RenOS
Dadder than dad
No bio...
User ID: 2051
RenOS
Dadder than dad
6hr ago
Don't worry, as a Paki Indian in the UK you're bottom very slightly above bottom rung in terms of dating, and being a doctor is roughly comparable to construction worker in terms of income there.
On a more serious note, I've noticed that men who are having decent success (in terms of lots of matches) on dating apps seem to run into a lot of crazies, and it's unsurprising that psych med students have the worst ratio of all. Having "doctor/psych trainee" in your dating app bio kind of screams "do therapy for free, but you can tip me with sex". Neurotypical women also don't really want to date, they want to have a stable relationship, so they spend as little time as possible on these apps, so you're already oversampling from a biased sample.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
6hr ago
My experience has been that it's generally a fool's errand to try to change someone's behaviour whom you're not in a position of power over (heck, I find changing my own behaviour difficult enough, at least our daughter listens for the time being). Also, sleeping 16 hours a day is not really something people do for fun, does it really matter whether it's the depression or just physical? She is 81 and clearly very unhealthy, at that point it's kinda understandable to just wait for death with minimal discomfort, even if that sounds sad. It does not seem clear to me that "just become more active and healthy again" is actually an option on the table for her.
For your father-in-law, I would consider a serious talk about wasting away since he is clearly in a better shape and would benefit more from more activity, but in the end it's also up to him. We have a somewhat similar situation with my wife's grandfather, who was struck by the unexpected death of his wife. Before, he was unusually healthy for his age both physically and psychologically, since then he has started to explicitly say he's now just waiting for his time to come to an end. He stopped almost all physical activity and he has started to show signs of a rapidly deteriorating dementia. Despite all his children constantly trying to to talk him into becoming more active again, with varying angles. It's unclear (though not unlikely) whether he will actually die anytime soon - they're certainly not letting him.
In general, I'm happy that we have the options of modern technology and medicine, but it seems to me we're culturally failing pretty hard at gracefully taking advantage of them. Though I guess that is now going beyond the scope of this thread.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
8hr ago
The steelman of this is claim is imo that conservative christians have been the primary enforcers of the current political landscape where the (mostly secular) center-left is tolerating and even regularly allying with the far-left fringe, but the center-right (which is almost entirely the aforementioned conservative christians) is not even tolerating, let alone willing to ally with the far-right.
For concrete examples from my own life experiences, being a literal card-carrying full-blown stalinist communist apologist at university will certainly make you fringe and most probably bar you from the highest formal position of powers in the university itself, but you're unlikely to get kicked out for it and you can wield considerable influence through student activist groups, unions or similar. A professorship is also not out of question if you're otherwise sufficiently savy. On the other hand being even just a suspected Nazi-Sympathizer can easily get you kicked out from Messdiener or the Landjugend (the two primary rural christian youth groups, at least where I'm from).
As such, it's unsurprising that the far-right is especially negative about christian conservatives; They ought to be allies (at least occasionally), but really aren't.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
8hr ago
By contrast, politicians in Britain, America and Australia, which have the same migration situation but less monolithically progressive politics and media, will publicly say more should be done to control illegal immigration, stop the boats, it’s not right, it’s a crisis, propose some measures blah blah (I mean even Biden does this to some extent) but then actually do nothing. And in a way, that seems to stifle some of the dissent.
This seems to work across the west, across different topics. Here in Germany we regularly have even greens occasionally admitting the struggles to get the latest immigration waves integrated, that our social system is buckling and that we need to do something. But any policy that has any chance of actually reducing immigration levels is stridently opposed, the "hardest" option on the table seems to be to crack down on crime but that doesn't actually solve the large numbers of social benefits recipients, where the only solution seems to be "support them more, hopefully they'll get a job this time". In science, people are willing to admit that standards in the soft sciences are low and that something needs to be done, but actually firing anybody is apparently impossible (and admitting that they're very biased as well and take advantage of the low standards to advance their own political agenda is usually denied strongly as well).
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1d ago
The media is also still regularly uncritically reporting numbers from de-facto Hamas controlled bodies such as the Health Ministry. The UN is likewise blindly trusted, despite the fact that they have been caught red-handed over and over at this point. There is a very strong zionist lobby with a lot of influence, but the media landscape as a whole is a mix of very different biases.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
2d ago
The self-determination in the current mainstream conception is always individual, though. It makes thus sense once you consider that individuals are indeed more free to live their life in the West than in Russia and self determination is supported on those grounds.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
3d ago
In addition togenomic prediction/lifeview, https://www.orchidhealth.com has also recently entered the consumer market afaik. I have little personal info on them, though.
FWIW, a large part, possibly majority but at least close to 50%, of our college-educated left-leaning friends (and it's not even unpopular among our non-college-educated friends) is some kind of vegetarian. Among those who aren't, the majority is constantly stressing how little meat they're eating. The line between them is pretty fuzzy, since there's a decent number of people who claim to not eat meat at home, but sometimes outside when there's no other option, and these people will sometimes consider themselves vegetarian anyway, sometimes not. Almost nobody is an unabashed meat eater. As justifications go, animal sympathy is at the top for the stricter vegetarians, health benefits for the less strict (this actually includes myself), climate considerations are generally second line ("and btw it's also good for the climate I've heard").
Surprisingly, this did not greatly change when we became parents; Yes there's very few super-militant vegetarian parents, but we know multiple families where only the children eat meat, not the parents, and eating relatively little meat is actually the norm.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
10d ago
Yes, I'm also considering writing a post about (the loss of) trust which imo explains large parts of our current problems. Blacks have lost trust in whites ever since the colonial era's blatant racism, and only ideologies that strongly denounce this past manage to successfully build a coalition with them. The right has lost the trust in public institutions since many of them blatantly push a left-wing agenda, sometimes even above the interests of the institutions they nominally belong to. Center-left people disgruntled with wokeness don't trust the right with power due to the moral majority & McCarthy era and more recently the rights failures to replace laws and institutions they got rid of with functional replacements.
The same is happening on the country level; Russia, after briefly moving towards the west shortly after the fall of the USSR, has lost the trust in the west due to consistent "will never happen -> has already happened, sorry" Nato-creep. China, India and many other non-western ascendent countries feel likewise betrayed by a western attitude they interpret as "we totally tolerate all cultures, except everything about them that's not about exotic food and funny clothes, or else you're a fascist and we'll punish you with sanctions".
RenOS
Dadder than dad
10d ago
As advice, one thing that is not explicitly banned but somewhat frowned upon and which makes people suspect a troll is writing a top-level post and then not engaging at all with the comments. You can't answer everything, but most regular people would at least be reactive for a short while after writing the OP.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
10d ago
Vegetarianism/Veganism has already been extremely popular on the left due to animal sympathy, and they can be quite pushy about proselytising. Mandatory Veganism is imo a weakman. Anti-natalism is the same; Having less kids has been quite popular on the left (arguably in general) because it means less obligations, more money you can spend on hedonistic pleasures, more time to do whatever you want. In both cases, climate justifications have come long, long after people argued for & adopted the change in the first place.
Also disagree on the second point. If you're actually seriously trying to tackle a problem, you'll usually end up with some technical, politically agnostic solution. If I notice that a certain widely used statistical measure is biased by, say, base rates, then I'll just recalculate it with a correction term, write a proof that the correction term indeed does what it should and maybe write a paper about it. I don't advocate that more BIPOC representation will somehow solve it (well, maybe I'll advocate for more statisticians, but that's not considered political yet). If engineers notice a turbine having a rare but potentially dangerous unexpected failure mode, they'll add a component to compensate or re-design it.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
12d ago
I was talking about Peter who assigned something ridiculous, though now he claims he was just trolling with that one.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
15d ago
This ties in with another argument :re poverty-as-a-cause-of-crime. If you actually do some ballpark estimates for the average criminal, you'll frequently find out that they make money barely on par with a regular minimum wage job, often worse, with the added risk of ending up in jail. This goes against the claims of significant parts of both left and right; The left often thinks that people turn to crime since minimum wage jobs aren't enough to get by, but as it turns out crime isn't actually better so that argument is kinda moot; Many on the right think that criminals are self-serving egoists taking advantage of a well-meaning system for their own gain. As it turns out, the majority of criminals are probably just idiots who are screwing themselves over and others. And at least for me a lot of things clicked into place upon that realisation; For example you'll notice that many people who just barely get by have a certain degree of self-destructive behaviour that holds them back significantly, they just also have some admirable (or at least tolerable) qualities in addition. Your contractor seems like a good example.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
15d ago
I was literally taught in a german school that resettlement was a serious option for awhile and that some Nazi officials probably indeed favored it. It's just that when they ran into even moderate difficulties they jumped to "let's just kill them all send them to camps where they mysteriously vanish, then". Which is in no way surprising, since the Nazis are very much on record even before the actual holocaust started how much they'd like to cleanse the world of jewry.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
15d ago
It seems you haven't been here for very long. This forum had this problem a bunch of times and has banned multiple people over it, with different offending topics. Holocaust denial is certainly an all-time-favorite, but there's been a pedo who would constantly top-level-post about age of consent, another who invented a new "scientific" theory of power and would write multiple absurdly long, barely readable screeds about it, and Skookum was quite recent. It's a rule only a certain kind of obsessive tends to run into, but it's important imo.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
18d ago
I think you're greatly overstating hostility to #4 here. This is my field and I'd say the majority of biologists is not only fine with it, but even frequently colloquially uses the language indicating #4 as the primary reason. Me included. Yes, it's more complicated overall, but "genetic variants associated with sharper front tooth developed because it allowed specimen to sever meat better and so they had more offspring" is more or less correct in my view.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
18d ago
Tbh if you're at that level, the answer is probably "Please don't buy stocks, you're gonna get ripped to shreds by the professionals'. There's basically just two reasons why I'd say it's a good idea to buy specific stocks by yourself:
-
You're a professional who knows the ins-and-outs on how everyone else does their stock picks, where they get their information from, and generally plays on an equal footing with them
-
You're a domain-specific expert who is extremely bullish/bearish on a certain technology by a specific company due to deep knowledge that traders can't reasonable have
In the first you already know where to look, in the second you only want to trade on a short list of companies you know well anyway.
Disclaimer: Not a trader precisely for this reason
RenOS
Dadder than dad
23d ago
Coolness or fuckability seems like a simpler and better classification, though. Rockstars are cool/very fuckable, but generally aren't considered jocks or class clowns, see David Bowie for example.
I've never been super invested in this debate, but to me one of the most striking features is that almost all the evidence we have available is filtered through people who have a strong incentive for bias in favour of the zoonosis side. The chinese establishment seems to favour a variant of zoonosis with a heavy implication of coming from somewhere abroad, the local chinese lab favors zoonosis for obvious reasons, and even the global biomedical establishment is hardly unbiased on the matter. Further, I find the justifications on the biggest coincidence, the failed grant for a similar furin-cleavage site, very poor - I'm literally currently working on a project which I failed a grant on. I know how labs operate in the west and almost all of the claims that they would never do this or that are ... just BS, honestly. And chinese labs have a well-deserved reputation to be even worse.
I also agree with the rootclaim guy that the wild overconfidence of the zoonosis side is a very poor look. I really don't get how many people apparently got convinced by this debate, though I only read Scott's textual account, not the full video debate.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
23d ago
The coalition is not actually doing anything yet, though. Even the SPD lead is rather mealy-mouthed: "we can't entirely rule out a Verbotsverfahren as a last stop, maybe". People are certainly complaining a lot about the AFD, which is legal. Funny enough I've heard the same criticism from the left in person - the SPD hasn't actually done anything against the AFD yet, and Scholz has mentioned deportation favorably in the past, therefore they secretly agree! I find that silly, to be clear.
More questionable is that AFD-members are being kicked out of some smaller organisations, which I'm mostly against, but this has little to do with the FDP, and is difficult to legally control without throwing out freedom of association in general.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
23d ago
What you call milquetoast false-centrism, I'd call regular centrism. I know Corona is your hobbyhorse, but the FDP was if anything overly critical compared to the center (which suits me, since I also was on the critical side).
On the AFD, the FDP is explicitly on the record as being against the Verbotsverfahren. Privately, I've argued multiple times that the AFD has a point, and that as long as the german political establishment is unwilling to tackle the dysfunctional, barely existent border and immigration politics, they will only get stronger. This is reasonably close to the stated position of the FDP, though I suspect that being libertarians they're more in favor of open borders than I'd like, but unfortunately we don't have a topic-based voting law.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
24d ago
If you want to know, my last vote went to the FDP, which is the german libertarian party. Unlike the US, the FDP is not consistently on either side, but has coalitioned with both sides (currently it's in fact part of a broad left-leaning government). Myself I'm not even a straight-ticket FDP voter, I've considered the CDU (originally center right, though nowadays probably just pure centrist), due to their family-first focus which I find appealing, and the SPD (center left), since I'm in favour of broad redistributive policies if done right. My vote ultimately went to the FDP however since it's the closest thing to free-speech absolutism on the menu and because they currently appear to be the party most concerned with imo common-sense concepts such as "having a functioning economy".
Privately, at work, and online, I primarily push back against left-wing orthodoxy since it's quite common among my acquintances.
Nevertheless, and yes this is precisely what I mean, if you try to force me into a binary left-wing orthodoxy vs right-wing orthodoxy, both enforced equally, I'll choose the left everytime. The right needs to be significantly less orthodox for me to consider it.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
24d ago
That's my point though. Universities should strive for academic excellence and political independence. However, it got increasingly taken over by leftist politics, got (mostly correctly, then) labeled an enemy by the right, and is correspondingly now a target. I've been a critic of this process from the start, precisely because this was the only logical outcome. Nevertheless, as far as I can see the right has always been more interested in using the same tactics of silencing and outlawing disagreements, just now for their position, than in restoring some semblance of academic excellence.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
24d ago
I mean, I push hard enough against left-wing orthodoxy both in person and online that I'm regularly reflexively labeled right-wing, and I have the same frustration as you with plenty of other allegedly centrist politicians who fall hard for the "no enemies to the left, all enemies to the right" fallacy. You're really throwing this at the wrong person, sorry.
Ah, I was being facetious. Highly-educated Indians don't have a bad rep at all (at least not in London where I lived for a while, can't really speak about Scotland but would be surprised if it was different there), and being a doctor has always been in the particular sweet spot of being both reasonably high-status and being a good person that makes women swoon, even if the UK is arguably not the best place to be one. I'd be surprised if you'd struggle terribly.
On online dating in general, the worst at everything are universally men, and more obviously so as well. My point is rather that it seems like "medium-value" guys, while having less matches overall, seem to have a better ratio since mostly serious, normal woman show interest in them. "High-value" guys attract a lot of attention, which will disproportionally be crazy attention. That girls fall in love from like meeting you twice lends credence to this, imo. But in the end this really is just second-hand impressions from acquaintances; I've never used, nor intend to ever use, dating apps myself.
On therapies, I've gotten that impression more than once; Though it also seems to be the reason why some people seem to get stuck in therapy perpetually.
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