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
2d 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.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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.
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.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2d 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
11d 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
2d 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
2d 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
11d 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 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
3d 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
13d ago
It’s a will question, like a hoarder who lives in filth because they just can’t throw anything away for psychological reasons even though there’s a dumpster right outside.
Your core point is correct, but it's worth noting that there are principle-agent problems within this. Plenty of people do have the will to simply remove vagrants, but the United States is home to people that will take it all the way to the Supreme Court insisting that bums have a right to camp in your parks if you don't just give them housing. The threat of litigation and the fact that there are lunatic judges that will rule in favor of the bums means that it takes a lot of will to proceed with something as simple as telling bums not to camp in your park. Some of the hoarders don't want to live in filth, but there is a powerful federal government forcing them to at gunpoint.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
15d ago
I think you're overfitting different phenomena into a limited number of buckets. All of the following are true (IMO, of course):
- The self-immolator is probably schizotypal and connected a lot of dots that aren't connected.
- There are many schizotypal conspiracy theorists that believe very weird things about the world as a result of their lack of reasoning ability and overly aggressive pattern matching.
- Some people lean towards conspiracies because randomness bothers them.
- Some people lean towards conspiracies because humans have a tendency to pattern-match and attribute causality. They're not bothered by randomness, they're just not very good at understanding it, so they see intentionality everywhere.
- There are substantial conspiracies that actually exist, including those by intelligence agencies, big corporations, non-governmental organizations, and more.
- Some of these conspiracies will include trying to discredit people that notice what's going on.
- There probably isn't a shady cabal that secretly controls everything - the most powerful people are probably the people that appear to be the most powerful people.
This set of positions allows plenty of space for some pretty wild conspiracy theories to be true without needing to add unnecessary moving parts to my understanding of the world. The CIA really does organize coups, but the guy that lit himself on fire is a garden-variety nutter.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
13d ago
Relatedly, eliminating corporal punishment in favor of just modulating the length of prison sentences is one of those things that strikes me as a solution someone could only like if they're basing their policies on squeamishness rather than genuine care. There is simply no way that most people would prefer years of incarceration to caning or similar physical punishments.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
17d ago
For me, this highlights what a terrible idea it was to accept Muslim immigrants to Western nations in large numbers. Resolving the irreconcilable differences between Muslims and Christians is much, much harder than agreeing that they're actually quite different and would be happier living separately. I don't care if Muslims want to pray five times a day and refuse to eat pork, more power to them, but I want English kids to just be able to eat normal English meals without someone from an alien culture taking offense. If you want to move to England, learn to be English rather than demanding accomodations.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
13d ago
While it doesn't cash out to legible living standards outcomes, the waste and fraud in government spending is meaningful. The illegal alien might not be who receives that $350 per day, but someone is getting $350 per day and they like it that way. This should cause some hesitance in proposing government spending as solutions to problems more broadly.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
12d 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
15d ago
...the courts have given near-complete carte blanche to regulatory agencies to anything even remotely near the borders.
While I don't expect a total fix anytime soon, this is why I'm hoping for rollback on Chevron deference and related doctrines. To oversimplify, I want to shift from a position of tie goes to the government to tie goes to the private party. If a court can't figure out whether the regulatory body is correct and the regulatory body can't providing compelling factual evidence for their assertion of power, they should just lose, not get to claim that they have special expertise that's just too special for a non-expert to understand.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
22d ago
The CDC remains batshit insane on the matter:
When possible, wear long-sleeved shirts and long pants and skirts, which can provide protection from UV rays. If wearing this type of clothing isn’t practical, try to wear a T-shirt or a beach cover-up. Clothes made from tightly woven fabric offer the best protection. A wet T-shirt offers much less UV protection than a dry one, and darker colors may offer more protection than lighter colors. Some clothing is certified under international standards as offering UV protection.
Personally, I'll be continuing to run without a shirt all summer. Since 2020, my position has become that the safetyists are wrong about basically everything.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
13d ago
I remain surprised that there aren't more people that want Israel to win, but don't want to give them $26 billion.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
16d ago
I agree with so much of this, but want to offer one piece of gentle pushback - there's an old sports axiom that you shouldn't do the thing that your opponents want you to do. Don't punt on 4th and 1, don't pitch to Barry Bonds, don't take a race out slow against Mo Farah, don't swang and bang with Derrick Lewis. I'm someone that absolutely despises Sotomayor and the view that the Constitution should be highly malleable to current-year preferences, and what I want is absolutely for her to keep her seat for the moment. This is my preference for purely strategic reasons - if she stays, she may well die and be replaced by someone that views the law much more like I do. If she retires now, it'll be an incredibly stupid spectacle with people insisting that we need another Wise Latinatm and it'll probably be some crank for the Ninth Circuit or something. Regardless of whether you take a Moneyball approach or a trad gut-feel approach, you should generally not give your opponents what they want.
For me, the best argument for her not retiring cynically would be that the goal should not be to game the institutions and that you should stand on the business of insisting that this type of institutionalism should be taken seriously. The problem there is that the left already views the right as having defected from that equilibrium by refusing to confirm Garland and then replacing Ginsberg almost immediately on death.
Your argument for the growth and influence of justices over time makes sense, but the problem really does come down to the object-level justice in question - it doesn't seem like anyone, left or right, sincerely believes that Sotomayor is an intellectual giant that's going to change hearts and minds. I'm sure there's a spin on this from her fans, that it's just that her detractors are a bunch of stupid racists, but it doesn't seem like there's any real disagreement that she's never going to be treated like an important intellectual figure in shaping future courts. This argument would work much better for Kagan, who generally is treated as a serious and influential colleague with incisive perspective by both friends and foes.
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.
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