faceh
4mo ago
FWIW Noah Smith's opinion:
As I've stated now several times, his opinion is worthless.
So I will once again assume he has it wrong and in fact is missing some obvious counterexample, but no, I will not be reading his arguments since it would be a waste of time.
Why is he being cited in this discussion anyway?
faceh
2yr ago
Question then is, do you see anything wrong with abusing, torturing, or otherwise putting animals to other 'inhumane' uses.
Since once you've accepted that killing them for sustenance is permissible, seemingly anything else is on the table.
Yeah.
Even if you assume there's a large contingent of white people who actively would prefer to live away from most minorities... the ones who are in a position to openly state and act on that preference are probably not the high-quality human capital that most would want to live around, either.
Or they've made their white identity the entire basis of their personality and those folks tend to be tedious.
At the risk of sounding, I dunno, petty? Did Fuentes put any money on the line, did he find someone to take the other side of his position, reduce the bet to fairly specific terms, and have someone willing to judge who won by a given deadline?
Bryan Caplan puts money on all of the bets he makes and chronicles them in a wiki he maintains. He's got a great record against some very smart people.
There's specific lose conditions, plus incentives to be accurate/not bullshit.
Fuentes also didn't put any specific confidence estimates on those bets, so he can always walk back the ones that were off base if he wants "oh that was a long shot anyway." Well you never said if you thought it was a 10% chance of a 90% chance, so I guess you can retroactively change that belief.
This is how pundits operate. Throwing a bunch of vague predictions against a wall, phrased to feel specific and of course they never let someone take up the other side of the position who can then call them out later.
Like when I was talking about how Tariffs would play out I really tried to be specific enough that I can be judged wrong and lay out a strict 'I was wrong' scenario.
Speaking of, looks like the time is ticking down for some more 'permanent' deals to be worked out in the next month or I'll have missed the mark on the most recent extension.
Edit: And I'm still confident (80% to be specific) that they get it done soon. 20% is reserved b/c we're in a time where crazy events can happen in short time frames.
EU is allegedly pretty close:
As is India:
faceh
2yr ago
If Bud Light had gone out of its way to create a special can for a child molester who was making tik tok videos espousing how fun it is to molest children, that would also not be looked at as "a minor screw up".
But Light went out of their way to put a Trans influencer on the can mere days after a Trans mass shooter killed a bunch of kids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting
So in that context... yeah.
Why not? Oh yes, because this will bump the property tax beyond what I can afford
So your real disagreement is really with the tax rate it sounds like.
Advocate for the tax to be brought down to, say 0.0001% of the property's value and it ceases to be a problem.
We just have to fiddle with the dials a bit to solve your objection.
If your problem is with taxes as a concept then just say that! Its a fine position!
On the other hand, if I bring it down to what I can afford, bots will no longer leave me alone. Point is, you’re trying to pull a fast one here.
I'm trying to explain how this system can be made fair, rather than depending on the government to set accurate values by fiat, which is how almost everywhere does it currently.
Because you seem to blame everything on women while rejecting any suggestion that unsuccessful men are to blame for their own lack of success .
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST I'M POINTING OUT A SYSTEMIC ISSUE THAT IS EFFECTING EVERYONE IN EVERY COUNTRY SIMULTANEOUSLY AND YOU THINK I'M PLACING BLAME ON ANY SPECIFIC GENDER, OR GROUP?
This is why the problem is impossible to discuss, everyone automatically assumes you're an incel, or bitter, or hate women, or are just motivated by envy or something OTHER than 'concern for the very trajectory of society.'
The only reason it reads any differently is because every other institution blames men explicitly. I don't have to make that argument, but pushing a different line automatically makes people assume you're blaming women instead. Even trying to make the case lowers your status and thus tends to make people take you less seriously.
There's no benefits to being the one person talking about it like this. Plenty of potential costs.
And so the issue goes undiscussed, let alone solved.
ahem.
No. I'm not blaming women. Women themselves are less happy than they've ever been. I feel bad for them too.
I'm blaming the lack of cultural pressure on women; a society that places zero expectations on women to settle or marry or have kids.
It is unsurprising that women live up to those expectations when Academia, Corporate America, Hollywood, Social Media, and all the dating apps are telling them they don't have to settle, ever.
Whilst continually telling men that they're worthless, from a young age.
Then giving men advice that provably isn't working. Anywhere. Then blaming men for this even though its clear there's something different causing it. "Why are the younger men turning aggressively to the right?" Because that's the only place that DOESN'T blame them.
do you have any suggestions that aren't basically "Reduce female agency"?
Identify the cohort of males who are carousing and stealing women's most fertile years and cull them. Just straight up kill 'em.
If that's too extreme, we can just castrate them. Compromise!
That cuts out a major factor that is both preventing women from settling AND is making them less marriageable. Heavily punish males who exploit young women's emotions and leave them worse off than they found them.
If that's still too extreme, then maybe just ban dating apps altogether.
If THAT is too extreme, just require every dating app to VERY publicly disclose their actual success rates for men and women forming relationships, so people can make an informed decision when using them. There's a reason they don't disclose them normally. They're abysmal.
And then, reduce or remove all economic policies that explicitly favor hiring women so that women are less likely to marry a corporation. There's enough competition amongst biological men without having to compete against Megacorps anyway.
Then reduce or remove most policies designed to allow an unmarried women to live 'comfortably' on the public dime, thus becoming brides of the state.
Basically, remove the economic policies that keep women from enduring any significant difficulties, ever, from childhood on, so that women will actually need a man in their life for more than just happy fun sexy times. This is called "ALIGNING THE INCENTIVES."
But that's about the most politically unpopular idea possible, since poor, single mothers are genuinely the most sympathetic group out there, across the political spectrum.
None of these steps are 'reducing female agency,' in the sense women are still fully able to make whatever choices they want without the law stepping in.
But they're leveling out the system so its not completely and utterly slanted against (average) men's interests, as it has been for like 50 years.
Every single one of those suggestions is tongue in cheek because the whole problem is that NOBODY serious is willing to even suggest any solution that admits that women have every single social and legal advantage possible over the average guy, and thus there might need to be a correction.
There's no political solution unless enough men are willing to do some things that will upset women en masse, or some strongman takes power who just does it. And even then it ain't guaranteed, since this problem exists in dicatorships too.
all I'm asking from YOU is that you politely stand aside and don't raise a fuss if men start taking steps that will address the problem since you're clearly not interested in accepting any responsibility or otherwise intervening to help.
If you suddenly start interfering with attempts to address the problem, you're really not on men's side anyway.
faceh
2yr ago
I would broaden it to "scare the shit out of anyone who was thinking of trying to fraudulently influence the election" at all.
This is a flex which shows "we can detect illegal votes and we WILL investigate illegal votes. Risk it at your peril."
My prediction is that there will be little fraud in the 2022 Florida elections. I DONT know how much occurred in prior elections. But there won't be much this time.
You know, I'm going to call you on this one:
Under what possible, realistic set of circumstances would someone actually be willing to pay $1,000,000 to have sex with a particular woman, rather than just buying time with 500 top-tier escorts?
And what person would experience emotional distress in excess of what 1 million dollars could ameliorate?
No. You come to me with an offer and earnest money, and I decide if it is worth my time to bother listening to you based largely on the number.
I mean this happens, constantly, all the time. If you live in a desirable area you will get a veritable stream of calls, texts, e-mails trying to make you an offer on your land.
It's dreadfully annoying to filter.
From my perspective, I'd much rather just publicly set the asking price for which its worth my time to even engage with a possible buyer, and only interact with those who can prove the ability to pay the asking price, and everyone else can pound sand.
If someone values my home at $3 million because of the feng shui, they can offer me $2 million and keep $1 million of surplus for themselves.
And if you think there's someone out there who values your house at $3 mil, maybe set the price at $3 mil, or $2.5 to split the difference.
Nothing in this hypothetical situation demands you set the price exactly where you value it. You're free to set a 'strategic' asking price too.
Illegal immigrants generally need to work. If an area made it so they could not find work, most illegal immigrants would leave that area. You can make it hard to find work for illegal immigrants by passing severe and immediate penalties for employers that employ illegal immigrants, and boosting the agencies investigating such crimes. For maximal effect, the severe penalities would include jailtime.
Can we at least agree, though, that the practical implications of enforcing this law would impose substantial costs on the state?
Prosecuting hundreds or thousands of businesses and migrants and the judicial resources this would encompass alone could total in the 10s of millions of dollars, if not 100's. And since you're suggesting jail sentences to maximize efficacy, that's further resources expended in doling out such punishments.
And all the while the actual source of the waves of immigrants has not been stifled. Thus this proposed law has no guarantee of actually solving the issue in the long term. Just millions of dollars spent on enforcing these laws, year after year, indefinitely. Perhaps not an optimal use of resources.
I think the central argument by the Governors dealing with this situation is that the scope of the problem is far beyond the capacity of these states to address. South America has a population of 422 million people. Another 184 million in Central America. Thus, there could theoretically be 5 million immigrants crossing into the U.S. every year for 120 years, just counting current population, before it stops. I'm not sure how a handful of states are equipped to handle the potential influx vs. their population this would represent.
The Federal Government is supposedly charged with controlling the flow of immigrants into the nation, so by all rights the Federal Government is at fault for this current state of affairs.
Calling attention to this and forcing them to notice and address it is pretty much the only way this situation gets 'better.'
So I see why Desantis likes putting illegal immigrants on a plane: it doesn't offend his employer constituency, and it appeals to the anti-illegal-immigrant constituency.
It also imposes a cost on the very people whose opposition is causing the problem and who also have the power to start fixing it.
Isn't that the point of most activism? Make your opponents uncomfortable enough to agree to address the concerns you are expressing?
In 2020 I sat and watched mass protest movements, civil disobedience, and other aggressive efforts to get cities to comply with the 'defund the police' mandate, as ill-defined as that was. I watched many cities, in response to the discomfort this caused, try to cooperate and compromise with this mandate.
This was hailed as important social change.
Ironically, Florida and Texas were both some of the least impacted by the Riots of 2020.
So I am really, REALLY not having any sympathy for those who are discomfited by a busload of migrants showing up in their community unannounced. If they actually agree that this is a problem to address, there's a clear path to trying to make the rate of illegal immigration decrease to 'manageable' levels.
The women I know best wouldn't dream of setting up an OF account.
How do you know this?
Would you expect them to admit it if they did?
Regardless of the answers, the fact that this is a question that gets asked suggests these girls and women who put themselves in that marketplace are not the norm, despite how it seems.
I'm really no longer sure what "the norm" is, other than all indications are that its trending towards running an Onlyfans being a relatively acceptable practice.
And more to the point, it means any female who wants to figure out how to satisfy male sexual preferences need only check into what some of the top content producers are putting out.
Women now have no real excuse for being unaware of men's sexual preferences.
And guys now get the impression that females are willing to satisfy those preferences even if they claim to find them disgusting and crude.
An equivalent would be normalization of, say, fighting and violence for men.
AH, but I don't think that is equivalent.
Sexuality is often idealized as something to be shared with solely your committed partner, and seeking sexual gratification outside the relationship is considered adulterous.
Hence why having a sexually explicit OF might be a violation of that relationship.
I don't think a man's capacity for violence is something that has the same level of "sacredness" where he is expected to express it solely to his partner.
Although I see your point that we have a social interest in restraining the male tendency to violence.
faceh
1yr ago
Yes yes yes but the only reason anybody is at risk is because somebody chose blue while red exists and there's no force compelling people to pick blue.
I can understand altruism AND realize that this exact scenario is when it's time to turn off and ignore the altruistic impulse.
I don't think there's any reason to believe someone when they say "I'm picking blue" because there's no direct punishment for defecting.
I also worry about 'evil' players who say "i'm picking blue" specifically to convince others to pick blue and die, while the evil player defects.
So I'm not suggesting you're not altruistic. I have no proof other than your word, and you absolutely can be telling the truth. I'm saying I can't believe you, because I have no outside information to confirm it, nor is there some way for you to provably demonstrate it.
faceh
2yr ago
The simplest rebuttal is that it is immoral to tax people for having natural human feelings of attachment to their home.
If we grant that people's feelings have moral weight then we're opening up quite the can of worms here.
If people aren't willing to place a specific price tag on their 'feelings of attachment' then how can we know that their attachment outweighs that of the buyer's desire to have the house?
What if the buyer is actually attempting to re-purchase their childhood home, and has INTENSE positive feelings associated with it?
How ELSE can you figure out how to weigh the disparate interests here?
faceh
3mo ago
Offer access to your country's natural resources, like was proposed with Ukraine?
Make direct investments into American manufacturing like Taiwan?
I expect that the deals reached by each country will look different, with the outcomes being the result of some creative horse-trading.
Now, I'm also concerned that this will result in an overly complex patchwork of trade deals and potentially contradictory obligations between various countries, when the simplest outcome would just be everyone drops tariffs to some agreed-upon maximum and signs on to a treaty to keep them there.
But this is not some historically unprecedented diplomatic endeavor.
faceh
7mo ago
Yeah, but you're using a second currency to denominate the value of the asset. Not the currency it was actually purchased in.
faceh
1yr ago
If you assume 20% of people will pick blue because they misunderstand the question then the moral calculus is very different.
Please, please explain to me what the type of person it is that has two buttons in front of them, one which grants them a 100% chance of survival, and the other which grants some uncertain chance of survival, and then, from pure ignorance (not making any complex moral calculation) picks the second button.
Because there are a lot of other things that this person's existence would imply.
I have a genuinely hard time believing that this person exists. And if there are enough of these people who can't comprehend the question, I'm DEFINITELY picking red because they might very well be making their choice at random, in aggregate.
faceh
2yr ago
The part that raises it to true malfeasance was that they chose to do it mere days after a Trans mass shooter had killed a bunch of kids at a Christian school
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting
Basically, most companies know way, way better than to come anywhere near a controversial matter in the wake of a serious tragedy. In almost any other case, this ad campaign would have been shelved for a month or more to avoid a politically contentious blowback. Or possibly cancelled altogether as it might seem to be bad taste.
But nope, they decided to poke the wound while it was fresh.
faceh
2yr ago
I’m loosely with @Tarnstellung: this response is disproportionate. That’s becayse it’s not about the actual offense. It’s about ethics in games journalism the ingroup successfully flexing in the culture war. You said it best yourself—the “usual suspects” had to fan the flames, or it never would have gotten off Insta.
Do people forget that mere days before the Mulvaney stuff dropped, the Culture War issue du jour was a Trans shooter killing kids at a Christian School?
Tempers were already burning extremely high on the Trans issue when Bud Light waltzed in. The response was not merely driven by Mulvaney, but by the rage felt over the incident in which the entire Cathedral functionally sided with the shooter.
faceh
2yr ago
Are you familiar with the legal distinction between "Allodial Title" and "Fee Simple" ownership?
at least I do not wake up one morning and get told I have to move out within the next month.
If you set your asking price correctly, then this should be priced in.
You are robbing the entire owner surplus here.
Again, if they set their price accurately and account for all the value they can reasonably extract from the land, they should be capturing close to all of the 'surplus' available to them, OR there's simply nobody out there that would match their asking price.
then there is negotiating with the swarm of AI drones outside my house exactly how much my child's life is worth to me compared to their value of him in paperclips.
I guess I have a hard time accepting that someone would be so attached to a piece of land that they cannot express a price point at which they would gleefully part with it.
As opposed to parting with a human who is, from an emotional standpoint, of nigh-infinite value and not replaceable.
If you set your price high enough, you could use the sale proceeds to pay to have the entire property reconstructed in exacting detail at a different location, such that you would barely notice the difference.
But I also own things that I value much more than their market value in cash, which is positive surplus, so it balances out.
Can you name one such thing that can't be replaced by a good-enough reproduction if it were ever lost or broken? Do you have some unique pieces of art or some item that has sentimental value only to you?
Otherwise, why do you value such items more than a near-identical one you could just buy on the market?
faceh
2yr ago
Now lets be fair, this tactic is approximately as old as mass media is.
Slamming out barely-coherent sequels to books that became unexpected bestsellers, producing a whole series of films based on one hit, and using completely unrelated scripts with the familiar character names swapped in, or making a spinoff TV show using some side character just so people might watch what would otherwise be a generic sitcom.
You'd have a much harder time naming a piece of media that sprang up and grew into intense popularity without having some recognized and respected name attached, be it an actor, director, beloved character, or an established series.
It probably does hit harder for media properties that have a long history and have mostly avoided being exploited or cheapened for years or decades upon decades. But those media properties will be viewed as untapped gold mines by producers, rather than precious natural resources where further development should be banned and tourism restricted to maintain their pristine condition.
I guess I'd say that I agree with you and yet the proven preference of the median consumer/viewer is that they just want to see more of [thing they like] produced and aren't too picky about quality, so given that there's no enforceable rule against slapping an existing franchise's logo on an otherwise unrelated work or spitting out a low-quality sequel, spinoff, or adaptation, it is all but inevitable that it will happen to a series that you love... unless said franchise just isn't popular enough to warrant such sequels, spinoffs, etc.
faceh
3mo ago
Or potentially agree to grant access to your country's natural resources, or make investments directly in American manufacturing.
Like Ukraine and Taiwan, respectively.
https://apnews.com/article/taiwan-us-tsmc-chips-investment-71d3aeb2bc403a92ce8eccdd8c51c0c8)
Now I actually would NOT like an overly complex patchwork of trade deals.
I'd prefer the world where everyone drops tariffs to some agreed-upon maximum and signs on to a treaty to keep them there.
As I intimated upthread, if these countries do NOT come to the table to attempt negotiation, I will have to seriously rethink my model of the world at large.
I'm dragging up the gender, dating, and fertility discourse for one last rodeo.
The below analysis is a possible infohazard for young single males. It contains analysis done by LLMs, but I solemnly swear I drafted this through my own brainpower, using AI only for the analysis I was too lazy to do myself.
I'm following upon a comment I made about a year ago that pulled out some raw numbers on the quality of women in the U.S., and how this might impact the desire of men to actually develop themselves and find one of those women and settle down.
At the time I didn't bother doing the work to produce an actual estimate of how many women would match the basic crtieria, given that these are NOT independent variables. The though occurred to me that AIs are the perfect solution for exactly this type of laziness, and now have the capability to do this task without completely making up numbers.
So, based on my old post, I chose 9 particular criteria that I think would ‘fairly’ qualify a woman as ‘marriageable.':
Single and looking (of course).
Cishet, and thus not LGBT identified.
Not ‘obese.’
Not a mother already.
No ‘acute’ mental illness.
No STI.
Less than $50,000 in student loan debt.
5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’).
Under age 30.
And ask both ChatGPT and Grok to attempt to estimate the actual population of women in the U.S. that pass all these filters, accounting for how highly correlated each of the variables are.
Notable criteria I omitted:
Religious affiliation
Race
Political affiliation
Career
Drug use
Sex work/Onlyfans
I argue that a reasonable man would NOT want to ‘compromise’ on any of the original criteria, whereas the omitted ones are comparatively negotiable, or alternatively, are already captured in one of the original criteria.
Would you accept a woman who was carrying $50k in student loan debt into the relationship? I guess maybe if she was a doctor or lawyer or made enough money to justify it. Much higher than that and it starts to suggest financial recklessness.
5 as a body count is definitely an ‘arbitrary’ number, but again, you get much above that and it implies more bad decision-making. Ditto for being STI positive.
The age one is probably the most ‘unfair,’ but if having kids is a goal then this is pretty close to the ‘reasonable’ cutoff given the ticking fertility clock. Adjust upward if needed, I guess.
Here is the ChatGPT conversation. I used o3 in this case.
Here is Grok, specifically Grok 3.
In each case I used the “Deep Research” mode for the main query. I used identical prompts to start them off, they each seemingly did slightly different interpretations of the prompt. I was not using any fancy, complex prompt engineering to try and force it to think like a statistician or avoid hallucinations.
ChatGPT Gives this conclusion:
Grok comes to quite the similar conclusion:
Then I asked the truly cursed followup question: “how many men in the U.S. might be seeking these eligible women and thus how much competition is there for this population? How many are likely to ‘fail.’"
ChatGPT:
Emphasis Mine.
Grok:
Then the followup, when I tell it to extend the age range:
The error bars are pretty large on this one... the 9-out-of-10 number doesn't quite pass the smell test... but I think the point speaks for itself.
I don’t want to say that this is bleak, per se. I mean, 1 million or so women in the U.S. with some decent marriageable bonafides. That’s not a small pool! The problem stems from noticing that said women will have somewhere upwards of 5 men, possibly near 27 who will be competing for their affections, or more if they’re near the absolute peak of physical attractiveness.
Hence my increasing annoyance with the bog standard advice proffered to young males “become worthy and put in some effort and you will find a good woman” as it becomes increasingly divorced from the actual reality on the ground.
It’s not wrong. It is incomplete. Insufficient. If we increase the number of “worthy” men, that’s just intensifying the competition for the desirable women… while ALSO ensuring that more of those ‘worthy’ men will lose and go unfulfilled, DESPITE applying their efforts towards “worthiness.”
You CAN’T tell young men both “be better, improve, you have to DESERVE a good woman before you get one!” and then, when he improves:
“oh, you have to lower your standards, just because you thought you deserved a stable, chaste(ish), physically fit partner doesn’t mean you’re entitled to one, world ain’t fair.”
That dog won’t hunt.
Thems the numbers. I’m not making this up wholesale or whining about advice because I find it uncomfortable. No. The math is directly belying the platitudes. I’m too autistic NOT to notice.
So where am I going with this?
First, I’m hoping, praying someone can actually show me evidence that this is wrong. All of my personal experience, anecdotal observations, research, and my gut fucking instinct all points to this being an accurate model of reality. But I am fallible.
If I’m wrong I want to know!
I’m also not particularly worried about ME in general. I am in a good position to find a good woman, even though I’m sick of all the numerous frustrations and inanities one has to endure to do so. I get annoyed when someone, even in good faith, tries to suggest that my complaints are more mental than real. I can see the numbers, I've been in the trenches for years, this is a true phenomena, the competition is heavy, the prizes are... lacking.
And finally and most importantly, I genuinely feel the only way we keep the Ferris Wheel of organized civilization turning is if average women are willing to marry average men, and stay married, and help raise kids. I’m all for pushing the ‘average’ quality up, as long as actual relationships are forming.
Objectively, that is not happening. And so I’m worried because if society breaks down... well, I live here and I don't like what that implies for me, either.
(Yes, AGI is possibly/probably going to make this all a moot point before it all really collapses)
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