Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
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User ID: 551
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3mo ago
I continue to dislike that as the primary metric of doing better during Covid. The important way that Sweden did better is that they engaged in fewer human rights violations, which is much more important to me than how many elderly people passed away of natural causes.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3mo ago
We can just count total deaths. A bunch more people died than usual. We don't really tend to miscount how many people died.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3mo ago
During the same period, roughly 15 million Americans died in total. I just really doubt that the average person can notice an ~8% increase in death rate, particularly when most of the people dying aren't people that you're very surprised died. My position remains that basically nothing should have been done other than expediting the vaccination schedule even further for those that would plausibly benefit from it and I've never seen anything that makes me think that position is even slightly wrong.
Maybe the real lesson is that evenly distributed deaths just aren't very noticeable even if they're statistically relevant.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3mo ago
I don't have any inclination to sleep in the middle of the day, but if I wanted to spend an hour doing something where I was sure I wouldn't inadvertently fall asleep I'd either go for a run or play some vidya.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3mo ago
Seconding @pigeonburger, I'm not even packing light! I always have a laptop (Macbook Pro, not even a slim one) and iPad. I'll usually have two pairs of shoes in the bag (running shoes and dress shoes). Running clothes, dressier clothes for work, a hat for running, a warm hat for chilly days, and more.
I'm with you on overpacking for driving trips because it just doesn't matter - throwing another bag in the car is pretty much the same thing as doing one fewer. On flying trips though, it's just unreasonably convenient to have the soft-sided bag to avoid ever needing to even gate-check a bag. I wouldn't quite go so far as calling it a virtue to figure out travel economy, but it's something in that direction.
Wheeled luggage came about shortly after the Women's Rights Movement made it more common for women to travel on their own, and whereas a typical man would feel weak if he avoided carrying his own luggage, a typical woman would feel foolish if she didn't.
The typical man should still feel this way. Traveling with something like a Cotopaxi backpack is superior for the vast majority of applications to the point where I wonder how so many people got psyopped into using these unwieldy rollers that I watch them fighting to fit into overhead compartments.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3mo ago
At least until there's a volunteer manpower shortage and they either pay someone to comply with the onerous amount of boring administration or they wind the requirements back.
The bureaucrats and politicians won't be sad about that either. People that aren't on the payroll don't have the same levers to pull and thus lack the same sort of patron/client relationships that political types thrive on. Oh, sure, there might be budgetary problems, but that usually just resolves as a referendum on property taxes that everyone dutifully agrees need to be raised.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4mo ago
I know poly isn't for me, but if someone says it works for them, who am I to argue?
Many people claim things are good for them that self-evidently aren't. Whether this is one of them or not isn't easily answerable, but you don't actually have to accept a junkie's claim that he just really enjoys the freedom of living in a tent.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4mo ago
But because our culture glorifies working in the sports, fashion and entertainment industries, and scorns working in a normal job like a normal person (bullshit jobs,4 soul-crushing desk job etc.), lots of people keep pursuing their dream job long past the point at which it’s abundantly obvious that they’re not talented enough to make a living as a rapper or streamer.
Most people trying to make it as rappers and streamers probably don't actually have a powerful skill set that could be swapped out for a strong income elsewhere, so the people I feel really bad for are the postdocs plugging away in research labs well into their 30s, making a pittance and crossing their fingers that they'll finally get an academic offer. Academic research isn't quite as extreme of a rockstar profession as rapping, but it is actually a gamble with enormous opportunity cost relative to other options that high-IQ people that are willing to work long hours can take.
The biggest piece of advice I can give to talented young people is to stay flexible, that you don't actually know what your dream career is when you're choosing the starting path as a teenager.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4mo ago
Other expensive imported whiskey- Black
I would be shocked to see a black dude drinking Red Spot or Yamazaki 12. Are you thinking cognac rather than whiskey?
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4mo ago
What's maximally red-coded? Probably Jack Daniels?
I feel like an upscale liquor shelf kind of supersedes the tribes. I would be equally unsurprised to see BTAC bottles at a car dealer's home in the suburbs as an academic's bungalow in the city.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4mo ago
I think this one was always going to stick because Trump doesn't like booze. Annoying, but here we are.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4mo ago
A few dissident Conservatives have praised Starmer for taking advantage of Brexit to get a better deal than we could in the EU.
I am fairly uninformed about British politics but this seems like the smart play for Tories. The deal is what it is, probably fairly unremarkable for both sides, but the ability to lay claim to having done a lot better than EU members seems like pure gold.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4mo ago
I don't think spotting the weak links is actually as hard as this framing makes it sound. You can allow an almost arbitrary amount of academic freedom in biochemistry and expect that there will be at least some valuable and true information that is eventually produced. In stark contrast, many social "sciences" cannot and will not ever produce any true information about the world and I think these are pretty easy to spot from a mile away. No deference is owed to fat studies scholars on the basis that the university also employs materials scientists and agricultural microbiologists.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4mo ago
It is far from clear to me how all of the above lack something which happily married monogamous people have.
I don't think I'll be able to convince you then, but it's pretty obvious from where I sit, even though it's a subjective view rather than empirical.
I am sure that there are claims of the form "X couples can form a special bond in a way that people in other forms of relationship can not", which someone somewhere has made for X being "lesbian", "same-race", "dominant-submissive", "straight", "enlightened", "Christian", "black", "child-producing", and so on.
I have no issues with someone expressing such views. I'll disagree with them but I don't really have some ironclad way to knock down their ideas. I might share some of them, I definitely don't share all of them, but I think it is broadly fine to say that not all relationships are equal.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4mo ago
That's what I would have said about gender woo until it swiftly moved from just being left alone into conscripting everyone else into participating in it. If people want to do something I don't approve of with their own lives, sure, that's their call, whatever, but I am now leery of pushes for normalization.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4mo ago
Probably not. I suppose they say they do but I don't really believe them.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4mo ago
I flatly don't believe in polyamory being real as I have typically heard it articulated. I don't believe that people who share the sort of bond that happily married people share can ever exist among people that aren't monogamous. They're not monogamous couples with extras bolted on, they're people that are failing to form successful pair-bonds concocting unstable edifices based on their desire for promiscuity and unwillingness to engage in genuine commitment to another person. I really hope there won't ever actually be a push to normalize this behavior with some social obligation to pretend that I believe polygamists have relationships that are as respectable as actual marriages.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4mo ago
OK, but who gives a shit? Would it change his point? Was the article he linked fundamentally false?
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4mo ago
The AI slop article in question is describing real events. For Silver, there simply was no need to go digging for a better source for something he had already heard about when he was just posting on X.
I am in favor of deporting men that show up looking to reside here with tattoos that plausibly resemble gang tattoos. I am not actually all that interested in trying to decipher whether the tattoos are actually gang tattoos or just kind of look that way; I want nearly zero alien gang members in the country and I don't really view it as much of a boon to get tatted up Venezuelans that aren't in gangs either. While I might be inclined to extend some sympathy to the plight of winding up in an El Salvadoran prison, I mostly chalk that up to being the pragmatic solution to Venezuela refusing to accept their people back. At the end of the day, cleaning up the absolute mess that previous regimes have left when it comes to illegal aliens, criminal aliens, and immigrants with various extremely questionable "temporary" and "asylee" statuses, I am just really not inclined to balk at the removal of tatted Venezuelans with fake asylum claims.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4mo ago
Which side’s vices are worse? That’s an empirical question...
It's not. One cannot turn the question of whether international trade policy that costs some fractional percentage of production is worse than promoting racially discriminatory college admissions policies. Hell, one can't even reliably determine which economic policies are better or worse in a strictly empirical question. Most political questions are values questions, not empirical questions, and you should immediately distrust anyone that claims that their preferred policies are just The Science.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4mo ago
Can't slow down a stationary object.
American statute is not stagnant. It certainly doesn't line up with what I'd like but plenty gets done.
Works better when people were dying at age 50. When the average age of the Senate is higher than the life-expectancy 100 years ago, you know something went wrong.
Wealthy people that cleared the early years never had particularly low life expectancies. The average age in the American Senate at the moment is indeed shameful but it's not a product of medical advances.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4mo ago
DEI discriminates against white people: 33% - 41%
It remains interesting that people are simply misinformed about the facts. DEI policies, factually, are discrimination against white people (and Asian people). They literally cannot accomplish their stated goals without doing so, they are definitionally policies that implement discrimination. That's not an ironclad argument for or against them from where I sit, it's just the starting point that we all need to be aware of in order to have these conversations.
I also didn't know anyone that died. My octogenarian grandparents got it and were fine.
Opioids on the other hand... well, I was from a poor rural town. A couple old friends that I have very fond memories of apparently got hooked on something and died, although the specifics are murky.
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