curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
I also don't think that there's a problem that warrants a solution
Planning a city or even just a neighborhood is a large-scale project, if there are better ways to do one spreading knowledge about what to do and what not to do is part of getting your epic mixed use urbanism realized.
Does anyone have a link / post that argues against this? Like, ignoring the kulakisms and just focusing rebutting on the steelman that a primary cause of america's urbanism issues is mostly-black crime
There is a small dedicated neighborhood park adjacent to our home, and for a time I used to busy myself with its upkeep, until it was gently suggested to me that this was accruing undesirable on on the part of the rest of the neighborhood, to whom my behavior could only be seen as odd but then what-can-one-expect-from-foreigners.
Huh, could you elaborate? That seems 'very weird', and glances into unfamiliar social situations are often interesting.
You can play with your kids in the neighborhood park, ofc. If anything it's a better place for play as it could naturally gather many different children.
There's a bit of a 'food is shit and portions too small' with the above critique though - lawns suck! They use too much space, and you're not allowed to fill it with a permaculture food forest!
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
But, of course, as long as the system continues to require a terrifyingly downtrodden underclass to scare the general mass into compliance - bums will continue to exist in the cities
I have no idea what you mean by this, elaborate? Are you suggesting the middle or upper middle class would stop working if homeless people were less visible? That doesn't seem correct.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Might be wrong but I think you're assuming more malice than exists on his part - he thinks demolishing suburbs would be 'ideal', but presumably as a practical policy supports getting rid of zoning laws, instead of eminent domaining every suburb
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Almost nobody wants to ban suburbs. Idio is suggesting suburbs are bad for the people who live in them and that they should do other things, not that they should be legislated away.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
All of the cities and suburbs that currently exist were planned and built! Planning and building continues! We could use this approach for new developments. Every complex social thing has entrenched interests and approaches that make change very difficult, this is just a general argument against change.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Put the houses closer together, maybe stack some of them, and turn the space used by lawns and garages and driveways into community parks and such. Maybe density would enable 'mixed use urbanism', where there are enough people nearby to support small shops and attractions!
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
I agree that lawns are bad in that sense, and that HOA rules requiring lawns are also bad. I even think you could draw on that as part of a broader criticism of the suburbs and the american middle class or whatever.
But you don't really do that, just 'they have bad taste and are annoying but still are mean to poor people', in a rdrama style rant
And I personally enjoy the rdrama rant as a genre, but this place really isn't for it - "My office plankton job makes me inherently superior to those dirty poors, who just lack my good, old-fashioned work ethic" is considered to be boo outgroup, just a content-free insult, here.
Competition pushes prices down. Your argument wants to be: "if the marginal cost of producing software is so cheap, why don't new firms enter the market and push prices down"? Well, one, smart coders and good leadership are rare-ish and thus expensive. Two, they do, but the frontier of 'the best software' continuously expands, so there's still money to be made. Three, network effects and generally the advantages of already being big are strong (just go make your own google lmao). And four, software is so valuable that only capturing a tiny fraction of the value is still immensely profitable! When I google a wikipedia article, google serves me an ad or two that I won't click on, whereas I might've paid a few (of today's) dollars for a newspaper a hundred years ago, but times a billion people times a few thousand views ads most people don't even look at are still a lot of money.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Nuking the third-party apps and killing pushshift are both overall surplus-destroying moves, especially since Reddit's search function does not work and their mobile app sucks (and mostly in ways that are orthogonal to extracting money from users!). I'm not entirely sure how the admins benefit from making the API prices this artificially high to kill apps? If you're worried about ads, why not just introduce an ad SDK for third-party mobile apps or require them to give you 50% of their in app purchase revenue or something. Also not sure that banning pushshift and requiring paid API access will stop scraping for LLMs, because normal web scraping of HTML the way archive.org, google, and everyone else does still works.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
"Anything that gets people to talk" is not the criterion for a good post.
Aren't we missing out on a lot of interesting conversations as a result though? Banning forever is fine (OP is an undeniable bait post), but in general I think a lower effort-level for toplevel posts would be good. I think we'd have interesting discussion, at the time, over this or this or a dozen other things I've seen over the past month, but obviously I haven't made such posts.
I strongly suspect that some the low-tech equivalents of prank shows were existed in the 1940s and 1800s, whether that be individual groups of young people pulling pranks. Can't think of any examples off the top of my head though. Also pretty sure scams were widespread (although likely less than now, internet makes finding good marks easy and the current grant of anonymity to internet users (which could rescinded should a govt choose!) makes punishing scammers harder).
If humor is about exploring contrast or confusion, pranks serve the function of playing around with situations that are socially marginal or bad, informing individuals of what happens within them without actually causing the potential harm. So a prank where you steal a friend's trinket might help illuminate the routes by which an actual thief could steal something important. Obviously that literal prank serves no such function today, but you can imagine how something something evolution and how humor might serve that function in some ways today.
And that doesn't mean prank shows are good - it's still a simulacra of something that once had purpose but no longer does - but it's not really reducing trust as the thing it mimics normally builds trust, in the same way that fucking around with your friends builds trust.
Okay, a quick google found this. Which, after I googled, I noticed was in your OP! But wikipedia describes it as a popular TV show beginning in 1948. So, clearly, they did exist in the 1950s? "it often featured practical jokes" ... "The show involved concealed cameras filming ordinary people being confronted with unusual situations, sometimes involving trick props, such as a desk with drawers that pop open when one is closed or a car with a hidden extra gas tank. When the joke was revealed, victims were told the show's catchphrase, "Smile, you're on Candid Camera." The catchphrase became a song with music and lyrics by Sid Ramin."
I've also never been 'pranked' in a grocery store, or a job interview, and don't think many randomly-selected americans have been either. I haven't met anyone who has. I think in at least half of all pranks (e.g. on youtube or tiktok), the supposed victims are in on it, and the other half are infrequent enough that pranks themselves aren't an issue.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
I mostly stick around for the technical parts of truth-seeking and discourse - how to figure out what's true, how to prioritize what's important. Being able to write stuff like this, and read everyone else's similar.
I still believe that people of different viewpoints discussing issues can help create understanding and perhaps approach the truth.
I haven't changed any large-scale political or philosophical positions that I can think of due to themotte but I have changed my mind on a lot of small-scale issues, learned many new things, and gotten a bit better at presenting ideas and understanding things. And as one forms larger-scale ideas from smaller-scale ones, it's still valuable for, maybe, future large-scale ideas.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
But you can't measure that, you can only measure interesting posts
You can just ban people for making bad posts, the mods just don't think that's fair.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
In a DM conversation they asked me what my political leaning was, and when I responded something like "far-right but not fascist" they responded with a "I don't talk to fascists", so yeah it's some sort of bait considering OP is explicitly talking to fascists.
It is an instance of the thing Zorba(?) said a while ago (paraphrased) "if the trolls are forced to contribute interesting pieces and/or make composed, reasonable arguments in service of trolling, then we've already won"
You have posted several times like this, long form culture war articles which you don't explicitly agree with, even suggest you might disagree, but this appears to be merely a guise for introducing the article without committing yourself to actually endorsing it. "Look at this article by a white nationalist; isn't this interesting?"
But he made a similar post of an article by a far-left person (the article by ganz). All told I'd rather have his posts than not.
Also ... while for each individual post I'd prefer some commentary than no commentary, the requirement to add commentary instead of just excerpts significantly decreases the number of posts, and if the rule would lead to e.g. the ganz post not being posted because the author has no commentary I'm not sure it's a good rule.
huh, we are archived quite a bit. some of it is from commoncrawl, which is just general untargeted web crawling, but a lot of it is from 'save page now' which is people individually requesting pages.
Someone appears to be, uh, keeping tabs on a specific user.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Disagree, I think the community naturally attracts people who want to write long and detailed posts. I was writing paragraphs upon paragraphs on random subreddits long before I found /r/ssc or /r/themotte.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Switching to farming cotton is probably exporting manufacturing jobs to china or something?
I picked up on the specific analogies but don't really get the point of the allegory. Trump has a lot of low-iq low-skill supporters, sure, so?
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
I haven't ever looked at studies on n95 masks as applied to smoke, because when I put the mask on I can't smell the smoke anymore and that's good enough for me (i know that sometimes something can mask a smell without physically removing the gas/particles but can tell that's not happening here).
This is like 4 minutes of effort, I probably should do more, but https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-020-00267-4
Surgical masks and respirators can provide limited protection for children during wildfire events, with expected decreases of roughly 20% and 80% for surgical masks and N95 respirators, respectively
]. In 2007, 30 half-facepiece masks were tested and the protection was further improved, with 95% of people having <30% of the exposure when wearing any of the respirators in the class [96]. While this amount of protection is likely inadequate for a worker who anticipates high lifetime exposure, in a situation where the general public is trying to temporarily reduce ambient exposure, such as with wildfire smoke, a 66–70% reduction in exposure for nearly everyone may be meaningful. In fact, in a general population cohort of non-fit-tested healthy adults, a crossover study in China found that there was less increase in airway inflammation (measured with exhaled nitric oxide) associated with air pollutant exposure when a study participant wore an N95, compared to wearing a sham N95 mask [103].
Note that 95% <30% doesn't mean the median is 30%, the median would be significantly less than 30%.
And you can (try to) notice when the fit is wrong and letting too much outside air in and adjust it yourself.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
there is no evidence to assert this as unique
If you can find evidence that a past president did something like this and wasn't prosecuted, I'll significantly change my mind.
a federal investigation over a crime it is not possible for the president to commit.
It is still illegal to lie under oath / to investigators about a crime you didn't commit!
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
I'm pretty sure this wouldn't have happened if he hadn't hid the documents and "corruptly concealed a document in a federal investigation, and made false statements and representations". I'm not even sure why he did those things, it doesn't seem to have helped him at all.
Reminder that around the same time, biden was found to have kept classified documents - but he (as far as we can tell) hasn't tried to hide them or lied about their existence!
Whatever you want to, but I'm specifically interested in whatever social norms led to maintaining the park seeming undesirable and being foreigner behavior, as opposed to anything political. Why isn't it just a harmless hobby? Do the local kids not use parks? Like - a vignette of an unfamiliar culture.
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