JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
2d ago
You can, but then they may put you in jail, or ban you from leaving the country and mandate to check in with local police regularly.
How many Anglo-Saxons Germany has? https://x.com/visegrad24/status/2059993196495511575
How about Belgium? https://notthebee.com/article/belgian-court-rules-factually-correct-stats-about-migrant-crime-are-hate-speech-during-sentencing-for-right-wing-activist
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Probably the simple fact that disrupting municipal elections in a town with population of 343 is not going to be worth the effort, and if some crazy person decides to spend millions of dollars on doing that, it's relatively simple to amend the charter to prevent it, e.g. by allowing to more than one vote per piece of property.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Oh this is a terrible article. Non-human entities already can vote - in certain circumstances, such as for example shareholder's vote - if an entity owns shares, it is entitled to voting rights in accordance to their shares. It doesn't mean they get to vote in presidential elections and such - not everything that is called a "vote" is the same, and the asshats at Bloomberg deliberate confuse the issue, because they are partisan assholes. In this particular case, certain tiny town has a provision that property owners can vote in municipal elections - which makes sense, I mean they pay all the taxes (most municipalities live on property taxes) why wouldn't they be able to vote? ACLU claimed only human property owners get to vote, which may be a sensible approach, but not what the charter of that particular town took. ACLU wanted to force them to change their charter, because apparently "liberty" nowadays means "do what I say, or else". The court told them to take a hike. That's what happened, not "corporations have a right to vote".
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Why are Americans so insane about alcohol?
Historical legacy. Alcoholism used to be what fentanyl addiction is now. It's still a problem, but people who are prone to this kind of thing moved on to much harder stuff, so alcohol is largely not a huge deal anymore. But some cultural trauma remained.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
I thought the United States was a „free country?”
Ideally, yes. Practically, as always, it's more complicated. In Europe, you can drink and smoke weed, but if you want to criticize the government policies, you go to jail. In America, you can criticize the government (unless Democrats are in power, of course) but in some places you can't smoke weed or buy hard alcohol outside specialized stores. Everybody has their own imperfections.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Well, there could be an infinite number of potential genders, though not all of them yet instantiated. If genders can be generated on-demand (which as I understand is a basic premise of gender theory) then a simple diagonal procedure makes it not only infinite, but potentially uncountable number of genders. The question whether the cardinality of gender set is larger than the cardinality of continuum is unclear - I think there's a combined math-gender-theory PhD lurking in there somewhere.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Defensive measure against the crazies. It's easier to put a couple more lines in the form than to fend off a never-ending stream of offended individuals with a lot of free time (they always have a lot of free time) and zero common sense (they always have zero common sense). What a time to live in.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Well, yes, I dislike coercion. But also, it's not just a personal preference. You can not build a society where there's maximum coercion in one thing, but everybody is chill otherwise. It comes as a package. If you have 99% conviction rates, you bound to have a bunch of false convictions, because nobody's perfect - and Japan, if you mentioned it, has its share of horror stories, and while I share the common educated Westerner's fascination with Japan, I also know its culture has some very dark sides too (as any culture does). So it's not just my arbitrary personal preference, it's the kind of society US founders envisioned, and that's why I want to be part of it, and many other people too.
Also, for weed specifically, it's physical addiction potential is very low. Unlike, for example, alcohol, opiates or other scary things, very small number of users are physically compelled to use it, regardless of the costs and consequences. That makes it easier to suppress it, sure (if you are hard drugs addict, the threat of the jail won't scare you, because you have much bigger and scarier demon to handle) - but it also makes it easier to dissuade potential and casual users by societal means. And it's usually more effective, because the costs of full-field suppression - especially in a society like US - are very high. Both monetary and society-wise - a machine that can be used for repression will be used for repression, and it may start by repressing something terrible, but eventually somebody would have a bright idea of using it against their political opponents (who are, as everybody knows, absolutely horrible people) and there we go. Using milder mechanisms is much less risky and harmful.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
That's true to some extent - last time I visited (earlier this year) UN Plaza didn't look like a refugee camp anymore. And I sometimes could walk almost a full block before I met a drug zombie. But the shit is still on the streets to welcome me. It is moving in the right direction, but it's still very deep in the hole.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
In America, there seems to be a feeling of general hopelessness that isn’t present in China. People are still generally content, even in their decline. Why this difference in attitude exists, I’m not sure, but I can definitely feel the difference. Coming back to America, I literally feel myself getting more depressed over time. This can also be chalked up to Chinese propaganda. Most of the Chinese are incredibly assured of their country’s and their people’s greatness.
I think you have a big point here. Look at current politics. One of the major forces is "Make American Great Again" - what does it say about what America is now? Certainly not great, and nobody is pushing back on that with claims "No, we're actually doing awesomely already, there's no need for all this again business!". While the other side throws all its power of education, entertainment and academic industry to prove that America doesn't deserve to be great at all, in fact, it is so burdened with past sins that it's better for it to cease to exist, or at least cease to be America.
This is very sad to me because I think America and what it represents culturally and societally had been great, is still great and deserves and needs to be great in the future. But that certainly doesn't seem to be the current mood. Everybody uses propaganda as a pejorative, and there's a lot in it that is deserved, but I also think there's a non-zero does of propaganda that is healthy and necessary for the society. Intellectual types may fashionably frown at it, but dismantling it have not proven beneficial to anybody but a bunch of pompous academic assholes that made careers out of it, and I'd rather have a healthy, even if unfashionably crass, society, than a bunch of assholes smugly looking at the desolation and muttering "told you so, it's all lies!".
JarJarJedi
4d ago
That can be handled socially, I think. If the weed is legalized, it is not cool anymore. If it's not cool anymore, it is permitted to say it stinks. Cool people need to start openly saying it stinks, and going around in public stinking up the place is not cool.
It's all social. Alcohol used to be so much of a problem that America went through all that Prohibition insanity to try to get rid of it - and failed. And now, it's not that much of an issue anymore. I mean, alcoholism still is, but as society evils go, it's pretty mild and manageable. Weed, as an addictive substance, is much less dangerous than alcohol, and several other things (like benzos, for example). And yet, the establishment pretended weed and heroin or fentanyl as basically the same level of danger, which makes no sense to anyone.
Also, with all that bickering about which exactly substance is the worst, we still don't have the solution for the addiction problem. People got addicted to alcohol and opium, now they get addicted to fentanyl, say all this valiant struggle is successful and in 20 years people instead are addicted to AI-engineerd neo-meth or some other new shit. The problem is still the same and nobody is solving it while chasing the chemicals. The only people who even try to think in the terms of not chasing the chemicals are some woke academics, and their current solution to everything is more woke communism. We don't only have no solution, we're not even thinking about having a solution.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
coastal California from SD to SF is genuinely the best place to live imo.
It's a tricky question. Generally, given enough money that you can afford to live anywhere in California (which is A LOT of money - I am not poor, but I don't see any way I could have enough money for that in my life, barring successfully running one of those $100M childcare scams), there are definitely places in California where one could have a very good life. As long as you don't need to go out of those places too often (if you have enough money, the only reason would be pleasure), those are one of the best places. SF (excluding maybe some places I didn't get to), San Jose (most of it by now) and many other Bay Area places are not such places. And even there you'd be a subject to absolutely howling insane politicians, which one day could just decide you have too much money and just try and take it all from you, because why not. Or let your whole town burn to the ground. Or disconnect you from electricity for months because of some obscure bureaucratic snafu. Or hurt you in a myriad other creative and imaginative ways.
Granted I never lived on the east coast, and I don't even plan to visit places like Baltimore unless I am paid staggering sums of money by somebody to make it worth it, so maybe I don't know how bad it could be. To be honest, I am not very eager to find out.
I'm sure it's difficult and annoying to see your city decline
Fortunately, SF never have been my city (though it had been, once, a city I loved to visit). But a city that I considered my city for many years underwent a similar, if slightly less acute. degradation. And yes, it hurts. Especially infuriating is that I know it didn't have to be that way. I have seen how it could be not that way. It was a deliberate choice to destroy a good thing out of sheer idiocy. I will never not be salty about it.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
If I’m being honest, compared with AnShan, you’d think that San Francisco was the failing city in the second world country.
Well, I won't say anything about the country, but IMHO San Francisco is a failing city. When I first visited SF in 2006, it was much different than now and much, much better. The decline has been tremendous and completely obvious. It is a disaster area, and the disaster is entirely human-made. Many places in Bay Area are the same. I watched it happen for many years, before leaving, and it had been heartbreaking. And totally avoidable, though at the same time inevitable.
Never been to China, so can't compare really, but it's pretty clear by itself.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
I must be so bad at it, because I am not even sure what does it mean for a clothing item to "work" for me. I mean, if it does not cause me physical discomfort when I wear it, and does not look ridiculous, it works? That said, my wife pre-approves almost all clothing items I buy anyway, so maybe "working for me" is part of the criteria, I have no idea. Also, I very rarely find myself in a situation where it matters what I am clothed in, provided it is clean, conventionally looking and approximately matching the season.
JarJarJedi
8d ago
The rigs that are driven by cheap foreigners are rarely owned by them I imagine. Somebody owns them. That somebody could keep the rigs and start hiring natives?
JarJarJedi
8d ago
Strategic Surplus Saturday
Skillful Stewardship Saturday
JarJarJedi
8d ago
No it does not. It only prohibits IRS from re-opening old cases, but not from auditing any new tax returns. Whatever press article you've read about this lied to you.
JarJarJedi
8d ago
I think the limit applies to amount of losses that can be applied to other income, but there's no limit to the amount of stock loss that can be used to offset other stock gains, otherwise people with highly volatile portfolios would go bust very quickly, having to pay taxes on full amount of wins without offsetting them by losses. Imagine you had stock A and B, both worth $50, at the start of the year. At the end, A costs $1 and B costs $99. Your portfolio is still $100 but if you couldn't offset losses from A, you'd have to pay tax on profits on B even though you did not earn any profits. That does not sound sustainable.
JarJarJedi
8d ago
I looked at my portfolio (or, rather, part of it for which I can quickly get the data) - which is managed by professionals with little input from me beyond "make my money make money" and since the start of the year, between rebalancing, tax loss harvesting and other routine portfolio management, it has ~300 trades since the beginning of the year. My portfolio is beyond minuscule compared to Trump's, so I can believe his needs much more of that. And of course, people managing his portfolio may be using it more creatively than "buy the market and sit on it".
What is meant by "Trump" though? If it his personal trading or the whole portfolio owned by him? If it's the latter, I don't think it's very high frequency. We're talking about billions, in who knows how many accounts.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
Met online (back when forums were all the rage) and chatted for a while, but it was pretty lightweight. Then we met in person and within a few weeks it became clear (at least for me) that it's going somewhere, and I want it to go somewhere. Moved together within about 2 months or so, and it has been more and more serious for the next 20 years :) I don't think there ever was anything unacceptable. I mean, there are a bunch of things that wouldn't be acceptable to me in a partner, but they usually surfaced pretty quickly and it didn't go anywhere. This time it did.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
I can kind of get the whole incorruptibility thing, it has a sensible narrative behind it - like, if you live in a particularly good way, your body improves too and does not become filthy after you die. That's a very understandable line of thought. But it never included any blood at all or weird aggregate state changes of it. And with the Resurrection too - that's the narrative that has internal reason which you can appreciate, whether you believe in its factual accuracy or not.
People who convert to Catholicism on the force of having an experience at Medjugorje are weird and have difficulty becoming spiritually mature.
Yeah, that's I think where my problem is. If people go "oh, here's weird stuff happening and those guys are saying that's because of their religion, so I must join", that's a very spiritually weak conversion IMHO. I mean, business-wise you take whom you get, but that's what is called a low quality lead. It turns religious matters into some kind of magicians' contest. And it's not unnatural - that's exactly how the scene between Moses and the Paraoh went in the Bible - but Egyptians were pagans, so it looks like some kind of pretty primitive paganism. Not much removed from worshipping trees and thunder. It's very common I guess - given how widespread paganism has been over history - and could be a first stepping stone, but it's not something that one would really want to brag about if one talks about a modern religion.
I am not an atheist, but my main problem with those "miracles" are that they are... weird. I mean let's say God, the Lord and Creator of the Universe, wants to communicate with people. How does He establish His creds? Look in the Bible - he appears in a huge column of fire with a booming voice. Clear enough? Want more proof? How about turning your whole river into blood? How about producing water from stone and food from nothing? Those are miracles that make sense. Here's God's power, here's something comprehensible to people - not in how but in what happened and why. Bible's miracles may be not believable to a skeptic as an empirical fact, but they usually make a lot of sense as a narrative, if you understand what I mean. They aren't just random weird unexplained things occurring, they make sense.
Now, producing two vials of blood that change aggregate state, who is supposed to have belonged to a random third century bishop and that now randomly changes its aggregate state at certain times (or maybe other times, or maybe not)? What's that supposed to mean? Why this bishop? Why blood? Why only two vials? Why liquefaction? I know Lord's ways are unfathomable and all that stuff, but we can't just say it every time something doesn't make sense. Catholicism is largely a rational religion, as far as I know, and avoids "shit happens, move along, it's not for you to understand" kind of things. And that's my main problem. Natural phenomena don't have to make any sense. They are just random - the nature has no goals, no intent, no message for us. We're not always supposed to understand them, they are not there for us to understand some message, at least most of them, they're just there.
But the Supernatural is not random. It's supposed to have His Intent behind it. And if you look in the Scripture, you find it all over it, everywhere. But these "miracles" just feel so random for any comprehensible intent... It just does not compute.
Also, Wikipedia (I know, I know, but allow me) has a curious paragraph about this:
While the Catholic Church has always supported the celebrations, it has never formulated an official statement on the phenomenon and maintains a neutral stance about scientific investigations.
I mean, if it's a genuine miracle, why not come out and say so? Why keep neutrality? Looks like the Church's position is much closer to mine: if you folks want to have your fun, go full steam ahead, no harm in that, but when it goes to claiming it's the Lord's hand in action, let's not be so hasty.
many of these miracles have been examined scientifically and found not to have another explanation.
This is a very ambiguous statement. It could mean either of two things:
- There were scientific investigations of the phenomenon, but none of it reached the level which would allow to claim, with scientific rigor, that a certain explanation is definitely correct. There are myriad of phenomena like this, from ball lightning to migraines, where nobody has a satisfactory rigorous explanation, that's a common thing. There are theories, of course, but none of them has enogh evidence and explanatory power behind the theory to establish it beyond reasonable doubt.
- There were rigorous scientific investigation (or several) that somehow concluded that no natural phenomena, neither presently known nor possible to discover in the future, could explain the observed result, and it is established that a natural explanation of it is impossible. This would be highly abnormal and if that indeed happened I would very much like to hear about it and understand how such thing could be established.
If.
Americans are well aware of it. They are also well aware that Europe is given to them as a warning it could get way, way worse if they're not careful.
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