cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
11hr ago
We just fundamentally disagree here. I don't see any path to reconciliation. I didn't realize there was such a large disconnect on the meaning and essence of culture.
But this is also a values disconnect. It's subjective.
cjet79
11hr ago
Generally American corporations have spread to everywhere they are allowed.
Poor countries often have more rules and operating a legal business without bribing a bunch of people is impossible. International corporations are unwilling to cross that line for good reasons.
I feel that calling corruption incompetence is disingenuous. Most European nations were equally impossible to operate in legally a few centuries ago. That's just how poor economies and politics tend to mingle.
cjet79
15hr ago
I don't think assimilation is harder today, or at least its a wash with the various technological and social changes. Especially for assimilation into and out of American culture, because so much of American culture has become world culture.
What does it matter that they can face time back to Italy when Italy is also watching MTV, eating at McDonalds, buying coffee at Starbucks, and talking about 21st century technology using barely converted English words? This same phenomenon makes traveling as an American simultaneously easier and more boring.
Lets not forget that past immigrant populations found plenty of ways to resist assimilation. Every "Little [Country]" in a big city is usually a past example of an immigrant population congregating together and avoiding assimilation as long as possible.
Matt Yglesias posted on X an argument in favor of immigration (having trouble finding it now).
...
why would presumably smart people like Yglesias make such a sloppy argument?
I think you pre-emptively answered your own question.
Anyways, its not like its hard to find a more thought out exposition on why immigration proponents want more immigration. Bryan Caplan did a whole book on the topic where he tried to make the arguments approachable for laymen: https://www.amazon.com/Open-Borders-Science-Ethics-Immigration/dp/1250316960
Twitter/X is a place where you can throw out a lot of arguments. And see which arguments stink or are good depending on the reactions. You are implicitly buying into a culture war framing on the whole thing by treating arguments as soldiers. You can certainly downgrade your opinion of certain commentators if they make a bunch of dumb arguments, but dumb arguments in favor of a thing does not make that thing wrong or incorrect.
cjet79
16hr ago
I'd say that food is a massive and very important aspect of culture. Its behind language in importance. But maybe as important as religion. Definitely more important than holidays (since many holidays are heavily defined by religion and food).
You eat food every day. You share meals with family and the people you like most in the world. Food can lock in memories, and eating it again can bring back those memories. Its one area where attempts to relentlessly optimize everything enjoyable and unique out of life have mostly failed (meal replacement options were only ever popular in small enclaves of weird programmers and rationalist). Food is one the first ways people like to meet their romantic partners. Food is how we celebrate.
Aside from language, what is more foundational to the lived experience of a culture than its food?
cjet79
1d ago
Just finished System Delenda Est. Another good series from the author. Part of the end confused me. Feels like it left out a critical sentence or two.
cjet79
2d ago
I just keep going back to Starship Troopers Extermination. Its 16 player player vs computer (bugs). Not a perfect game by any means, but I just don't want to be in PvP matches, and this game saves me from that.
I play with a light military sim discord which makes things way more fun. 1stmi.gg
cjet79
3d ago
Idea #2: Semi-mandatory service. Want Pell grants or Medicare? Better sign up, 18 year old you. You can join the military, or you can go to a national forest to survey land for a year. Compulsory-but-not-compulsory service might sound like state violence to some, and fascism to others, but maybe we can find a few programs in addition to the military that a supermajority could support staffing with conscripted teens.
Semi-mandatory is a dangerous line to ride.
We have protections from certain kinds of fully mandatory actions. But Semi-mandatory is protected from court challenges, and can really ride the line on "semi" hard enough to make it meaningless. Turning down someone for a job because they have a felony on their record is illegal (unless you are the FBI). But anyone doing background checks is generally turning down felons. Its possible to make something extremely adverse selection. Signing up for the draft at 18 is one of those things that already sort of rides the line. Its not been relevant for a long time, but it can cause trouble for men who don't do it. I was certainly tempted not to when I turned 18, mainly for ideological reasons. Practical concerns won out, and I signed up. I'm now out of draft age. My plan at the time if being drafted was to plead flat feet (I do have that, and all running sports are generally off limits to me).
What might be other ideas for actionable things to combat the misery and cultural malaise?
Lean into sports and competition. E-sports is a growing area. Find more professional sports to elevate. I wouldn't mind my favored sport of underwater hockey achieving more widespread adoption. But realistically you could go for existing sports that already have international adoption. The Romans held their empire together for a couple extra centuries by just feeding everyone and providing "circuses".
cjet79
7d ago
I am generally against cancellations. But even during the height of the woke cancellations I feel like I remember some careful Republican criticisms of "its insane to cancel people for saying something that half the country believes". So I don't feel like their stance was ever fully principled free speech.
I do have one exception for cancellation: if you've cancelled others then you yourself become fair game. Jimmy Kimmel was fair game. Roseanne Barr, and apparently some band that was on the show were both things he was happy to cancel.
cjet79
8d ago
I've been dreading this a bit too.
My middle daughter is 4 and has been insisting for a year now that she is a boy. That she doesn't like girls or playing with them and only wants to be with boys. We've mostly surrendered on the clothing front, we buy her boys clothes and shoes, but she still has long hair. And we certainly don't introduce her as a boy.
She has been in the same daycare most of her life, and they are not the kind of place that would encourage that sort of thing. The hispanic lady that runs the place talked to me about voting for Trump because of the things the left was doing to kids in school. The pre-k she is in right now is Christian oriented and less likely to pull any funny business on this topic. Our best guess for why she does this is that she had a really good friend at the daycare that was a little boy a year older than her, and she just wanted to emulate many things about him.
But she enters kindergarten at a public school next year.
I wish I had good advice for you. The one positive thing that might be going for me is that class sizes are large and she is likely to go unnoticed.
cjet79
8d ago
Choose your own adventure books exist, but I think that whole genre just fits way better with a game. Multiple ending options based on how you played just makes sense within a game.
Any stories that play off the actions of the player are going to be more powerful in game form. Bioshock is a good example here, but far from the only one in the genre. Dishonored is another one where choosing to be non-violent, or staying completely hidden will change minor details in the following levels.
cjet79
9d ago
I played that a little while back, definitely enjoyable game. Can't remember if I even got to all the biomes they had released at the time.
I might have eventually gotten a mod that allowed portaling metals. I remember travel just sucking up a bunch of my time in the game.
cjet79
9d ago
Is that the second book in that series, or the entire series? I only remember reading the first one. And it was about the time I put down all Brandon Sanderson novels. I think he executes decently well, but he also goes off a formula. Or maybe its the same formula every fantasy writer uses. But things became too predictable and I got hardcore into web novels instead.
cjet79
10d ago
Video game thread.
I played return to moria this past two weeks. It's a survival crafting game. Gameplay wise it is fairly standard for the genre. The setting of middle earth is fun. I'm not a massive LOTR nerd, so I'm sure I missed some subtleties.
There are some mechanics that definitely make the game better suited for co-op. I played it alone and felt like I was missing out. Storage sizes always felt too small, there were legendary gear items that you could only carry one of, and you could be picked up upon death by a comrade if you had one. I eventually downloaded a mod to fix the first two issues. It expanded storage and allowed carrying multiple legendary items.
Progression happens entirely through gear. And gear drops on death. Corpse runs were not as brutal as I feared. The game seemed to handle agro and grave placement in a way that helped corpse runs.
Resource collecting was generally pretty standard but sometimes I'd find myself making fun little mining platforms to get higher.
The map is procedurally generated, but it's more like pre-made rooms that are stuck together in an odd assortment rather than fully new terrain each time.
Navigation was tricky with the map not helping much except to provide general directions. I ended memorizing a lot of tunnel layouts in order to get where I needed to go.
Replayability felt low. I didn't want to totally start from scratch after getting used to all my awesome gear. The next update is supposedly adding NPCs for bases, I'll probably replay the game when that comes out.
cjet79
10d ago
Solid black, we have joked about wrapping it in caution tape to improve visibility.
cjet79
11d ago
Got so close to getting T-boned this morning. 4 way stop, I'd stopped, spotted a car to my right still headed to the intersection. I'm like cool I win. Start driving through the intersection. Car to my right blows through their stop sign. Is turning onto the road like I'm not already halfway through the intersection. Lay on my horn swerve to the left, narrowly dodge the car.
It happened 100 feet from my house, with my baby daughter in the back seat. Fucking asshole drivers, I might have ended up in jail today had he hit me. I am also starting to think that the minivan I was driving is cursed. It would have been the 4th accident in that vehicle in just 3 years of ownership. The other vehicle we've owned for 8 years has zero accidents.
cjet79
12d ago
Wrong thread, I'm assuming you meant this for small question Sunday thread.
cjet79
12d ago
Path of Ascension for space cultivation. It's not finished, but there are a few arcs that make for good stopping points.
Elder Cultivator has a kind old man as the main cultivator. Story eventually starts to drag, but I got like 1000 chapters out of it before I dropped it.
In racking my brain for other cultivation stories I've read and coming up blank. I'd say learning how to quit a story is a useful skill if you are gonna start reading cultivation stories. And not just quitting books you immediately didn't like, but quitting a story you've enjoyed for 800 chapters, but the last two hundred haven't been good and the trend is in the wrong direction.
cjet79
16d ago
I wouldn't say I purged it so much as never had it in the first place. Or at least haven't had it much as an adult. I have some vague recollections of jealousy from elementary school. Pretty sure puberty switched my priorities.
I thought most adults were similar. I guess that was typical mind fallacy.
There are a bunch of philosophies/religions that try to curb that jealousy. Marxism being a major exception that encourages everyone to embrace that jealousy, and tells them that it is fully correct.
There are large financial returns on embracing a search for the good, rather than simply trying to do better than a neighbor or friend. There are also social gains to be made in cutting off status competitions with friends.
cjet79
17d ago
This debate shakes out the same way every time. Amadan was willing to write the objections, so I'll not repeat them all.
I'll add that I see being slow on responding to news as a feature rather than a bug of the policy.
This is not a news website it's a discussion website, and it's a place for thinking. I'd prefer allowing people to digest the news elsewhere and then post here if they want to actually discuss a particular thing.
The poster earned a ban because I have explicitly told them in the past to not do this. I'm not in favor of unlimited "warnings" that have no teeth.
cjet79
17d ago
You know not to do this, I've warned you before about low effort top level posts. 1 day ban while the discussion shakes out.
cjet79
17d ago
There is some silliness here. The existence of a zero sum game at the top of a field doesn't mean everyone has to be involved.
Only one person can have the absolute best house. It's a zero sum game. And there can be an arms race / wealth race to own that house. But there is no limit on how many people can have an excellent house.
Zero sum competition seems to be the game in top end places like New York or San Francisco. But you can travel to any other metropolitan area, find a software or finance job at one of the many companies based in that city and be at the top end of middle class wealth in that city.
Competition for Ivy League schools can drive kids crazy, but a good state school is not hard to access.
I live in a good house, in a good neighborhood, in a good area, with good schools, and our family income is through good well paying jobs. None of these things in my life are the best. There are better houses / neighborhoods / schools / jobs / etc. But I'm happy at the current trade-off point.
I am continually confused by people that seem willing to burn all of their wealth and happiness to compete for the best in something. I often find that quality growth in a product or service is linear. And price growth is linear, except for the top end of the market where things go exponential.
The lines are often blurred between state and non-state actors. That is usually part of the problem with corruption, that the state hasn't fully locked down a monopoly on violence.
I was mentally thinking of France and Scotland when I thought of corrupt state actors.
It's been the longest amount of time since they were bad about corruption, but they absolutely were not free of it in 17th and most of the 18th centuries. The king of France would sell these tax collector positions that were basically approved banditry. In England it was difficult to run anything larger than a family business without the backing and often bribing of a noble. These places were absolutely corrupt in a way that we would all call "third world".
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