odd_primes
9d ago
The AI-airbrushed photos thing did happen apparently:
odd_primes
12d ago
The demand for labor at $0 is infinite. No matter what you set your immigration target at, companies will still kick and scream about having a "labor shortage" by which they mean a shortage of labor at the price they want to pay. Taking their claims at face value is ridiculous. They are optimizing for their company's own individual benefit, ignoring externalities that impact the public. Low-wage workers have a massive burden on social services like medical care, schools, welfare programs, etc. For some farmer to get a $7/hour agricultural worker, everyone else is paying tens of thousands of dollars per year to subsidize their ongoing existence in the US.
I also think that it is in everyone's interest to argue for efficient and well-ordered, predictable governance, even when they don't agree with the policy goals.
I think most people here would take issue with previous governments intentionally turning a blind eye to illegal migration, rather than the current administration's effort to actually enforce federal law as intended by Congress.
odd_primes
13d ago
The way they implemented blocking is completely idiotic. The one thing you are still able to do is edit your own posts in the thread and add something like "lol this loser blocked me" which helps a bit at least.
odd_primes
13d ago
The problem with that is it eliminates the price incentive to find better ways of doing those shitty low-wage jobs. No VC will invest money into a startup trying to replace sub-$10/hour migrant hotel maids with robots. At $25/hour? Suddenly that's a lot more space to capture value.
Just as an example of this dynamic, look at touchscreen ordering in fast-food restaurants and self-checkout machines. The technology had been there already for 10+ years, what made it finally hit mass adoption was the point where the marginal hourly cost of a unit and its maintenance went below the cost of a worker by a significant enough margin that stores were willing to annoy their customers for a bit as people got used to it. I'd personally rather have an economic makeup that has fewer low-wage jobs and more engineers figuring out automation rather than an underclass of serfs that are paid so poorly (yet subsidized by the taxpayer) that they are impossible to displace.
odd_primes
14d ago
That's how modern propaganda works though. In a country with 340 million people, you don't need to make things up whole cloth. Just find that one outlier incident that suits your narrative and blast it out for weeks until people are suitably outraged.
There's a reason normies were blasted with the George Floyd footage for weeks, but not the Irina Zaretska video, which was arguably even more horrifying.
That seems like more of a media control problem. Right now an illegal immigrant who murders someone typically gets called a "Texas man" with no photo and a stub of an article in the local newspaper. Rare exceptions exist, but they are usually because Trump forced the story into the national conversation, and the national media coverage is to "debunk" whatever he said. Meanwhile these ICE incidents get weeks of breathless coverage by national media, orders of magnitude higher than comparable police shootings that happen every day. It's easy to give normies the ick, the problem is that the right doesn't own the propaganda apparatus.
odd_primes
14d ago
Yes, the terms and conditions they put on access to the data includes a prohibition on the use of the data for studying verboten topics like race and IQ. The "scandal" is that they apparently got access to the data second-hand via another researcher and used it to do science.
odd_primes
16d ago
The military has dereliction of duty - if you refuse to perform your duty or are willfully negligent, that's a UCMJ charge. I think you could apply a similar argument to police. This is not slavery or conscription. A soldier who voluntarily signs up for the military, knowing what it entails, can do a significant amount of harm by simply refusing to do their job in a critical moment. The time to make that call is before enlisting, not months or years later when lives are on the line. By commiting to performing an action and then intentionally failing to perform it in a way that cases harm, that creates liability, potentially criminal liability.
Another good example is fraud. If you pay someone $10k to fix your roof, and two weeks later they "refuse to act" and keep the money, that's a crime. This case is less black and white obviously, but police officers receive pay and benefits in excess of comparable jobs because of the potential danger. Police officers who defect on this social contract should be punished accordingly, whether that's administratively or through criminal charges in the most extreme cases.
odd_primes
16d ago
Tactically autonomous vehicles are a big problem for public transit advocates because cars are much more labor-intensive, and yet still overwhelmingly preferred. Eliminate the need for drivers and instead of cheap bus routes, you will end up with a bunch of low-cost Uber Pools outcompeting the public transit system by doing point-to-point trips more quickly and in a safer, more comfortable environment.
So for anyone who is a public transit activist for environmental or aesthetic reasons, this is a disaster because they lose their best arguments for convincing moderates (cost and efficiency).
I randomly stumbled across that series at the library as a kid and read at least the first couple books. It definitely would not get published today, just due to the premise being anathema to mainstream publishing houses. For context, the series is about a group of young Australians essentially engaging in guerilla warfare and sabotage against foreign invaders (from unspecified countries in Southeast Asia). Looking at the critical acclaim at the time is a fascinating window into the discourse in the '90s and early 2000s.
Edit: Just to be clear my recollection is that the author really tried to avoid racial and geopolitical issues to the point where I found it somewhat confusing and unrealistic. He mostly focused on the characters and their struggle to survive under occupation. The premise is what would make it unpublishable, not his execution of it.
odd_primes
18d ago
Weird, scrolling through the best-selling books list on Wikipedia Matilda is a fair amount behind both James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when it comes to Dahl books, not to mention the movie adaptations for the latter.
A couple other contenders post-WW2 are Charlotte's Web (1952) and Watership Down (1972). A lot of the bestsellers in the '80s and '90s seem to be series like Goosebumps, Nancy Drew, and such.
odd_primes
18d ago
It's kinda lame since like you said, 75% of penalties are converted. The keeper has to both guess right and commit early enough to intercept it. The trick really just relies on the fact that the keeper is in such a bad position that they have to commit early in order to have a chance.
Then again my opinion is colored by hating the dynamic where games sit at 0-0 only to be decided by a penalty shot.
odd_primes
21d ago
Usually they can't because when they sign a contract for credit card processing, they have to agree not to offer a lower price for debit/cash. It's pretty normal in some countries like Australia to have a credit card surcharge though. In Australia the surcharge is capped at the cost for the merchant to accept that payment method, which seems pretty reasonable. That way there is actual price pressure to cut interchange fees.
odd_primes
28d ago
I picked up MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries over the holidays, overall it's pretty fun. It's the first installment I have played in the series though so I can't really give a comparison to other iterations.
Pros:
- It's just viscerally satisfying to pilot a giant robot around and blow stuff up.
- They do a great job with the sound design and feedback from stepping on things, firing weapons, etc.
- It's fun to customize mechs in various ways, the shotgun Kintaro build is great.
- The career progression is overall pretty good, with missions unlocking new, bigger mechs in a somewhat random way.
Cons:
- The AI teammates are a bit slow in the head, they make up 3/4 members of your squad but often do under half the damage.
- The standard missions get a bit repetitive (although to be fair the story ones are decent).
- Walking distances... Bigger, more powerful mechs are slower, but the mission maps stay the same size. This started getting pretty annoying later on in the campaign.
odd_primes
30d ago
This case looks a lot more justified than Babbitt. Accelerating a vehicle towards a police officer is an imminent threat of death or serious harm, while Babbitt was unarmed and did not present an immediate threat to anyone. The officer could have used force, but I don't think they were justified to use deadly force given the circumstances.
The OSS published a field manual about this for WW2 resistance fighters. It mostly focuses on practical, low-level resistance and sabotage rather than grand acts though. Amusingly one of their suggestions is simply to be annoying and incompetent.
A non-cooperative attitude may involve nothing more than creating an unpleasant situation among one’s fellow workers, engaging in bickerings, or displaying surliness and stupidity.
It also depends how you calculate impact. For example the idiot who tried to smuggle bombs in his shoes has probably caused hundreds of aggregate human lives to be wasted by the delay of every air passenger now having to remove their shoes, despite his attack being completely unsuccessful.
odd_primes
1mo ago
Apparently there have only been 54 recorded homicides of US judges since the 1800s, and that includes homicides that were not work-related. Also I really doubt an elderly liberal lady in Milwaukee owns firearms in the first place, just based on gun ownership demographics.
odd_primes
1mo ago
I'm not surprised it went to trial, my bet is that it came down to the issue of Dugan continuing to serve as a judge and the two sides could not reach an agreement on that point. If the prosecution's offer was Dugan resigns and pleads to a misdemeanor, she really did not have that much to lose. She is retirement age and the only real impact of the felony conviction will be to force her to step down or get impeached. For a first time non-violent offense, she will almost certainly get no jail time, plus now she will get to do a #resistance martyrdom tour, and quite possibly get a pardon in three years.
odd_primes
1mo ago
The piece addressed this point as well. Based on the stats white men did not migrate into other high-status fields like medicine, law, and tech, likely because of the same discriminatory hiring practices.
The white men shut out of the culture industries didn’t surge into other high-status fields. They didn’t suddenly flood advertising, law, or medicine, which are all less white and significantly less male than they were a decade ago. White men dropped from 31.2 percent of law school matriculants in 2016 to 25.7 percent in 2024.
The shift in medicine has been even more dramatic. In 2014, white men were 31 percent of American medical students. By 2025, they were just 20.5 percent—a ten-percentage-point drop in barely over a decade. “At every step there’s some form of selection,” a millennial oncologist told me. “Medical school admissions, residency programs, chief resident positions, fellowships—each stage tilts away from white men or white-adjacent men… The white guy is now the token.”
Nor was tech much of a refuge. At Google, white men went from nearly half the workforce in 2014 to less than a third by 2024—a 34 percent decline. In 2014, at Amazon, entry-level “professionals”—college graduates just starting out—were 42.3 percent white male. These were the employees who, if they’d advanced normally over the next decade, would be the mid-level managers of today. But mid-level Amazon managers fell from 55.8 percent white male in 2014 to just 33.8 percent in 2024—a decline of nearly 40 percent.
odd_primes
1mo ago
Yeah, that was definitely a weak point in the piece. Minorities and women clearly benefit from these discriminatory hiring practices and are often fervent advocates for their continuation and expansion, they share at least some responsibility for this situation. Old white men didn't just suddenly wake up one day and decide to throw young white men under the bus for no reason at all.
odd_primes
1mo ago
Of course the author will focus on the institutions with the most cultural prestige and influence - they are the tastemakers that set the bounds of appropriate conduct for everyone else. If Ivy League colleges are discriminating against white men, guess where administrations at less prestigious colleges will take their cues from? And guess who built the ideological framework that the HR lady at that forklift company will use to implement a DEI policy to discriminate against white men? Like with the Harvard racial bias in admissions case, tactically it makes the most sense to try to make an example out of the most prominent offender.
Also when writing for a national audience, you need a topic and subjects of national relevance. Ivy League colleges and the media conglomerates that decide what you see on TV are household names across the country, random small businesses are not.
odd_primes
1mo ago
Its frustrating when older white men in powerful positions in institutions enthusiastically support policies that would have prevented themselves from being successful, had the policies been in place when they were younger…
It really grinds my gears as well. I had a conversation with an older white male physics prof at a social event a while ago, and he was giving this rather sanctimonious monologue about all the work they were doing to make the field more "diverse", and how they were rectifying the issues that led to women being excluded from the field. Of course he isn't giving up his job to a 60 year old women who was passed over for tenure in the '80s - but he apparently thought it was perfectly reasonable to have a lab with exactly one token white guy. It's just perpetuating the same problem on another generation, with different victims.
Compact published a quite thorough analysis of the discrimination millennial white men have faced since the mid-2010s, focusing on the liberal arts and cultural sectors. It does a good job of illustrating the similar dynamics at play in fields including journalism, screenwriting, and academia, interviewing a number of men who found their careers either dead on arrival or stagnating due to their race and gender. It's a bit long, but quite normie-friendly, with plenty of stats to back up the personal anecdotes. It also does a good job of illustrating the generational dynamics at play, where older white men pulled the ladder up behind them, either for ideological reasons or as a defense mechanism to protect their own positions.
A great quote from near the end of the piece that sums it up:
But for younger white men, any professional success was fundamentally a problem for institutions to solve.
And solve it they did.
Over the course of the 2010s, nearly every mechanism liberal America used to confer prestige was reweighted along identitarian lines.
Edit: typo
odd_primes
1mo ago
Here's a compendium of a bunch of different articles and papers about HBD: https://www.humanbiologicaldiversity.com/
Richard Lynn's work is one good starting point. It has been quite a while since I have gone down the HBD rabbit hole though, it's one of those topics that eventually got tiresome to argue about. Talking to some blank slate proponents feels like arguing with a young earth creationist, no matter how good the evidence is, they will find a way to make a "god of the gaps" style argument for nurture, education, or whatever.
Fanficfare works pretty well to create an epub from most popular story hosting sites. I believe it also has a Calibre plugin. It has worked pretty well for me in the past to download from ao3, ff, etc.
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