Ioper
2mo ago
It is not the military that makes the USG "insolvent", it's generous unfunded (mostly elderly) entitlements. Neither America nor much of western Europe ran up these massive deficits during the cold war when military spending was much higher than today. The issue clearly isn't military spending.
And even if one wanted to make cuts to the military it could easily be done without endangering freedom of navigation, by for example making cuts to the army rather than the navy.
How can I trust that they have any deeply held convictions or principles at all, if the sentiment comes and goes that easily?
Why would you trust that?
In my estimation the vast majority are largely amoral and just go with the flow. My wife is mostly amoral for example, she doesn't have moral opinions on almost anything. She isn't stupid or malevolent, she just doesn't care.
When I want to talk about some moral issue she just zones out because she gets bored. She wants to talk about what happened at her work or what she is planning for the garden or the baby room.
Very few people have moral opinions as anything more than accessories or as part of cheerleading for their team. People do get incredibly passionate about cheering/booing though.
Fun fact: Japan has almost 2x the tfr of korea. Japan has managed to stabilise and even reverse the trend somewhat while Korea breaks new records of low tfr every year.
We had a major economic crisis in Sweden in the 90s and rebalanced our unsustainable social security system, which was previously thought inconceivable. It wasn't the end of the world. There is still fairly generous social security, pensions, our nation debt is down from 73% to 32% and taxes are down (probably unrealistic for the US...).
It can be done if a crisis gets bad enough, the insanity can stop.
Politicians usually do the right thing as soon as they've explored every other option. Not every country is Argentina.
Ioper
4mo ago
I think most people don't care a great deal about homosexuality but what frequently happens is that male friendship is sacrificed for (the possibility of) gay romance. People do care about the friendship and dont want to be on guard to not signal sexual interest to the player-sexual characters when they're just trying to be friendly. A prime example of this was in the release verison of BG3 when you could just be friendly to Gale and suddenly you had sex.
If some character was clearly gay from the outset and not conditionally gay/bi depending on what the player does, complaints about this would be a non-issue. It would also be a far smaller issue if video game writers were more competent but that's never going to happen.
IMO, Playersexuality is an awful idea that should be binned.
Ioper
11mo ago
Not sure that is the best route for you.
I've seen this a thousand times and it's (almost)never about lacking specific knowledge about popular culture, the issue is that you think this is the issue. You're trying to engage in these subjects like a nerd would discussing his nerdy interests. People generally don't want to talk like that even about the things they are interested in.
What you need to do is learn how to engage in small talk, not study popular culture like there's an exam coming.
Ioper
9mo ago
Regarding your first point and the blog post, this runs very counter to my lived experience so I'm inclined to believe this is either strongly socially mediated so that it isn't an underlying unchangeable reality or that it's a fringe opinion mostly held by internet wierdos.
In my experience many women fear the pain of childbirth but this doesn't hinder them from seeking natural born children. Furthermore, it's practically always the women that push for having children earlier or having more children. Its the men that want to get back to doing activities like you want to with your brother, or fear losing that by having children, not women.
My impression is that its the demands and costs of modern life that prevents women from having more children, and that the "revealed preference" mostly reveals what society strongly selects for, not what women want. The fact that Korean children study 16 hours a day doesn't "reveal" that is what they really want, it reveals that they're trapped in a destructive zero-sum game that hurts everyone.
I feel like there it is a bit of a mistake to assume that hazing and macho locker room culture necessarily overlap with "rape culture".
I've been part of the former and I saw no indication of that. Guys were borderline raped by their team mates but treated women with a lot of respect and care. It's not in the same mental world and I don't think the guys considered what they did to their team mates sexual, even if it literally was. I'd argue that it's really bad if the hazing goes overboard or just becomes a sustained severe harassment (and given how hard it is to police it might be better to outright ban it), but that doesn't mean that people are more disposed towards sexual assault towards women. I've not been part of one of these youth academies but I've known and played with people who have, and they've not been worse than anyone else.
What I think is going on is that celebrity makes people behave really badly, both the guys being celebs and the women seeking their favour/attention. It seems to me that the same thing happens with all kinds of stars: sports, music, acting. It's not about whether the people involved do (severe)hazing or not, it's that they're idolized stars, allowing them to do whatever and still be rewarded for it. It creates a really fucked up incentive structure for everyone involved. The younger you are and the more isolated from general society you are, the worse it gets, which points in the direction of these academies possibly making things worse.
I understand that there is a desire to put an = between hazing and "rape culture" but I think that is a mistake and obscures what's really going on. Solving hazing is probably desireable, but that won't solve the sexual assaults and pretending it will is counterproductive.
Why not both? Extremist twitter brain rot turbocharged by copious drug use, in combination with being surrounded IRL by people competing to suck you off.
There aren't very many older women I respect and want to be like. My own mother is fine, and it's basically fine if I'm like her, but I feel this in general, like older women are kind of just playing around, with very little purpose.
To be fair i think this goes for men too. I don't think this has to do with denigration of women's work or anything but with the very extended retirement and generally privileged existence of a good portion of the current generation of "elderly". The retirement, where people are protected from a lot of current hardships through various policies such as Medicare, inflation protected pensions or the abolishment of property tax (while simultaneously massively benefiting from their inflated value) leads to a sort of reversed and very prolonged adolescence where slightly diminished but perfectly capable people mentally, socially and spiritually degenerate through disassociation from the economy and purpose in general. Being a reality divorced leech isn't very admirable, regardless of age.
Men aren't protected from this much more than women, even if they often retire a bit later and aren't stay at home moms with kids in school.
People who keep working usually are worthy of respect though and I do respect most of my seniors at work, men and women. There are a few retired people I respect, they are almost always very active with helping out caring for their grandchildren, but can also be active in some kind of local charitable organisation.
I feel like you already got most of it with polearms not being concealable but I'd also argue that they're unwieldy and designed to be used in formations and/or at choke points. At the length you're describing something concealable you're just ending up with a much worse sword.
I think a better question is why're they not using shields and armour. A small shield like a buckler could be concealed and even something larger could probably be brought along if it's wrapped up. As for armour, you could easily wear a gambeson under a large coat/jacket.
My guess is that they're generally not planning to fight other armed and unsurprised people. Furthermore I think people just are vain as well. People shoot guns holding them sideways because it's cooler, despite the massive downsides, why would they want to look like a dork, wearing a gambeson (that likely cost a good deal)? Finally, If you're going to that much effort and expense then why not just get a gun?
I think you underestimate the degree to which plenty of people completely stop working when "working from home". You might think they were low productivity before but now they're producing practically nothing.
I'm under the assumption that we will move towards a situation where pretty much all jobs for which it isn't trivial to measure productivity for, isn't commission based or where the the organisation is sufficiently small that people share ownership, will move back to almost 100% office.
This means all larger companies, governmental agencies, etc. When it isn't it will often be with a tacit understanding that the job is in fact part time.
Ioper
10mo ago
Legible output selects for departments engaging in fake performance. Like health centrals that focus on dealing with non-sick people or police departments boosting numbers using speed traps instead of following up on rape cases. This shit is absolutely rampant and without an in-depth understanding of what the organisation does and what the "legible output" actually means, making cuts based on that is a godawful idea since most of the most important people don't have legible output and the least important and the actively parasititic often have large legible output.
Ioper
2yr ago
This just reads as lazy incumbents wanting to use regulatory capture to catch up and not be disrupted, imo.
I'm not the least bit afraid of GPT4 and seeing the improvement of between 3-4 I'm not afraid of gpt5 either. Gpt6 maybe, who knows, well see how the next iteration turns out.
There will probably be issues at some point in the future but pausing at GPT4 in particular sound like a transparant attempt of getting time to catch up so that Google search etc. isn't disrupted + some general hysterics.
Somewhat related but I've become convinced that the way the doctor profession works is a major drain on society.
A practicing doctor is a somewhat important profession that requires a reasonable amount of intelligence to do competently, but they also have horribly low productivity compared to many other highly paid professions, seeing as the doctor only ever helps as many people as they physically can see. Combine this with fantastically high base compensation and a borderline ironclad employment security until the grave and we have a societal problem where medicine effectively becomes a form of sinecure for the intelligent.
There are more productive professions within the realm of medicine like researchers and med-tech engineers (and there is some overlap with doctors here) but they generally aren't meaningfully better compensated than regular practicing doctors and often get paid less.
I'm not saying these people shouldn't be well compensated or that we shouldn't have doctors but the current incentives leads to a situation where a good portion of the most intelligent are drained away from the economy to do low productivity work at a very high cost.
This could all be solved with an increased amount of doctors. The intelligent and driven will go on to more productive work (whether in the realm of medicine or elsewhere) and society gets access to more doctors for a more reasonable cost (just how much lower depends on the country).
Ioper
3mo ago
That depends entirely on what constitutes "special education programs". I remember going to some supplementary reading classes during grade school, along with a good number of other students, for an hour once every couple of weeks for maybe a year. Were we a special education program? It wasn't part of our regular class and we met with a special education teacher. Some other people went to a speech therapist, was that a "special education programme"?
Without knowing how special education program is defined, these kinds of stats aren't very interesting.
Ioper
9mo ago
Its been a while but:
- Being unhygienic and smelly
- Leaving trash everywhere they go
- Almost always wearing very casual and dirty clothes
- Getting into loud public fights about inane shit.
- Getting drunk on weekdays and getting into fistfights at the local pub
- Doing drugs in public
- Spitting indoors
- Stealing from the local supermarket
- Wearing way too much makeup and waxing their eyebrows
- Harassing women
- Very publicly running their prostitution business out of their apartment.
- Constantly abrasive towards everyone
- Having phone calls (or watching/listening to media) on speaker on public transit
- Stealing laundry times (if you have a communal laundry room), and fighting with you about it when confronted
- Constant, unrelenting lies about their poor behaviour
- Casual destruction and defacement of public property
Another factor is how much the "Shy Tory" effect still matters.
Polling institutes in Sweden have had pretty severe issues with the "shy Tory" effect the past few elections concerning SD, the anti-immigration populist mildly reactionary party, not the traditional right wing.
In the elections in 2010 and 2014 (first time they made it into the Parliament) they were pretty severely underestimated, by as much as 20-30% (easier when their total vote share is relatively small). The pollsters were heavily criticised and even accused of partisanship for this with many people asked how they could possibly have made such big errors and if their methods really lead to representative results.
Then in 2018 they ended up actually overestimating SD by about 10%. Everyone were equally as surprised by this polling result as they were the previous two, but none more than the some of the representatives from SD in TV panels, who strongly believed in getting as much of an overperformance as previously.
Then in the latest election in 2022 SD were as accurately polled as anyone else.
My point is that I don't think its wise to rely on or expect a shy Tory effect because polling institutes can adjust and so can the population.
So, will Trump be underestimated or overestimated in this election? Are people outside of blue strongholds actually still "shy"? I have no idea, but I do think it's questionable to continually rely on this polling pattern over time when making predictions. Polarisation surrounding a candidate should probably be treated more like a thing that increases the margin of error of polling, especially when the worst of the hysteria seems to have died down.
Ioper
1yr ago
And slavery was made illegal in Sweden in 1335 and serfdom never really existed either in practice or as a legal concept, even though there were major agricultural areas (Västgöta slätten, Östgöta slätten, Mälardalen).
The far more important thing to look at is societies like China and India and South Korea and Singapore and Japan, which mistreat their own women to such an extent that their societies fail to reproduce themselves.
This was and still is a very curious thing to me. I have three friends with east Asian wives, one from Korea, one from China and one from Japan. Their wives are all middle or upper middle class and they have all married either laterally or downwards (especially lookswise), but all seem exceptionally happy with their husbands, who are not really exceptional people.
As I've come to understand it this does not have to do with fetishization as much as with just how badly these women have been treated by their previous Asian boyfriends and the general expectations on them from their prospective in-law families and society in general. From the perspective of a decent Swedish guy, the standards for being a good partner seem astonishingly low – to the point where failure almost seems to require an active effort.
It just seems so unsustainable for them. It's not like we're perfect or giga-cucked over here but it's still a walk-over, at least in the mind of these particular women. They just want to be treated with respect by their partners, be able to work after having children and not be treated as pseudo servants/slaves by their in-laws. I've had a bit of hard time really believing this, could it really be that bad?
Perhaps.
Or perhaps my friends' wives have a overly negative view of their home societies and that's why they ended up with western husbands. Or maybe it's a combination.
As a self admitted enjoyer of east Asian cultural products I agree that they're doing well and are even ascendant but the Chinese don't really factor into this.
LoL is an American game, made by an American studio in America, that was acquired by a Chinese company well after it was released and got popular.
China is lagging in all areas of culture production, games, movies, TV and books. There are a few standout hits like wukong or the three body problem but in general the output is trash, unbelievably so. Have you tried playing the chinese mobile Skinner box games? Watch Chinese hit tv shows? Movies? They're almost universally god-awful. They have the technical and financial capacity to create good things but overwhelmingly aren't, even compared to woke America, which really says something.
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