ulyssessword
No bio...
User ID: 308
ulyssessword
2mo ago
The proper way to do things is first reach the moral high ground, then attack your opponents for not being there. They skipped a step.
If the Right has to own up to this (at this point only alleged) failure, what does the Left have to own up to (or better yet: What has the Left already owned up to, to serve as an example)? The closest Scott gets to answering that question is through a link that contains a link that links to resources for thinking critically about Social Justice. I assume that there are object-level criticisms in the resources listed there, but I haven't actually checked.
ulyssessword
10mo ago
A missing mood in development news: Environmentalists pin hopes on tiny fish to stop Highway 413.
From a plain reading of the article, the logic goes:
- Activists don't like the proposed Highway 413
- They searched for a way to stop it.
- They found these fish, and the strategy may be effective.
In a sane world filled with people arguing in good faith, you might see a similar situation:
- There are endangered animals in an area
- Environmentalists discovered development posed a risk to them
- Therefore they oppose that development
If you trust the CBC's reporting, then the activists would be better described as anti-development rather than environmentalist. The discussion is centered on the highway, the political situation around it, the promises that Doug Ford (bad!) made, and the actions the Federal Liberals (good!) took which slowed it down.
ulyssessword
2yr ago
Are you completely certain that the government was doing most of the work of locking people down?
Yes.
If I want to visit a friend/business and they don't want me there, then that's fine. You can set whatever standards you want for yourself, and I'll accept them even if I don't agree.
If I want to visit a friend/business and the government threatens to imprison or fine me for it, then it's a lockdown.
How do you ensure that a piece of information is simultaneously public and secret? I have no idea, but I hope that someone can explain a reliable strategy because this story makes no sense in its absence.
EDIT: link to the policy in question.
TL;DR: The government of Saskatchewan just enacted a new policy that affects "preferred names" and pronouns for younger students (along with some other changes, which I'll skip over). It requires that teachers obtain parental consent before using new names/pronouns for students under 16 years old. The criticism is focused on two claims: First, being "out" is important. Second, it can be unsafe if a parent learns that their child is transgender.
The first claim has already been argued to death, and there's nothing new in this story.
The second claim is just bizarre in this context. What do they expect would happen in the absence of the new policy? Everybody starts using the child's new names/pronouns in everything from casual conversations to official reports...and the parents don't notice for >2 years?
If I knew that a child had information that could be dangerous if it got into the wrong hands, I wouldn't encourage them to spread it far and wide. In fact, I'd direct them to a professional that would help them to develop a strategy that minimized the damage from its release, or else cope with maintaining the burden of secrecy.
But maybe I'm missing something, so I'll repeat my question: how do you ensure that a piece of information is simultaneously public and secret?
ulyssessword
7mo ago
relative to her demographic cohort the reaction towards Trump and his supporters is unbelievably tame. It is somewhere around 3/10 on the TDS scale. So I don't think that apology is even warranted. Every reasonable person knows that emotions will be high for a while.
I'm not grading on a curve. If you say that's a 3/10, then I say apologies start being appropriate at a 2/10. You don't get any credit for even worse people existing.
Yes, emotions will be high, but that just means that you have to deal with it like an adult or apologize for your failure to do so.
ulyssessword
1yr ago
Am I missing a potential steel man here,
If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. All of the franchises share a reputation for taste, service, cleanliness, etc, and they also share a reputation for supporting political groups. Don't like being lumped in with activist franchises? Get the HQ to cancel their agreement and maintain stricter message discipline.
ulyssessword
1yr ago
ulyssessword
11mo ago
Right wing cancel culture is a thing-
Not much of one. If you added up the top 10 people cancelled by the Right, do you think they would reach the prominence of James Damore? Google Trends could quantify it if you want to check.
remember when homosexuality could get you canceled?
No, I literally don't. Jack Black probably does given his age, but homosexuality has been (at least) tolerable for as long as I've been politically aware (though that could be a Canadian vs. American difference).
ulyssessword
1yr ago
Not directly, but it has provided the foundation for some changes.
The most notable change came about in the wake of the Rittenhouse shootings. From reading the Culture War thread(s), he was very clearly acting in self defense. In the months that followed, his opposition completely ignored everything inconvenient and spouted braindead takes that went against easily-accessible evidence. If they had done half as much research as I did, they would easily see their own mistakes. Therefore, either A) they saw the mistakes, but made the erroneous statements regardless, or B) they didn't do the research. From that, I formed the hypothesis that they simply don't care about truth and facts.
Welcome to Conflict Theory.
ulyssessword
5mo ago
Consistent, static user interfaces are so last year. Modern UX design is all about placing the most-used options in the most-accessible places so that new users can find them as quickly as possible.
With that in mind, I'd like to recommend a plugin to anyone who likes creating dynamic user interfaces in that style: Markov Keyboard is a revolution in UI design, placing your most-used letters in the most-accessible locations on your keyboard. Instead of just doing this once (as in a Dvorak layout) it remaps the keys after each keystroke, maximizing the benefit.
(ask me about my latest experiences with Windows 11. Or don't. I'm sure you can guess.)
ulyssessword
1yr ago
You expect ProPublica to do a good job of analysis? They're the ones that broke my faith in in-depth journalism with this article. I'd recommend reading it yourself to see if you can find their trick.
Spoilers:
They certainly know how to tell a compelling story, but that's all it is: a story.
ulyssessword
4mo ago
it will not be surprising that a) existing academics shift away from you
Why would anyone think that's surprising? I suppose a few people might believe that professional ethics and impartiality beats human nature and relationships, but I can't see that being a very common view.
I think it's bad that those supposedly-neutral institutions have taken up partisanship.
c) a feedback loop emerges where conservatives and academics increasingly view each other with hostility because the former (largely correctly) believe the latter don't share their values...
You think it's thoughts that the conservatives are opposed to? What happened to "parasitic and quite possibly degenerate" from earlier in the paragraph?
...and the latter (largely correctly) believe the former want to destroy them.
Where are the bulldozers? As far as I can tell, American conservative goals stop at tightening the public purse strings. If private donors want to fund it they can go right ahead.
ulyssessword
8mo ago
Don't laugh, it's already happening in other countries.
I'm not laughing, because it's happening here in Canada.
The federal government banned free news posts on large websites (literally just Facebook and Google). Facebook decided it didn't want to pay some unknown hundreds of millions of dollars to host paid links, so it chose to not be a Digital News Intermediary under the new regime and was therefore required to block all news links. Google negotiated an exemption for itself in exchange for $100M/yr paid to the Canadian Journalism Collective, so there are literally zero companies covered by the Online News Act.
The end result? News as a whole is worse in Canada, with smaller outlets (particularly ones that won't get funding from the CJC) hit the hardest.
They had the gall to complain about Facebook harming Canadian journalism by "not paying their fair share" and "unfairly profiting". Now that Facebook is drawing zero profit and their fair share is consequently zero, the journalists are still complaining about how harmful the ban has been. Of course, they blame Facebook for following the regulations rather than the Federal government for creating them.
Ideally, journalists would even receive state funding to spread regime propaganda more directly, removing the need for subscribers at all.
Yup: "(8)...the groups wants 70% of news costs paid for government or through government regulation." If that had actually occurred, then Canadian journalists would barely have had to provide anything, nevermind anything of real value.
ulyssessword
1yr ago
Last I heard, it was because black women chose black obstetricians, and being in a situation where you give birth with a doctor other than your first choice indicated some sort of problem (usually, complications that required a non-racially-filtered specialist).
It's also why home births are so safe in some studies: if they become dangerous, they become hospital births.
ulyssessword
1yr ago
What I'm confused about: why is this a story at all? Presumably, the main effects of this are to make him unemployable and perhaps cause some interpersonal issues.
The Guardian (Like the New York Times before it), was exercising its right to kick people in the balls:
suppose Power comes up to you and says hey, I’m gonna kick you in the balls. And when you protest, they say they don’t want to make anyone unsafe , so as long as you can prove that kicking you in the balls will cause long-term irrecoverable damage, they’ll hold off...
No! There’s no dignified way to answer any of these questions except “fuck you”. Just don’t kick me in the balls! It isn’t rocket science! Don’t kick me in the fucking balls!
In the New York Times’ worldview, they start with the right to dox me, and I had to earn the right to remain anonymous by proving I’m the perfect sympathetic victim who satisfies all their criteria of victimhood. But in my worldview, I start with the right to anonymity, and they need to make an affirmative case for doxxing me.
And yet it is a story, and a story that gets me emotionally invested,
It is a story. It has plot, characters, setting, conflict, and all the rest. It just isn't news.
They've pulled a great trick: they (often) write newsworthy stories, therefore (all) stories they write are newsworthy. Heck, they're even called "the news", so anything they see fit to print must be real news.
To be clear: no one is banning tiktok. They may force ByteDance to divest from the American form of tiktok. ByteDance can then sell it to non-Chinese owners. Or take their ball and go home. Their choice.
I generally agree with people that describe "Do X, or else we'll do Y" as "plans/threats to do Y". In this case, I have zero problem describing "divest from the app, or else it will be banned" as "...planning to ban tiktok".
It would be like arguing "the mobster isn't threatening to break your kneecaps. You can pay back your debts, or else... It's entirely your choice."
ulyssessword
1yr ago
It's not the 9th circuit (and it's not even the US), but if you go just a bit north then using hard drugs in a playground is not illegal.
The Restricting Public Consumption of Illegal Substances Act was passed by the legislature in November, allowing fines and imprisonment for people who refuse to comply with police orders not to consume drugs in certain public places.
The nurses association argued the act, which has yet to come into effect, would violate the Canadian Charter in various ways if enforced.
ulyssessword
1yr ago
The most charitable explanation is carelessness.
The second most charitable explanation is selective carelessness. If you compare your conclusions to your worldview as a sanity check, then you would only notice the politically-inconvenient errors.
Also, I guess it's time to post Pro Publica's Machine Bias again, since we're on the topic of misleading statistics (though I don't think they made any factual errors).
ulyssessword
1mo ago
I think free range is good for kids simply because it allows for kids to grow into adulthood.
A quote that stuck with me: "You aren't raising a child, you're raising an adult who happens to be a child right now."
Some people have learned very well how to be children, and have 20+ years of experience in that role. Others have already gained experience with adulthood before they get legal recognition at 18, and are already (somewhat) prepared for the challenges they will be facing.
ulyssessword
3mo ago
New Microsoft insanity.
I made a powerpoint presentation1, and went to save it. There were the normal options: Save, Save As, Export, Share, and one new one: Save as PDF.
Great, I thought. I want to save it as a PDF, so I will select the "Save as PDF" option. What a fool I was. Microsoft hadn't given me a convenient option to Save as PDF. It had embedded an ad for Adobe Acrobat Reader Pro's integration with their software, and offered me one free sample per 30 days, and the wonderful opportunity to buy (or rent, I assume) their software to unlock unlimited use and access many other features!
Needless to say, I went to "Save As", selected the .pdf filetype from the dropdown menu, and saved it as a pdf.
1 Not really, but Powerpoint some of the best software there is for simple image editing.
ulyssessword
5mo ago
My greatest fear at the moment is that we will reach a stage where people start designing UI for AI agents and not humans anymore, and from computers become truly incomprehensible.
My guess is that if they optimize UI designs for LLM-derived AI systems, it will be more intuitive than whatever they are doing now, and that an alien network of tensors and model weights is more in-tune with the average person than the current crop of UI designers is.
I've had several gripes with modern software and websites, if you haven't noticed.
ulyssessword
6mo ago
A related article (that I've unfortunately lost) found that women are faster at Ultramarathons based on selection effects: the women who enter those races without professional sponsorship are faster than the men who enter those races without professional sponsorship. You should expect to see the median female racer finishing before the median male racer, and the slowest racers (whether they finish or not) will likely be men.
It's an important finding for race organizers who want to know how long to keep the finish line staffed, but that's not how it was discussed on social media.
ulyssessword
10mo ago
Why can you drive faster than the speed limit ?
Passing, for one.
If you A) don't tailgate or cut someone off, and B) don't speed, then you can't pass anyone going >=70% of the speed limit in many designated passing zones, even assuming instant acceleration and good luck with oncoming traffic.
ulyssessword
1yr ago
That said, it's not hard to imagine an explanation like "fantasy world genetics are different from real world genetics" or something along those lines.
You could, but that gets awfully hard to justify when the main character uses his knowledge of Mendelian genetics to discover infidelity. "Children consistently inherit hair color from their parents, but skin tone is pseudo-random" would require a lot of epicycles, and I don't think they even had one.
In fact, the support for piecemeal race-swapping I've seen has actively avoided in-world justifications, and boils down to "because it's [current year]" when it isn't "because fuck you, bigot".
Union leadership also limits membership to secure jobs for their members.
If the local union has 500 members and each can do 0.2 houses per year (e.g. a crew of 10 can do two houses per year), then I guess your city is building a max of 100 houses. What if you want more than 100 houses built? Too bad, union labor is mandated, and they're not interested in de-monopilizing the sector.
Those 500 workers will sure be happy that they're in so much demand. The union did its job.
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