SophisticatedHillbilly
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User ID: 1964
SophisticatedHillbilly
7mo ago
Objectively, pretty much just white men in the like 25-45 range (definitely blurry at the edges there) who are some combination of wealthyish, charismatic, and healthy (or maybe just agentic? I’ve always felt that was a bigger factor.)
SophisticatedHillbilly
7mo ago
Machine operator is a pretty basic role. If you’ve ever used a 3d printer and had to deal with leveling the bad, clearing stuck plastic, verifying that prints are proceeding correctly etc. it’s basically that but with bigger machines.
SophisticatedHillbilly
7mo ago
If it set the stage for Trump, then it sure does make sense for Trumpians to support a continuous long-term version of it.
SophisticatedHillbilly
7mo ago
Two arguments here:
1.) Government spending: consider that the massive efficiency issue applies not just to bridges, but to nearly all government spending of any kind. While bridges alone are a small cut, it’s significantly more expensive to spend 10X or 100X for many different things.
2.) The issue goes beyond government spending to include government cost. Cost includes the expenses that are offloaded to the private sector, many of which are executive in nature. Rolling back a wide swath of administrative regulations could massively increase private wealth and save the public fisc indirectly. This also applies to the healthcare spending that makes Medicaid so expensive. That 10X multiplier is there as well (more than in most industries really.) Cut medical regs, increase doctor supply, etc etc.
The administration will have trouble with this politically though, since the second type of cost saving doesn’t show up in a straight “spending in 2022 vs spending in 2026” analysis
SophisticatedHillbilly
7mo ago
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.
SophisticatedHillbilly
8mo ago
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.
SophisticatedHillbilly
9mo ago
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.
SophisticatedHillbilly
9mo ago
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.)
SophisticatedHillbilly
9mo ago
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.
SophisticatedHillbilly
9mo ago
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.
SophisticatedHillbilly
9mo ago
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:
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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.
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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)
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Different rate of change. Abortion is quick, education and cultural change are slow.
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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.
SophisticatedHillbilly
9mo ago
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.
SophisticatedHillbilly
10mo ago
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:
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organizations dedicated to improving the public image of parents and parenthood, pushing it through ads, media content, etc.
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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.
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organizations that help “eliminate gender disparities” by establishing prestigious awards for accomplished mothers, special job positions for current and “retired” (empty-nester) mothers.
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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.
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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.
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development groups dedicated to redesigning urban areas in favor of large families
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festivals, maybe even a whole month, dedicated to parenthood.
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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.
SophisticatedHillbilly
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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.
I think the answer there hinges on whether you’d vote for a pro-abortion anti-Griggs candidate or an anti-abortion pro-Griggs candidate if they were head-to-head.
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