fluid_pride
No bio...
User ID: 621
fluid_pride
1yr ago
I will second this recommendation. I got my CTM shortly after college and it was an amazing experience. I met lots of interesting people and it did wonders for my social skills. No organization is perfect but the Toastmasters groups I've been in were pretty fantastic.
fluid_pride
5mo ago
Don't forget that "born this way" is self-justifying as well as unchanging. If you're "born this way" it's "natural" and good and any shaming or even different treatment is bigotry.
fluid_pride
7mo ago
And someone who is African American is more likely to know the will of African Americans than someone who isn't.
Not to derail this thread, but I think this statement is mostly false. It used to seem self-evident to me. More and more, though, I think class and occupation are much more relevant.
Two points as to why: a) People like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have done more to harm black people in the US than all the KKK members combined. b) Black people are not a monolith (especially wrt the trans/gay stuff) even if they have a lot of statistical and biological things in common across the entire race.
It seems to me that you would probably agree that "Someone who is White is more likely to know the will of White Americans than someone who isn't" is kind of a meaningless statement. To the extent that it's true, it's trivial.
I recognize that this is probably one of the deepest core progressive concepts, though, so I don't expect many on the left to be eager to abandon it. I just think it's false and around here we should note stuff like that.
fluid_pride
10mo ago
I recall a story about a guy being deported for rape and the whole plane protesting until he was released (and went on to murder someone else). If the population is clamoring for more "enrichment" how is mass deportation even plausible?
fluid_pride
10mo ago
That's not a tax loophole, it's fraud. A loophole is a legal, non-fraudulent way to avoid taxes and is typically the result of the state trying to use the tax code to do social engineering.
fluid_pride
10mo ago
That's actually a pretty good analogy for how you're using it. Well done!
fluid_pride
11mo ago
Let's give these guys the benefit of the doubt.
Not anymore, no. The benefit of the doubt has been weaponized and only ever runs in one direction. Reading about this case led me to discovering the new paradigm for purse snatching. The thief approaches the victim and says, "give me back my bag!" On the surface, this looks like it could plausibly be a legitimate case of someone picking up the wrong bag. That's what it's for, to induce in normal people just enough momentary confusion for the thief to take off with the bag. Four "teens" hanging around the bike rental deserve absolutely zero benefit of the doubt.
fluid_pride
1yr ago
I agree with what you're saying here, in general. And I think that even if the thirst streamers didn't exist, the ordinary streamers who are just streaming-while-female would still end up with subscribers just there to fantasize about dating them. Anytime a female does something on the internet, some guy will try to "send bobs and vagene" her. There's a hilarious example out there of a guy posting Botticelli's Birth of Venus on twitter and getting marriage proposals. With that in mind, deepfakes are inevitable. There are even deepfakes of Martha Stewart, after all.
At the same time, the rise of monetized streams and sites like onlyfans (spit) have really weaponized this tendency. That's bad for the guys whose wallets are getting drained, obviously, but it's also bad for the normie women who just want to share their hobbies. The thirst streamers are definitely part of the problem and they're making everything worse for everyone. Because of that, I have no sympathy for deepfakes of thirst streamers.
fluid_pride
1yr ago
Does it actually generate wealth and competence or merely attract it? If you raise a middle class kid in San Francisco is he going to be better off than the same kid raised in San Diego or San Jose or San Houston? If you found Twitter in Miami, does it do better or worse than if it were founded in San Francisco?
fluid_pride
1yr ago
there is in fact a legal definition of grooming in the US
That website is awful and looks like it was written by non-native speakers and definitely not lawyers. There may indeed be a legal definition of grooming in the US, but that website is not it. The citations in that article refer to anti-trafficking laws and, being Federal laws, require crossing a state line to be enforceable. It says nothing about grooming as anyone here has used the term.
fluid_pride
3mo ago
If you look at what his supporters are saying, they trust him more than any other candidate to do the things they think they want him to do. That this requires a huge suspension of disbelief is just part of the process.
MBD of National Review told a story recently of asking his driver why he supports Trump. The driver said he thinks military experience is important and Trump went to a military style school for a while. MBD asked him if he knew that DeSantis actually served in the Navy for six years (as a lawyer) and the driver admitted that he knew this. He just counted Trump's boarding school experience as more relevant than active duty service.
He starts from the premise that Trump is his guy and any evidence is weighted to support that conclusion. Somehow, Trump has convinced a huge segment of the population that he's "their guy." It baffles me, too, but it seems that that's all there is to it.
fluid_pride
4mo ago
This is also the attitude of the conservative Texans I personally know. Homosexuality is tolerated, faggotry is not.
fluid_pride
4mo ago
The closest is probably the eastern euro countries where public homosexuality has legal restrictions
The closest in my opinion is Japan, in which public homosexuality is tolerated to the extent that it conforms to longstanding dramatic/performance norms (eg okage). Private homosexuality is permitted but not encouraged and generally considered shameful. The vibe as I understand it is "be gay if you have to, but keep it to yourself".
fluid_pride
4mo ago
Would that the pro-gay-marriage camp shared your disdain for state sanction. As it stands, forcing everyone else, including the state, to recognize gay "marriage" was an explicit goal. Partly, this was because state sanction included some obvious benefits, such as end-of-life care decisions, intestate succession, tax status, etc.
fluid_pride
7mo ago
The appointment does not supersede the usual election formalities. So there will be a primary and general election. It's just that, as you note, primary opponents will be discouraged and the general will reliably elect the Dem candidate. It's not like a Harlem Globetrotters game; they actually do have to hold a real election.
fluid_pride
7mo ago
National Review was speculating that this was maybe a chance to punt Kamala off of the ticket and get her to agree to the essentially lifetime appointment to that Senate seat. Newsome appoints her, she steps down, Newsome takes her spot as the VP candidate.
fluid_pride
10mo ago
taxing large fortunes going to people who did nothing to earn them directly is good
I strongly disagree with this. It is no business of the state to decide how anyone spends their money after death. What is the meaningful difference between giving your children $10M when you die versus giving that to a local animal shelter? The animal shelter didn't do anything to "earn" that money either. It's the decedent's money and the only reason the state can take any of it is because the owner isn't around to protest anymore. If you can't do it to people when they're alive and able to complain about it, you shouldn't be able to do it to them when they're dead and can't fight back.
fluid_pride
4mo ago
And don't forget that the Chinese (at the very least) are actively looking for ways to degrade Harvard's (and other Western universities) reputation. English, Japanese, Chinese, French, Swiss, South Korean, etc. universities aren't going to cry if Harvard gets knocked off its perch. There's a whole world out there waiting for a chance to step into the prestige circle.
fluid_pride
4mo ago
I was just saying that presumably the intended outcome for the prosecution wouldn't be just to harass but to actually convict.
Right, but I think his point was that even if they'd prefer to convict (maximum punishment), they'll cheerfully settle for causing years of pain (guaranteed minimum punishment). Even if you (the defendant) win, you lose, and people will think twice about that kind of wrongthink in the future. The intended outcome is to suppress this kind of speech.
fluid_pride
11mo ago
Unfortunately, I think you're probably right, especially in the third point. I'm not sure the second point matters because, as you said, that already happens all the time with everything anyway.
Getting the public on board with AI safety is a different proposition from public support of AI in general, so my point was to get the Blue Tribe invested in the alignment problem. Your third point is very helpful in getting the Red Tribe invested in the alignment problem, which would also move the issue from "AI yes/no?" to "who should control the safety protocols that we obviously need to have?"
I should also clarify that I don't actually think there is any role for government here. The Western governments are too slow and stupid to get anything meaningful done in time. The US assigned Kamala Harris to this task. The CCP and Russia, maybe India, are the only other places where government might have an effect, but that won't be in service of good alignment.
It will have to be the Western AI experts in the private sector that make this happen, and they will have to resist Woke AI. So maybe we don't actually need public buy-in on this at all? It's possible that the ordinary Red/Blue Tribe people don't even need to know about this because there isn't anything they can do for/against it. All they can do is vote or riot and neither of those things help at all.
If that's the case, then the biggest threat to AI safety is not just the technical challenge, it's making sure that the anti-racist/DEI/HR people currently trying to cripple ChatGPT are kept far away from AI safety.
fluid_pride
11mo ago
This is a great point. In some sense, this is the situation we had with the CDC. It was a trusted institution that was able to play around with gain-of-function because its reputation indicated that it would only ever use technology to fight disease, not win at superplauge war. It was limited to disease-type stuff, though, and the AI would presumably be able to predict and head off any kind of threat. Assuming, like you said, that we can trust it.
I think it makes "pausing" AI research impossible. There's no way to stop everyone from continuing the research. If the united West decides to pause, China will not, and it's not clear that the CCP is thinking about AI safety at all. The only real option is figuring out how to make a safe AI before someone else makes an unsafe AI.
fluid_pride
1yr ago
The fucking President met with Dylan Mulvaney, on HD video, visible from the little clairvoyant in everyone's pocket. It's over.
Sure, and in 2083 this will get the same treatment as the "Democrats" in the KKK
(Byrd), and the ones who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the ones who voted to expand slavery into every new state at the 1860 Democratic Convention. To wit, "Those were actually Republicans."
fluid_pride
11mo ago
I remember seeing a bunch of weird Grand Theft Auto images on imgur years ago that were supposedly Russian number station posts.
fluid_pride
11mo ago
This is exactly the analysis that converted me from loathing college football to a begrudging support. I still don't enjoy the hype, but I can now see the good things football programs bring to the environment. I want people to be able to do fencing, curling, archery, golf, soccer, track, etc. I think those are excellent channels for character development. If football makes all of that possible, then I support football.
But that's the mechanism to get people to invest time and effort in these lawsuits. For individual cases, giving the lawyers a shot at a huge payoff is what enables them to fight big companies with lots of resources to spend on defense. And in class action cases, especially those where most of the class members end up with $20 gift cards or a year of credit monitoring, most of the money goes from the defendant to the people who did all of the work putting together the case.
More options
Context Copy link