, unless you're suggesting that Quebec is going to become a primarily Arabic speaking province. If you know anything about Quebec, you know what is implied by such claims is that English is displacing French. But the very thing producing this statistic of declining use of French at home is actually making the province more French.

In reality, partly because of a law that prevents immigrant children from attending English public schools, 90% of immigrant children grow up to be francophones, which is a larger share than the native population. Even a majority of anglophone children attend French schools and the vast majority of young anglophone Quebeckers are bilingual.

Quebec also has a large degree of independent control over its immigration, allowing it to prioritize immigration from French speaking countries, particulary France, Africa, and Haiti. The anglophone communities are thus largely prevented from replenishing their naturally declining populations with immigrants.

Earlier, this fear was used to justify limiting the number of places in English speaking CEGEPs (two year colleges that are attended between high school and university) and requiring almost all immigrants to speak French, including students, temporary workers, and those sponsored by family members.

The government is justifying these latest policies by saying they are needed to protect the French language (which is not under threat), while complaining that it costs them money to pay for students who leave after graduation (in large part because of their oppressive language laws). But if they leave, they're not much a threat. Canadian citizens are the only people who are allowed (because of a constitutional right) to put their children in English public schools.

They don't want them to stay. A small but stable anglophone minority is not a threat. These policies seem clearly calculated to slowly strangle the anglophone community until it disappears. The real fear is not that French will disappear, but that Quebec will fail to become purely French.

There was an episode from a few years that I think illustrates well the insanity that has taken over public discourse in Quebec and Ottawa. In 2020, Liberal Member of Parliament Emmanuella Lambropoulos, a trilingual millennial representing the Montreal borough of Saint-Laurent, told the official languages commissioner she would need evidence to believe that French was on the 'decline' (with air quotes). This provoked such outrage in Quebec, where she was lambasted for 'disrespecting' French Canadians and asked by other committee members to leave the committee, that she felt the need to offer her 'deepest apologies' and resignation from the committee the next day. You'd have thought she said something racist given the level of indignation expressed, with anglophone politicians falling over themselves trying to distance themselves from her remarks while Quebec nationalists accused them of secretly agreeing with her.

For most of history, Canadians could just move to the US. There were no immigration restrictions. And even today, it's one of the easier countries to move to the US from. It also used to be easier and more attractive to move to the US than to move to Canada. So most Canadians are descended from people who either chose to move to Canada over the US or chose to stay in Canada and not move to the US, generation after generation, despite the worse weather and the worse economy.

I don't have strong feelings about the result of the election (I'm not even American and I detest Trump) and I have long been a strong opponent of mail-in ballots, going back before Trump got into politics. The whole design of the voting system, from the rules against campaigning near where people are voting to the fact that you fill in the ballot out of others' view and you're prohibited from photographing your ballot, is to ensure that you can't prove to anyone who you voted for so that your vote cannot be bought or coerced. This is all thrown away by mail-in ballots.

This is a widely held position. My parents, who hate Trump and think he's a fascist who is trying to become a dictator and that January 6 was an attempted coup, strongly feel the same way.

And I'll be honest, I've had a crush on Aella for ages; she's a very attractive nerdy woman, and as a sexually confident and charismatic female Rationalist, she is a very horny unicorn among horses.

Is this a common opinion? I really don't find her attractive at all. She looks like she could almost be very attractive, but there is something very offputting about her. Has she ever done a poll to see what people think of her? I was genuinely surprised when I learned how much she makes as a prostitute.

I must be misunderstanding the question because there are obviously a lot. Vaccines, antibiotics, various surgeries, etc. Do you mean natural remedies? Cleaning a wound with alcohol? Bandages? Splints? Are those too artificial?

If you're not asking about treatments, I could say variolation. Shoes? Clothing? Unless you mean natural preventative treatments. Staying in the shade?

Everyone knows about the crazy long waitlists, which is an obvious and inevitable consequence of capping the price, but what I haven't seen anyone talk about are the dangers of giving your children to an insitution under these conditions. There is a shortage, so the daycare doesn't have to do anything to attract customers, and so they'll have every incentive to cut costs. Is this who you want looking after your children? People who are trying to do the worst job they can legally get away with knowing that there is a long line of children to take your spot if you leave, also knowing that many of the children's parents may not be able to easily afford an alternative?

Someone should do some reading on how such things worked in the Soviet Union or in other Eastern Bloc countries. I'm sure there are horror stories and I'm sure whatever they are will be repeated here.

The government is also preventing the parents from taking the child out of the country to get treatment. So, no, the government has specifically decided the child needs to die because keeping it alive or trying to treat it is cruel.

It wasn't as nearly as bad for me either, but I had a great deal of shame about my attraction to women in my early teens and I know where it came from. I was constantly teased about girls when I was a kid and I got a very clear message that liking girls was wrong. I remember being shocked at 11 years old when a friend openly admitted liking girls. I hadn't even admitted to myself that I liked them yet. I remember being 13 when I decided that if a girl I really liked asked me out, I would have the guts to day yes. I was 15 before I seriously considered asking a girl out but I chickened out. The first time I asked a girl out was at 23 and it took me a year to get the courage.

The fact is that I probably was ostracized for my mistakes with women at 28, and looking back, I had no idea how little I understood back then.

I have more sympathy than this, because while I am very aware of how weird it would be to ask a female friend to have sex with me, I am also very shy and have remained single for many years because everything that might lead to any kind of romantic relationship seemed very weird and overly forward to me at first until I forced myself to do it, with my heart beating out of my chest and every instinct telling me not to.

Because of this, the first time I had sex as an adult was at 25 and I had my first serious girlfriend, who I met online, at 28. The only relationship I've had with someone I met in person started when I was 31. So while I always have a strong reaction to these stories where I think the guy was obviously doing something really weird, I also recognize that I am really bad with women and that I really should be doing a lot more things that feel wrong to me. So who am I to judge people who make these mistakes? At least they're trying.

The thing is, no one ever sits you down and tells you how dating works. Almost everything I know comes from TV, the internet, and experience, and experience is really the most important one that allows you to figure out what from the first two sources is bullshit and what is not.

That's a relationship that usually develops from mutual attraction and having hung out together enough that clearly there are some sparks, but neither one (claims) to want a "relationship."

It sounds like he thought that's what happened.

So this poor guy wasn't ill-intentioned, but he made an absolutely horrible social blunder, one that anyone, man or woman, could have told him was a blunder, and unfortunately he's suffering the effects people usually do when committing a massive faux pas.

And this is probably where my evolved instinct to never take any risks comes from. But I had to force myself to overcome those instincts and when I started trying to date, I made some mistakes which may have resulted in my ostracization from a group of friends in my late twenties, which was very difficult, especially since it happened right before covid. Finding the right level of risk aversion to maximize social success is very difficult when you are fundamentally just not good with people. It's not enough to recognize what you shouldn't do. You also need to be able to recognize what you should do. Telling the difference is the hard part.

One of the first immigration restrictions in the US had the goal of reducing the number of Chinese prostitutes.

The weird thing is, the kind of stuff that people typically get cancelled for is usually not that different from things I occasionally hear boomers and older people say in person, but which would get you banned from almost any online platform. The standards for what's acceptable in person seem to be much more relaxed than what is acceptable online, at least when it comes to certain topics. I suppose the opposite is true when it comes to swearing and talking about sex. But certain opinions which are actually quite common (especially those related to transgenderism) have been utterly tabooed by young people online.

This is why I find some of these cancellations so confusing. People aren't just getting cancelled for saying edgy stuff when they were anonymous teenagers. They're getting cancelled for stuff that is well within the Overton window if you step outside the terminally online bubble.

For example, try asking anyone over 40 whether transwomen are women. Few would say they are. But you say this on almost any social media, and they'll react as though you're some kind of extremist. Or ask someone over 60 what they think of gay marriage.

B.C. top court broadens sentencing law aimed at reducing indigenous incarceration rates

British Columbia’s top court has broadened the sweep of a sentencing law meant to reduce incarceration rates among indigenous peoples, ruling that indigenous-specific sentencing can be applied even to offenders who have become disconnected from Indigenous communities and are only minimally aware of their heritage.

...

The decision reduces a five-year prison sentence to four in a case involving an unprovoked, near-fatal stabbing.

...

The offender, David Kehoe, is a Métis man who prosecutors argued had not been aware until recently of his indigenous background. He was convicted of aggravated assault after he used a kitchen knife to stab a man who had played loud music in the parking lot of an apartment building where Mr. Kehoe lived.

Mr. Kehoe, who was 30 at the time of the 2018 stabbing, had a record of 33 prior offences as a youth and as an adult. (The victim suffered a lacerated liver and punctured lung, and received life-saving surgery. He did not submit a victim-impact statement at Mr. Kehoe’s sentencing hearing.)

Under federal sentencing law, judges must pay particular attention to the circumstances of indigenous offenders. The Supreme Court interpreted that law in a case called Gladue (which involved a fatal stabbing) to mean that the history of colonization has harmed indigenous peoples, and that they are therefore entitled to special efforts to reduce their overrepresentation in the penal system. Social workers and others write “Gladue reports” for judges at sentencing time to detail indigenous-related background factors.

...

As of Christmas Day, 34 per cent of federal male prisoners were indigenous, and among female prisoners the rate was 48 per cent, according to the Office of the Correctional Investigator. Indigenous peoples account for a little over 5 per cent of the country’s population. In 1997, they made up 3 per cent of the population and 12 per cent of men in federal prison.

...

B.C. prosecutor Grant Lindsey noted in his arguments that Mr. Kehoe’s parents and grandparents had not gone to residential schools. His criminality was related in part to growing up with a non-indigenous stepfather who used and trafficked drugs, Mr. Lindsey said. Justice Alan Ross of the B.C. Supreme Court accepted that there was little nexus between Mr. Kehoe’s indigenous background and his crime, and sentenced him to five years in prison.

...

Justice Marchand, who was appointed by the Trudeau government to the appeal court in 2021, added it was not “simply a coincidence” that Mr. Kehoe’s Métis mother had fallen into an unstable, dysfunctional environment. He cited the report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls to make that point.

Some additional background. In Canada, indigenous people have a lot of problems. They tend to be poor, especially if they live on reserves. Many of them have drug and alcohol abuse problems, and they commit a lot of crime, especially violent crime. There's a lot of teen pregnancy, and in general, many of them live what most people consider to be highly dysfunctional lives.

It has recently become accepted wisdom that this is definitely entirely due to their historical mistreatment, especially their attendance at residential schools, which were designed to forcibly assimilate indigenous children into Western culture. The evidence supporting this is weak.

I have a few questions about this and similar cases.

Why are prison sentences so low in Canada to begin with? You often hear cases where someone kills multiple people and they get sentenced to under ten years in prison. After accounting for credit for time served and parole, they're often only in prison for a few years. Is there evidence supporting this approach to reducing crime?

Is there any reason why the optimal sentences for indigenous convicts are lower than for non-indigenous convicts?

Does it really make sense to blame the offender's dysfunctional background on his indigenous ancestry?

Does it even make sense to blame his criminal behaviour on his dysfunctional background?

Why are crime rates among the indigenous increasing?

As a non-American, I certainly care about the US interfering in other countries by spreading disinformation. Even if it were my own government, I care about Twitter acting as a free propaganda arm of the government to give it more influence when I want it to have less influence in the world, because I don't think it is actually generally acting in my best interest when it does these things.