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SophisticatedHillbilly


				

				

				
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joined 2022 December 04 20:18:48 UTC

				

User ID: 1964

SophisticatedHillbilly


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 December 04 20:18:48 UTC

					

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User ID: 1964

We could have chosen differently

And in fact, some countries, or even states, did. I feel like this conflation of COVID with COVID-response is a huge issue.

That leads to the obvious question: What is Trump?

It has largely worked for the woke. A large portion of the population has gone from fervently supporting color blindness to fervently supporting affirmative action, and so on for every other social issue. It doesn’t convert everyone. It doesn’t have to.

Yeah aren’t American conservatives one of the only non-hyper-religious groups left with an above replacement fertility rate? (only like 2.3 if I remember right but still)

You have to look at their predictions in aggregate. If they predict 20 elections with a 95% chance for party A, and A wins 19 of those 20 elections, then yes they were accurate.

Even if that 1 election was a landslide for party B, the prediction method is accurate. People who say otherwise just aren’t accepting that it’s a percentage chance and not a poll.

Human cloning: not enough people want it badly enough. Same probably goes for surrogacy, with the added fact that anyone who could afford the criminal price could just afford legal workarounds.

In the case of CP I think it results in similar behavior to drug prohibition. Extensive criminal networks, child trafficking and all the associated crimes, etc. the people who want it want it bad, will pay for it, and have no easy substitutes.

Deepfakes are currently too easy and still readily available even when technically illegal. No market when the supply is nearly infinite and demand is relatively low.

None of those things are comparable. A better comparison is bans on drugs, which do result in broken kneecaps and gang shootings, and bans on prostitution, which result in the same.

True. It was always unclear to me whether this worked for the whole food or included each component. I assumed the former (in the sense that after applied to spinach casserole, they will be fine with spinach casserole, but not with spinach by itself.) It’s not really applicable to when a kid just doesn’t like a particular food (in the case of spinach they might just have have really high taste sensitivity to bitterness) but specifically for the “will literally just eat one food and nothing else, potentially up to starvation if they don’t get french fries” type of kid

Also I understand not wanting to do this. Most people don’t like eating the same things repeatedly. I am not one of those people (my desire to eat a food grows ~linearly with the number of times in a row I’ve consumed it) but I wouldn’t blame anyone for not applying this info.

Every time I eat Little Caesars, I feel like I want to die. The pizza helps me here, because it makes me feel like I am actually going to die.

At first I start to sweat. I lose feeling in my limbs, my stomach aches in a concerningly numb way, and my eyelids become heavier than my crushing guilt. Actual ambrosia would not be worth the feelings it creates.

And yet I still crave the Caesar. Despite smoking many times throughout my life, I have never once failed to resist the cravings to do it more. Nicotine has nothing on that hellish pizza. An entire day’s worth of willpower is burnt if it ends up in my presence.

May Satan take that whole chain (but maybe I’ll have just one slice before he does.)

I’ve heard from multiple people and personally seen one example where the following is true:

It’s basically just overly low risk tolerance around food safety, built in on an evolutionary level. The solution is having the whole family eat the same thing repeatedly (for like a week straight) and nothing else. That food will then be added to their ‘safe food’ registry and they’ll be fine with it forever. Rinse and repeat with each food.

Those things all do say something about one’s character. Some degree of rebelliousness, courageous, or social obliviousness is required to do things in public you know will garner negative reactions. The fact the reactions are negative do not make the actions negative per se, but they do change what information you can gather from the action.

In your example: there are presumably other gay couples that don’t kiss in front of homophobes, and that allows you to judge them in other ways. Maybe they’re cowardly, or just very polite.

Any more info on this? I’d be very interested in getting an EU citizenship.

What are they, if you don’t mind sharing?

they can't bring themselves to fire these employees or disproportionately reward the people whose productivity increases.

Why is this so true? I would be happy to do this, but it seems it’s anathema to most companies. Any explanations?

How effective would nuclear weapons by a relatively small nation be against an invading army? It’s not a scenario we’ve ever seen play out.

The standard nuclear war scenario involves a 3-prong nuclear strike combined with standard missles to assist with saturation and eliminate all enemy industrial and military centers approximately simultaneously. Does Israel have the capacity to hit so many targets at once? Or is it more of a tactical-use scenario? Or maybe just a “whoever attacks first gets their political capital eliminated” scenario?

These aren’t rhetorical questions, I’m just genuinely not sure, and I feel like smaller scale one-sided nuclear warfare looks very different than the Cold War images most people think of.

I do think a lot would come down to how competent the Arab alliance could become in the lead up to an invasion. Even a comparatively old-fashioned but reasonably equipped army should be able to win by sheer numbers in this matchup, but they’d have to get the corruption under control and actually build a lot of equipment.

The last couple wars seem to show a severe lack of competence, but I don’t think that’s inherent or will always be true. After all there have been some very effective Arab conquests in the past.

Because actively destroying something is fundamentally different than preventing its creation? This is one of those things that is so intuitive I do think the onus would be on you to prove the inverse, but:

  • The end result is not the same. Things that are destroyed leave ghosts, things that were never made do not. Memories, physical damage, emotional attachments, etc are all left behind and change the calculus.

  • The process is obviously different, and processes have by-products and side effects. In the case of abortion, a case could be made that normalizing abortion weakens norms around the inherent value of human life, or the value of facing the consequences of your own actions (I don’t necessarily believe this, but it is just an example)

  • Different rate of change. Abortion is quick, education and cultural change are slow.

  • Different subgroup impacts. Sex education will likely have stronger impacts on the more educable, and abortion on the more avoidant.

This applies to basically every instance of prevention/elimination. Why prevent cavities when we can simply fill them? Why prevent infections when we have antibiotics? Prevention and elimination are only the same in the most spherical-cow utilitarian nonsense world imaginable.

Couldn’t the argument be made that it’s not about increasing volume of life, but rather just about not ending life that already exists? Prevention =! Elimination after all. He even gave the birth control argument (though many conservative Christians would oppose this as well).

Yeah this wasn’t (isn’t?) uncommon in my very white hometown.

Why only factor in IQ? Given that things like moral preferences, health, and a good portion of culture come from genetics as well, doesn’t an IQ-maxing breeding strategy destroy those other three things?

In that same vein: determine which presidential+congressional ballot is more likely to be split and vote for them. Seems like R president and D Senator? Perfect. Hate D president but think R senator can win? Vote for them. And so on.

This creates an odd scenario where you could reasonably argue that a few modern despots are the wealthiest people ever. Near-infinite monetary wealth, combined with modern amenities and technology, combined with ancient style control over other people.

Stalin wins out I think on total amount of control of resources, but he does miss out on some modern goods. Perhaps Putin as wealthiest person ever? I could see arguments for other despots as well.

NGOs. Take a look at any other issue that is handled by an NGO network, and you’ll quickly realize that no state really has the political will to achieve what a disperse network of wealthy unaccountable independent actors can do.

Imagine for a moment, the immigration NGO-blob, but for parenthood:

  • organizations dedicated to improving the public image of parents and parenthood, pushing it through ads, media content, etc.

  • organizations dedicated to making parenthood as free and painless as possible, through free money, training, and even individual caseworkers assigned to families to assist them with any difficulties that may arise.

  • organizations that help “eliminate gender disparities” by establishing prestigious awards for accomplished mothers, special job positions for current and “retired” (empty-nester) mothers.

  • sex-positive education orgs that importantly note that having children as a result of sex isn’t a disaster, it’s a boon for society.

  • weird humanities degrees focused around the study of children, family-formation etc that gradually force the university as a whole to be extremely pro-parent.

  • development groups dedicated to redesigning urban areas in favor of large families

  • festivals, maybe even a whole month, dedicated to parenthood.

  • extensive lobbying groups to make sure that all of the above are not only legally favored, but funded with federal dollars.

There’s really no simple policy that could do the same.

Isn’t this what winning is supposed to look like?

No. Winning is supposed to look like getting an increase in resources and abilities, allowing you to tackle even more difficult challenges, ad infinitum.

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.

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).

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.