ulyssessword
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User ID: 308
ulyssessword
4mo ago
My favorite argument is similar, but it focuses on the government instead of the family and therefore avoids your criticism: If sex work is Real Work™, then the government can use all of its regular powers to compel you to do it.
Prisoners can be compelled to do work; some clean up ditches, some fight wildfires, some stamp licence plates, and some perform Real Work™. Maintaining your unemployment benefits requires a reasonably active job search and accepting good offers of employment, which obviously includes Real Work™ for a significant subset of the population. Appearance/ethnicity is a bona fide occupational qualification for Real Work™, so obviously foreign workers will be qualified to fill the niches that locals can't.
If you want to go wild, they could even restrict who gets to do Real Work™ (even as an unpaid hobby) much like they restrict the practice of medicine, engineering, or law.
There are countless other ways that something would be changed by becoming "work", but those are the most obvious and objectionable IMO.
ulyssessword
2mo ago
From people I’ve talked to opioids are amazing... They have to be if people do them.
Maybe I'm an outlier (or I was taking an insufficient dose as described in Drug users use a lot of drugs), but Opioids weren't that great unless I was in pain.
My experience made me much more sympathetic to the idea that the "opioid epidemic" is an appropriate reaction to the chronic pain epidemic (particularly among blue collar workers with physically-demanding jobs. Who would've thought.)
ulyssessword
1mo ago
Do you also dispute the wavelength basis of color? It fits in perfectly:
gardenofobjections seems to not understand. Color is still a social construct. There are wavelength variations among different colors, but this doesn't mean the categories of color are not socially constructed. Who decided we are going to define one color white and another black, based on photons? He (doesn't) uses the example with Hanunoo, but this makes no sense since their categorization of color is different from the Western categorization. These color categories have a purpose and are useful for a variety of reasons, but he's not making a convincing point that color categories are not socially defined. Certain color categories are fuzzier and an American invention: whites and blacks.
Put plainly, everything is a fuzzy socially-defined category, even the categories used in the hardest of hard physics. Bringing up this argument for genetics only is an isolated demand for rigor.
This is somewhat tangential to the culture war, but WD-40 will soon be banned in Canada, despite what the headline of the linked article says.
At issue is a 2021 piece of legislation that comes into force on January 1, 2024. It limits the amount of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) in many products, setting the limit for "multi-purpose lubricants that are not solid or semi-solid" to 25% (Listed in Schedule 1, Item 26(i)). Needless to say, this is much lower than the 65% VOC concentration listed on WD-40's MSDS pages (website link) for the classic product.
WD-40 Company responded to talk of the ban by evoking the spectre of Fake News, and didn't mention how they would comply with the regulations. I've sent them a message asking if the MSDS info will be valid into 2024 (because I don't trust journalists, particularly when they can't find the "VOC" entry in a table and don't understand that "low vapor pressure" means less volatile.), and I strongly suspect that it will be reformulated by replacing at least 40.1% of WD-40's composition with substantially different chemicals. EDIT: They've answered, and it will be reformulated.
This ties into the same issues as @some's top-level comment on food names: I don't think that breaded tofu is "Chicken" (or even "Chikn"), and I don't think that a >40% new lubricant is "WD-40".
See also: PYREX vs. pyrex
ulyssessword
1mo ago
...the conflation that social construct means it doesn't exist.
That's a very common conflation in my experience, which makes it a valid target for counterarguments.
The socially constructed definition of race includes genetic information, which means that it is a physically-grounded system instead of an arbitrary one. This puts limits on how much society can change the definitions without going off the rails.
Though I understand you are just using an example, it's not a very good one since genetic differences between races aren't always clear.
First, differences between colors aren't clear either. Light with uniformly-random wavelengths is widely agreed to be "white". What about light with 1/3 each 450 nm, 550 nm, 650 nm? It might appear identical or different depending on the situation, so we've created the color rendering index to deal with that. What about fluorescent objects? They reflect visible light in a way that's easily-describable using standard terms, but they also create some extra by converting UV light. Category differences not being clear is completely normal, and there's nothing special about genetics in that sense.
Second, it doesn't look that bad? Look at the graphs Scott included just above your quote: they sure look like clusters to me, and the line-drawing isn't too egregious. Also remember that we're looking at a 2D projection of an N-dimensional analysis, so some more differences will show up in the later principal components.
I am pretty sure ethnic differences are larger within one race than between different races.
I've heard that statement before, but I still haven't got a good explanation of what the factual claim is supposed to be. My attempts all end up in nonsense.
My first thought was "a random pair of coethnics is more genetically different than a random pair of non-coethnics humans", which seems trivially false. My second was "a random pair of coethnics is more genetically different than a random pair of archetypal members of each race", which seems like a category error for the comparison and also plausibly false (see the graph again: races have size 0.2ish, while the distances between their centers are 0.35ish).
What do you mean in a hard statistical sense by that statement?
ulyssessword
5mo ago
Doesn't know the value of 10M USD with 7 years of compounding.
The value of $10M with 7 years of compounding (accessible in 7 years) is exactly $10M, as measured by Net Present Value. Actually it's probably a hair lower, as the beneficiaries likely have a different discount rate than the investment.
The poor conditions in their home communities were also the fault of the Canadian government, so relative rates aren't a very convincing argument.
EDIT: Nevermind, I've fallen for the narrative. Death rates at residential schools reached acceptable mortality rates by 1949 (Source Canada’s Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials (PDF), p17, from this website).
(As a sidenote, my thought process was "Why the downvotes? Motteposters are usually smarter than that. I'll show them with FACTS and LOGIC." lol.)
ulyssessword
4mo ago
Whenever Christianity is under attack its a distinctly Christian affair so that attacks on Christmas are attacks on Christianity.
It helps when the attackers clarify that they are, in fact, targeting Christians with their statements. For example, see this excerpt from the Canadian Human Rights Commission:
Only through better understanding of how religious intolerance takes place in Canada can our legislation, policies and programs be crafted to address the causes and consequences of this intolerance.
Discrimination against religious minorities in Canada is grounded in Canada’s history of colonialism. This history manifests itself in present-day systemic religious discrimination. An obvious example is statutory holidays in Canada. Statutory holidays related to Christianity, including Christmas and Easter, are the only Canadian statutory holidays linked to religious holy days. As a result, non-Christians may need to request special accommodations to observe their holy days and other times of the year where their religion requires them to abstain from work.Footnote 4
Canada’s history with religious intolerance is deeply rooted in our identity as a settler colonial state.
(Any non religious attacks on Christmas are so utterly banal that they've slipped my mind. Something something commercialization? Something something bad family dynamics? Snow is cold?)
Whenever Christmas is being celebrated, though, it's merely a secular holiday with no particular religious associations that no one should feel uncomfortable celebrating!
When's the last time that you saw a Christmas movie that included mass? How about the last time you've seen a government agency or an official (not a politician) celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour? Heck, I can't remember the last time I've heard a "Bethlehem and Jesus" style song on the radio instead of a "Presents and Reindeer" one.
The religious connotations haven't been entirely removed, but it's not far off.
ulyssessword
14d ago
Windows 11 may have my least-favorite feature ever. Try this:
- Open a file.
- write some new stuff in it.
- close the file.
- reopen it.
- confirm that the changes were kept.
Did you notice a missing step? I never said to save the changes, so the file was never updated. Instead, the changes were kept in a sort of suspended animation by the editor, and reappeared (in the editor only) when I reopened it.
ulyssessword
6mo ago
I bet you don't know any young earth creationists either, despite them being 46% of Americans. Filter bubbles are crazy.
ulyssessword
8mo ago
You don't think that the conditions on reserves are the responsibility of the Federal government, or you don't think that they were bad, or what?
How familiar are you with Canadian history?
ulyssessword
4mo ago
Related to @DuplexFields below, if you could create a system of weights and measures that would be used worldwide, what would you do?
The SI system is pretty good (and a vast improvement over the mishmash of units that they replaced), but IMO there's still room for improvement. The "kilo"gram is the most obvious failure with its extraneous prefix, a change of one Kelvin is too small to detect unaided unlike one second, meter, or kilogram, and the ampere and mole are just weird numbers.
My proposed system would keep water as the informal reference material, as well as the second. Everything else would change to match the new discoveries in the last ~150 years: I would keep the rotation of the Earth, the mass of an atom, and the density and freezing point of water, but replace the circumference of the earth, the force produced by electromagnetism, and the boiling point of water with absolute zero and the elementary charge as follows:
| Dimension | Value | Original Metric Derivation |
New Derivation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time | 1 s | 1/(24 * 60 * 60) day | No change |
| Length | 2.71 cm | 1/(40000000) circumference of Earth | A 1x1x1 cube of water masses 1 |
| Mass | 19.93 g | Water has density 1000 kg/m^3 | 10^24 carbon-12 atoms has mass of 12 |
| Electric Current | 160.3 mA | Magnetic force between wires | 10^18 elementary charges per second |
| Temperature | 2.7316 K | 100 degrees freezing-boiling |
0 is 0, freezing is 100 |
| Amount | 1 | Atoms per gram | None |
| luminous intensity | ?? | Whatever. |
Do you have any improvements to the metric system you can think of? Any other changes you'd like made?
ulyssessword
7mo ago
That doesn't answer the core contradiction. Why is sexual assault the only topic that "victim blaming" is used for?
Over the years, my local police (and a few nearby and/or related organizations) have put out information on protecting yourself from break-and enter, carjacking, bike theft, scams, mugging, and incidental gang violence. None (or at most a few) of those were paired with substantive actions, and none drew serious accusations of victim blaming.
Given that the organizations in charge of societal-level policy proposals (or implementations) routinely give individual-level advice with negligible pushback, what makes sexual assault so special?
ulyssessword
7mo ago
Presumably if there was a big difference in performance you would have heard about it by now.
By my understanding, the volatility of its organic compounds is a core feature that distinguishes WD-40 from normal spray lubricants. It dissolves gunk, penetrates through cracks/threads, and spreads over surfaces because of the relatively small molecules (which are also volatile).
Also, where are you getting your news from, that you would expect to hear about things in a tiny niche like this??
ulyssessword
8mo ago
One trigger I've noticed recently is blatant logical or physical errors.
- In a radio broadcast about Canada's proposed sustainable electricity regulations, the reporter stated that prices would likely increase but the harm to consumers could be mitigated by switching to more electricity-intensive alternatives like heat pumps (instead of furnaces) and electric cars (instead of IC cars). That's the exact opposite of mitigating it. They then repeated the error: The changes will make the grid be less reliable, but that's okay because we will depend on it for more services.
- In this article, the first point on the first claim is utter bullshit. It claims that air conditioning heats up cities by moving heat from buildings to the environment. That's technically true, but A) a city's airspace is much bigger than the volume of all of its buildings, and even a light wind provides a large amount of ventilation, and B) the heat transfer happens once per year, not as an ongoing effect. All of the heat that an AC is removing from a building had to leak in through its insulation first.
Is it a shit test? Do they think they can actually get away with it? Or (worst of all) are they honest and making a mistake? I don't know, but it's another mail in the coffin for their reputation.
ulyssessword
9mo ago
I just saw the report, which as far as I can tell, is the first time it was reported in the six days since it was posted.
IIRC, almost the same thing happened on the old site: Someone made a bad comment, there was a public complaint about it, and a mod replied that there were zero reports filed about the bad comment (including by the complainant, obviously).
I'm not sure if it's universal or just Motte-like, but I definitely sympathize with the urge to talk about an issue rather than acting on it (and clicking on the Report button is "acting on it"). I'm also not sure if it's a good predilection or not, but I try to fight against my instincts while I'm here.
ulyssessword
2mo 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
4mo ago
This might be an old wives' tale, but I heard that if you point at something, a dog will look where you're pointing. A cat will look at your finger.
ulyssessword
5mo ago
I'd like to offer you a trade: You give me $20 now, and I'll give you $21 in 1000 years. $21 > $20, so surely my half of the deal is worth more.
The value of $10m invested for any amount of time starting now is (by the linked definition) $10m. If you could guarantee 10% returns, then $10 million today = $11 million next year = $12.1 million in two years = $19.49m in 7 years, etc.
ulyssessword
6mo ago
Okay? 62% Christian - 46% YEC = 16% Christian nonYEC (very very roughly).
I didn't expect that to be a smaller subset of Americans and I'm still not confident in the calculation, but filter bubbles are salient because they break your intuition.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
Are we gonna get body-cam footage and be able to come to an independent judgment on the conduct of the government in the course of the raid?
I doubt it.
I wish that we held public servants (particularly ones authorized to use deadly force) to a "duty to proactively gather proof of innocence". That way, if an officer couldn't decisively clear his own name then he would be at risk of being fired, even if the evidence that exists is too weak for criminal charges.
Instead, they get cover for bad decisions, like in this case (paraphrased and dramatized):
- Officer: After checking the details, I proceeded with the raid.
- Judge: You checked the details and confirmed that they were correct right? Actually never mind, you get qualified immunity regardless. You checked, after all.
ulyssessword
2mo ago
an "HBD aware" set
What is that set of policies? My first thought was colorblind meritocracy, but that's obviously not what you're referring to.
ulyssessword
3mo ago
They just don't enjoy the friendly relationship with the media that the progressives do.
That's like saying a business is run amazingly well, but can't make any sales. A friendly relationship with the media (or at least positive coverage in a wide-reaching format) is an essential part of many protests. If you can't do that, then your protest is failing at one of its core goals.
ulyssessword
3mo ago
I am sure I've heard similar statements of ethnic solidarity from other politicians.
Examples?
I can only think of examples from overseas, and all of them have come to my attention because of Western (more progressive than not) backlash against the statements. One place I would've expected ethnic messaging is in Wab Kinew's victory speech (the first Native American Premier in Canada), but the closest he got was (paraphrasing from @2:53)"I want to speak to young [Native American children]. I want to speak to all youth, and people of all ages, but young [Native American children] in particular:..."
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?
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