Titus_1_16
2yr ago
As much as Americans kvetch about their black people, there really is no population over there that's really comparable to Gypsies.
It's an unfair over-generalisation to assume, without any other evidence (habitus, dress, accent, etc) that some individual black American person has a meaningfully higher chance of committing crime. But with Gypsies, man, it's an iron law, there's not even a question. A gypsy president, or for that matter gypsy lawyer or doctor or other middle-class type, is inconceivable.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
It's ubiquitous porno usage, not obesity. The Japanese example supports this heavily
Titus_1_16
2yr ago
If the principal of a school is responsible for all injuries on the playground, the result is going to be obese kids who aren't allowed to play fun games.
Side note, but I've long thought it would be a pro-social act for someone to sue a school over their child's obesity/ADHD, and charge that policies mandating physical inactivity for most of a child's waking hours are the direct, proximate cause.
Just establishing this legal risk would provide cover with insurance etc to allow more short-term risk (eg running at playtime)
Titus_1_16
2yr ago
The quality of the discourse here is incredibly shoddy.
Okay, let's see some evidence?
It is 95% as if Ibram Kendi were debating Ben Shapiro.
You immediately provide direct, contrary evidence with this simile. 4D chess or...?
Titus_1_16
4mo ago
Degiro is a pretty standard choice if you're based in Europe - low transaction fees, good interface, reputable, and decent KYC (identity verification) process. I'd think they're fine for small retail investing, ie <€1m, beyond that point you might find a better experience elsewhere (not a concern for me lol)
Also, from your username you're based in Ireland right? Bear in mind that the taxation process on shares in Ireland is DREADFUL - it's both much dearer than a normal EU country and more cumbersome. An ETF specifically is taxed differently to ordinary single-share investment - for some ludicrous reason ETFs are taxed identically to ordinary income, not like a normal capital gain. This means if you're already at the highest rate (52% cumulative) all of your gains will be taxed at this rate. You're also hit with deemed disposal every seven years.
To bypass this there are a few UK products (eg Scottish Widows' Trust, can't recall the ticker) that basically mirror an ETF investment basket but are assessed as individual ordinary shares (ie 33% capital gains).
It's worth highlighting that you're unlikely to be audited any individual year, but if you're investing for the long haul the likelihood of you being hit at some point over eg a 20-year investing span is pretty unfavourable.
Bonne chance!
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Is the Motte supposed to be funny?
This is the funniest shit I've read all morning
Titus_1_16
2yr ago
also pro-infanticide
I'll take the bait. Go on then, spell it out
Titus_1_16
2yr ago
We previously were kind of a tax haven, yes. That's no longer the case, and what keeps all the tech HQs here is a mixture of inertia, business-friendly climate, etc. These aren't letterbox offices: Google is the largest private employer in Dublin, tech is the largest sector of the Irish economy both in employment numbers and GDP contribution, most US tech companies you could think of (bar Amazon) have their European HQ here. When I worked in the sector it would often surpise visitors from the US that [company's] largest office and official HQ was in Dublin and not London or Paris.
Titus_1_16
2yr ago
many indigenous /antiracist/ anticolonial movements in recent times are demanding not reconciliation but restorative justice. Never before has this been such a global and forceful phenomenon, all directed at one group: white Europeans.
Two points of contention here. First, there certain has been a strong global anticolonial movement before now: back in the 60s, when decolonisation was at its height.
Second, speaking as a right-wing European: second-wave colonialism from 1870 - 1970 in Africa was bad policy. It didn't help European imperial powers on net, and (to be generous) it helped African natives only in a very suboptimal way.
Titus_1_16
3mo ago
That's actually a really great example of what I meant yeah
Of course, the motivation for a lot of retro-homo-spotters is more often a fervent desire to see boys kiss than homophobic revulsion at same
Heck, I can't remember the last time I've heard a "Bethlehem and Jesus" style song on the radio instead of a "Presents and Reindeer" one.
A point that rankles my American other half, year after year, is that the "Christmas Music" played publicly here in Ireland is a completely different canon to what she grew up with back home. And, unusually, there is just a total failure of Americanisation in the domain of Christmas music - her canon seems ancient (many tunes from the 1950s versus a tilt towards the 1980s here, because of different population pyramids - we don't have a bulge of 60-70 year olds monopolising all the cultural memory space) and painfully schmaltzy to most Irish ears, including my own.
For example, the universally-acknowledged GOAT of Christmas music in Ireland is The Pogues' Fairytale of New York, a thoroughly secular 1980s ballad that consistently rankles schoolmarmish woke types not because of overt Christofascism, but because the word "faggot", in the pejorative sense, is a key lyric. This song gives rise to the only occassion in modern Ireland where a person can drunkenly chant the word "faggot" at a stuffy office (Christmas) party and recieve no censure.
Overtly religious stuff is also played publicly (a fine example is Mary's Boy Child by Boney M, a jaunty German-calypso tune) because it's a religious holiday. The modal Irish person under 35 sounds like a Q-Anon believer when discussing Catholicism (it's a giant conspiracy run by paedos to amass wealth & get a go of children), yet will still tolerate religious music at Christmas because, come on. I don't know how American culture has managed to get away from this. Maybe it really is semitic sour grapes from the pullers of American cultural levers.
Titus_1_16
2yr ago
I've definitely never heard of a farm kid thinking of cows as pets before
Have you talked to an Indian dairy farmer before? I know a small-scale dairy farmer here in Ireland that would be loth to eat his own cattle, even though there's no taboo on beef here.
For OP it's like growing up on a stud farm and then eating horse.
Titus_1_16
2yr ago
Twitter has an EU HQ in Dublin that runs the EU subsidiary. Post-Musk, they still have over 500 staff here. Most of those are salespeople, selling ads to EU customers.
I don't know the breakdown for Twitter specifically, but typically American MAGA/Faang/whatever firms make about 25 - 30% of their revenue in Europe. It's not nothing
Titus_1_16
5mo ago
Everything else aside, on the semen retention: what stops you having nocturnal ejaculation? Is there an equivalent mode for non-semen-makers? Are women constantly enjoying the fruits of semen retention?
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
the above are just a few years ahead of the rest of us. If we survive the singularity then we, too, will spend our lives on our little reservations, everything provided from above
It's worth considering that the rickety, shitey-arse state of many reservations etc. is as much the result of incompetence, indifference and bad faith from conquerors, as it is the inherent fecklessness of indigenes. Perhaps a hyper-competent, hyper-intelligent robot overlord would simply provide a better standard of reservation.
Competently-administed mandatory eudaimonia would actually be a wise policy on the part of any hypothetical roboking that was disinclined towards genocidal eradication. To keep humans in a sub-par state of flourishing would mean less predictability - there's always the chance of some freak behaving who-knows-how. Having all the decorative/ethically-sourced humans in a state that is the absolute pinnacle of human excellence means you can plan accordingly, and the odd freak won't "hop the fence" so to speak.
Even that practical concern aside, I think an AI inclined to keep us would probably keep us well. And for the humans, this is a life at least as fulfilling as that experienced by all the chaps in the old testament, in Greek myth, etc - a life of challenge, overseen by known gods. Not too bad really.
Titus_1_16
2yr ago
Also the world bank data shows that before the whole tax haven thing, Ireland was trailing the UK with around 65% of its GDP per capita.
Small note here since I both work in finance and am Irish; this exagerrates the UK advantage since a large proportion British GDP also comes from financial/tex efficiency stuff. If you're going to strip out the Irish tech sector (which is both the largest employer and largest GDP contributing sector of the economy) on the basis that firms are only sited there for tax efficiency, then to do a fair comparison you'd need to strip out the UK financial sector too.
It's true that GDP isn't a good metric to examine Ireland; our central bank publishes a figure that tries to account for the distortionary effect of profit funnelling, and which puts us about on a par with France on a per capita basis. If we're talking salaries and cost of living, Irish salaries are higher than non-London UK ones, and slightly lower than London ones.
Titus_1_16
2yr ago
Akshually... oppression isn't a binary state, it's a scale. I'd contend that the leash on the Chinese people has been loosened gradually but meaningfully since Mao's era, very skillfully, in such a way as to uplift them and allow a more advanced society without slackening too much and causing social disharmony
Titus_1_16
2yr ago
Notice that midway through my huge screed I talked about oppression of the Irish by the English, or Russians by themselves. Oppressive social structures don't need a racial dynamic (though they are still helpful colour coding who is oppressing whom).
Africans are perfectly capable of oppressing one another brutally without outside help.
This says nothing either way about my central thesis that oppressing a group while people in your society have access to books about the French Revolution is not a tenable strategy in the long term.
Titus_1_16
2yr ago
The author's name is the same as your username, did you write this?
Titus_1_16
3mo ago
Rock music and alternative subcultures
Bear in mind the parents of @Eupraxia paired off in the past
Lots of the black girls who might view white guys as suitable mates, especially in the past when music was more racially segregated, were into goth/grunge/punk/metal/emo/scene - interest in all these genres is also associated with common mental illnesses, particularly depression, and creativity generally
Titus_1_16
3mo ago
Actually I'd greatly respect the chutzpah of someone with, say, half Croatian and half Ashkenazi parentage who declared themselves biracial on that basis
Depends who you ask I guess
Inter-ethnic might be a better term
Titus_1_16
4mo ago
Yeah, I think given Ireland's reputation as a low-tax jurisdiction it's often surprising to those abroad to learn how selectively this low-tax regime applies.
Income tax is genuinely super low for low earners, but the technical "higher band" of income tax (42%) kicks in at just €35k, and increases incrementally up to 52% at €70k - ie every euro over that is taxed at 52% for most workers. Most people working in the tech sector are paying quite high income tax in Ireland, and very high (by European standards) tax on financial products and investments. Even though the corporate tax rate is one of the lowest in Europe, that's just to get companies in the door - we are certainly NOT Dubai on like a personal scale, contrary to what some of our peer countries imagine.
Also the weather is shit and there are too many foreigners (25% approx foreign-born), in a sort of Canadian social-anomie sense.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
It's really interesting to me that someone could post regularly on this board and yet still enjoy cannabis. I'm envious of your mental robustness tbh.
A strong plurality of people posting here could fairly be called "anxious overthinkers" - the board is a bilge pump for excess thought, and eg expressing any worry whatsoever about AI risk (whether the worry is grounded in real things or not) ought to be a criterion for anxiety diagnoses.
I smoked a fair amount of weed in my teens/early 20s, took plenty of other recreational drugs, and a near-universal thing I've heard from peers with a similar profile is that around age 25, they started to find weed disagreed with them. Specifically, it makes them/me really unpleasantly anxious. Weed to me now is solely a tool I would use if for some reason I wanted to give myself a panic attack. Maybe I'm a little more dramatic in my dislike than normal, but it's very normal to find weed unenjoyable from mid-20s onward.
So what's your secret? Youthful brain? No prior history of smoking? Iron resolve?
I actually would quite like to like weed again, and agree with the demerits of drink that you outlined - so if there's One Weird Trick you can share, please do so.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Would you say a majority of people find the linked image amusing, or sad?
I gotta say the cat at the end really bummed me out. Poor little chap
Twitter is a lot more crass than this place, it's like putting your mouth right on the tap.
I know the answer is always to curate one's feed, but it's hard to stop the low content creeping in on twitter
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