ThenElection
No bio...
User ID: 622
I actually liked the show. Good acting (particularly by the incel kid--his first time acting iiuc) and well-shot. I am quite the sucker for the one-shot, apparently. It's a beautiful reflection of the neuroses of our society.
The issue: it's entirely fictional and doesn't represent anything real. Which is entirely fine as fiction, but a lot of viewers are having trouble distinguishing fiction from reality. One MP called it a documentary.
For reference, open up Homicide in England and Wales: year ending March 2024 and Appendix Tables.
You might notice lots of things, but some (mostly obvious) things I'd highlight:
-
Men in aggregate are murdered more than women.
-
The rate of homicide has been trending down for all age groups. This is driven by a decreasing rate of homicide for women, while the male rate has remained stable.
-
There is zero Tate effect, stating the Tate effect as a statistic showing murders of a female victim increasing during his influencer period. This also holds even when looking at particular age groups. More accurately, there's a negative Tate effect if anything: guess he's mostly helping women. He loves the free marketing, regardless.
-
Children are murdered at a much lower rate than adults. To ground everything that follows, one to two dozen girls are killed per year in England and Wales, and two to four dozen boys.
-
Under sixteens, when they are murdered, are mostly murdered by parents and step parents. Look at Worksheet 16 of the Appendix tables. Of homicides where there's a known suspect, the vast majority of suspects for girls are one of the parents. Boys are also most likely to be murdered by a parent, but they have more distribution throughout the other categories.
-
Look at Table 34 of the Appendix tables in the victim under 16 section, which breaks out homicides by the sexes of the victim and suspect. Woman kills girl is the smallest category. Following that are man kills girl and woman kills boy, which are about equal. Man kills boy is the largest category. (Considering point 5, "man" and "woman" should be read as "father" and "mother.)
-
Maybe it's in the 16-24 age group we should be looking? But even there, there's no evidence of a Tate effect. Murder rates do increase, but driven almost entirely by boy victims rather than girl victims (Worksheet 4). The largest category of suspect for female victims in aggregate is the partner or spouse: the "acquaintance" or "stranger" categories that incel killings would fall under are barely represented (Table 34).
I want to revisit my point 6. A boy is at least one order of magnitude more likely to be murdered by his mother than a girl by an incel (though both happen extraordinarily rarely). Should we make a TV show about it? Hold hearings in government about it? Order that all expectant mothers need to attend a mandatory class on how they need to purge themselves of misandry and not murder their sons?
true crime shows usually feature karens and highly intelligent men as the killers. This is because their crimes are shocking and unexpected
This is kind of @Sloot bait, but that's not the reason. True crime shows feature Karens because Karens are a self-insert for the viewer, and they feature the men they do because etc.
ThenElection
3mo ago
(Warning to the reader: this turned into an extended rant.)
The issue with homeless shelters is quite simple: other homeless people. They are unsafe and chaotic. You can add rules to make this slightly better--no drugs, no alcohol, no pets--but that makes the homeless you most want out of the libraries and off the streets even less willing to go to a shelter.
So that leaves individual housing and apartments. But they can't be temporary: if they are, what happens when the beneficiary runs out of time? Do you kick them out, making them homeless again? So you indefinitely let them stay. A one bedroom in my city runs around $2500 a month, at the very low end. That's $36k/year for each person housed, which in isolation is still better than $100k/year. But the population housed would be constantly growing. And it's assuming no additional costs: you might reduce emergency room visits from once per week to once per month, but it's still a cost. And what happens when the tenant destroys substantial parts of the property? During COVID, vacant hotels were used by my city to house the homeless, and one hosting a couple hundred suffered $20M in damages over two years. $20M here, $20M there, and soon you're talking about real money.
All these funds are coming from taxpayers that are themselves having to spend a significant part, and often a majority, of their income to pay for rent or mortgage. It's the number one reason people leave my city.
And yes, our housing policy is shit, significantly contributing to the issue. But in a world where activism to improve our housing policy has failed for over a decade, I have to assume that it'll be at least a decade before anything improves on that front. Does that mean I should just forego crazy luxuries like clean and safe libraries, parks, sidewalks, and transit for the next decade? Why shouldn't I just move, taking the 60k I pay every year to the city along with me, when there are plenty of places that do manage to have public spaces at a small fraction of the cost? Plenty of people are doing exactly that already, which has driven massive deficits in the city budget. And then how are we going to pay for even more homeless services? Shutting down schools? Libraries? Parks?
ThenElection
11mo ago
Hilariously, I did pretty much exactly what she suggests in college (kept tampons in my dorm room, so if a female friend needed one, I'm at the ready!) The one time the opportunity came up, it played out exactly as you'd expect, weirding out not just her but everyone in the room.
There really are guys who buy advice like that. Usually someone a bit on the spectrum who listens to what people say they want and takes it literally. All the "friend-zoning" advice is right up that alley. I don't know why "get fit, put on muscle, and exhibit extroversion and dominance in social situations" is so hated as advice, even though it provides about 200% of the value of the aggregate dating advice given and would solve 99% of guys' issues.
ThenElection
3mo ago
Why not just rotate in the cooks and cleaners into the garbagewomen roles, since they're equivalent jobs?
This would be especially good if you swapped in the elderly caregivers into the gravedigger roles. It aligns incentives: if your care receiver dies, you dig the grave for them.
You left out a third option: raise taxes on the entire country to equalize compensation across the different job classes. You even get to hit highly productive men (and women) more, creating even more equality.
Do this process enough, and you can eventually make sure part time yoga instructors get paid the same as the top researchers at DeepMind!
There's also the fourth option, of doing pretty much nothing and then complaining on BlueSky about the conservative incel wreckers for causing the Fourth Bubonic Plague.
ThenElection
8mo ago
Most voters, even Democratic voters, don't actually buy the bodily autonomy argument, even for abortion. If you ask if women should be able to abort a day before she's scheduled to give birth, for no reason beyond feeling like it, most will just divert the conversation ("that never happens!") instead of biting the bullet. It's something cooked up in a philosophy journal that works as a convenient one liner.
"When a person shows you who they are, believe them."
No update on opinion. What it means to me: the most useful way to interact with a system is through modeling what it does and how it does it. Not what it says it does, not how it originated, not what its creator intended it to do, not what its subcomponents think it does, not what you want it to do, not what purpose it having would be the best for the world, not what the documentation says it does, not what the label on the tin says it does.
If you don't do this, you will run into trouble. For example, consider corporate DEI training sessions. The entire DEI training ecosystem, including outside trainers/consultants and corporate HR, will publicly state that they are doing it to help reduce bias and discrimination (along with some secondary claims around it increasing efficiency and innovation). Suppose an employee took this at face value, and he's deeply committed to racial DEI. He does some research, and it turns out in general these sessions increase discrimination and racism. And he does further research and is able to prove, with incontrovertible empirical evidence, that the sessions at his own company are making employees materially racist. He reports this to HR; surprisingly, they seem to ignore it. He thinks his report is being missed because of an overworked HR department, and so he publishes his research and evidence widely within the company.
What happens, do you think?
If you take HR's statements of their purpose at face value, you would expect them to effusively thank him for pointing this out to them, quickly remedy the situation as quickly as possible, and maybe even give him a bonus for his exceptional effort in helping them achieve their purpose better.
If you think the purpose of HR is instead to tick boxes to protect the company from legal liability and to join in into popular fads, you aren't as sanguine about the employee's future. You might even expect him to be called into HR for public desanguination.
When it comes to personal decision making, people who use one of these heuristics for ascribing purpose to impersonal systems are going to do much better than people who use the other.
Scott's post is, frankly, lame and disappointing. He doesn't even mention Stafford Beer and only has interest in responding to Twitter randos.
ThenElection
3mo ago
Vancouver homeless have nothing on San Francisco homeless. A&W halberd? I'll raise you a McDonald's raccoon corpse. Hand separation by machete? Have a do-gooder who invited a homeless man into his home for shelter and ended up dismembered in a fish tank. And we exalt them enough that we don't even punish them:
SFPD officers responded and gave the [raccoon carcass man] a mental health evaluation and determined he did not need to be detained.
And:
Police found a body without a head or hands in a large fish tank. They arrested Lance Silva and another transient, Robert McCaffrey, living in the house. Both were charged with ID theft, financial crimes, and homicide. Through DNA, the mutilated body was identified as that of Brian Egg. An autopsy concluded he was murdered and died from blunt trauma... Lance Silva and his friend were released.
The question of why things are the way they are is a good one, and I think it just comes down to costs. It is expensive to impose costs on the homeless: you have to get involved physically with them to impose any kind of penalty. If things go awry (which they inevitably will), you end up with either a dead police officer (costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars) or a dead homeless guy (costing the city millions of dollars). And, when arrested, they are just an endless pit you throw cash into. Put them in prison, and you're talking a process and punishment that itself costs hundreds of thousands. Letting them wreak havoc on the local populace has its own costs, but those are diffuse and don't immediately harm the government budget: it's a tragedy of the commons.
The non-homeless, though, are cash cows who are easily... cowed. So the city focuses a disproportionate amount of its law enforcement capabilities on them, and it's self sustaining. Sure, SF might shrug at someone being murdered and dismembered, but that's because they have to focus on much more serious issues like a businessman spraying down a homeless woman with a hose, which gets everyone from the NAACP to the New York Times weighing in.
ThenElection
11mo ago
I usually think a lot of the red pill rhetoric about social shit tests is nonsense, but stuff like this makes me think they might have a genuine point. "Give out really bad advice that someone with zero social skills might take seriously, and then you increase the chances that they'll take it and reveal their lack of social skills in a way that makes women more able to avoid them."
Widespread, I don't know, but it did happen. For instance:
The Morning Star bundle ceremony among the Skiri Pawnees (who lived in what is now central Nebraska) reasserted devotion to the power of the rising Eastern Star (Mars). It was their only ritual involving human sacrifice and was one of only a few not tied to seasonal cycles. For the ceremony to occur, a male member of the tribe had to announce that he had seen Morning Star in a dream and, upon awakening, perceived it rising in the east. Ritual tradition then called for dispatch of the dreamer (now deemed the "warrior leader") to secure a girl captive by raiding neighboring villages... After being dressed by the Morning Star priest in sacred raiments from the Morning Star bundle and anointed with red ointment, the captive stayed with the Wolf man... the Wolf man led the captive to the scaffold, constructed of different symbolic species of wood. The killing was carried out with a ceremonial bow and arrow. Immediately a stone knife incision was made near the heart, and specially prepared buffalo meat held to receive drops of the victim's blood before being prepared for feasting. Before the body was removed and placed in the prairie facing east, the entire village, including children, lodged dozens of arrows in the victim's back. The Skiris believed that this ceremony allowed the victim's spirit to ascend to the sky to become a star, while her body returned to the earth... The last known Morning Star Ceremony sacrifice took place on April 22, 1838, with the killing of Haxti, a fifteen-year-old Lakota girl. The United States subsequently suppressed the ceremony, but it also seems that some Skiris themselves wished to stop the human sacrifice.
http://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.rel.035
I'm always somewhat torn about highlighting this kind of thing: it's not surprising for Native Americans' level of development, and most cultures have things equally sordid in their past. But it's an essential corrective to the idea that Native Americans were noble savages, little fairy children dancing in the woods in communal bliss until big mean Europeans came and ruined Eden.
ThenElection
9mo ago
Since this is a gossip thread...
I have a couple friends who genuinely want the extinction of the human race. Not in a mass murder sense as they conceptualize it, but in a create a successor species, give a good life to the remaining humans, maybe offer them the chance for brain uploads, sense. Details and red lines vary between them, but they'd broadly agree that this is a fair characterization of their goals and desires.
Where do they work? OAI, Anthropic, GDM.
I have a fair amount of sympathy for their viewpoints, but it's still genuinely shocking. It's as if you suddenly found out that every government official was secretly a Hare Krishna or part of the People's Temple, and then when you point it out, everyone thinks the accusation is too absurd to be real.
ThenElection
3mo ago
In a deep blue area, mine are similar. Except, they're also places that double as homeless shelters. Last time I went to one for a change of pace, in front of me there was literally a man looking up images of preteen boys in briefs on a computer, and he was zooming in on some... Very suspect areas. And no one dares go to a bathroom, because you've got an appreciable chance of stumbling across someone who ODed on fent.
I like libraries and in theory want them funded, but I want them to exist to serve the local community. They would have more defenders if they served their purpose of being places to borrow books instead of being places to enact an ideological agenda.
ThenElection
9mo ago
It's comparatively rare, e.g.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16054005/ (21 positives of 1014 reported drug facilitated sexual assaults)
That's not to say DFSA doesn't happen. It's just that nearly always, the drug in question is alcohol. And I'm sure you've seen sketchy dudes slipping vodka into a partying girl's shot glass.
As another note... This was pretty much impossible to Google. Every link you see come up is either people hyperventilating about the problem with no statistics about its prevalence, or statistics about how many people are sure they've been roofied or know someone who's been roofied.
ThenElection
7mo ago
I don't know why the election has triggered a renewed gender war. The gender gap remained the same, or even decreased : https://www.nbcwashington.com/decision-2024/2024-voter-turnout-election-demographics-trump-harris/3762138/
Even if you think there's new evidence that says it makes sense to use sex as a carrot to convince men to vote Democratic, isn't going full Lysistrata a bad idea? If Democratic women go on an absolute intimacy strike while Republican women are still happy to form relationships etc., for men who would be swayed by such things, it just creates an incentive to become Republican.
Lastly, it seems self limiting: as women drop out of the relationship market, the women who choose to remain in it move up in terms of the quality of the men they can get.
All of this is probably overthinking things, though, as it seems mostly like a temper tantrum of the overly online set.
ThenElection
8mo ago
He has this manic charisma that makes no sense but is incredibly compelling. Imagining a counterfactual Harris victory, her speech would be full of positive words but have no joy behind them.
Trump has an optimistic vision of the country, who he is, and his role in it. I think that's what won it for him.
The status dynamics are interesting. Having worked at McDonald's sometime in the past clearly isn't something that Democrats feel there should be shame over--regardless of the veracity of Kamala's work history, it's still something she thinks gives a boost to her resume. But the response is nevertheless unhinged.
Is it some kind of stolen valor? I'm imagining Trump stocking shelves at CostCo in a photo-op, and I doubt he'd even get any media attention. Or even doing the same exact thing at Burger King: despite being identical slop, the response wouldn't be nearly so vituperative.
It has to do with what McDonald's represents. Kamala worked at McDonald's, but it was something horrific she was forced to do, serving the lowest of the low so she could better herself. If her life is ever dramatized by Netflix, her last day there will depict her departure as she gives a soliloquy about the depravities of mass consumerist slop, corporate wage slavery, car-centric culture, and factory farming. Trump, by contrast, is not only going there voluntarily, but going there as if there were nothing wrong or shameful about going there. Anyone with his privileges doing something so declasse is breaking a code.
ThenElection
2mo ago
the tariffs have not in fact collapsed the economy, while the institutions' commitment to being paranoid ninnies about covid did
I still find it shocking that everyone important just agreed to never talk about COVID and our response to it again. I don't know how anyone can discuss bad policies that wreck the economy without at least bringing it up to refute it being an example. It's like remembering the COVID shutdowns happened is icky and uncouth.
ThenElection
3mo ago
My city spends almost six figures per homeless person. The exact accounting is difficult, because of a combination of understandable (what philosophically counts as spending on the homeless?), bureaucratic (how do you get figures on the costs of emergency room visits?), and sheer graft (nonprofits that mysteriously siphon away lots of money with no services rendered evident), but it's a lot. Despite that, the homeless problem is as bad as ever, and many of the libraries are as a result entirely unusable to the public.
So, suppose it is true that so long as spending isn't, say, a quarter million per year per homeless, libraries will remain unusable. Voters are left with a set of unenviable choices: spend a quarter million per year on the homeless and finally get clean safe libraries; let libraries remain ersatz day shelters for the homeless that happen to be decorated with shelves of books; or stop funding public libraries. The first option isn't practicable, and the second is just stupid. So the third option ends up being the one that actually happens.
ThenElection
8mo ago
I don't think even the Trump campaign would be so crass to have a board of men rating a woman for her weight and cup size, liking her, and then dismissing her when she said she wasn't voting Trump. It's just a really gross image. Somehow, he manages to be classier than that very low bar (or at least knows how wildly counterproductive it would be).
ThenElection
8mo ago
Testosterone causes the closure of growth plates. So, surprisingly, lower testosterone might lead to taller heights.
Eunuchs in China were notably taller than men who were whole, and it's been known since antiquity that castration results in larger male bodies (Aristotle: "As a general rule, mutilated animals grow to a greater length than the unmutilated").
ThenElection
8mo ago
For what it's worth:
So many comments about the @latimes Editorial Board not providing a Presidential endorsement this year. Let me clarify how this decision came about.
The Editorial Board was provided the opportunity to draft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenures at the White House, and how these policies affected the nation. In addition, the Board was asked to provide their understanding of the policies and plans enunciated by the candidates during this campaign and its potential effect on the nation in the next four years. In this way, with this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years.
Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision. Please #vote.
https://x.com/DrPatSoonShiong/status/1849217132183060705
His very online progressive daughter retweeted that as well, along with an excerpt about how he got arrested for participating in anti-apartheid activities.
ThenElection
11mo ago
Some things in it are dumb, but I'm a bit sympathetic: you literally can't test everything; organizational mandates to test everything ("we're TDD!") just slow down development without adding much if any value; and if your organization relies on not having any shitty programmers on the team, your organization is doomed to fail, because at scale you will get shitty programmers.
The thing that's absolutely unconscionable is the lack of staged rollouts. That limits the blast radius of bad releases no matter how stupid the person was who made the bad release. That's like SRE 101.
I would say I'm appalled and surprised at how bad that is, but I'm not. It's just the state of software engineering as a field. We're all idiots and should die in a fire. (I'm a bit grumpy because I spent the day integrating with an LLM-based auto code eval system that represents scores with emojis.)
ThenElection
11mo ago
Start making evaluation of students at school track objective measures of learning instead of whether the teacher vibes with the kid, and maybe you'd have a point. As it stands, boys significantly outperform girls on standardized tests, particularly at the top end. It's likely the abandonment of objective standards that students can fairly compete over is a major part of why boys are disengaging (and also explains the collapse of the college wage premium). It's not surprising that when you turn school into a question of who can flatter a teacher and her their biases more that you end up favoring girls.
ThenElection
5mo ago
He was controversial; I vaguely remember a Gould polemic against the Bell Curve, back in the day (thought it was in the Mismeasure of Man, but that was published in 1981).
The difference was controversial meant "lots of people criticize you and imply bad things about you," not "you get blocked from all media organs for all eternity, as does anyone you're associated with."
In the wake of her
weaknessincredible historic strength among young men, Kamala has a new ad out on IG and SC, "Don't Get Popped":https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1847720298335948932
For those who don't want to view it, I'll transcribe the ad and set the scene: a speed dating scenario where women rate the man.
On the face of it, this seems entirely tone-deaf. The theory seems to be "vote Democratic, or we'll Lysistrata you" but I can't imagine a single man who would react in the way the campaign would want them to. Most would just roll their eyes, and, if you're a young man frustrated with dating, it would probably provoke outright hostility. So you might write it off as a clueless campaign hiring a couple of rich white women and gay men trying to imagine a way to make young men vote Harris and failing, just another example of the empathetic gap between who the campaign gets ideological inspiration from and the voters she needs to win.
The surprising bit is that the Harris campaign isn't targeting men with this but women, as indicated by ad targeting spend. My theory here is that Kamala is not offering a threat here, but selling a power fantasy. If you're a woman, vote for Harris, and you'll have a parade of men approaching you, who you can reject at will.
More options
Context Copy link