wlxd
5mo ago
These two words represent the same thing, the “dictator” one just carries negative connotation.
wlxd
3mo ago
It’s not “what if”, as this is clearly true. The question is, rather, so what?
you want me to not acknowledge at all the hypothesis that their opinion might have something to do with the fact that it disgusts them.
No, feel free to acknowledge it, but so what? People are free to form their opinions based on disgust, and this is not considered to be any sort of demerit to their position, except in a couple of progressive hobby horses. For example, most gun control advocates are disgusted by guns. Should we discount their opinions based on that?
but do you really think that pointing out this pattern of behaviour over time is not acceptable?
I don’t understand the point you are trying to make in this paragraph.
wlxd
1yr ago
You are missing the point. Sure, you can certainly make the case that Jacob Chansley’s actions were criminal if you look only at the bare letter of the law, and ignore context. The argument is, however, that there have been thousands of other people, hundreds in the specific example of Kavanaugh hearings, that also broke the bare letter of the law in roughly the same degree of egregiousness as Chansley, but none of whom even faced anything close to criminal trial, much less years in prison. The argument here is about malicious prosecution which is completely outside historical norms for the behavior.
Imagine, for example, that federal government found that some of these protesters are not US citizens, but permanent residents, and found that they are not carrying their green card, as required by law, and charged them with misdemeanor and put them for 30 days in jail. The letter of the law clearly allows that, but it would be completely outrageous, as this law is never enforced in any other circumstance, so it would be hard to see it as anything other than malicious political targeting.
wlxd
7mo ago
Can you make your clear? Are you suggesting that the person you are replying to might genuinely not be aware of that, or are you just engaging in petty language policing?
wlxd
7mo ago
What weapons the west gave to Poland that allowed it to beat Soviet military and throw their shackles? What military strategy was used?
(4) provides the option to have a large successful family. The EV is much much higher.
Why wasn’t Ukraine on this path before the war? Poland started off around where Ukraine was in early 1990s. It failed to thrive, to put it mildly, and the pre-war trajectory was not optimistic. The neighboring puppet state of Russia, Belarus, has done much better for itself.
If the plan is to build stronger ties with the West, join EU etc similarly to what Poland did, isn’t better strategy to cut the losses, stop the bleed, and negotiate peace with Russia, where you cede some territories in exchange for Russia acceding to your western strategy in future?
wlxd
6mo ago
Internet actually brought enormous amount of consumer surplus, which simply is not reflected in GDP. If you tried to value the stuff that we today get for effectively free, like ability to stream any movie you want for peanuts, or free long-distance video calls, or free mailing, or play sophisticated video games etc according to how much these costed in, say, 1970, you’d observe that we consume thousands of dollars worth of services for free.
wlxd
1yr ago
While I agree that there is some strangeness about the entire story, I think the “gay escort” theory is highly unlikely, for the very simple reason: people like Pelosis can afford and procure services of higher quality providers than crazy hobos.
wlxd
8mo ago
Is your response really “sure, the overwhelming majority of homeless might indeed have mobile phones, but large fraction of them just carry non-functional phones with no plan or data, for no useful purpose”? Is this really the point you are trying to make here?
wlxd
1yr ago
Yes, that’s what I said: there are former NATO soldiers in the offensive. No, this does not make them NATO forces. Similarly, NATO has been funding Ukraine, sure, but it does not make NATO forces Ukrainian forces, any more than “moderate” Syrian rebels were actually US forces.
Let me be quite clear what I would accept as “NATO forces” participating in offensive: a unit of active duty soldiers from the same NATO army, which was put together by said NATO army and sent to join AFU. Volunteer veterans slapdashed together into a unit upon arrival by the AFU military leadership does not count as NATO force.
This is important distinction, and I hope you are not purposefully trying to confuse people.
wlxd
1yr ago
Your understanding of Margaret Hamilton’s role in Apollo program is still closer to what activists want you to believe instead of actual truth.
She was a lead of a team that wrote the Apollo lander program, this much is true. What is less commonly known is that she joined that team as the most junior member, and only became a lead after the code had already been written, and the actual leads (whose names, ironically, basically nobody knows today) have moved on to more important projects.
wlxd
8mo ago
California mid century population was a third of today’s official population, probably a quarter of actual one. Moreover, during mid-century, there were more people per housing unit on average, and there were far fewer single person or two person households.
This means that the mid century California housing stock is pretty much irrelevant for the discussion of today’s housing woes, because it’s only a small fraction of today’s housing stock. The working class neighborhoods of 1950s California are places like Santa Clara or Fresno today.
wlxd
11mo ago
What if you look at AP math class literally anywhere else in the country other than New York? How Jewish is it? Does it also have 1400% overrepresentation?
That if you think they don't deserve the treatment they're receiving, your problem is with how we deal with criminal suspects in general.
I find your suggestion that they get the same treatment as common criminals to be rather ludicrous, and I do not believe that you are making it in a good faith.
The criminal justice system did not treat the George Floyd rioters in the same manner, that is, by attempting to catch every single last one of them and keeping them in pretrial detention for months or years. Instead, George Floyd rioters were allowed to run mostly scot-free, and only a handful of the absolute worst ones faced any consequences at all. In the "100 days of Portland", for example, the handful of rioters that did end up getting arrested, was immediately released and often rearrested next night, rinse and repeat.
In fact, I wouldn't have minded much how the Jan 6th rioters are treated if BLM rioters were treated the same (in fact I suggested that we do exactly that at the time, the Jan 6th treatment is another good example along the Waco one I brought up that stopping riots is definitely doable when proper methods are used). The problem here is that you are asking me to play along the rules of the game, while your side of the "criminal justice reform" argument is rigging the game to punish my side and benefit theirs. I reject that.
wlxd
7mo ago
I specifically mentioned the Russian puppet state of Belarus to point out that you can do much better than Ukraine while remaining in Russian orbit. My point was that if Ukraine experienced decades of stagnation while in Russian orbit while Belarus grew, why expect much different outcomes in western orbit?
Poland well the breakup of the USSR made it not possible for them to do war so they had an easier route.
Poland left the Communist Bloc years before USSR broke up. They managed that through diplomacy and negotiations, not western warmongering. Ukraine should try the same.
wlxd
1yr ago
To my understanding this represents an escalation of the war, wherein NATO forces commanded by Nato leadership are directly involved in a major offensive for the first time.
Which NATO forces? What country of origin, which unit?
Among soldiers in the offensive there certainly are some who served in NATO militaries before, but this does not make the offensive force NATO. It’s makes as much sense as saying that it’s the Soviets who invaded Ukraine, because some soldiers in Russian force served in Soviet Union.
wlxd
7mo ago
Strange for you to, in response to /u/the_nybbler predicting that the Feds will use overwhelming force to roll over any state resistance, bring up Waco siege as an example of Feds having trouble with serving warrants. Yeah, next time they have troubles, they do another Waco, why not?
wlxd
1yr ago
I remember sitting at the table with an M.D. who's doing some kind of fellowship at Harvard and hearing her say airily, "Yeah, blockers are safe and totally reversible." Even with my rudimentary freshman bio understanding, this never sounded plausible to me.
Indeed, this is extremely implausible a priori, and so people repeating this must have crimestop in their mind preventing them from doing any thinking on the subject at all.
The image I have in my mind is this: we have someone who is taking “puberty blocker” from age 10 to age forty 50. He never went through puberty as a teenager (or at least, I am led to believe this is the outcome of taking these drugs). Because of this, he now looks and behaves as… well, definitely not a middle aged male. Am I really expected to believe that once he stops taking these drugs, he goes through normal puberty at 50, and his body ends up the same as if he never took these drugs, and went through puberty around 15? This is simply ludicrous on its face.
Or, even better, consider a woman in post menopausal age, who finally gets off puberty blockers. Will she now finally begin menstruating, and be able to bear normal children? Highly unlikely.
I would expect the typical retort to this from pro sex modification side to be “but you are not supposed to take this drugs for so long”, which is a tacit admission that the effects of these drugs are only reversible for so long, until they aren’t. This much makes sense, but then repeating the mantra that they are reversible without saying loudly that this is true only if you stop taking them until they are no longer reversible (which might very well only be a couple of doses!) is criminally deceptive.
wlxd
8mo ago
Yet there was also much more time in general to be devoted to childrearing, since there were clearly more children back then.
You’d think so, but you’d be wrong. US Census has been running time use surveys for many decades now, which give us good data on what people actually spend their time on.
The trend is obvious: people spend much more time on active childcare today than they used to. Today, a mother working full time spends about as much time on childcare as stay at home moms used to 50 years ago. Hard to believe it, but it’s true.
In my personal experience, time spent on childcare doesn’t scale linearly with number of kids, and indeed plateaus pretty quickly. For example, when I visit my friends who also have kids of age similar to hours, I basically don’t need to do any child caring at all, they just play together and don’t need anything from me aside from occasional conflict resolution. This is a huge glaring contrast compared to times when we only had one, and it demanded constant attention, because it simply did not want to be left to play alone. As you get to 4-5+ kids, I imagine the older ones can be very helpful in caring for younger ones.
wlxd
10mo ago
Sometimes they work very well, sometimes they work very poorly. There is a great channel on YouTube, PoliceActivity, where you can watch first hand what it is that police has to deal with.
Here are some examples of taser use:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=slgCVJLYP-c Taser temporarily incapacitated the guy, but then he removed the taser probes, recovered and took off.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=xcAorLQAqW4 Here the taser has been very effective.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=pGEp4EArrHA
Here it was somewhat effective: it made the guy compliant, but not incapacitated.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6w7ARs9qdP4 Here it was only marginally effective: it temporarily incapacitated the guy and caused him to drop his knife, but then it stopped being effective.
Point is, if you watch these videos, you’ll find that the effectiveness rate is more like 50% than 95%.
wlxd
1yr ago
Well, yes, indeed I believe that upstanding citizens shouldn’t suffer the same condition as criminals, who should experience bad conditions in order to deter them from doing crime. Not sure what your point is, that I should lobby for improved conditions in jails so that political prisoners of my side have better time there? No, I’d rather the other side stop taking political prisoners.
wlxd
1yr ago
Funny how everyone here was very much aware that Twitter was ran by leftist activists, but the CEO was not.
Being aware of what happens in your company is the single most important job of a CEO.
wlxd
1yr ago
So when you add lanes, more people get to live where they want to live. Isn’t it great?
wlxd
1yr ago
meaning simply "those the court decided were victims"
The court did not decide that any of that. This was a jury trial, so the court was not making determination here. Instead, it was the prosecution who claimed that those killed by Rittenhouse were victims. The jury unanimously rejected that.
This is true in principle, but in practice, you will never get enough of more direct signals to completely discount the priors coming from the race, and this is if you even get a chance to collect more direct signal at all: collecting signal itself is not free, you cannot run background checks on every passerby on the street.
The race is a sort of highly universal prior, and it carries immense amount of residual predictive value even after controlling for more direct predictors.
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