But you cannot say "nobody is saying X" when there are people saying X right next to you. You really shouldn't be saying "nobody is saying X" when you are saying X.
Have you heard that from me?
You, specifically, call out accusing gender traditionalists of holding up idealized historic gender relations as a kind of strawmanning and then proceed to hold up idealized historic gender relations: "It's largely women that have a problem with this in 2025, not men.
Show me on single person in TM that has ever said "the 1950's was a utopia for relationships," and I will retract my reply that that is a strawman. You're conflating two separate points on this issue.
I did not "blow past" this. The fact that historic conventional standards of behavior do not reflect what you seem to think they did is my point.
If you didn't blow past it then why did you take issue with something I agreed with you about? It seems your disagreement with me is based on something I never said.
Why, then, do our gender neo-traditionalists complain about gender equality and claim that men are entitled to a privileged status on account of all the special responsibilities they assume? Why is men's work held up as load-bearing while women's work isn't?
I have no idea what you're talking about. I've said the exact 'opposite' of this. I've said I think if a woman chooses to pursue a professional vocation she absolutely should. If a woman wants to pursue a commitment to family life, that should be considered a full time job and should be paid for by the state. What's the issue I'm supposed to have with this?
... does not in any way imply a male-led social order, and yet for some reason the people saying that always seem to come back to it...
This should be pretty obvious. Show me where all these matriarchies are in the present day or throughout history in comparative terms. History's rendered a pretty clear judgment on this.
I rather strongly suspect that this is because they want women in a subservient social role.
Trust me, I've known men who have thought this way. There are definitely men who think like this and try to control them for all kinds of reasons. All of them as such have issues that become clear if you get to know them.
Witness the anger over "HR ladies", "feminization of the workplace", demands for bringing back traditionally masculine jobs, etc...
HR departments are necessary. Especially in large institutions. If you employ 100 people and expect there never to be interpersonal difficulties between others, disagreements and professional worries to process through and review you're a fool. But the stereotypes around the attitudes of the people that often populate these departments draws attention because most people have experienced it through their interactions with them.
This rebellion against the breakdown of old gender roles is a huge part of the appeal of manosphere-type media.
That's a symptom of the problem. This all goes back to the 1960's. I was around before social media was a thing. Trust me, this absolutely existed before YouTube. And then before Facebook. And then before MySpace. All social media today has done is put a camera in front of it. The breakdown of gender roles in this sense also coincided with an e collapse in parental authority over misbehaving children and constant arguments between husbands and wives over pursuing individual desires over being a responsible and cohesive family unit. I've seen it dude. You may say, "well that isn't a causal relationship." And it may not be. But it highly tends to follow after the fact.
Shit like this would've got you murdered in my family by my father and grandparents. I was very harshly disciplined when I misbehaved as a kid. If the stuff that happened to me was repeated today, my parents would be in jail. What was done to me wasn't the best way for them to get their point across and the rod often carries emotional damage people carry later in life. I'm not against spanking at all, but there are much better ways to raise children than how I was taught. In my own life one of the things my parents would always do when I was growing up was accuse me of doing things I never did and lying about things I never lied about. I sometimes used to wonder if that was some kind of reverse psychology tactic. Maybe the entire point was for them to make me that way. Because if I'm being accused of X constantly, well then I'll just become the thing they're accusing me of in the first place because why not?
If a child gets into trouble and you catch them in a lie, you don't ask them if they're lying. You already know they did. By asking them, you're inadvertently training and teaching your children how to lie to you. The goal should be for your children to come up with solutions to problems and ask what they can do to fix what they've done and not do what they did, in the future. That doesn't mean your children never get into serious trouble with you. But a lot of parents don't try to understand how to parent correctly and they don't think deeply about what it is they're doing. Punishing them when they "tell the truth" in the case of demanding the answer you want to hear of your children versus punishing them "telling a lie" only ever showcases that lying is a gamble. A gamble that's totally worth it if you get away with it in 9 out of 10 cases.
To the second: men are generally more willing to date down than women, but less willing to date up (see also: feeling emasculated).
Sure. Part of it may feel being emasculated. The other part owes to the fact that men and women aren't after the same thing in relationships. Income is wholly irrelevant to a man's desire for a woman. If she has what he's looking for, whether she makes $70k a year or $1m a year makes no difference to him. Yes, this don't apply for "absolutely every single" man out there. But it might as well by the lopsided preferences men overwhelmingly have.
Yeah, there aren't a lot of female doctors who want to marry male plumbers; there also aren't a lot of male plumbers who want to marry female doctors.
Yeah. Because of the differences you encounter. Read the immediate statement quoted above.
... but it is far from obvious that unequal gender relations are the 'best' way to handle things...
Again, you're putting words in my mouth:
You can have decency without tradition, but the best way to get it [historically] is often through a social/life script that tells you how you're supposed to act and behave, lest you face punishing consequences if you deviate from what you're told.
Thus far, it has been the best way.
I'm sure there are a bunch of people here who feel persecuted on account of their interactions with women. I find it hard to believe they've never been told 'good job' or 'I love you' unless they are incompetent and have incredibly toxic families and social groups, neither of which are gendered issues.
Let's just be honest dude. With guys who have no opportunities to score, it's just jealousy and envy. Nothing more. Guys will lie about it to save face and not lose social standing. But that's really what it is. But look at it from the standpoint of being an advocate for the young women in your own life. You'd quickly understand their perspective on things if you were forced to be their advocate. Guys don't like confronting that, so they'll divert from and redress the issue in other subtopics which they think will favor their point of view and conceal their internal feelings of frustration about the matter out of embarrassment.
But again, who can blame women for wanting to avoid men like that? A woman would have to be insane not to be turned off by those men. When it comes to me, I wouldn't let guys like that within 100 yards of my niece or younger female relatives. And then I'd get decried for being a "misogynist" for "controlling" their behavior if they choose to associate with such guys who would mistreat and abuse them. What gives? I'm only trying to guard their own interests and be protective of them...
Did they? Decree 770 was one of the first things to go after Ceaușescu got got, and in the interval required a totalitarian enforcement apparatus (and resulted in an enormous number of abandoned children).
Extreme. Just as I said it was.
This is less 'conservative' and more the kind of thing conservative anti-communist writers would make up to make communism look bad.
It's "conservative" in the sense it's collectivistic and paternalistic. And even of the terminal values itself (technically speaking). Natalism is a primary concern of conservatives. Myself included.
If your policy proposal leads to people overthrowing you and shooting you on TV, I think it's safe to dismiss its viability (and yes, I'm aware that the Romanian Revolution was not about this specific issue, but you can't separate totalitarian policy from totalitarian regimes).
I'm not at all saying I advocated what he did. I'm simply stating an observation that it worked. Draconian? Absolutely. And yet, very practical. The remainder of that comment I don't see any substance in replying to.
Tretiak
8hr ago
Lmao! What in the fuck….
I love how this thread has turned into a discussion where we’ve essentially become a group of Jews debating scriptural nuances and statements of other Rabbi’s, vindicating the stereotype that Jews love to argue with each other.
Tretiak
2d ago
I was going to say this as well, for the most part.
Nick is more the trendy influencer type conservative who’s great for the outrage machine of social media. I don’t follow him in particular unless he’s made a splash large enough like on Tucker that I have to watch him. But I’ve seen him in other venues before. I’ve never found him informative at all. And he has been clearly misinformed on various topics.
Take one particular example of this. When Halsey English debated Nick back when Warski Live was still a thing. Nick’s a young and good looking guy who was dressed up for the discussion. Most people watching this would’ve said Nick won. And if you asked me on the optics and performative antics of how debates go, he did. But as a person that’s read extensively and pretty deeply across various topics they touched, Halsey actually had the argument correct by a good shot.
Take Nick’s remarks about the Talmud (or Dan Bilzerian’s if you want to). He’s repeating a lot of the classic tropes and accusations about anti-Christian and anti-Jesus remarks that have been around for centuries. Not knowing some of these are outright fabrications (they don’t exist), are a collection of scandals where Rabbi’s give different views about hypothetical arguments among classroom discussions, or are often refuting various claims. The Talmud is a massive religious collection of “case law” more or less. It’s not a single unified composition of discrete writings that says shit like “you can murder gentiles.”
I personally own a complete collection of the Babylonian Talmud and Christ is it a pain in the ass to read and make sense of. But if you actually read it, it fully conforms to the explanations the Rabbi’s give. Nick either doesn’t know this or knows and is lying about it. I think the former is probably true in his case.
Nick is mostly popular IMO not because he’s some kind of scholar or intellectual heavyweight making waves. He says things that are outrageous for the times that are funny and inflammatory and progressive ideology is falling more out of favor with conservatism again becoming in vogue. He’s caught a high point in the wave of things and is riding it very effectively. The real testament to how bright or successful he is, is what he ultimately does with the victories he’s stacked and the popularity he’s accumulated.
Tretiak
2d ago
“Dude” is appropriate. Just in proper context and not when a woman calls you it. “Buddy” was always considered an insult where I’m from.
A lot of them are either fooled easily or have never met pathological liars before. The tells were pretty obvious to me. He was mostly caught out on his inconsistencies.
A lot of people think lying is simply a matter of whether or not people volunteer up information or confess their involvement in certain activities. That’s not how they get you most of the time. A long time ago I read an encyclopedia on the tactics of trial lawyers that was written around the first half of the 20th century.
This is how they catch you. The first thing they do is they’ll have you tell your story from beginning to end. Then after some lines of questioning they’ll have you tell the exact same story again, but to start from the middle. Then after they repeat multiple lines of questioning they’ll have you tell the same exact story again, from the end, all the way back to the beginning. And often times you’ll get tripped up, you’ll be caught thinking your way through the web of fabricated details you made up, it becomes very disorienting and incoherent.
Naturally this doesn’t take 100% of the time. Some people just remember things in weird ways. Some people’s natural conversational pattern causes them to misspeak a lot. Some people are naturally more nervous and anxious than others. But it’s effective enough where they rely on this method of interrogation to this very day.
And it’s the same thing where they coax you into conclusions you wouldn’t agree with by describing an activity but avoiding the word that describes it directly. So for instance, if you were accused of “stealing” money, they’ll ask, “Did you ever take property that didn’t belong to you?” Because they know “steal” is an emotional trigger word that raises the alarm bells in the mind of the accused, such that they dodge, resist and avoid it. Same with “kill,” “rape,” “shoot,” “rob,” etc. But if you’re a trained target or are acutely aware of the precise frame of the question, you know what it is they’re asking. If you look at the Nuremberg Trial’s for instance, Herman Goring ran circles around the prosecuting attorney such that they had to appoint a more specialized and seasoned attorney in his case to be able to handle him; because he knew what the word game was that they were playing with him.
I don’t know. This whole world is topsy turvy when I’ve got 20 year old girls calling me “dude” and guys much shorter than me calling me “buddy.” You’d still get a glass cracked on your head if you say that to another man where I’m from. It’s like calling someone “friend” or “homeboy” making quotation marks with both your hands at someone right before you spit at and smack them across the face. That term was always considered insulting in any context. You never call someone that.
Tretiak
3d ago
The criminal justice system is an absolute statistical mess when it comes to making sense of the data.
I remember a number of years ago when the book The New Jim Crow came out, how widely panned it was and popular it became. Not a lot of people know that among criminal justice scholars behind the scenes, it's a textbook case of how not to do criminal justice research. To take an example. Let's compare a young black guy and a young white guy who are guilty of possession of marijuana. If you compare certain profiles in a database you'll see odd things like this white guy got off with community service for a joint and this black guy got 3 years in prison. And some activist will come along and see this and declare "This is evidence of racism!," with no other context given. Here's what actually happened.
When the white guy was pulled over and caught, all he had was a joint on him. When the black guy was pulled over and caught he had a joint on him and also possession of a firearm. The police officer offered to show clemency to him by dropping the gun charge on him in exchange for 3 years in prison on the marijuana charge. So the gun charge disappears from the database. In other words, the police are granting you a tremendous amount of leniency here. Being a young guy, the police don't want to ruin your future and opportunity for growth when there's a gun charge lingering somewhere on your background when a prospective employer looks at you. Incidentally as well, if you live in a blue state with more stringent gun control measures and laws against owning firearms, guess who's often going to suffer disproportionately as a result? Minorities and those living in bad communities who can't escape.
Yes, there are also bad cops. Asshole cops. Racist cops. Some cops are outright evil. I've had my share of interactions with them when I was younger and on the wrong side of the neighborhood. I have had interactions with cops who were such assholes that if I were black guy and the exact same interaction went down, you certainly would've walked away from that situation, thinking the cop was racist. I'm a huge supporter of law enforcement but I know what it's like to also wonder "... are all cops like this?," because police do treat people like shit. But then again, they're often dealing with the worst of society on a daily basis. The good ones unfortunately have to suffer their reputation for what the bad ones do. But the criminal justice system in this country is so fucked up from an analytical standpoint I see little hope at the chance there's going to be substantial reform to it in my lifetime.
Not sure why you're necro'ing an almost two week old post, but I'll bite.
One of the marvelous things about the Motte is how often you'll get one Mottizen saying "no one is saying X" in the same thread that another Mottizen is saying "X, and furthermore X doesn't go far enough." Or, hilariously, the same comment.
Depends on what issue you're talking about and the details therein. Should it be a surprise different people have different opinions? Any large enough group is going to have dissenting opinions, even from within their own camp.
It's sort of implied when one says that a) motherhood is the highest aspiration for a woman b) women don't deserve to have an equal voice in society because the things they do are less valuable.
There are two fundamentally different views you can have on this type of thing.
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Human mating and relationships are too important and shouldn't be left to individual choice and preferences.
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Human mating and relationships should be left to individual choice and preferences.
Neither of these propositions are true to the outright exclusion of the other, entirely. But they exist on a spectrum. The state has an interest in the propagation of the next generation. Humans are still in control of their romantic choices and attitudes. From 1, it should be easy to understand why motherhood is of such great importance. Without a future generation, your country and society will rapidly cease to exist. Virtually all of the arguments against it lie on the side of 2. I also happen to believe that for the majority of women, their own individual fulfillment is best found through the emphasis placed on motherhood through 1. Through my own life experience of people I know. That's not conservative dogma. That's simply an empirical fact that also happens to vindicate my own position.
Yes, not all women share that same pursuit. And of those that don't, I say let them. Women who have no desire to be a mother or don't think they would make a good one, probably shouldn't be one. Their kind will wash out overtime anyway by the future generations that will continue to show up and replace their position as well as that attitude. It's why the far right-wing is growing and reproducing itself, not the secular world. The secular world is a dead end from the get go due to their social values. Don't worry about us dude. We'll be fine.
We're back to the rose-colored vision of historical gender relations. "Treating a women with respect and common decency" has not been all that common.
Did you not read my statement at all? That's exactly what I said with respect to American history:
I've never met a single detractor you could ever say this to without them trying to shove back down your throat the proposition that the mid-20th century wasn't some kind of utopia, as no conservative I've met has ever said that.
You just blew right past it and ignored it. "Utopia" was the key word in that sentence. Meaning. Pin-up girl's of the 20th century were largely propaganda. It was 'not' a utopia at all. The classic image of the man and woman with 2.5 kids living in a white picketed fenced home with the family waiting outside for dad as he pulled up in the driveway from work was largely a myth. But it was nevertheless a known thing that did happen. There were things about that time and place that were much better than what we have currently.
Incidentally as a historical sidenote, you'd happen to be wrong if you think women were as oppressed as people like to tell each other.
If you take specific cases at the times they existed, it's easy to understand this. And plenty of examples can be extrapolated to the modern era. But if you want to take a historical case. One reason the niqab became a primary garment of women in Arab tribal society in medieval times had to do with the fact that women were so frequently kidnapped from competing tribes, the best the men could think of to prevent it from happening (you obviously couldn't guard them 100% of the time) was to cover them up so they couldn't tell which women bandits would be picking up. It was a way for men to protect women. That's wholly different from today's views where the Taliban would execute a woman in a sports stadium for visibly wearing nail polish. They’re oppressed to the hilt in shitholes like that.
Nor, frankly, do I think it's correct to say that traditional gender roles are enforced primarily by women.
Plenty of women today will often tell you they want equality. They will also tell you they want a man that makes more money than them. What historically has been the standard that enforces such ideas? Gender roles. Women will tell you they want a masculine man that can carry out traditionally male tasks and activities. Women in return will refuse to uphold the traditional corollary of that. That's gender roles. Men don't have a problem with abandoning gender roles because a man will date across his station in life. Women often won't. So why are these norms enforced in one sided ways? They want you to fit your role as a man while they're free to behave as they like. Women are the ones primarily enforcing gender roles. Men don't have a problem treating women equally. Women do. To be a privileged person and be treated like a man feels like oppression.
As an aside, I find it worrying that you find treating people with respect and common decency is not a universal basic obligation. Like, why would dismantling gender norms lead to men treating women badly? This would lend credence to the misandrist perspective.
Whether it's an obligation or not the best way this has been found to work is by enforcing norm and custom (i.e. what conservatives call "tradition”) on the population. You can have decency without tradition, but the best way to get it [historically] is often through a social/life script that tells you how you're supposed to act and behave, lest you face punishing consequences if you deviate from what you're told. Also what we call gender roles. The notion of the "fair sex" didn't arise out of 21st century egalitarian dogma. It's wholly antithetical to it. That came from my ideological side of the aisle. If I look around today, I don't at all see a great state of health between the sexes. If you think dismantling a bifurcated view of the sexes doesn't open the flood gates to an anything goes social landscape I'd say you aren't using your eyes very much. And that’s not hypocritical or a double standard. A double standard is when you hold two different sets of expectations for the same people or group. The reason that isn’t a double standard is because men and women are not the same. We don’t hold women to men’s standards, and we don’t hold men to women’s standards. They are not identical.
This is so unbelievably alien that I'm left thinking that you're trolling.
Seems to me you have a hard time coming to grips with the fact that several people here know exactly what I'm talking about.
Why? Every conservative solution I've seen proposed is some flavor of putting the toothpaste back in the tube, ignoring that the world has changed in innumerable ways.
Romania and Georgia did it. Hungary and Russia are struggling. What's the difference? Both are pro-natalist, right-wing policies. The former took extreme measures. The latter doesn't go far enough. (Exactly what you were complaining about earlier.)
Tretiak
5d ago
Elites weren’t captured by these ideas, they were the ones actively promulgating them for the longest time. The Russians understood this phenomenon for a long time:
“The fish rots from the head.”
If I was a woman I would also object to the tone of this statement too. I recognize what you’re trying to say and still would dispute a lot of it, but it lends support to a number of prejudicial ideas that do, in fact demean women.
If you’re a woman for instance who violates the “nice” and “nurturant” stereotype, you can often find yourself being penalized in hiring and evaluations. In a man’s world, that’s part of who we are. A woman does it and she’s a bitch. In my own experience of 1 personally, the best bosses I’ve ever had have been women. I’ve had good and bad of both, but the best female boss I had vastly outstripped the best male boss I had. The worst boss I ever had was a 40+ year old spinster who acted like a Stalinist and was an idiot.
Who is more prudent? Who is more happy-go-lucky? Who is more practical? Who is more imaginative? Who are better educators? Men or women? I really don’t know. And there’s a thousand questions you could subject this analysis to. The one categorical area men unambiguously tower over women in is raw physical strength and force. The average man could wreck the shit out of the average woman in a physical fight. Okay, fine. One can win that argument.
I think acknowledging sex differences can be harmful at times, insofar as it can play into the hands of others who want to serve some bad ideas. I think the harm of ignoring sex differences is far worse. Biologically men and women are different enough that you don’t have to agonizingly compare individuals for every trait, you can aggregate experiences.
I’m a pretty far right leaning guy but there is a basic point to be made that women do face significant social deprivation in traditional societies. And that downward pressure can in turn suppress inborn personality traits. And if you always have to modify your expressions to meet the tendencies of your culture’s social norms, it’s going to warp how you view the other gender. Yes, the same thing can also be said about men. But one interesting feature about egalitarian societies is that they’re simpler in one respect. Both sexes are freer to do what comes naturally. And that’s for better and worse.
Tretiak
5d ago
Practitioners of the faith obviously do.
(Edit was due to my remark not being relevant to the OP’s comment.)
Tretiak
5d ago
Am I the only one who finds this line of thinking incredibly dumb?
No. I’ve essentially thought the same thing forever.
I think it was Mike Huckabee who said when he was on the debate stage years ago, “… the military isn’t a social experiment. The military’s job is to kill people and break things…”
When you’re a society as affluent as the US is, you can afford to have your head deep in your own ass and believe all kinds of absurd nonsense like this when you have no real problems to deal with. People in third world countries don’t have time for this shit, so they get real logical and strait laced about the correct attitudes much easier when their daily bread and way of life is under threat.
I used to sometimes teeter around a bit in how I should view this. On the one hand they should be kept out of combat roles. On the other hand, if you’re stupid enough to sign up for the front lines, natural selection will fix the problem for you by eliminating people who think this way and it’ll strengthen future generations with less of those people anyway. So long-term it’s a win/win. Nature will beat you over the head with the correct answer whether you like it or not.
Militarily women have no business being a front line soldier. That’s a suicidal death sentence.
Tretiak
5d ago
If no amount of examples will be good enough for you, there’s not much I can do beyond that if you think people don’t live said experiences.
I don’t have numbers on this but I also don’t think it’s necessary to make the point.
North Korea has a better border policy towards illegal entrants than we do. Finland has a better educational system. Germany has better employment law. Singapore has better real estate policies. China’s executed people for expropriating capital out of the country. Switzerland has a better healthcare system. How many examples would you regard as sufficient?
I'm not saying the solution is for America to immediately and identically adopt all said policies and replace the existing ones we have. There are unique circumstances that fit each country’s needs the way that they do. I don’t think raw economic or GDP numbers are the appropriate gauge to make this argument however. It’s been well known for quite a while that correlations between a person’s annual salary and personal happiness fall off remarkably about around $70,000. You don’t need to be an American to make $70k per year. And being the richest country in the world by GDP matters far less than where those numbers are captured and what the distribution is.
Oh I’m 100% with you on this.
The data my friend sent me was for a different year altogether, but at 3% per your example, that’s still quite consistent to the point that the health insurance industry isn’t sitting on mounds of cash when measured as a percentage of their annual profitability. In dollar terms yes, it’s still a lot; I’m aware.
The fact that that much also goes to the administrative layer is something I’ve suspected and doesn’t surprise me one bit. The growth in that sector is one of the major causes for the neoliberal shift in higher education as well, where a large proportion of that goes directly to. I was shocked years ago when one of my adjunct professors told me how much money (namely how ‘little’) her cohort makes, compared to the upper admins. On the one hand mediocre teachers shouldn’t make substantial salaries. Greater pay that’s untethered to performance causes people to want to go into education that have little interest in it. On the other hand, good teachers should be greatly rewarded for excellent performance. But then you have the problem of avoiding grade inflation.
But back to your point about hospitals specifically. George Halvorson pointed out a number of years ago, one of the largest causes of the growth in hospital costs at every point is just ordinary price inflation. Believe it or not. Cost of labor, cost of supplies, it’s enormous and ever-climbing.
Tretiak
6d ago
Meh. A lot of times we all just vastly overthink things and have a predisposition to anxiety. When I’m having a moment I suspect that’s what’s really going on. The reality is far more mundane than the worry we often have.
Sounds like you may be somewhat embarrassed to be out and forward with your interests and who you are. The best way I’ve found to deal with it is to adopt the mantle of “that guy” and own it. A lot of others feel the same way internally and we invest an inordinate amount of time doing our best to “keep up appearances” of being a certain way, which is why we all look so ordinary on the outside. But just try being you more often instead of covering for yourself. Doesn’t mean you have to be up in the face of others. It just means you don’t put yourself away when you state something that sets you apart from someone else. Someone comes up to you and says “… you’re weird…,” you say, “… yeah, I try to be…” / “… as opposed to what, being boring?…,” etc. Let them process their own look of stupidity on their face.
Once we’ve progressed beyond the primitive stage of mind reading technology, I think you’ll find a of people have internalized worries like this and it isn’t so much a ‘you’ thing.
Tretiak
6d ago
This clearly wasn’t an ER/ambulatory emergency I’m guessing, since it’s a little difficult to haggle over pricing or consult the HealthGrades rating when you’re in the midst of a heart attack…
It’s just another reminder though that healthcare in the US is a business. The psychology behind the price point becomes irrelevant in almost all high risk occurrences when the choice is pay whatever X is in terms or cost or die on the other hand. If it’s just a routine check-up, this becomes much more debatable.
To your last point about insurance. I read an interesting paper that a hedge fund credit analyst once sent me of the breakdown behind a lot of the activist/propaganda economics people throw around about the industry. As it turns out, healthcare insurance when totaled amounts to only a 1.1% profitability margin (meaning most healthcare premiums actually go directly to costs). All the regulatory red tape also obscures price signals tremendously. There’s a lot of bad ethics that sits behind the industry as a whole, but it’s also a massive challenge trying to genuinely determine what the price truly is.
Tretiak
6d ago
Depends on what sense you mean “more functional.” Plenty of societies on Earth do things better or more effectively than Americans do.
A lot of "civilization" is about making it harder to be a live lion. But acting the jackal really sucks if you don't have the temperament.
Is it? When I look upon my own life, ethics, not prudence has been the main thing holding me back. When I see how liars have so much currency with the shear amount of endless lies that have been told about me, or backstabbing and throwing people under the bus which takes you up the ladder a step, and the finger’s always getting wagged at you if you even think of promoting your own self-interest for the moment, this place could use a lion or two to be set upon the mass of the population and remind people to stay in their lane and mind their own affairs.
“Freedumb” is nothing but a playground for thieves, bullies and narcissists.
“We’re best punished for our virtues.”
It’d be impractical to do that here where I am. The parks and recreation guys I’ve come across are jackasses with the lone exception of one of them. Maybe I can’t entirely blame them. Even the good side of the neighborhood has people vandalizing the grounds on the regular, so they’re always painting over the play structures and facilities. If you showed up one day with your hardware and just started making changes to things, you’d spark the ire of them in their trucks rolling up on you. No doubt.
I think this works in business too. No, do not go coordinate a monthslong marketing campaign with the idiots in marketing or let them have any input; just implement the feature that makes clients' lives better (assuming you are competent enough for this to indeed be the case). Seeking approval is just the opposite of a Cover Your Ass paper trail.
I have stories of doing this at different jobs in the past. Looking back on it, some of the “fixes” I’ve implemented probably could’ve got me fired, not because they were dangerous or crossed some serious boundary, but it would definitely raise more than a few eyebrows and make people very suspicious. But you have to improvise when you’re not empowered to do your job. Shadow IT for instance has been a great worry of companies for a very long time. But when you’re on a shoestring budget and you get treated as an afterthought, what can you do?
Tretiak
8d ago
If there’s anything I potentially would want from YouTube such that I’d consider paying for it is to tell me what the background music is that’s often playing in the background of certain videos that I like. Sometimes the music only gets sampled in part of the video, making it impossible for you to determine what it is or where it’s from. It doesn’t happen often but it’s happened a small handful of times such that an option to extract or point to the other contents involved in the creation of the video may be worthwhile. Content creators often don’t list it in the video description.
"It's my fucking computer, and it'll do what I tell it and nothing more"
That’s my perspective. Computers are just a practical tool, not a way of life. To this day I’ve never tried VR at all or the shit that just tries to completely immerse you in every trendy tech device out there. And I’m a techie myself to a good extent.
One of the reasons a lot of non-influencer/trendy programmers intensely hate Rust is because its syntactical paradigm forces you to adapt your programming style far too strongly to the preference of the compiler. Have you seen what complex Rust code looks like? I’ve seen regular expressions written in Perl that look more comprehensible than this shit. It requires you to think like a machine and doesn’t abstract as much from it to the human level. People say in response if you feel that way and hate it because it forces you to program things “correctly” then you’re a bad programmer. I disagree. You shouldn’t have to be screaming and having arguments with the compiler because it doesn’t like your design choices. People have historically hated languages like Java for similar reasons. It’s why you can catch a lot of developers designing class structures specifically to circumvent the type system. They love C by contrast because it’ll do whatever the fuck you tell it:
“Execute!”
“Yes master!”
Segfault
Wouldn’t be the only thing coming out of Minnesota. Sigh. Reactions are as one would expect.
The political class will continue to do nothing until the problem lands on their doorstep. Western countries have no idea how to integrate people. Nor do they have a desire to.
This country needs a radical transformation of the immigration system with a simplified (albeit still strict) pathway to citizenship. I actually have a friend of sorts who works in tech and previously used to work doing malware analysis for the NSA. At one point in his life he lived in Mongolia and did work there.
One thing he told me was that the very hard and industrious working Mongolians frequently emigrate out of the country leaving the more complacent and indolent workers who are content to sit around and do whatever their thing is from within the country. He never told me where they ones who moved often went to, but a preferential policy of selecting for and seeking the best and brightest who are willing to work should at the very least be given priority in that regard.
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