sodiummuffin
No bio...
User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
1d ago
How is "adopt the policies of your political opponents" even responding negatively to them? Whether Trump or Harris gets a 10% government stake in Intel the result is the same, the only difference is which side supports it and what justifications they use. Would it make sense for Democrats to respond negatively to Trump by building the wall?
The only thing that would make it at least somewhat different is if the party doing it used it to somehow dictate Intel policy in a partisan way, but that isn't happening in this case and it would be short-term regardless, since after the next election it doesn't matter who was in power when it happened. It's not adopting left-wing tactics against them, Trump just genuinely believes in a bunch of left-wing policy positions like opposition to free trade and government ownership of companies.
There seems to be a recent tendency I've noticed online where people are so eager to signal animosity by throwing away their principles that they'll do it when it doesn't make any sense. For instance I've seen several cases where SJWs censored something and there were comments kneejerk supporting it as "what goes around comes around" because they somehow misinterpreted which side the censorship was coming from. If you don't have principles besides "oppose the enemy", and also you don't understand what your enemy believes, it's pretty easy to end up supporting the enemy against your own side.
sodiummuffin
2d ago
That sounds very much like Let This Grieving Soul Retire!: Woe Is the Weakling Who Leads the Strongest Party, which got an anime adaption last year. It's not cultivation though, just Japanese light-novel/webnovel fantasy.
sodiummuffin
2d ago
The full copypasta:
Meng Hao walked into the McDonald's. The cultivator taking his order gave a derisive snort, but Meng Hao did not really care, because he had repressed his aura down to the Single Patty Realm, and a fool would not be able to tell his true level of burger eating.
"Give me... a Happy Meal!"
The cultivator's face flickered before he finally regained his composure and laughed. "You couldn't afford a Happy Meal. Get lost! Don't you see that there are Double Quarter Pounder Realm eaters waiting behind you?"
Meng Hao slapped his bag of holding and threw 80 billion spirit McDonald's coupons onto the counter, causing an earthquake which demolished half of the restaurant. Everyone dropped their jaws. None could see how this was possible!
"I'll take that Happy Meal with a side order of fries, " Meng Hao said. He was as calm as the ocean in a painting of an insanely calm ocean. "And let me see your manager!"
The cashier cultivator coughed up a mouthful of ketchup. He simply could not handle Meng Hao's killing intent, because he was only at the Quarter Pounder with Cheese realm himself. Even though Meng Hao had suppressed his aura, because he had cultivated the Heavenly Burgin' Qi, this was enough to kill people a few levels higher if he truly wanted.
It was then that another man which a much more fierce aura stepped forward. "You dare make trouble here?"
"P... Patriarch Hamburglar!"
Patriarch Hamburglar was 99 cents of the way into the Big Mac Realm, plus tax! Meng Hao was pushed back two feet, knocking over a soda machine. Powerade Mountain Berry Blast geysered outward, killing several onlookers.
Of course, Mayor McCheese saw all this happen through the window.
Meng Hao coughed up a mouthful of blood, snorted, constricted his pupils, and then his expression went calm. He unleashed the aura of 64 patties, condensed down to a 2 patty stack that could fit into his mouth!
Mayor McCheese coughed up a mouthful of cheese. His pupils constricted.
"Is this... Seeking the McRib stage??"
Meng Hao had the gentle air of a scholar, but it wouldn't stop him from killing several people in a McDonald's.
"Burger Devouring Scripture! I'm Lovin' It!"
With the first keyword of the Burger Devouring Scripture, everyone below the early Quarter Pounder With Cheese stage exploded into purple mist. The light of the immense heavenly burger shone down with the contours of a golden arch as 9 illusory burgers floated around Meng Hao's body, which is probably an important xianxia number that matches the number of lakes in some sacred Chinese province I've never heard of. But that was only a fraction of Meng Hao's power. He waved his arm, bringing forth thirty more cultivation techniques that hadn't appeared in over 400 chapters!
"Heavenly Tribulation Fries! Eastern Everburning Egg McMuffin! Fruit Smoothie Guillotine! Soul McCafe Mocha Incarnation!"
Meng Hao's expression was the same as ever as he slapped his bag of holding, and brought out his karmic ketchup packet, Fry Cook Lord medallion, seventeen different wooden time spatulas, a five-coloured resurrection coupon, the silk burger wrapper, various souls of lightning McNuggets that he may or may not still have, and his mask of the legacy of Ronald McDonald. Oh, and the image of a flying Chicken Snack Wrap dragon appeared. Remember that? It was basically his Main Thing at the start of the novel, but quietly faded into irrelevance. Until now!
All of this takes some time to describe, but actually happened in the space of only a few breaths.
"What! Impossible!"
Meng Hao wanted to summon the parrot as well, but it was too overcome with eroticism by the purple fur depicted on a nearby poster of Grimace, and was busy drilling out a glory hole straight through the poster, and the wall it was pinned to, with its strong parrot erection.
But it was more than enough. The Hamburglar's soul flew out and was absorbed into his mask! He screamed as his body was destroyed completely.
Meng Hao brushed off his robe and swept up his spirit coupons and everyone's bags of holding which probably didn't have any cool sh*t inside unless I write him into a corner later, and anyways, don't worry about it for now. He surveyed the rubble that was all that remained of the McDonald's.
"Guess I'll be taking that Happy Meal... to go!"
Originally from this review of I Shall Seal the Heavens.
sodiummuffin
4d ago
Does that actually benefit Democrats though? Concentrating your safe voters in a single district is generally the opposite of what you want to do if the goal is maximizing number of seats or attaining a majority. My default guess would be that majority-minority motivated gerrymandering would actually hurt Democrats, but I assume somebody has done the actual analysis.
sodiummuffin
15d ago
I haven't been following the issue but haven't there been a bunch of cases of it going off in the holster, some of which were caught on camera? A quick search finds this CBS video from 9 months ago that includes footage of a few cases, it's not just the Air Force one from a few weeks ago. Now, maybe the media coverage is misleading and all of those have an explanation that exonerates SIG, but without addressing those prior cases it is hardly "taking refutation of their stance as proof that they are actually right" for people to continue believing there is a problem.
sodiummuffin
15d ago
I am very skeptical about profit motive in trans medicine being a notable cause of the rise, rather than both being a result of a social movement that involved true-believers creating or taking over trans medical institutions. As a matter of chronology I'm pretty sure the movement came first, I remember the ancestor of the present trans movement (and SJW stuff more generally) already existing back when a common complaint was that medical gatekeepers would require prospective (adult) trans people to live as the opposite gender for a year before prescribing them hormones. That wasn't a policy designed to maximize the number of trans people, and I believe it fell to the trans movement not them suddenly realizing it was reducing profits.
The rise of "non-binary gender identity", for instance, doesn't seem like something that would have happened if it was mostly driven by medical profit motive. Yes it is sometimes medicalized - a few days ago The New Yorker had a puff piece about a mother and her "non-binary"/"demi-girl" daughter who went on testosterone at 11 and got "top surgery" at 13 - but it seems much less common than with conventional binary trans identification. The trans movement has similar patterns to all sorts of SJW stuff with no profit motive. Nobody is going to doctor due to identifying as "demisexual", and indeed people who identify as "asexual/grey-asexual" are presumably less likely to seek treatment than those who identify as having "hypoactive sexual desire disorder".
sodiummuffin
25d ago
That isn't really how people think about counterfactual people in other contexts. Relevant post from Scott:
sodiummuffin
25d ago
The deal is one sided and quite good for the US.
One sided yes, good for the U.S. no. Fundamentally a 15% tariff is still just making the economy less efficient for no benefit besides some tax revenue that could to collected in less distortionary ways. Plus, unlike keeping tariffs that already exist which at least reduces disruption at the cost of long-term growth, new tariffs actively cause disruption. Pretty much the only possible advantage would be slightly increasing resiliency to trade disruptions, and even that isn't that likely because the inherent instability of tariffs imposed by the President without Congress means investors are unlikely to make long-term investments based on avoiding the 15%. Imposing tariffs without retaliatory tariffs in return is like if the U.S. bombed some EU factories and got them to agree not to bomb the U.S. in return, it's one-sided but that doesn't mean it's beneficial.
sodiummuffin
26d ago
Aside from the goblins there was also an effort last year to label her a "Holocaust denier" for denying that the Nazis specifically targeted transgender people. "Holocaust denial" and "Nazi apologia" are anti-semitic, so she's anti-semitic. Here is an article from the time arguing the pro-Rowling side.
sodiummuffin
29d ago
People fall for specific individual people more than they fall for hypothetical lists of attractive traits. So the women rich men are interested in are often just the ones they happen to have contact with. Statistical differences between groups can't be assumed to reflect the preferences of those groups, they can also reflect who they have contact with in the first place.
Notice how even when they aren't peers they're often stuff like Arnold Schwarzenegger cheating on his wife with his housekeeper, rather than with some beautiful model. That's not "rich celebrities prefer housekeepers", he didn't cheat with some random woman employed as a housekeeper to someone else, he cheated with a woman he was actually in contact with. It reminds me of when people were questioning Jeff Bezos's marriage recently - sure he could theoretically pick between a lot of women, but she was the one he actually met via work.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
And since humans created the rules, by their impartial enforcement we can understand what their underlying motivations actually are. That being, ensuring that reddit discussions are as anodyne and helpful as possible.
Well, really it's "make as much money as possible."
I think people really tend to overrate how much people prioritize maximizing corporate profits compared to ideological motives. Reddit higher-ups genuinely think it's bad when users "advocate violence", they mentally associate it with some sort of Reddit lynch-mob psyching themselves up to murder someone or with those news stories blaming the Rohingya genocide on Facebook. They might also mention something about advertisers if you asked but mostly they just genuinely think it would be morally wrong to allow it, so they created site-wide rules about it many years ago. Much more recently they made an AI to do moderation at scale. The AI can't distinguish between your post and the sort of advocating violence they actually care about, in part because the distinction isn't articulated anywhere or even really thought-out. LLMs aren't relevant because they want pacifist training data, LLMs are relevant in that "automated Reddit moderator banning people for advocating violence" is now something that can exist at all. Anthropic literally scanned millions of print books for more training data, AI companies are not trying to do alignment by sanitizing violence from their training data, especially not in such a roundabout way.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
Good idea I can say that, as it's a way to refer to the event without saying his name.
Different event, same effect. The Ferguson Effect refers to the rise in crime following the death of Michael Brown, and by extension any similar event. (Michael Brown being the guy who protestors chanted "hands up don't shoot" over, who wasn't actually holding his hands up and was in fact attacking the officer and grabbing his gun shortly after having robbed a store and assaulted the store employee). It was somewhat contentious whether the Ferguson effect was real, but then we had the Floyd Effect which was much bigger and less ambiguous.
-
The main reason why similar items targeted towards men and women sometimes have different prices isn't for the purpose of trickery, it's because prices are heavily determined by factors like economy of scale. People value product differentiation enough to sometimes buy the more expensive product, so companies make it, and then they charge a price that recoups the money they spent on manufacturing/shipping/etc. another product line.
-
The actual overall "pink tax" seems to be approximately zero:
Gender-Based Pricing in Consumer Packaged Goods: A Pink Tax?
Further, we show that segmentation involves product differentiation; there is little overlap in the formulations of men’s and women’s products within the same category. Using a national data set of grocery, convenience, drugstore, and mass merchandiser sales, we demonstrate that this differentiation sustains large price differences for men’s and women’s products made by the same manufacturer. In an apples-to-apples comparison of women’s and men’s products with similar ingredients, however, we do not find evidence of a systematic price premium for women’s goods: price differences are small, and the women’s variant is less expensive in three out of five categories. Our findings are consistent with the ease of arbitrage in posted price markets where consumer packaged goods are sold. These results call into question the need for and efficacy of recently proposed and enacted pink tax legislation, which mandates price parity for substantially similar gendered products.
It is one of those issues that reflects the speakers more than the subject. Why is there a "pink tax" meme? Because many people view the world through the lens of feminism, so when they see a male-targeted product that happens to be cheaper than the female-targeted product next to it they believe this is an injustice and a systematic issue. Feminism's influence as an ideology means the "pink tax" then becomes a political issue, the subject of discourse and even legislation, without ever doing the first step of finding out whether it actually exists. Even if it existed it would probably just be a result of something like women statistically valuing product differentiation more so there's many smaller product lines, but we don't even have to move on to that argument because there isn't a notable difference in the first place.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
I don't think your political enemies like references to the Floyd/Ferguson Effect regardless of what you call him. If anything derogatory partisan nicknames mean such references are less likely to be taken seriously by those they might otherwise be worried about you convincing.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
So there are a lot of threads going on with this article, but my take on this is that the store was probably doing okay before 2020, but then Fentanyl Floyd's crime wave absolutely decimated the area.
You can just call it the Floyd crime wave. I think everyone here already knows he was on fentanyl and that there is an argument that it would have killed him regardless of how he was restrained, you don't need to remind us every time you say his name. (Though I'd actually be interested if anyone has ever done a reasonably credible/objective look into that argument, since from what I've seen the trial, mainstream media, and conservative media all seem unreliable.) "Fentanyl Floyd" is approaching "Amerikkka"/"Drumpf"/"Demonrat" levels of nicknames that do nothing besides signal your politics in a way that can easily come across as obnoxious.
Sun Fresh market was actually a [successful independent grocery store](Sun Fresh Market)
I assume this was supposed to be a link.
That seems like a bad way to judge a metaphor? If you say "wolf in sheep's clothing" or "fox guarding the henhouse" that has very little to do with the typical way farmers respond to animals threatening their own animals (shooting them).
For reference, the quote in question:
It's all well and good to want to plant seeds, and failing to plant your own, nurture what you can find. Just make sure you aren't nurturing some virulent invasive species that will leave the land barren.
Whether accurate or not, I think the crux of the metaphor would be the idea of carelessly planting something that is destructive to the other plants/environment (particularly because they aren't well-adapted to dealing with it), not any particular response. The focus is on the planting/nurturing, on some poor gardener who thinks all seeds are the same (e.g. is a blank-slatist regarding nurture/nature) and then is left with the consequences, not on what he should do afterwards.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
I may agree, but every study has found tattoos correlate with an increased number of sexual partners in men, so clearly it isn't a widely shared belief.
Despite the emphasis that tends to be paid to it in media and discussions, surveys indicate that casual sex is only practiced by a fairly small minority. The norm is serial monogamy, under which "more sexual partners" just means more failed relationships than the guy who had the same girlfriend the whole time. Now, it's possible men with tattoos are also more likely to have a romantic/sexual partner at all (after all both "getting a tattoo" and "asking out a woman" might be considered a form of risk-taking), but number of sexual partners isn't the right metric to determine that.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
It includes future children who aren't conceived yet, so by that logic it would also apply to preventing them from existing via condoms or abstinence.
The argument is that it will harm them in the future after they are born, which is presumably considered different from preventing them from existing in the first place. Like if a company was dumping a chemical that caused birth defects and you got a court to order them to stop on behalf of victims that don't yet exist. (I am not a lawyer and don't know if you can actually do that, but I'd guess you can.) Conversely I would be very surprised if someone distributing free condoms or putting up "Say No to Teen Pregnancy: No sex before marriage" posters could be sued on behalf of the counterfactual people who would have been born if they didn't do that.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
Today in trying to interpret survey results: 22% answered "No" to "Do you think tattoos can ever be attractive on a man?". But when asked "How do you think tattoos generally look on a man?" only 19% answered "Bad" or "Terrible". This implies at least 3% who thinks tattoos can't ever be attractive but think they generally look "OK" or better, and also a severe lack of people who think the average tattoo looks bad but that some small minority of tattoos can look good. I assume they are not answering the questions literally, but the result is sufficiently far from the questions that it is difficult to guess what they are actually trying to convey.
Skimming ahead, in the next table I check out 51% say it is "Always unacceptable" to "Assume someone with tattoos is more likely to commit a crime" but only 45% say it is "Always unacceptable" to "Deport immigrants based on their tattoos". So at least 6% think that if someone has a gang tattoo it's unacceptable to think he's 1% more likely to commit a crime, but acceptable to kick him out of the country for it. (Well, unless there's some sort of non-criminal-associated tattoos they want to deport people for? Like if there were a bunch of people who thought of swastika tattoos but just associated them with "political beliefs" rather than "being in a prison gang"?) I guess what's happening here is that ironically the very severity of "deport" makes people imagine worse tattoos, even when the language of "always" should make that a non-factor?
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
The stuff about Epstein potentially working for Israeli intelligence (or U.S. intelligence) seems fairly plausible to me, though I haven't followed the case that closely. The idea of a secret "client list" that the police retrieved from his documents but haven't released or been leaked across multiple administration (coincidentally matching the "Epstein list" meme that developed for other reasons) is much less so, especially when people respond to the continued non-release by assuming "it must incriminate high-level politicians on both sides" over "it doesn't exist". Israel is fully capable of storing their own blackmail documents. If he was a blackmail tool they probably wouldn't be "clients" anyway, it would be "turns out that girl you had a one-night-stand with was under the age of consent".
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
The reason people thought there was a "client list" to begin with was because of people using "Epstein list" to refer to the lists of everyone who ever flew to a party hosted on his island or were mentioned in the court documents in any context.
The Independent: The Epstein List: Full list of names revealed in unsealed court records
BBC: Jeffrey Epstein list: Who is named in court filings?
Newsweek: Jeffrey Epstein List in Full as Dozens of Names Revealed
Yeah of course it didn't exist, I personally saw the rumor of its existence develop from people saying "Epstein list" to imply things that the actual Epstein lists clearly did not imply.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
Oh sure, but in this case we're trading off with risk of being killed as a child, not 11 extra minutes on your deathbed, so QALYs are the appropriate metric. By "reduce their lifespan" I was imagining it as taking those minutes from their prime, reducing healthspan by an equal amount.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
Note that "total blindness", "clinical depression", and "chronic pain" all involve average QALY estimates that still imply an above-zero value of life. There's a lot of people with those conditions who would gladly sign up for boring seminars if they eliminated their condition for the duration of the seminar. And of course history is full of people opting for unpleasant slave-labor over death. So if you're not joking your opinion seems non-representative.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
People would rather spend time attending a safety seminar or working than reduce their lifespan and spend an equal amount of time being dead, so you can't trade off QALYs for time worked 1 for 1. Instead it's just another adjustor to quality-of-life, roughly equivalent to time spent working without being paid (the actual workers get paid, but it destroys the value they would produce doing something else). You could also compare the cost to the standard "economic value of the life" calculations derived from the premiums on risky jobs, and indeed certain safety measures require risky construction work and thus are partially paid for with the deaths and disabling of the construction workers you have implement them. Your calculation is still useful as a sanity check though, even though the actual tradeoff in time spent wouldn't be 11 minutes.
The specific context which inspired his post is Trump doing stuff like buying the government a 10% share in Intel and some people justifying this with "your rules, fairly > your rules, unfairly". I'm pretty sure this isn't even Trump trying to "use left-wing tactics against them" or anything, it doesn't accomplish anything partisan. Trump just genuinely believes in a bunch of left-wing policy positions like opposition to free trade and government ownership of companies. How does "spend political capital to achieve left-wing policy goals (and take the blame when they fail)" accomplish any of what you're saying?
I've been noticing the exact opposite problem on the internet lately, where people are so eager to throw away principles for the sake of spite that they aren't stopping to ask questions like "Is this just helping the people I'm trying to be spiteful towards at my own expense?". For instance I've seen several cases where SJWs censored something and there were comments kneejerk supporting it as "what goes around comes around" because they somehow misinterpreted which side the censorship was coming from. If you don't have principles besides "oppose the enemy", and also you don't understand what your enemy believes, it's pretty easy to end up supporting the enemy against your own side. After all, people understand their own positions better, so if you treat "this violates our principles" as a sign of insufficient commitment against the enemy you've given up your main indicator and all that's left is understanding your enemy so well that you hopefully notice before you end up accidentally supporting them.
More options
Context Copy link