odd_primes
1yr ago
Did you do any searches or view any articles about HIV or gay issues while writing that comment? That's more likely to be the cause.
The correct comparison here would be a non-diplomatic foreign government official from a friendly country. A good comparison here is actually the Harry Dunn case in the UK. An American government official without diplomatic immunity killed a motorcyclist while driving on the wrong side of the road. She was released with the expectation that she would show up to court. It turned into a big diplomatic mess because the US government smuggled her out of the country on a military plane and tried to retroactively claim diplomatic immunity under a highly questionable legal interpretation.
The expectation especially among friendly countries is that foreign government officials who are charged with a crime will respect the laws of their host country and show up for court. This is especially true among first-world democracies with trustworthy legal systems.
odd_primes
1yr ago
The litrpg space and progression fantasy genre is weird, it feels like the audience is vaguely right-leaning (lots of male video game nerds) but there are author cliques that purity test each other. And in order to succeed on Royalroad or Amazon, it really helps to get bootstrapped by other authors. For example the progression fantasy subreddit has a year-round pride flag, and it's run by a clique of authors who chase off anyone outside their political window of acceptability.
Out of curiosity have you read To The Stars? It explores a kind of similar idea.
Mild spoilers (worldbuilding elements): ||Eventually they interact with an alien society structured around the idea that individuals have a prefspec (preference specification) that they can modify at will which determines their compulsions and interests. An individual can decide to modify their own prefspec to better match their desired goals. For example someone planning to be a parent could self-adjust to enjoy the nurturing and caring components more than they otherwise would.
This also allows for prefspec negotiation, where individuals or groups can negotiate mutual modifications to each others' prefspecs to reach compromises between what would have been mutually incompatible values. Factions end up trading prefspec modifications between each other, sometimes for material compensation or sometimes for prefspec modifications in other areas.||
It's a pretty neat exploration of the concept, but it does start pretty deep into the story.
odd_primes
1yr ago
Washington DC will go into a near full death spiral as a city over the next decade-plus. It will be 2040 before anyone considers living there again.
This seems unlikely to me, the DC area has gentrified a lot and they are one of the main beneficiaries of the federal government money printer. A serious effort to relocate core government functions to other parts of the country would kneecap the city, but look how DOGE turned out...
odd_primes
1yr ago
Both are insane. The former perverts the intent of the legislative branch of government, and the latter is some form of bizarro judicial equivalent of jury nullification.
odd_primes
1yr ago
If the individual is allowed to be out in public unfettered he will have some non-zero contact with children. For example if he gets sent to do community service picking up trash in a public park, there likely will be children playing in the park at some point. The bigger issue is making sure that someone like that is not in a position of trust or authority over minors that they could leverage inappropriately. If they can't be trusted in public spaces at all, they should be incarcerated. Obviously this guy should have been deported though.
How many Japanese nationals are there who get involved in a custody dispute in a foreign country? A surprising number of people avail themselves of the option when it is available to them. Japan is just the most notorious example, plenty of countries will drag out an international custody dispute for years until the issue is effectively moot. Once a child is 12 or so years old, it becomes very hard to force them to live with an estranged parent they have not seen in years, who lives in a foreign country.
I get your overall point though, most people who disobey custody orders are not exactly masterminds, and likely don't have a foreign abscondment planned.
odd_primes
1yr ago
It's pretty trivial in some cases, depending on the citizenship of the parent. Japan is notorious for example, there have been hundreds of cases where a parent takes their child to Japan in violation of a custody agreement, and then just refuse to go back. Japanese courts do not take into consideration foreign custody agreements, and strongly favor Japanese parents.
To date, no child has been returned to his/her country of habitual residence as a result of any action taken by the government of Japan.
https://web.archive.org/web/20101122071433/http://tokyo.usembassy.gov/e/p/tp-20100122-85.html
odd_primes
1yr ago
Schools are supposed to be assessing learning on a more thorough, ongoing basis. If a student can't read at their grade level, that should be made very clear to the parents repeatedly throughout the year. The point of standardized testing is to keep the schools honest and get information on relative performance between schools or districts.
With respect to the bottom 10-20%, spending huge amounts of resources to get someone from a grade 4 reading level to a grade 5 reading level won't help them avoid getting swindled by someone with a law degree. Also, I suspect that there is a very significant overlap between the people who cannot read a basic contract, and the people who would not understand such a contract even if it were explained to them. The latter category cannot function independently in modern society and likely need some form of assisted living arrangement to help them navigate daily life.
It's viewed as a form of juking the stats by some people, since the point of standardized testing is typically to measure the performance of teachers, schools, school districts, etc. If there are differences in policy on grade promotion, that makes it harder to do a fair comparison.
Just as a really simplified example, let's say low-performing students in state A learn approximately 0.7 of a grade level each year, while in B they learn 0.6. State A has social promotion, while state B holds students back a year if they are doing poorly. So in grade 4 standardized testing, the low-performers in A would be working at a grade level of 2.8 (4x0.7) while in B they would be working at a grade level of 3.0 (5x0.6). Someone just looking at the aggregate stats would assume B has more effective teachers, when the opposite is true.
This probably has a pretty minimal impact since the number of students held back is in the low single digits, but it is a confounding variable.
The bigger problem in my opinion is that standardized testing really emphasizes getting the bottom 10-20% over the bare minimum bar, while ignoring the top 10-20%. These inter-state comparisons are really just measuring which states are better at handholding the remedial students enough to just barely feign competence.
odd_primes
1yr ago
The guy who runs KiwiFarms wrote an interesting piece about digital self-sufficiency. The site itself is not to everyone's taste (lots of 4chan-style shitposting and racism) but he has had to deal with an insane amount of pressure from big tech just to run a glorified gossip website. It illustrates just how hard it is to run a website nowadays when you're blacklisted by Cloudflare, search engines, payment processors, and even T1 ISPs.
https://madattheinternet.com/2021/07/08/where-the-sidewalk-ends-the-death-of-the-internet/
odd_primes
1yr ago
In terms of the slope slipperiness, Canada is expanding MAID to people suffering solely from a mental health condition. This is legally required due to a court case they lost challenging the MAID law's exclusion of the mentally ill. They have temporarily delayed this through new legislation, but eventually they will either implement it, or be taken back to court and forced to implement it. The people newly eligible will all fall under track 2.
odd_primes
1yr ago
Loads, this one only came to prominence because of the recent focus on Israel/Palestine.
Personally as king of DOGE I would have abolished the TSA, fired most of them, and transferred the rest to ICE. It's an obscene waste of time and money on security theater that is universally hated, yet somehow employs over 60,000 people.
The big change is that the grant amounts have skyrocketed in recent years. When the program was created in 2004, funding was around $25 million per year. The program was proposed and lobbied for by Jewish groups. Last year the total was $454 million, and synagogues receive a disproportionate amount of funding.
https://www.fema.gov/grants/preparedness/nonprofit-security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_Security_Grant_Program
odd_primes
1yr ago
The similarity lies in the fact that they are both visibly indicated in a way the parents can use for social signalling. Right now prenatal screening is still not ubiquitous, so having a child with Down Syndrome is not necessarily a choice. Ironically that reduces its utility as a signalling mechanism. But in 10-20 years? The only people having a child with Down Syndrome will be doing so because they refused the screening, or deliberately ignored the results.
I don't think this trend will take off in progressive circles though, given how it's uncomfortably similar to evangelical Christian practice. Evangelicals will have staked out a position on this first just by being generally anti-abortion.
Obviously it wasn't intended as a 1:1 comparison, but Haiti has an average IQ of 82. A significant percentage of that difference is likely genetic, based on our current understanding of the heredity of intelligence. The mother's health and nutrition also plays a significant role, and that's outside the control of the adopting family. A young child adopted from Haiti is statistically going to be at a significant intellectual disadvantage compared to the biological children of that "wealthy white couple".
International adoptions in general come with a much higher risk of a child with physical or mental disabilities. Growing up I knew two families that did international adoptions, one from Russia and one from Asia. The Russian child had fairly significant behavioral issues and developmental delays, and the Asian child had a physical disability likely caused by prenatal or infant malnutrition.
The charitable interpretation is that these families do international adoptions out of a genuine desire to do good and provide a better home for a child, but from a utilitarian perspective it seems to provide pretty low impact compared to other forms of charity in terms of cost effectiveness. What is does provide is a very visible signal of social status and virtue, and the frequency seems to ebb and flow depending on whether it's trendy in a given community. For example, it was a trend in Hollywood in the early 2000s, with celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Madonna. At some point it fell out of fashion, and now international adoptions are practically verboten in left-wing circles, particularly if the parents are white and the child is not. The same dynamics seem to play out on a smaller scale in some Christian communities.
I could see a similar dynamic playing out with Down's Syndrome in the future, particularly for for parents wealthy enough to offload much of the care onto hired help. Let's be real, Angelina Jolie likely didn't change the diapers for all six of her kids while shooting movies every year or two.
Isn't that basically the trend of adopting children from Africa or Haiti? It's weirdly popular among white Christians, eg. Amy Coney Barrett and her husband adopted two children from Haiti.
2710, top 16%. Scored 0 on three rounds, due to
Edit: looks like the same questions when I refreshed? Put the answers in spoilers just in case.
odd_primes
1yr ago
One time this topic came up in a group setting with men and women, and all the women (plus one gay guy) were shocked that the straight men did not find Zendaya that attractive. They were saying 9-10, while we were more like 6-7. She definitely has a unique look, but personally I found Rebecca Ferguson much more attractive in Dune, despite her being over a decade older.
odd_primes
1yr ago
Markle is a bit of a stretch, her father is white and her mother has mixed ancestry. She's at the point where she could easily pass as Italian or Spanish.
odd_primes
1yr ago
The study most people reference is a 2018 study by Denmark's finance ministry:
It's in Danish, but there are plenty of secondary sources discussing it in English, eg. the linked article in The Economist.
The entire purpose of Israel's exercise of government-like power has been to prevent Gaza from leveraging resources or building state capacity in a way that would harm Israeli interests. That's obviously challenging, since it goes against the will of the vast majority of Gaza's population, and they have had to maintain some degree of pretense that Gaza is self-governing to appease the international community. October 7 broke that balancing act, because Israel is now exercising it's authority in such a blatant way, and has created such a severe humanitarian disaster, that the international community can't turn a blind eye anymore. The UK and Canada are threatening to recognize Palestine as a state now, this would have been unthinkable five years ago.
Just to clarify, when referring to governmental or government-like, I'm describing how Israel de facto controls many elements of modern statehood for Gaza and the West Bank. Eg. Defense, law enforcement, taxation, regulation of the movement of people and goods, medical care, etc. They effectively have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That does not mean complete or universal control over all elements of Palestinians' lives, just that they hold onto many of the authorities that would normally rest with the government of an independent entity.
odd_primes
1yr ago
I'll address the culture war point, since other people are far more qualified to talk about the issues with the P320's internal safety. Ron Cohen, the current CEO of Sig Sauer, was previously the CEO of Kimber. There is a perception that he aggressively cut costs and relied on Kimber's strong reputation to sell sub-par products at a premium price point, cashing out before consumers caught on. Now he's at Sig, and strangely enough a formerly well-respected brand appears to have aggressively cut costs and are suffering quality control issues while coasting on their strong reputation... It's starting to look like a pattern. People would be pissed with Cohen no matter what, but the optics of a Jewish CEO deploying the private equity looting playbook on popular brands has resulted in the sort of backlash you'd expect from certain corners of Twitter.
Saagar from Breaking Points says he has a copy of the arrest documents and will release them today.
https://x.com/esaagar/status/1957589200540225927
More options
Context Copy link