pigeonburger
9mo ago
They have their own topics on which they'll ignore the other side's nuanced opinions and just go by what's most convenient to assume the other side's saying. Accusations of "communism" from that side are often like that.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Without the urgency of the current war encouraging the West to transfer arms to Ukraine, and especially if the West loosen economic sanctions on Russia following peace, Russia will replenish its arms stocks for the sequel war way faster than Ukraine can.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
That is still meritocratic with one extra step; they're meritorious because they've been appointed to the job by God, who's the supreme judge of merit.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Or the crypto-racism of having every evil or stupid character look like me, and every cool, heroic and most importantly moral character look like a Gen Z Nonbinary Zirboss.
Being a bit of a devil's advocate here, but I can't help but see this as validating the other side's concerns about representation. One of the main defenses against culture being remade was that the old one was serving everyone just fine; that black kids were identifying just fine with a white Little Mermaid. Of course, there's an obvious over-representation of diversity now, but after how many decades of under-representation? The thinking here, which I can't agree with, is that dragging our faces in it for a while is necessary for straight cis whites to learn not to do this again. But your reaction seems to be exactly what they're going for and is likely to embolden them; your unease is the mirror of the one they claim every non straight cis white has felt for decades before they established institutional and cultural dominance.
They could also stop subsidizing some of their industries in which americans would otherwise be able to undercut them, stop supply management systems, etc...
There's plenty of ways short of forcing companies to buy american that governments can enact that would affect the trade balance. It's not like the world economy was truly a free market the way libertarians dream about; every government (including the US, though to what extent is what's basically the real question under contention) keeps making moves to give their country's companies an edge, through tarrifs, subsidies, taxation regime, currency manipulation, espionnage, enforcement (or non enforcement) of foreign copyright/patents, dumping, etc... The current american administration simply thinks that access to their market is worth dropping some of these moves for other countries.
It's not like they're playing a new game no one else has been playing. They simply made a big move in the same game everyone has been playing.
pigeonburger
4mo ago
Only if you make eye contact
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
3mo ago
and note this analysis is from a right wing/libertarian news org so I’d actually give it more credibility
The analysis is from the CBO, Zero Hedge's analysis (I would not put much stock in it, their analysis for years has been that the world is weeks/months away from economic collapse) is that CBO talks bullshit:
Well if only the previous administration hadn't listened to the CBO's cheerful forecasts years ago when the "nonpartisan" budget office said to do... precisely what was done and lo and behold, here we are. And now the CBO wakes up?
The bottom line, however, is that the CBO has openly declared war on Musk and is daring him to shutdown whole swaths of the government, and if there is anything Elon lives for, it's a dare. It sure would be ironic if the completely useless and thoroughly partisan CBO itself were to be the next to be eliminated.
He's immune from having to testify, maybe, but it would be so trivial for him to show up, say "yep, I authorized this" that refusing to do so would raise questions. His refusal to testify on its own would not push towards a verdict that goes Trump's way in the courtroom, but it would certainly go Trump's way in the public opinion.
pigeonburger
11mo ago
The problem is that no automatic updates is also a terrible idea, as a majority of systems don't get patched, ever. The ideal is manual updates but responsible companies/admins testing before deployment, and sadly I don't think that's gonna happen. The second best is gradual/tiered deployments with the ability to opt out, which is more realistic but still require more effort than many companies are willing to provide.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
I guess it comes down to whether the regime is all in on teaching kids to be trans in public schools. And if they actually care about black people as saints or would mostly be fine with treating them the same as white people. Those are useful tools to bash maga but I don’t know how many in the PMC actually believe that stuff.
There's also the possibility that Desantis himself personally doesn't care that much about these things and that as he got into power, he would pivot his priorities into ones that get bipartisan approval (read: the priorities of the PMC/cathedral) so he can line up some quick wins and would only make weak ineffectual gestures at placating his base on these topics.
pigeonburger
1mo 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
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Very arbitrary. A 26-year-old woman who became sexually active at 16 and slept with one guy every two years would exceed it.
Yeah, I've been single for a long time, and if it had been "as easy" for me in my moments of peak horniness/loneliness to go out and find someone at least acceptable looking for a one-night-stand that no else has to know about as it seems to be for women, my body count would have effortlessly cracked the double digits. And I'm far from a libido monster.
5 by 26 for a single girl seems like a girl with a good amount of restraint to be honest.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
What proportion of men are:
- Making over 50 000$ in a profession with enough employment prospects and stability that they could possibly support a family. I guess this can vary depending on location, so you could replace it with "makes enough money to not use over 1/3 of his salary to pay for a 2 bedroom living space, be it house, condo or apartment, in a neighborhood where children could safely grow and thrive".
- Emotionally stable. Most importantly: not violent.
- Not obese / is at least in minimal physical shape to offer some sort of physical protection for his family.
- Not going to cheat. Hard to know, but it's important to note that not cheating means jack shit for someone who does not get any and never had the opportunity to.
- Responsible financially and don't blow their entire discretionary income on hobbies.
- Not somebody's baby daddy already.
Not including but probably should:
- Not drug abusers
- Not a degenerate gooner (does not subscribe to an only fans; it's only fair to judge the people who enable the sex work as well)
- Again, IF HE HAD THE OPPORTUNITY, would not have a body count over 5 partners? (I understand it's less of a dealbreaker for women than for men)
- We mentionned hobbies already, but what proportion of men are not deeply invested into women repellent hobbies? That depends per generation, but for some generations it's manga/anime, for others it was video games, now it's probably like being terminally online on racist or "red pill" forums.
I mean, I could probably keep going and match all of your points with equivalents.
It depends what kind of criminals you're thinking about, but most of them don't do any kind of reasonned risk/reward analysis. They simply believe punishment doesn't matter because they won't get caught. It's like reckless driving; a likely result is death, the harshest punishment, but it's infrequent enough that the people doing it discount its possibility to zero. Or teens and unwanted pregnancies, even when there wasn't an easy way out, it still happened all the time because the punishment was infrequent enough as to seem unlikely to happen.
Because if my biggest enemy managed to get the BIOS password to one of my machines (if I even cared to put one; I don't), I would not give a fuck. If you told me my biggest enemy managed to get the BIOS password to my machine AND unsupervised physical access to my machine for for a couple of hours, then yeah I'd be worried and wouldn't trust that machine anymore.
But so would I if he just had unsupervised physical access to my machine for a couple of hours.
Hence, the BIOS password is inconsequential.
pigeonburger
8mo ago
posting polemics about how only Trump will save us is allowed
I am pretty sure the point being made is the opposite, and the quotes and references are on-purpose bad just so they can point at this post and complain about how it's all dumb Trump supporters here.
This is about Canada, not the US.
Disclaimer: I've used family reunification sponsorship to help my wife move to live with me here. But she's not elderly, she's from a western country and she will contribute to society.
But anyway. I don't think it needs to be steelmanned: it's pretty obviously a nice thing to allow people to move in to live with their family. I think it's up to the other side to demonstrate that we cannot afford it.
I'm not saying that they cannot make that case. Chain migration exists. But I would be more in favor of slowing chain migration at the source, taking it as a granted that an economic migrant is likely a beachhead for a larger group, and thus being (A LOT) more selective in allowing them in. This, rather than disallowing family reunification, which has a clearer case of being a pro-social, pro-human justification for immigration.
*EDIT: Though I guess I'm open to some changes to family reunification. I'd be open to increase the delay between immigration and being able to sponsor. I think now it's 5 years from the moment you become a permanent resident. Maybe 10 years after becoming citizen? Long enough that anyone planning on chain migration will probably look somewhere else, unless they have extreme patience. I don't know how the pathways for immigration are for an extended family group, maybe these need to be developped/improved so a prospective immigrant and all the family he wants to bring to Canada can all attempt to immigrate together, so they can't then complain that it's inhumane and evil that we won't allow all the cousins to move in with them after we accepted one of them.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
I would guess there's a lot more sponsored immigrants that are/will be economically productive (spouses and children) than there are elderly sponsored immigrants, making it not worth writing an exception around, especially when there's a pretty compelling compassionate reason to allow the relatively few cases.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
I don't know, if I were Hamas I would probably wouldn't want my support to appear too high in polls, because their best weapon is the innocents they hide behind. If it turns out that the innocents are pretty much in full support of Hamas, they stop being so innocent and Hamas lose their best shield, both literally in battle and figuratively. Though there's also a lower bound of apparent support that Hamas also has to avoid, at which the Palestinian civilians might decide they have a good enough chance if they start a civil war to stop/disarm Hamas.
pigeonburger
12d ago
Personally, I've been hit by the thunderbolt before, but I think it's not an indicator of any kind of compatibility, but our biology's attempt at getting people who are failing to pair bond to reproduce regardless.
I went and fed the initial criteria I listed through Gemma 3, had to correct it for one misunderstanding it made. It gave between 4.3% and 11.2% of the US male population.
I fed it through a Deepseek R1 Distill to see if a reasoning model went about it a different way. The reasoning chain, the way it tried to guesstimate, was wild. Still, it came up with 5-10%, so roughly similar.
Strikethrough: Sorry, just realised I also forgot to tell it this is of SINGLE men, so the numbers are probably significantly lower. I'll prompt again.
And I'm sure I could add criteria. I forgot to ask them for cishet men, I forgot to tell them to exclude men above a certain age.
If you want to put a ceiling on body count for women, it'd be fair to put a floor on it for men; at least 1 partner; virginity is not attractive for men, it's lack of social proof. Maybe if we wanted to be more fair we could put a specific age to them. A floor of 1 partner for men after 20, a ceiling of 5 partners for women before 25.
*SUBSEQUENT EDIT: I reran the numbers with SINGLE men and cishet, and it gave less than 2% of men fulfilling these criteria. Note that I don't trust AI estimates for these since it uses extremely simplistic analysis and can't really account for correlation between criteria appropriately, and tends to mix specifics in ways they shouldn't (compared US-wide salaries to rents in highly inflated high cost of living areas) but I think for both men and women, with my and your criteria, we're probably both in single digit percentages.
If you want to see this as a blackpill, go ahead, but I think both criteria sets probably are too restrictive. Women probably shouldn't be looking only for men who are financially capable of being single income breadwinners, men probably shouldn't be looking at education debt and >5 body count as dealbreakers.
As for the large contingent who fall short of these criteria, they'll end up matching with one another.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Every airport I've been to recently still has carts you can just pick up and use for free, and they work much better than wheeled luggage.
I'm sure luggage makers love the wheels though, because they break and make people want to buy new luggages much more often.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
I'd argue the opposite. If you break some fingers or a rib in sparring, or sprain your ankle, then that doesn't at all impair your ability to drive or ride the subway to your office job and interact, perhaps a little more slowly than usual, with your computer / papers / coworkers. Plus, nowadays you can just take sick leave in many western countries.
On the other hand, once lives are on the line "unsportsmanlike" techniques that are hard to realistically train without risking injury (like eye gouges, fish hooks, striking at the throat, etc...) are definitely on the table. Risking injury in training to some extent might be worth learning how to realistically defend against them.
I mean, the thought experiment is comparing two extremes' effect on irrational actors, but any sane policy would adjust punishments so that it doesn't at the same time create unfortunate incentives for rational actors.
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