SophisticatedHillbilly
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User ID: 1964
SophisticatedHillbilly
4d ago
Yeah the beauty of modern drone weapons is that pretty much any electronics hobbyist has more than enough skill and money to build and fly them. State-level weapons at individual-level prices.
SophisticatedHillbilly
12d ago
Referring to Kennedy. I don’t know if I like the grassy knoll theory, but several of the alternatives still have a second shooter (including my personal favorite, accidental discharge by adjacent Secret Service officer).
SophisticatedHillbilly
12d ago
From what I’m seeing a direct torso hit only had a 62% death rate in the civil war era. If you have a better than 62% odds of hitting their head, you would have been better off aiming for the head. Doubly so if the person is particularly healthy and hardy, given it was usually days or weeks till they actually died, and those with robust immune systems had much better odds.
SophisticatedHillbilly
16d ago
While I agree with you on the general idea here (that we shouldn’t try to solve their suffering) I disagree with this general idea.
You absolutely can do this, it is just incredibly expensive. With enough resources you can catch someone every time they fall, and piece their foot back together after every time they shoot it. Do I want to expend the immense resources this would take in literally insane people? No. But it is possible, especially when the insane people’s own standards for “not suffering” are far below that of a middle-class teenager.
Some people certainly want to expend the resources required, and I think a different argumentative tack is necessary to bring those people around.
SophisticatedHillbilly
16d ago
Understand that for many the problem is in fact the suffering the homeless people themselves are experiencing. You might not care about them, but many do, and this is one of the core disconnects in these debates.
SophisticatedHillbilly
16d ago
Could you please expand on what you mean by this? I’ve read a lot of Woodgrains’ stuff and never noticed any ideas in this vein. Interested in what you’re referring to.
SophisticatedHillbilly
19d ago
No. In what context would that be necessary? All state-level stuff has always been online, and county-level, while theoretically doable via mail, is easier to just do in person. I can’t think of anything that would require the mail, and anything that doesn’t require it gets sped up by several weeks by not using it.
Meanwhile, all my dealings with the feds have involved a blacked-out SUV showing up at my door. By far the most convenient.
SophisticatedHillbilly
20d ago
I’m youngish (just shy of 30). I have never sent a physical letter. No one I know my age has ever sent a physical letter. I have sent 1 package by UPS. I recently had to walk a friend through how to do so because they had no idea how it worked at all, whether they needed their own box or were provided one etc.
It’s just really not that common unless you sell stuff online or something and so need to ship things.
SophisticatedHillbilly
30d ago
For what it’s worth, I find those discussions very interesting.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
And thus, overwhelmingly ‘not-that’.
Seems perfectly reasonable to me that someone with fringe political beliefs would acknowledge that 90% or so of people are on the other side of their culture war. Similar to how a Jewish supremicist could easily acknowledge that the world is overwhelmingly non-Jewish, or an extremist Christian sect could acknowledge that “true believers” are a very small community, and so avoid giving aid in ways that will be, to them, mostly wasted on the oppositional general public.
Frankly I don’t know why people got so caught up in that part of his comment.
(The ban was still reasonable due to broader patterns, but this comment was mostly fine.)
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
just working-class-coded banter
Which from what I’ve seen, means the same thing as gaffe to anyone who doesn’t interact on a peer basis with working class men.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
there must always be sewage janitors working on minimum wage
Or there could be sewage janitors making extremely good wages, sufficiently socially respected for their sacrifice to assuage the struggle of the work.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
The trick is to feed them dinner scraps. My eggs taste like spiced meat. Onion and garlic really comes through especially.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
I’ll continue following the law, but to place the onus of “don’t be suspicious” while following the law onto the citizenry is exactly the sort of infringement on rights that I’m talking about. The state has no right to arrest citizens for doing things that aren’t illegal, even if they look bad. If staring through a wall is arrestable, make it a crime.
There’s so much low hanging fruit for police to deal with it’s absurd that this should even be an issue. This was in a major city where I saw shoplifting on a daily basis! A car in front of me got shot up in a drive-by shooting! Entire sections of the city were defacto no-go zones! The fact they took time to arrest me, at the time college student working two jobs, was absurd.
I live my life in an upstanding manner and do not involve myself in situations that could lead to me being suspected of criminal activity.
Sounds terrible. I’ve been ticketed for things as simple as picking up a rock in the wrong jurisdiction. I can’t imagine how little you must do for this to be possible.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
short of being a person who lacks good judgment?
This is most people in stressful situations.
taking a plea deal strikes me as a very poor choice.
Depends on the details. For example, I once took a deal to have something I didn’t do negotiated down to a fine. If I had been found guilty in court, 1/2 year in prison was the minimum. This seems to me like demanding money with the threat of prison if I exercise my rights.
Even if I had been found innocent, I likely would have been jailed for an unspecified amount of time, which would have been a larger hassle, and more costly, than the fine anyway.
Additionally, things which are a poor choice but alleviating in-the-moment stressors basically make up half the economy, and most people partake in them. The government should not be participating in such predatory behavior against its own citizens.
there’s no murky questions of intent, evidence that could be interpreted either way, etc.
This describes effectively 0 cases. If someone actually is totally innocent of the crimes in question. Any situation where you don’t have video evidence of you being somewhere other than the crime scene comes down to he-said-she-said, but one of you is a cop.
For example, in my trespassing case: - I was found on the sidewalk adjacent to the property I was supposedly trespassing on (I was going for a walk for no particular reason, far from my home)
- I had been seen peering through the slots in the walls surrounding the property (it was a cool building and I am a curious soul).
- A police officer claimed to see me climb the wall. (Honestly no idea where this came from)
- There were scrapes on my arms/pants that looked like they were from climbing walls of that material. (They were, I regularly climbed over a wall of that same material that sat between my apartment and my apartment complexes pool/grill area so I didn’t have to walk around)
All this in a case where I was 100% factually innocent. The fact there even was a camera on the building is what saved me, or else I might have actually ended up in prison. This isn’t the only instance either. There have been at least 4 times in my relatively short life that I have been falsely accused by police, and one of those led to an arrest. I’m fairly good at navigating those situations, but there are many who I’m sure would fair worse
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
Their civil liberties are being violated by being pushed through a system that de-facto requires them to confess without trial, regardless of whether they are actually guilty or not.
I expect a not-insignificant amount of people were in fact innocent though. I was arrested for trespassing once, and urged to take a plea deal because they had video footage of me committing the crime. I knew they didn’t because I never committed the crime, but I was under enough pressure that I wouldn’t be surprised if someone in my shoes took the plea deal anyway.
There are many issues with the criminal justice system. Excessive leniency for actual criminals can be true at the same time as corrupt, aggressive prosecution against innocents. It’s the core of the whole idea of anarchotyranny.
SophisticatedHillbilly
2mo ago
The world doesn't need everyone to have a job where everyone needs a 130 IQ to function.
No, because the current world is built around a 100 IQ. In a world where 130 IQ was average, systems would be built in such a way that 100 IQ people would struggle and be mostly useless/a net negative. This doesn’t necessarily mean we need to rebuild our systems around 70 IQ individuals, but it does call into question if building it around 100 is optimal. There are many ways that 70 IQs could be put to use with enough structure, though the increased structure would likely mean the 130s would be even more needlessly constrained than they already are.
SophisticatedHillbilly
2mo ago
The problem you’ve presented is not comparable to 1x1, but rather to (1x/y) x (1y), which would equal one in either system.
A better comparison is: you have a property that is 1 mile in length, and 1 mile in width. How large is it? Certainly not 1 mile. Is a response of 1 mile or 2 miles closer to reality?
I think the system we have for math is very useful, but it’s not necessarily cleaving reality perfectly at the joints, and maybe there’s a way it could be.
SophisticatedHillbilly
2mo ago
Honestly this pushes me the other way. I’ve found straightforward by-the-book medicine to be largely useless in resolving any of the health issues I’ve had (other than one infection, at which point the doctor was just a hoop to jump through to get the antibiotics I knew I needed.)
As such, whenever I’ve had a doctor actually solve my problem, it was less because they were a doctor and more because they were an extremely high-iq person with enough exposure to health problems to discern the zebra-problem from the hoofbeats.
I can go through the checklists and find the normal issues myself. Hell, I can set a bone, pick medications out of the available options, or look at my bloodwork myself too. It’s like changing your car oil, just a series of steps.
What I can’t do is realize that I have a 1/1000000 congenital heart issue because of a weird head feeling I get, or know what the proper course of action is after that. Luckily for me I found a doctor who could, and it only took going through a dozen doctors who were useless.
My experience with that last doctor was completely incomparable to any of the others, and I desperately wish there was a way to differentiate the two. Frankly, they don’t even seem like they should have the same job title any more than the attendant at a Jiffy Lube and a Lamborghini mechanic should both just be called “mechanics.”
SophisticatedHillbilly
2mo ago
For what it’s worth, the Njal’s Saga post got me to actually read the Saga. By the time I had done so, the post was gone, though.
SophisticatedHillbilly
3mo ago
We are nowhere near constraints on space right now
No, but we are well beyond the point where you can add any more people without it having a negative effect on other people. Kowloon Walled City is the constraint on space. I don't want that.
The world will not be more idyllic following a population collapse.
Immediately? Perhaps not. In the long term, the average-quality-of-life ceiling is higher with fewer people.
If this hits worldwide, then we could well have an economic decline everywhere, as division of labor and economies of scale worsen.
The economic gains of the last 80 years have not been driven by increasing economies of scale or division of labor, but by technological advancement. This is part of why labor value has declined so precipitously. A farmer today can produce many multiples of the amount of food of one 80 years ago, with fewer people working to make that happen. Most of our economy is either providing service tasks (the demand of which obviously falls proportionally to the population) or performing largely pointless clerical tasks. You could achieve the same real output with far fewer people, and likely much higher on a production-per-capita ratio (which is the measure that actually matters).
Even more of the economy than now will be spent on supporting old people
I expect this is likely true for some comparatively small amount of time. Once a sufficiently large economic contraction happens, however, I do not think the entirety of the working-and-fighting-age population will consent to toil to pay for 80-year-old welfare. Sucks for those that didn't have kids, sure. They made bad choices and can pay for them.
Which might lead to more use of dirtier power and so not the "cleaner, more open world" you describe.
80 million Americans doing nothing but burning coal results in a cleaner world than 1 billion Americans consuming at current standards with all the electricity coming from non-nuclear renewables.
And more garbage, as things designed for more people fall into disuse.
The disuse of things currently in existence would have an infinitesimally small impact on the amounts of garbage compared to that produced by an extra ~650 million Americans.
People do not think Detroit is better because its population has fallen.
No, they think it's worse because it has too many net-negative people. I am not suggesting we remove the most productive people from the group (which is roughly what occurs to a city like Detroit when it's primary import-replacement industry collapses,) but merely that we have fewer people in total.
But further, even supposing you're right and those are the options, do you really think that cruise ships and video games are a better life than raising a family?
Absolutely not. I will continue to tell people I care about that they should raise a family, I just don't know why I would want to increase the birthrate among the population at large in the meantime. The ideal scenario as far as I'm concerned is "literally no one but me and my family and friends has kids," but that's obviously not realistic.
SophisticatedHillbilly
3mo ago
My main issue with this line of thought is that we aren't running out of people, and reducing the population by 75% or more seems positively wonderful. The US was plenty capable of a very rich and successful society with far fewer people than today.
Why would we want more? Do you want 1.2 billion people in the US, with the accompanying congestion, resource usage, and garbage? Why is 330 million the magic number? Surely 75 million is sufficient?
Sure actively lowering the population would make me question your motives, but if people just prefer cruise ships and video games to reproducing, why do you want to stop them? Why not just have kids of your own who get to inherit a cleaner, more open world with beaches that aren't packed with strangers?
SophisticatedHillbilly
3mo ago
Abortion bans are mostly worthless without contraception bans, as least as far as impact-on-tfr goes
SophisticatedHillbilly
3mo ago
Banning women from the workforce makes such wages possible, because it more than doubles the labor bargaining power of men in middle-class and white-collar lower class jobs.
No. Winning is supposed to look like getting an increase in resources and abilities, allowing you to tackle even more difficult challenges, ad infinitum.
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