ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
24d ago
you're underselling how radical the typical redditor is these days
Perhaps; I spend as little time on it as possible (and am pretty sure I have a shadowban anyway, for unclear reasons).
In lieu of a Redditor, how about a poster from rDrama running as a Democrat in Michigan?
ThenElection
24d ago
People who think Newsom's IQ is sub 1000 SAT equivalent just have not interacted much at all with that actual level of intelligence. No one would confuse him for bright, but he's well above average.
ThenElection
24d ago
He sounds like... A Redditor. Of the stupidpol variety, but nothing too exceptional (didn't look through his profile--I wonder if he was on stupidpol). I think you're treating mood affiliation rhetoric as actual ideology. In terms of how he'd actually vote, it wouldn't be dissimilar to any other Democrat who would run in a Senate primary would vote; to the extent he didn't, it'd just be on votes that either had no chance of passing or no chance of failing, as a dispensation granted him by leadership.
It's really just an aesthetic choice: slimeball in a suit vs erratic disordered rebel. I'm sure neither is what is actually optimal, but the latter wins over the former. A large group of Democrats are enraged at the status quo (say what you will about their prescriptions for moving away from the status quo, but the sentiment is genuine) and will be thrilled by the aesthetics he brings, and the ones who actually are happy with things but want to be the ones running the country will fall in line.
ThenElection
25d ago
As best as I can tell, school administrations have tried to address the problem by telling professors really really hard over the last 20 years, and it has resulted in things only getting worse.
A friend of mine was working as a graduate TA of a freshman physics class a couple years ago at a prestige university, and they had a fairly reasonable initial grade distribution. School administrators yelled at the professor and told him he had to give more As.
Professors generally respect intellectual effort and accomplishment and want grades to reflect that. But when admins, students, parents (sigh) are all on the opposite side pushing for inflation, the easiest path is to lower standards.
ThenElection
26d ago
there's still constant pushback and struggles in implementing it.
And yet it's still implemented, eagerly and enforced by state violence against men by governments who are typically hyper-sensitive to the barest hint of coercion. Natural state of the world, I guess. While "birth conscription" is so far outside the Overton window that I can't say I've ever heard it seriously argued for. Scoffing loudly at the idea of something being a double standard doesn't make it not a double standard.
ThenElection
26d ago
Their education should be masculine, STEM oriented, and in co-ed settings.
That gets things entirely wrong. It's not that women have been masculinized and gone into masculine roles; it's that institutions have been feminized, offering roles that are much less competitive and much more about your social standing. Universities now are scared to grade on a curve that might imply some people perform better than others; you turn up, and you get an A. It's much more about consistency and the kind of conscientiousness that women excel at.
ThenElection
26d ago
It will sort itself out, eventually. But for a period of a couple decades, things will be really rough. Since I'll be living and retired for those decades (and my kids will live through it!), I'm very concerned. Best case scenario, we take the iceberg approach to the elderly for the interregnum; worst case, we tax the kids to take the large majority of their income so the elderly can have a dedicated ass wiper.
That choice is kind of baked in at this point (unless AI saves us all), but maybe we can make it a bit less painful.
There is the risk of death that you're leaving out. IIRC for a conscriptee to Vietnam it was around 1 in 40; the risk for women dying of pregnancy related complications is at least an order of magnitude lower, so in terms of QALYs, military conscription probably outweighs it.
That said, we will never conscript again, so conscription seems like a kind of fake issue to me: if it were abolished tomorrow, pretty much no one complaining about male gender roles would change their tune, because it's not really a primary or even secondary issue motivating people in their day-to-day lives.
ThenElection
26d ago
There is no mechanism available to "extend the social contract obligations to women, and all that entails." The male gender role is primarily constructed by social pressures, not through any kind of law or policy (hypothetical conscription notwithstanding). And the role that women collectively imagine for men forms something much more strongly coherent than the role men collectively imagine for women. Both can turn down their respective roles in an instant merely by choosing to; men face far more social consequence from that choice, though, so they choose not to and learn either to shut up and accept their role or to celebrate it.
ThenElection
26d ago
The IRS was out of control
Isn't the appropriate phrasing here "Trump had lost control of the IRS," or even "Trump never established control of the IRS"?
Aside from the optical issues of sueing yourself, it reveals the deeper issue. Trump has done little to nothing to actually change the systemic problems of government bureaucracy; instead, he's most interested in simple legible money, which he'll skim off the top and distribute as spoils to his allies. This does nothing to actually change the culture, but it's an equilibrium satisfying to both sides: bureaucracy keeps getting their paychecks, and now Trump hanger-ons get paychecks too. Even Trump haters get something too: more outrage of the day to cement their sense of identity.
The only losers are taxpayers and people who want effective government.
ThenElection
29d ago
As a child, I was lucky enough with MtG boosters to build a deck with two Black Lotuses. It lost track of it sometime in high school or college. Probably buried in my parents' house somewhere.
ThenElection
29d ago
Do fresh eggs in old women develop more closely to fresh eggs in young women or expired eggs in old women? The former seems more likely to me, though I've not looked into it. Genetic risks especially.
Interpersonal finance question: how do y'all reconcile different finance/investing approaches when married?
Luckily, my wife and I don't have differing consumption habits; our main line items are taxes and our mortgage, and beyond that it's probably under $2k/month in expenses. But what we do with the remaining money is quite different. She's a balanced portfolio type; I'm more of a... adventurous type, though we both consider ourselves Bogleheads.
We reach compromises; e.g. recently I agreed to her requests for a $60k emergency fund, while before I kept as near $0 in cash as possible (her preference is $100k). Most of the compromises lean her way, though. At the same time, I've been planning to deleverage anyway as I draw closer to retirement, so it's not a big deal. But other situations have led to conflicts. E.g. we both have family members who want money; she sees familial handouts as a way to make life smoother, I see them as throwing away money to enable bad patterns.
Meeting halfway, or near enough, has worked fine for us. And most financial conflicts dissipate into irrelevance if you have money (so, maybe the generic solution to financial issues is to have money). But do you have a different approach?
We've got a couple hundred sitting around for tipping housekeeping.
Otherwise, I feel like I should have some (a couple thousand?) in our go bag. The issue is I don't know how to size it: in a scenario where banking and payment infrastructure is shut down entirely, what problems am I trying to solve with cash? Seems like extra ammo would be a better use of the space. Maybe gold jewelry if I expect to be moving abroad?
TMF was the bane of my portfolio, sigh.
How much leverage do you target for your whole portfolio? Mostly LETFs, or other instruments as well?
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