betascience
4mo ago
I think that work sounds really cool. I hope a private company wants to continue it and you get hired.
But I mean come on "you have to give me and my friends money or your country will fail" is obviously not a compelling argument. If it don't make dollars it don't make sense.
betascience
4mo ago
We're not going to do unlimited gay race science funding. I'm sorry. Just pour so much money into the program that everything is funded is not the a realistic vision of the future. Forget practically reasonable, it's not politically reasonable. This will always devolve into patron-client politics.
betascience
4mo ago
It's just silly. Trump can fire any government employee. DOGE can advise Trump. Elon can advise Trump. The janitor can advise Trump (and from what I've heard, probably does!) when he empties the waste paper basket in the oval office. The firings come from department heads who the President instructed to collaborate with DOGE. The department heads can fire the people under them, as can Trump, and Trump can fire the department heads.
That there's any confusion around this leaves me a bit flabbergasted.
betascience
1yr ago
I think the excessive fat storage is because your metabolism has been broken by industrialized food. If you were to repair it, your experience would be different.
betascience
1yr ago
I don’t fully understand what you’re proposing here. It doesn’t sound like a better situation for anyone involved. Is this actually two states occupying the same territory with international militaries policing it? How could this possibly be better than the present situation?
betascience
1yr ago
The idea of stealing and the system that disallows it are just social technologies and systems that are agreed upon prior. "Don't steal and that's the law" isn't different in principle from "young people have to support old people and that's the law." In fact, both are pretty straightforwardly Biblical.
Ownership relies on violence which means it's not coercive only by some means of special pleading, which you make pretty explicit by hinting that it's not coercive because you prefer to live in a world that includes it. That's fine for what it's worth, but recognize it more forthrightly. It is coercive, just a type that you specifically prefer.
betascience
1yr ago
It's only strong for certain types of activities. Simple reaction time like someone throwing something at you which you bat away, it's almost nothing. Strategizing or problem solving, it's quite high. Defensive linemen probably have some of both. I'm sure it's way better to be smart than not, but much of it is using techniques and tactics on which you've drilled against techniques and tactics on which you've also drilled.
betascience
2yr ago
How so? I’d really like to understand the logic of this position.
betascience
2yr ago
The whole question is pretty philosophically precarious. I don't know how I'd feel about trans people in a world where they were mentally healthy, lived normal life spans, and didn't tend to die young due to overmedicalization and the outcomes of their suicidality and other dangerous mental health issues. I live in the world where most "trans" people who make it to twenty without going on hormonal treatment just return "normalcy". My current biases say that the hypothetical you draw is statistically impossible, and I wouldn't trust the person offering the bargain.
betascience
2yr ago
trying to force everyone into a vaccine was a huge risk management error. a reasonable approach would have been to try to guide the outcome towards 25% rate for each of the three approved vaccines and 25% unvaccinated rate (especially in low-risk populations). vaccinating children was pointless, all risk, no upside.
betascience
2yr ago
Well we have no examples state educational interventions correcting IQs and test scores and have numerous examples of at least allowing a certain social contagion to convince (some small number of) people to cut off their genitals. But most trans-trenders don't bother with that.
But what you're saying is over-simplistic. There are plenty of easily conceivable models that could consider things like IQ, ambition, height, disagreeability, openness or a number of other traits including potentially the curiosity to want to toy with the idea of genital mutilation to be highly inherited and yet the expression of those to be highly regulated by environment. If every modern trans would have been trans-curious in other cultural environments but gone on to mostly grow out of it and live happy lives that doesn't mean that the modern environment where they're rushed onto puberty blockers is strictly better. In fact that proclivity may have had some advantage only in environments where it wouldn't be indulged.
Obviously if it is indulged it will likely breed itself out of existence.
betascience
1yr ago
Are they basing the poverty rates on a national income cutoff rather than a local cost of living standard? I bet dollars to donuts they are, and until that's corrected for, I don't know why I'd waste additional time entertaining the argument.
betascience
2yr ago
There’s far less legal ground for this than there is for student loan forgiveness. At least with regards to loan forgiveness you have the executive of the actual agency that holds the debt taking tan action that is by definition legal (if the courts say so).
The universities more or less deliver what they promise. They’re accredited to the standards of the various regional accrediting boards, and if a person attends they will receive education at that low standard.
The big issue is the lending program itself which incentivized enrolling and matriculating as many students in possible for access to the money. The government created this by incentivizing it.
betascience
2yr ago
Fair. Rocks being conscious or at least representing something that is was more or less a default for belief in many cultures across time. Ruling it out so casually is a result of a particular unique, historically rare socialization.
betascience
2yr ago
Well…. now you’re getting somewhere.
betascience
1yr ago
Its a generational trap. The system places the burden of funding on kids that are not yet born, and couldn't have possibly voted to not have the system.
Is this not true of any store of value system? Ultimately the question of caring for the old is a question of how the resources of those that are young enough to work will be redistributed to those who are too old to work and what precisely counts as too old to work. If we allowed old people to save thing X in their productive years, protect thing X from being taken with force by those who are young enough and strong enough to do so, and thing X is then used a store of value to pay those who are young and strong for food, services, etc. then we are essentially back in the same place.
This isn't to argue for or against social security, but simply to point out that any system to care for the elderly is going to do so by using some element of coercive redistribution on the young because the scarce element is their productivity.
betascience
2yr ago
What is “sentient thought” in this case? Like… thinking the words out loud step by step? That’s useful and really powerful but smart people also have valuable flashes of insight where they skip from a to d bypassing b and c entirely.
Is someone faking their way through a last minute work meeting while they think about what they want to eat for dinner doing sentient thought? Someone daydreaming about the new girl at work while they drive on autopilot?
betascience
2yr ago
It doesn’t matter how the model works if you don’t know how consciousness works. You can get a pretty good gist of transformers and attention on youtube. But you can’t find anyone who can definitively tell you how consciousness works to ensure that this isn’t it or something very much like it.
betascience
2yr ago
Mental illness is caused by a “chemical imbalance” in the brain.
betascience
2yr ago
If your child was drafted to a war and came back with his genitals blown off and a condition requiring life long medical treatment that results in a drastically shortened lifespan it isn't fair to say he's dead, but he's certainly well on his way. Whatever life you shared before is over and new vista of terrifying possibilities has opened its stead.
betascience
1yr ago
What do you think happens if that state suddenly exists? Is it a democracy? What do you think the Palestians elect to do to the Jews?
betascience
1yr ago
There's a nigh infinite number of ways to approach this. I would recommend perhaps starting at the beginning of the fabulous Secret History of Western Esotericism podcast (https://shwep.net/). Christianity did not evolve in a vacuum. It's a part of western thought with roots dating back to pre-Socratic philosophy. It may benefit you to have a more complete picture of how it came to be and the issues that early Christian thinkers like Origen and Augustine wrestled with. There are as many different Christianities as there are Christians, and there is almost certainly a Christian path that is true for you.
betascience
1yr ago
If the government ever touches the money allocated for social security.
It's actually mandated by the program that they do. It purchases treasuries. What would you have them do with it?
betascience
1yr ago
I think that all of Godot is ultimately interpreted whether you're using C# or Gscript. So if the thing that I think is correct, then yes. But I'm not certain what's going on under the hood.
Calling a series of factual statements a “gish gallop” is basically telling on yourself. There’s no argument here, but you’re admitting the conclusion you would draw is uncomfortable ergo assuming bad intentions.
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