cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
1mo ago
You joke, but the underwater rugby team is much more successful at recruiting and in that sport you can hold people underwater.
cjet79
1mo ago
Going out after practice is difficult, but I try to make it happen. The main options are Hooters or Denny's.
My own charisma as a coach is hard to judge. People thank me for the coaching and give me compliments, but that could just be politeness.
The people that play are often eclectic. Usually smart people, it's an interesting team sport because you can't easily communicate underwater, but it's absolutely essential that you help your teammates.
Being in shape and able to swim well helps a lot. If you can't do those things but keep playing you will become a good swimmer and at least a little in shape. I've seen and coached people up from 'cant reach the bottom of a 7foot pool with flippers' to 'can swim most of the pool length underwater on the bottom'.
There are three different learning curves for the sport:
- Fitness and water agility. Being an athlete and good swimmer helps this, but coming out to practice consistently also helps
- Positioning and team play. Being in the right spot for passes or stealing the puck from others. People that have played other team sports like basketball, or soccer pick up on this stuff better. But just being smart helps a lot.
- Stick/puck handling. It's possible to do drills and rush to get much better at this. It is very satisfying when you have these skills. They are the least important of the skills though. You can be pretty bad at these and still be a great player. If you are good at these skills you can be a lazier player. They allow you to maximize the benefits of the other two skills.
With a new player I teach them these things:
- How to get down to the bottom easily
- Pushing the puck along in a straight line
- Turning around with the puck
- A simple push pass.
There are usually a few things to correct with each of those. If someone can get to the bottom easily the other items are pretty simple to teach.
We are short on players so just last week we had a brand new player being legitimately useful and scoring a goal against people that were trying to stop him. He is somewhat of an exception. Almost like a track star that played soccer for the first time in a rec league and just ran past everyone even while they sucked at dribbling.
A good athlete or swimmer can be ok at the sport within a few practices. They can be good at it in a year. A person could find the sport their freshman year of college and be selected for an international U23 team by their senior year. That is not an outlandish tale, that is one of the guys I play with.
The learning curves are there. It can take time to get good at the sport. As much time as it takes to get good at any sport, and in some cases less time, because there is less competition. But no one has ever heard of the sport or played it. Meanwhile everyone learns other sports in elementary school. Where they can get the boring basic stuff out of the way. By the time they get to highschool they can choose to play on a team where everyone has a minimal level of good fitness, understanding of the sport, and a basic to intermediate level of experience in the specialized skills of that sport.
cjet79
1mo ago
Northern Virginia, USA.
But the sport is international. Best place to be is New Zealand, where its a high school sport. Best place to be in US is Lake Tahoe where Elon Musks' billionaire cousin is building a super team and paying people to live and play there. That last part might sound like a joke, it's not.
cjet79
1mo ago
People are not allowed to express an interest in committing suicide without being subject to a whole of oversight and interruption to their life. This can be a good thing to prevent suicide, but it makes all survey data about suicidal willingness a little suspect.
I'd also say that every suicide that happens via someone torturing themselves to death via one of the harder methods is something that could have been prevented with more painless methods being available. At least they could have had a more peaceful death.
cjet79
1mo ago
What is it gonna take for you play underwater hockey?
I need help getting new recruits and keeping them around.
cjet79
1mo ago
Knew an East Asian looking woman with a Hispanic looking last name, but an accent that only sort of seemed like a Spanish accent. Then met her white friends that she went to college with that all had the same accent.
Felt more comfortable asking them and finally got the obvious answer to her origins I should have realized sooner: Brazil.
cjet79
1mo ago
You can be a software dev in a small 100% male company in Eastern Europe that has a chat channel for sharing porn.
This is both mind-blowing and completely believable.
cjet79
1mo ago
But it is my understanding that there is a noticeable and undeniable effect of guns on male suicide rates.
That was what I said above. I never disputed that guns increase suicides.
Gun Rights are Civilization Rights
I believe, if you don't trust an independent adult to have a firearm you ultimately don't trust them enough to be in the same civilization or society as you.
There are three categories of people that nearly everyone agrees should not be allowed to own a firearm:
- Children
- People with mental deficiencies
- People with demonstrably violent impulses that they cannot control
And you'll notice we generally don't trust these categories of people with much of anything. The first two categories of people we insist on them having guardians, or being wards of the state. The third category of people we imprison.
There are two major arguments against gun rights that I think hold the most salience for people.
Argument One: Guns are Dangerous and Unnecessary
They are undoubtedly dangerous. Their purpose is to be a weapon. But there are other things that are dangerous that we don't ban. Cars can be used to achieve mass casualty events. Bombs can be made with some commonly available materials. These other things are rarely labelled as "unnecessary" though. There are also plenty of "unnecessary" things that we don't ban. Plenty of purely recreational items and services exist. Jet skis, theme parks, cruises, large houses, etc (some of these things are even dangerous). Only the most hardcore socialists and communists want to take away all the fun toys.
There is an argument that gun advocates make that gun rights are necessary to keep the government in check. I generally like this argument, and think it is demonstrated by the level of free speech rights in places like Great Britain where guns have been successfully banned for most private "citizens".
But I'll grant for the sake of argument that guns are totally "unnecessary". And that it is the special combination of Dangerous+Unnecessary that leads people to want to ban it. Since other categories of things like Safe+Unnecessary or Dangerous+Necessary go largely unbanned and untouched.
I think the widespread existence of many "Dangerous+Necessary" demonstrates that we can trust most adults to handle dangerous things in a responsible way. We can't trust them 100% of the time. And we can't trust that there won't sometimes be negligence.
The "unnecessary" component of the argument is also a scary slippery slope to be on. People have different desires and wants. There are I think two steady states of being in regards to "unnecessary" things. Either you let everyone decide for themselves on every topic. Or you have a central authority that decides on everything for everyone. If you are willing to bite that bullet, keep in mind that it will not necessarily be you deciding what is necessary and what is not. I believe it is fully possible for such a bureaucracy to mercilessly strip every single joy out of life, and they'll fully believe they are making your life better. You'll eventually be sad enough that you'll come to the second main argument against gun rights:
Argument Two: Guns enable easier suicide
I don't have the data on hand, and I don't really want to get into an argument about said data. But it is my understanding that there is a noticeable and undeniable effect of guns on male suicide rates. This makes intuitive sense to me. Many methods of suicide require you to actively torture yourself for a short time period, drowning, hanging, cutting yourself, jumping from a very tall building etc. Or they present a chance of a failed suicide attempt that leaves you heavily injured, like jumping from not high enough, or getting in front of a moving vehicle, or pills. Guns make the attempt a more sure thing, and present an option that does not involve torturing yourself.
Something about this whole approach to suicide prevention feels very wrong. On an individual basis I think you should not commit suicide, and if someone can be talked out of suicide they generally should be talked out of it. But there are also some cases where I believe it is very cruel to prevent suicide. Medical cases for sure. But there are also people who have drawn a shit straw in life in too many ways. A bit too dumb, constant low level bad health, unable to figure out how to love or be loved, etc. A life of quiet misery. They should have an exit option, and they should have one that doesn't require them to torture themselves on the way out.
Civilization is one big nebulous agreement we have that helps us get along. But I think saying "you can't leave this agreement without being tortured", is just evil.
Forbidding gun ownership means forbidding exit, and it means you lack trust in others to such a degree that it breaks down many of the assumptions we already have about the rights and responsibilities of adults in society.
Some of the implications of my argument that I am already aware of and fine with:
- It justifies drug ownership.
- It justifies legal euthanasia.
- It does not justify gun ownership if you are a socialist or communist.
Some areas that I left unaddressed to save space:
- Inner city crime ridden areas. Not sure what to do when you have too high of a prevalence of violent people. I am willing to say that civilization has broken down in those areas, and then reiterate that gun rights are civilizational rights. If you don't have civilization, you can't have that right.
- Violent people don't always stay violent people. Testosterone is a hell of a drug, so young men are often more violent than older men. Not sure if ex-convicts should be allowed to have guns, but maybe if you don't trust them to own a gun you shouldn't trust them to be out of prison.
- The line between children and the mentally deficient and adults can be blurry in real life. 17 year olds, and 75IQ people for example. I didn't want to litigate where I think those lines should be drawn.
Edit: lots of good responses. I've read all of them but I'm unlikely to respond. Most of the responses were better thought out than my original post. I sometimes just have ideas or arguments kicking around in my head that need to be spilled onto paper. And I think better in response to what others say so this has helped me refine my thoughts on the subject a great deal. That synthesis of thought might end up in a future thread.
cjet79
2mo ago
My wife's father died of cancer. She tends to notice and react more strongly to stories about cancer in fictional shows, and real cases in people around us. Our brains are not perfect logic engines. Traumatic enough events can have an outsized impact on how we judge and notice other events around us.
I generally reserve usage of the term "racist" to refer to people that hate others because of their race. I know that is not how everyone uses the term, but I'll stick with it. If you feel no hate but you treat other races different that is what I'd call "prejudice". I do not consider it "racist" merely to notice things about the world. I might not agree with what they have noticed, but we can definitely have a discussion about it.
I try to pick my words carefully, and I prefer words that add light not heat to the discussion. The term "racist" usually just adds heat. I would almost always prefer to just write out the whole definition of what I mean rather than use "racist" as a shorthand term. I know its verbose, I don't care. whiningcoil responded to me, and didn't seem to come away with your interpretation. So you are butting you head in and trying to make it look like I picked a fight when no one actually involved seems to have felt that way.
cjet79
2mo ago
I think bad luck on his part. Or maybe he is just predisposed to noticing a particular type of bad thing in his life.
It's not been my experience or the experience of most people I know.
cjet79
2mo ago
Might be a bit of a u shape phenomenon. They exist at low wealth and high wealth. It's not just big cats, but big predators in general.
Urban areas are voting for policies of allowing predators to live among their nearby rural areas. The rural areas hate those policies for obvious reasons. Happened in Colorado where they were releasing wolves.
cjet79
2mo ago
Not sure how you are doing wealth comparisons is it per capita? Total GDP? Median or average?
Norway has a higher median Wealth than the US but loses in total and on average. So big Canines might also be US again with wolves living there. But Norway also has brown bears and polar bears. So if they win the wealth game for canines they'd win it for bears too.
Same issue with eagles.
I'm also not sure if Singapore should win anything. Depending on how much work "non-marginal" is doing for the population counts. There might be more large snakes in zoos and private collections in the US then there are in Singapore.
That also brings up the invasive species issue. Florida has a bunch of large snakes. They are not native to the area, so do they count?
Also we could add crocodiles to megafauna. Florida/US probably wins that.
Wild horses is another potential category. They are large grazers, but it feels like they are pretty different from bison. There is a wild population of them in North America in Virginia and Maryland, and maybe out west still. But they are also an invasive species in North America.
The invasive species issue is more important than you might think. Texas ranchers have a surprisingly large number of large game animals for hunting purposes. Some of those ranch animal populations actually outnumber the estimated wild populations for those animals.
Hogs might also be megafauna. They are bigger than wolves, and certainly bigger than Eagles. America wins that depending again on the invasive species question.
cjet79
2mo ago
they bought the land in exchange for half the skin on their babies pensises
Too antagonistic.
You have been warned and banned before for this type of behavior. You have multiple other comments in the queue right now. 7 day ban
cjet79
2mo ago
Glad you enjoyed it!
Try Timberborn next if you want to mess around with water
cjet79
2mo ago
As the other commentor pointed out even the nearby tragedy doesn't have any kind of particular flavor. The bully that committed suicide is something I already mentioned.
The other nearby tragedies don't have a flavor other than "random".
A classmate killed on her way to SATs by a truck driver running a red light.
An older swim team friend dying in a car accident.
A swim team coach dying of a sudden heart attack on deck at a swim meet.
A student a few years older burned himself alive outside the school due to bullying.
A friend in his mid thirties dying of a sudden heart attack.
A cousin losing their boyfriend to cancer.
Tragedy has been around, but it's not very violent. And it's definitely not anyone's fault.
I have heard of the civilizational fraying, but I haven't really personally seen it. I don't even disbelieve you or anything. It's just accepting some of your conclusions or policy advice would run heavily counter to my own personal experiences. I don't even have a good way of resolving this dissonance. 5 years ago pre COVID I might have suggested trusting expert opinion and statistics on the topic. Now I'm pretty doubtful on the usefulness of that approach.
cjet79
2mo ago
Yeah that's a good description. Tragedy hasn't impacted me or the people around me.
cjet79
2mo ago
I do think you have had a uniquely bad experience. I'd maybe have similar views if my experience was at all like yours.
I've generally had a very different experience, and I'll share since you did.
Lived in the suburbs of St Louis for a while where inner city bussing policies made sure that there was at least one or two black kids in each class that were uncontrollable by the teachers and would mercilessly bully everyone else.
At the time I lived in a neighborhood with few kids my age, they were at youngest two years older like my brother, so he had a bunch of friends. I only managed to make friends in school with a nice Indian boy and his immigrant parents had me over for sleepovers.
We then moved to Charlottesville. And I went to a school that was semi infamous for being one of the last holdouts on segregation. That was decades before. By the time I was there it was still mainly two types of people liberals that had left a city and wanted a 'quiet' life in the country. Or rednecks that had been there for dozen generations and couldn't throw a rock on the playground without hitting someone they were related to.
Some of the rednecks bullied me. I made friends with the nerdy liberal's kids. The worst bully that I remember took his dad's gun in middle school and blew his own brains out.
When I was in middle school things didn't change much except I went to the school that was in the suburbs rather than the one that served the rural areas. So the bullies switched to being white jocks and rednecks were a minority, but I'd learned how to have friends at that point and I was no longer the one being bullied. One kid I remember getting bullied was a happy Mexican boy that lived next door in one of the apartment complexes. He eventually punched one of the kids in the nose after the kid took his backpack and that seemed to resolve things.
There were ESL classes in all of my elementary/middle/high schools and they were full and I never knew a single one of these kids.
Most of my friends in middle and highschool were white, because that was about 80-90% of the population. I was on friendly terms with the very few Muslims, Indians, and East Asians that were actually in our school. I teamed up with an Asian kid to represent the libertarians at a school wide political debate.
When I got to college things became way more diverse. I went to George Mason University because they had a reputation for a libertarian friendly economics department. My best friend became a 2nd generation Indian Immigrant. For two years my roommate was a Hispanic of some kind. I made a habit of intentionally forgetting and confusing him with Mexican origins because it annoyed him. He might have been Cuban. His parents were doctors, he eventually became a doctor too.
I graduated college and went to work at a company founded by an Indian entrepreneur. Met my white wife there and we have three beautiful blue eyed daughters.
I still live in Northern Virginia. I live in a predominantly white neighborhood my main encounters with immigrants is when they come to mow my lawn. There has been a homeless problem in the area lately, the worst of them look like drugged out old white people.
Overall my life has been awesome and not filled with much tragedy. My encounters with immigrants have been almost entirely positive. The race and ethnicity of people I've known has rarely provided me much insight into whether I will like them, get along with them, or find them totally odious. Usually the people that like or dislike me for my race are the people I get along with the least well.
I'm not ashamed of my race or heritage, I'm currently serving on a board for a family heritage organization. They've been here since the 1620's. We often field requests from people looking for more information on slaves that my ancestors once owned.
cjet79
2mo ago
Depends on the restaurant. Chick-fil-A feels the opposite. There are also some local Burger joints that seem to be all English as a first language teenagers, but naming them would dox me.
cjet79
2mo ago
That application you are working on does sound interesting.
I've been wanting to skip the middleman for a while and just have AI write the stories based on simple prompts.
I have an existing 300 page story I'd love to just feed to an AI and have it finish the story for me, or at least fix it up.
Back when I fed the first chapter to chatGPT it just told me that my story was offensive and refused to help me, which was when I stopped using it altogether and a few months later switched to grok.
Progression fantasy : Epics :: sex : love
And anything with a modern setting is just unbelievably boring or depressing.
cjet79
2mo ago
I've thought about this a decent amount. I rebelled against the norms around me in highschool and became a libertarian, but I often wondered if I was just an accidental encounter away from going the other direction and becoming communist or something.
Its easy to notice that many young men rebel against the norms around them, and it seems to drive their political, social, and cultural views. But this "rebellion narrative" has a glaring set of problems: it assigns little or no agency to the individuals involved, it ignores the power of ideas, and thus it lacks any explanatory power for why people rebel into a particular set of ideas.
Instead I think it is just that failures that are happening in the here and now are easier to notice than all of the successes happening, or the bad things that aren't happening. A political entity that is clearly in charge gets blamed for all those problems. People go looking for answers. Since we are in a two party system they often just go to the other side. But not always! The two party system isn't a rule of reality, just a quirk of how our system is arranged so people can and do find their ways elsewhere.
cjet79
2mo ago
My gaming tastes have changed so much now that I have kids. In many ways the shallowness of the game is a plus rather than a negative. It's just wrapping a bunch of game elements I've played dozens of times into an isometric action game that I haven't officially completed. And that's enough to occupy my brain in my few hours of off time, or during my partial off time when I need to drop the game at a moments notice to handle something happening.
The sailing and exploration is fun. I think I'm getting close to exploring just about every game mechanic it has. I'm not sure I want to grind out the fishing mini-game. It's similar to mining other resources, but with a failure option. I've always hated fishing in games. I'm still confused why devs bother adding it. (Dave the diver was great, but that is mostly spear fishing).
I'll play it for another week and then leave on vacation and forget it/drop it while I'm gone from my PC.
I don't know if I've ever seen double white lines outside of an airport runway.
I recently just went on an 11.5 hour road trip.
More options
Context Copy link