Zephyr
5d ago
A concern about “loser pays” is that the payment only occurs when they, well, lose. If I can’t afford the up front costs, or if the settlement is much less likely to hurt me, I may have to go for it, as I can’t be certain that a case that I should win will go my way if it goes to court.
It also has a number of weird edge cases - for example, say that I sue someone for $10000, and my lawyer is going to charge me $1000 - if my opponent has deep pockets, they could hire a lawyer that costs them $90000, which means that if I lose, I lose $91000, which puts enough of a risk factor that I couldn’t afford to sue them, period, even if my case is good.
Zephyr
8d ago
So one thing I think is very common in modern western countries is something like the following:
- No administration may bind a future administration to a promise.
- An administration has a deep, deep desire to do something that they think will take more years than they will be in power.
- So what they do is let themselves be "negotiated" into a position where breaking the promise that they made, although possible, is extremely costly.
If voters want to express a sentiment against something a government has done, sometimes the more rational option is to bite the bullet and do the costlier option, even if it'd be "easier" to not do so. I think for a lot of voters, they've hit that point with immigration.
Zephyr
9d ago
The way you write Hanania reminds me of Sailer’s law of female journalists (https://www.unz.com/isteve/sailers-law-of-female-journalism/) - very low value human capital of him to succumb to the same pressures.
Zephyr
9d ago
Have you heard of the use-mention distinction?
One of the reasons we left Reddit was that a user was explaining the (((brackets))) around certain names, and what it meant, and Reddit decided that using them, even in an explanation like this one here, indicates an endorsement of the position.
Now sure, if your ideological opponents pick a name that is obviously biased, you don’t have to use that - no one is saying you should call it “The Public Execution of the Innocent George Floyd by white supremecist cops, as endorsed by Republikkkans”. But calling it “George Floyd’s death” is, if anything, conservative coded.
Censoring his name, or censoring the name of the activist organization BLM, simply makes the arguments appear unserious - to me, they seem like someone who is so angry about the concept that they can’t think clearly about it, and as a result, are probably incorrect about it.
Zephyr
11d ago
So to be entirely fair, while horrific, this isn’t the kid’s fault. I think what TitaniumButterfly is looking for are times when an adoption went wrong as a result of parents being unable to deal with the kid.
Although you alluded to this in the post, I think the specific examples would be more useful for what was requested.
Zephyr
11d ago
I would argue that it’s selection effect.
If the enemy is strong, and I don’t think I can defeat them, I’m not going to bother trying.
If the enemy is weak, and trivially beaten, I don’t need to spend any time defeating them - especially if I have allies who are against them too.
It’s only the situations in which the enemy is plausibly the same strength as me in which this comes up. And due to the asymmetric nature of people, it’s easy for both to be true at once. Academia is fairly heavily captured by the left wing, so they are extremely strong when represented as “expert opinion.” (At the moment) the US government is captured by the Trump wing of the republicans, so they are extremely strong when it comes to court rulings and similar.
Zephyr
13d ago
I mean, not everyone is at the top; you could easily have mid level bureaucrats in the party blackmailing other mid level bureaucrats, or someone higher level (but not at the “throw your enemies out the window” high).
A lot of the time, the blackmail is the excuse you use to remove someone - you keep them around and use the blackmail to make them publicly support you, then (when they know too much, or are making noises about possibly not being 100% on your side, or are simply embarrassing now that you’ve used their support to climb higher) you reveal it to have a public excuse to remove them.
Hell, you could argue they’re more effective in totalitarian countries - if you are exposed in the US, you are definitely not getting the death penalty (you probably won’t even serve jail time if you were powerful). If China discovers you are acting against the party, you may just disappear.
Zephyr
16d ago
I know at least two people in real life who (were they to use that handle) it would be kind of an “obviously it was them.”
It only seems obvious in retrospect. If true, that is (I’m inclined to believe it’s at least plausible).
Zephyr
16d ago
Perhaps I misunderstood - what I read from your initial comment was that “nobody not made of straw” would deny that it was a baby. But that they supported abortion anyways. If I am misunderstanding, my apologies.
A lot of pro choicers also call it a “clump of cells,” not a baby.
If you want to bite the bullet and say that abortion is ending the life of a baby, go ahead, otherwise this is false on the face of it.
Zephyr
18d ago
Perhaps "You can't sell yourself into slavery" would be a better example here.
There are no pure assertions of "negative" restrictions on rights -- there are only positive assertions of rights. "You should not have the right to do X" can be rewritten as "I should have the right to punish you for doing X". Or, more explicitly: "I want the right to punish you for doing X".
I think this is a bit confusingly written. There are three possible states here:
- You have the right to do X.
- Everyone else has the right to be free from you doing X.
- You may do X, but you do not necessarily have the right to do so.
The way you phrased the above implies that 3 and 2 are equivalent, while I don't think they are.
Free speech (in America) falls under 1, murder falls under 2, while something like "paint your house vibrant pink" falls under 3. In theory, you are not allowed to enter into an arrangement where your right to free speech is abridged(1), you are forbidden from entering into an arrangement where you are allowed to murder someone(2), and you are free to enter into an arrangement where your ability to paint your house is denied (HOA).
(1) The reality on the ground may differ from the ideal.
(2) Soldiers and police officers aside.
Zephyr
20d ago
You need to know that you’re missing the experience to know you have to look it up on Wikipedia. If you only worked part time as a teenager, you just assume all jobs work like that; if you assume that everyone anti-trans is just a Christian bigot, you don’t have to look up their views, you just write a religious idiot.
I very much disagree that college students know that they are sheltered and don’t have life experiences.
Zephyr
23d ago
I would disagree entirely - I think it’s an “Al Capone was arrested for tax evasion” type thing.
If someone lies about intending the downfall of America, you have a much better excuse to kick them out than if you have to find an example of them stepping outside the bounds of free speech.
Zephyr
24d ago
Yes, but do a sufficiently bad enough job at the bridge that they tell you to stop. Sometimes the only way out of an impossible situation is to act so incompetent that people stop forcing you to do it (after all, if you hadn’t saved the guy the first time, you wouldn’t be asked back).
Zephyr
28d ago
So we don’t actually know that they reduce overdoses either. There is a plausible mechanism for them to do so, but there are also a few mechanisms in which they could not.
- It is possible that fatal overdoses are reduced, which would allow the individual in question to overdose in the future again.
- It is possible that SIS increases the number of people who get addicted to drugs (in BC in particular, there is an ongoing controversy where safe supply drugs are sold to get funds for fentanyl, which leads to more people having drugs than would otherwise; although I realize this is not quite the same thing as SIS, the SIS are responsible for the distribution of the safe supply, so I think the consequences apply here too).
I would also caution in believing that the three items in your list can exist simultaneously - although there is no physical reason that they cannot, there are political reasons they will not, and that is much harder to change.
Zephyr
29d ago
I'd rather be talking to my agent than looking at code.
What type of developer are you if you'd rather be talking than coding? /s
More seriously, the situations I find AI is really useful is when I need some information, but have enough knowledge to fine tune it after the fact. I've tried to use it to write code, and it always produces code that is kind of messy and bad. I asked it to produce some builder interfaces from a set of DTO interfaces, and it would do weird things like put in defaults that I didn't intend, or return the wrong field occasionally*. What worried me about it is that the junior developer I was working with at the time was copy-pasting them into the codebase as is, and didn't have any comprehension about why they wouldn't work.
*For reference, the type of implementation I was talking about would be something like:
interface IAddress { function line1() : string; function line2() : ?string; function city() : string; function province() : ?IProvince; function country() : ICountry; function zipCode() : IZipCode; }
interface IAddressBuilder { function setLine1( string $line1 ) : static; function setLine2( ?string $line2 ) : static; // you get the picture }
It would give me something like:
interface IAddressBuilder { function setLine1( string $line1 ) : static; function setLine2( string $line2 = '' ) : static; function setLCountry( ICountry $country ) : static; function setProvince( string $province ) : static; }
Which was just not very useful.
Zephyr
30d ago
I really wish I could see in AI what other people do; I recently tried to use Cursor at the recommendation of a senior developer, and I found that it was actively trying to force me down the wrong path when I was coding (I had to write a one-off web page that was compatible with some very ancient technology, and it kept trying to suggest CSS rules and autofilling text that made no sense for the use case). This has been a very consistent experience for me whenever I try to use AI for literally anything.
It's possible that I'm just not very good at prompting it, but I find that every time I start relying on it for anything, it is subtly wrong in ways that are frustrating to track down and repair.
Zephyr
30d ago
I think you could honestly do it much more easily then that; for example, you could keep all of your existing assignments, but simply tell people that you will be asking some number of random students a question about their essay/assignment/whatever at the start of the class in which you return their assignments. There's been a recent study which shows a lot of people do not retain a lot of information when they use AI to write essays for them. This would catch a good chunk of AI submitted assignments with very minimal work.
If they "cheat" and use AI anyways, but memorize enough of their assignment to answer a question? Mission accomplished; the nominal goal is to teach students the information, so we shouldn't actually care about how they learn it.
Zephyr
1mo ago
I believe that most people don’t actually think of Trump as a god emperor, but do be wary - every insane position on the left also started with “no one taking it seriously” (usually through being “just on tumblr” or “just some kids on campus”). Some people are definitely taking it too seriously, even accounting for the lizard man principle.
Zephyr
1mo ago
The benefit of fortune telling is that it lets you understand yourself if you are too clever by half.
There’s a strategy you can use to make a decision where you flip a coin, and (while it is midair) think about what you want it to land on. Tarot is the same thing, but is complicated enough that you can’t outsmart yourself in the way you could with a coin toss.
To take a very simple example: if you draw the fool as your “problem” card, and have the upright 4 of swords as your “obstacle”, it can represent quite a few things.
The fool represents the start of a new journey, or it can represent naïveté, or it can represent letting go of problems. The 4 of swords can represent interpersonal conflict, intellectual conflict, or someone who limits your potential. So valid readings of the two cards are that you should forgive someone as they don’t understand what you are trying to do, or that you should avoid someone who is making your life more challenging, or that someone has your best interests at heart and you should reconsider a decision.
A good fortune teller will present the card meanings so that someone listening can make their own choices based on what they actually feel.
Also, if you are a dude - I mentioned once that I knew tarot to one of my female coworkers, then spent the next 3 months doing readings for a huge number of women my age, so…
Zephyr
1mo ago
Sex used to create the expectation of romantic exclusivity, but we kind of bulldozed those expectations. If you want that, make it a condition of having sex with the guy (and if he doesn’t want that, move on).
Zephyr
1mo ago
With a mental illness you can’t.
This should really be “With a mental illness, it is much more challenging not to.” I don’t give a lot of sympathy to people who use excuses like BPD or autism or whatever else to be a jerk.
Some people are dramatically helped by medication (see using Ritalin to make it easier to have executive function with AHDH) - the consequences of not having executive function should not be inflicted on others. If you struggle to remember to (for example) bring both children to school, then put a note on the doorknob, or the coffee machine, or wherever else you will definitely look. Too often, I see people who claim (for example) that they have to make a mess for their partner to clean up, but somehow the negative consequences of their actions never seem to land on themselves.
I mean, you absolutely can assign greater culpability to the more effective side.
I have a new kitten who is just three months old, and a one year old cat. The kitten loves attacking the bigger cat, but I have to be very careful to keep him from hurting her.
That being said, as Hamas’s intent is seemingly “genocide all Israelis,” I do have very little sympathy for them.
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