cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
12hr ago
Your perspective is missing "I placed myself with a deadly weapon (a car) in a situation where it could be used as a deadly weapon"
Without that caveat I'd say both Fields and this lady have much more defensible reactions with their vehicles.
But vehicles are shitty deadly weapons. They are endangered by people to the sides of the vehicle, but they are deadly against people in front of and behind the vehicle. So self defense is much harder to justify.
Kyle Rittenhouse brought a deadly weapon to a protest and then managed to kill three people only in self defense. Ironically if he had been in a vehicle his body count likely would have been higher and against people in front of the vehicle and not his direct aggressors to the sides of the vehicle.
cjet79
15hr ago
I remember analyzing that at the time. I know those streets in cville. GPS would never take you that way. He chose to drive down that street.
I think if she had hit and killed the officer instead of getting shot and killed shed be getting a murder charge like James Fields.
And if someone had shot James Fields on that street as he was accelerating down it towards a crowd they would have been in the right.
cjet79
1d ago
I agree it's bad policy to have an officer stand in front of a vehicle. The escalation is one factor. But it also just blatantly puts officer lives at risk in a totally unnecessary way.
They have vehicles nearby, they have the persons plates, and even eye witnesses on the person driving. If they make a run for it they are fucked and not getting far.
If something is going to be placed in front of the vehicle it should be a police vehicle.
cjet79
2d ago
Veritasium has a video out about how the best chip making machines are made: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0
Pretty fascinating the level of sophistication, accuracy, and engineering involved in the process. They have a nozzle that sprays 50k tin droplets a second, those tin droplets are then hit three times with a super laser to produce the exact x-ray they need.
cjet79
2d ago
From my experience at university the student preferred professors were not preferred by the university because each group just had a different idea of a good professor. Nothing to do with affirmative action. Teaching quality vs grant proposal quality.
Multiple axis of "merit" just makes the problem worse, because it just means that are more "qualified" people for the position, even if they are only partially qualified.
cjet79
3d ago
What's even more interesting is how this culture war intersects with the political one. For example, there was a post here recently about meritocracy that bothered me much more than what I normally see here. It seems to be exactly the same almost nihilism that I'm reading into the defenses of Gino. The mindset in the comment is so similar: that there's no actual point to the positions you give people, no actual value these positions produce that might vary based on who gets them. Really it's all solely a zero-sum way to assign people status. Just pick the game you're going to have people play to get assigned and then stick to it fairly.
The example post is at +25, so clearly there are a lot of people here who buy the "everything is solely a status game" viewpoint. I'm biased here to the point that I can't even imagine arguments why this viewpoint is at all reasonable, either in the Gino case or in comments like the example---does anyone want to explain? Or maybe I'm just reading too much into this?
Its possible for a job to be both meritocratic, and selected by status games. It happens anytime a job can be done to a sufficient degree by a large pool of candidates. There has to be some kind of alternate selection criteria. Some of these jobs might even adopt what look like anti-meritocratic sorting mechanisms.
Imagine a toll booth operator job where you basically just need to watch cars drive by and pay automatically. Maybe sometimes you hit a button to let someone through when the automated payment system gets messed up and should have let someone through. Generally you are doing nothing for 8 hour shifts. Almost anyone could take this job. 100 people apply for the position, you only have one opening to fill. If you were interested in the public good you yourself might implement a restriction like 'no smart people can have this job, they can actually use their brain to help the world instead'. If you were selfish and corrupt you might offer the job up for auction, that some percentage of the pay ends up going to you instead of the actual job candidate, or you just get a flat up front payment. Or maybe you have to sit in the toll booth with this person so you just pick the funniest and most likeable person. Even if you just decide to draw the name out of a hat, the final process for selecting the job candidate is not meritocratic.
So what happens when the job is much harder like "Harvard professor" and there are still 100 candidates for just one position. I'd imagine its much of the same thing, the job candidate is going to be picked on non-meritocratic factors, because the merit based filters have already been applied and they were still left with a large pool of candidates. Its also my belief that the larger the candidate pool left after merit filtering, the less a job will look like it is "merit based", regardless of how strict the merit based filtering was. A million qualified candidates applied for one professorship position and you know whoever gets that position got it because of political connections / nepotism / race favoritism / etc. Three qualified applied candidates for one professorship position, and you feel that they probably gave it to the most qualified person.
cjet79
4d ago
I'm a parent of three youngish kids, my initial reaction is sort of "eh ya I get it"
Not that I really agree with them. But kids are a radically different gear speed than career.
All the instincts that probably serve very well in a career, like caring about time / productivity / efficiency are negatives when it comes to being around kids.
Kids eat slow, they do things slowly, they get distracted easily, their play isn't working towards anything specific, etc. At a young age their accomplishments are existence and survival.
It's tempting to say that the dad should learn how to slow down and get to the level of his kids. But I think that's his decision to make, and there will be trade-offs. He might get worse at his current job role. And if it's bad enough he will lose the position and resent the kid for it. The kids will speed up eventually so he will miss their younger years as a father, but being bored with them as toddlers doesn't mean being bored with them as school age kids.
cjet79
6d ago
I removed your first post according to mod history. I don't remember why or even if I definitely meant to. I'll undo that now. Sorry it upset you, we do have lots of alts of banned users that persistently join and cause the same problems. Sometimes we are trigger happy.
cjet79
6d ago
Ya bronze age was nuts. I think I listened to the hardcore history episode about the sea peoples and bronze age collapse.
cjet79
6d ago
I like interesting historical theories. Especially with an element of the fantastical. Ancient apocalypse series is full of them.
Another one I read somewhere was about how "dragons" might have been real. A large winged predator that was hunted to extinction at the end of the last ice age as they clashed with human populations.
Anyone have any fun ones they've read recently?
cjet79
6d ago
I remember there being some fun magic mods that really opened up the variety of spells. That and I was always a pack rat so I liked having mods that increased carry capacity. Which led to stores running out of gold too fast, so I'd get a mod for "investing" in stores that would allow you to upgrade merchant gold capacity.
Half my modded playthroughs were abandoned cuz I just kept adding new mods to tweak things.
Stealth archer gameplay is fun. It's cliche too but whatever, lean into it.
cjet79
6d ago
Alright this has come up before. No more pedophilia cases in the Friday Fun Thread. It's just not fun for a lot of people.
cjet79
8d ago
It has a cult like smell to it for new people.
My mother recently joined the DAR and they have a whole badge system for in group rewards.
Scouts organizations get away with it, cuz it's cute when kids do culty things and the adults quietly role their eyes a little.
cjet79
8d ago
I worked in the tech sector and don't follow sports so "Manu" is definitely an Indian name in my mind.
I like the greeting. Say hello to your new asshole overlord.
cjet79
8d ago
Meta bought an AI company called "Manus". The company automates remote work using AI.
I was wondering how it is pronounced.
The easy candidate is "man-us" like we are going to man you with workers.
Less likely but funny: "Manu-s" like we are going to provide an endless number of Indian workers named "Manu" for all your remote work needs.
Finally my favorite and definitely not the case: "M'anus". Like you better start enjoying all the shitty slop we put out, it's coming straight from "muh anus"
cjet79
9d ago
I said they rarely make an impact, not never. Those rulings you listed are spaced out by decades sometimes.
It's also often questionable how much impact they really have. We have a resident gun law expert that will tell you the supreme Court rulings aren't worth shit and the states regularly flaunt them.
They abolished obvious and explicit affirmative action, but it was very much still happening under "holistic" evaluations.
Compare their impact to something like the IRS which has a daily impact on our budgets, and their yearly rule changes can make thousands of dollars of difference.
Or your state DMV which isn't federal but impacts almost everyone.
The bureaucracies of the federal and state governments impact me way more than any of the official branches of government. But of those branches the supreme Court is often most removed from daily impact on my life.
cjet79
9d ago
Weird inconsistency for him. Usually his spiel is about how making things more restrictive and exclusive them better. Like the urbit project.
cjet79
9d ago
I'd say most of the law making gets done in the bureaucracy. And technically that bureaucracy is under the presidents authority, but reality is a much different picture. The supreme Court handles a tiny minority of disputes that are interesting to legal nerds. But they rarely make much of an impact. The only ruling I can think of recently that impacted me was their handling of homelessness.
cjet79
10d ago
Nothing ... we have three kids and celebrated with three other nieces the day of (my wifes side of the family). Aint no one got time for adult gifts. I also nixed the secret santa gift exchange that typically happens on my side of the family. Maybe if we'd both been feeling better I would have gotten some marital enjoyment, not so hot when the wife is coughing up a lung, and I'm shivering under three blankets.
cjet79
10d ago
I'll admit to being that guy. I feel like I get sick less often than my wife, but my worst sicknesses on any given year are always worse than my wife's.
I'm pretty sure we are getting the same sicknesses just reacting differently to them. Sicknesses tend to burn through me fast and hard. I am very sick for a few days and then mostly back to normal. Whereas my wife is often just a little sick for a week or two. Just over the last two weeks with holidays and the spreading of germs everywhere I've had two mild fevers (101-103). She has had none. I have also had a light cough, she has a heavy nasty sounding cough. For two days I had one of the worst sore throats I can remember, literally was drooling to avoid swallowing. Its fine now. She has had a scratchy throat the whole two weeks.
cjet79
10d ago
Excellent post Dean. I've joked before about renaming AAQCs to "The Dean's List". Consistently high quality stuff from you. Thank you for being part of the motte.
I've noticed that I have different writing modes depending on what I'm hoping to get from TheMotte at any given moment, and some of those writing modes lend themselves more or less to getting an AAQC.
There is a sort of "trying to be informative about something I have deep knowledge on" mixed with frustrated rant that seems to be most likely to get me an AAQC. The stars don't align for me to be in that writing mood very often.
More often it's "a stranger is wrong in the internet" or I'm just trying to work through some new arguments in my head and through open debate. I have noticed that working through new arguments tends to lead to plenty of AAQCs around my post. Some even shredding me apart. I guess some people need a good sparring partner/ punching bag. I'm usually happy when that happens.
Glad your Tolkein comment got nominated, I wouldn't have seen it otherwise. I do really like Tolkein's approach to writing fantasy / fiction. "No this is not a complex metaphor for the real world. I wrote a different world and I tried to make it internally consistent."
People who don't believe him on this point confound me. Most authors that write in metaphor whack you over the head with it. And if they don't whack you enough within the chapters of the book, they certainly do afterwards in their interviews and explanations. The most straightforward clue that Tolkein was not writing in metaphor was that he says he was not writing in metaphor.
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