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
42m ago
If you imagine (simplistically) any compromise to lie between two extremes on a spectrum, that compromise will fall somewhere in the middle. But probably not the middle. One side gets more.
I think this toy model misses and important dynamic that seems to happen somewhat regularly. Instead of policy changes that are at two ends of the spectrum, instead imagine one group that thinks the status quo is basically fine and one group that wants to make a change. Any compromise at all, literally any agreement to do something will be in the direction that the party of change prefers. The specific issue that I see this on is firearms, where there are just almost never actually any meaningful compromises that include tradeoffs, it's just one side winning and getting more of what they want while declaring it a compromise.
Of course, there are paths to tradeoffs even on these sorts of things because issues aren't necessary monofactorial and logrolling other policy preferences is also an option, but in practice, a compromise on "gun safety" is going to look an awful lot like an unmitigated win for that side of things.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1hr ago
My first thought was I didn't even know he was pregnant!
Seriously though, it registered as kind of weird, but a man's got a right to his priorities and I wouldn't question him either way. I'm probably always going to have a soft spot for Gobert after people gave him so much shit for joking about Covid.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
21hr ago
I think your last paragraph gets to the heart of the matter. Attractiveness is tied very tightly to status, particularly for women. When men are ranking women's attractiveness, their rankings are pretty close to openly articulating the status rankings of the women in question - ranking someone last in a group is basically the same thing as just outright saying, "I think she's a loser and not worthy of the same respect as the other women". When this is done with people are members of a near-group (or worse still, a friend-group), it's a fairly aggressive action to take. On the flip side, this is why ranking celebrities can be fun even in a mixed-gender group - no one has to be personally invested in it in the same way. Of course, everyone basically knows where they stand anyway, but it's rude to say it outright! If you had a group of guys where one buddy was unathletic and low-income, everyone in the room would know he's low status, but it's still a dick move to explicitly point it out.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
22hr ago
While I am sure that there is some antisemitism, I'm annoyed by this being the standard for whether people that are trespassing, camping illegally, detaining others illegally, and so on are worthy of condemnation. I really don't even care whether what the mostly peaceful protestors are on about, whether I agree with them just doesn't actually play into whether I want them to knock off the nonsense. If you're trying to camp in a park, cops should show up and inform you that you that you're not allowed to do that. If you insist on doing it anyway, they should arrest you and remove your stuff from the park. The idea that the basics of evenly enforced law are up to whether the scofflaws are antisemitic or not is absurd (and plainly anti-constitutional).
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
22hr ago
My annoyance with some of the other issues here aside, what exactly do they imagine is to be done about the supposed epidemic of women being targeted for violence by men? Is there really a generalized belief that the problem is insufficient scolding or insufficient laws targeting this variety of crime? Men killing women seems to have basically two main categories - partner violence and random violence from serial killers or impulsive psychopaths. The latter variety is about as looked down on and prosecuted as reasonably possible and the only thing you can really do to go even farther is being quicker to lock up psychopaths and never let them out of institutions. Partner violence could maybe be addressed by being quicker to lock up men found guilty of these sorts of violence. I quite literally cannot imagine that a more scold-heavy culture would improve either of these.
If you want to lock up obviously violent men, that's fine, the broader right will probably be happy to work with you on that. Be prepared for the usual socioeconomic splits though - this is mostly not actually a problem of posh teenagers snapping and killing their girlfriends. If you're not willing to lock up violent people, there is pretty much nothing else that's going to have any meaningful effect.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3d ago
Trick question, I would never be waiting at a bus station (and I did have breakfast this morning).
But really, I would go get my first-mover advantage if I could. I can see the case for lining up the same way, but people probably won't, and I'll be damned if I going to get the short end of the stick because of a coordination failure.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3d ago
Changing the size and influence of movements is actually pretty hard. If Hamas can do that for some fairly trivial investment, that's pretty impressive on their part. I find it a lot more plausible that the primary drivers aren't actually Hamas-controlled NGOs, but the academic elites at the institutions where the mostly peaceful protests are happening.
I once again find the solution to be localizing the matter. There is something that is vaguely grotesque about industrial-scale slaughter, even for those of us that don't find anything morally objectionable about. Nonetheless, I know farmers and butchers, and they aren't particularly bothered by their work, and I think it's precisely because they're sufficiently close to it and doing it on a sufficiently small-scale that they're confident that the animals were humanely raised and slaughtered. Yeah, it's quite literally bloody and grisly work, but no worse than the same operation conducted on a deer that you've shot and killed. I wouldn't go so far as saying that I like gutting and skinning an animal, but you get on with it and it's not that big of a deal. I've done worse to mice as a research scientist, I did feel bad about that, and the marginal number of ruminants required to feed a family is a hell of a lot lower than the number of cute fuzzy animals necessary to do immunology.
Somewhat echoing @Primaprimaprima, I just don't care. When it was Russian mind control rays from Facebook, I didn't care. The current run of Chinese brainwashing from TikTok does not induce me to care. Now that I find out that American rioters are actually being puppeteered by Hamas, I likewise do not care. In all of these cases, there's the same belief that the Americans being mind-controlled lack their own agency and that an utterly trivial investment on the part of foreign actors can create a completely inorganic belief system within the United States. Efforts to suppress speech across borders didn't even work when it was literal printed text, we still wound up with a bunch of communist spies and Nazi sympathizers and they sure as hell aren't going to work in the modern electronic world. You have to deal with the reality that people will see, read, and hear things that you don't like and then address them where they're at.
I absolutely despise the campus "protestors" and it's irrelevant to me whether their puerile, idiotic ideas came from Facebook or the original Communist Manifesto.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3d ago
Energetics are less of a problem with cattle than vehicles though - they're not particularly efficient, but they're capable of growing literal tons of high-quality nutrition by simply eating grasses that grow naturally. While this is apparently not as cheap as CAFOs currently (although I'm not clear on how much of that is a product of corn subsidies), there's something to be said for the ability of someone without expensive equipment and sterile lab conditions to produce excellent meat via naturally occurring inputs and a herd of cattle or bison grazing. You can afford to waste a lot of energy when the energy is being produced by the sun, processed by plants in a field, and reprocessed by ruminants.
We'll see. Cell culture media isn't cheap though. For the time being, I suggest exercising a lot of skepticism about what the financial inputs for lab-grown tissue are if someone claims that it's actually quite cheap.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3d ago
There is no need for a conspiracy of puppeteers - the public health people really do have some very stupid ideas about what's good for the public, they've displayed it repeatedly, and taking options away from them preemptively has value.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3d ago
Seems pretty niche. The reason people know what beef tastes like is that beef tastes very, very good. For more people than not, it's basically optimized for deliciousness already. There is just not much better than a good cheeseburger or steak. I'm fairly adventurous with food and love trying different meats, but the reality is that none of them are actually as good as just getting a classic cut ribeye and grilling it up.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3d ago
I have no idea how things will shake out in other parts of the world, but North America has no trouble sustaining tens of millions of ruminants indefinitely.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3d ago
What's there left to object to, on primary moral grounds?
For the strict vegans, the objection really does seem to be that it comes from the incorrect kingdom. They don't eat mussels or honey, for example. Veganism doesn't hold to some consistent morally coherent standard, it's a quasi-religious practice where the lack of high-quality human food is sort of the point. I think this is what you're getting at in the next paragraph; I guess we're going to find out how much is about not wanting to eat cute fuzzy animals and how much is about avoiding food-sin.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3d ago
In the same spirit, many of us can afford humanely raised, fully pastured animals and should elect to do so whenever possible. I'm not as good about this as I should be, but I've moved strongly in this direction and the food is just better anyway.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4d ago
Lab grown meat, if it can be made cheaply and to taste indistinguishable from the real thing, would be an immense scientific achievement that would improve billions of people’s lives.
I accept the premise here, but those two if clauses are doing a ton of work. I'm skeptical that either is plausible, but concerned that in the name of going green, governments will push them anyway. My preference would be for government to stay away from it altogether (aside from normal basic research that NIH and others fund), but if we're going to wind up with governments feeling the need to get involved, I'd rather they ban the slop than subsidize it. Note that scientists generally benefit from the same public optics issue - it's a "good" job, so pouring money into questionable endeavors is pretty common.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4d ago
I'm ashamed both of the fact that activity level was enough to cause an injury...
Any level of activity is enough activity to cause an injury if you try hard and believe in yourself!
After casting my eyes down a bit, I see @Rov_Scam already said the same thing, but seriously, it's true. Similarly to Rov, I have the experience of being perfectly fine for 65 miles/week of running for an extended stretch, then tweaking my back getting out of bed in the morning. I ran a marathon on Sunday and the thing that hurts the most today is the shin that I slammed into the corner of the bed at the hotel last night. I will never cease being amazed at the capacity of the human body to simultaneously be durable to incredible insult while being frail to the slightest twist or bonk.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
12d ago
Who made this argument?
Potter Stewart, writing the controlling opinion in Robinson v California. I find it amusing that @netstack linked it to approve of the argument - when I read that portion of the case earlier, I couldn't believe the levels of idiocy or dishonesty that Stewart was engaging in by analogizing a common cold to "catching" narcotic addiction.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
12d ago
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, there -- there's food that you can eat without cooking it. I mean, they -- and they could could get a handout from the -- from a -- from an individual that, you know, people can beg for money. I mean, there are -- there are ways that this works out in practice.
To me, this gives away the whole game. Bums aren't sleeping outside because it is literally impossible that they could find a place to shelter, they're sleeping outside because they've failed to do so. If the hypothetical options one could avail themselves of to avoid starting a fire to cook suffice to eliminate a claim that it's cruel and unusual to prevent people from starting fires, the same must apply to sleeping. Someone having failed to talk others into cooking for them or paying for them sleep at a hotel shouldn't result in them being granted some putative "right" to sleep where they like.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: A number of us, I think, are having difficulty with the distinction between status and conduct. You'll acknowledge, won't you, that in those terms, there's a difference between being addicted to drugs and being homeless? In other words, someone who's homeless can immediately become not homeless, right, if they find shelter.
On the flip side, despite everyone trying to be careful with language, it's pretty obvious that what the town is concerned with isn't "homelessness", it's bums. Someone that is homeless may sleep in their car, they may sleep on a friend's couch, they may stay in a shelter for a couple nights. If you're sleeping in the park, you're not just "homeless", you're a bum, and that is very much a real status that's going to be difficult to change for quite a few people. In the same fashion that many addicts cannot simply elect to stop doing drugs, many bums cannot simply elect to start doing the things necessary to maintain shelter.
Personally, I'm with you that the whole question of status is pretty ridiculous here. Kudos to you for making it all the way through the oral arguments, I simply couldn't bring myself to do it after they started doing laps around whether a stargazer that fell asleep was also criminal. Everyone in the conversation knows the conversation isn't about stargazers and isn't about falling asleep in public, it's about bums and all the trouble that comes with letting bums camp in your park.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
12d ago
I have to confess that I simply do not care about the day-to-day litigation of whether such-and-such attack or finding constitutes a "war crime" or not. The present conflict is the direct result of choices made by Gazans. The conflict can be brought to a close with the snap of the fingers of Gazan leadership, they're simply unwilling to accept the terms of surrender. Arguing about whether a given incident is an example of Israelis behaving badly seems about on par with someone in 1944 arguing that the American response to Pearl Harbor has been wildly disproportionate, and they've sank way more warships than Japan ever sank of the Americans, and it would be terrible to hurt any innocent Japanese civilians. Anyone arguing this would rightly be seen as an anti-American agitator. By all means, sort out whatever you can when it comes to conduct of your soldiers after the war, but I just do not care about the claims of the side that picked a fight that they can't win, particularly when that side's chief tactic is trying to get civilians killed to create international pressure. I am completely fine with Israel inflicting misery until their enemy surrenders.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
13d ago
Where some folks on the right said the census bureau was cheating as they redefined poverty to include food and housing aid, to make it seem like we've made progress eliminating poverty when really all we've done is increase government handouts?
Supplemental poverty is the alternative measure that includes transfers.
Conservatives and progressives both seem to vassilate on what exactly they mean by poverty when it's convenient to do so. Conservatives claim that transfers don't work because they haven't pulled everyone up to a middle-class earned income, but they also note that America's "poor" are housed, clothed, fed, and have entertainment budgets. Progressives claim that transfer programs work and we can tell because supplemental poverty figures tell us we've pulled people up, but then insist that tens of millions are "food insecure". To the extent that the concern is actual material impoverishment, welfare spending works and we do a lot of it.
I do try to be consistent - I occasionally get annoyed by the size of these programs, but the reality is that spending $183 billion per year for the hungry instead of for space has resulted in Americans having entirely too much to eat rather than any issues of "food insecurity".
Do you think that the anger at elites is unfounded (given nobody falls below your definition of poverty anymore), more related to status than income (although definitionally 49% of people will also be sub-median statuswise...) or are you more sympathetic to discourse around income inequality than poverty?
I am completely unsympathetic to inequality discourse. Part of the reason is that it's often couched in the language of poverty, insinuating that the relatively deprived are absolutely deprived. Really though, I just generally don't buy that inequality is a real problem. I'm fine with anger at specific elites for specific reasons, but some fuzzy claim that Jeff Bezos just has too much money because Amazon is wildly successful is just annoying to me.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
13d ago
Probably a similar amount to what we'd expect if American glazers were responsible for replacing all of the windows broken in Israel. But yes, I grant that these are largely wealth transfers within the United States as much as they are funding for Israel.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
13d ago
I won't pretend to know the solution to poverty...
My proposed solution is to pick an absolute standard of what "poverty" is and try to solve that. When poverty is defined as a percentage of median household income and explicitly excludes food and housing aid, the problem simply cannot be solved. I believe this is intentional, but it doesn't really matter to the point whether this is just a mistake or not. If we can define "poverty" by absolute standards of access to the basic necessities of life, I think we will find that the United States has already solved poverty or needs to do very little to fill in the last couple gaps.
If, instead, "poverty" just refers to having less than the median, well, the poor we'll always have with us, I suppose.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
14d ago
I remain surprised that there aren't more people that want Israel to win, but don't want to give them $26 billion.
I know it's hopelessly, comically naive, but I'm still just kind of blown away that this ever became a thing. There is probably nothing that marks me as more of a 90s lib than thinking that the appropriate answer to, "what will you do for diversity, equity, inclusion?" has always been, "I promise to embrace the quality of work that any potential student does without regard to their race or gender, I care about physics, not skin color". That this became not only unacceptable, but a sign that someone is actually quite racist is just absolutely amazing and completely irreconcilable with a university caring about merit.
I suspect that serious technical institutions are more likely to scrap these things for exactly that reason. You can't DEI your way to being able to do math, physics, or chemistry that actually works. Other departments are perfectly safe to keep using these political statements though - sociology departments produces can net-negative knowledge, there is no requirement that they ever do anything that actually works, and nothing about their funding relies on that changing.
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