SophisticatedHillbilly
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User ID: 1964
SophisticatedHillbilly
8mo ago
That leads to the obvious question: What is Trump?
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr 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
1yr ago
Same, and it bothered me a bit because I was like "I don't even remember interacting with them! What could it mean?"
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
The only human beings who have consistent principles are those you'd never want to live with or be governed by.
This honestly has not been my experience at all. Those with the strongest principles have consistently been the only people in my life worth keeping around. If someone doesn't have any values that they'll maintain when it's painful, then you're basically dealing with a particularly cunning animal.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
Honestly I don't believe this entirely. The issue of try-try-try again-pass is real yes, but as Brexit shows it's an advantage inherent to the "Anti-Status-Quo" stance rather than inherently an advantage for progressives.
The problem is that conservatives believe you can just rest on your laurels and do nothing whatsoever to uphold your beliefs beyond voting, while progressives understand that to win you have to fight for your beliefs every single day. If conservatives tried half as hard to ban gay marriage as the progressives did to legalize it, it would be illegal.
Progressives collectively throw hundreds of billions of dollars towards their social goals, have numerous people whose entire lives and careers are dedicated to furthering the cause (many of whom abandoned more profitable avenues to do so) and have millions more who make art, put the values into their work, make public displays of loyalty, etc. Conservatives aren't even in the same ballpark of effort and commitment.
The sole exception would of course be Christian Evangelicals, who do all the same things progressives do to to actually attempt to win. And would you look at that, they did in fact get Roe v Wade overturned! Turns out conservatives can win if they actually care and put their money where their mouth is!
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr 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
1yr ago
An increasingly centralized EU could be a world power if it takes the direction that the US did early on and gradually become a single state. Barring that, no single EU state is powerful enough to qualify, and too restrained by the rest of the EU to flex the requiref muscles.
Russia will likely be more of a regional power than a world power, I agree. However, do not underestimate the psychological impact that backing the losing horse has on international opinion. Ukraine will likely lose the war, which means Team USA lost the war.
Doesn't matter how costly it was to Russia, it demonstrates that even very heavy US backing doesn't protect you against even a dysfunctional regional power, which means many smaller states will look elsewhere, such as forming their own regional blocks.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
Currently that is the case, and my only response is "Yes, and if Conservatives cared enough they'd be stealing our money to fund pet causes too."
But it wasn't always true. The early progressive movements were largely funded by progressives, progressive sympathizers, and donations by those who supported the associated causes. Conservatives could do the same, but they don't. An expected counterpoint would be the funds seized from the trucker protest but 1. That's not America, and 2. You have to actually put money towards building power structures (like the Federalist Society), not just in response to a single politically hot event.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr 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
1yr ago
I don't entirely disagree with your point, but:
Regression to the mean is a major issue here. The children of elites frequently do not have great genes, as the elites who spawned them was simply a statistical anomaly. They get to keep their elite status, however.
What we lack for the meritocracy you describe is downward social mobility. I want every high-class idiot out of their positions, but at the moment the upper class is far too secure.
If we had that then I'd be mostly fine with the system yes.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
I think part of the issue is weird occurrences that have no satisfying explanations given, which people can then attribute to their own pet theory.
Take the Phoenix Lights for example. Super weird, seen by millions, and the only explanations given are "aliens!" and "super secret weird government shit." Given that to many people these are more or less the same thing, or at least connected, you end up with a lot of people that can then point to the Phoenix Lights as evidence of aliens.
Most serious alien believers are, in my experience, equally willing to accept "the government engages in numerous weird programs and experiments, often testing them on the unwitting public (or at least exposing members of the public to them) MK Ultra style," to explain these weird events as much as they will accept aliens, or demons, or synchronicities or kabbalah or whatever.
What they won't accept is "none of that happened, pay no attention to the strange occurrences, nothing happens that is not publicly available information."
SophisticatedHillbilly
2yr ago
From my experience working in a job where the use of the quotes feature was vital: Google will randomly and without warning place users into experimental variations of their features as a form of A/B testing. If you get placed in the "Google prioritizes words in quotes" user bucket and not the "Google demands exact string match of words in quote" bucket, your search won't turn up the exact results and you're just out of luck.
I managed to escalate this issue quite high into Google support at one point, and the above was more or less everything they told me. Was quite stressful when I needed the exact match for my job.
SophisticatedHillbilly
2yr ago
"The same boiling that hardens the egg softens the potato"
I've found people's opinions on things like bullying or violence tend to just be them projecting their own egg-ness or potato-ness onto others. Yeah, some people will grow character because they got picked on, pull themselves together, become more socially adept etc, but others will just break, curl up into a ball in their own isolated corner, and suffer for it for a long time.
Now you can just say "they should be better," but I'm not sure that's possible. Most things are genetic, and I'd be surprised if fragility isn't heavily genetic as well. There's always trauma adaptation, but that usually makes the person less fragile and also less socialized, so there is a tradeoff there.
The way I see it, the problem is trying to act like everyone is equal. By insisting that this is true, we've left no room for people to exist safely at the bottom of social hierarchies. There's always a sense of "why aren't they better?" that just wouldn't exist in a world where it's understood that yes, some people are at the top, and others are at the bottom, and you each have responsibilities and expectations. Meritocracy has become an excuse for those at the top to ignore the responsibilities they must carry, and an excuse to blame the bottom rung of the ladder for not carrying out responsibilities they shouldn't even have.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
I don't entirely disagree with this, though I would say it occurred largely because conservatives didn't care enough about their own values to maintain them. They could have done what progressives are doing now, but failed to do so, and instead let sinful behavior take control of the most powerful state to ever exist.
The solution now is to find new tricks, new takeover methods, that the opponent doesn't see coming. It is a war after all. You can't just reuse the old methods identically, but there are consistently functional principles that are timeless.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
Wait, how do airline stocks work?
SophisticatedHillbilly
2yr ago
This makes me extremely interested in what a day in your life looks like. Would you be willing to share?
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
That's perfectly reasonable from an individual perspective. I suppose my concern is more with the "layabout poet son of a hedge fund manager" who ends up being handed a sinecure sort of job, or worse, one of actual importance. If that person gets paid $200,000 a year to be worthless, they have already had a worse impact on society than almost any petty criminal. The impact is double if their lineage somehow gets them into a position they're less-than-capable in.
I am much more okay with garbage humans living garbage lives than with mediocre ones rising above their deserved station unfairly, if only because I believe that "who sits at the top" has immense downstream effects on basically everything.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
While I agree with your point and generally am opposed to simply handwaving away all the details on how exactly we will par for things, I think the USA might actually be an example where this is true.
The state has immense resources at it's disposal, and almost certainly could give a comfortable life to everyone if it tried to do so without raising taxes or the like.. Of course, this would require cutting costs in other areas, and more importantly it would require cutting cost disease and corruption. Tough to provide for your citizens when the budget is stretched to its limit on $200 aspirins and $100,000 sinecures.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
My position would be somewhere along the lines of: "If there is no way to evaluate the factor being considered directly, then discrimination based on proxies is acceptable. Voluntary proxies (like dress) are preferable to innate proxies (like race)."
Say redheads have an unusually high chance to spontaneously combust, and I don't want to hire them in my explosives factory. If I can measure an individual's combustibility, then discrimination against redheads is pointless and nefarious. If I can't, then yeah, sorry redheads.
Given that we can measure Big-5 personality traits and IQ in mere hours at most, effectively all proxies (race, education, class, wealth etc) are unacceptable nowadays, though they were fine before.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
Not him, and don't necessarily support his claim, but I think the logic goes something like
- ~0% of women want to sleep with your average incel (definitionally)
- Some percent, say 5%, of women want to have sex with a dog.
- Therefore there is a not-trivially-small group of women (millions!) that would prefer some dog action to poor old incel.
I think it's less about the idea that it has a major impact on the marketplace (though the complete non-existence of dogs would probably have some infitessimally small impact) and more just one of those realizations where people are hit with the fact that they are literally less fuckable than a literal dog.
Of course, this all falls apart if the focus is on "average looking" rather than "beta," as it only works if talking about incels specifically.
My own view is that what I laid out above is roughly true, but mostly just the fault of the bottom-tier men for sucking that badly. It's not even really a bad or shocking thing. As you said, furries exist, and they're a much larger group than loser-philes.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr 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
1yr ago
Those systems tend to be framed as meritocratic internally though.
"Of course the aristocrats should run things, they are literally better than everyone else due to superior breeding (blood)"
"Of course we need to distribute things between the races, they are equal in their merits and so need equal rewards."
"Of course the most experienced people are in charge, they're the best at their job because they know it better than anyone."
Or for the credentialists: "Of course those with the highest credentials should run things, the credentials show that they're the best in their field."
Or for the IQists:
"Of course the smartest should be on top, smarter people are better than everyone else due to their superior inherent abilities."
I can't think of a system which a typical adherent doesn't frame as meritocratic. The question is always how to determine merit, which if you ever hired for a job you know isn't particularly easy.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
Nobel prize winning scientists can't exactly imbue intelligence, which SATs generally measure, nor was he likely taking the time to instill test-taking skills. I don't see why it would.
SophisticatedHillbilly
2yr ago
What is the absolute cheapest way to acquire a decent house? Money is tight, but me and the girl are tired of living in an RV, and we're ready to upsize. Land isn't a concern because we have a family property, but it needs to last awhile and it needs to be larger than the 350 sq ft (!) we currently live in. I've been looking at the following options:
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Construct an A-Frame house. These seem solid, but the cost is somewhat prohibitive, at somewhere around 25k with me performing a significant amount of the labor. Not a huge fan of the shape either, as it seems to be pretty bad conceptually in the cost-vs-space sense.
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Do one of these sort of things: https://www.steelmasterusa.com/quonset-huts/. Cost seems comparable to the A-frame, but for more space and durability
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Buy a used mobile home. They can be surprisingly cheap. As low as free, actually. They won't last more than probably a decade, but hey, that's a future problem. Size is disappointing, but not unbearable. I grew up in a mobile home after all.
Any other ideas? Any actual home construction seems to move it into the 200k range, which seems not worth it to me relative to the steel building setup, though I'm open to other opinions.
I want to start a mining operation and I need help figuring out what the best way to get off the ground is with limited starting capital and only a modicum of technical know-how.
Normally, this would be a pie-in-the-sky nonsense dream, but I have an unusual set of circumstances. I have inherited a 400-acre mountain property which was the site of an old mine about 100 years ago. That mine was started by my great^4 grandfather, but it died in the fuel-rationing of the World Wars.
My father attempted to start a new operation, but a lack of business-acumen, determination, and time prevented him from doing so.
The property itself is loaded. The 20th century operation was attempting to mine copper, not realizing the immense mineral wealth they were casting aside as refuse. Of particular interest to me are two things:
There is a particular mineral vein (about a 100ish feet wide, around 1000 deep) that tests show containing several ounces per ton of gold, an obscenely dense amount. However, this gold is AuO2, or gold oxide. I’d you’re thinking “gold doesn’t oxidize!” you would be mostly right. AuO2 has been made in labs, but I can’t find much info on it. A PhD student from a local college went and did a paper about it, but had few answers. No idea if it complicates extraction at all.
There is another deposit that tests show as containing around a half an ounce per ton of Rubidium. For those who don’t know, rubidium is a rare-earth metal used in many electronics which the US is currently 100% reliant on imports from China for. It is worth somewhere in the ballpark of $100 per gram.
It’s definitely an opportunity, but getting off the ground will be difficult with me having no idea what I’m doing. My circumstances are as follows:
Bank loans are usable, but the property must never be used as collateral.
I currently make $45,000/year in a low COL area, and don’t pay rent as I live in an RV on the property. I work 45 hours/week
I have a friend who inherited a fortune and is willing to bankroll me effectively for free but only if I have clear, well defined checkpoints and goals.
I need help figuring out where to start. I messed around with acid leaching in high school, and I’ve looked into making an arc-welder furnace, but I’m somewhat lost as to what the extraction process should even look like, or where I should start. I’m just rather scattered.
If anyone here can help, I’d greatly appreciate it. If there’s any interest, I can post mineral tests.
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