curious_straight_ca
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User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
It just seems stupid that I remember several hundred builtin function names for each of ten different programming languages that do mostly, but not quite, the same thing. push, add, append, insert, push_back. what's the difference between unwrap_or vs unwrap_or_else? It isn't really a problem, because I can comfortably remember them, but you're right about the hidden opportunity cost. There's no obvious better alternative, they all evolved independently and often really do have to many different things, but still.
The things I really despise are domain-specific languages where you have to remember an entire new set of 250 terms and relationships. Why should anyone have ever learned the specifics of elisp or vimscript, or even lua?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I think that the ruling class strongly discouraging support for Red candidates and encouraging support for Blue candidates, establishing favorable conditions on the ground for Blue Candidates through the selective manipulation of impactful process mechanisms, selectively harassing Red candidates via the state security apparatus, encouraging widespread political violence against Reds and their proxies while engaging in equally-widespread selective enforcement against such violence, as well as a variety of similar actions, constitute illegitimate actions within a democratic system.
These are all ... soft. "Encouraging", "favorable conditions", "harassing" - these are all things that have happened, to greater or lesser extents in the past.
I think there are more suggestive examples in the past. A president who appears to have committed voter fraud to become senator. Or Bush v Gore, where SCOTUS may have directly decided an election on controversial procedural grounds.
And if we can go further back, there's the compromise of 1877.
All of those undermine democratic mechanisms more!
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The only class of goods I feel is more available is electronics, and maybe cars. If the price for that is the absolute gutting of manufacturing and farming jobs in my country, I'm not convinced it has been worth it.
In my experience and also (i think) the statistics, 'durable consumer goods' have gotten significantly cheaper. Definitely more slowly than in the past.
From FRED, "all employees, manufacturing" / "all employees" has been flat at 8.5% since 2000 after a fairly linear decline from 38% since 1940ish. I am very confident goods are cheaper now than they were in 1970 and 1940. This probably is just meaningless because these numbers don't mean what i'm guessing they do but durable consumer goods CPI / total CPI has dropped 43% since 2000 and 20% since 2010. So just intuitively by glancing at the graph (and this isn't a strong argument as a result, you'd want a more detailed understanding of what happened) I don't find 'less manufacturing jobs so higher prices' to be correct
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I don't understand why you think i'm arguing that, like, the lab leak is fake because Qanon people are crazy. I'm not saying any thing about the lab leak or similar. I'm saying that OP's claim about chinese soldier immigrant coups is Q-anon tier.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I observe that Blue teachers and administrators have put large amounts of effort into policies that specifically protect and enable your scenario 2, excepting the last sentence
Can you name something Blue teachers have done that enables 2 but not 1? Ignoring the sex part.
Instead, these teachers have explicitly demanded lessons on gender identity
As far as I know, this is, like, one or two lessons per year in a group setting. Which is at most 1.
have specifically demanded a policy of actively facilitating queer expression at school while lying to parents about their kids actions, and their interactions with those kids
Again, this seems to be 1 to me. "Maybe they talk for three minutes at the end of class every other week" as opposed to, like, half an hour once a week or so. I think you need the latter for any grooming (in the usual sense) to happen.
I suppose it's possible that all these teachers and administrators are simply lying about the things they do, the things they intend to do, and the actions they support, when all they actually want to do is completely innocent and unobjectionable things. If so, they are too foolish to be allowed to keep their jobs.
I don't think they're doing that.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
You haven't actually done anything to refute the claim that the benefits and drawbacks of illegal immigration aren't evenly distributed.
That's not what you said, you said:
The result was the creation of an immense work force of noncitizens who have no economic or political rights they have any hope of enforcing, which could then be used—and has been used, over and over again—to drive down wages, degrade working conditions, and advance the interests of employers over those of wage-earning employees
This implies they drive down wages and advance the interests of employees in general. This is not true. They drive up the value of the wages of most americans, while driving down the wages harming of the interests of workers in the specific sectors immigrants work in. And in such a way that, if there were tax increases and redistribution to specific native workers, everyone would have more 'value'.
And given that, the paragraph doesn't make any sense!
(This is totally separate from IQ, culture, race, etc arguments about immigration, and doesn't disprove them at all)
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The "drive down wages" thing does not make sense, economically. When an illegal immigrant does repair work on your house, sure, he lowers the wages of a native repairman, but he also gives you a cheaper repair. When an illegal immigrant picks berries, he substitutes for a native picker, but the price of berries goes down (because food markets are quite competitive!) In order for this to make sense, 'the elites' would have to be capturing all of the value of illegals, somehow, despite the competitive marketplace. This is theoretically possible, but I don't see much evidence!
Also, to steal a left-wing argument, do you support the workers rights that illegals are supposedly undermining? Like, 15 dollar an hour minimum wage, strong unions (no right to work laws, state-mandated bargaining), etc.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Did you read the post you were replying to? The idea is conspiracy theorists are wrong almost all of the time, and sometimes right simply because they copy the things others are saying and make them more extreme. And then, after the fact, their fans select specific things they said that aged well to declare them accurate. And you respond by ... selecting a specific thing Jones said 20 years ago and arguing for his accuracy.
No, there is a thing that 'conspiracy theory' materially refers to and they are extremely wrong. There are people in 2018 who believed that secret numbers in Trump's tweets are hints about how he's still the real president and fighting a shadow war against the soros deep state. "Is China bribing American politicians to allow Chinese soldiers to become American soldiers to conquer the USA via military coup?" is recognizably one of those, in a way that "ukraine did nordstream" is not. I agree there are gradations, but there's clearly a huge gap between the two. Just because some NYT journalists called things you agree with conspiracy theories doesn't mean the concept isn't useful. Your reply is pure 'arguments as soldiers' - kooky conspiracy theories are bad, therefore they must be generated by the other side to hide the REAL truth! Come on.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
This looks like the umpteenth iteration of a particular persona who keeps returning here.
You could just ban them. It's probably also worth banning 'thenether', who's more obviously ban evading. (I haven't looked closely enough to be confident in either case, but it seems likely)
Eh. There's a real class of very bad ideas like the QAnon cinematic universe, or things like 'the government has secret spies all over the place. I have a friend who used to be one of them, he tells me about the reptilians and their spiritual plans for humanity's enslavement. I'm not sure I believe it but apparently the elites conspire with them, they took out JFK, they took out the people on the Clinton kill list..." (those are all real things I've actually been told by people who were being genuine, not hyperbole). I think OP is very much coming from the mindset that generates that.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
It's a thought experiment. We're trying to figure out how something works, why it's like that, so we ask - how does fire work? Would fire burn without air? This doesn't mean we want to burn everyone.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I think what Arjin is getting at is that a lot of people believe something like "if two people want to have sex, they should. it's fun, they'll enjoy it, get some powerful emotional experience and deep human connection, that's what life's about, it's not your place to judge them". A conservative might believe something like "sex is sacred, it serves an important role in building families and having children, treating it casually undermines that and harms the people involved and society". The former is "like tennis", it's fun, you do it whenever you want. The latter isn't. My guess is you support the former and not the latter view, and maybe could continue the conversation by defending that view? I think people often get stuck arguing by throwing clever quips / weak-men / reductio ad absurdums / unexplained references to internally held beliefs at each other and never make contact with their actual disagreements.
To be clear, "the media" are, at their core, just a ton of very smart and driven people who also happen to be, mostly, progressive. Nothing stops driven conservatives from reporting on the misdeeds of liberal justices, other than a lack of conservative reporters (as in Trace's earlier post), or a lack of misdeeds.
I think it's entirely possible the liberal justices haven't done anything similarly bad? Thomas's actions are specific things that might or might not have happened. I could see an alternate history where Thomas didn't do what he did. I can see a history where the liberal justices and thomas both did similar things. So I can also see a history where Thomas did that and liberal justices didn't do something similar. Like, Bob Menendez chaired Foreign Relations, and he happened to be a democrat. It totally could've been a Republican who did that, but it wasn't.
(also: Liberal Media didn't seem hesitant to report on Menendez's misdeeds. Obviously supreme court justices are more of a sore spot, but it's a comparison)
Adam Unikowsky, partner at Jenner & Block and great legal blogger, wrote about this a month ago
In my view, the Supreme Court should answer this question the following way: “The tax is unconstitutional. We have no idea where the line between constitutional and unconstitutional taxes lies, but wherever that line is, this tax crosses it. Our holding should not be construed to cast doubt on any other provision of the Internal Revenue Code.”
Legal purists will blanch. In addition to the unaesthetic nature of such a holding, it seems incoherent. How could the Court determine whether a tax crosses the constitutional line without deciding where the line is? Or put another way: implicitly, by holding that one tax crosses the constitutional line and other taxes don’t, the Court must have some idea of the line’s location. Why not just say where it is?
Answer: because any attempt to adopt a verbal formulation of the constitutional line is bound to be misleading and embroil lower courts in confusing disputes. Moore puts the Court into a zugzwang situation: whatever test it adopts will make things worse. The best way to do no harm is not to adopt a test at all.
Moore illustrates that judges are less like philosophers and more like plumbers. Their role is not to think deeply and elucidate the law’s True Meaning, but instead to provide practical solutions to concrete problems. Sometimes the judicial task is best performed by announcing and applying general legal rules. But not always.
...
... All of this is almost a reason to support the government’s position. But not quite. I’m going to get dewey-eyed here … we do live under a written Constitution that judges must follow through thick and thin. And there’s simply no way that money earned by a company 30 years ago is a taxpayer’s “income” merely because the taxpayer has bought some stock. The opinion just won’t write.
That’s why I want the Moores to win without the Supreme Court saying anything about the legal standard beyond that the Moores win. Circling back to where I started: the Moores win because this isn’t income. Exactly where the line between income and non-income is, I do not know. Don’t get your hopes up, tax shelter designers.
The whole post is a good read
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
You seem to be in the strange position where you don't think anybody should transition but you don't see a big deal with teachers and other influential adults putting pressure on children to encourage certain important life changes like transitioning.
I am also not worried about teachers forcing children to become Muslim, because that isn't happening enough to matter.
There is so much energy available to shut down anti-vaxxers, shut down white nationalists, shut down Russian influence, but to prevent kids getting groomed into sterilization there's nobody.
Yes, I agree that none of those are significant enough to matter, except perhaps white nationalists. That is a hypocrisy, the left claims A and B and we know that A iff !B. But you only get to pick one side of the fork, either A and !B or B and !A. Not both.
I know I'm going away from the subject, but if you disagree with the concept of transition, what are you doing about it?
I disagree with a lot of things that I don't do anything about! One does have to prioritize.
Less Of This, Please. There are plenty of 500k follower twitter accounts that react with horror to tweets with out of context clips and screenshots of news headlines, I know where to get it if I want it, and I don't want it here.
Ok I swear I don't just get up every morning and ask, "How can I be schizo today?"
It's funny how all sorts of "conspiracy theorists" and people with weird ideas are halfway self-conscious of the fact they're like that, and make jokes about it. You should either genuinely believe your ideas, deeply investigate them, debate them - or consider what 'schizo' ideas you had five or ten years ago and how many of them have held up, and admit you're very wrong.
Also, whatever standard approves of this post but not posts about perfectly reasonable topics that just don't have enough context isn't serving its purpose.
see here https://www.themotte.org/post/780/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/166814?context=8#context
As I have said multiple times over the past so many years, I do not think there is a single trans person who should, from their perspective, socially transition or medically transition. I think the entire thing is dumb. I don't see why that means I must support whatever decentralized oppression mirage conservatives claim that's directionally similar to my position!
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Forming a special, secret relationship with a vulnerable individual and encouraging them to lie to others about the details and nature of that relationship is a profound violation of trust regardless of the motives
You are conflating two things here. One is: a student goes to a teacher and tells them they are trans, wants to use the female name in class, and doesn't want to tell their parents. The teacher says 'awww sure of course sweetie'. Maybe they talk for three minutes at the end of class every other week. I think this happens for <10% of trans kids, but still does happen sometimes. The teacher plays ~no role, either in terms of direct causation or in terms of being a 'prime mover', in causing the kid to be trans.
Two: A teacher spends an hour plus every week or two talking to the kid about trans issues, sex, or porn. The teacher, causally and/or by intent, plays a significant role in the child realizing they're trans or deciding to transition. The teacher tells the child to not tell their parents. Maybe they themselves are trans, and like the idea of having more kids be trans, or maybe they just believe it because it's the wholesome LGBTQ+ thing to believe. Maybe the teacher also does sexual acts with the child.
I think two happens with <1% of the frequency of one.
Forming a special, secret relationship with a vulnerable individual and encouraging them to lie to others about the details and nature of that relationship is a profound violation of trust regardless of the motives. To do this from a position of formal power, as an agent of the state, is a profound abuse of power as well.
You are imagining that most cases of one carry some of the characteristics of the second, enabled by your engagement with the topic being very 'alienated' from the details of the actual people and causation involved. You're also imagining that cases of one are more common among trans kids than they are. Neither are true! To whatever extent children transitioning is bad, this paints a false picture that just makes it impossible to prevent anything bad from happening.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Every time this issue comes up you excuse the teachers by saying it's mostly creepy discord moderators and tumblr influencers doing most of the grooming, but you don't ever talk about them except to dismiss criticism of the teachers.
This is assuming 'arguments are soldiers'. Am I wrong, at all?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
No, we have seen people mutilate definitions and concepts to deflect criticism of teachers "hatching little eggs
This mostly doesn't happen. There hundreds of millions of people so i'm sure it's happened, but >95% of 'trans kids' realize they're trans on the internet.
why is this teacher showing my kid porn and telling him he'd look sexy in a dress" is "woah, how is that any different than promoting patriotism, tu quoque
This is like saying Catholicism is a fundamentally Pedophilic religion because look how they cover it up!! Except actual generic pedophilia is 1000x more common (among both catholic priests and teachers) than teachers showing kids porn with intent to trans them.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
This is sort of true, but in the context of 'trans kids teacher lgbt disney grooming' stuff it's a haze of nonspecific meanings that mostly means the 'base sexual gratification' thing as opposed to the other meaning.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I am using the term descriptively! I don't want to give a definition and examples because social categories are quite fuzzy anyway and I think we both understand what I'm getting at in terms of 'the far right are censored a whole lot more than steven crowder is'. Steven crowder is censored a bit, yes! But much much much less than someone like the distributist or fuentes or whatever
I've known about that guy for a long time! Search "nrx" on his twitter. nrx -> far right!
edit: removed thing that bordered on insult
Agree, but I don't think it's entirely correct to just blame capitalism, although obviously the profit motive and marketing play a big role - capitalism or not, modern technology would produce an abundance of consumer goods and enjoyable experiences, and also drain away the practical function of communal rituals about seasons and harvests and group purpose.
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