ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
1yr ago
Did I call him a pedophile? Just pointed out that he had an age-inappropriate relationship with a teenager, which is true.
The broader point is that sexual peccadilloes don't matter one way or another in terms of the value of someone's work, and (secondarily) cultural context matters. In the case of Foucault etc, they lived in a milieu where society hadn't yet decided that having sex with a teenager who was not yet of age was the Worst Thing Ever.
ThenElection
1yr ago
why the hell do we subsidize incompetent mothers one penny
Subsidize is doing a bit of work, here; as far as child support goes, it's a choice of how we split what's currently the man's contribution. Regardless of anyone's level of sympathy for irresponsible mothers, there's no reason that they should get less sympathy than irresponsible fathers. And even if we did want to subsidize irresponsible fathers compared to the status quo, allowing financial abortions would unleash a dynamic that results in substantially greater financial subsidization of children by taxpayers.
And hypothetically, at least, all this money is going to the upkeep of the child. If the money not actually ending up benefitting the child is the concern, you'd get a lot more buy in (from me, at least) with ideas on how to make sure a greater proportion of child support goes to benefit the intended beneficiary.
ThenElection
1yr ago
The reduced effectiveness against Omicron appears to be due to the virus being better at evading the immune system not due to a mismatch between the vaccine and the virus. Although that's difficult to tell because it's hard to find an entirely immune naive individual to expose to Omicron (either the actual virus or a vaccine).
One approach: why not engineer a new virus that the vaccine doesn't protect against and that mimics Omicron's ability to evade the immune system? It could give us deep insights into future pandemics.
ThenElection
1yr ago
I agree that the US is uniquely well positioned, though I think that high quality immigrants are going to be harder to come by, particularly in the quantity needed to reverse the costs of an aging population. My hope is that we try to reverse the culture of anti-fertility starting now and that technology will catch up in the next decade or so to help with the dysgenic effects.
ThenElection
1yr ago
That includes people who are on Social Security. If you scope it to Millenials and younger, I think the average is around 10.
ThenElection
5mo ago
Depending on your threat model, it's pointless anyway. Anything that stays up on the Motte for more than an hour is being stored somewhere, and if you've left a couple hundred comments, stylometry can identify you. Editing comments after the fact is only useful if your threat model is a weirdo who browses here regularly deciding to track you down for whatever reason.
Do you want children? I was in a similar position as you and found my wife in my 30s and it's working out pretty great, but parenthood was never a major goal of mine. The thought of raising a child in my forties is absolutely exhausting: you have time, and biologically your sperm will be fine for a long while, but I do strongly suggest having kids sooner rather than later if it's a goal. You won't have issues finding a partner who wants and is capable of having kids when you're 40, but your energy levels will have dropped precipitously.
Where do you live? If it's a tech-heavy West Coast city, I do think moving to NYC is a pretty good piece of advice, something that I wish I'd done. Plenty of jobs there, and the ratio is significantly better by all accounts. And there's more variation among the men there: in your niche, you're less likely to be drowned out by other men for women who are into that niche. I'd recommend against a developing country move: you'll have your pick of partners, but the cultural and gender expectation gaps are huge.
My Linguistics 101 take on it (I hate categorically dismissing a paper):
It's an okay study in itself; they give subjects a stick figure drawing, and say
“Please use the text boxes below to describe in 3 sentences what the person in the image is doing. Please be as specific as possible and provide as much detail as you can. In your description of this individual, it is important that you use the pronouns ‘[he/she/they]’ and ‘[his/her/their].’ This will help to standardize the accounts provided by all participants in this survey, which will make them easier to interpret.”
with each individual receiving a version with one of masculine/female/neutral pronouns (except in Swedish, with they/their being a new pronoun recently introduced by the government).
They then poll subjects on several political topics, and those primed with different pronouns show meaningfully different results. My main complaint here is around social desirability bias, as the prompt makes it pretty obvious the object of study here. They attempt to rule it out by measuring reaction times, but I don't find that particularly compelling. It's also weird that the results they find go beyond salience (e.g. increased recall of female politicians) to a wide range of issues ("profemale preferences"), as there's no suggested short-term mechanism that would do this. I don't think that compelled use of pronouns would make people immediately switch their votes from Trump to Clinton or move from opposition to support of gay marriage and abortion, and they only discuss salience because that's the only part they have a plausible mechanism for. The exceptionally broad result suggests they're not measuring what they think they're measuring, and social desirability fits better than increased adherence to progressive principles.
The broader issue is what you point out: who knows if the study will replicate. If a hundred grad students attempt to, we'll get five papers saying it does replicate, none saying it doesn't, and a thousand articles in the popular media saying it does. Other things (like the known issues with Sapir-Whorf-style linguistic determinism that should make us skeptical of the result) will never be mentioned as important context for the results.
ThenElection
15d ago
All taxes are distortionary.
Hate to be that guy, but land value taxation (or really taxes on anything that's inelastic in supply) doesn't have that problem. Probably the most compelling argument for it (plenty of arguments against it, as well).
ThenElection
2mo ago
I agree with everything you said, and no one should have to worry about making sure there isn't a homeless encampment a block away from a Four Seasons.
That said... 2cim isn't some yokel from Kansas City visiting San Francisco for the first time with her corn-fed husband and kids unexpectedly finding herself surrounded by syringes and shit. She is absolutely aware of the issues with San Francisco, and she's quite capable of finding and staying in parts of the city that are liveable.
ThenElection
3mo ago
It's absolutely fair to say that, if you're doing something the government places a high priority on detecting and punishing, Google is not the place to put digital evidence of that something. And that's a certainty.
The issue comes in when someone believes that there exist digital safes that no one but they can open. You're not going to build one in your spare time, and you're certainly not going to find one in other well-known third-party services (which are equally compromised by the government and less secure than Google) or in unknown fly-by-night services (half of which are government honeypots, and the other half are people waiting to do a rug pull to steal all your bitcoin and which are probably breached by the government anyway).
ThenElection
3mo ago
China has a material advantage in the local theater, but the best it can hope for is getting its neighbors to commit to neutrality (and at least Japan will not, and it still has meaningful shipyards). The US also can shut down Malacca.
Everyone's economy will be f'ed, but if China can't win in the span of ~9 months, it has lost. That said, I don't reject the possibility of it winning in that duration: there are just too many uncertainties to call an outcome.
ThenElection
4mo ago
Is your main point of contention that vegans bundle together a lot of beliefs that should be independent, likely motivated by a core moral dislike of killing animals? Sure. But the vast majority of people do that; beliefs are tribal, and that's far from unique to vegans.
I'd be curious to see a link to the vegan post you mentioned; did he jump from point to point as you describe here, or did he focus on the (likely wrong) "veganism is good for high performance in sports" argument only to have a bunch of posters bring up unrelated points?
ThenElection
4mo ago
You could nuke Council Bluffs and Google would shrug. The idea that someone could shutdown Bard by shoving down a bunch of server racks is delusional; Google's initial reaction to a nuke would be crafting the right PR release and figuring out how to get a big tax write-off for it. FdB is more invested in heroic myths than coming up with an objective, materialist understanding of tech power.
ThenElection
4mo ago
Good catch, appreciated.
ThenElection
5mo ago
Accept is the key word that needs some refinement. Migrants are entirely free to try to change society in their image. Their host society is entirely free to say "lol no." So long as both non-violently accept the outcome of that negotiation, it's all above board.
The issue many rightists have is that their host society instead goes "meh, just let me have my McDonald's, reality TV, and video games, and you can do whatever you like." That's arguably a bad outcome, but it's entirely on the natives for allowing the situation to develop like it did.
ThenElection
5mo ago
It's consistent: if it isn't clear, I think both Israel and Hamas are the prisoners who murder an innocent guard for no reason, just to make a point, which is reprehensible.
That said, it's a bullet I'm willing to bite: if either Hamas or Israel had a solution that killed thousands of innocents that actually managed to solve their problems, I'd consider it morally acceptable. (That said, I'm rooting for Israel's vision for the region over Hamas's, but I classify that as an aesthetic preference, not a moral one.)
ThenElection
6mo ago
What do you use for your fermentation vessel? I've been sticking with the Chinese ones with a water lip (guessing other cultures have something similar), along with ceramic weight stones. I'd have guessed that the acidity of the brine would be bad for metal plates, but apparently not?
Harder to do on a phone, though, and I try not to open my computer on weekends. Maybe I'll do it at work on Monday.
ThenElection
8mo ago
On the news today (USA), during an inflation/possible interest rate hike story the reporter claimed that the cost of bread had gone up because of the war in Ukraine causing supply disruptions of wheat. Is this a major reason? My mental model has it as more a result of the broader macroeconomic situation.
The land based trade that China is interested in (Gwadar fantasies aside) is alternative routes for importing fossil fuels and natural resources via its northern and northwestern borders. Decidedly worse economically than sea-based trade, that's still far more practical than the Hindu Kush route. And in a Taiwan contingency, the costs don't matter too much: it's already decided to nuke its economy. It's more than willing to take on otherwise uneconomic projects if those can secure resources from a Russian vassal state to help wage its war, and that's entirely rational (taking the rationality of a Taiwan invasion as given).
Its goal isn't to create some permanent Eurasian land-based trading bloc but to provide energy security in the case of war. Post-conflict, it would return to sea-based trade, with the hope/expectation that it would be able to dictate the terms of what sea-based trade in the western Pacific looks like.
China has to be pretty happy about what the war is doing to Russia. Before, there was some chance (admittedly less than likely) that Russia could be drawn into some kind of sanctions regime. But now it's certain where Russia's chips will land, because it really won't have a choice.
Most recently, a friend told me about a manuscript showing that of the 402 proteins which have been highly conserved in bacterial metabolism, 380 of them are highly stable at the pressure, temperature, and pH of these mineral-emitting thermal vents.
Perhaps this? 355 instead of 380.
The concept of a last universal common ancestor of all cells (LUCA, or the progenote) is central to the study of early evolution and life’s origin, yet information about how and where LUCA lived is lacking. We investigated all clusters and phylogenetic trees for 6.1 million protein coding genes from sequenced prokaryotic genomes in order to reconstruct the microbial ecology of LUCA. Among 286,514 protein clusters, we identified 355 protein families (∼0.1%) that trace to LUCA by phylogenetic criteria. Because these proteins are not universally distributed, they can shed light on LUCA’s physiology. Their functions, properties and prosthetic groups depict LUCA as anaerobic, CO2-fixing, H2-dependent with a Wood–Ljungdahl pathway, N2-fixing and thermophilic. LUCA’s biochemistry was replete with FeS clusters and radical reaction mechanisms. Its cofactors reveal dependence upon transition metals, flavins, S-adenosyl methionine, coenzyme A, ferredoxin, molybdopterin, corrins and selenium. Its genetic code required nucleoside modifications and S-adenosyl methionine-dependent methylations. The 355 phylogenies identify clostridia and methanogens, whose modern lifestyles resemble that of LUCA, as basal among their respective domains. LUCA inhabited a geochemically active environment rich in H2, CO2 and iron. The data support the theory of an autotrophic origin of life involving the Wood–Ljungdahl pathway in a hydrothermal setting.
So one also has to wonder why a deity would create life in the place most likely for life to form from a naturalistic abiogenesis event instead of somewhere else.
ThenElection
10mo ago
Is curiosity really such a mental issue? If you can change your sex more or less at will, I don't know why most people wouldn't jump at the chance for the experience: it's reversible after all, in the hypothetical. It seems no weirder than wanting to see what being a bird is like for a couple hours.
I would say 5 minutes a day while you're sitting on the toilet. More than 100 contacts per week, less than 200?
Going with the spousal example, it's not equally optimal for both to choose red and both to choose blue. Both choosing blue is superior to both choosing red, because the very act of both choosing blue is indicative of stronger bonds and itself reenforces them.
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