SerialStateLineXer
No bio...
User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
I don't really know who it benefits to keep creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society and then, when they fail to live in modern society, say "Yeah, they deserve to be tortured for that".
Is he saying we should practice eugenics?
Not that I'm opposed, but...he knows about heredity and the poor track record of educational interventions above and beyond what we're already doing, so what else could he mean by "creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society?"
SerialStateLineXer
11mo ago
I met a girl at a party. She laughed at my stupid jokes and said I looked like an actor, and she didn't even qualify "actor" with "character."
So obviously she's ignoring the message I sent her. Why are women like this?
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
Harvard's law school made more of an effort to appear to comply as well, although they still seem to be discriminating.
SerialStateLineXer
5mo ago
"Gulf of America" is kind of silly, though. The US borders many bodies of water. The Gulf of Mexico is the one that has Mexico on the other side.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
The talking point about the lack of an enforcement mechanism is silly. The enforcement mechanism is the same as the one keeping regular men out of women's bathrooms: Mostly voluntary, but the women can call security if there's a problem. If you pass well enough that nobody notices or cares, you get away with it.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
This is pretty bleak: Adjusted for inflation, South Africa's GDP per capita is up less than 7% since 1974.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
You can clearly see that "business today" is AI generated fake USA today, "economic times" is fake The Economist / Financial Times, etc...
The Economic Times is a real Indian newspaper, isn't it?
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
I've been taking the stairs up to the 17th floor, and it's so much harder than I expected. I thought I'd be able to run up, like I normally do with stairs, but after 3-4 floors I just can't, and after 10 I can barely walk up. My heart rate gets up to like 170 and just stays there until I get to the top.
17/17, would power through it again.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
The fact that breasts lose elasticity with age is proof that there is no God.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
Linoleic acid. I wouldn't say it's unusual, but you wouldn't normally get it in the concentrations you get in processed foods cooked in seed oil.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
with simple tips like “wear a suit to a job interview” or “don’t curse in front of your boss.”
Sometimes I forget that the tech industry is weird.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
Yesterday, I was indirectly reminded of an old classmate I had in 5th through 7th grade. Out of idle curiosity, I looked him up and found that he had died of a fentanyl overdose last year.
I hadn't really thought of him for decades, and we weren't all that close back then, so it didn't hit me particularly hard, but it did shock me a bit, since he didn't really seem the type. He was from a high-SES family, both parents being archaeologists, and in the same gifted classes as I was. His best friend from back then is an attorney now.
I wonder how people's lives go off the rails like this, even when they seem to have everything going for them.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
Maybe even consider removing it from your toothpaste.
Let's do the math on this. Toothpaste is about 0.1% fluoride. Typically you'll put about 1g of toothpaste on your toothbrush, so that's 1 mg of fluoride. If you ingest 10%, that's 0.1 mg. Fluoridated water is typically around 1 mg/L, so by using fluoridated toothpaste twice a day, you're probably ingesting about 10% of what you would get from two liters of fluoridated tap water. Not insignificant, but probably not a major concern.
On the other hand, if it's available in the US, hydroxyapatite toothpaste is a perfectly acceptable substitute, if a bit more expensive.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
the democratic candidate being VP to a very unpopular president, which has historically been a near ironclad portent of defeat.
On the other hand, the Republican candidate was an unpopular President. I don't think we have much data on former Presidents running for a non-consecutive second term after losing reelection once. How many have done that, just Cleveland and Roosevelt?
SerialStateLineXer
5mo ago
I regard it as what happens when libertarians who read Hacker News and Ayn Rand stop believing in liberty.
No, it's more that they stop believing in the ability of democracy to deliver liberty. The whole point of competitive government is that exit is a better guarantee of liberty than voice.
Wealth inequality is a made-up issue. To the extent that we care about economic inequality, our primary concern should be consumption inequality, because consumption is ultimately what really matters. The whole point of accumulating wealth is to allow you or your heirs, or the beneficiaries of your charitable contributions, to consume more in the future. Consumption is what you've taken from the economy, and wealth is the difference between what you've contributed and what you've taken.
For various reasons that should be fairly obvious if you think about it, consumption inequality < income inequality < wealth inequality. That is, in any given year, consumption is most equal and wealth is least equal. Lifetime consumption is even more equal than consumption in a given year, because at least some of the inequality in consumption is just due to life cycle effects. This is also true of income, and even more so of wealth.
Egalitarian ideologues started out talking about income inequality, because it's easiest to measure. At some point they should have realized that it makes more sense to talk about consumption inequality, but instead they went in the opposite direction and started talking about wealth inequality.
Why? Because, as I mentioned above, consumption is more equal than income, and wealth is less equal. This makes it much easier to sensationalize. The top 1% might do 5% of all consumption in the US, but they earn 20% of all pre-tax income, and own something like a third of all wealth. US billionaires may have more combined net worth than the bottom 50% of the population (If you say this, a lot of people will incorrectly assume that it means that billionaires own the majority of wealth, which is why Oxfam releases a statement to this effect every year), but they probably consume less than than the bottom 1%. There are fewer than a thousand US billionaires and 3.3 million bottom one-percenters; to consume more than the bottom 1%, billionaires would have to consume 3,300 times more per capita. If the bottom 1% each consume $20k per year, that's about $70 million per capita for billionaires. Likely some of the richer billionaires hit that at least some years, but $70 million is quite a lot to spend in one year if you only have a net worth of $1-2 billion.
So if you're trying to promote hatred of the rich and build a consensus for more redistribution, obviously you want to talk about wealth, and not consumption, so that's what we get.
I have a genetic defect that puts me at extremely high risk for developing a fatal neurodegenerative disease in my 50s or 60s. Recent evidence suggests that reducing neuroinflammation might help delay or even prevent onset, and there's also evidence that a diet high in soluble fiber can reduce systemic and neuroinflammation through increasing production of butyrate and reducing production of lipopolysaccharides by gut bacteria.
Which is to say, I've been trying to eat more legumes, but legumes are kind of a pain to cook. I want to live, but I'm also lazy. Purely by chance, a package of ZENB spaghetti, which is made of yellow peas and nothing else, caught my eye at 7-Eleven, and I decided to try it out. With the caveat that I have eaten very little pasta in the past 20 years, and pasta enthusiasts may disagree, it doesn't taste much different from wheat pasta to me. Pasta's mostly just a vehicle for sauce anyway, right?
The more people buy it, the more likely they stay in business, and the less effort it takes for me to do everything I can to keep my brain from eating itself, so I'm pimping it out here. If you like pasta, but wish it had more protein, fiber, and potassium, with fewer empty calories and/or no gluten, try ZENB pasta! Your Italian grandmother will hate it, but you might not!
SerialStateLineXer
19d ago
Gonzales v. Raich
I just realized that the closer you get to New England, the more specific a background "Yankee" denotes. Overseas, it means an American. In the US it means someone from the Northeast. In the Northeast it specifically refers to someone from New England. I assume that this regresses further, and that in New England it refers to someone from Massachusetts, where it refers to someone from Boston, that within Boston it refers to a specific neighborhood, and that within that neighborhood resides the One True Yankee.
I'm agnostic as to whether it's a hereditary title or one that comes with the house.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
Yeah companies want them because they can't leave.
They can, though. There's some paperwork, but it's absolutely possible to change employers on an H-1B visa. It's not even that rare—in 2023, there were 76k approved change of employer petitions, down from something like 120k in 2022 (due to a slowdown in tech hiring generally).
Twitter had a very interesting few days before Christmas, we even saw the return of the huwhite man Jared Taylor to Twitter
It's not "huwhite," just "hwite." Taylor speaks with an accent that hasn't undergone the wine-whine merger, probably because he's from...(checks notes)...Kobe, Japan.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
Why would China nuke Taiwan? From their perspective it would be nuking their own people.
I don't pretend to be an expert on foreign policy in general or China-Taiwan relations in particular, so maybe I'm wrong, but that sounds unlikely to me.
My friend Fred says that median real wages for doctors have been going up since 2000 at least. Although $2700/week seems pretty low. What's your source for the claim that they're going down?
Anyway, I don't think we should cut doctors' salaries as such. We should allow more people to become doctors and let the market sort it out.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
I'm sure they do seem like a lovely person
I'm not picking on you in particular, but I see this all the time and genuinely wonder why people do this. The person in question is clearly identified as a "girl," and OP consistently refers to her with the appropriate female pronouns. Why the "they/them?"
Some guy in China killed 35 people by driving a car around a running track.
Not that I'm complaining, but why doesn't this happen more often?
Much is made of the fact that US has more guns and many more mass shooting incidents than other wealthy nations, and this is commonly attributed to the fact that guns make it easy to kill a lot of people. But so do cars, and those are widely available in most wealthy nations.
So why is it that the US has a lot of mass shootings (yes, I know that they're a tiny percentage of total homicides), but running cars into crowds is fairly rare in countries that don't have such easy access to guns? Are Americans just especially prone to running amok? Are mass shootings a meme? Is killing a lot of people with a gun just that much more satisfying than running them over with a car?
I don't have any good theories; I'm just noticing my confusion.
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