MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
20d ago
If that were the extent of the advice, I think it would be fine. Put sunscreen on is good advice. Don’t let your kids play outside is batshit insane. In fact, to my mind the benefits to children from playing outside are substantial enough that if I thought talking about sunscreen would keep a kid indoors I’d never tell parents about sunscreen.
The physical benefits are that a kid gets actual exercise, running around, playing. They develop better coordination. A kid who’s playing is basically getting hours of aerobic exercise, building muscles, and so on. A kid stuck inside gets none of that. They sit and stare at screens and get fat.
Then there’s the social benefits. Making actual real life friends improves mental health. It embeds a child in a social network of peers and other adults. It teaches social responsibility and empathy and a whole host of social skills that simply cannot be learned by chatting over a headset.
It teaches good problem solving. Kid wants to get across a stream, he might accidentally learn something in trying to figure out how to do that. He might want to play a different game than the other kids and have to learn to negotiate with the other kids to get that. He might learn how to practice a skill so he can get good enough to play with the other kids.
If children only got one single benefit, I’d still be in favor of having the kids play outside. Even if the only benefit were preventing obesity, it’s an easy trade. Cancer at 70+ is bad, but if caught early is fairly treatable most of the time. Obesity is a chronic disease that often causes heart attacks in fairly young people. Taking 5 years off retirement or 30 years? Easy choice.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
5d ago
The problem is of course that AI can take jobs faster than we can train people to do them. It’s just as adaptable as we are, maybe more so. Can an AI atttached to cooking utensils make a hamburger that’s as good as Five Guys? I think it probably could, given enough time. If it can do that I think it could probably make just about any food you wanted. I think it can also produce creative writing and movies and TV. What it takes is someone deciding to train it.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
26d ago
I hadn’t heard this particular story, but it absolutely tracks with the naive way that modern western leaders approach global politics. There’s just a weird thought that all they need to do is “be the good guys” and they win by default. Couple this with the idea that bad actors wouldn’t use subterfuge to get what they want and it’s a system that’s not hard to either work around or subvert. We expected Russia to just collapse when we disconnected them from the global exchange. We sneered at them rushing western stores to get the last goods before they closed. What we never ever seemed to consider is that Russia might well have had contingency plans for the sanctions they knew the west would impose, that they’d already created BRICs and could do just fine without us. We expected a short war tha5 they would lose any day now. Annnnd guess which side is lowering their draft age.
We’re in some sense victims of our own success. We have been so dominant for so long that we don’t think about how vulnerable our systems are or what a determined nation can do.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
25d ago
I’m personally of the school of thought that interventions should be minimal until at least the mid teens. Don’t make a fuss about their clothes, their hair, their activities. Give them a nickname if you must, but keep it somewhat gender neutral. At 16 or 18 if the child is still thinking they’re the wrong gender, then and only then is there a subject worth talking about. There are real trans people. They do exist, though I suspect they are much rarer than supposed. But I don’t think we need to go much beyond “don’t be mean to people who look weird or act weird” in a grade school classroom.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
21d ago
It’s not a scam it, like solar is overrated for large swaths of the globe simply because the weather and geography often make those solutions impractical. Solar only works in places that have a lot of sunny days. And transmission can only go so far. Wind has a similar problem— if the place isn’t windy enough, there’s no power. Add in the space requirements for either solution, and it’s a minor source of power that people overhype because they want to believe you can get free-ish energy that’s perfectly green and leaves no waste. I think it’s a step backwards simply because for most of the globe nuclear fission is so much more efficient per meter of space used and produces so little waste that anything that stops people from wanting more nuclear energy is a step away from green energy.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8d ago
The internet led to a small resurgence of pagan LARPing among largely young whites in a way often tied to Nordic black metal. Not all of this is far-right really, but much of it is. Varg Vikernes is obviously a major figure in both worlds and a pagan missionary of sorts. Naturally these people blame Christianity for destroying ancestral European paganism, and they blame this for hurting Europeans in various ways for arguably religious reasons. There is also obviously a hostility towards the fact that in Christianity an aspect of God is embodied in an unambiguously Jewish man and that much Christian ritual and scripture is descended from Judaism.
I think the lack of a religious alternative makes the idea of trying to remove Christianity from western culture more or less a nonstarter. Until there’s a robust religion that comes out of Pagan thinking in a real pagan way, with an unapologetic pagan way of think (that is, a religious and philosophical movement in authentic paganism that doesn’t have its origins in either Christianity or as a reaction to Christianity), then you can really build outward from it. Judaism is its own thing and always has been, and it’s not really a LARP of a dead religion that exists only in distinction from Christianity and Islam. Jews have their own thing. My experience of paganism is that it’s a LARP that no one takes seriously, and certainly don’t behave as though they believe in Odín, Thor, Zeus, or Athena. They don’t have a sense of reverence for their deities, the sense of them as having wants that you might not like. No sense that you can’t just pick and choose.
And I think that matters because like it or not, the best innovation the Abrahamics have is that their texts are canon and inspired and thus it gives a bulwark against it being twisted into whatever form the elites want. The Torah, the Bible and the Quran are explicit in what they say, and thus cannot be easily interpreted to not mean what the text says it means. Islam can never allow pork. It’s in the book, and the book is from God and not changing for the whims of the rest of the world.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
22d ago
The problem of people no longer seeking treatment is to my mind one of the more serious problems with this ratchet. Managed properly, people with even serious mental illness can live somewhat normal lives. But untreated mental illness can easily become a time bomb in which the person muddles until they can’t anymore. And removing guns for mental illness or cars or knives doesn’t help when the people with those mental illnesses decide not to risk losing their guns or their car by talking about their anger issues or depression or bipolar. Then it goes off in an explosion when the person with anger issues takes them out on a room full of people.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
12d ago
I tend to agree with the idea that the meme itself is artificial, and I think the aim is to give the public a meme that simply dismisses the idea of conspiracy out of hand. I don’t believe in any particular conspiracy personally, but I find the meme obnoxious simply because dismissing a claim out of hand is a dangerous thing simply because it means not even bothering with the evidence. I think the proper and critical thinking response to a conspiracy claim isn’t dismissing it out of hand, but demanding proof. If the earth is actually round, it will still be round even if I question it. And provided that the evidence is available, truth will eventually win.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1mo ago
The problem comes in the design phase of the game. The developers aim the game at “Bob”s in the customer base and then later add difficulty, usually by tweaking the HP, or maybe the hit boxes. Or they might lower the number of recharging drops. What they don’t do is create a hard game for Alice alongside an easy game for Bob. Alice no longer has a game designed ground up to be challenging in a thoughtful way. She gets the easy version gameplay - one that might well not really require strategic decisions or foresight or grinding. She just has to mash the attack button more often than Bob.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1mo ago
I think it’s a culture change. And it’s not just sex. It’s a weird thing where people no longer simply do things for fun. They have to have a purpose to do them. You don’t read because you like it, you read because it’s good for you and keep track of all the books you read because you have to hit your reading goal of X books a year. You grind all the time to make money, but it doesn’t seem that most people are doing so because they intend to actually spend it, god forbid. Instead, it’s for show. They live minimalist spartan lifestyles to not spend money. It’s a bank number, nothing real. Even vacations are supposed to be learning experiences and get you to experience a new culture. Partying, relaxing on the beach, sitting around and reading a book, these things aren’t what people think a vacation should be. I’m kinda a duffer of a writer, it’s a hobby, and it seems like the entire culture around this hobby and art in general is about selling your work. I have no objection whatsoever to selling, but it’s a monofocus on publishing, on getting sales, and working on what will actually sell rather than on having fun. Even though getting your stuff out there can be literally free (a pdf and a webpage is good enough) nope, publishing is it, sell it.
To me, the entire experience of life in 2024 is an exercise in optimization. It’s not about enjoyment, fun, or doing things you enjoy doing for the sake of doing them. It’s about trying to optimize the time used to become a better person in whatever sense it is. Almost as if somehow we’ve lost the sense of doing things just because we want to do them, to have a good time doing them. And I think there are several reasons for this.
One is work culture. Everything has metrics and you’ve been judged by metrics since you were a child. Your parents sweat whether or not you’re keeping up with your peers. And sports at least after age 9 is almost all select teams. You live in a make the grade culture. And you will do your best to measure up.
Two is that leisure time is shrinking. People work 60 hours a week instead of 40. And this shrinks your available time to do anything not work or chores. With that shortage of time, every moment counts and therefore you feel pressured to show that you did not waste time.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
22d ago
But at least in the case of a getaway driver, the driver absolutely knows and is an active participant in the murder. He knows he’s driving someone to a place where they fully intend to shoot someone, and they know after the fact they will be helping them escape. If an adult I share an apartment with takes my car keys and drives to someone’s house and shoots them, I’m not involved. I had no reason to think that a crime would result from me leaving the keys on the counter.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
24d ago
I’m glad we agree. My point though is that this is a huge problem with trying to turn schools into one stop shopping for solving everything that affects kids. They’re daycares, cultural centers, therapists, art centers, sports leagues, enrichment activities, and when they can find the time and money, education centers. I don’t think it’s possible to have schools take over everything that other institutions and families drop and still perform their primary function as education simply because everything added takes time, energy and resources away from that purpose. And I think this is also a major factor in teacher burnout. They’re wearing so many hats, many of them contradictory, with little to no support and often forced to deal with serious mental health crises while trying to teach the other kids something.
My sister in law teaches elementary school. She had a kid in her class who was cutting herself as a way to get attention as well as acting out a lot. Because the resources are minimal she had to deal with this, and pretty well beg the school to get the kid more help than she could provide (parents didn’t seem to care). In the meantime, the class could get nothing else done. That’s the result of turning public schools into the Swiss Army Knife of society. Once it does everything, you no longer have time for teaching.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1mo ago
Morally speaking, yes it is defamatory. It’s obvious to anyone familiar with the subway incident that the story is in fact a direct reference to that event and that the audience is meant to assume that the background is at least somewhat accurate as well. And as to other stories, I think the same holds true. If I’m very obviously writing a story about George Floyd and then veer off into making my fictional Floyd into a drug dealing, gang-banging pimp, it’s very clear that I intended those accusations to filter down into the real person that my fictional character is a representation of.
And again just from a moral perspective, I think if you’re going to use a “ripped from the headlines” story, you need to change the story and the character enough that it’s not intuitively obvious that I’m talking about this specific person who did this specific thing. A fictional version of the story where the event happened somewhere other than a subway, and perhaps the guy getting choked had a weapon or whatever is probably a big enough change that the average viewer isn’t pointing to the screen with Daniel Perrry’s name on their lips. Then you have a fictional character that you can do whatever you want to do especially in making them hated in some way.
Or son Scott Card had advice about world building that amounted to “don’t use warp drive, everybody knows it’s Star Trek.” And I think in any fictional story, the general advice is good. If I’m creating my own fictional story, it’s bad practice to make it obvious where I’m getting my world building, characters, and events from simply because it tends to pull people out of the experience and in the case of using real events, transfer the fiction onto the real world.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
28d ago
At risk of wildly extrapolating from my own experience with my peers, women generally don’t care that much about sports. They’ll watch if someone they know is on the team, or if the other members of their group want to watch or if their SO wants to watch, but they only rarely seek out sports on their own. They also don’t follow as closely even if they do watch. The male sports fans I know can name players, know stats, follow trades, know coaches, etc. so this also boosts the sports men like because it’s not just catching a weekend game, it’s following news about their team, it’s buying merch, attending in person (if one has the means).
I think the only way to get profitable as a women’s league is to do what women’s tennis does — make the players dress in cute outfits, push the players to be media personalities that women bond with, sell the kinds of merch that women buy because it makes them look cute. Have pinups for the men. The WNBA suffers because they can’t admit what their audience actually wants. The men want women’s sports to be hot pinups that look cute in short skirts. The women want to have pararelationships with successful women on social media. What they’ve done instead is treat the WNBA as a “men’s NBA, but with women,” which doesn’t work. Men follow men’s sports for the competition and women’s sports for the hotties.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
16d ago
But compared to the USA, Russia hasn’t been a globe-trotting military power imposing its will on other countries. This is the first large scale military invasion of a sovereign nation by Russia since the end of the Cold War. Compare that to America who has invaded Iraq twice, bombed Libya, invaded Afghanistan, and expanded NATO to include almost all of Eastern Europe. Whether or not you agree with either the geopolitical position (not wanting a NATO member along a difficult to defend border) or the stated aims (removing Nazis from Ukraine) or not, it’s not exactly the military adventures of the USA.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
17d ago
I’ll say We, as in NATO would be stupid to do it. Putin has nukes and has said repeatedly that NATO in Ukraine is his red line. If Putin is backed into a corner where either option is “lose and die”, the restraining force of gentility just isn’t going to stop him.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1mo ago
I think this is why people are really using DEI. It’s a great way to deflect attention and criticism from your story or game because any time someone says they don’t like the product, you can always default back to “the fans are just mad about inclusion.” Which means you don’t have to spend time producing something fun or good — which takes time and costs a lot of money — and still get people to buy it and even defend it.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1mo ago
I think we’ve lost the ability to self organize to a large degree. There’s a sort of (https://www.adbusters.org/articles-coded/what-is-hypernormalization) hyper normalization that I’m observing in almost every aspect of modern life. It’s like everyone knows that the system doesn’t work anymore that our leaders don’t have any desire to fix things, most of the pre-centralized system institutions are largely withered away, and no one has any inkling of a way to get back to functioning society. We know, they know, they know we know, and none of it gets better because nobody has a vision of the future that doesn’t seem hopelessly naive.
I watch old shows from the past and what strikes me most is the lack of modern nihilism. People seemed to put up leaders who legitimately wanted to solve whatever the problem was, and the writers tended to play that straight up. The person not only wanted to do good, but he was allowed to defeat evil and fix the problems and we actually had a happy ending. Jedi were not opportunistic nihilists in it for themselves. The rebellion wanted a democracy for everyone. There was the sense that people in charge of things were altruistic and not self serving and that problems were fixable. It’s mostly gone. People just sort of default to a grim dark idea of the world in which nothing works, nothing gets fixed, and everyone has an angle.
And I think the nihilist mindset is part of why we no longer make those communities. If everything is unfixable and everyone is on the take, there’s no point in trying. Just get yous,protect yourself and your family, and try to not rely on other people and systems any more than you actually need to.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
16d ago
True, but then again, we expanded NATO eastward to a difficult to defend border after it told Russia it had no intention of doing so. Even if Poland wanted in, it’s hard to ignore that having NATO troops and military equipment on the border of Russia is at least somewhat provocative. And given that it’s all of Eastern Europe and soon Ukraine as well, Russia is going to be basically surrounded. It’s about equivalent to Russia forming an alliance with Mexico and Canada. I can’t imagine a universe in which the USA would not view that as a threat.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
14d ago
I think that Nate Silver’s approach is correct, though like you, I don’t think his math is right. Probability modeling is just simply more accurate than gut feelings. Or as Ben Shapiro likes to say “facts don’t care about your feelings.” And this is something the left especially has missed quite often. In fact they missed out on putting a liberal on the bench because RBG didn’t retire with a Dem majority.
And if the polling data is showing that Biden loses in 2024, you’re talking about minimum 2029 before we could replace a justice with a liberal judge. If Trum does really good, he might win in 2028 thus making the next replacement window at 2033. That puts her at near 80.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1mo ago
I think federal office is more or less closed to non-elites. I can’t remember the last time someone from a normie background achieved such a thing. Maybe Carter, but even in his era, he’s an outlier, you’d probably need to go back the the 19th century to find a significant swath of congress being from relatively normal-people backgrounds.
As to what to teach kids, I mean I think it’s cruel to over promise on their futures. We’re in the third generation of people raised to dream big. And I think for the 99% who won’t get those things, their lives were hampered by these outrageously high aspirations that any adult could have told them were wildly unreasonable. The result is a generation saddled with a lifetime of debt for a degree that is quite literally worthless. It’s young adults feeling like failures because their wildly inflated expectations of success in fields where there are maybe ten thousand new graduates hoping for a single job. We graduate more psychology majors every year then there are psychologists in the USA. We graduated millions of aspiring artists with no real job skills despite the fact that even those who manage to sell their art almost certainly won’t make a living off their art. Publishing houses get mountains and mountains of letters from people who want to be writers. Now they can’t pay off their loans, can’t get a real job, and have been taught that the jobs they’re actually qualified for are beneath them. I’m sorry, but for the vast majority, the fine arts and liberal arts majors qualify the students for retail and restaurant jobs. Psychology is in a similar position. Had they been told at 18 that they were likely to get an ordinary job and live an ordinary life, they’d very likely have chosen a major of actual career value and not be making TikTok’s of themselves crying in the car because they got a worthless degree loads of debt and can only get jobs at call centers, retail and restaurants.
I think all of the above is a way to say that essentially people need to think more about what the failure state is. Over encouraging your kids to dream big rarely results in huge success and more likely results in heartache and financial difficulties.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
2mo ago
As much as I dislike Trump, I always thought the ballot strikes were pretty dangerous to democracy, at least absent some sort of congressional action (which seems to be the SCOTUS take) or criminal conviction of a disqualifying crime. What the states involved seemed to be doing is declaring in absentia that a crime had been committed, and that Trump was guilty and therefore the 14th amendment holds. The problem being that this creates a hole in democratic norms that you could drive a semi truck through. Without some requirement for a legal ruling and either congress or a court conviction, it’s basically what SCOTUS says: the states can remove any candidate for almost any reason without the candidate being able to challenge the decision quickly enough to be on the ballot. Keep in mind that the decisions are made sometimes mere weeks before the election, and therefore the time available for a challenge is often limited.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1mo ago
I think a huge part of this is the repeated lying. Just after the pandemic, when inflation started up, everyone was screaming from the housetops that this was a very temporary thing, a blip and due to pent up demand as the economy restarted. And during the pandemic as well, people were told not to notice that the economy wasn’t working right. So trust in officials and their statements of “the economy is just fine” have plummeted.
The other thing that’s happened is that our economy has bifurcated into the elite and the rest of us. The pandemic sped this up massively, but it’s been this way for some time. So there are two economies: one for the rich and elites for whom food costs and housing costs are trivial, and one for the workers struggling to make rent and buy food and after necessary expenses has nothing left. If you’re struggling, even after inflation related wages, to survive even after downgrading your lifestyle beyond the pain point, inflation is very very real to you. And given the struggles the economy for regular people is in the toilet. I’ve seen replies to stories about inflation not being real that detail the kinds of things that people have given up. Restaurants are simply no longer an option for a lot of people. They’ve canceled all their streaming services because they can’t afford them. They coupon and buy off brands or lower quality products, or simply do without. There’s a not insignificant portion of households that can no longer afford meat. But these are the peasants, and they aren’t to be listened to. If you’re rich, none of this matters to you and the economy is just fine. You might laugh about the cost of soup, but it’s not a lifestyle adjustment for you.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
14d ago
In general I think formalism is a good thing. If we’re to have a debate on the merits of a certain social system or political ideology, we must know what it is that we’re actually talking about. If I’m advocating for “democracy” or “white nationalism” or “communism” it’s absolutely important to know what the terms actually mean. The first reason this is important is that it prevents people from speaking past each other. If “communism” is formally defined as “state ownership of capital” then we can be sure we won’t get lost in the weeds of talking about things that look like communism that actually aren’t like Kibutz or monasteries or nuclear families. It also avoids the issues of changing definitions and snuck premises. If we don’t define Communism, then either one of us are free to change the definition in ways that suit us. If I don’t agree with communism, I can redefine it to be only totalitarian socialism and dismiss everything else as “not really communism” even if it would meet the definition. If I’m in favor of communism, I can do this in reverse and start including Sweden as a communist country because some utilities and the health care system are state run. It also prevents to snuck premise problem where I talk about things that I really wish were part of the communist system but aren’t.
I’ll agree to the decline in quality of entrants. But I think the bigger issue is student loans and the ease with which those institutions can make money by reducing rigor even in high rigor subjects. A butt in the seat of any university makes them 30,000 a year. This is putting enormous pressure on schools to not only admit anyone with a pulse, but to reduce the difficulty of coursework so students don’t fail or drop out. So you basically remove the difficulty from the courses, handhold everyone in the class, and offer more extra credit to shore up flagging grades. Which means students are no longer thinkers, innovators, readers, or otherwise able to do anything beyond regurgitating whatever is in the study guide.
Another issue, which I think has also reduced the usefulness of college is that really, the ability of any program at any school to be held to any sort of account for not actually teaching students to do the things that are a major part of doing that work. As it sits now, what students and employers know about what the program does is what the school says it does. If I’m looking at a program in biology, I honestly have no way to know whether a program I’m looking at is going to teach me to do the labs, or to teach me the fundamentals of biology or statistics used to analyze the results of an experiment. I can use reputation as a proxy, but it isn’t a very good proxy.
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