Rov_Scam
11mo ago
I'm not impressed. I mean, I'm impressed insofar as a Chatbot can write anything, but the particular example you posted was of the quality I'd expect from a community college student taking a creative writing elective.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
micromanaging whether or not a state can ban porn-adjacent books from elementary school classrooms
It cuts both ways, though. Assuming you're talking about Florida, I could easily argue that the state is spending too much effort micromanaging schools and waging a quixotic war on Disney for having the gall to publicly criticize that micromanagement, all the while the state has a murder rate higher than "woke" states like New York and California. If the elites are in control and can do whatever they want then the opposition is defined by what they're actually opposing, and choosing to oppose bullshit about trans people seems to be pretty low on the priority list apart from its value as culture war fodder.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
I mean, yeah, it's a cool toy, but other than that, what's the point? On a different note, is there any kind of payoff? I"m not terribly familiar with the genre you were having it work in, but I'd be curious if it's capable of writing a unique story with different cool plot twists and an original ending, or if it just regurgitates common tropes, i.e. there are two opposing sides fighting it out and the good guys win at the end. I was playing with GTP3 a while back getting it to write a satirical obituary for the past Penguins season, and while it seemed impressive at first, rerunning the prompt with other teams (including those from entirely different sports) produced practically identical results. It spoke in generalities rather than cite specifics, and when asked for specifics, it was still vague and often wrong. For instance, it said something about Sidney Crosby not having a good season while anyone who remotely followed the team knew that the problems weren't with the stars but with depth and goaltending. The fact that it's not up to date wasn't the problem, either, since it wrote the same obituary for other teams that were within its purview.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
The harm must be weighed against the harm of not engaging in a particular intervention. The argument from those in favor of permitting teens to receive gender affirming care is that puberty is going to cause their bodies to change in a way that causes them severe psychological distress for the rest of their lives and greatly increases anxiety, depression, and suicide, and that this likely isn't just some adolescent phase that they can ride out or that they'll come to regret in the future if interventions are performed. And the reason we know this is because people such as this exist in significant enough numbers and throughout a long enough timespan that they can be studied and we can determine which kinds of interventions are likely to succeed and which aren't. I don't know enough to know if these claims are true or not but I suspect that whether or not one believes them to be true is solely a function of one's politics. However, at a certain point this becomes more a scientific question than a moral one. Children wanting their ears removed or some other medically benign but socially damaging procedure only becomes a relevant question if the child in question is suffering from a well-recognized condition from which having the procedure done is an effective treatment.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
It's possible I'm missing something (and it's one of the reasons I'm here asking), but I haven't been able to find it despite a wealth of ACS data to go off of. And given how social ills tend to correlate with each other, I would expect it to be noticeable somewhere.
I'm not sure where you're from, but I live in Pittsburgh and a lot of areas in the Rust Belt just have an ineffable shittiness about them that isn't necessarily reflected by statistics, other than, of course, property values. A lot of these are technically suburbs but were built out prewar due to some local industry that isn't there anymore and had little to offer during postwar suburbanization, with more attractive alternatives nearby. Now they just sort of exist, with no hope of gentrification or investment. Mediocre housing stock, lack of local amenities, and distance from major employment centers often aren't enough to make up for relative safety and low housing costs. These places are also filled with white trash, though that hasn't necessarily stopped black people from moving into other places with low housing costs. It's also worth noting that a lot of urban violence, isn't as widespread as it can seem by crude zip code maps. I can only speak for Pittsburgh, but the areas with the most random pedestrian violence tend to be the ones with the most pedestrians, not the ones that are the most violent. Downtown and the South Side (the biggest nightlife district) take the cake when it comes to crime stats, even though no one really thinks of them as high crime areas. That perception is changing somewhat as Downtown has a problem with homeless addicts and the South Side has had a few prominent incidents, but these were the highest crime areas by volume long before such perceptions existed, and they are both still high-value areas as far as housing is concerned. In the actual poor areas, most of the violence is relegated to bad housing projects or areas with high drug activity, and is usually limited to those in gangs. These places aren't great but grandma probably doesn't have much to worry about walking down the street in the daytime. Leaving a place like Homewood to move to a place like Whitaker is probably going to be a step down in quality of life for someone with connections to the former but not the latter.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
It's been a staple of Canadian TV and radio since the 60s, and it isn't going anywhere.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
Montana is a red state but they've shown themselves to be more moderate than Texas. Jon Tester still represents them in the Senate and Steve Bullock was the governor until recently, and they legalized recreational marijuana. That being said, these are both moderate to conservative Democrats, and I don't think Zephyr fits that bill. The upshot is that she won't even be able to win a primary there, because when the state party thinks they have a chance of winning, they actually care to have an electable candidate.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
Even that would be too much of a culture shock for most people. Consider the cell phone. Now that they're ubiquitous there's some consternation that they intrude too much into daily life; it used to be that if someone wanted to get a hold of you either had to be at home or (in an emergency) another known location. Now there's nowhere to hide. This ignores the fact that before the rise of cell phones if you were expecting a call you were pretty much stuck at home until that call came. And when a call did come you had no control there. Caller ID existed, but it cost extra so few people had it. When that phone rang it could be anybody, and the only way to find out was to pick up. When you did make a call, you generally couldn't call just anyone, since there was a charge for anything other than local calls, and it wasn't cheap. And of course you can forget about text messaging.
along with the rise of Internet as a system that facilitates human communication and togetherness instead of replacing it
While the 90s may be know for the internet's meteoric rise, it wasn't really a thing for most people until the end of the decade, and even then it was more popular as a buzzword than something people actually used. By the year 2000 only about half of American households even had a computer, and fewer than 40% had internet access. In 1995 fewer than 10% had internet access. And the most popular way of getting internet access was through AOL, which was describes as a "walled garden" since it wasn't true internet access but access to a curated selection of popular sites. You got this access via a 14.4 or 28.8 kbps modem (though broadband was available in some places by the end of the decade) that was slow as hell, and through a machine that was as finicky as hell. This was the era when you'd try to do something relatively straightforward—like connect to a new printer—and all hell would break loose with Illegal Operations and Blue Screens of Death while you tried to navigate the autoexec.bat and config.sys via MS-DOS to make sure there wasn't some driver problem or IRQ port conflict or whatever. And this "togetherness" was limited to the before time, when the internet was Usenet and was the domain of hippies and nerds. By the time normies got online chatrooms were full of drunken fratboys swearing at each other and flame wars over which pro wrestlers were better (I still maintain that Nailz sucked).
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
This is why Curtis Yarvin irritates me so much. He's an unapologetic monarchist, but the definition of monarchy he uses doesn't describe any actual monarchy in history. In one of his articles he lists ten principles he wants, the implication being that they cannot be achieved by democracy which is why monarchy is necessary:
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The health of the citizens is the supreme law
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Every citizen is equally protected under the law
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The law does not notice trivia
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Every citizen has freedom of association
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Collective grievances are socially unacceptable
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Every citizen gets the same information
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The government makes all its own decisions
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The government is liable for crime
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The government is financially simple
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The government curates labor demand
I could go by these blow by blow, but one would be hard-pressed to find historical examples of monarchs who subscribed to any of these principles, let alone all of them. In the introduction to the article, he tries to differentiate monarchy from dictatorship by describing the latter as merely physically competent while the former is also spiritually competent, which brings to mind images of Platonic virtue and philosopher kings. Well, what actually kings could be described that way? Henry VIII? Louis XIV? Nero? Mohammed bin Salman? Once you have absolutist rule you have absolutist rule, period. The minute you put restrictions on a monarch's power (especially the kind of restrictions advocated for here), congratulations, you're a liberal.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
Dude, if you were waiting for a girl to call you back you weren't looking for her to get the machine. There's a reason Soul Asylum sang "Waiting by the phone / waiting for you to call me up and tell me I'm not alone".
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
In other words, you hope your country loses a real war in order to make some parallel statement about culture war politics? That's in the same league as the assholes who hoped Trump would lead the country into a recession so it would help them win midterm elections.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
I don't think one's influence on societal decision making tracks particularly well with income. For instance, in Pittsburgh we have a rail trail that runs from downtown to Cumberland, Maryland, where it connects with the C&O Canal Towpath and continues to Washington, DC. The trail was constructed over a 20 year period thanks primarily to local trail chapters who did all of the fundraising and grant writing themselves and coordinated their efforts to complete a project that involved innumerable bridge and tunnel restorations and required significant right-of-way acquisition. In addition to being an exceptional local resource, the trail attracts people from around the country and the world who are looking to do a weeklong ride that doesn't involve significant hills or automotive traffic. It's only possible because of all the mostly anonymous civic-minded people who volunteer to cut the grass and chainsaw downed trees and find novel ways to keep tunnels from icing in the winter without having to close the trail. These are all volunteers and the only requirement for having this kind of power is to show up. Literally. Yeah, you may start at the bottom as a worker bee but if you're willing to do the work then people will start handing more and more responsibility to you.
I'm on the board of a similar nonprofit that involves recreation and we're currently in the midst of a huge project with a lot of moving parts and various state agencies and other nonprofits involved and if I had a problem that required intervention from on high I could get at least two and possibly three politicians up the ass of whatever bureaucrat was in my way, and if the problem went deeper than lack of priority we could probably get targeted legislation passed. I don't know if anyone on the board makes $250k but if they do it's purely incidental. Contrast this with friends of mine who are lawyers making more than $250k because they billed a bunch of hours on some lawsuit that no one has heard about or cares about. Who has more of an impact on society? Or one guy I know who owns a plumbing business that makes a ton of money but I don't think he even votes.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
Whatever happened to economists discounting future value? Many people are riddled with debt because they absolutely need the latest Iphone or a shiny new car. Why would they consume less and hoard money if products were going to get slightly cheaper next year?
First off, these people aren't buying anything like that on credit during a deflationary spiral because the banks are worried enough that they'll be able to pay off their existing debt (which is worth more now) let alone buy something now that's going to be worth less in a year. In a recession, luxuries and positional goods are usually the first sectors to take a hit. Second, this kind of spending has a relatively small impact on the economy at large. A bunch of idiots buying iPhones they can't afford is a drop in the bucket compared with a business that cuts back on purchasing after the financial people tell them that they can save 5% if they can hold out another 6 months, which they can because nobody is ordering anything anyway.
And why hasn't this happened in electronics, where the price of memory or processing power falls very rapidly?
Because that's the result of increasing productivity and not of processing power. If the price falls because the company is able to produce it for a lower cost and passes on the savings in a competitive market it's much different than if the company is forced to sell the product for below cost because the market is unwilling to pay the price the company anticipated due to a drop in the money supply.
The issue is deflation in a recession, only then do you have problems.
Any significant deflation almost always accompanies a recession. We had slight deflation around 2015 but few people noticed. If we had the kind you could notice we'd be in a recession. When prices go down companies can't get as much money for what they sell. Some companies may be able to hang in there as normal but others are going to be more sensitive to the market and will have to cut fixed costs somewhere. If the company has debt that's a fixed cost that's not easy to get rid of. It's much easier to either cut pay or, more likely, lay people off. And layoffs and pay cuts across wide swaths of the economy mean that consumers can't afford to buy goods and services, which means further price decreases, and the spiral continues. SOme companies go out of business entirely, and accordingly, fewer people are willing to invest because the risk is too high. Hence, companies that are in trouble can't find investment capital to stay afloat and are more likely to fail. The cycle only ends after a bottoming out period, or with significant financial stimulus that may or may not be effective. Inflationary price increases are tough for consumers to swallow but they generally don't come with the knock-on effects of unemployment so the Fed tends to err on the side of a little inflation.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
My sister-in-law is a PA and worked in the COVID ward of her hospital. Ventilation isn't and never was something that is done lightly, and it especially wasn't something that was done lightly in the early days of COVID given the fears of a shortage. She said that people didn't go on ventilators until they couldn't breathe on their own and were otherwise going to die. I'll grant you that some of the early COVID treatments were later found to be sub-optimal, but in those early days they were the best that we had, and we can't fault the medical profession for not knowing everything that we know now.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
I honestly think the best food situation for getting drunk is a party in which only "heavy appetizers" are served. If there's a dinner then it's too easy to overeat when you're expected to eat a full meal. Light appetizers like chips are too insubstantial to stand up to heavy drinking. Heavy appetizers like buffalo chicken dip, wings, gutbusters, pepperoni squares, etc. are best because they're as substantial as a full meal but meant to be consumed gradually over the course of several hours. Thus it's easier to maintain the optimal level of fullness. That being said, I only get drunk twice a year, and really don't enjoy the aftereffects. It's not even the physical symptoms of the hangover that bother me, it just makes me tired and depressed the next day in a way that I can't seem to get comfortable.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
Saying that society should recognize that these people are garbage and not give a damn about them is a position that can only be taken if one is very selective about whom this categorization refers to, and this selectivity is why activists protest and call opinions such as yours inherently racist, or classist, or whatever. When Mr. Penny decided to put Mr. Neely in a chokehold, his information was limited to what he could tell from the approximately 30 seconds or whatever it was that Penny observed him in public. He didn't have a copy of the guy's criminal record to know that he was a general homeless scofflaw who had been arrested 42 times previously, mostly for turnstile jumping and public drunkenness but at least four times for assault. All he knew was that the guy was ranting and raving about being hungry and not caring if he went to jail and that this behavior made some (most?) people around him uncomfortable so he decided to do something about it, or, more accurately, assist in a group effort to do something about it.
Giving him a free pass on this seems reasonable enough, but only because we have the additional context that this was a black, homeless, schizo, ne'er do well. Suppose, on the other hand, a white, middle-class, student at a prestigious university (possibly your son) got drunk and started making a scene on public transit. A group of black passengers were made uncomfortable by his behavior and the young man died after on of these passengers put him in a choke hold. When I was in my early 20s being drunk, loud, and obnoxious on public transit was a regular occurrence, as we could go to the club in the city on 50 cent drink night without having to drive or park. Just a few years ago a friend of mine went into a similar rant about Taco Bell on the train back to the hotel after the 2018 ACC Championship Game in Charlotte. And if the counterargument is that Neely was obviously a dangerous hobo then that just confirms the suspicions of all the social justice do-gooders that you expect the rules to be different for certain people, and we're supposed to expect people to be able to tell the difference based on the way a guy's dressed or whether we think he's mentally ill or homeless or, mast damningly, whether he's white.
I remember a similar storyline back when black guys getting shot by cops was in the news more often, and most of the conservatives I know kept pointing out that one has an obligation to obey when a police officer tells you to do something. As a guy in his '30s this seemed reasonable, until I looked back at my own life and realized that by these people's standards I'd have been dead a long time ago. Yes, I agree generally with the argument that if a police officer decides to arrest you then what happens afterward happens on his terms, not yours, and if you have a problem with that you can bring it up in court. On the other hand, any teenager who is told to stop by police is going to start running. I wasn't a bad kid by a long-shot—I only got two write-ups in four years of high school, and one was for a class cut—but I still liked to occasionally indulge in the kind of mischief kids indulge in, like drinking in woods of indeterminate ownership or stealing pumpkins from farm fields and shit like that, and this would sometimes end with a fat, black cop chasing a bunch of spry kids through fields and woods. I once got away because I crawled under a fence that the guy couldn't fit under. If we took these statements about a duty of compliance to their logical conclusion, the officer had every right to shoot me. After all, I had clearly committed a crime, ignored his orders and fled. And it was clear that he wasn't going to catch me unless he could stop me from a distance. And this was for the same type of "quality of life" shit a lot of law and order types are complaining about. How would you like it if property you paid for was being used without permission by people on quads and dirt bikes during the day, cutting trails you don't want, contributing to erosion, and scaring away huntable animals, and then at night the same kids would come back and build fires and leve beer cans and fast food wrappers everywhere? People in rural areas have gotten in trouble for putting up tripwires and spike strips and other kinds of booby traps to keep people from trespassing, and while there's some pushback it's understandable that parents get pissed when criminal trespass results in serious premeditated injury. If we develop standards they have to apply to everybody, and few people realize what the implications of this would be.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
Even if it has predictive value I don't see what the point is. Either people causing disruptions that make the general public do so at their own risk of consequences up to and including death if anyone feels the least bit threatened or they don't. Even if someone can make an accurate predication about another person's criminal and mental health history we have to establish criteria under which he can operate. Do we really want to go down the road of defining how many arrests it takes before someone is legally considered scum and forfeits basic civil rights most of us enjoy? And what happens if someone's wrong? If Neely was really just a normal dude dealing with some personal problems that expressed themselves in an unfortunate way, do we then bring the hammer down on Penny for wrongfully assuming he was some homeless wino? If not, then do we just give everyone the benefit of the doubt and lose the distinction entirely? When dealing with matters involving human life I don't know if this is a road we want to go down.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
How does arming rural citizens to the teeth help here? You already said that people in rural areas should be given special treatment (for what reason, I don't know, since rural meth heads are just as obnoxious as urban ones in my experience), so you have to give them special treatment. A guy with a shotgun willing to shoot anyone who enters onto his property has even less opportunity to evaluate if the person he's shooting fits into one of the special categories you seem willing to create wherein people are given a free pass to violate laws that ostensibly apply to everybody. If it becomes clear that antisocial behavior is tolerated beyond a certain line then ne'er do wells will have an incentive to go there and urban leaders will have an incentive to make sure they go there, especially progressive ones who don't want to put them in jail.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
Then the principle is wholly untenable. You may have edge cases like this where someone acts and you "get lucky" in a manner of speaking, but you're not going to encourage this kind of vigilantism if it requires holding the vigilante strictly liable for knowing the personal history of his target.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
Just seeing this now, but some things just don't have the penetration you'd expect. For instance, in Pittsburgh, Italian bread is a grocery staple. I rarely buy anything other than Italian bread, unless it's rye or something. Every grocery store large enough to have a bakery has fresh, unsliced loaves made the same day, even national chains like Wal-Mart (where it's attractively priced at a buck and a half). The deli has the local brands that some people swear by, Cellone's and Mancini's, and even the bread aisle has inferior but still acceptable mass-market versions from Nickles and Schwebel's. Then a couple years ago friends who had moved to North Carolina some years prior were visiting and mentioned how they needed to grab a loaf of Italian bread before they left. Apparently, the stuff is virtually unheard of in the South, even in major metros like Charlotte, and it's not the kind of thing that lends itself to ordering online. Even Schwebel's and Nickles, which I had long assumed were major national brands based on the volume they sell here, are evidently only regional. All kinds of stuff you'd think other people would know about, they just don't know about.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
Those political entities (the city and state of New York) have chosen to do otherwise. That means the locals either must put up with the subway-screaming bums no matter what they do, or they must use less-measured force.
Or, alternatively, they can empower the city and the state to use such necessary force to lock them up. The fact that they haven't suggests that the people would prefer to deal with the occasional nuisance of subway bums than subject them to what they feel are the deleterious effects of "the system". To suggest that individuals should have the power to unilaterally decide to take matters into their own hands makes a mockery of any pretense to having a rule of law. What if a similar mob thought that certain posts on The Motte were inherently racist and not appropriate for civilized society and therefore, since the state and national legislatures have chosen to do nothing, track down the authors of those posts and beat them within an inch of their lives? Would you find this behavior opprobrious? Once you come to the conclusion that individuals and mobs should trump the laws of political entities you disagree with, you empower all such people to act as they will, not just the ones you happen to agree with.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
I don't know about the ancient world but the upshot of this was that in the medieval world the murder rate was ridiculously high by modern standards. I remember reading one article that estimated the murder rate for Oxford in the 14th century being well over 100 per 100,000 people while New York City at its most dystopian never cracked 30. Estimates of the overall American murder rate dropped from over 30 in 1700 to below 8 in 2020. By comparison, only the 5 most violent Mexican cities even approach the medieval Oxford murder rate, and the 1700 US rate is comparable with modern-day South Africa. The best that can be said about historical eras when law enforcement was decentralized was that it wasn't any more violent than the most violent places in the modern world, and that seems like damning with faint praise.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
And that only follows if there is broad public consensus that some people are human garbage who are undeserving of basic rights and that violence against them should be ignored provided it's executed with some broad excuse of having the "public interest" in mind. Something tells me that no such public consensus exists.
Fewer than 200,000 American Jews have emigrated to Israel since the Jewish State was established in 1948. Out of a population of over 5 million. They weren't given financial inducements, but Israel is a much more attractive option than Ghana, and Ghana is about as good as you're going to get in West Africa. How much would I have to pay you to agree to leave your home country permanently for a country that was, by all objective measures, less desirable?
You're assuming this would be good for America because race is a good proxy for IQ and criminality, but even if I agree with that, why use a proxy at all? Why not just focus resettlement offers on criminals and dumb people generally? It's not like these things are hard to measure without proxies. Furthermore, there are 40 million blacks in the US. Relocating 6.5 million of them represents 16% of their total population. All you'd be doing is reducing blacks from 12% of the total population to 10%, which is about what the proportion of blacks was in 1960. It would probably be unnoticeable for most people. During the Civil War there were some serious plans for resettlement of freed slaves, but black leaders such as Frederick Douglass met Lincoln at the White House and voiced strong opposition for the plan. After a failed attempt at resettling some volunteers in the Caribbean the idea wasn't seriously brought up again. It was a dumb idea then and it's a dumb idea now.
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