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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Isn't the hype is almost entirely a domestic Chinese thing? To what degree it's an organic expression of nationalistic enthusiasm over a competently made product or more engineered is unclear. What is clear however is that the movie isn't very good.
I don't think you're just a hater. I've actively tried to consume mainland media for the past half decade and it's almost without fail bland slop. This goes for all mediums. I have no doubt that the Chinese could make decent media if the party got out of the way, seeing what Hongkong produced and to a lesser degree what Taiwan produces. It's a bit uncanny when things are so technically well produced but universally bland. It's as if blandness is the goal (which I guess it kind of is).
His interests of what? This is theMotte, not an opinion column in the NyT.
He is not claiming that Kamala is good or that you should vote for her but that in his real life democrats are excited and centrists less apprehensive about the democrats, which seems to align well with what polling and donations show.
You don't want the type of people who are unemployed to take care of your kids though.
The people you want taking care of your kids are unaffordable since they've better options. The market can't really solve this for the middle class. The best you can do is usually hiring teenage girls from middle class+ families, but they can't do that full time for obvious reasons.
Surely it's both? The schools have control over the children 8h a day, time during which they interact with their peers. This is very likely the most important part of the day for socialisation and a part that the parents can't really influence much.
Of course the parents play an important role but so does the school. It's a collective responsibility.
I used to believe that the green parties and their members wanted to save the environment and stop climate change. I've now come to believe that isn't really true and that their championed policies are at best counter-productive in relation to their stated goals, and they're uninterested in improvement. They don't want society to work well, decrease suffering or the environment to be saved. What they really want is for their aesthetic preferences adhered to, consequences be damned.
Furthermore, like all parties outside of the mainstream they seem to be magnets for the worst members of society.
All of this is commonplace things on both the right and leftwing extremes, but it isn't recognized as much for the greens, which is an issue. They get legitimacy from championing the cause of the day while having just the same skull generating disregard for reality and/or the consequences of their actions as the commies or Nazis.
That's a gross mischaracterization. He was Miami's MVP of 2022. It's like not recognizing Zlatan in Sweden.
I think you grossly underestimate how famous (and how broadly famous) Zlatan is and overestimate how famous Tyreek (and athletes in general) is.
Zlatan has won best footballer 12 times. He is easily the most accomplished Swedish footballer of all time, not just another good footballer. He has been one of the most famous Swedes for some 26 years. In the 2010s he was the most written about famous person in Sweden, all categories. He is probably better known than the king.
Tyreek is just another good footballer, who is from another state and who's played almost his entire career for another state's team.
I don't fucking know who the left mid fielder for lets say Borussia Dortmund or Manchester City is. I have no idea who the vast majority of the Champions League players are and im not uninterested in soccer, I'm just not very interested. I certainly wouldn't recognize them.
If you're not into football I'd wager you have no idea who Tyreek Hill is unless maybe if you're from Kansas city.
And yet Korea, the place with possibly the worst gender relations on earth, accompanied by the lowest TFR by a mile somehow manages to be the world leading producer of romance dramas.
I don't think your theory holds up and this has more to do with what people producing movies and TV shows think people want and whats "in" in their social circles.
There is a massive market for romance out there and a shitton is being produced in America, just not necessarily in film. Romance is the biggest written fiction category by far and accounts for some 25-30% of books sold.
My uncle worked as an electrician his entire life and he was none of that. He's in his 70s now and still does regular part time work for fun and money. Perhaps you just worked for a terrible company?
I mean, it's not glamorous but it's not that bad either. Something like firefighting on the other hand... Now that is truly backbreaking work and everyone is physically worn out decades before retirement and there are only a few desk positions available for dozens of aging firemen.
I don’t have direct access to pre-made timestamped subtitles for Johnny Cash’s "God’s Gonna Cut You Down" from American V: A Hundred Highways (2006), but I can create them for you based on the official recording!
I don't know exactly what's is going on here but LLMs often respond like that. I'm not sure that "lying" is the correct term or if it's more accurate to say that they frequently don't "perceive themselves" as having the literal knowledge that they're trained on and with some prompting can reproduce.
The second reason is to create a layer of cultural mulch around the pathways to success. The truth is that nobody actually gets success without an extremely strong drive to strive for it.
I don't think this is true, although i guess it depends on what your criteria for "extremely strong drive" and "success" is.
I know multiple people with only a moderate drive for success that have become dollar decamillionaires and two that are dollar centimillionaires.
The people with extremely strong drive for success are doing very well too of course but not necessarily as good or better. At some point it seems that drive and intelligence hits sharply diminishing returns and you end up with somewhat luck-based results. This goes for both career and startup success.
You need enough drive and intelligence to get a seat at the table but once there you get to roll largely the same dice as the rest of the guys there.
I think this is also why the media doesn’t like Tiger Mothers. Those women and their kids unironically believe that striving is good and that puts them in competition with their betters. The Asian kids who study more than you are trouble. And if white parents start doing this as well, it’s a problem.
Once again I disagree. I think people don't like Tiger moms is because they engage in zero sum crab bucket behaviour, which if generalised pretty much amounts to torture of the youth, without material or spiritual benefits on the group level. IE. their zero-sum behaviour becomes (very)negative-sum if generalised.
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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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