cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
3mo ago
Sublight Drive is a Star wars fan fiction of the clone wars. Main character is competent and generally so is everyone else in the story. The only times there is anything approaching incompetence is when someone is outside their area of expertise.
cjet79
3mo ago
And I naively though children's health and an international pandemic would supersede politics due to the importance of getting them correct. But now I don't know what politics has touched and what it hasn't.
cjet79
3mo ago
From your conversation below. There is a difference between common sense medicine, and common sense applied to medicine. I am more talking about using common sense medicine. Things a practicing family doctor might take for granted after 30 years.
One of those common sense things is that a major medical intervention requires a set of good justifications:
- Life of the patient is in danger, or severe quality of life impairment.
- The efficacy of the treatment is proven to a set of standards.
- The side effects are known, disclosed, and understood by the adult patient or the patients' medical guardian.
There is a lot of elaboration and nuance for those points. But it feels like they were repeatedly violated for political reasons during the last decade. And it has drastically lowered my trust of medical authorities.
cjet79
3mo ago
Yeah all the steroids abuse by teen athletes seems like a natural experiment to look at. I'm not even sure steroids are as impactful as hormone therapy, but no one thinks steroids for kid athletes was good idea. The "medical" justification for both is kinda the same too, self hostage taking. "I'll be sad and kill myself if you don't let me take these drugs."
cjet79
3mo ago
It's partly that they flipped all the standards of evidence on their head.
Interventions were considered safe until proven otherwise. Masking young kids in school, widespread adoption of a novel medical treatment (MRNA "vaccines"), puberty blockers, etc.
Covid is basically a flu/cold virus. All intuitions about such things turned out to basically be correct. And there was good evidence that was true in 2020 but they spent nearly four more years dragging it on. Unless you were part of a BLM protest, and then things were fine.
Biology can often be weird and unintuitive I get that. But when it gets weird is when you need more evidence and research, not a political wall of silence saying "you are a bad person if you don't believe us".
I literally cannot imagine a non life threatening scenario where hormone therapies would be allowed for kids. Hormones are definitely one of those systems that we don't understand very well. We know that getting it wrong can even cause life threatening conditions. We correctly vilify anyone giving out steroids to teen athletes, this seems just as dangerous and permanent.
cjet79
3mo ago
This is one of the topics that really broke my trust with the medical 'experts', along with the covid stuff.
There are some basic common sense things to know about medicine and if someone is going to make a claim contradicting it they need to have a lot of evidence and some damn good explanations.
The idea that halting a major development milestone would be harmless breaks every bit of common sense about child health. The idea that infection with a sickness does not grant any kind of immunity is also insane.
cjet79
3mo ago
You'll definitely love sublight drive. A bunch of parts in the first book go into explaining some of these ship differences that appear.
The separatists preference for missiles is because they don't have access to some of the high quality gas needed for better blaster weapons.
Some of the ships are specifically adapted from private usages which gives them unique advantages and disadvantages, like e-warfare capabilities, or badly armored locations.
Mostly neither side is on a war footing for production when the clone wars start, so there is a sense early on of throwing ships meant for fighting pirates against full on navies, and then later in the series those same ships are far less effective because manufacturing and fleet doctrine has caught up. But ultimately the core worlds have far more production capabilities so it feels a bit like the American Civil war where the north had advantages in manufacturing and manpower, and the south had advantages in experience.
cjet79
3mo ago
Just slow role the 2000 pages and you'll hit the finish line by the time the last chapter comes out in a week. Or if your reading speed is not an excessive 300 pages a day then don't worry.
cjet79
3mo ago
There are different degrees with different levels of capital formation vs signalling.
Even with technical degrees that seem very useful my experience and the experience of those I know is that half of it is useful to someone but 80-95% is still mostly useless to any individual because those careers require specialization.
The student loan program is mostly indiscriminate, and graduate and doctorate degrees are often funded in other ways.
cjet79
3mo ago
That is a really cool post, thanks for sharing.
Can't say that this fanfiction totally follows along. There is something weird going on with the droids in the FF, buts it's never full elaborated on, and we are starting to get epilogues, so I assume it won't be clarified.
cjet79
3mo ago
Sublight drive is a Star wars fan fiction. I started reading this based on a recommendation from either here or /r/rational. If it was here, thank you to whomever recommended it. Very enjoyable.
A person from earth is reincarnated in the star wars universe, and they are a ship captain with the separatists during the clone wars. The mc has some basic knowledge of star wars.
There is no boring lead up. It jumps right into the space opera action.
The characters are smart and facing very tough problems. But they are also not all perfectly intelligent. For example Jedi generals are often skilled in the force and have advantages that they use well, but they can often be outsmarted by other characters in fleet battles.
cjet79
3mo ago
Sheepskin effects.
It's the finding that someone with 3.9 years of college education and no degree earns significantly less than someone with 4 years and a degree.
You don't have to ask anything of business. Just stop subsidizing a signalling game.
It's a bit like handing out stools at a concert so people can see over the crowd better. It's self defeating.
cjet79
3mo ago
I think I like what @SSCReader said better.
And no I can't make any promises on moderation because someone will be obnoxious with it. There is a gradient from bad to good. Fed posting, and specific calls for violence are very much on the bad side. Trying to engage with people you disagree with, or at least targeting ideas rather than individuals is on the good side.
There are ways to make the bad side acceptable, I'm sure there is even a quality contribution that did it at some point. And vice versa there are ways to make the good side a bannable offense.
cjet79
3mo ago
What's wrong with sight words?
I have a kindergarten age child. I am mostly happy with what she is learning in school, including some new math stuff and sight words.
The main reason I'm happy is that many of the concepts they teach are how I eventually learned to do things. But I learned them on my own after years of struggling to do it the "right" way and not making much progress.
Words like "the" simply don't make sense to "sound it out". In a logical phonetic alphabet, "th" would be a separate letter altogether since it represents a unique sound. So just teach it as a sight word, and memorize what those three letters together mean.
I don't have a specific example in mind with the math stuff, but it seemed similar when I went and looked at new math content. It's often teaching the shorthand that I had to figure out myself. The way they encouraged my generation to figure it out was to literally bury us in math problems. You either figured it out and math became easy, or you were labelled a 'struggling' student with potential ADHD because you didn't want to spend hours a day doing math problems the hard and slow way.
I do agree with your main point that the department of education sucks. I just think you would have seen adoption of some of these new teaching techniques without the department, since some of them are good.
cjet79
3mo ago
Spelling out specific plans for violence puts us in a shit spot. It's very unlikely any of you carry out such plans, but if you were to and had posted about them what happens to the mods or other forum goers afterwards? Will victims sue us for not reporting it to the police?
Our solution is to not be put in the spot. Any expressions of preferences for violence puts us in this bind.
Expressing disgust towards people falls afoul of other rules like boo out group.
The rule compliant way to express things in both cases is "dont hate the player, hate the game".
"The progressive ideology has ruined libraries for me. It seems to ruin everything it touches. I wish the ideology was dead and buried with other past terrible ideas."
cjet79
3mo ago
Pick out any decent books they haven't already destroyed, herd the board inside, bar the door, and torch the place.
I believe this is known as fed-posting.
leftist brain parasites
This isn't good for being boo out group.
You have been on thin ice. Normally I'd just make this a warning, but this needs to stop. One week ban.
cjet79
4mo ago
Higher levels of education is only good if education is mostly capital formation. But if it is mostly signalling then it is doubly wasteful to subsidize it. From personal experience I'm inclined to think of it as mostly signalling, the econ literature apparently agrees with me.
cjet79
4mo ago
If the college is going to reap the benefits of a lucrative degree program it might be incentivized to encourage them more.
A college that graduates a bunch of engineers that can go on to make 6 figure salaries is going to be better off than a college that creates a bunch of underemployed barristas.
With the way student loans currently work the university is getting the price of tuition and on campus amenities, and those costs are similar between different degrees. But the cost of teaching the more lucrative degrees is often more expensive, usually because professors that teach it have the option of better private industry jobs, so they command higher salaries at the university.
cjet79
4mo ago
There are often problems that are made worse with more money.
There are generalizable circumstances that cause this to happen, and those circumstances often apply to government organizations but not exclusively to them.
- Principal agent problems. The money is being spent by an agent on behalf of someone else, and either due to conflicts of interest or lack of knowledge the money is spent in a way that actively harms the principal.
- Information gaps. The consumer and producer are not easily able to judge what is good spending vs bad spending in terms of solving the problem. This can cause money to be spent on costly or ineffective signalling items.
- Crowding out good money. A working market with a working and functioning incentive system can be thrown off by injections of cash from a misaligned actor. Producers go chasing the extra cash while not caring as much about the original consumer. And consumers do less research than they would if it was their own money being spent. This happens in medical insurance all the time.
I think student loans are actively harmful to many of the people involved.
I'd fix them by making them dischargeable in bankruptcies and making the university partially responsible for the debt in such cases. I'd leave parents off the loan. I'd maybe see them changed to loans where a percentage of post college income is owed. Right now they suffer from all of the above problems.
cjet79
4mo ago
Trump voter and generally disappointed, especially with tariffs. It's not that any of his bad economic policies are a surprise. Its a bit of a toss up of whether he is worse than the alternative. The Democrats tend to have lots of dumb but relatively small impact bad economic policies. Trump just has the one big policy of tariffs that is very dumb.
cjet79
4mo ago
I'm vaguely in favor of the death penalty, but not so much as a penalty.
It just seems that some humans are irredeemable and mentally broken enough that it seems like the only thing to do is to just remove them entirely.
If you had a tied up evil person (Hitler, Mao, Stalin, etc take your pick) and a gun in hand, what would you do?
For the punishment minded maybe they shoot the person in the gut and let him die a slow death over a week. I'd generally just shoot them in the head and be done with it.
If someone has personally wronged me I become all in favor of punishment. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite, but I feel that the emotional response is not a good guide for society wide policy.
cjet79
4mo ago
Third kid arrived on Friday, little baby goblin. Slowly starting to look more like a baby girl instead. Still cute and makes my heart flutter holding her.
Just came home from the hospital. Babys two older sisters love and adore her already.
I'm doing my part to be above replacement rate for population growth.
cjet79
4mo ago
Ya I find myself repeatedly drawn to games that have 30 minute to one hour play sessions. If they get much longer than that I have a good chance of dumping the game when real life forces me to quit in the middle of one of the long sections.
There is that old meme about gaming:
Young: you have skill and time but no money.
Adult: you have skill and money but no time.
Old: you have money and time, but crap skills.
I'm solidly in that adult phase right now. In many cases I've even downgraded to games that have 5-10 minute play sessions. Which often ends up being idle games, where I just check in on long running number counters and update a few things.
The story is a bit of an odd duckling. It feels closer to cozy western fantasy than most cultivation. The main character is an old man, and generally concerned with his extended family/ descendants. The sect he joins is good. It's different from many cultivation stories that have selfish jerk MCs playing in a world of only terrible people. Generally if you are looking to avoid dysfunctional families I'd agree that avoiding all cultivation novels is smart. But just consider this something that might fit your preferences that otherwise would get totally filtered out from your searches.
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