official_techsupport
who/whom
No bio...
User ID: 122
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
Everyone in the USA still believes that the USA is the first etc etc. The only thing that matters is the domestic response to foreign posturing. "I'm against America First" is a viable posture in America because nobody in America really believes that America could be anything but first.
official_techsupport
who/whom
7mo ago
Or maybe it was just about stirring up enough heat that the Israel-Saudi normalisation doesn't happen. I dunno.
I don't see how this was supposed to work. A small terrorist act that causes Israel to respond disproportionally, all right. 400 paratroopers killing Israeli civilians? Again, this is a thing that you do when you have 5000 tanks ready to roll towards Tel Aviv and you want to show your potential Saudi allies that you mean business. They don't have a single tank. Saudis will be like, fuck those idiots.
I might have recommended (or would have recommended) "The Rise and Fall of the Dark Lord Sassaflash". It has the Mule protagonist character who talks like Snakes. Also it turns out that MLP canonically has a pony with SS lightnings as her ponymark or whatever it's called. Also it's pretty good.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
How would this get any good outcome? Does the George Soros fund care about helping prisoners, or do they want to advance their political goals?
They were very successful at electing people like Kim Foxx and Chesa Boudin and George Gascón who kept and keep doing exactly what was expected of them, so if that part were somehow removed and they were forced to select for people who are good at overseeing rehabilitation initiatives because that's the only way recidivists don't get back to prison, the people the Soros Foundation would choose for that would be pretty good at it.
It's, like, I'm saying what I would do if I were the Czar of the US prison system. I'd set some inviolable rules but then let Soros and friends do their best within the rules instead of trying to micromanage everything.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
By intervention I meant that hypothetical Soros-funded anti-recidivism experiment that funds all sorts of activists trying various ideas.
The alternative to that is the current situation when violent recidivists are in fact locked up for a long time on taxpayer's dime.
My point is that I'm sure that pretty much nobody, including KKK Grand Dragons, hates black people in a sense that they would actively pay to harm them. So we shouldn't worry that our hypothetical program would receive a pushback from the nonexistent group of people that prefers more black criminals around.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
Btw as a result of arguing with people in the BotCcord, I managed to convince myself that Red is actually the prosocial choice.
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The selfishness of the Red choice is a bit of a red herring, you can modify the scenario where you are choosing the pills for your underage children while having won a lottery that guarantees your survival in a Red world. The problem remains.
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The actual scary worlds are where 10-50% of people choose Blue. This is the nightmare scenario that we want to avoid at all costs, including killing 1% of suicidal people, idiots, etc--if that actually works.
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After I pointed that out, I got weird arguments from Blue people that they were certain that Blue would win anyway, but somehow this didn't make them choose Red just in case.
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A sort of Kant's Universalizability/one-boxing in Newcomb's problem came up too: you should choose Blue so that people like you choose Blue and Blue wins. But by the same logic you're also morally responsible for killing everyone who chose Blue in a 49% Blue world.
official_techsupport
who/whom
9mo ago
Anyone creating such a law would have already thought of obvious workarounds like this and done something to avoid them.
Absolutely not, see this: https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc846f2a19d87b03440848f1
official_techsupport
who/whom
10mo ago
Rdrama Bookclub Discussion Thread #1 :marseyreading:. “The Master and Margarita” Chap. 1-7
You're welcome to join, 100 pages per week is actually not a lot given how well it's written, I accidentally got to chapter 5 on Monday night lol. Also apparently people are very surprised that rather than Dostoyevsky it's more like Douglas Adams with some extra dark humor.
The discussion is pretty good too!
You can pirate the supposedly best English translation here: https://libgen.is/fiction/819D3E8A110577E3C53018814ECAAACD, I checked out the first chapter, I guess it's about as good as you could expect a translation to be. Anyways, people seem to really enjoy it!
official_techsupport
who/whom
10mo ago
Ticks will stay on your body for comparatively a much longer duration than mosquitoes. I don't see how there's any actual benefit from a mosquito having any kind of analgesic property when they'll finish sucking and fly off in seconds. The benefit to a tick is much more obvious.
I understand. To reiterate, my question was: do mosquito bites become itchy because the mosquito doesn't care what happens after it has fed, so whatever it injects is optimized for short term anesthetic and anticoagulant properties, which by default causes itchiness later? Or are mosquito bites especially itchy because there is in fact some benefit in that to mosquitos or humans?
To that I received several responses basically claiming that itchiness is inevitable, because scabs itch when healing, skin itches when pierced, an immune/inflammation reaction is produced in response to introduced bacteria and foreign proteins, and so on. However ticks provide an excellent counterexample: it turns that when it's important to pierce skin without causing neither pain nor follow-up itching for days, Nature finds ways to do so, despite all of the problems above.
So then back to my original question: if it is possible to be entirely non-itchy, are mosquitos itchy simply because they don't care, or are they especially itchy for some reason?
I don't know that I've ever had a mosquitoes bite become itchy as quickly as you describe.
Well, yes, maybe not in a couple of minutes (it can be hard to determine when the bite itself occurred), but in 10-15 minutes for sure, based on the interval between me entering a mosquito infested area and realizing that I've been bitten in a bunch of places.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
By the way, "Mother of Learning" author wrote 3 "alternate-universe" chapters for it and started a whole new series, the first chapters of which hooked me hard: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/71045/zenith-of-sorcery
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
Static isn't really a concern where I live, it's far too humid.
It's not static electricity, it's a bunch of energy stored in capacitors. It's real as you can see by unplugging the computer, then trying to switch it on -- the fans briefly start up, at least for me. But after that it should be mostly safe, if in doubt poke with a grounded screwdriver or something.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
I said:
Most of desegregation initiatives also had this component to them
And again, steelman going above and beyond letting anyone to go to any school they want and forcing them to go to a racially diverse school.
Combine it with a sense of justice, and you have an adequate explanation for people trying things like busing.
You will have to spell it out for me, I don't have none.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
Most disagreements of note—most disagreements people care about—don't behave like the concert date or physics problem examples: people are very attached to "their own" answers.
There could be other reasons than hidden motives for that. Consider for example that one of the largest debate here recently was about a completely hypothetical situation involving red/blue pills. Or imagine a technical discussion about some software engineering problem, those can get quite heated too.
So, first of all, sufficiently complex problems tend to be like icebergs, with only a small part being easily communicable, and a lot of underwater assumptions, connections, and intuitions that are personal to you.
For example, if the concerts at that place are always on Thursdays which I know because I'm a regular there, and you have never been there before, I'm sure as hell double checking your claim. Or if your answer to the physics problem is not just different from mine but doesn't make any sense given all other stuff I learned about the problem while working on it, I'm likely to start by asking pointed questions about those discrepancies instead of humbly assuming that one of us just made an arithmetic error somewhere and that could as well be me. And of course in case of software engineering, "your approach is going to suck, I feel it in my bones as a result of decades of experience that I can't just spend years relaying to you here"...
Second, that last example doesn't fit into your model even if it does have an underlying conflict of interest. I can 100% honestly believe that my approach is superior for complicated reasons I can't articulate convincingly enough, and I don't want to waste my time implementing your inferior solution, while you honestly believe and feel the exact opposite. So that seems to be a conflict of interest, but we both can easily be 100% open about it because it's actually driven by a factual disagreement.
That's not to disagree with your main thesis, that there's a lot of "bad faith" arguments, so much that it becomes a counterproductive label. But you're both too optimistic and too pessimistic about that, because there's also a lot of hard to reconcile factual disagreements.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
GPT failed me on this, so I'm asking you folks: Find a sci-fi short story about a politician who was denied rejuvenation treatment and started a campaign against it in revenge, only to discover that being elderly he forgot to check mail and missed a letter offering permanent immortality as a space colonist. That plot twist came after he talked to a friend who explained that the only reason the treatment didn't grant permanent immortality was because of the lack of living space, once the space colonization issues were solved everyone would be allowed to become immortal.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
And because rich people are there it is clean and safe.
I doubt it. You don't have to be rich to Uber/Bolt everywhere. In fact by the time you can actively shape what the public is allowed/encouraged to vote for you can have a private driver.
To be honest I don't know why American cities appear so dysfunctional while other places do just fine, when I don't see how the decision-making is remotely democratic. Or maybe it is democratic but ordinary urban Americans are way more brainwashed somehow. I don't know, I know that where I leave we have very nice and cheap public transportation that is used exclusively by people who can't afford cars, but it's nice because it has these social ads playing, telling that if there's some smelly hobo (literally the ad is showing green noxious fumes!) you should immediately call the police and they will remove them. Which they do and if any politician tried to run on the platform of not infringing hobo rights, they would be laughed at by everyone.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
The real question we are interested in: "we can have an intervention that would make this black man a productive member of society that you don't even have to pay for, or you can pay $30k/year for decades until he grows too old to do crime".
official_techsupport
who/whom
10mo ago
Scrapes and cuts, especially scabs, itch too.
It's not comparable at all. A cut doesn't begin to itch until after several days, and don't itch at anywhere the intensity proportional to the affected area. Needle pricks don't itch at all and they are tens or hundreds of times larger by area than mosquito bites. So no, it's evidently a reaction to the anesthetic stuff they inject.
official_techsupport
who/whom
10mo ago
Why do mosquito bites itch?
Is it entirely accidental, as in, evolution only cared about whatever stuff mosquito inject acting as an effective anesthetic for the duration of the bite, not about what happens next? Or maybe it's beneficial for humans (makes us much more alert and aggressive towards further mosquitos) or maybe even individual mosquitos due to intra-species competition?
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
I totally disagree with the conclusion. First of all, we are literally living in the time where one man's vision is about to revolutionize space travel by making a rocket that can lift 100 tons of payload to LEO. Yeah it's interplanetary for now, but why not interstellar next, maybe by the next man with an itch for it?
And second, why do you need to persuade the whole society to migrate? Most of the old world people didn't migrate to America and it was their loss. The few people who did migrate multiplied and prospered. "Indirect evidence of extrasolar planets will never be enough" -- for whom? So we will have bootlicking statists like the author waiting for the government to give them credible evidence and orders to go, while adventurous types will be populating the galaxy.
Marxbro was a troll by the way. At one point we had a discussion about the Labor Theory of Value, I tried my best to steer it away from theorizing and keep to a concrete example of some guys on an island exchanging fishes for pots etc, and eventually he had enough and basically said that no, he didn't want to explain this or that, he was doing it to get a rise out of people like me. Or at least that's how I remember it, it was, what, five years ago? But yeah, my impression was that he let the mask slip.
Of course, in words of a Chinese poet, if you pretend to be insane and tear your clothes and run into the garden, are you actually pretending, which also applies to single-mindedly "trolling" an internet forum for years.
official_techsupport
who/whom
7mo ago
The brutality and cynical tactics that Hamas uses do lead to them having lower support than they would if they were less sociopathic though.
That's the weird thing though: their cynical tactics used to be launching rockets from hospital rooftops and parading the inevitable Palestinian corpses, or having Palestinian kids shot for throwing stones, etc etc. The grift has always been provoking Israel to violence and posing as an underdog.
But this, parading enemy civilian corpses around, is a diametrically opposite thing. It's something you do when you have several thousands of tanks ready to roll over the enemy capital, you expect to win, and you want to demoralize the enemy to win easier.
So I don't know, either Hamas expects Iran to nuke Israel, or the old guard that understood the nature of the grift all retired or something and the new leadership got terminally high on their own supply.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
Your hypothesis is stupid. It’s needlessly complicated, and paints your enemies as both naive and devious. Why should activists expect results from foisting “the problem” onto an unwilling majority?
Because then the majority has skin in the game and has to deal with the problem. It's naive and usually doesn't work, but if you totally expect it from deBoer, why not from other activists?
Is desegregation really worthless except as a means to an end?
I never said or implied that. But you're conflating two very different things: all the stuff that MLK mentioned, let's call it "negative desegregation", meaning that black people are no longer prevented from being in white spaces, and "positive desegregation" that actively tries to mix up communities, such as busing (read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation_busing btw, it was an unmitigated disaster opposed by everyone involved expect the actual rich and affluent whites). Can you give me your best pro-busing steelman? Because I'd put making whites have skin in the game wrt education quality on the first place, tolerance through familiarity on the second, and aesthetic preference for de facto desegregation as a sort of a strawman (though no doubt real) justification.
Same for the Soros DAs. I'm not saying that there were devious conspirators planning to have a crime wave, I'm sure that they hoped that there wouldn't be a crime wave! But don't you think that it was very weird to do things in the opposite order to what I proposed? Like, first you figure how to prevent criminals from reoffending, then you go soft on reoffenders because they won't reoffend yet again? If you go soft on reoffenders first, what exactly do you expect? Is "uh I hope someone also figures how to prevent recidivism now that they are forced to" painting my enemies as more stupid and evil than "idk I don't give a fuck lol"?
official_techsupport
who/whom
5mo ago
Looks like everyone here is no longer willing to give you any constructive feedback. Consider presenting your case on https://rdrama.net, some people might mock you, but at least you'll have engagement.
Use https://rdrama.net/signup?ref=2481 for signing up btw, I'll get a badge for referring you!
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
First of all, that's literally the first point in my list of possible explanations for why forced skin in the games fails in my examples.
But also I want to point out an important thing: I'd want a stable legitimately non-working solution. As in, imagine one of the more inconvenient possible worlds where we have implemented my proposal for solving recidivism, everything appears to work as intended, George Soros makes sure that the people he funds really believe in the cause, those people report that they get nothing but enthusiastic cooperation from the prison staff, and they keep trying protocols devised by the best sociologists and they can't get recidivism rate below 70%.
That world is pretty unfortunate, but it has one very good property: whenever someone says "hey I think that you people are doing rehabilitative justice wrong, we should abolish prisons and replace it with mutual support communes, and for starters let all recidivists out on no bail" we tell him that there's currently three pilot mutual support communes, he's free to join any of them as staff and try to do rehabilitative justice right, but no, no way no how we are restarting any of those catch and release programs. If his ideas work, they work, yay, he solved an impossible problem, the criminals don't reoffend and are not affected by our harsh recidivism laws. If not, too bad, but at least the society is safe.
It's important that if the solution doesn't work the society can be reasonably sure that it's because the problem is very hard and not for the lack of trying.
As in you read the whole linked article and have no idea, or gave up after the first ten or so paragraphs? Because while undeniably excessively verbose, containing frequent tangents, and actually being less about the Climategate and more about how the Climategate is yet another example of how power corrupts, it presents clear points with solid justifications.
If you're interested in something much more concise and aimed at someone who is not already on the same wavelength you might want to read the AGW section of this: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22/ . It is not, strictly speaking, about the Climategate, because it predates it by a few months I think, but it predicts it presciently.
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