MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
I think it’s about safety. If a woman cant absolutely feel safe around you, you are done. And one of the best ways to find out if you’re able to stick up for yourself is to try to push on the boundaries until the choice is you stick to your guns or you cave.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
I’ve always read Caplan as mostly talking about college specifically, not really anything K-12. And I agree to a large measure, that the current model of
- Get credential
- ???
- Get hired for tons of money
- Profit
Is flawed for a number of reasons. It doesn’t work for those kids incapable of attaining the diploma. It encourages the dumbing down of educational standards to allow the stupid to get on the path toward a diploma, and allows banks and schools to get rich financing this. It creates a ratchet for the actual talent who now must get ever higher degrees to prove “no im not just here because I paid tuition I actually learned something worthwhile in school”. And it wastes lots of time that could be put to better use.
I argue that at this point higher education credentials are a fetish. They are not worth something for their intrinsic value, but because both the holder and the person reading about the diploma on a resume believe it means something. It doesn’t.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
I’m a convinced Christian but rather skeptical of “retvrners” mostly because I don’t see a living faith per say (granted this isn’t everyone and im an outsider on a lot of it) I don’t see talk of praying or charity in the name of God, or attempts to live out the faith. It’s got rather a zombie feel to it, as though the person is going through motions and pep talking themselves into it and into doing the trappings but without the faith behind it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
Honestly, the ideal way to measure it is buy tracking an individual student through the system and using something like “median student improvement per year” as a way to evaluate the school itself. A school system where students improve by 0.5 a year is objectively a bad school, no matter how the class behind them does.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
I’m not demanding a literalist view of the Bible, in fact it’s a naive reading. But I don’t really think it’s a problem to suggest that certain events were highlighted or downplayed by the author to be more memorable and appealing to the audience they were writing for. It’s a narrative story, and any story humans tell will highlight and downplay elements to make the story appealing or to make heroes look better or villains look worse. I don’t find the early church reading the Bible with the kind of literalism that modern evangelical fundamentalists use in interpreting the text. Not that they don’t believe the Bible and the stories in the Bible are true, but that they are not literalists insisting that everything described is absolutely meant to be literal.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
A sort of problem is that the “marred more than any man” bit isn’t in the gospels, it comes from Isaiah 53. And if you’re dealing with a person who was crucified, the beating and the crucifixion would be part of the story whether or not you’re trying to create a memorable scene. Just like the ending of Hamilton being played for drama, this doesn’t change the fact that the historical Hamilton actually died in a pistols at dawn duel with Aaron Burr.
I’m not going to suggest that the prose of the text wasn’t written to highlight certain parts of the story to appeal to people reading the story. But I think the claims of skeptics that the story must not be true because it matches a rhetorical style is a bit too far. The story was told in a way that appeals to Romans of the first century.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
What drives such a belief? Do you think that drugs care about the moral pulchritude of those taking them? We discovered semaglutide in the saliva of Gila Monsters, which aren't known to be particularly discerning moral actors.
The drugs don’t care about morality, and I don’t see it as immoral to want to fit into a wedding dress. But if it comes to light that there are serious side effects, then the FDA is going to tighten the regulations on who can be prescribed the drug because a 19 year old trying to lose 20 pounds to fit in a dress should not be taking drugs that have serious side effects that far outweigh any benefits she gets from losing those 20 lbs. if she ends up with a permanent injury to her digestive tract, or a heart condition or something along those lines, it’s tragic.
Such risks might be worth taking if the person in question is obese enough to have the choice of risking those problems or dying if they don’t lose 200 pounds. We do that all tge time with other problems. My grandmother was on blood pressure medication that was slowly making her blind. The alternative was she has a heart attack. Blindness is bad, obviously, but when compared to a heart attack, not intolerable.
If someone with high blood pressure takes antihypertensives, their blood pressure falls. If someone with a normal BP takes them, theirs falls too. I would obviously prescribe them to the first case, and not the other two (at least for the control of blood pressure), but the mechanism remains the same.
Yes, and having blood pressure go too low is dangerous in its own right. This is why I don’t think it’s going to be prescribed as often as people think. The use case depends on how bad the person’s obesity is, both in absolute weight and in the difficulty of losing tge weight. Depending on the costs it might be much lower than what people are expecting. And as such I think touting ozempic as a miracle cure for obesity is vastly overselling it.
My expectation is that ozempic will mostly be a last resort drug used much like gastric bypass surgery is today — reserved for serious cases of morbid obesity.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
I’m in full agreement that it should never happen that a kid who can’t read and do math on grade level should not be moved to the next grade. The problem lies in the vested interests that almost everyone involved in public education have to bury systemic educational failures. Schools lose funding and prestige if kids don’t at least appear to be learning. Teacher and administrator pay are tied to kids being able to go to tge next grade and kids passing standardized tests. As such the pressure to cheat the system at tge expense of the kids is high. Once you add in the irate parents who will storm the school if little Johnny gets held back and you can pretty much expect “social promotion” to happen with the tests fudged to hide the evidence.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
I mean it depends. Getting one or two of the same data points — knowing post history, or having a similar political profile, sure, I can see that as coincidence. Once you add in posting style, knowing the history of the forum, knowing the SA connection, etc. after you hit 4-5 unique features being tge same, im generally high confidence in believing that it’s the same person. Writing styles are especially important because they’re both hard to fake and hard to mask, especially in multiple writing samples over time.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
Think that it’s a bit silly to worry about what people think about guns, mostly because the people who are against gun don’t really know much about them. And furthermore, it doesn’t answer the question of whether or not guns are actually contextually good. If I lived in a place where the police and legal system were unable or unwilling to enforce the laws that keep people and their property safe I would want a gun because I need to protect myself and my family and my property. If I lived in Japan I wouldn’t want one because it’s pretty safe even at night.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
I’m not going to say it’s impossible that this one is the one, but I think as far as putting money down, I’d wait a year or so to see if the hype is just hype or if it’s real, or if there’s not going to be issues with side effects making the product only “worth the risk” for people who are either going to lose several hundred pounds or die. If the product is only going to be used on the population of people who weigh 300+ lbs, that’s a much smaller customer base than if it can be used by every woman looking to lose ten pounds to fit a swimsuit or wedding dress. If it’s just morbid obesity, it’s life changing for those people, but I don’t think it’s something that’s going to spike the stock price like if you cured a common and deadly disease like cancer
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
I think eventually that these kinds of drugs will be shown to have extremely negative consequences for anyone who’s not extremely morbidly obese (or at least in bad enough shape that the side effects are less serious than the obesity). Of particular concern is the number of people who are using this product for aesthetic reasons rather than as medically necessary treatment. Women have used this stuff to fit in their wedding dresses as an example.
Long term, given that this substance acts like a hormone, I think that homeostasis will eventually strike leading to the body becoming less sensitive to semiglutide and therefore the person cannot feel full. And there have been some reports of things like stomach and intestinal issues, so I’m not sure about that either.
There have been lots of these pills in the past starting with fenfen in the 1990s. Most of them overhyped or have serious side effects (fenfen worked, but since it was basically an amphetamine, it caused a lot of heart problems and was withdrawn). The thing I keep coming back to is that people are so desperate for something like a skinny pill to be true that the public and doctors pounce on it without thinking about the long term effects. So that’s why I’m shorting it. I’m expecting wrongful death or serious injury lawsuits to kill it in all but the most serious cases and thus limit the profit from it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
Yes, because the government has been allowing them to get away with it. And in our fictional universe of Fascist America, those same people and their acquaintances are being beaten and thrown in jail for the first rock thrown, and thus relegated to menial labor jobs once finally released a decade later. This is what happens to rock throwers in actual police states. What middle class or upper class person is going to stick a gun in the face of an actual policeman if it means that for him and his family, their future is thrown away? What person in that situation would allow their kids to hang around the kind of people who are throwing rocks if letting it happen means the rest of the family loses their position and lives in poverty? If it meant that your other kids can no longer dream of going to college and getting a decent job afterwards?
Maybe the lower classes with little to lose would try it. But the control the modern world has is such that it’s less a fear of getting shot and more a fear of the social and economic consequences to follow of stepping out of line. They fear HR more than anything.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
I mean the fact that so many (in fact I’d argue most) urban cores have become anarchic places where the law doesn’t matter is a general argument against liberal democracy. One of the hallmarks of a good system is that life where the system has control is better than places where it doesn’t have control. When the places nearest our form of government are places that people are paying as much as they can afford to either protect themselves from or escape, the system sucks. And on that score I’d urge anyone who suggests that modern liberal democracy is the absolute best system of government to walk through the urban core of your nearest city unarmed and alone. It’s genuinely scary in many places where crime and criminal gangs are common and not pissing off the gangs is more important to survival than obeying the law.
Now if you’d go to the “bad old days” of whichever autocratic government you choose, chances are you could walk down the street at least in daylight, didn’t worry so much about crime because that government would not tolerate the kind of store-looting in broad daylight that happens today, or mugging or rape or home robbery. Try any of that in China or North Korea, you’re going to be caught and imprisoned rather quickly.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
I mean it’s been generations in Europe. Like everything else context matters. American healthcare is not anything like European healthcare— ours is a private, for-profit system designed to cut the costs of healthcare and to ensure profits for hospitals and insurance companies. In a taxpayer funded system like NIH, I’d agree that the slippery isn’t that steep, it’s probably a little steep depending on who’s caring for the patient, how difficult that care is, and the ability of the family to either provide it or pay someone to do so. In America, everything is mediated through health insurance, and as for-profit companies, those companies have every incentive to not cover treating elderly patients who might not live long anyway. Treating cancer is expensive: hospital stays, chemotherapy, pain management, in home care between visits, blood work. Giving an elderly cancer patient an overdose of morphine is cheap. Few extended families in the US can afford to pay out of pocket for cancer treatment, it’s simply too expensive, so if the insurance company refuses to cover it because the cancer treatment is expensive, there aren’t any options, either the extended family spends themselves into poverty to pay for granny’s chemotherapy, or they let her get her OD of morphine and convince themselves that she — and they — chose “death with dignity.”
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
But doesn’t that require that the population be willing to actually fire back? That might be easier with guns, but modern suburban Americans are not the same stock as Muslims in MENA. Insurgency works if you have a population willing to fight. Arabs in the Middle East sure, they’re raised to fight, to wish for tge deaths of their enemies. White suburban Americans are not made of that stuff. They’ve been tamed from birth, raised to be nice, to prize comfort and safety and peaceful living. I just find it hilarious that people expect suburban professionals who meekly obey every dictate from corporate America and schedule their two week vacations during which they do work emails are suddenly going to rebel and shoot government workers. It’s not going to happen because most of us would be under the bed afraid of the cops.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
See I think we largely agree that absolute principles do not work in the world of actual humans simply because at bottom, everyone is going to be working in their own favor and cooperate only to the point that doing so advances their interests, and the trick is to get pro-civilizational behaviors is to make benefits from society dependent on being beneficial to that society. But of course this is difficult, and probably more so with the hyper-individualism that the west suffers from that says you can do whatever with no regard for others and quite often very few social or legal consequences.
I don’t know how to get there, but I’d love for America to have social cohesion like in Asia and a Scandinavian economic system.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
Maybe it’s because I live in rural Midwest but I just don’t get that worried about the guy with a pistol in a holster on his side. I’ve never once seen anyone pull a gun like that in public. Those guys are generally the responsible ones, the guy prone to shooting at people is not going to open carry because he wants to surprise people with the gun. Open carry doesn’t lend itself to sudden shooting or crime because as you mentioned everyone notices the gun.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
Politics is always compromise between the need to get things done and the need to uphold principles. Quite often because those principles lead to paradoxes and contradictory answers depending upon the questions at hand. The principle of free speech is not infinite, you can’t talk about weapons on an airplane or in an airport, you can’t urge the commission of crimes, you can’t, rather famously, yell fire in a crowded theater (unless of course there actually is a fire), and you can’t lie about a product you are selling. Why? Other very important public goods: public safety, prevention of fraud, etc. need to be protected and cannot be if free speech is absolute.
And on it goes. Policing is a necessary evil, and using force is a necessary part of policing because criminals tend not to respond to polite requests to please stop robbing, raping, murdering, or selling drugs. That doesn’t mean you don’t have rules against overreaching, but one man’s police brutality is another man’s stopping those criminals terrorizing his neighbors.
And balancing this stuff, all these balances between two things that are goods in themselves, or at the very least avoiding some form of known bads, gets complicated very quickly. I’ll be blunt in saying that most people are unqualified for this kind of stuff because they don’t understand the issues involved. Most political conversations are vibes based bleating not even willing to engage in the entire argument, quite often undertaken by people who don’t bother to find out how things work. I put myself there, I have no idea where the highway should go, where the lines of public decency vs degenerate behavior should be drawn, how exactly to police a community without unnecessary brutality or excess permissiveness. And as such I think that politics would go much better if more people tuned out and dropped out and let people who know deal with the problems without me telling them that their solutions are not aesthetically appealing to me.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
I find that for most things having a reasonable for normal people and easy to use system is better. I can plug my height and weight into an online calculator and get my BMI. And unless you’re dealing with someone outside the 1σ of height or muscle mass BMI is good enough. And people that BMI doesn’t work for will be high level NCAA D1 athletes, pro athletes, or extremely tall people and they and their health providers can understand where BMI is wrong and do something else or correct for it.
For most people, an excessively complex measurement doesn’t work because they won’t use it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
I think another way to move the needle is to make eating vegan convenient enough that the average person can eat vegan without too much added effort— no need to scour the ingredient list for obscure ingredients that are derived from animals, restaurants having multiple options that are specifically vegan and are not salad or steamed veggies. As it is now, the choice to be vegan specifically comes with a lot of extra cognitive load. You have to constantly look at ingredients, you have to call ahead or visit the website of restaurants to see if they have a vegan option and be grateful if one exists even if you don’t want that, it’s the only place nearby you can go eat with your friends and not have to bring in food.
This is how gluten-free took off. Until a person could actually have bread products, pastas, desserts, and common foods, being gluten-free was only done if you couldn’t process gluten properly and had no choice. No one else chose to make do with only meat veggies and potatoes, never ever having a dessert. Now, there are gluten free pizzas, cakes, cupcakes, muffins, breads, and a fair assortment of processed convenience foods that don’t have gluten. It’s a bit more expensive, but you aren’t feeling deprived by it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
I think most people who fear IQ as a concept are generally unwilling to live in a world of winners and losers. They don’t want to admit that being born a loser is possible and that no amount of trying hard can overcome it. Women seem especially prone to this because they’ve been socialized to be “nice” and to believe that “if everyone had access to the stuff the rich have, they’d all succeed.” IQ is a monkey wrench in that concept of the world. A hard limit.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
I think with 4 and 5 it’s much more likely that they have various companies do that for them, and have arrangements to let them ask to see it. There’s a lot of ways that this could be happening, and since your isp/phone company/social media isn’t literally the government, it’s not really illegal. The arrangement would be something like what happens with pictures. Apple can search your photos (or at least tge ones on their cloud) for child porn. They are also obligated to report any such images they find. But I absolutely believe that if I said something that the government really really doesn’t like that it would be reported to the government fairly quickly. And it’s mostly down to liability laws — if I have a social media account where I talk about doing something illegal and I actually do it, my victims can absolutely go after those media outlets for knowing that I said that and not warning people to stop me.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
I think it’s fair to question the official report, you just need to be clear about what it is you doubt and what evidence points to the conclusion.. If I think the ME is wrong about the hanging, I better be coming with statistics and medical evidence and so on.
More of a legal question than anything, but wouldn’t a recall be a tacit admission of guilt? It seems like it might well be, as you’d have to have an understanding of the mechanism that’s causing the failure so you can replace either the part or replace the gun with a completely different design that removes the offending mechanism.
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