benmmurphy
2mo ago
I think there is a bunch of magic stuff about 'liberalism'
- we settle our differences at the ballot box. instead of killing each other we have a vote and then decide on how we are governed
- even if we disagree with each other we can still trade with each other and be better off!
i feel like we are have been losing 2) for a long time and i guess eventually if we start losing a lot of the benefit from 2) then we might start losing 1)
benmmurphy
2mo ago
This might make sense if you have an advantage or think you have an advantage in the realm of ideas. But if you have an advantage in terms of smashing skulls or coordinating other people to smash skulls then I don't think it makes sense.
benmmurphy
2mo ago
Harder to be obese when our food is so terrible
There has also been questions about his education credentials as well. I see two extreme interpretations of the current situation. Either he is extremely unlucky and has been a victim of ICE and now the internet sleuths have been activated and is now is whole life is being painted in the worse possible light or he is a serial grifter archetype. Laura Powell has a breakdown here: https://x.com/LauraPowellEsq/status/1971811032235753770
The other weird thing is in that twitter thread from Laura Powell it shows he was married and presumably married to an American for a long period of time. It seems to me to be a massive screw up if you do not become a citizen through marriage if you are not already a citizen.
It's also interesting to read his statement about the hunting rifle while imagining he is either this unlucky victim of circumstance or he is the grifter. He even implies that maybe it was not a case of luck but rather that he had been targeted due to race and that the citation was due to him trying to create a safer situation for the law enforcement officer. His statement could definitely be true. There is no doubt that there are law enforcement people out there that might see you place a rifle back into your vehicle temporarily and then write you up instead of letting it slide. (https://www.yourerie.com/news/local-news/millcreek-superintendent-issues-statement-after-receiving-hunting-citation/)
He also has not made everything up because is is an olympic athlete and did compete in the Sydney 2000 Olympics where is ran 1:52.32 in the 800m qualifier. (https://worldathletics.org/results/olympic-games/2000/27th-olympic-games-6951910/men/800-metres/heats/result)
Some people are claiming he is was able to get a pass due to his ethnicity but maybe he was able to get a pass because of his sporting accomplishments. Maybe the school board thought that employing an Olympian would help inspire kids regardless of his actual suitability for the job itself.
its quite possible Des Moines Public Schools has an unofficial policy of not complying with immigration law. there is presumably a lot of this going on in the private sector i guess it should not be surprising if its happening in the public sector as well. also this seems to be a failure of the federal government. the federal government is able to coerce banks into acting as policeman for all their crazy money laundering laws. if the federal government were seriously interested in cracking down on immigration then they could just coerce private and public employers in a similar manner.
benmmurphy
3mo ago
Then when a woman purchases the firearms that are used in a capital crime due to this restriction we can give them honorary doctorates.
benmmurphy
3mo ago
isn't this just a muh plaintiffs don't have standing decision. if the plaintiffs weren't looking for relief against future violations from the government but instead focussed on current violations maybe they would have been successful.
benmmurphy
3mo ago
The claim seems to be that Kimmel is not blaming MAGA for the murder, rather Kimmel is claiming that MAGA are trying to claim non-MAGA murdered Charlie. I feel like this is probably the correct strict parsing of what Kimmel said but I wouldn't be surprised if you asked his audience directly after he said this whether MAGA killed Charlie a lot of them would have the impression that MAGA did based on what Kimmel said. This feels a lot like wordcel lying where what is said is truthful but it is deliberately structured to give an impression to the audience that is incorrect. Also, the problem with analysing this kind of thing is it kind of assumes malice on the part of the speaker instead of treating the speaker in the most charitable way possible.
benmmurphy
3mo ago
newer iPhones have their bluetooth running when they are 'off' (i think this runs for up to 1 day?) in order to network with nearby iPhones to support the find-my-phone feature. https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-bluetooth/
benmmurphy
3mo ago
his twitter is now full of innuendo that he is a special subject matter expert on transgenders
benmmurphy
3mo ago
it gets weirder because now there is a claim that he was living with his transgender partner (https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/09/breaking-charlie-kirk-assassin-tyler-robinson-lived-his/ and https://nypost.com/2025/09/13/us-news/charlie-kirk-shooter-tyler-robinson-lived-with-transgender-partner/) according to reporting by both TGP and the NYPost. I guess this could be the same law enforcement source that claimed there was transgender markings on the bullets so it could turn out to be some kind of exaggeration.
benmmurphy
3mo ago
its theoretically possible the government could be running a policy that is harmful to everyone or harmful to a subset of people and neutral to everyone else and so removing such a policy would leave no one worse off. there is also bunch of literature in economics about pareto improvements (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency). though, i think they there is a larger possible space of such improvements if you tax the winners of improvements and compensate the losers so the losers are no worse off. also, i think there is some term for doing this but then not doing the compensation because of 'efficiency' or some other reason.
benmmurphy
3mo ago
Kirk bit the bullet and acknowledged his preferred policy option had a drawback and the internet mercilessly bullied him after he was murdered. Almost all policy options have some drawback but a lot of advocates will not acknowledge this and will not try and defend the tradeoff. Policy options that have no tradeoffs are presumably rare because such a policy would be very popular and so presumably would already be implemented. People acknowledging drawbacks is something the rationalist space should be getting behind but it wouldn't surprise me if part of that community were needling Kirk as well.
benmmurphy
3mo ago
police claiming they saw the footage and it proved X but it went missing is highly suspicious. surely, they would have some kind of evidence process to ensure footage related to a criminal investigation is properly backed up. also, this is suspicious enough that maybe this claim should be treated suspiciously.
benmmurphy
3mo ago
I always thought MBTI was horoscopes for Korean people.
benmmurphy
3mo ago
i guess what happened to Trump with the spying and Russia collusion hoax had plausible deniability so people see it as tolerable whereas because Trump is brutish in the way he acts he doesn't receive the same benefit of the doubt.
benmmurphy
3mo ago
isn't there a sex tape of Destiny and Fuentes. wouldn't that kill any chance of Fuentes becoming mainstream in the Republican party.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
when it comes to IQs the testing is done so the population mean for men and women are both 100. i assume you could alter the composition of questions so men or women as a group had a higher mean than the other group. so your impression of women's IQs being lower than what a test might show could be because you are measuring based on aspects that men generally do better than women.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
i've always wondered instead of a commission you could just agree ahead of time on some rules on how redistricting would be performed and then just have the rules execute at a fixed time period. i assume one problem with this is people would try and simulate the rules in the future and try to choose rules that would benefit them. i guess maybe the current districting is so ridiculous that it would be difficult to come up with rules that can handle that as an initial state and be somewhat stable.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
Aliens have been following LLM progress and are involved in their own Butlerian Jihad.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
so the presumably if we follow this logic a CEO of a company would get a shorter custodial sentence than an unemployed person because the extra consequences will be much larger for the CEO. if you have special circumstances that will make punishments extra costly then you should make extra effort to not break the law.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
I'm reading along as well. Thank you for sharing your book.
one wonders if they are using the same social time preference rate when calculating the costs of global warming in the future vs the costs of preventing global warming in the present. my understanding is the Stern Report used a discount rate of around ~1.5%. So that seems kind of suspicious that they are using a discount rate of between 2.5 and 3.5% here. however, the difference in rates is not super large. I think if they used a Stern rate it would increase the present value of the payments by a factor of 1.4 (where 1.0 would be the same value) compared to the rate they used.
also, whether it was misleading or not I think depends on how it was worded. If they said something like "the cost of the deal is 3.4 billion with payments over 100 years" then I think that is misleading because it gives the reader the impression that the payments are going to be something like 100 payments of 3.4 billion / 100 and a reader might think the net present value will be much lower. If you did not want to mislead the reader you would use more explicit wording like: "the net present value of the payments is 3.4 billion and will be paid over 100 years". My guess is the wording will just be standard wordcel games where you try to put false impressions in the heads of other people and then later claim the reader is at fault. I guess its also completely possible that all of the detail was shared with parliament but no-one in parliament actually reads the detail.
i've read the telegraph article and part of the article is written by the shadow foreign secretary priti patel. it seems like everyone knew what the cash value of the payments were all along but did not know how the treasury were calculating the final cost. i think in this case its hard to claim that treasury were that misleading. treasury should have explained originally how they came to their present value calculations but it's not like the value of the cash payments was hidden.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
Maybe he just found goatse and was sharing it with his friends.
it could just be 'bants'. maybe he is just venting to a friend and there is some context that is snipped from the conversation that we see that makes it less bad. cancelling him has parallels to cancelling people for having misogynistic/sexist/racist comments in a whatsapp group with friends. there is an expectation of a privacy and lot of it is just people venting or memeing and not being serious.
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