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Commander, USN (ret). Former Googler. Computer programmer.
User ID: 2527
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1yr ago
When I was a teen, it was called “surfing the web”, which I think was a great metaphor for the free-form movement across websites as you followed whatever path interested you. Nowadays I feel like we are (or at least I am) much more constrained to single sites that are ruthlessly optimized to keep you from venturing away. But I was surfing over the weekend, riding the big wave from the US Supreme Court’s bump stock ruling. About 2/3 of the way through I started turning it into this post due to some culture war implications, but those turned out to be false after digging deeper. So now I’m looking at this long, rambling post, which will soon expire as “old news”, and have decided to share it. Maybe someone else will learn something, at least.
In Sotomayor’s dissent in the recent bump stock case Garland v. Cargill, she writes (on page 26 of the pdf):
When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck. A bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires “automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” §5845(b). Because I, like Congress, call that a machinegun, I respectfully dissent.
A guy on X/Twitter astutely pointed out:
The real irony about Sotomayor's dissent is that US law about ducks is actually incredibly specific. If anything, the adage "if it looks... etc" is the exact opposite of the statute. There is an annually updated list by which protected ducks are classified by 7-8 different parameters. It's over 1100 entries long. There's also a list of explicitly unprotected waterfowl that has hundreds of species, too.
I always had a feeling like the US has some absurd animal protection laws, especially around birds, though I never new the details. I like cats, and when I worked at Google I was part of a cat-lovers group (effectively a mailing list) that was mostly for just sharing pictures of cats but occasionally ventured into cat-activism. I wasn’t in Mountain View, but those who were had set up a catch, neuter, and release program for feral cats nearby. This also included some feeding stations. The Audubon Society got a burr in their bun that people were caring for cats somewhere, and found a few Burrowing Owls that lived near the places where the cats lived. This isn’t an endangered species, but California calls it a species of “special concern”, and that’s enough to get the State to catch and euthanize all the cats in question. Here’s how the New York Times spun the story.
So I had this feeling about stupid bird laws. Seeing the X/Twitter post led to some good ol' fashioned web surfing towards the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, including this article. Choice excerpts:
In 2002, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia declared that members of the military violated the act by unintentionally killing protected birds that flew into a live-fire training area.
In 2011, federal agents from the Fish & Wildlife Service threatened to imprison a Virginia woman because her 11-year-old daughter had rescued a woodpecker from a cat. Following nationwide scrutiny, the Fish & Wildlife Service declared that the mother’s citation had been “processed unintentionally.”
And in 2012, several oil and gas businesses in North Dakota were prosecuted because 28 protected birds had flown into state-sanctioned pools of fluid and oil.
That second one seemed suspicious to me: imprisonment for rescuing a bird? Digging deeper it turns out to be true enough. News story and government release.
According to WUSA, eleven-year-old Skylar came upon a baby woodpecker just before a cat was about to make the bird his next meal. The aspiring veterinarian told the TV station, “I couldn’t stand to watch it be eaten.” So Skylar asked her mother if she could care for the bird and then release it. Mom agreed, and the family went on its way, stopping at a home improvement store in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Rather than keeping the bird in the hot car, they brought the woodpecker inside the cool store.
It was there that one of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s undercover (!) agents spotted the mom–daughter crime duo. Nervously, the undercover wildlife woman held up her badge and proceeded to reprimand Alison and Skylar for illegally taking and transporting the bird.
When the Capos got home, they released the woodpecker and notified the Fish and Wildlife Service. Two weeks later that same agent, accompanied by the Virginia state trooper, showed up at the Capo residence and, according to Alison, delivered a citation stating that she violated federal law, owed the federal government a $535 fine, and could be imprisoned.
Incidentally, Politifact rates Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner’s criticism of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s behavior here as mostly-false.
Now, the culture war angle that started me actually typing all this up. I have historically rolled my eyes at complaints that wind turbines kill birds. I don’t care that much about wild birds, and as much as I think “renewable energy” is a scam, the “it kills birds” argument seemed like a desperate attempt to find something bad about wind turbines that environmentalists would care about. Then I saw a post (that I haven’t been able to find again) claiming that enforcement of these bird laws against green energy companies sure has been a lot lighter than against everyone else. So I did some digging. The bird lovers and tree lovers use the same studies for their estimates of yearly bird deaths from turbines: between 140,000-679,000. When oil and gas businesses in North Dakota accidentally killed 28 protected birds, they got taken to court, even though it was eventually thrown out.
The wind turbine companies? Well, actually, they’re getting hit pretty regularly, too. ESIEnergy was prosecuted. Duke Energy Corp was sentenced in 2013 to $1 million in fines and restitution and five years probation following deaths of 14 golden eagles and 149 other birds at two of the company’s wind projects. PacifiCorp Energy was sentenced to pay fines, restitution and community service totaling $2.5 million and was placed on probation for five years... from the discovery of the carcasses of 38 golden eagles and 336 other protected birds.
AP whines that there are fewer criminal cases being brought against bird killers and that The Biden administration on Thursday proposed a new permitting program for wind energy turbines, power lines and other projects that kill eagles although I couldn’t find the actual proposal.
So I guess the US government is pretty consistent in flipping-the-fuck-out if you harm birds. Though there are movements towards giving green energy companies a break on these laws, it doesn’t strike me as different than all the other laws and subsidies and special treatment green companies already get.
Anyways, I’m thinking of buying a bump stock, but really want an FRT. My local Fudd gun range recently changed their rules from a complete ban to allowing automatic and simulated automatic fire as long as one of the chairmen was present “to ensure everyone’s safety”. I think the board just wanted to get to shoot automatic guns, but I’ll take what I can get. The range rules explicitly prohibit shooting birds and other animals that wander into the firing range, which I appreciate a little more now.
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8mo ago
Eternal September is a real thing that happens to communities when too many newcomers arrive and don't adapt to the existing culture. We literally have a rule asking to not link to here from high participation platforms. This community is small, and the mods already have to work very hard to keep the current quantity of us cretins obeying the rules.
We just saw a sliver of attention to our little Rationalist corner of the internet by a US Vice Presidential candidate on the most popular podcast in the world. Even if he's not pointing people directly to this site, I think it's completely valid to believe that there are ways where fractions of fractions of Joe Rogan listeners find their way here. "What was that article Vance mentioned?" "I liked that article, where could I discuss it?" "No talking politics on Reddit? Where else could I go?" And we get a few thousand new users. Sure, that's unlikely, but that's not a criterion for making a claim here.
If you disagree then please engage with the substance instead of doing so with mockery.
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1yr ago
How's everyone feel about OneDrive integration in Windows, or Google and Apple cloud in their phones?
Two is one, one is none, and three's a spare. I run multiple backup solutions on my data because I do not want to lose a bit if any one of them breaks.
For phones, I think you're pretty much stuck with Google or Apple owning your data. That's a large vulnerable surface of your Google or Apple account, so ensuring you set up 2FA (and not via phone number since those can be easily spoofed). I use a hardware key. I'll have to reassess if I ever decide I'd like to start committing felonies, because both of those companies share your data pretty freely when there's a legitimate request from law enforcement. That'll include GPS and location data, and "person who always brings their phone with them decided to leave it at home on the night in question" is very easy to tell from the records. Also important not to google incriminating things. The military uses cell phones a lot when targeting bad guys. Most of them had good OPSEC but their wives never did. My military career was mostly in intelligence, and being resistant to the techniques we used is just not practical for anyone who doesn't believe their life or freedom is in serious jeopardy from the US government (ala Snowden).
At home I'm using a ZFS array to protect against hard drive failure and bit rot. I have a TODO for exploring backblaze, AWS, and other places for offsite storage of large unchanging data sets since I want to keep my data in the event of a house fire. I keep my important stuff on Google Drive mirrored to my ZFS array. I have a VeraCrypt file that holds anything I want to backup but not let Google read. Examples of things that someone might not want Google to read include TOR accounts and bookmarks, "hacking" tools and scripts that have been used in violation of the CFAA, and cryptocurrency keys. Not that I have any of those.
Having seen how Google handles data privacy and security from the inside, I'm not at all worried about their cloud integration from a security perspective. I trust Apple and Microsoft similarly. The company is not going to blackmail you with your nudes or leak your social security number, and employees can't access those things on your account without getting caught. The company will cooperate with any and every government if they feel the request is legitimate, as I mentioned. I keep that in mind, but don't actually want to join up with the Proud Boys or kidnap the governor of Michigan, so I'm comfortable keeping my files with them. I am quite comfortable keeping my SSN and bank account information on my Google because I have the hardware 2FA key (and no other 2FA allowed) to protect against account takeover. The government and law enforcement can already get my SSN and bank account info if they want them. And if Google deletes my account, no biggie because I have a local copy of everything.
I moved my email off gmail and don't have a plan for email backups yet. Another TODO.
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1yr ago
When I was a young SWO on deployment to the Horn of Africa for anti-piracy operations, we regularly came upon skiffs in open waters with a dozen Somalis crammed on. We'd drive our big warship close, then our VBSS team would take a RHIB over to see what they were doing. They always had one or two fishing poles and a few rotten fish aboard, having jettisoned their weapons as soon as they saw our big warship approaching. "We're fishermen" they'd tell us through a translator, in open ocean on a 12-foot boat with 20 men onboard. Well, one day one group of Somalis decided that they were not going to jettison their weapons, and instead opened fire on one of the ships in our ARG. They launched at least one RPG and somehow completely missed the giant, boxy, unmoving ship that was right next to them. The VBSS team shot them until they surrendered. We zip tied the Somalis, brought them onboard, and gave them a fair bit of medical care (and not just for the holes we'd seen fit to add to a few of them). So now we had these Somalis onboard, locked in our medical spaces (because while the US Navy apparently takes inspiration from jails when designing their berthing, they don't actually make any of those rooms secure for holding criminals). This was back when the US didn't recognize Somalia as a country, so our State Department was having the darndest time figuring out what to do with these guys. We drove around for a week, maybe more, before a deal was brokered to give them to Yemen. They were dropped off and (according to the scuttlebutt) promptly executed.
This was almost 20 years ago, and I still think about it regularly. Should it have gone different, from the moment the Somalis surrendered? Would have been a lot cheaper and easier to have just shot them all there and sunk their skiff, with the same outcome. But that's morally wrong, and not in keeping with the rules of war. We shouldn't've given them to Somalia; they're not a real country (still aren't, IMO) and they government would most likely use the pirates' lives to extort bribes from whatever warlords or families they could, and then free or execute them (flip a coin). We shouldn't've put them into an American jail or Gitmo because they weren't worth it.
The conclusion I keep reaching is that the Somalis (and, to bring it back to the point at hand, immigrant criminals) are a time when "don't flip the switch in the trolley problem" is the best answer. We can know that the "justice" they'll face in their homeland (or Yemen) will probably be unjust, but it's not us doing it and that absolves us of some of the moral responsibility - enough to make it the least shitty of a bunch of shitty choices. We remove them from our control and return them to a place where a government will claim jurisdiction over them, and if that government doesn't afford all the legal protections that we do for our citizens, well... that's on their government. And I know there would be extreme cases when we shouldn't give them over to the other government, like shipping our Jews off to the Nazis or our Lienz Cossacks to the Soviets (oops). But those seem like the extreme cases. As a rule, I think "make the other country deal with their citizens" is the right answer. Our State Department has the power to make every country on Earth do that, assuming we have the political willpower. I worked closely with the State Department later in my career, and there is no doubt in my mind that they're capable of brokering that deal. If the US is ever told by another country that they won't take possession of their citizens who have committed crimes in the US, it is only because the US State Department has decided against spending the effort/money to convince the other country.
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11mo ago
I don't think it will lead to introspection by most people on the left; most people in general are incapable of "are we the baddies"-type introspection. An escalatory course of action is likely to lead to a change in behavior by the left because when it's widely known that (doing whatever left-coded thing the right is able to push outside the overton window) will cost you your job, friends, social status, etc. then most people will stop doing that thing. The masses will make posthoc rationalizations for why they were justified in their prior behavior but now they know better.
If the right continues to "take the high ground", there's no reason for the masses to ever change their behavior or beliefs. The right would have to wait until the majority of the left decides to perform that "are we the baddies"-type introspection, and that will never happen.
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1yr ago
a teacher left Jennifer Crumbley a voicemail saying that her son had been looking at bullets on his phone in class. “Lol I’m not mad you have to learn not to get caught,” she wrote to her son in a text.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Looking up ammunition on your cell phone is completely normal behavior, and I do so occasionally to keep an eye on prices. If I was somehow back in school, where administrators and teachers are stupid and afraid of all things firearm related, then the correct advice is absolutely "learn not to get caught". Why is everyone under the impression that this text message is damning?
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8mo ago
There are plenty of stories of wildly successful people who were failures in their early to mid lives. There are almost no things that are too late to turn around.
Winter in Alaska is tough, though. Someone in the Rational spaces (maybe Eliezer) noticed that his SAD light was rather, well, sad. He bought a ton more of them to actually get lumens equivalent to daylight everywhere in his living room, and it turned to be all he needed. So if the SAD light helps you, but not enough, why not try more dakka?
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1yr ago
My grandfather was a bomber pilot stationed on the Aleutian Islands during World War II. With not much in the way of local entertainment, the USO on base would provide what they could. This included a lot of books, and my grandfather either bought or stole the 20th anniversary anthology of a popular periodical that remained in his library until he died. I have a deep love of old books, but that apparently runs in my family, because upon the death of my grandmother (who outlived her husband by 10 years) this anthology was one of only two old books from their library I was able to claim.
In it, there's a wonderful article titled "My Five Best Dinner Companions".
Here is an interesting thought: You and I will give a dinner tonight, and our guests shall be five men we choose, out of all who have ever lived.
I love how, in 1924, le petit caporal is the obvious choice they feel a need to dismiss immediately. They pick Socrates, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Pepys, Montaigne, and Lincoln. Read the short article here.
Myself, any time I am given hypothetical time travel powers, I feel a moral obligation to pick Homer so we can get the missing poems from the Epic Cycle. If my sole purpose was for my own enjoyment, I'd pick Robert Heinlein, and talk with him about our alma mater, politics and space travel. For the sake of an entertaining dinner amongst my friends, though, the only option is Samuel Clemens. That is to say, if anyone wasn't entertained by Mark Twain at dinner, I wouldn't count them as my friend.
Who would you pick?
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1yr ago
No, I'm glad it's going this way because now we get more focus on the currently-stupid law. I'm hoping that Republicans can find one or two full spines between themselves and actually get a real concession from Democrats in order to pass a bump stock ban: get suppressors and/or SBRs off the NFA. Reopen the machine gun registry is another reasonable step, but that's probably asking too much for this moment.
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11mo ago
That does not match my predictions of social behavior or my reading of history. People do not pick sides based on which they view is more of a hypocrite; they pick sides mostly based on what's socially acceptable. The Peace of Westphalia was not negotiated because the Catholics "turned the other cheek" so much that the Protestants felt guilty. It was because everyone got tired of the killing.
The responses to StickerMule's milquetoast post-assassination-attempt call for unity tell me that the left is not close to being tired of the metaphorical killing.
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1yr ago
Given how stupid the COVID-19 response was, I've lost faith that anything with the slightest bit of ambiguity or cost+benefit can be handled reasonably by our society. Wind turbines generate electricity, externalities be damned. Hell, I'd label the entire anti-nuclear movement "virtue-signaling", and we haven't "examined ourselves closely" for the 80 years that's been going on. I blame it on 2 parts conflict theory, 1 part Moloch.
Killing birds is a tragedy of the commons. From my reading of history, nobody has found a good way to actually ensure a proportional response to a tragedy of the commons. We either threaten to jail people for rescuing woodpeckers, write some sad articles that change absolutely nothing, or funnel money into mismanaged non-profits. Even when a fairly simple law by Congress could save tens of millions of otherwise lost books, we can't do that because it might benefit Google.
Take the blackpill and accept that this probably won't get fixed. Ensure you and yours are benefiting from this foreknowledge. When I take my kids to see their grandfather (we're far apart so this is infrequent), we always take a walk into the nearby forest to see the family of bald eagles that have set up a nest there. And they've seen fields of flowers, and we have a huge physical collection of old books. My kids don't fully understand why their weird dad is obsessing about these particular things, but they don't need to.
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11mo ago
At some point I hope to make an effortpost about innumeracy, and how people who work with numbers are grossly overestimating the ability of the average person. This old Unz post really stuck with me. The example Level 3 question is literally read a table and pick the smallest number in the appropriate row. Back in 2012 less than half of 15-16 year olds in the USA were able to answer a Level 3 question correctly. I'm a numbers guy, and I really struggle to imagine the perspective of someone unable to do that. And that's half the American population (perhaps a little less, as some people could learn with age)!
wanyeburkett's thread you linked makes a similar/related point. patio11 has some good insights. There's also a good discussion to be had about whether giving these innumerate people an LLM that can understand numbers and complex processes for them is good solution or if that would just encourage more complexity.
The Libertarian Party of Colorado has declined to run Chase Oliver, the national Libertarian candidate, and will instead put Robert Kennedy on the ballot. Colorado is solidly blue (screenshot) according to the prediction markets (screenshot), but the polls (screenshot) are showing that Kennedy is hugely popular in the state.
Whether it's Biden, Harris, or door number 3 on the Democratic ticket, I think this has potential to split blue votes and turn my accursed state red for one brief, shining moment.
I think that may actually be The Libertarian Party of Colorado's plan. Kinda refreshing to see a political party actually playing 2D chess for once, instead of Candyland or whatever the hell the Democrats and Republicans are playing.
Edit: updating with screenshots of prediction sites since they might change
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11mo ago
"Pick sides" in this context is "we should get our enemies fired from their jobs" vs "we should abstain from doing that". Apologies if that wasn't clear.
Regardless, that does not match my predictions of social behavior or my reading of history. From the standpoint of the right, the choices are:
- Your proposal, where the right takes the high road and keeps losing the culture war until they cease to exist, or
- Double down, expect the left to double down, and let it keep getting worse until both sides agree to stop
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1yr ago
FYI your comment was presented to me for janitor duty, and as I read it I marked it as Good, until I got to your last two sentences calling for Gaiman's murder. That made me change my rating to Bad. You have great points and I think it's a shame you've ruined a good post with that ending.
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11mo ago
Yudkowsky mentioned Madoka Magica fanfiction To The Stars as being the best science fiction to predict the future of drone warfare. I liked Madoka Magica, so figured I'd give it a try. As you may see from the fanfiction.net link, it's 910,487 words, which is roughly 10 novels worth of prose. I use Calibre to manage my ebook library, and it has a plugin to download from fanfiction.net, so I downloaded the whole thing and sent it to my Kindle. I then spent about 3 weeks feverishly devouring the whole thing, only to get to the end and discover that it's not finished, and the author writes at a snail's pace. It wasn't until chapter 65/70 when I even considered he might not wrap up all the loose ends. The lesson for me is to use AO3, where it's much clearer that the work is unfinished. I've been moping around and having trouble starting another nonfiction book after that letdown. I really, really, enjoyed the work, but hate the idea of having to come back to it every few years to find out how the story is progressing.
I'm nearing the end of Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. I can't recall a book that better captures the mentality of fighter pilots, the politics of the military, and the experience of wearing the uniform. The author isn't afraid to make bold claims, like "A performance report like this would normally kill your career" or "Nobody would dare talk to a General like that" (not actual quotes, but it was an audiobook and I don't want to scroll around to find specific examples). The only thing I disagree with in the entire book is the claim that promotion to Colonel, Boyd's final rank, is more difficult than the promotion to flag officer. Otherwise it's my top recommendation for fiction writers (or anyone) who want to understand the experience of being in the US military. I also recommend it to anyone who enjoyed The Pentagon Wars, since the dysfunction of the Air Force picking aircraft and Boyd's fight to get the right plane built is quite similar.
What are you reading?
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11mo ago
I think that's an unnecessary nitpick, and we should encourage colorful metaphors because they're fun to read.
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1yr ago
Could you point out where in that article (or elsewhere) there is any important insight provided by the mainstream of constructvism? I do not have a positive view of constructivism as a useful way to analyze the world or predict future events, and that article further cemented my view since it mostly seems like a posthoc justification for obviously-true statements whenever it's testable: "Constructivists argue that states can have multiple identities that are socially constructed through interaction with other actors." is untestable, "500 British nuclear weapons are less threatening to the United States than five North Korean nuclear weapons" is obvious without constrictivism.
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11mo ago
Here's a NSFW reddit thread with a picture of her burns, which is way worse than the experience most people get when they spill coffee on themselves. I daresay something that would cause those injuries could be reasonably described as "ultra-dangerous".
One of the answers to this Quora question has a picture of someone's arm after they touched molten metal, and to non-medical me it seems similar enough to the lady's injuries. Yes, less time in contact with skin between her coffee and his slag, but I just don't think the distinction is enough to be worth arguing over.
And, again, I like a good metaphor.
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11mo ago
Would you show me some historical examples of when your choice 1 was successful? Mitt Romney is the favorite counterexample of how that strategy doesn't work here in practice. I don't think Gandhi is a good analogy, since the modern American right lacks many of the factors favorable to him (Britain's economic and military weakness after WWII, a shared Indian cultural identity, international pressure against colonialism, Britain's willingness to negotiate).
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1yr ago
You could do some military jobs!
- Leave Papers, Please: Reviewing and processing leave forms (penalties for approving too many, or approving ones with errors)
- Sweeping the same 50 square feet for an hour, making sure you look busy the whole time even though you've finished after 10 minutes.
- Navigating a warship at night through a busy shipping lane, trying to keep your closest point of approach (CPA) greater than 2000 yards for every ship out there so you don't have to wake the Captain, whose standing orders require you to tell him if you're ever going to have a CPA under that.
- Polishing your dress shoes
- Mess crank: like Cooking Mama, but you have to cook 10x the quantity, some of the ingredients are rotten, and you can't tell the difference between tablespoons and teaspoons.
- Leverage an LLM to determine how effective your speech is after telling your division not to get any DUIs over a holiday weekend. Additional levels could be to convince them not to buy a Dodge Charger at 26% APY, and not to send half your paycheck to the Filipino prostitute you met at the last port call.
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1yr ago
I'm not educated on these terms and this whole school of thought, and right now the gap between my understanding of how the world works and what you've linked/described about Constructivism is too great for me to understand your points. I do not see a reason why I'm not allowed to conclude that nuclear weapons in the hands of North Korea should elicit a different international response than nuclear weapons in the hands of Great Britain without the constructivist need to claim that the nature of the nuclear weapons is different between the two. Like, I can change my opinions, reactions, and decisions between a good adult friend and the 14-year-old across the street when each asks to borrow my car. I'm allowed to do that without needing to believe that my car has changed. And there are inherent truths about nuclear weapons and cars that would be true regardless of social context: nuclear weapons make a big explosion when successfully activated, and cars have 4 wheels. A society that believes the will of a supernatural entity is the only cause of fire is unable to modify a nuclear detonation through prayer no matter how important the supernatural entity is in their society. A society that believes the number 4 to be bad luck and that refuses to allow anything to have that number of wheels is allowed to collectively say a car has 3 wheels, but that doesn't make it true.
Where are you getting your definition of "realists"? In the colloquial meaning of "realist", I don't see why they would conclude that a country whose government has committed genocide would be less likely to intervene to stop another genocide. The obvious conclusion seems like it could be reached by observing the real world, with real, testable things that really exist, regardless of social constructs. Measure: has each country committed genocide, and have they intervened to stop another genocide. Calculate: historically, what's the chance a country that has committed genocide will intervene to stop another genocide versus one that hasn't. Predict: given two countries, one that has committed genocide and one that hasn't, which is more likely to intervene to stop this particular genocide. The answer is independent of social context.
Again, I'm ignorant here. I want to understand why there is any benefit for believing that social context changes the reality of objects, or that we're not allowed to consider any actor as different than any other actor without constructivism. Because the downstream effects of constructivism I see are awful: college professors claiming that aboriginal interpretations of the world are just as valid as the scientific method, and the superweapon of unfalsifiable "lived experiences" that trump rational debate. I want to stop those things, and from my perspective shunning constructivism - making it costly and embarrassing to believe and support - seems to be a good solution. I don't see any loss, because what you're saying constructivism adds all seem like common sense that we could figure out without that structure.
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11mo ago
That's actually a really helpful perspective for me. Funny enough, I had the following conversation with my 6 year old this morning:
Son: I like your new tattoo. Kids like tattoos.
Me: Well this is a permanent tattoo. You can only get temporary tattoos until you're 18.
Son: I'll do that! Will you drive me?
Me: When you're 18, you can drive yourself.
Son: I could drive?
Me: Yes, but you'll need your own car, and they're expensive.
Son: How much does a car cost?
Me: $10,000. You'll have to save up!
Son: I'm going to count my money now. gets his cash box where he keeps his allowance, and spends the next 5 minutes counting out the $45 he has in there
He has no concept of the difference in scale between the $10,000 and the $45 he has. He was counting it, and if he got to $10,000 then he would get a car. He didn't this time, so he needs to keep saving. I find his focus, sincerity, and innocence sweet for a 6 year old. I'd find that level of numeracy terrifying in a 16 year old, but apparently that's where half of all Americans are. "My 6 year old's understanding of numbers" is a theory of mind I can grasp.
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1yr ago
That's quite a different outlook from me; I'd love to learn more about why you think that way. I feel like I could fill a month of enjoyable dinners easily from my imagination, and a year of dinners with some web searching.
Have you ever read and enjoyed a biography? Have you ever seen a live speech and enjoyed the speaker, or even topic? Are there comedians whose sense of humor you relate to? Why wouldn't you take an opportunity to have a more personal experience from any of those people?
JD Vance was on the Joe Rogan podcast, and references Scott's Gay Rites are Civil Rites. It happens at 23:45. As TracingWoodgrains says, the Eye of Sauron approaches.
I apologize if I can't add much more insight. Are there going to be left wing smear articles explaining the evil Rationalists that have the ear of JD Vance? Or is there so much chaos right now around the election that this will get passed over, widely unremarked upon?
Threats to our community aside, it's pretty awesome that a VP candidate referenced one of Scott's articles.
Edit: Andy Ngo is boosting this part of the interview, focusing on the trans children discussion, without commenting on the article.
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