I wouldn't be sure about either one of Russia and China. I can't find any indication it has changed since then, but it was late Soviet policy to operate its SSBNs from "bastions", highly guarded areas in friendly waters. The noisy environment this created made the comparatively less stealthy Soviet SSBNs stand out less than they would on their own. On their own, they would have an SSN shadowing them, ready to sink them within minutes of war being declared.
China's SSBNs are pretty crude designs for now, decades behind the west. Though of course, they iterate quickly and can be expected to catch up quite fast, assuming they're getting some help from Russia which is not as far behind the west. And that they have homegrown SSBNs at all is no small feat. But considering how noisy they are, they would not feel comfortable operating them outside of safe areas either, meaning they are believed to also operate on a "bastion" doctrine.
pigeonburger
18hr ago
I think it's because it's the only governing body on the planet that is ideologically bound to engage in total warfare against an opponent that dominates it in every way, so that losing in ways that creates a PR nightmare for their opponent is the only possible victory they can get.
pigeonburger
18hr ago
The work not being done until the wages raise to a level where workers are willing to do it is not a market distortion, it is the market working as intended.
Illegal immigrant workers are the market distortion; international borders (not market forces) that have very stark difference in cost of living on one side compared to the other create the incentives for people to go work for way below local market rates. Not that I'm arguing for open borders, but that is one situation where governments create bad incentives (by not having an open market with a poorer neighbors) for reasons that can be desirable for other reason than economic, and where it should also work to compensate for it (by policing illegal immigration properly to counter the incentives they've created).
pigeonburger
1d ago
People sometimes survive absolutely unbelievable stuff because bodies just happened be in just the right way. And sometimes they die because their body has a mild shock in a very unlucky way.
pigeonburger
3d ago
Yes, that's what is counterintuitive: of course a car is deadlier, but we get more angry at cyclists anyway.
And herein lies the big reason as to why the pro-choice side has to fight using misleading arguments; they have actually very good, defensible arguments, but they're technical, philosophical and feel bad to say. Like pointing out there's no easy answer as to when consciousness or life begins. It feels like you're telling pregnant women their fetus isn't a real human. At that point you might as well tell pet owners their pets don't love them, they just want food.
It feels much better when you frame it as defending some highly sympathetic but non-central cases like rape victims than as denying a maybe-baby's humanity.
Same with the "it's my body", " I can chose whether to have a medical operation"/arguments, technically correct and mix it with the previous argument and it's convincing to people with ethics brain. Doesn't code as nice and empathic.
Not my opponents actually, I'm not on any side in this. But pro-choice is pretty much tautologically against the compromise I gave, because the "choice" in the name of their movement is the mother's, not a police officer's, a doctor's or an ethics panel's choice.
They might take a compromise on timing, but not on reasons, because those are no one's business than the mother's.
pigeonburger
7d ago
Oh, okay, I musunderstood you
pigeonburger
8d ago
No, it's the Democrat aligned media that try to make a big deal of Republican controlled legislatures that try to (futilely) put the genie back in the bottle and require age verification for access to porn.
But there's more than two sides to this, I'd point out. There's a large contingent, maybe even a plurality, that believes that being born from parents who didn't want you sucks, that ideally children should only be born from parents that want them, that wouldn't care to defend considering a fetus a human being at the moment of conception, but ALSO wouldn't care to defend it only being a human being at the moment of birth. That contingent feels intuitively, even if they cannot articulate it with nice convenient lines, that there is a difference between an abortion days after conception and an abortion days before expected birth.
That contingent might be easier to compromise with. In fact, compromise is what they want, and usually get. Taking off the table some few but highly sympathetic exceptions might make them willing to go for a more restrictive compromise.
pigeonburger
8d ago
I'm sorry man, that sucks. I didn't even have that traumatic of an experience and I still could not muster to do better for most of my adult life.
I wish I had better advice for you than what you've been probably hearing. I hope you can get over at least the personal aspect of it; as for the world, it tends to be at least a bit kinder to men when we get older.
pigeonburger
8d ago
Interesting, this does seem to explain something I've noticed recently in how little purchase the "War on Porn" that the left and mainstream media seem to be trying make into a big thing has. Considering how many guys watch porn, you'd think they'd defend their access to it passionately, but it doesn't seem to get any reaction from the public. And I doubt that it's because the public at large has untangled the media's spin and can tell that it's not something to panic over, the public is rarely that sophisticated.
pigeonburger
8d ago
I think the pro-life people, particularly the religious who form a majority of them, don't tend to view the question tactically. If a position was imposed that reduced abortion rates without bringing it to zero, they'd still be happy, but they cannot themselves argue for a mere reduction because if they did they imagine themselves being tormented in the afterlife by the ghosts of the unborn fruits of rapes asking them "Wasn't I also a precious human being worth fighting for?". So for them, it has to be a total ban. This might change in the future if the pro-life position gets taken up en-masse by people who have another basis than religion for it; after all, natalism is not inherently religious.
Rape and extreme health risks with regards to abortion are some of the clearest examples of motte-and-bailey arguments I know of. The best way to spot a motte-and-bailey argument is to see if the person is satisfied if you were to grant them the motte. In this case, imagine abortion was 100% completely legal up to any point in the pregnancy for rape cases and for significantly higher health risk than usual pregnancies, and 100% illegal for family planning purposes. If necessary, imagine an omniscient arbiter were able to make sure no rape victim gets dismissed and no one could get away with falsely claiming rape just to get an abortion.
I think a majority of pro-life people would be overjoyed. Even though they might have preferred a full ban, what they want, to save what they percieve as life, is in accordance with the arguments they put forth, so any decrease is good. Pro-choice people would be almost uniformly against, because extreme cases like rape and risky pregnancies are not the reason they are pro-choice, family planning is (but it's a harder sell, especially to family and duty minded conservatives). So in that case, guaranteeing absolutely no rape victim or no risky pregnancy is forced to term is not worth giving up on family planning.
*EDIT: In fact, I suspect that they would be unhappy in ways they could not reasonably explain themselves if full right to abortion were granted to rape and high medical risk cases on top of current compromises. Truthfully because they could not then use these as a shield to expand family planning rights, but I can easily imagine half-assed excuses as to why the medical establishment (or the omniscient arbiter) has no right to judge whether a woman has really been raped, only she can know!
pigeonburger
9d ago
We're all just actors in a play. We enter stage, say our lines, and exit stage. The surest way to be disappointed with this is to try to direct from the stage.
pigeonburger
9d ago
Main problem with therapy is that unless it is mandated by someone else, a therapist is chosen by his patient. So it's likely that the patient will seek out a therapist that tells them what they want to hear rather than what they should hear.
Re: Windows, I don't fucking get why Microsoft doesn't worry about performance more.
Honestly, I'm pretty sure Microsoft just doesn't care about Windows anymore, period. Their money-maker is O365 and Azure subscriptions, which they will gladly sell you on any platform of your choice.
I think they've quietly given up on Windows in general shortly after giving up on Windows Phone. After admitting they were not going to own pocket computing, they must have understood that their monopolistic hold on the software ecosystem was inevitably going to get shattered. Without owning the software market, they have to compete on the quality of the operating system, and developing a state-of-the-art operating system costs too much, and it's too hard to extract money from it compared to cloud services.
Add to that their multiple failures at taking control of PC game distribution which cemented, even before the Steam Deck and SteamOS, that gamers were going to follow Valve wherever they go, not Microsoft.
pigeonburger
10d ago
No, I do realise all of that. But the forms and niceties are important, even if they are just pretending. If you pretend to tolerate the other for long enough, you start believing you do. And when enough people believe it, something magical happens (or rather, something terrible doesn't happen); your society becomes more stable and its constituents don't jump to civil war anytime they lose an election.
pigeonburger
10d ago
Yes, but the form of the justification is important in maintaining a functional liberty-minded society, in which the social contract is something like "You and I probably have different ideas and values as to how we should live our lives, so let's just agree on a minimal set of coercive laws so that we can be peaceful neighbors."
Now functionally, in practice, there can be severe disagreements as to what should be part of the minimum set of laws; there's non-ridiculous arguments to be made that allowing people to stockpile a military arsenal can make their neighbor fearful and not able to coexist peacefully, or that someone removing "just a clump of cells" is depriving a being of life. But they're couched as arguments over what is the minimum set of laws to allow diverse viewpoints and lifestyles. Even if in practice they can be the same, they are not presented as a naked "Ok, now that I have the backing of a majority you better adopt the lifestyle I want you to have or else..." I guess in a spirited debate it's possible to accuse the other side of doing it. But to resort to unironically, unashamedly doing it is crossing some serious lines.
Because at that point, the polite covenent of let's just be neighbors and leave one another alone is irreparably broken.
pigeonburger
10d ago
So exactly as he said.
It sounds like what you actually want is not the freedom to do as you wish, but the power to coerce others, and particularly to deny the other what they want.
pigeonburger
14d ago
There are presumably non-exploitative ways for children to labor--otherwise there would be no children in film. Would it be a bad idea to extend that to other industries?
Here, there are exceptions for kids working for their family's business (provided the family business does not employ 10 people or more), newspaper delivery, tutoring, babysitting or working for a nonprofit.
pigeonburger
15d ago
I think what makes it appear suspect is simply who feels the impulse to drink calorie free sodas. It's just correlation, not causation.
As a wise man once said:
I've never seen a thin person drink diet coke
But the factors are not beyond their control. Guys can decide to start going out, making friends and meeting them IRL. Just because society won't push them to do it as it maybe once did (it's debatable), doesn't mean it cannot be done or that it's even harder than it used to be. It's the same as weight issues; sedentary lifestyles and easy/cheap hyper-palatable high calories options means that if someone doesn't make any effort, unless they've been blessed with excellent genetics, they will gain weight. But it's hardly an immutable prophecy, people can have a good diet, can exercise. In fact, having a good diet and exercising is even easier than ever before in history.
Having a diverse social life is the same. Internalise that locus of control. CHR is a stat that needs exercising, just like STR.
pigeonburger
16d ago
Something we can all relate to
Yeah, I imagine that's the bulk of what they do. And all the time spent shadowing the Chinese subs, US sonarmen get better at identifying them, and more sound from the particular screw on these boats' propeller gets recorded and then processed to help algorithms pick it up from noise.
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