fartVader
6mo ago
Utilitarianism in war : what are some under-explored tools of war that are effective but dismissed out of hand due to bad optics ?
This isn't so much a top level post as a seed to begin a conversation. I've always found it rather barbaric that the only acceptable way for a superior power to engage in war is straight violence & bloodshed. This is especially true with a truly imbalanced siege. In almost every occasion, the 'honorable' way of doing a siege costs more money, causes more deaths and eventually leads to the same outcome.
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Chemical warfare is horrible. But are there way to engage in chemical warfare that neutralizes the enemy without any long-term consequences to the heath of those attacked ? Why limit yourself to flashbangs and smoke grenades ? Why not use FPV drones with mass-pepper spray ? You can buy a 1000 pepper-spray FPV drones for a $1 million. Train a few people to operate them as a swarm (like a school of tuna) and they will be very hard to take out. A single deployment of the iron dome costs Israel more.
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Sound based violence has been used before, but can it be taken further ? Gaza is just across the border.
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Why not identify 1 of the tunnels on high ground and flood them ? Maybe flood them with sewage just so it is extra disgusting.
It's war. You're willing to kill by the thousands. Less than honorable means are absolutely acceptable (with long term effects accounted for) if that means a lower body count.
What are some other avenues of war that could be tried to minimize body count but increase effectiveness ? Is there some long term pandoras box reason to keep these tools of war off the table ?
fartVader
5mo ago
Truth is, 90% of all work is stupid. The difference between a committee of competent Harvard grads from every major (smart and competent, but no genius) and the kind of people who create true innovation is a couple of orders of magnitude.
AI might be around the corner, but super-human intelligence that can innovate (Neumann, Terence Tao) is much much much farther away than we think.
I want to take this in another direction. - 'The universal empathy for the remaining life of a parent who has lost a child at a young age.' Susan is a billionaire with power, access and status. Everything you wish for, she has. And I am certain that she would give it all away to bring her son back.
Events like this hold up a familiar but often ignored mirror to the face of young people like me. My parents are still around. I will have kids one day. I have the one thing Susan has lost: time and agency.
Or close to 3% of US population at current rates will die by a drug overdose
No matter how much money I earn, it takes 1 not-so unlikely event to unilaterally turn me into a hollow husk of a person. Whether that be a permanent disability due to a car accident, death of child/spouse or slightly misplaced tap on my head.
From a utilitarian perspective, I am better off minimizing the changes chances of a unilaterally disastrous event, than trying to get billions. Because the money only matters if these disastrous events don't happen. I could live an unimpressive life where my kids live tiil a ripe old age, and I bet Susan would trade my life for hers any day. The negative utility of losing a child is THAT high.
Have kids, help them not kill themselves and you're already living a life that's the envy of many billionaires.
After a 24 hrs existential crises resulting from having the mirror held to my face, I shove it into the closet of 'things to think of when I have time.' I wake up, 2 continents away from family, 1 continent away from my partner, and innocently continue grinding it out in hopes of making a couple of millions in silicon valley at the expense of my 20s and 30s. Some people never learn. Hopefully, I won't stay this way for too long.
Even on this anonymous no-name forum, I feel the urge to say I'd never wish such a tragedy on anyone. I wish she finds the support and space needed to get through this difficult time.
fartVader
1mo ago
There is no amount of social welfare that can convince a person to have kids. There are more important things that are aren't in place.
You need
- Labor support (Retired parents and an extra room)
- A stable partner (Time to date through your early 20s, rather than slog it out in your career)
- Your own house (lol, good luck)
All govt. assistance ends up being fed to landlords downstream. Italy tops the list of western-european countries where 25-35 year olds still live with parents. Don't try anything another solution unless you fix housing first. Everything else is downstream.
I know a ton of people in their late-30s who're struggling to have kids / 2nd children becasue they're too old. The urge to be parents exists. Things just take a LOT longer to stabilize.
fartVader
4d ago
I'm guessing this is South Bay or thereabouts. The Dumbarton bridge marks the beginning of Asian (south and east) tech town. Indians and Chinese tech workers are eating up the area from Palo Alto to San Jose back up tp Fremont. But that is silicon valley proper, so it's hardly surprising.
The rest of California and the Bay Area is not infested with Indian and Chinese tech workers taking over.
fartVader
6mo ago
Related tangent.
Your typical globalist-hater doesn't understand that America's wealth comes from being the only global superpower. While the US is more benevolent that previous aspiring claimants to that crown, they are the only ones to have actually achieved it. Now, benevolent as they may be, American supremacy is maintained through the threat of economic and physical violence.
A world where America is not the sole superpower, is a world that is unquestionably worse for Americans and the nations America protects. Now yes, some American protectorates have been coasting off the US, but that comes with them resigning their agency on matters of national determination. A world where every nation has competing alignments from its neighbors is world where the threat of war looms on every corner.
The $1.5T military spending of the US Govt, is a 'world peace spending' and in return the US gets to be the reserve currency of the world (and essential wage unilateral economic war on any nation of its choosing). Yes, that's a lot of money, but look at America's superior covid recovery vs all the other Pax-American nations. That difference is entirely owed to being able to print as many $$$$ as it likes.
From that perspective, America's military spending a total win-win. American allies get to save money on military and enjoy guaranteed peace. America gets to stay as wealthy as it likes and be the only nation that can truly impose its will on the world.
Now, the so-called global-south consists of countries that are finding their identity in a world where China is throwing its weight around. They don't value global peace, because they don't know a world before it. They don't value local peace, because they haven't enjoyed much local peace or stability during this Pax-American century. Many global south nations haven't been brainwashed (convinced) into favoring American values as baseline. They don't understand Chinese debt traps. They don't see the value in putting the nation state over the wider global religious identity. They don't value democracy in their bones, because they can't imagine majorities having favorable moderate views in their low-trust societies. Point is, they don't see the amazing win-win that Pax-Americana is. They might play along with it, they will change masters at the drop of a hat. They will dump any values they claim to hold, because it is all performative to them anyway.
That's where American global south allies come into the picture. Israel & India are the only 2 proper liberal western democracies in the region, and that matters. India is more independent and still ridding itself of its soviet scars, but Israel understands the value of Pax-Americana in its bones. And you cannot buy that kind of loyalty. It's the kind of loyalty that comes with a strong belief that any alternative than your current master is a worse one. And for that Israel gets rewarded. It is the only unconditional-American ally in the global south.
It is also why I think the America-India alliance will continue flourishing, even if India occasionally plays both sides. India (now) accepts Pax-Americana & liberal-democracy as the best overlords in their bones. Being a natural adversary to China guarantees India's 'loyalty'. Maybe not as a subject, but at least as a willing partner.
Lastly, to me, MBS (and allied Emirati Sheikhs) are the last peace of this puzzle. They might be the only practicing Muslims who have truly abandoned their global-religious identity in favor of Americanism.
The winds of change are here. The US cannot be the sole-superpower on its own. It needs allies and subjects that stay with it out of both convenience, belief and natural alignment. The EU-Korea-Japan-Canada-US nexus ensured that Global-North and its waters remained 'Peaceful' (by encircling Russia). The South exposes 2 new battle fields. Israel-Saudi-India-Australia-Japan are the 2nd front for encircling China, Oil resource & the Indian Ocean. The final front is around the South Atlantic + Southern Indian Ocean. But, Africa and South America aren't as important, so we haven't seen lines be drawn as strongly just yet. Maybe that'll emerge as the final front in 30-ish years.
So yeah, within that context, American favoritism towards Israel makes a lot of sense.
fartVader
11mo ago
some of these anti-car people could just spend a month actually living in the "car free"
I do, it is amazing. I haven't driven a car once in 2023. I used to have to drive a car everyday on the west coast. I can confidently proclaim that at least all NYC boroughs, Boston (until 2022 MBTA collapse), Mumbai, Madrid, Singapore & Paris can be lived in completely car free.
Note: I have nothing against cars. I literally have an automobile-engineering degree and spent a past life building cars at a big-car co. I love cars, I love road trips and I don't drink just so I can be the happy designated driver. It's just ....... Cars just make no sense as the primary mode of transport in an urban environment. Yeah you can have a car. A fast, spacious and small car. VW Gold R, Model 3 & the Mazda 3 Turbo are better SUVs than SUVs. You just don't need to drive it 99% of the time. Guess what ? The roads are still packed with cars. But now those who NEED to drive can drive, and the rest of us get convenient options.
This can be achieved in smaller towns too. There is high car ownership in college towns (Amherst, Ithaca) and small town New England (Portland Maine), but people still walk around or take transit for most occasions. The car comes out when it's needed.
I can bike, but if I bike I have to carry a 20lb chain with me to lock it
Many major cities now have bike sharing systems around the city which completely eliminates the need to carry your own bike around.
I can walk, but homeless shelters and drug injection sites.
Sounds like Portland, Seattle, SF..... west coast cities are not walkable. They are not even cities. They are dystopian examples of human deterioration. West coast cities are exactly what happens when car culture is unwilling to cede any ground. Not a single wealthy boomer lives in the city core, because highways drop you in the middle of the city core anyway. All 3 of these cities are designed with meeting the needs of car based visitors more than the needs of the residents. And it shows.
The parks are de facto homeless encampments, meaning if I want to take my kids to play, guess where I go? 30 minutes out into the suburbs.
I fully agree with you here. Progressives are idiots. Stringent enforcement of public-safety is first step towards convincing people to move out of cars.
This idea that "boomers like cars and ruined everything by making car centric cities" is absurd and I can only assume is parroted by people who never leave their goon caves.
It is true. They did ruin everything. It's just that it is a self-fulfilling prophecy now. Boomers created the wound and cars were the bandage. So if you ever suggest removal of bandage it gets met with obvious anger. But if you ask for funding to treat the wound itself, it gets treated with confusion and dismissal.
fartVader
9mo ago
If you want to drop one kid off at one activity, the other kid off at a different one, get a week's worth of Costco, and then pick them both up, while changing at least one of the activities every six months, you simply can't beat the car.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Suburban homes have space. Suburban homes have large cars. Suburban homes find groceries to be detour. Costco only exists because large cars & large houses allow families to do groceries in bulk. It's negatives (inability to provide fresh food, fresh bread, 1 day expiry or non-standard items) are also unnoticeable, because you can't get those things in a suburb anyway. You need to drop off kids to school because walking and biking are either unsafe or impossible on suburban roads. The idea of letting kids go to their activities themselves is so impossible to consider, that the car then becomes a solution to a problem of its own creation.
It's like saying that Pandas & superior to Orcas because because they do well in Chinese captivity. Well, the entire Chinese captivity system was an unnatural system created to facilitate the conservation of Pandas. If you are going to compare to animals, then maybe evaluate them outside of a system hand-crafted to benefit one of them.
Why would someone want to solve suburban problems in a city. A city should not have suburban problems at all, emphasis on 'should'.
American suburbs appear great, because honestly, American cities are forced to suck. Even the best ones : 'NYC and Boston' have to be the unrivalled centers of the world to rise above the quicksand that is the American system. Other cities, are straight up terrible. Cities should have city advantages. If the streets are unsafe despite sufficient density and transit, then nothing is going to convince parents to let their kids be independent. If residential and commercial areas are zoned far away from each other, then you can't ever grab groceries 'fresh on the way back'.
What we really talk about when we talk about suburbs is social climbing. the main factor for where people live is the human environment - family, jobs, schools, crime.
Yes-ish. Suburbs are perceived to be higher status because it allowed people to have big families, better schools & lower crime. But, what about suburbs enables any of those 3 things ?
Safety : There is safety in numbers and it hard to commit to the most common crime (car crashes) if you aren't interacting with cars as much. NYC has a lower homicide rate than the median American suburb. American cities are only unsafe because American city police does not enforce crime the same way suburban police would.
Schools : Wealthy places have better schools. When cities are able to self-select for wealthy people like suburbs (Somerville, Newton, Brookline), they have great schools. If anything, cities have access to the best talent and should have better schools as a result. Boston Latin, Stuy High and Bronx Science are 3 of the best schools in the country and they're all in big cities despite much lower property taxes.
Big families : This one is tricky. In an era when most people won't be having more than 2 kids, I can't see why a house needs to be bigger than a 4 bedroom apartment. If anything, a safe city allows your kids to be independent and therefore allows the parents to have more kids without a proportional increase in required work. It is also much easier to setup babysitting when your kids can hang out in a large apartment lounge area or a neighbors house in the same building.
And those points are precisely why Americans live in suburbs. All of these benefits of cities are badly realized in most American cities. People would rather live in good suburbs than bad cities.
fartVader
10mo ago
You've put my feelings into words better than I ever could.
We're not too different. I too am Indian, ADHD riddled, and confused at how un-appreciative my fellow coastal-Americans are of this great nation. My American girlfriend lives out in Europe and refuses to appreciate the great nation for what it is. I quote her from last week : "Screye, we need to talk about settling down in the US and how it is going to shit. Abortion is illegal and everyone is becoming conversative." God bless her.
I was lucky enough to choose the 'right' science, the one with an easier pathway to the US, but that's about it.
All global super powers are ruthless. America too is a ruthless global superpower, one that tries to be benevolent, more so than any that came before. There is no ruthless superpower I'd rather be oppressed by. The US is so wildly productive, that no amount of crumbling infrastructure or urban zombie hordes can so much as dent its economic productivity. It's a fucking cheat code in nation form. Competing is futile.
If that wasn't enough, its secular founding document has an appeal so universal through time and space, that even the best efforts of enemy nations can't stop their best from dreaming of America. The people here are fair and uncorrupt. They try to be race blind, as much as their caveman genes would allow. They don't treat me as an outsider, and all they ask is I try.
The country has issues, but the US is a nation in decline in the same way that Michael Jordan was 'over' after his 1st retirement.
Don't think I don't see the cracks in the pristine facade, the erosion of the meritocracy that made your country glorious. I simply think that if America wakes up and patches a few holes, it can earn the right to slumber again in peace for centuries hence.
All that being said, this is exactly what I thought about Intel, and they some how managed to stay in their slumber until everyone had leap frogged them and it was too late.
fartVader
11mo ago
Nope, if anything, the goal is not to regain Anheuser-Busch as a conservative stronghold. The goal is to inject fear in every other organization, that 1 mistake is all it will take. Anheuser-Busch might be forgiven if they grovel, but not if they apologize.
Conservatives do not want SJW hires to be rendered impotent. They want SJW hires to be screened out at the hiring phase itself. Sadly, given the pool they're hiring from, that seems like a lost cause.
fartVader
8mo ago
I and my girlfriend have been putting on some weight lately and we've struggled with constructively helping each other lose it. We've both been wondering how to communicate : 'you're not unfit or fat, I still find you attractive, but a few pounds off wont hurt' to each other. (We've both started hovering around 25 BMI)
She's supposed to meet my parents by the end of the year. Turns out Indian parents are a great excuse. Indians are famously direct in calling fat people fat. So, that's been a good excuse to start actively pushing each other to lose weight without your self-esteem being shanked every time. 'We aren't losing weight for each other, we are doing it for the glaring eyes of society'. Both us are intelligent enough to know what's going on, but somehow the lie still functions effectively.
Tech lad that I am, I'm still learning how to balance soft-landing so your loved ones don't feel attacked vs proving direct feedback to avoid passive aggressiveness. It's getting better, but it's some verbal IQ gymnastics for sure. Also, timing. Timing is everything.
IMO, the kind of person who has sex with more than a critical mass of people was already broken to begin with or will be sufficiently broken by the end of it. This applies to both men and women.
An endless supply of sex completely distances you from the intimate nature of it, converting it into a bare transaction. When viewed as a transaction, you can't help but view everything about it with contempt. This is especially true about rock-stars who can clearly see the proportionality between their rising fame and rising body-count.
When a girl say[s] NO it means no.
I believe this, but it is womankind's responsibility to enforce this on all other women. When 50%+ of the 1000 women this dude has slept with has said some variant of 'noooo stoooop' before actively engaging in sex, No does not mean No.
"No means No" is something I and a good few of my principled peers actively practice. That being said, almost all of them have stories where women expect men to make non-consensual moves by 'reading their signs'. Signs that I can confidently tell you, are NOT consistent. It is a good principle to always ask for consent, but it is a well-acknowledged losing-move if you want to get laid.
during an emotionally abusive and controlling relationship that lasted for about three months
Things get even more fucked, when a guy has some impression of initial consent and then exploits that for increasingly extreme sexual fantasies.
Russell Brand sounds like a terrible human. He is one among thousands of typical frat-boy assholes who treat women like trash. If a woman ever speaks out against them, they're either ignored or bullied by other women. At the same time, men like Russell Brand keep getting bodies thrown at them, as long as they are on the side of the system. Ideally, these men would get cancelled
The present form of accountability culture is completely broken. It involves further scaring the principled and paranoid, while the brazen and unaccountable continue to live life as they always had. Every once in a while, the iconoclast (Brand) has the hammer brought down on him. But only after the damage has been done.
David Mitchell's legendary rant remains as relevant as ever.
If women want to explore extreme kinks on 1 night stands with the same top 5% of physically desirable men and have consent be conveyed through soft-hints, then you will inevitably incentivize habitual line-steppers into occupying that 5% space.
I am all for a society where everyone has the freedom to do what they want without patriarchal oppression holding them down. BUT, we need to be practical about 'cause and effect'. People are going to behave according to their incentives. And in this world, narcissists like Russell Brand are incentivized to be aggressive, abusive and unaccountable liars. As long as that's the case, more Russell Brands will keep popping up. And No, being cancelled after fucking 1000 women is not what accountability looks like. You have to nip it in the bud.
fartVader
9mo ago
Wrote a big comment, and then I refreshed like an idiot and lost it all. Why do I never learn. use an offline text editor.
tl;dr: Doomerism is not culture war, it is THE culture. Life is improving for many, but it is in the middle tier of Maslow's pyramid. We've dismantled the social structures that enabled people to seek the top 3 needs on Maslow's pyramid. Doomerism is people saying, "What's the point of getting all these lower-tier Maslow's needs met so much harder, if that means giving up on the top 3 needs on the pyramid."
p.s: I went into a side rant on housing prices/urbanism/density/social-fabric-of-a-build-environment how it all relates directly to this issue. But, I am the definition of a single issue broken record. So, take it as you will.
fartVader
10mo ago
Don't think this is culture war as much as "it was inevitable".
company moved fast and broke things
I am glad to see SV get torn a new one. As a MechE turned CompSci person, the difference in ethos between both fields is shocking. It is one thing to have a careless approach when human lives aren't at stake. But to then throw shade towards fields where safety is paramount is classic SV hubris.
their physical products kinda suck
Thanks for saying this out loud. Credit where it is due to Apple. It is the only tech company that knows how to make robust physical products.
fartVader
5mo ago
If it was anywhere even near sentient AI then the Feds would have taken over by now. No, I don't mean 1 random DC strategist on the board. I mean that OpenAI's network would have been air-gapped and massive gag orders would have been placed on anyone. No multicolored twitter hearts. OpenAI, for all their generation defining technology, still has a rather spotty record of crying wolf when it comes to sentient AI. I don't think this one is any different.
But, but , but ......... it is likely that they have stumbled upon another step change improvement over GPT4, which likely means they can destroy another few hundred startups, businesses and careers.
It wouldn't take too much to make all but the top 10% of the following jobs obsolete:
- Translators
- Data Analysts
- Simple CRUD backend makers
- Simple Form/static front end makers
- Generic Consultants
- Virtual Doctors
Note, the biggest issue with Agents has been that they lose context part way through that process or meander. But all current agent architectures are super-naive when compared to the kind of swarm-RL stuff that has been out for a good decade. With GPT-4 Turbo 128 they have effectively solved all RAG, which allows it to pretty much surf the entire internet without meandering for a lot longer. Thus making its intelligence upto-date and functionally infinite.
My guess is that they have managed to fully stabilize agents for certain usecases and are fairly sure that they can deploy 'robot employees' for certain jobs in the span of a year.
But I might be wrong.
If it is just better MCTS, slightly better RAG and better GPT-4 RLHF then I will be soo disappointed. Yes, it is much better, but honestly, it speaks more to Google's incompetence and Facebook's complete not-giving-a-fuck for OpenAI to build up this kind of lead. None of this is fundamentally novel.
We are in an era of free-lunch where people think OpenAI are the best around just because everyone around can barely walk without tripping over themselves. (I say this as someone who still considers OpenAI to be the best applied engineering team assembled since Xerox Parc)
fartVader
5mo ago
I like that you gave the example of India. It is filled with instances of "place vs place". If anything, Kashmir is the more recognized version of 'place vs place' within India. Kashmir is well known, but the political instability around the region has made it difficult to recommend as a tourist place.
Kolikkumalai India vs NaPali Hawaii.
The western ghats, eastern 7-sisters and Himalayan areas are seriously underexplored.
I especially see the 'place vs place' phenomenon with food.
Pate, Escargots, Foie Gras & Caviar are all seen as delicacies. On the other hand, goat brain (bheja), frogs legs, tripe, gizzards, etc. are all seen as disgusting offal eaten by barbarians.
I see a similar trend in American Carnival food vs east-asian street food. Indulgent street food vs shitty gas station food. Korean street food gets praised to high heaven, while the exact same stuff in the USA gets made fun of for being hill-billy food.
fartVader
7mo ago
There are 3 kinds of books:
- Fiction novels
- Textbooks
- The rest
Fiction Novels entertain & enlighten. Textbooks educate. If your textbook can be condensed into a blog it isn't a good text book. If your Novel can be enjoyed just as easily in a video, then it isn't a good Novel. A book should be borne out of necessity, not narcissism. Sometimes you are desperate to express an idea or tell and story, and every medium falls short. Books are the last resort. But they work.
Growing up, I thought I was immature not not being able to enjoy non-fiction. But, I've since realized that non-fiction books are prime candidates for blog-i-zation. If the cliff notes for a book is no better than reading the book itself, then that's a gross failure.
The best non-fiction is either sufficiently fictionalized to be fiction novel, or sufficiently dense to be a textbook. There are no other types of books.
fartVader
8mo ago
To add to this, the Spanish women's team was already very unhappy with the Spanish federation.
They were in open protest before the world cup, and won by ignoring their coach's instructions and with half the 1st team 'exiled' from the squad.
Vilda and the federation have been under fire for nearly a year over failing to create a professional environment for the team. A group of 15 players sent individual but identical emails in September 2022 asking not to be called up until certain changes were made, including Golden Ball winner Aitana Bonmati. The players' complaints reportedly included insufficient preparation for matches, including travel arrangements and a limited amount of staff, as well as coaches who restricted their freedom during camps.
The federation and players held discussions last winter and spring over improving conditions, which led three of the 15, plus three who publicly supported them but did not send the emails, to eventually be included in the World Cup squad.
The federation continues to back Vilda despite the complaints, with president Luis Rubiales saying on Thursday that the coach has "forgotten the people … who wanted to destroy him." The official account for Spain's women's national team also posted a photo of Vilda kissing the World Cup trophy after Sunday's final with the caption "Vilda in."
They won despite Rubiales (who put his weight behind the coach). He was the villain in the story even before the kiss. (Yes, the team was that absurdly strong. Sort of like a USA NBA team)
The previous post annoyed me. It was written by someone who went looking for a culture war angle, and came out with the least charitable interpretation of the whole thing, just so it looked like SJWs had gone too far.
Some men deserve to cancelled. (or at least fired for gross incompetence)
fartVader
15d ago
Does a Fullstack Engineer on here want to found a startup together with a larger vision of solving communication on the internet?
I'll have a demo for y'all in a month, but if you're keen to take a leap of faith and wanna know specifics, hit me up.
Internet strangers are reputed as neckbeards in their mom's basement, but some of us do well for ourselves. We are both well-compensated engineers but neither of us do web-work / full-stack work. For grounding, we're targetting YC W25 and have a well-defined product plan with sensible unit economics. For once, cynical quokkas might just be the right people for this kind of endeavor.
I'll be doing it anyway, but you know what they say : "2 is a company, 3 is a startup founding team."
Tangential rant.
My roommate who is a 2nd gen american-indian dated a bunch of indian dudes who went to AIIMS Delhi or IIT Bombay and now live in our high COL US city. She obviously has zero context for Indian institutes.
Then i hear her complain one day about how these men she dates only talk about work, never have time, cant make time for hobbies or jusst generally sound self important.....all while showering praises on any ivy league dude she ran into.
The ignorance is mindblowing. This is literally the 0.01 percentile of the country. They were the top 200 smartest Indians among 1 million annual applicants. MIT CS basically hands out free-admits eyes-closed to any IIT top 100 ranker. Some of my closest friends are MIT CS kids, and it is an open secret that the international chinese and Indian kids are straight up smarter. (Might not be as wellrounded tho) The funniest part is that all of these men are insanely humble, becuase thwy know their brand does all the talking for them. But in this case, they just come off as under-signalling.
Then when her dates dont work out, she'll say something like : "my expectations arent too high. I just want date someone like the guys i go on dates with, but that'll have time for me."
Lady, I dont think you even understand that youre dating the 10% of the 0.001 percentile of India who are both mindbogglingly smart and somehow hot enough for you to swipe on them. Her ex worked at google and paid for a whole Euro-trip and she says she doesnt care about how much money her partner has....... girl.......
Its a little sad to know just how monumentally delusional the expectations on these dating apps are. Also a little sad to hear people say things like : "Green cards to the US are not that hard. My friend did his medicine from Aiims / is a professor after studying at IIT bombay" and he got in. You should try something like that."
Bruh, I'd have better odds if I tried winning the lottery.
fartVader
9mo ago
Do the stats on trans people being child abusers pan out ?
More specifically, I am talking about MTF trans people getting into positions of power or supervision (however small, but still) and taking advantage of it for child abuse or sexual crimes in general. The plural of anecdotes is not data, but more than a few anecdotes of a statistically unlikely combination absolutely raises alarm bells.
No value judgement here. Want to start with tallying the numbers first.
For having an unironically decent track record as president ? (bad human, worse husband, terrible role model.....solid track record)
- Putin did not invade Ukraine
- Got Abraham Accords signed
- Correctly re-sanctioned Iran
- Restarted the on-shoring of American manufacturing
- Economy flourished until Covid
- Started building the wall. I made fun of it, but I was wrong. It is necessary and urgent
- Made illegal immigration to the US seem unsafe, and led to reduced illegal immigration attempts
- Got the Vaccine to approval at 'light speed'
- Tried to keep lockdowns to a minimum, which in hindsight was especially important to economic recovery and schooling
- Served as a useful deregulation counter-weight to the Senate/House's pro-regulation instincts.
- Correctly banned Tiktok
The way I see it, Trump doesn't give a fuck. Ramaswamy, DeSantis and especially Haley care too about much about their career after politics. This means they are more or less beholden to the whims of the American elite. Also, after seeing them debate, I do not think Haley has any change of victory. DeSantis has sounded more and more bitchy as the campaign has lost momentum and Ramaswamy is a little too early to the game. US is not there yet, racially.
So as much as Trump is not the ideal candidate to face Trump Biden, he is the only one who might win and maintain his anti-establishment status. Yeah, a white Ramaswamy or a less whiny DeSantis would have had a better chance. But, that's not on offer.
edit: Note that I am talking about his presidency rather than the Republican house. A republican house + senate have shown themselves to be pretty incompetent. However, they don't have much to do with the President.
Commentators in the west frequently tempt themselves into 'us vs the rest of the world' narratives. Non Christian / Non Anglo-Saxon societies are all viewed from a 1000 ft lens, where all nuance is readily thrown out in favor of stereotypes. India isn't some shallow extrapolation of headlines you've seen over a few years of news. It has layers and layers of nuance, each of which follows millenia long lineages. I couldn't tell you if Indians still like Shahrukh Khan, and you've got external viewers confidently predicting a deterministic path for the country.
From a civilizational perspective, India has the longest history of being a sanctuary state for those persecuted from outside. Jews, Parsis, Buddhists and in fact Sikhs and Muslims (Ismailis, Shia, Ahmediyyas, ex-Muslims) too have found India to be the one country that has welcomed them with open arms. India is the only civilizational state, that has never bothered to proselytize or expand past its borders. Most of India's famous losses have come after being too trusting or too forgiving. Sounds like a liberal place to me.
From a recent perspective, no country has had its democracy tested more often than India. Yet, its democracy has held together. The electoral process is iron clad and no-one dares interfere with the electoral commission. The Supreme court routinely overturns the Govt. of the day, and occasionally even the titular President (Gyani ZailSingh) has refused to fall in line. In the face of much resistance, the institutions have remained strong and healthy. Western nations like Canada and the Scandinavian block have never faced similar existential threats to their democracy. A homogeneous people living under the gentle embrace of Pax Americana. I'd argue that India is a much stronger democracy than any nation barring US/UK & France.
India is not western, yet. I agree and I rejoice. The Indic civilization has undergone 1000 years of erosion at the hands of Turkic people, Brits and some of our very own Coconuts. But, we've preserved some religion agnostic ideas which have shaped the very foundation of life in this subcontinent. Indians haven't fully westernized yet, and there remains some hope to recover ideas that aren't inherent Abrahmic. Not sure where that will take us, but most immediately, that little bit of resistance might be the one thing that lets India maintain a 2.0 fertility rate, unlike the rest of the world undergoing population collapse.
fartVader
8mo ago
haha, that's the thing. She's already doing most things right. Eats salad for all lunches, walks a lot, works out regularly.
But she has a fatal love for chocolate and eats like shit when travelling. And she has been travelling A LOT.
I actually think it will be a lot easier for both of us to stay a decent weight once we move in together. But long distance has made that especially hard.
Do individuals relations need to be so strongly hyphenated with the zeitgeist. With individual relations, everything is negotiable.
Just talk to them. Make your boundaries known without having an explosion. Tell them in clear words that this behavior is not acceptable. Be ready to erect boundaries if need be. Talk to your wife before you do anything. Ideally, she will take care of it for you.
That being said, I struggle to make sense of people who are logical about everything except religion. Not so much about the existence of God or the social technology that is religion. I mean religion as the arbitrary yet oddly specific rituals that can make or break your entry into heaven.
It is one thing to delude yourself for comfort or to believe in the social value of religion. But, to live in a world of Science in 2023 and to think that the specific sub-set of rules outlined by your pastor will get you into "Christian heaven" is some proper hypocrisy. By definition, if these people believe in the power of these specific rituals to get you into heaven, then don't 99% of all living humans go to not-heaven. (hell?). Even if these in-laws are right, then surely a place where 99% of people go after death, can't be THAT bad.
I know, "2005 called, they want their Christopher Hitchens rants back". But still, do these people never reflect on what they believe in ? Even for a moment ?
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