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Texas is freedom land

9 followers   follows 3 users  
joined 2022 September 05 17:27:40 UTC

				

User ID: 647

netstack

Texas is freedom land

9 followers   follows 3 users   joined 2022 September 05 17:27:40 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 647

Maybe you don’t know about them because they’re not actually reasonable?

Like, the same reasoning applies here as to underwater pyramids. Or moon landing skeptics. Or celebrity gossip. It’s bad epistemics.

Bastards? No, I’m saying ugly couples are willing to have plenty of kids in wedlock. A guy whose farm feeds 10 is liable to end up with 10 kids whether he pairs off with the prettiest girl in the village or an absolute goblin.

Also I guess I doubt the bastard survivability claim.

First I’ve heard of it.

You know what I have seen, recently? Broccoli.

If you search “kids hate broccoli,” you can find countless articles parroting this un-American talking point. Some even suggest that “science” has solved this classic mystery. They’re citing the same study from 2021 which something something enzymes something sulfur.

Is this a psy-op? Maybe a ploy by those regulators over in Brussels?

That doesn’t make a ton of sense.

You’d only get a selection pressure if love matches offered a competitive advantage to attractive/attractive couples over attractive/ugly or ugly/ugly ones. My understanding of male sexuality suggests that partner hotness was not actually the limiting factor. Ugly/ugly couples were and are definitely willing to pop out as many kids as they can afford.

Miles, Mutants and Microbes, a Miles Vorkosigan anthology. It’s got a very different voice than either the stereotypical or reactionary flavors of modern sci-fi. More to say on this once I’ve finished it.

I’m reading it as a palate cleanser from those John McPhee geology essays. The last one was about California fault lines, which are simultaneously awe-inspiringly massive and, uh, kind of dull. Not my favorite. Plus, I was too young to remember the 1989 World Series earthquake which kind of inspired the piece, so that was lost on me.

There’s nothing wrong with saying that you find a comparison ludicrous, but we ask that you leverage a more substantial complaint than “TDS.”

Normally I like reading your legal dispatches, but I don’t see how these are fun at all!

If they’re coming to opposite conclusions, then I don’t see what makes you say they’re using the same calculus.

Sure they are. Some more than others.

You’re treating “cruelty-free” like it’s “vegan,” which has an obvious single condition to meet. But it’s more like “pescatarian,” an awkward wastebasket taxon that doesn’t quite match the literal name. It’s just that most people don’t bother distinguishing oysters from lobsters from tuna even though they are happy to draw the line at whales. We could add prefixes until we partitioned out the 12 principled pescatarians, but it is not generally considered relevant.

The partition for “Cruelty-free” means not complicit in a subset of acts which are considered cruel. It’s not exhaustive, and you can catch practitioners in weird edge cases. But 99% of the time you can get them to agree, hey, that thing they do to male chickens is in the “cruel” category, right? Then they’re supposed to avoid it.

How is this different from asking pescatarians if whales are fish?

If I’m willing to pay $5 for a coffee, and someone else says it’s worth $100, why wouldn’t I think that person is misguided?

I don’t think this is true, but I suppose it’s rather hard to prove.

There’s no particular statement that crossed the line, but if I had to point to the biggest red flag, I’d blame the scare quotes.

Don't paraphrase unflatteringly. Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

I’m not convinced that most people make decisions on that timescale.

It’s the kind of sentiment that convinced communists the world revolution was coming any…minute…now.

Probably not.

AI is on the part of the hype curve where it will get included in press releases for any and all reasons. If the news is bad, AI will be mentioned as a mitigation strategy. If it’s good, it becomes a growth plan.

My company had a little mini-reorg recently. It also consisted of shuffling some matrix management, and it also gave lip service to new AI tools. I hope no one expects a defense contractor to lead the charge in adopting AI-driven requirements.

I don’t know about you, but I have all sorts of preferences which don’t lead to minmaxing.

Oysters are particularly weird, to be honest. No brain! They just sort of stick around, filtering the water. Like plants, but meaty.

I don’t trust them.

I don’t care if they’re living. I care if they experience something that I would recognize as pain. The closer they get to having our sort of neurotransmitters or whatever, the more empathy I feel.

Surely aborting fetuses for having a trait has a different moral calculus than removing that trait while leaving the person otherwise intact?

I think that level of imprecision is pretty darn normal when describing preferences. It’s not a technical term like “gluten-free” or “kosher.”

Hell, even the latter is subject to complex edge cases.

Excluded middle, no?

You can’t point to the most useful examples of suffering and conclude that all suffering must be at least as valuable.

Pretty much, except it’s neither silencing nor unjust.

You and Turok are welcome to state your true facts in a suitably polite, cooperative fashion.

Congratulations! You’ve advanced from lazy, uncharitable snarling at your enemies to. Uh. Marginally higher-effort snarling at the same people.

It doesn’t look like you are arguing to understand anything. It looks more like you’re picking fights. This is an immense pain in the ass and against various rules.

One week ban.

specific niche

This weekend, I stumbled into a crossover post 1) between my favorite world-war-punk logistics MMO and 2) Steel Panzer. That wasn’t the weird part. Apparently the mod author had commissioned unit art from a Twitter artist with the following bio:

I may be drawing furries, femboys, NSFW, and guns. I realize some of you may not be comfortable with one of these.

I suspect—but I can never be sure—that the guns are supposed to be the dealbreaker. Twitter is a foreign country.

Is it a heavy read?

That sounds either kickass or pornographic. I could believe both.

If I were writing to a public forum, asking for advice about my lurid love affair, I’d take any opsec I could get.

I should probably do more here.