Zephyr
4hr ago
To be fair, mine was supposed to be a joke about how many men exaggerate their - let's call it "physical attributes" - upwards.
Also, they generally don't take female oriented IPs and change them to make them more attractive to a male audience.
I know you said "generally", but I seem to remember reading (probably here) that the My Little Pony phenomenon was due to them doing exactly that. I vaguely recall reading something that basically said that the way they'd designed it to appeal to young boys was by including a lot more adventure/hero's journey elements than are usually present in girl's media, and I explicitly remember them mentioning something along the lines of "we know boys won't go out of their way to watch it, but if it's on because their sister is watching it, we want them to watch it too."
Which plays a lot more into @The_Nybbler's point - it is definitely possible to make media that is intended for men, and extend the appeal to women as well without compromising what men like about it. Which implies that they are making it woke because that's what they want to do, not to expand their audience.
Zephyr
5hr ago
Also height is pretty easy to lie about.
My conspiracy theory as to why there are more men in the trades than women is that women constantly hear a bunch of false measurements, so aren't able to eyeball it (after all, if you always hear that 2.5" is actually 6", and 5'8" is actually 6', then how are you going to place nails every 8")?
Zephyr
7hr ago
Zephyr
1d ago
The issue is that the more you push policies that are "fuck you for not having a girlfriend" at young men, the more likely you are to get young men who choose violence. If a man can't afford housing, so can't actually end up in a stable enough situation to attract a partner and have kids, then there isn't a good reason to not just rebel against the entire system.
If we're going to punish men who don't have a partner more than not having a partner is a penalty in and of itself, we're going to disproportionately be punishing men who are more educated (quick googling shows that men who have higher education levels are more likely to be both unmarried and virgins).
Zephyr
1d ago
Yes, it's sleazy, but c'mon: you've been telling us for years that he's sleazy and corrupt.
This is almost more important than everything else - Trump being sleazy and corrupt is already priced into him as a candidate. If you provide more examples of it, the base is going to say “so what?” - they already know all this.
Zephyr
1d ago
While you’re absolutely right - do you think that means anything if the press/democrat influencers want to make hay out of it?
Zephyr
2d ago
I swear, people who are not me have to have been using entirely different LLMs than I have. Every time I've used them for anything beyond the super trivial, I get results that are missing major components, or don't solve the business requirements, or contradict themselves. Like, I just opened up cursor and asked it for the CSS to render rounded corners in outlook, and it got it entirely wrong (it produced non-rounded objects because it used border-radius, which anyone who has coded anything for outlook knows doesn't work). When I told it that, it produced different code that (and I can't stress this enough) still fucking used border-radius.
Seriously, at this point I'm more likely to say that the person using the LLM is going to stall the project; they're going to produce verbose but contradictory requirements, they'll produce code that is written fast, but doesn't actually work, or they'll use it to answer emails in such a way that it doesn't actually answer the question that is stalling the damn project.
Zephyr
4d ago
PHP is even better about not stopping if it thinks you made a mistake - try to open a file that doesn't exist? Yeah, sure, fine, just return false. Loop through false? Of course, obviously that's intended behaviour. Mix and match numeric and stringy keys in an array? No problem, it's a hashmap, and it'll even sort for you.
If Python and C are the languages god wants us to use, PHP is the language he uses himself.
(In case you couldn't tell, /s).
Zephyr
4d ago
The fun part is that Canada's is also notionally (though not actually) paid by a tax paid during your working years; the issue is that like any government, ours spent all the money that was supposed to be used for it on other things.
Perhaps a valuable lesson can be learned here about voting for people who spend more than the country makes, and have to take the money they promised you to fund it is in order here.
Zephyr
4d ago
Sure? If you're awarding people extra "points" based on how likely they are to be in jail, I'd call the midpoint of the curve when it swaps from "benefits" to "discrimination against", which (given that population trends are approximately 50% female) would be at the gender level, not the race level, but if you want to call anything that isn't "maximally in favour of" as "discrimination", then yes, that would be discriminating against white/asian men.
Like, I don't understand the point you're trying to make here; our current system is that the more progressive stack points you have, the more affirmative action selects for you; so "white straight male" is bottom of the pack, while "queer PoC who identifies as female" is the top; I'm stating that it is extremely backwards from how it should be if the jobs are simply busywork to keep people out of jail, as "male" is like, 90% of the weighting towards criminality there.
To be clear, I'm stating that I do not think there should be affirmative action at all; I think that we should hire based on merit. If we're not hiring based on merit, but instead based on how much we can keep people out of jail, then we should hire based on male vs female, then race, then sexuality.
I'm really not getting what you're saying here - it seems to me that you're proclaiming that DEI is already a program for this, but ignoring the fact that it is doing a terrible job of it.
Zephyr
4d ago
I mean, you could just stop subsidizing it, rather than actively punishing the elderly who do not have children.
In Canada, we have programs that are explicitly a transfer from the working aged to the elderly (OAS); these programs have insane cutoffs (OAS is only fully cut off at an income of $180k/year, and doesn't check existing assets; it's very possible for someone elderly to own a $3m+ house, and still receive the full amount of the OAS). Cutting that off would increase the amount of money in the pockets of the young, improve housing availability (as it forces the elderly to sell their oversized homes to have funds), and not punish those who didn't have children; but instead just punish those who chose not to plan for their retirement.
Seriously, I'd be homeless and living on the streets if I were jobless - why are we saying that the least productive members of society get immunity, and to keep their assets, while the most productive (by which I don't mean me, but the young in general) have no safety nets at all?
Zephyr
4d ago
No - I favour a world where corporations hire the most qualified > the less qualified. I'm simply stating that if the point of jobs is to keep people who would otherwise be criminal busy, then it should favour men over women.
Zephyr
4d ago
Honestly, you've convinced me; I hadn't thought about it that way, but you're absolutely right.
Zephyr
5d ago
Why? White men are more likely than any demographic of women to be in jail (I found the number of 158/100000 when googling for white men, 88/100000 for East Asian, and 68/100000 for black women). Seems to me any attempt at making jobs to keep people out of prison should discriminate against women regardless.
Zephyr
5d ago
Does that matter, though? If everyone sees that the married men are getting all the best assignments, and get constantly let out early to go pick up their kids, and are paid the best - then it doesn't actually matter if it's official or not. Everyone knows what needs to be done to get the benefits.
Zephyr
5d ago
If you're paying people to stay out of jail, pay the people who disproportionately go to jail.
So, men?
Zephyr
5d ago
Most businesses tend to give better benefits towards men who are married, even if it isn't explicit. This can involve promotions or better opportunities (as married men tend to be seen as more stable or more reliable), better financial compensation (as the man is "providing for a family"), or better work-life balance (the number of times I've been asked to work late or on holidays while my married coworkers get to go home early is way too high).
Zephyr
6d ago
I mean, I'm perfectly happy if we decide that no, we're not going to punish people for wrongthink anywhere; if we insist on it, it should also include those at the highest echelons of power.
Zephyr
7d ago
I think the way to thread the needle is that we can eject people who are net negative, and who had to opt-in to our society. Because of the way that our governments are currently set up, being in a governments territory requires that you pay taxes and follow their laws; you can't decide that you do not wish for the government's services in exchange for not being subject to its rules (or rather, you can try, at which point armed men come from the government to put you in a small room until you agree to follow the rules once more).
Immigrants of all flavours (by definition) come from another country; they choose to proclaim that they will follow the government's rules; they are choosing to follow the rules of that government, rather than being stuck with them.
This kind of plays into the idea of noblesse oblige - if you are demanding the loyalty of a group, you owe them your loyalty in return. In the military, it's very common that the front-line troops always eat first; the officers can order them into situations where they are almost guaranteed to die, so the officers owe it to them to see that they are treated as well as possible. The same applies to governments; the government can enlist citizens to die, claim an increasing portion of their wealth, and take their freedom or their life for crimes against it. The least the government can do is put the people who are obligated to support it first; if they aren't, that becomes a problem that the people have the right to seek redress against (and if they don't have the right, the next step is often them clearing out space for someone who will give them that right).
If we followed this chain of logic:
- If wealthy Jewish people were involved in getting the country into the war in the middle east (by wanting intervention on behalf of a foreign nation), and they were citizens of a foreign nation, we should kick them out (preferably of an airlock, but failing that, at least out of the country).
- If wealthy Jewish people were involved in getting the country into the war in the middle east (by wanting intervention on behalf of a foreign nation), but were citizens of the United States, we should consider them to be in violation of the societal contract (in the same way we would a fraudster or scam artist); they should serve appropriate jail time, and be removed from any levers of power that they may be attached to, and forbidden from interacting with them again.
- If wealthy non-Jewish citizens of the United States were involved in getting the country into the war in the middle east (by wanting intervention on behalf of a foreign nation), we should consider them to be in violation of the societal contract (in the same way we would a fraudster or scam artist); they should serve appropriate jail time, and be removed from any levers of power that they may be attached to, and forbidden from interacting with them again.
- Once we are doing #1, #2, and #3 reliably, we can determine whether Jewish people are considered to be high-risk in the same way Chinese researchers are (in which case, we can decide to heavily restrict them from positions in which it is an issue, in the same way we do with Chinese researchers), or we can determine if its just a few bad apples.
Either way, we shouldn't ignore the issue; we currently screen men more heavily than women when they want to be involved with children because a large number of men who want to work with children have pedophiliac tendencies. It sucks if you're just a guy who enjoys spending time with kids, but it has proven enough of an issue that we put boundaries on it. Likewise, if you're an earnest student of Chinese origin who wants to fully embrace the greatness of the USA, it sucks that you may be barred from positions that require a security clearance; but again, we've seen that this is a large enough issue to society that collectively we have to stop it.
If wealthy Jewish socialites are disproportionately favouring other countries above the US, we may need to put additional screening on them being permitted to be government lobbyists or owning media platforms. Which again, isn't fair to the people who don't do this, and don't desire to do this - but if it's consistently a problem, we can treat it in the same way men or Chinese students are already being treated.
One thing that I want to make clear is that despite this screed, I don't actually think that the Jews are secretly or openly advocating on behalf of Israel; I think there are a lot of people who are determined to make the Jews the source of all evil, and they are looking for a justification to hunt them down. That being said, we don't have the data; it's verboten to actually go after the people who are favouring other countries above their own citizens. We need to actually start treating it as a crime so we can see if there is a "Jewish Problem" or simply a "leader problem."
Zephyr
9d ago
This makes sense to me - so it's not so much "Ukraine wins" as it is "Russia loses," which I can see.
TheMotte is super slow for me now, so I'll look at Dean's submission as soon as it finishes loading - thanks!
Zephyr
9d ago
I supported Ukraine in early 22, when it looked like Ukraine might be able to win.
As someone who was never really of the belief that the Ukraine could win - what evidence were you relying on for this belief? This is a sincere question, I've never heard anything that overcame my belief in the difference between population sizes, so I'm very curious why it felt winnable for Ukraine for you.
Found the link, if you're curious:
https://www.themotte.org/post/2732/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/358520?context=8#context
The quote I was thinking of:
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