PokerPirate
19d ago
We're about to close escrow on a house. What are some fun things you can do with a house you own that you can't do with a house you rent? I'm specifically looking for ideas that small kids (ages 2-7) will find fun.
PokerPirate
22d ago
Arguing over the definition of "lawyer-brained" is about the most lawyer-brained thing there is. I legitimately can't tell if you're trying to satirize yourself here. Either way, I love it.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
Your classification of honorable/dishonorable is totally foreign to me. Out of all the animals you list, I would have classified dolphins as the most "honorable". Is there really a major culture/ethnicity that thinks eating dolphins is okay but eating octopus is bad? It's hard for me to imagine.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
The Ludditism stems from spending so much time on the computer for work... but here I am on a Friday night replying to a forum post instead of doing luddite things...
PokerPirate
1mo ago
My wife basically arranges all my/our socialization. From my perspective, people just randomly show up and leave. I login to the motte when I'm waiting for the code to compile.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
I thought about it, but then I didn't think the right people would find the PR subthread.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
Thanks. PR submitted at https://github.com/themotte/rDrama/pull/748
PokerPirate
1mo ago
How embarrassing... this was intended as a reply to @WhiningCoil's post https://www.themotte.org/post/2277/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/352249?context=8#context
I never understood how other people make this mistake, but now I realize it's due to a number of confusing interface features. (Or at least they are confusing to this Luddite...)
Mods/Zorba: Maybe the following interface changes could help:
- change the button text for posting a reply from "comment" to "reply"
- remove the ability to make top level posts when you are not "at the top level"; for example, in the link above there should only be the ability to reply since I am "zoomed into" a comment, and not the ability to make a top-level post, since no one should be doing that from the linked page.
I'm pretty sure I could submit a PR that makes these changes if you all are too busy, but I forget where the github repo is at.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
Luddites unite! Anyone else here not own a cellphone?
I don't even own a dumb-phone. If someone wants to talk to me IRL, I insist there be no electrons involved. It goes without saying I'm not very popular :(
PokerPirate
1mo ago
Talk about kids. I assume you don't have kids, but you can talk/ask about theirs. If you can mention being an aunt/uncle in relevant ways, then you've made a good conversation.
If they don't have kids, then they probably have a pet that they treat like a kid and you can talk about dogs/cats.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
Econ majors understand calculus to the same extent that anthro majors actually read the assigned reading...
So for good students in good schools, yes, absolutely; for bad students in bad schools, it's chatgpt all the way.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
(Tenured CS prof here.)
One thing that you're missing is the teaching/research split among faculty. At all of the most prestigious schools, research is the priority and teaching only secondary. I've never heard of a faculty member denied tenure for poor teaching at one of these schools; it's always about their research not being good enough.
This research emphasis means that you won't find any faculty members who want to participate in a scheme like this (of any political persuasion). Your proposed classes would require a lot of extra effort to teach, and generate no career benefits.
As an aside, I suspect you are also wildly underestimating the amount of effort such a class would be to teach. Trying to teach anthropology to an econ major won't go well because the econ major won't know how to read a 300 page book in a week (a typical anthro major at a top-tier school like Harvard will be reading >20 300 page books/semester); conversely, teaching econ to an anthro major won't go well because the anthro major won't have any intuition for calculus (and you can't reasonably teach any micro/macro econ without math). Developing material that actually is engaging for both of these audiences is hard.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
I honestly like rotation schemes like this. There's a reason the military (in basically every developed country) does this. It prevents all sorts of corruption, promotes loyalty to the broader organization over narrow silos within the organization, and develops a generalized competence.
It might be implemented poorly in the UK, but that's not a reason to dislike the organizational system in principle.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
I tattooed my wedding ring. It's a simple black band around the ring finger that looks like a standard ring from any distance. I did it because:
- I like the symbolism that the marriage decision was permanent and there is nothing I can do to undo that decision.
- I do enough work with machines that I didn't want to have to constantly be removing the ring (and risk it getting lost, which it would).
- Expensive wedding rings (even "simple" bands) look gauche to me and I don't like the striving-middle-class aesthetic they represent.
I'm generally wildly against most tattoos, but I think a thoughtful tattoo that actually represents something meaningful is a good choice. Maybe <1% of tattoos I've seen in the wild fit this category.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
I think the great LKY put it far far better than I ever could talking about the true character of Americans
I very much enjoyed your link because I enjoy listening to historical leaders talk about how they see the world and why.
But I don't see this link as a meaningful example of America's flaws. In the video, LKY talks about how a CIA officer tried to bribe a Singaporean security official and why he won't work with America because of the fallout. This is something that all countries would do and have done on 1000s of occasions. The fact that the US did this in a hap-hazard, unskilled way I don't think reflects poorly on the US. If anything, the fact that the CIA was incompetent I think reflects well on the US for not "needing" this type of espionage for most of its history. I expect these days the CIA to be significantly more competent than the 1960s because it has now existed for 80 years instead of 20.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
I wish our best and brightest were competing to make video games. They're all at FAANG serving ads and optimizing our attention.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
Making twins is super easy. Basically every couple I know who had kids >40 has twins due to how IVF works. I don't know of a way to make identical twins though...
PokerPirate
1mo ago
I've been thinking about the role of shaming children into desirable behavior recently. My wife is firmly against shaming in any form---she's a practicing psychologist and so is used to seeing the ways that shame has been used to emotionally torture people. But my experience is that judiciously applied shaming can greatly motivate people of all ages. Your story here is a good example.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
There's a couple at my church who were having trouble conceiving. For them, the doctor did say "you just need to do X and then it'll all work out" where X was a hormonal injection into the woman. Apparently she wasn't ovulating and so this obviously resulted in no babies.
Well the hormones worked too well. She started releasing multiple eggs/month, and now they have a set of twins and quadruplets... 6 kids under 5 years old...
PokerPirate
1mo ago
I very much enjoyed reading your post and all your links. Thank you :)
PokerPirate
2mo ago
you have to either water down "very large" from 70%+ down to like 30%
Yes, I meant on the order of 30%. That's not a majority, but it's large enough that you can't just assume that everyone in the world agrees with it. For the type of framing that OP used, I think you need the percentage of people to disagree with it to be on the order of the lizardman constant.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
I've noticed the growth of a certain type of middle-aged-white-guy-dad who has a shortly trimmed beard and short hair. This is the style that requires the least maintenance (trim beard once/week, cut hair once every 2-3 months), and so seems to be popular amongst the very practical.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
particularly obnoxious violations (like, saying "obviously we all know that [woke position] is wrong...")
I find OPs framing to be even more obnoxious than your quote because it buries the assumption of agreement until mid-post and never makes it explicit. So I was expecting to read a very different type of post, and was unhappy when I realized what was going on. At least when someone starts off "obviously we all know..." you know where they're coming from and can read/skip accordingly.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
Flagged as consensus building.
What you call "optimal cultural leadership" is really just "how to make my outgroup not get in power". And your use of neutral language to cover this switch up is bad rhetoric.
A very large percentage of Americans still find the "social justice craze" to be a good thing, including many of the academics/religious leaders/politicians you are critiquing for not being anti-social justice craze from early on. It's fine for you to be anti-social justice craze. But you shouldn't be assuming that everyone else is or that it is the norm around here.
FWIW, I would be very interested in reading an ideologically neutral account of the failures of conservative leadership to account for the rise of wokism, and what lessons can be learned in order to better spread/suppress future ideologies.
FWIW, I appreciate the broad variety of cases you post. I don't think something needs to count as "fun" in a traditional family friendly sense to qualify for the Friday Fun thread.
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