sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
Suddenly I cannot remember the color of your eyes
Or the things we said as we stood together for the last time
User ID: 636
It obviously does, on the margin, since the options are:
- First trimester abortion, try again after
- Carry the baby to term, then recover from pregnancy and birth (and dealing with a young child with disabilities), then try again
Humans have a limited fertility window and most people are trying to hit some target number of kids. However, even if you are just trying to maximize the number of kids you have until you hit menopause, you're trading off a neurotypical kid for a down syndrome kid. Exception would be situations like "you're over 40 and you probably can't get pregnant again".
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
5d ago
Does a Down syndrome child entail a richer tapestry of experiences for the parent than a neurotypical child? That's the tradeoff being made here.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
5d ago
Sure. But you don't know you in particular are going to get cancer, or that by abstaining from smoking you won't get cancer anyway. You don't know how having cancer will feel in a subjective sense. You don't know what else might happen that might obviate all downsides of cancer; maybe you're destined to die before any negative health effects would arrive and smoking would be a pure net-positive for you. All of these can "support" the absurd claim that one's decision to smoke three packs a day was not sufficiently "informed", if one's reasoning is motivated. And as I've argued a number of times before, all reason is motivated.
Sure. But we can pretty confidently say that smoking increases your chances of getting cancer versus the counterfactual. Putting your life savings on black doesn't guarantee that you'll lose them, but I'm pretty comfortable saying that you're informed that it's a possibility. Arguing against this feels like sophistry.
Do you recognize that Good and Evil exist,
Probably.
the difference between them is comprehendible by humans
Based on the number of societies in human history doing absolutely heinous shit and considering it to be normal or even moral, I'm not sure about this. In fact I suspect there's very few societies that don't involve something I consider horrifically evil until fairly recently. And even then I'm not sure.
they have important consequences for humans engaging in them?
Unclear. I'm pretty confident that good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. Perhaps there is a settling of accounts in the hereafter, but that's the whole question, isn't it?
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
5d ago
Or know anyone who works in a big company?
Of course I know him. He's me.
Huge amounts of layoffs have occured predicated on the expectation of efficiencies from AI.
It's a fig leaf to lay off the, frankly speaking, terrible workers who got over hired during covid exuberance in the early 2020s, or otherwise for floundering businesses to shed workers in a bid to become profitable.
Some such companies, once they discovered that AI did not improve efficiency, have been forced to rehire the people they fired,
I'm not aware of any companies begging fired employees to return a la DOGE. Examples?
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
5d ago
Brazil! That will justly punish his wanton ways.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
5d ago
They are depriving themselves and their child of a rich tapestry of experience; one that is perhaps more challenging and painful, but also one that can and should be fulfilling. A life of short cuts is a life cut short; not in time but in meaning.
The implication seems to be that you should have children with as many different neurological disorders as possible rather than boring neurotypicals. Is that really your position?
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
6d ago
Note that you'd need to raise the retirement age to, like, 75 in order to avert insolvency if that's the only thing you're doing.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
6d ago
We've got a variety of fairly reliable evidence that smoking causes cancer. The evidence that unrepentant sin sends you to hell is, let's say, more on the hearsay side of things. If the best evidence for smoking causing cancer is that somebody said it totally does, it would be a different story.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
6d ago
Perhaps this is a stupid question, but why couldn't your manager escalate to his boss until it gets to someone who can do something about it?
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
6d ago
to companies firing large parts of their workforce because of 'AI efficiencies' that don't actually exist,
If the efficiencies don't exist, it follows that the layoffs can't possibly be AI's fault.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
6d ago
It feels like we go from one hype to the next without any response from the market when the hype doesn't pan out. Cryptocurrency was going to change everything. NFTs were going to change everything. The metaverse was going to change everything. 3d printing was going to change everything. Hyperloop was going to change everything. Full self driving was going to change everything by 2017!
Surely you can't really be surprised about any of this. What is the market supposed to do about NFTs not panning out? To what extent were public companies investing in monkey pngs with the hope of selling them to a greater fool? Why should the markets crash because some retards (technical term) were wrong about NFTs?
Except for the metaverse this goes for all of your examples. And Facebook stock took a 64% haircut in 2022 (the market overall fell only 33%) so it was hardly without consequences.
This sounds like:
It feels like we go from one hype to the next without any response from the market when the hype doesn't pan out. Flat billed caps were going to change everything. High rise ladies' pants were going to change everything. Low rise ladies' pants were going to change everything. Streetwear was going to change everything.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
7d ago
Who was talking about time machines?
The whole discussion is why we are still working as much as in 1920.
You were saying ‘if you’d a low income and lots of free time to make art then go on the dole’ and I was saying that the system doesn’t work like that.
It does, though. You just can't do it with significant wealth. The point is what it takes to get a 1920s level of existence today. It doesn't take 40 hours of work a week.
FIRE, you life and mine are different. Even if I paid no tax and had no expenses, it would take considerably more than a decade to get that kind of money.
It's not about your life or mine. You are the one who brought up the upper class. My point is that people who can amass 1M in savings in a reasonable timeframe almost never quit the rat race and live on 40k a year in perpetuity. That tells you something about the demand for such a lifestyle.
But that’s not the problem. The problem is that it renders you completely vulnerable, especially now that you’ve also driven yourself to zero net worth to be eligible. Even the people who don’t like their jobs know that going on the dole or claiming disability benefits as a middle class professional will be a door you can never reopen and that obviously affects their decision making.
Vulnerable to what, exactly?
Again, you seem to be gesturing towards ‘people say they want A but when pressed they don’t take A
(which is a really shit version of A) so they can’t really mean what they’re saying’.
Sure. The best version of A is I get paid $1M a year to make art at a leisurely pace. Everything else is a "shitty version" of that. if you want 2020s living standards, you gotta work like the average 2020s citizen. Can we not conclude anything from the fact that nobody takes the 1920s material conditions gambit in return for limitless free time? I think we can.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
7d ago
Indeed. The kinds of people complacent enough to be okay living a 1920s existence today are probably pretty contemptible.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
7d ago
I think this is mostly slang among Brits of Caribbean extraction (see "London multicultural English").
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
7d ago
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
7d ago
Well, of course you don't get to take your 2020s level of wealth into the 1920s time machine. That was never part of the deal.
the lack of middle/upper class takers doesn't tell you much about its desirability.
IME a significant portion of the UMC/UC is comfortable with, shall we say, questionable tax practices (dubious business write-offs, under the table nannies, etc). I don't think it's their acute sense of honor that keeps them from doing this.
Since you mentioned the upper class, let's look at this the other way. You can withdraw 40k a year from a 1M principal indefinitely. Certainly you can live better on 40k a year than the median 1920s person, and it won't take decades to save up 1M on a high income especially if you are already practicing for your 1920s lifestyle. Yet basically no high earners do this outside of FIRE weirdos. There's just not that much demand to live like you're in the 1920s. People would rather live in the 2020s and work 40 hours a week.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
8d ago
You need to provide evidence that you are working full time to apply for jobs, or they’ll cut you off.
I am sure that many unscrupulous individuals find a way to spend less than forty hours a week looking for a job.
And you need to be genuinely poor or they’ll tell you to live off your savings.
Naturally.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
8d ago
Is scarcity really still so much that people need to work 40 hours a week for the system, the same as a century ago? Probably not. You're probably getting ripped off.
You can probably get a 1920s level of existence by going on the dole and working zero hours a week. I mean, better, because you can still post on the motte when you're on the dole. Not a lot of takers though, relatively speaking.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
8d ago
That money should be reserved for the highest types of people
Such as, for example, yourself?
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
8d ago
one count of the production of a knife.
Do you need a loicense to sharpen metal in Ireland or is this "production" in the sense of "brandishing"?
You don't have to go into Marxism to protect your True Self. You can also go into crackpot science.
I know a certain person. Reasonably smart, has a PhD. He's always had a bit of a chip on his shoulder, but the years have not been kind. He sees people much smarter meet with professional success and status while not seeing a path to it himself. But he knows that while he may not be "quantitatively" as smart as the people at the top, he's much better at "making connections" (aka schizo daydreaming). He knows that all of academia is fake, a charade where people blindly parrot whatever the boss believes which is why a free thinker such as himself could never get ahead. But he knows that he deserves to get ahead, that he deserves to be on top and to have everyone (including, of course, Father) admit that they were wrong and he was right.
His current project is a new model for fundamental physics. You see, the reason he can't conceptualize quantum mechanics or whatever isn't because he doesn't have the chops but because it's bullshit and the lemmings in academia just eat it up. He's getting close. He's got a small following, mostly senile boomers and lumpenproles, but it's growing. His true self is coming into being. Someday, a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the academy.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
8d ago
I also get more out of many investments than I put in, I'm still entitled to it.
You're entitled to those because you own the investment vehicle.
government should not renege on promises if it can be helped.
It can't be helped without cannibalizing the ~entire economy for Medicare and SS.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
8d ago
We already have a PvP zone. It's called Washington.
If you want to argue that's it's immoral to abort a down syndrome baby, go ahead - but what you're doing is arguing that the parents are missing out, in fact impoverishing themselves, by not having a disabled child.
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