RenOS
Dadder than dad
No bio...
User ID: 2051
RenOS
Dadder than dad
7mo ago
Reminds me very much of Vlad the Impaler. By Romanians themselves he is regarded as a just tyrant that defended his homeland. He was exceptionally cruel to his enemies, but he - together with many Romanians - saw that as necessary to keep order and peace. By his enemies, he was allegedly slandered as a petty psychopath.
You obviously need to be careful either way, but it's imo very notable that on everything important and relatively verifiable, Moulay always was cruel only to true enemies. Nobody even claims that the sons or wifes he killed weren't conspiring against him. As far as I can see the claimed exceptional depravity strictly was about unverifiable slaves and such. I wouldn't be surprised if he was in truth a relatively just ruler, even if extremely cruel.
Of course, it could also be the other way - that Vlad was inappropriately idealized by Romanians. I wouldn't be surprised about that either, and in history this kind of ambiguity is kind of fundamental.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
7mo ago
When I was browsing 4chan I've seen images of Hamas soldiers showing off a dead girl with only underpants on. No links though.
If you want to quibble that it's technically not fully nude be my guest, but that's about as convincing to me as "well it wasn't rape bc she was already dead".
RenOS
Dadder than dad
18d ago
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.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
29d 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
2mo ago
Knife so, so much. If you protect your face/body with one arm up and just move in then you'll most likely kill the other guy with just a broken arm and maybe a broken nose or rip. Stabbing wounds are way more serious and can be inflicted much more easily.
From a simple practical pov, there is a reason why ancient armies almost universally used edged weapons, and short knife-like swords were quite popular even when other options were available. I'd trust them to know better than us.
who counts for these categories
Self-identification, genetics and identification by an unrelated observer generally have very high concordance, so any of those will do fine. One of the biggest issue is when dark-skinned asians and indians are thrown/put themselves into the same bin as african blacks, but the majority of them correctly infer that the term "blacks" actually implicitly means "african black".
and what attributes do they share within their category that distinguish it from the other two?
You know you can google this, right? I'm a postdoc studying the genomics of diseases, primarily cancer, so I can tell you that even just the basic caucasian-black-white classification has a huge predictive value on almost any disease. The most trivial example is sickle cell anemia, which is extremely common for blacks and relatively rare for other groups, and based entirely on genetic adaption. Plenty of cancers vary greatly in rarity between the races as well. For a somewhat recent overview on cancer and race: https://www.cell.com/trends/cancer/fulltext/S2405-8033(17)30040-7?sf66683340=1&code=cell-site
But there's plenty of other examples; one of my favorite recent papers is Tobler et al: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2213061120
They analysed ancient eurasian genomes and found a number of hard sweeps in the population that is the ancestor of almost all non-africans, and in particular showed that the loci they found are almost entirely absent in contemporary africa. These loci are associated with a large range of basic attributes. In a first category are cilia formation, skin structure and obviously skin color, all of which are most probably directly related to cold adaption. In a second category are neurological adaption, the result of which is, let's say controversial, but possibly also simply related to cold adaption. At last there are metabolic differences, relating especially to fat formation (also mentioned in the paper on cancer & race). And to repeat, all of these are purely genetic differences, that are present in almost all non-african populations, and almost entirely absent in african populations.
Between asians and caucasian, there's primarily the denisovan and neandertal admixture, respectively, but also some other differences. I won't expand on them since frankly I think there is already a pretty large effort difference in this discussion. You can trivially look them up however.
No, I am no expert on africa but I'm pretty sure that hausa are closer to other west african groups than they are to ethiopians, just going off by appearance.
Depends on whether you look at east hausa (for example in chad and sudan) or western hausa (for example in nigeria). Sudanese Hausa are almost half haplotype R1b, which are atypical for other subsaharan africans, but not unusual for the afroasiatic groups (and actually primarily associated with europeans). Nigerian Hausa have more typical subsaharan E1b1a as the modal haplotype, though still a significant R1b minority. But I'm also no african expert, and we're really getting off-point here.
Which brings me to the point that alot of these race realists like to talk about races in parts of the world that they don't understand at all with a false confidence that exemplifies the dunning kruger effect.
I think the interested reader may decide for themselves here who is exemplifying the dunning kruger effect.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
6mo ago
Ha, I already regret writing it here. It seemed funny to me when it happened, so I posted it here, but it comes of as overly edgy in retrospect.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
7mo ago
The big winner here is Iran; Israel has been working hard to normalize relations with as many arab countries as possible, and has been coming close for SA in particular. The problem is, while the arab elites are often westernised and receptive to talks of peace, the common arab man still absolutely hates Israel's guts. As long as there is no open conflict, the arab elite can go behind the population's back and broker contracts with Israel. But the moment any violence breaks out, the arab population is on Palestina's side no matter what. Hamas can massacre civilians and they will go "good riddance", and even if Israel would just answer with peace calls instead of violence, they will say "Israel is afraid, now it's time to strike!".
Engineering this conflict puts a wrench int relations between Israel and any other arab country, and weakens SA's position in particular. Yes the elites know what you know and would love to change things, but recognizing Israel while a conflict with Palestina is brewing is just about the only thing that could possible cause a rebellion to usurp the elite.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
8mo ago
At first I thought the article was fine if a bit rambly. I then read some other articles from the same substack, and noticed that if I don't already agree with it anyway the rambling style was very unconvincing. Now, I tentatively dislike it; I think my initial assessment was biased by me agreeing with the conclusion beforehand.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
8mo ago
Why on earth would any sane, unbiased strategic thinker choose to ally with Israel over the Arabs? The US wouldn't have any enemies in the Arab world if it weren't for Israel, that's by far the biggest problem with US-MENA relations.
Israel is the only country in the region that is even remotely sharing western values. Especially if you view politics as a fight between worldviews, you're essentially asking "why aren't we fucking over our own team to instead make deals with enemies that hate us, our views, and only work with us because they can't beat us?" You can certainly view everything in more narrow teams, but most people nowadays think in very large, globe spanning teams, and Israel is then part of "our" team already, whether we support them or not. It might still end up not worth it, but it's not as easy as you make it out to be. Especially assuming they need our help to not get swallowed by the arabs you may think about it in terms of the following thought experiment to understand the people who favor the alliance with Israel:
Imagine a much less centralized US that is more like a european union of states and that Mexico moved in a very different direction in terms of religion and values (say that they still follow some kind of central american religion, maybe not outright human sacrifices but incompatible with modern values to the same degree that conservative arabic Islam is), and is still hostile about the annexed territories and, in particular, about New Mexico. They are willing to work with the greater US in a limited capacity, but there's frequent costly border skirmishes and threats of war. New Mexico itself has a significant minority of mexican-identifying people that want to become independent/join Mexico, and the state in general is somewhat irrelevant and can't protect itself. You're in a far northern state and there is no chance whatsoever that you're at a direct threat from Mexico, and the US as a whole is clearly superior to Mexico in terms of military. Somebody comes along and asks you why the hell are you allying New Mexico when you can just abandon them and ally with Mexico instead? It's just a much better ally in any category you can imagine!
Also, you're argument pretty closely applies to Ukraine, as well.
I'm sure you'll find some ways how this example is different from the Israeli example, but this is - I think - quite close to how supporters of Israel view the situation.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1yr ago
Dunno, I feel like they are talked about to exactly the appropriate degree. I'm a german and they are occasionally mentioned both by acquaintances & media, always in a sneering, disdainful way a la "who is even still joining them, must be a loser" or "guess he must be a fraternity member" after seeing a guy misbehave.
Frankly, I can't help but agree with them. At least at my university, nobody in power I know of has any affiliations with them, and their reputation as places of toxic masculinity means that their at odds with the current social norms, so being a member is if anything a hindrance to gaining power. I'm not even sure we have them locally here, they are just the kind of negative stereotype that people love talking about - especially those who claim to not be prejudiced. I guess they used to be relevant and so some of the old guards had some affiliations, but nowadays everyone is scrambling to make sure that everyone else knows how much you hate them.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1yr ago
I would say it is considered the ideal here in Europe, yes. But it mostly works for the guys who don't struggle with women anyway. If you're an average guy with average social skills you will be able to meet women at bars and clubs and might get lucky. But if you try to weasel your way into a friend group with plenty of women, they will be nice and considerate but simply not invite you to most events except the biggest, which will functionally be the same as the bars and clubs you've already been frequenting. If you try to invite them to something, they will not show up. If you get pushy, they will start actively avoiding you.
I think many women really struggle to process the male perspective. As a woman, as long as you are nice and social and put in just a minimal effort to get along with any guy, he will generally don't mind your presence or even want to actively invite you to every social event he knows. More women is ALWAYS better. As a woman, your main problem is the opposite; You're bombarded by male attention and need to make sure to avoid the lazy fuckers, the losers, the stalkers, the cheaters and so on. Otherwise you'll end up being one of those wifes who does all the house work while also working full time and also caring for the kids, or you will end up having to bankroll your husbands stupid ideas that go nowhere or you will be replaced by a younger model once you're older etc.
As a guy however even woman you're friendly with will by default see no reason to invite you to any social event. All else being equal, a social event gets worse with more average men present. Men will want to come less since they want to meet women, women will want to come less since they want to meet the good men.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1yr ago
Inappropriately high standards from women is a thing I like complaining about myself, but that was not my point here. The point is that the look-based nature of online dating cuts both ways: Women can advertise themselves better, yes, but they can't themselves effectively select for the things they care more about, while it is trivial and obvious for men. So in practice women are naturally disadvantaged in online dating - being able to better advertise yourself while not getting what you want is a net negative - and this disadvantage translates into them not going on the platform in the first place.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1yr ago
Do you never do things like bath with your children when they're young? Or do you always wear bathing suits even at home? I have to admit I find the attitude genuinely puzzling, I don't want to make fun of you, I just don't even get how you manage to avoid them seeing nudity until a certain age. Many children's books here include nude people. If anything, there is the problem that older kids are more likely to associate nudity with sex so you show less nudity around them, while with small children your main problem will be that they think pulling or pinching your penis is funny when they see your reaction.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
11d ago
I guess Outward was a worse example than i thought. It definitely "feels" indie in many ways, but probably is more like A game instead of AAA.
Nevertheless, even if I think about "true" Indie such as Trese Brothers, I struggle to think of examples that aren't noticably woke unless they literally have no story involving humanoids whatsoever (and even then, they sometimes somehow manage).
Depends a lot on the country you're in, I'd honestly have to look it up myself for most of them. I'm not really directly involved with patients nor drug development, pretty much strictly lab experiments on one side and data analysis for existing data sets on the other.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
2mo ago
Admittedly I'm still on my first career of BTA itself and haven't gotten there, started near Terra with the Blakists and mostly stayed there except for a little bit of Clan action. But I'm in general a slow player for this stuff bc I spend way too much time in the mech bay.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
2mo ago
Where do you have the information from that this is the most common case? Afaik, the stats are pretty clear that the majority of companies aren't publicly traded, even in the US it's only something like 10%. If I go by my - admittedly very biased - german sample, founder=owner=CEO is quite common for smaller companies, and afaik the stats here are even worse in percentage terms.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
4mo ago
What are the reasons you don't want to live in other european countries? While I'm not terribly happy with the direction of the EU or my home country, they do seem clearly preferable compared to the UK. Especially most of north europe has some in my opinion critical perks:
- Parental money is pretty good, so having a family is quite easy
- (medical) doctor income is pretty good in several of them AFAIK
- objectively much better building standards
- a bit more subjective, but just visibly not in as much decay; London - and even moreso the few smaller cities I visited - just outright disgusted me at times at how it looks and feels like a third world country. Run-down buildings with smashed windows, barbed wires around the nicer places, cars that are scratched all over, non-capital crimes go de-facto mostly unenforced, streets with mounts of trash and the occasional literal human shit, erratic junkies on most trains and busses. Fairly blatant antisocial behaviour is also quite normalised.
- Food quality is imo also better, but admittedly a non-european may see it differently
RenOS
Dadder than dad
4mo ago
I'm not english but lived in London for a while and concur with what he writes. London is allegedly one of the best places in the UK but still sucks for long-term living unless you're either a well-earning childless professional or among the super rich, also doctors afaik objectively earn very bad by western standards in the UK.
Hmm, I agree that based on the figure of actual oil production, it seems questionable to claim that the Saudis "pumped like crazy", independent of whether Reagan talked them into it or anybody else.
Still, in terms of dependence on oil prices, it's widely accepted afaik that the USSR financed large parts of its own post-war economy by cannibalizing formerly better developed eastern european satellite states such as eastern germany and czechoslovakia. It's at least not only what I was taught in school, but also what contemporaries I personally know have told me. This obviously is not sustainable long-term, but high resource income can prop up a dysfunctional state indefinitely, see Venezuela. It's not a question of necessity, it means that in an alternative world with low crude oil the 70s might have seen a generally worse economy, increasing cannibalization leading to an even worse economy later on, and thus higher chances of earlier riots, protests and revolutions.
Selectorate ....
You will like an anecdote I have from a contemporary in the DDR who worked in military intelligence. He was a car mechanic/engineer and his main task was procuring, checking & maintaining vehicles both for general use by his colleagues and for various important people. One time, he officially was tasked with organizing multiple high-value cars for long-term use. Inofficially, this was more or less a party thrown to bribe insiders with hard-to-get western cars as the final touch. According to him, he was even offered to keep one of the cars for himself because he did such a good job getting them, but declined since he saw it as a betrayal of soviet principles (he is still a true believer). Obviously I have no way whatsoever to check this for myself, let alone prove it to you. But FWIW, I believe him; He never seemed to me like the type to make this up. And according to his kids he has have never owned any car but his Wartburg.
Ultimately I agree, though I think every system needs to "pay off" different interest groups to keep afloat one way or another, so I don't see a big difference between "high crude oil prices propped up the system" or "high crude oil prices allowed the system to buy off an interest group that would otherwise become unhappy".
RenOS
Dadder than dad
5mo ago
I think that its central claim, namely that it's not distortive since you can easily separate out "true" land value and development, is straightforward false. In practice, what we call land value is extremely dependent on the development around it. As a simple toy example, a neighbourhood group that works together to keep the streets clean increases the land value of their own houses, which in a pure georgist world would actively impoverish them.
That said, directionally speaking I'm not entirely opposed to moving into the direction of more georgism, I'm just opposed to going full george. Right now for example we have a questionable NIMBY feedback loop where real estate owners have an incentive to block any development nearby even if it does not actually bother them just to drive up their own land value. This means that you often have a small number of dedicated NIMBYs that genuinely are bothered by something, and a larger associated block of people that are tentatively on their side just because when in doubt, more land value is always better for you. A well-chosen land tax around 1 or 2 % might balance this out a bit better ( assuming 5%+ as full georgism). But you then also need to be dedicated to this tax. In the worst case, you grant extremely common exceptions so that everyone is paying land value taxes from de facto something like 20 years ago, and then it's strongly in everyones best interest again to drive it up.
Similarly, there are some decent georgish models for resource extraction such as the norwegian petroleum tax / oil fund system. I'm also in favor of those.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
7mo ago
Did you know that there is a rally point function and 'all cities build this in queue' function? Alt-click cities bar to select all cities, click what you want them to build and right click a tile for them to rally there. Once I discovered this late-game with 20-30 cities became much more enjoyable.
Yes, although I admittedly barely use it. Maybe I'm a bit too much of a perfectionist, so I tend to micromanage every city. Could be that I need to put more work into optimizing the ratio of suboptimality vs micromanaging tediousness more.
I like early game because I aim to start a war by turn 75 and conquer a civilization. Or sometimes I'm trying to grab wonders and eco up really quickly.
You still frequently click through like 30 turns with nothing happening except exploration though, and I don't like the ratio of unit speed vs tech advance in the faster modes.
City maintenance can be quite oppressive early on, when I've just conquered another civ. But I suppose it has to be to stop me snowballing incredibly quickly, taking another couple of civs. If things have investment costs to balance the rewards, that's alright. It's generally good to have more cities in 4, albeit they take time before they pay off their investment. But in 5 it's suboptimal to have more than 4 cities, as I understand it, due to Tradition's bonuses. Tall play dominates.
I think Sulla is unhappy about how V isn't so much about investment costs as fixed or proportionate costs. Cities make each tech or social policy more expensive in perpetuity, there are going to be many cities that can never pay off their science/culture debt. In addition to mere opportunity cost you get endless costs.
Maybe it changed, but Sulla in that rant is complaining about the opposite? According to him, spamming cities in 5 is always strictly optimal since happiness doesn't scale appropriately - you only need to make sure that they don't grow too much, and only have a limited number of big cities. But smaller cities are always worth it, the opposite of Civ4.
In general though, I've increasingly grown somewhat disillusioned with 4X games. Imo the real reason why empires had a limited size historically is the limitations of army movement speed and communication speed, so that past a certain distance from the capital any state was de-facto independently managed, even if officially subordinated. From there, true independence often wasn't a large step anymore, and trying to micromanage at a distance leads to so much dysfunctionality that it speeds up the process if anything. Even worse, Emperors of large empires may have a decently sized crownland that they personally manage but are really mostly wrangling a bunch of subordinates. If you don't do that appropriately, or you are just plain unlucky with a bunch of spoiled brat troublemaker heirs of your originally competent subordinates, everything falls apart fast. Happiness, upkeep etc. increasingly seem to me like extremely stupid, gamey workarounds to the problem, and as a result large empires are always either way too stable in games, or the mechanics for instability also feel random and gamey. Only CK at least attempts to simulate internal politics. But the AI isn't really there yet to consistently make games fun that force you to set up subordinates. CK is fun for a few runs until you understand the blind spots of the AI, and then it also increasingly feels silly.
To play Skookum's advocate, men's looks work quite different than women's, and asian men got the shortest of sticks on that account. A rugged, average height westerner will easily beat out the average asian moonface manlet in terms of looks. Sorry if someone feels insulted, I'm exaggerating for emphasis, but asian women are often quite open about western men being far more attractive than asian men.
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