dr_analog
razorboy
No bio...
User ID: 583
dr_analog
razorboy
7mo ago
In pretty much every jurisdiction in the world there are rules on what you need to do to drive a car for hire and Uber frequently did not require drivers to follow every jurisdiction's rules to start driving. These jurisdictions had the option to shut Uber down for this but they either couldn't get their shit together, they looked the other way, or they did and it became a constant political issue they had to balance against how mad local taxi companies were.
In my town Uber was warned to stop or comply, they ignored the warning, the town fined them, and then Uber disappeared from town. Then the town council got shit for it for years before they changed taxi laws. Uber did some form of this everywhere. As much as I appreciate Uber and love the future we live in, this is a blatantly criminally minded business plan!
dr_analog
razorboy
8mo ago
Seems real to me. If he was at a VC that did crypto they could have been ejaculating money over the pandemic.
Also his story seems not implausible given my own experience.
I filled out an OKC profile once and was my honest funny cute self. I also included my income, $250-500k and mentioned quant finance. I was getting about 3-4 dates a month. The women weren't amazing but not bad either. I kept this up for a year or so.
Then I came across some OKC blog post about how income is the biggest predictor of dating success for men. I felt crushed, in a lot of the ways the quoted guy did. Surely this didn't really apply to me?
So I removed my income from my OKC profile.
After that I landed two whole dates total over the course of an entire year.
Jokes on me, I'm cute and funny but not enough to cut through the noise the way possibly making $500k does.
I found the medical system in Germany, Austria and Italy each far superior to it (and at least the last one
I hear this all of the time but I can't reconcile this with my experience.
I took my sister to the doctor in Italy once, in the countryside, and the doctor was an obese stupid looking guy in a big dimly lit room with no computer or desk. He looked at my sister's really strange bite on her leg and seemed oblivious to the possibility that this insect bite could cause Lyme disease. Even though she told him (in fluent Italian) that she was concerned this was a tick bite and that she could get Lyme disease. He just gave her some of of cortisone injection and sent her on her way.
She got Lyme disease.
On the plus side it was free.
I dunno I'm sure there are some doctors like this everywhere but if there was a doctor in the US that was this incompetent and they charged $200 I feel like the community would deal with them.
It's so unbelievable I'm doubting whether this actually happened even though I was definitely there and sober.
(Your UK assessment seems very familiar)
Conversely, I have a step-kid and I very much try to be a serious parent interested in his long-term well-being. I am absolutely certain he wouldn't call me anything close to his real dad. Ironically, his actual dad is a hands-off checked out stoner who just buys him whatever he wants, let's him eat whatever and imposes no real structure. The teenage kid adores him, of course.
The kid needs life saving surgery once a year or so (he has some rare benign throat cancer) that requires two nights of travel. I've been there for 5 of the last 6. We're preparing to do the next one and he just asked me if I've ever gone to one of these. He honestly couldn't remember. Yeah kid :/
Meanwhile his biodad has only been to 1 of the last 6.
Indeed, his own dad can act absolutely psycho and the kid will defend him but if I criticize the slightest thing it's reported to mom.
No competing with biology!
What are we talking about again? Oh right. If trans women could sign up for the full package where they get periods, risk unwanted pregnancy with no access to abortion, and have an uncontrollable urge to oooh and ahhh and snuggle every baby in their vicinity while getting no special male or female fetish attention I will have no doubts about their need to be women (I mean, not that anyone asked me...)
Because if I can do real dad things and not be considered a real dad then it's more than fair for trans women to have to do real women things to be considered real women.
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo ago
Anyone have thoughts on the Huberman article run by NY Magazine? He apparently was dating 5+ women simultaneously, letting each of them believe he was only dating them, and therefore it would be safe to have unprotected sex.
My first reaction is: why did he need to lie about this? He lives in the polyamory capital of the world? Surely plenty of women would be down?
On further thought, I wonder if he didn't want to do the poly thing because you'd have to go through the process of electing a #1 girlfriend that you can swap fluids with, and then for girlfriends #2-5 you have to use condoms and that's no fun.
But on even more advanced thought, perhaps this is a signal that poly is actually pretty low status? If an adored sensitive smart hot famous-ish science-y guy can't even be honest about his sexual desires and find suitable partners, again, in the Bay Area (!), that suggests poly has a very, very long road to general acceptance.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
Great comment overall in general.
I'm still astonished that the Oregon legislature re-criminalized. Maybe this won't affect anyone's sense of liberal identity, but it at least shows luxury beliefs have a limit, and can be abandoned if confronted with enough harsh reality.
dr_analog
razorboy
3mo ago
Instructions unclear. Started compassionately guillotining terminally ill cancer patients.
Surely the indignity of the guillotine is that it turns someone's execution into a humiliating blood spraying spectacle? You can almost look cool standing in front of a firing squad, blind folded (obligatory: smoking a cigarette). Nobody looks cool on their knees with their head in a guillotine stockade, even with a cigarette.
OTOH, with a firing squad, you probably look much less cool suffocating to death from all of the holes ripped through your lungs; not sure what I'd pick.
The first few Quakers who took a stand against slavery were pretty annoying too. In reading about their early forms of activism one can’t help but be struck by how PETA-like some of their tactics were.
Anyway, there really isn’t really a non-annoying way of telling someone a message equivalent to “Hey actually, to all animals you’re more evil than Hitler. Animal lives matter. Have you considered being not animal Uber-Hitler??”
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
It wouldn't take too much to make all but the top 10% of the following jobs obsolete:
This may be theoretically true but strikes me as much too optimistic.
I use AI tools all day every day and continuously have my mind blown and say "this is going to change everything" to myself and to my wife if she's not tired of listening to me, but whenever I talk to other people, even other technology professionals and hear them tell me how they don't find this useful, I become resigned to the fact that it's going to take decades for the AI tech we have now to permeate the rest of industries. Just as it took decades and a fucking pandemic before we began to accept remote work as a viable way to function (though perhaps not optimal) even though people who were hip have been doing it since the late 90s.
Is your debate partner an underdog fetishist?
Someone here (or maybe on /r/themotte) opened my eyes to this idea. I'm sorry I can't find the post and credit you, various searches aren't helping me find it.
There exists an apparent mini-moral philosophy of always siding with the underdog. On the surface this has good feels: always side with the weak against the strong. In every conflict, between individuals or between nations, find out who the strong one is, and find out who the weak one is. The weak one is the one you should side with.
This is not as ironclad a moral imperative as it appears on the tin. The most extreme and simple form of the imperative's flaw is such:
Suppose Mr Rogers and some random homeless guy get into a fight.
These are the facts and they are not disputed: the homeless guy demanded Mr Rogers’ wallet and he said no. So, the homeless guy attacked him. Shocking everyone, Mr Rogers fights back ferociously, sending the homeless guy to the hospital. Mr Rogers escapes without a scratch.
Digging into the homeless guy's background reveals that he has been in and out of prison a lot. For theft and minor violent offenses, except he was most recently imprisoned for pushing random bystanders off of train platforms onto train tracks. He had been arrested before anyone died. The homeless guy was released from prison a few days before he got into a fight with Mr Rogers.
Mr Rogers is a saintly widely beloved media personality with a legendary benevolence towards all.
So. Should someone here be penalized?
An underdog fetishist might say yes, Mr Rogers should be penalized because he’s actually a member of an elite class whereas the deranged homeless guy is a member of an underclass. This is a perfect example of class struggle.
In my experience, most people consider the Palestinians the underdog here, but not everyone. Some consider Israel the underdog being propped up by the US.
Anyway, while I consider it morally confused, I contend people who would condemn Mr Rogers exist, and that if you're going to spend time debating an extremely nuanced complex situation like the Israeli/Palestine conflict with others, it's valuable to at least first figure out if your debate partner would always (e.g.) side with the homeless guy against Mr Rogers.
My step-kid has been on Medicaid for most of his life and he has some kind of non-metastatic cancer that grows and regrows in his throat. It's fatal for some kids and I think it's Make A Wish eligible (not really sure what that is but it sounds grim). In his case he merely had to have throat surgery under general anaesthesia on a near-monthly basis when he was a toddler to keep cutting them out.
Fortunately as he aged they stopped regrowing so aggressively and now he only needs surgery about every 12-18 months.
The surgeon who sees him is some kind of leading expert in this surgery and he's seen at this hospital that I didn't even know could be so shiny and nice.
Anyway, we never once had to pay out of pocket to treat it while he was on Medicaid. Now that we're on a private insurer it's about 10-20% co-insurance, so it's a few grand out of pocket every time we take him in; seems like a great fucking deal all things considered.
The surgeon did make a... funny?... remark once when he was finally switched to a private insurer from Medicaid that now the reimbursement will be enough that he can celebrate after each surgery with a mid-range IPA instead of PBR. Not sure how much to read into that; given how health care reimbursements work I could imagine the dude has a garage full of exotic cars or he really could mean he all-in nets beer money on each surgery. They both seem equally possible. I do hope he has a lot of exotic cars though.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
It's cute we can still laugh at the "A|B testing" ravaging our cities like this is all a Sim City game and we can load after the aliens destroyed the map.
It is cute but I think it's actually good to run experiments? Don't we bemoan vetocracies and general unwillingness by politicians to take risks? Initiative petitions (referendums) appear to be a good outlet for some direct democracy.
We do get some good outcomes from time to time and the fact that we rolled back so quickly is a credit.
If you asked this question two years ago I'm sure the sentiment would have been that the West Oregon leftists that dominate state political power would never roll back such a pro-drug law that was wrapped in racial justice.
dr_analog
razorboy
3mo ago
As an aside, hunters advance this justification. A rifle bullet through the chest is generally a much less miserable way to go than dying in the wild of starvation after you've broken your leg due to natural age-related muscle wasting. Or natural being-eaten-alive by the resident cougar because you're just not so good at avoiding predators in your senior years.
Assuming the hunters are hunting animals that are old enough (not uncommon if your species is not considered a nuisance species), hunting can be seen as a flavor of mercy.
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
Ozempic looks like it's the real deal. I don't put much stock in people who keep muttering under their breath about some hidden catch, as if the universe works that way. A cure for obesity, as well as seemingly effective
Ozempic is probably clearly an all cause mortality improvement for people with obesity, which is a huge win, though I think the cost-benefit is worse if you're taking it for non-health reasons since it does cause an apparent decrease in muscle mass and also elevated heart rate which... probably can't be good?
I think those are the catches.
I sure do hear a lot of muttering from naturally thin types about it though!
The steel manned case for banning lab meat is that it will be shitty and maybe even less healthy at first but it'll become the default/only choice anyway. Banning it pre-emptively means it'll be harder to introduce unless it's at least as good.
Aside: I would post this in the main CW thread but it's Sunday and don't want it to get lost when the thread rolls over. So I'll just do a lower effort slightly trashier post here.
HAS LIBERALISM PEAKED IN OREGON?(!)
In 2020, the state of Oregon passed a referendum, ballot Measure 110, which decriminalized all drugs(!) with a vote of 58% in favor.
Voters in Oregon (such as myself) believed this was the path to enlightened drug policy, being informed by the revered Portugal model. Tacked onto the referendum was a bit of social justice theory as well: the police would be required to document in detail the race of anyone they stopped from now on for any reason. To ensure the police weren't disproportionately harassing the, say, 5 black people who live in Oregon. (okay okay they're 2.3% of the population)
The ensuing data was an almost perfect A/B test, the kind you'd run with no shame over which kind of font improved e-commerce site checkout conversions. By 2023, Oregon's drug overdose rate was well outpacing the rest of the country, so much so that the police officers regularly Narcan with them and revive people splayed out in public parks. Sometimes the same person from week to week. It's true this coincides with the fentanyl epidemic, which could confound the data and have bumped up overdoses everywhere but that wouldn't explain alone why deaths have especially increased in Oregon. The timing fits M110.
Anyway! At some point someone decided to compare notes with Portugal's system. Some stark differences!
https://gooddrugpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/PortugalvOregon1.pdf
Briefly, Portugal uses a carrot and stick model with a lot of negative incentive, whereas Oregon just kinda writes a $100 ticket and suggests calling a hotline for your raging drug problem maybe lol.
In the first 15 months after Measure 110 took effect, state auditors found, only 119 people called the state’s 24-hour hotline. That meant the cost of operating the hotline amounted to roughly $7,000 per call. The total number of callers as of early December of last year had only amounted to 943.
The absence of stick appears to not be very effective in encouraging users to seek treatment.
Are the kids having fun at least? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/31/health/portland-oregon-drugs.html (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/fHxWk)
“Portland [not Portugal, just to be clear --ed] is a homeless drug addict’s slice of paradise,” said Noah Nethers, who was living with his girlfriend in a bright orange tent on the sidewalk against a fence of a church, where they shoot and smoke both fentanyl and meth.
Yes. At least, that's the brightest part of the article. The rest is pretty depressing and sad and sickening and worrisome.
After a few years of this, the Oregon legislature yesterday finished voting to re-criminalize drugs.
The NYT again: https://archive.ph/3zksH
Critics are out in force, arguing that the legislature overrode the will of voters (remember it was passed by referendum) and that the state sabotaged the program by not efficiently distributing treatment resources to addicts. This poster believes the low uptake and missing negative incentives prove that drug harm reduction is not primarily about access to treatment, but about incentive not to use.
The governor has indicated that she would sign.
tbh I'm surprised Oregon repealed this so quickly. Has liberalism peaked in Oregon?
As someone who voted for the referendum back in 2020, I'm a little sad that some of the overdose deaths are on my hands. Kind of. Like 1 millionth of the overdose deaths perhaps. It's good to run experiments though, right? This was a pretty good experiment. We at least have an upper bound on how liberal a drug policy we should pursue.
dr_analog
razorboy
3mo ago
Don't we need to establish the way the causal arrow goes? Places with high murder rates may feel especially compelled to keep executing criminals on the table because without them they'd have even higher murder rates.
Even with your explanation it still seems preposterous to say African-Americans aren't real Americans.
Does realness require being happy about it? Are Irish Americans no longer Americans if American culture takes a turn they find hideous and they start feeling proud of identifying as Irish-American?
Shibboleths abounds.
IMO, as a child of immigrants, I think most people take the awesomeness of America for granted. To apply your standards, I could determine most white Americans who have ancestors born here going back hundreds of years aren't real Americans because of how much they whine and complain about capitalism and consumerism or whatever.
Given an enemy so dead-set on your destruction at any cost to themselves (martyrdom!), how can you defeat them and win peace in hearts and minds?
Right, this is the heart of my question. Is there a path forward besides: wait for Palestinians to undergo a complete spiritual and cultural transformation? ( Or for the international community to give Israel a freebie on genocide)
Or, for that matter, a path forward besides waiting for Israel to undergo a complete spiritual and cultural transformation and then hope the Palestinians follow suit?
Why isn’t it also on Israel to try to find a leader like, I don’t know, a charismatic Jesus kind of guy who loves the Palestinians even though many of them will terrorize?
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
, absolutely forbid any violence towards Israel
Isn’t this the “miracle happens” part? Aren’t the extremists going to question whose side you’re truly on? Won’t you be marginalized or assassinated as more moderate Palestinian leaders have been?
assume last paragraph is a joke
Not actually. It may be less detached from reality than expecting Palestinians to stop doing violence to Israel over the next 100 years.
In my view, the maximally rational response to this would be
- significantly beef up wall security and air defense
- continue very surgical strikes into Gaza to kill Hamas and destroy military hardware
- find and use non-headline grabbing ways of depriving Gaza of resources
- otherwise go about life as normally as possible and not show any signs of being terrorized
So, +1 for not immediately invading.
That said, they're all clearly terrorized and look bitchmade. So, time to roll in and fill underground tunnels with fuel and burn Hamas to a crisp. Probably, as a matter of taste, it would be good to wait until the President of the US is safely out of the neighborhood.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
Right. The state legislature did touch it in this case! They rolled parts of it back and re-criminalized drugs.
Initiative petitions are often a clown-show, but on the other hand, they're a good vehicle for testing risky policy that career politicians might never put their name on. If it's a huge disaster the career politicians can step in and take credit for rolling it back.
This seems good, actually!
dr_analog
razorboy
3mo ago
I like your avoiding the Nietzsche last man vibe.
But, this is going to be a problematic jury selection, no? “Would you be able to vote to convict this man if his head might bounce into your lap during his execution?”
Might be really bad to have a jury made up exclusively of people who say yes to that.
What does this mean? The Jews in 2023 should just pack up and leave Israel for other countries because WW2 was supposed to be the end of these shenanigans? Why can't you say this to Palestinians?
(I agree stuff like "it's time to be cruel" isn't a good look)
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