netstack
Texas is freedom land
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User ID: 647
netstack
Texas is freedom land
8d ago
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.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
10d ago
There’s nothing wrong with saying that you find a comparison ludicrous, but we ask that you leverage a more substantial complaint than “TDS.”
netstack
Texas is freedom land
29d ago
When you move a supply curve with demand held constant, you change price by changing quantity. Less labor for higher prices. This is appealing to the (remaining) workforce. It’s not so great to the customers.
Same as cartelization. Same as tariffs. Like every form of protectionism, it’s the customers who get the bill.
Given that I am a customer, rather than a competing worker, for jobs like construction, I don’t expect to see any benefit from slashing the construction labor supply.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
29d ago
Man. I feel like you're hitting a giant blindspot here.
Maybe you're right in saying that, with the appropriate definitional games, one can peel materialism like a banana. But isn't there merit to the framework which is hardest to peel?
The Christian framework comes apart at the slightest interaction with evidential standards. This has lead countless mystics and gurus to spin off their own heresies which try and rehabilitate it. Gold tablets, ESP, Arianism, whatever. None of them do any better than "consensus materialism."
Or maybe I'm misreading you entirely and tilting at windmills. Sorry.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7d ago
Yes, sure. I am absolutely willing to believe that the government covered up one or more of these things. But not on the basis of one guy listing his favorite coincidences. If the only reason you encounter a data point is because someone picked it for you, it’s not evidence. It’s trivia. It’s an excuse to repeat whatever you already believe, maybe feel a bit clever about it.
What’s the expected fatality rate for training? Is there historical data? Previous spikes whenever a U.S. ally fights some terrorists? Who knows? Who the fuck cares? Some guy on the Internet said special forces “tend to” do this, so it must be real.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
12d ago
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.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
22d ago
netstack
Texas is freedom land
22d ago
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
Sorry, I'm not trying to speak for you, specifically.
I am assuming that maiq, who thinks the people in charge of crappy media got their jobs "without ever meeting a person that isn’t upper middle to upper class professionals," would view such volunteering as a stunt.
if it's significantly less common
Sure. But is it? Do you have any reason to believe that the modal screenwriter used to be more in touch? Because I keep running into examples that look pretty similar to today's.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
8d ago
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?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
20d ago
Exactly. Maybe there’s something analogous in the way certain states recognize different corporate structures? There are only a few which allow forming anonymous LLCs.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
29d ago
Just finished Stormlight and really enjoyed it. Yes, people will point out stylistic/prose issues, and they'll be absolutely right. But Wind and Truth succeeded as the plate-spinning, world-expanding, every-new-detail-an-entire-sequel-hook kind of book I was looking for.
For something completely different, I'm alternating back to Annals of the Former World, a set of geology essays. I mentioned the first one last year, but apparently never commented on the next two, so here we go:
In Suspect Terrain was a hit piece on plate tectonics. Great premise, slightly confusing execution, because it was really more like a series of reasonable objections to people in the "new theory" hype cycle. I can't tell if that means the main character was stating the obvious, or if she really was a visionary who was vindicated in the next 40 years of textbooks. The coolest part was that, yes, plate tectonics was new in the 50s and 60s. I always kind of assumed it was settled in the 1800s like so much fossil and timeline stuff.
Rising from the Plains, though, was amazing. It's a history of one family stretching back to the westward expansion into Wyoming. At the same time, it's a narrative of how the Laramie and Medicine Bow mountains got where they are today. Outrageous cowboy anecdotes share pages with the solemn march of Deep Time. Part of the charm was having to keep a map open to cross-reference. I highly recommend this one.
Anyway, the next essay up is Assembling California. So far he seems to be coming at the region from both the western fault lines and the eastern Sierra Nevada. As always, the prose has been delightful. Here's hoping it keeps up.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
21d ago
Obergefell is correct. The right to marriage does not distinguish between same-sex and opposite-sex couples just as it doesn’t distinguish between same- or mixed-race ones.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
21d ago
I would say that marriage is firmly under “equal protection under the law.”
netstack
Texas is freedom land
21d ago
As I understand it, Virginia v. Loving says yes.
I will admit that I’m not an expert. But I don’t think the dissents rejected the idea that marriage was a right protected by the 14th. They were more concerned with 1) whether the historical use of the term included the opposite-sex qualifier and 2) whether the due process clause protected positive rights in addition to negative ones. Or maybe that was just Thomas?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
21d ago
It’s no hair off my chin.
Seriously. On the long list of questionable bits of jurisprudence, intervening in an interfaith beard dispute is incredibly niche. There’s plenty of things more threatening than the government overstepping its prosecution authority.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
22d ago
Fighting Hamas is a just war. Reprisals against civilians, on the other hand, are broadly prohibited. Since Hamas has a vested interest in entangling the two, it is very hard for Israel to keep its hands clean.
The strongest criticisms of Israel involve the parts of it which appear profoundly uninterested in doing so. There are more of these than I would like.
Regardless of intent, every dead civilian lets critics pattern-match to My Lai. That’s the kind of event which shaped the antiwar psyche.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
27d ago
That might create people.
If you only drive sober, use your headlights, and follow all laws, you can still get in a wreck. When that happens, should you be held to the same standard as a reckless drunk driver?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
22d ago
True, but they don’t help beat the allegations.
It would be much harder to accuse Israel of genocide if they studiously avoided anything that hit the general populace. Water, power, etc.
But of course that would come at some cost in Israeli lives. Understandably not popular in Israel.
Goesaert v. Cleary: “Only when the owner of the bar was a sufficiently close relative to the woman bartender, it was argued, could it be guaranteed that such immorality would not be present.” 1948. Overturned in 1976.
Schulz v. Wheaton Glass: it turns out making identical job listings but paying the women’s jobs less actually counts as discrimination. 1970.
US v. Virginia et al.: no, spinning up a second school to allow male/female segregation is not, in fact, separate but equal. 1996.
I find it obvious that second-wave feminism was legitimately fighting oppression. The same is doubly true for racial minorities. There are plenty of reasons why the Civil Rights Act was significant, rather than a formality.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
How am I supposed to interpret this, then?
These are not people who had traveled widely and read, they go to college to learn to write (or make films)
I think there’s a no-true-Scotsman where each of these boring, normal careers gets recast as something exciting and meaningful. Is a stint working as a busboy really that unusual? Is speeding? Surely someone in today’s Hollywood has cleared this bar.
High-schoolers can volunteer in foreign countries and people will wave it off as PMC strivers padding their resumes. But when a rich kid stumbles into film school he must have collected some valuable experience. It’s a double standard in service of the age-old complaint. Those darn kids just don’t respect their elders.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
22d ago
More effort than this, please.
It’s awfully hard to argue with one-liners.
Hmm, what can “we” learn by summing your entire outgroup up as one monolithic movement, then gaming out an elaborate social strategy?
Probably not much. Definitely nothing “optimal.” I think you’re overfitting a model, and in a way that just happens to bait agreement from a certain sort of ambiguously-autistic Internet commenter.
I suppose I also think you’re assuming the conclusion. Perhaps, for bait, that goes without saying?
Point is, your model kind of sucks.
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