sodiummuffin
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User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
2d 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
4d 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
4d 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
4d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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.
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.
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