whatihear
9hr ago
Bjj is what I’m thinking of. Of all the options, it is probably the best at letting skill overcome weight differences. A 120 pound woman needs a specific style to beat a 170 pound man (extremely high tempo position switches and constant attacks), but there are women who have that level of skill out there. It is very hard, and they essentially have to be at the level of high level competitors to be able to beat male hobbyists who outweigh them, but I have experienced it and watched it.
whatihear
23hr ago
Unfortunately, Gracie combatives is taking over like a plague, bringing the mcdojo effect even to bjj.
whatihear
1d ago
I assume you mean at the highest levels of the sport. Female black belts can absolutely wreck even fairly experienced dudes with 50 pounds on them when it comes to grappling (not as effortlessly as a male black belt their size would, but still).
whatihear
5d ago
Part of that is just seniority. The line employees of space companies are the same multicultural mix of high caste emegrees or their children, hard working 2nd gen Asians, and whites that you’ll find elsewhere in tech. Citizenship requirements for aerospace do make the industry whiter, but the guys designing frontier chips can absolutely program FPGAs for space.
whatihear
11d ago
The Russians have actually tried a bunch of large armored assaults recently and they got shredded by drones and arty directed by drones immediately.
whatihear
26d ago
Elements of the right have always wanted to be more openly antisemitic, and that’s been building steadily on the edgier corners of the internet for years now. Though Gaza isn’t a primary motivation for right antisemites, I do think it is closely related to why right antisemitism is bursting out into the open in a bigger way now. Previously, if the right allowed their antisemites any air they were handing the left a massive stick to clobber them with. Now, the hypocrisy of the left accusing the right of antisemitism would be too rich after the last few years of anti-Zionism from the left that quite frequently spills over into outright antisemitism. So even though right antisemites don’t give a shit about Gaza, it is very helpful for them because it provides a permission structure to come out into the open.
whatihear
1mo ago
But you’re a programmer, not a government fail project maker. You have a very general skill set. You could in principle take a job programming in industry right? Unless you are not a programmer and are in some way specialized only to government work, in which case your argument seems to have a bit more merit. I still don’t really consider any line employee who goes to work and tries their hardest at their job every day a parasite. Maybe some are on a strict economic level, but on the moral level I don’t think they are. The exception to this would be certain industries and specializations that are just inherently parasitic like DEI consultants or patent troll lawyers.
whatihear
1mo ago
That sounds personally frustrating, but I don’t think it’s the same thing as someone who does not sell their labor at all and just games the system. You are contributing to a market that helps generate enormous value for the economy even if your code doesn’t end up doing useful things. The fact that someone else is using the threat of violence to separate other citizens from their wealth and then buy your labor with it doesn’t mean you aren’t usefully providing labor to the software market. That capital allocation decision is on them, not you. If a sawmill sells their product to someone who just immediately burns the wood, I would still credit the mill workers and owners with being productive.
This kind of buying of labor that is not actually useful happens in the private sector as well. Sometimes it is just the luck of the draw. It’s really common among startups, but I still think founders and early stage workers are contributing more than I am as someone who just checks in to my corporate gig. They are part of the great beating heart that keeps the economy going in a more direct way than I am, even if they just work on a chain of unfortunate failures.
whatihear
1mo ago
Is it? We run steady deficits that we debt fund, but I’m pretty sure the majority of each annual budget is still paid by taxes.
whatihear
1mo ago
It would take a while to switch over, but definitely not on the order of 60 years.
Small states have definitely been tried, such as the American state before income tax, and it went pretty great from a growth perspective. The fact that no one in the modern age runs a tiny state doesn’t mean we can’t analyze it. We can look at the things run privately and the things run by governments and see which ones contribute more to GDP growth. There are basically no profitable government run enterprises. There are vast private industries serving government priorities, but that’s not really positive sum in the same way. All I’m objecting to is the idea that government spending is somehow essential to the economy and that we would all be poorer without it. Obviously switching costs would be significant if it was done suddenly, but it wouldn’t have to be. Besides “what would happen if this went away tomorrow” is the wrong question. We should be thinking about how things would look in steady state.
I’m actually in favor of a tax and spend redistributive state that fields an army. I just think pretending we get gdp growth because of it is silly.
whatihear
1mo ago
Net present value of their pension at the current fed funds rate is about 3 million. Stocks and flows of money can be converted back and forth. If you consider the fact that most retirees will aim to draw down their nest egg, we should actually count their equivalent net worth as higher. On top of that they haven’t even started to draw social security. The total value of their government benefits is probably around 5 million when compared with someone seeking to get the same income from their own investments.
whatihear
1mo ago
In the short term that’s true, but we’ve run lots of experiments to see if government can allocate capital more efficiently than the market over the last century, and the answer seems pretty clear. Once things had time to shake out, the economy would almost certainly be larger. There are lots of reasons to support government taxing and spending such as cool jets existing or reducing wealth inequality/pasification of the proles, but greater GDP is not one of them.
whatihear
1mo ago
Market efficiency generally refers to pricing correctness. I don’t think it has much to do with elasticity of demand or supply.
“If ROI is high then more people will want to buy,” is generally true, but it’s not a priori true. We have to know something about the demand curve as well. Most of the time, it will generate a sellers market and allow sellers to raise prices, but it doesn’t have to happen immediately. In the case of political bribes, the market is intensely opaque and potential buyers might not realize how to make a purchase or may not want to buy for silly reasons like honor. Over the long run I would expect more buyers to clue in, but it wouldn’t surprise me if bribes could remain really high ROI for a long time without changing market conditions much. Certainly I wouldn’t expect it to move as fast as oil futures.
whatihear
1mo ago
You are assuming that demand is infinitely elastic. It is quite possible that there are just not many marginal new buyers of potatoes even if they are a great deal. Demand being inelastic would not free the farmers from competition and allow them to raise prices.
whatihear
2mo ago
Tit for tat leading to large diffuse groups wanting to come to the table obviously happens. It’s so common and predictable that we have a term for it: “war weariness”. War weariness is not just leaders deciding to compromise, it’s an attitude shift in the entire population. It takes a lot of time and a lot of pain, but it does happen. Cancel culture may not be high intensity enough to induce war weariness between the right and left, but you can’t dismiss it out of hand.
whatihear
2mo ago
Japan has far fewer economic migrants than other developed countries. That has changed a little recently (and immediately prompted a turn to the right politically). Including them on this list seems unreasonable unless you count having any number of economic migrants at all. There is clearly a difference between what Japan has allowed and what Europe or the United States has allowed.
whatihear
3mo ago
I think they were saying that black activists are to the left as “the good ones” are to the right, not that they are the same group.
whatihear
3mo ago
The three body problems idea that aliens would want to destroy other intelligent civilization because of the potential for explosive technological growth on galactic timescales seems to make a lot of sense as a motive for someone to release death probes targeting less developed species to their immediate neighborhood.
whatihear
3mo ago
I’ve seen it come up with enough regularity on personal drama subs that I think it is not actually that uncommon. Why are you so confident that it is?
Getting into a gunfight with police and traveling across a border with your own child are two wildly different things. The state has a very strong interest in dropping the hammer over the first because not doing so would be giving up it’s monopoly on force.
whatihear
3mo ago
There are some cases where someone can violate a custody agreement in such a way that the courts have very little chance of reversing matters. In particular, people often get away with kidnapping their own children to a different country that either holds a different view of who ought to have custody or refuses to extradite as a general principle. In fact, this even happens between US states (I know of some cases where California has refused to uphold Texas custody agreements related to trans healthcare for the kids for example).
In that kind of circumstance, and if the ex is horrifically abusing the child, it may in fact be reasonable to pull the trigger on violating the order. Your argument is that people don’t get away with kidnapping, so they shouldn’t do it even in extreme outlier cases, but people do in fact get away with kidnapping pretty commonly when borders get in the way.
whatihear
3mo ago
Yeah that makes sense in light of the broken bones and cartilage. Apparently those injuries can happen in older individuals from hanging, but I can’t imagine he had much space to get a good drop if he did hang himself, so it still seems pretty suspicious to me.
whatihear
3mo ago
You said “a soldier” so I assumed you had some tool in mind that would allow one person to reliably strangle a victim. It does seem plausible that a crushed trachea could keep the air supply cut off after an attacker walks away, though in this case if he was killed he would have been hung afterwards which would have maintained pressure on the blood vessels as well.
Honestly for a single attacker the best tool might have been a taser to subdue him and then they could have just strangled him with the sheets since they have the stage the hanging anyway.
whatihear
3mo ago
What equipment would allow you to kill someone in seconds leaving only the marks left on Epstein? How many seconds are we talking? Getting a garrote on a resisting victim is not trivial unless you have the element of surprise, and strangulation takes a while to set in. Even after someone goes out they are not dead immediately. Whether by blood or air choke, it takes seconds to put someone out but much longer to kill.
If you think you can win by just dropping all your weight one someone, it’s obvious you’ve never done submission grappling in a serious way. If someone with 50 pounds on me just drops their weight on me without any sort of skill behind it, I’ll be choking them in 30 seconds.
Takedowns are harder given a weight difference because wrestling is harder to do across weight classes than submission grappling is. I’m less confident that a very experienced woman could beat a dude who outweighs her and has a moderate amount of experience from the feet.
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