Just no one has even tried to explain how exactly government buying up and owning private enterprise is a smart idea (something that we've been saying isn't good for decades) and why it's a solid goal towards improving the nation's economy and wealth.
Is your modeling of Trump so poor that you attribute it to deliberately wanting to wreck the US economy, during his own term, because fuck the Democrats?
He's just not very committed to specific ideology, he mostly plays things by ear and gut feeling and he has a good feeling about this one. Sometimes his gut feelings are right and sometimes they're wrong. His feeling about sending those B2s to Iran seems to have been pretty much just upside so far. The dust hasn't settled on the tarrifs but at least it didn't lead to the immediate collapse that his detractors were claiming were coming. Governing outside of ideology is what his voters wanted, "Making America Great Again" is spectacularly vague and non-committal as to the method of achieving it after all, and for what it's worth I don't think it's a particularly bad way of going about it in reality. Pure ideology will get you all fruits of that ideology, the good ones but also the rotten ones. A wise king who can pick and choose which fruits to pluck is the best political system, and with the short supply of wise kings nowadays, a businessman with good instincts is not the worst stand-in. Of course, opinions can vary as to whether Trump has good instincts.
pigeonburger
1d ago
An optometrist helped diagnose me with an autoimmune disease. I had been having eye pain for a week or so, went to see a generalist who half-assedly assumed it was a bacterial conjunctivitis, prescribed me antibiotics which only made my eye feel worse. I looked for an emergency optometrist, the one that had appointments on shorter notice was in a small but fancy glasses store downtown. Went there, the optometrist checked my eye and she diagnosed it as a uveitis instead. Started me on steroid drops that helped, but then she asked me questions about stuff that seemed unrelated, like do I often get back pain. Is it at rest or from exercise that I get back pain. Indeed, I had been having back pain for years, that physiotherapist have been trying unsuccessfully to help me with.
Turns out having a uveitis was atypical at my age and in my condition, so she suspected there must have been more. She had me check with an ophtalmologist that specialises in uveitis, who then referred me to a rheumatologist and ayuup, I have ankylosing spondilitis.
Sure, the optometrist helped me by "merely" doing her job well, but to be honest she could have just treated the uveitis and I would never have thought that she had been negligent.
pigeonburger
3d ago
"The Mandalorian" worked because the female appeal was Pedro Pascal plus baby Yoda (and I understand the female lead was not actively terrible in a Girlboss mode, so of course Disney bounced her for badthink) while having enough of the SW lore to appeal to the guys.
I like to think it worked because it (well, at least the first 2 seasons) was a freshly brewed batch of the original Star Wars recipe. Instead of reheating in the microwave the same old moldy batch of samurai/western (same thing) tropes with pulp sci-fi trappings from the originals like Disney did with the sequels, Jon Favreau took the recipe but made it with fresh tropes. Western/samurai tropes that were not part of Star Wars yet, starting with the premise taken straight from Lone Wolf and Cub.
pigeonburger
9d ago
They soft retconned the entire point of the last two movies. Dinosaurs got loose and spread throughout terrestrial ecosystems, being somewhere between invasive and endemic. Photos of Triceratops herds migrating through Wyoming, Pteranodons nesting on skyscrapers, the works. And then they just... died off. No, seriously, dinosaurs - which colonized everything from the Arctic to the Antarctic - just couldn't handle conditions outside the modern equator. Thanks, global warming?
I think that's also pretty much what they did with the last two movies, in the sense of them trying to execute as little as possible on the premise of Dinosaurs Everywhere(tm), probably because it's not conducive to the kind of plot they want to tell, or it would be too high budget, or it would make the dinosaurs seem boring and not special anymore. So what they do is put out trailers that show prominently Dinosaurs Everywhere(tm), put it in opening or closing scenes, and then quickly in the movie find an excuse why yes, there's Dinosaurs Everywhere(tm) but not really dinosaurs everywhere and the trailer feels like a bait and switch.
I posted a while back about how practicing driving was tiring to me in a way few activities are. I'm happy to report that I now have my license and a car. Even though I live in the city so parking is less convenient, just feeling of being able to go anywhere without having to check public transport is very freeing.
The reason I only bothered so late in life is that I have been living in the city for all my adult life so it was never a necessity, and my province imposes taking expensive classes (around a 1000$) for one year before you're able to get your license, so the cost and delay killed my motivation to get it for recreational purposes. But now I'm thinking to move out of the city so having a license is a prerequisite.
It's still tiring and stressful to me in the kind of road environment I have practiced less in (highways, on-ramps, service roads) but busy city roads are getting to be second nature now.
pigeonburger
14d ago
I can imagine some recalls are just about adding a redundant safety feature to address perception of a weakness even if the existing safety features already work perfectly. While this is unpleasant for engineer brains, it can be necessary as typically marketing requirements trump engineering purity.
My understanding was that gooning is reserved for any particularly degenerate and indulgent forms of masturbation. Like when I think of a gooner, I think of someone for whom cranking it while looking at porn sitting in front of his computer doesn't work anymore, he needs to be watching 10 videos at once for hours on a multiscreen setup laying down in a reclining chair while vaping weed.
pigeonburger
16d ago
I find it useful to practice languages. I used to speak spanish but lack of usage means I'm not confident enough to speak it now, but LLMs are infinitely patient conversation partners that will not overly correct me (and shoot my confidence) during the conversation, but can afterwards give me pointers.
pigeonburger
19d ago
The specific fantasy you seem to be upset at is "killing a bad person who is trying to do a bad thing." Most gun owners who are interested in self-defense are interested in self-defense. Movies and gun manufacturing ads and the NRA website and all of those things you're discussing aren't promoting the idea of unlawful violence or mass shootings. (It's actually imho the liberal-leaning press and gun control groups that do the worst to spread mass shooting memes, because they amplify the contagious meme of mass shootings to advance, in the case of the latter, their policy agenda). They are promoting the idea of stopping a bad guy. You can go read the NRA magazine, they (at least used to. maybe they stopped) pull accounts of robbers, rapists, mass shooters etc. getting stopped by "the good guy with a gun" which happens pretty often, honestly. If there's a fantasy here, it's specifically the same fantasy that people who join the military or police often have. I think it's fine to criticize certain aspects of this but fundamentally wanting to stop bad people from doing bad stuff is an honorable impulse.
Moreover, this fantasy is in large part a response to another fantasy failing to become a reality, that of police being able to keep you safe if someone intents to hurt you or your loved ones.
I have a hard time believing that if there was demand bringing guns into european countries would be that difficult, considering how big the external frontiers of the EU are and how open the internal ones are, and considering how drugs make it there, illegal refugees make it there, etc...
I think that for the most part, there is little demand because local hard criminals are still civilized enough to understand deadly shootouts are not worth the hassle because they bring down a lot more heat on them. North American street gangs are not civilized; they believe shootouts are cool. As for terrorists, if you distinguish mental health cases (random nutjob just starts stabbin') from organized terrorist cells, I think the latter are usually packing (and packing military equipment).
pigeonburger
20d ago
general disarmament
I feel though that the kind of people who will not attempt to get illegal guns because they're more trouble than they're worth are the kind of people that are peaceful enough that they could be trusted with them anyway.
pigeonburger
27d ago
Very rarely do I have to take a pause from reading something because it elicited a visceral reaction. As soon as I realized where you were going with this, I had to take a little break because my brain was just filled with "Oh no, oh hell no. Don't do it bro!"
pigeonburger
27d ago
With hindsight it looks easy, but to people who survived a highly repressive era, a sudden repudiation of that era would have looked like a trap to catch more dissidents.
I had the discussion with friends recently about what being an adult is, and my position was kind of close to yours, it's that an adult has agency and initiative. If an adult sees that something has to be done, he will take into consideration that he can be the one to do it. He doesn't have to always do it, but he is confident he could and sometimes will. A child will only do things when asked or encouraged to do it, or by following others. An adult will plan a vacation trip unprompted, a child will wait for friends or family to invite them. If someone doesn't do it for them, then they will complain that their life is boring, even though they will not do anything to improve it themselves.
There are many old children. Some even elderly. And there are some very young adults.
pigeonburger
28d ago
The biggest argument in favor of EDKH, and the reason I endorse a (mild) version of it, is that it was predictive, and already existed prior to its occurring, giving the authorities every opportunity to prevent it. Almost all conspiracies are post-hoc rationalizations that look at the facts and then concoct a theory to retroactively explain the events. But EDKH predicted it ahead of time.
That is a very good point. Think of Seth Rich's death. No one knew the guy until he died, and then retroactively a compelling narrative was made to explain how his death might have been convenient for, and arranged by, powerful people. But for Epstein, the same people who questioned the official narrative, were pointing out how he was going to get whacked to stop him from talking.
An average joe hitting a homerun in baseball or playing a hole in one in golf is unusual but it's going to happen once in a while. But if they call it right before they do it, there's likely more to this story. Is anyone really seriously thinking Prigozhin's death was accidental?
The main question though is whether they have been calling it (wrong) every time before.
pigeonburger
30d ago
I wouldn't even say that the people in government are specifically dumb, just that we aren't selecting them for what we say we want (competent administration) but instead for what our revealed preference is (we select them for their ability to comfort our tribal biases). And for that, they are actually very good, some of the best we have.
pigeonburger
30d ago
It's a huge huge difference though. Canada to the US is almost a 6x difference. Do the inherent population and cultural differences between Canada and the US really justify that? And even if they did, is more prison the best way to close the gap?
Population has some effect. Cultural though I think does much of the lift here. America has an ambitious culture, which I believe pushes people to more extreme behaviors. Canada, as far as it has a national identity, is defined by not rocking the boat and getting along. This dates back to the foundations of both countries as independant entities, the US being created in a bold armed revolution, Canada by convincing daddy Great Britain that its peoples are getting along now.
It's not just Canada, much of Europe is the same in this, ambition is looked at with suspicion. This leads to calm, sedate peoples. Americans are more ambitious, which leads to a more aggressive people; more Americans resent and resist the idea that they have to be content with their lot in life, which leads many to act erratically.
When you say "Remove them first" I think you need to specify more precisely what that involves.
Of course I have preferences as to what I think it involves, but what I mean by it and what I assume OP meant is that all solutions that removes these people from the street are superior to those that let them there, including some that cross moral lines (for instance, some mild forms of supervised forced labor), and excepting only, for me at least, the most extreme ones (such as killing them).
I do broadly agree with your plan but I'm afraid that without a lot of "drawing the rest of the owl" it wouldn't necessarily resolve the issue, as some countries have actually managed to provide cheap housing to push its undesirables into, and the result is unpoliceable ghettos (see: French suburbs) that erupt into large-scale violence regularly. And as disfunctional as French immigration can be at times, the people that end up in the banlieues are still likely an order of magnitude more functional than raving park yellers.
pigeonburger
30d ago
Maybe, that's possible.
I'm not OP but I think I understand his take. It's a question of priority; it's not that I really don't care what happens to these people, but I think what happens to these people is less important than them being removed from public spaces.
Remove them first, then we'll discuss what compassionate solution we can find to make their lives better. As opposed to the standard western liberal answer that if we improve their lives first the problem will itself disappear from the public square, which has time and time again failed to bear out as the affected people actively resist and sabotage efforts to improve their lives.
If you want to think less of me because I prioritize my comfort and peace in public spaces over these strangers' wellbeing, then go right ahead, but I do also believe that there's complex feedback loops where tolerance of public disfunction leads to more disfunction, so I do still want what's best for my fellow human beings.
pigeonburger
30d ago
- 11km
- 2km (I live next to an italian neighborhood)
- 5km (it's a large rooftop greenhouse farm), greens, microgreens
- Going with Via Rail as it's our equivalent, 6km
- 1km
- 25km
pigeonburger
1mo ago
To what extent is the current competency crisis in government, academia, etc. caused by an inability to spend time by oneself and actually put in the work?
Almost none of it, because IMO the competency crisis is caused by misaligned incentives. In government, the incentives are aligned with playing up tribal politics, not with competent management. In academia, it's in appealing to grant givers, making sensational claims that get published and cited, not producing solid science or advancing human knowledge. In business and especially for public companies, it's maximising current shareholder value rather than building a sustainable business. And so on...
That said, learning and putting in the work is a skill that I believe we in the West have regressed in. Some people expect to be good at something from the start or else they believe they'll never be good at it. Kids need to gain the specific insight of learning how to learn trained into them to grow into capable adults, and I think we might be currently failing at that.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
"Becoming the mask" can happen to grifters, but I cannot believe she started from a position of sincerity. Maybe she deluded or reasoned herself into it.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
This is also part of it. I can't understand how Owens transitioned (heh!) from "well-regarded conservative commentator" to whatever the heck she's doing now.
Any one paying attention would have noticed that there was no reason to regard her well as a commentator right from the get go. Her "debut" was during Gamergate, she was trying to get in on a left wing, anti-gamergate grift, got aggressive pushback as she was encroaching on another grifter's turf, then in a week she reappered, rebranded as right wing, likely after noticing that there was tremendous alpha in being a black woman right winger.
Of course, that only works for so long. If you don't really have any worthwhile insight as a commentator to pivot from into doing serious work, the only way to keep the grift going is to go for ever crazier, more radical positions in order to try and keep the spotlight on you.
Ultimately I think that's simply because most people are intuitively centrists or flexible, but that's a tough position to defend in debates, because keeping your options open is also what someone without a plan would say they're doing. But ideology blinds and binds. Whenever a politician is out of power, they argue like ideologues, and they argue that whoever is in power is failling their own ideology by not sticking to it. It's an easy position to stake. Keeping your options open, while smart, makes you an easy target for nasty headlines, anything you refuse to rule out off the cuff while talking to a journalist (and they won't give you time to think) will be held up as "(politician) could/might/is considering doing this stupid thing!" Trump got very good at evading the trap, but most politicians stumble, they either submit and rule out the stupid thing and then they're made to look weak or stupid for having even considered it, or they find themselves driven into defending the stupid thing.
And that's how we find ourselves in a situation where people kind of hates all sides and no politician can really ever seem like just a smart honest person. Because you can't argue the same positions in the opposition and in power.
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