cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
3d ago
I have been absolutely addicted to the song "Golden" from k-pop demon hunters on Netflix.
I'm not the only one, apparently it's a huge chart topper.
The story of the lead vocalist is pretty fascinating. She was part of some k-pop training academy but they never launched her career cuz she was "too old" 7 years ago. She left them and went into composing songs. She was good at that, got some of her songs picked up by other famous k-pop groups and then got tapped to write the songs for the k-pop demon hunters movie. Well she was demoing the songs for the studio, and they thought "you sound great" so she got the lead role. Now she is the biggest (maybe second biggest) k-pop star ever.
The group just recently did their first live performance on jimmy Kimmel.
cjet79
3d ago
Nah, he hated central banks and had a huge wheel of cheese in the Whitehouse on his inauguration. One of the coolest presidents.
cjet79
4d ago
The Waffles article is a reminder of how much I hate interacting with other parts of the internet.
Its a writing style that consists almost entirely of assigning the worst possible terms you can get away with to people you don't like. "Fascist", "race scientist", "shit-head", "racist", "white supremacist", etc. No regard for truth value, just pure culture warring and mud slinging.
I barely learned anything reading the article. There was about one paragraph of content explaining something that happened and then like 30 paragraphs of name-calling. That half paragraph that is most useful is here so no one else has to visit that link:
A little while back, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber approvingly tweeted a post by Jerry Chen about a person bursting into a Waffle House and shouting "oh, so you hate pancakes?". In the replies, someone asked her why she'd not yet banned notorious transphobe, fascist and serial instigator of harassment campaigns Jesse Singal from the platform, to which she replied with only "Waffles!".
Even in those two sentences she couldn't help but throw out some names.
I have to wonder if part of this writing style is a leftover problem of "micro" blogging platforms like twitter. In isolation you might believe those things about Jesse Singal, and it would be very useful to learn that thing. So a tweet saying that would get boosted up and retweeted.
But when its paragraph after paragraph of everyone being called a fascist, or some other thing that is the worst thing a progressive liberal can think about someone. You can't help but notice that this writer thinks everyone is a terrible awful no good human piece of garbage. And suddenly the information content collapses from "this person she is speaking about is really really bad" to just "she doesn't like this person, and everything she says about anyone is suspect".
It also highlights why some of Scott Alexander's takedowns of people are so damn effective and brutal. He will spend a lot of writing space saying many nice things about people that seem objectively bad. And then he will end by saying something slightly not nice about one person, and you come away thinking "damn that person must be the worst piece of shit ever".
If your default is to be nice, kind, and charitable to everyone, then if you ever need to stray from that default and say bad things about someone we know you really mean it. If your default is to insult everyone you just look like a misanthrope.
cjet79
4d ago
This is what was so concerning about Islamic terror attacks in the early 2000's. It was a group of people willing to think rationally about killing and causing a bunch of damage. They used box cutters and a few flying lessons to kill thousands of people in a day and cause massive damage in New York City.
I do remember people trying to war game potential avenues for future terrorist attacks where there might be low hanging fruit. It quickly got depressing. The Western world mostly functions and operates on the assumption that everyone is not trying to cause massive damage and death to those around them. The water supply, electric grids, transportation infrastructure, etc are all vulnerable to determined saboteurs. Massive crowds of people in unsecured areas are common in every city every day. Explosives materials are monitored, but anyone can walk up to a gas station and buy a fire accelerant with cash.
cjet79
5d ago
As Ulyssessword pointed out, licensing boards often have their powers constrained and limited by the state.
There is a bargain happening here. Licensing boards get to borrow some of the power of the state to create and have the state enforce semi-monopolistic characteristics in their industry. But in taking that bargain they are in turn subject to the whims of the state that has granted them power.
When you are acting as an individual you have rights. When you are acting as an agent of the state you have constraints.
I'd be fine if the state licensing board for these therapies said "screw this, we are disbanding". That is fully an option for them. But they'd lose a lot of the benefits that they get being under the aegis of the state. Especially tie ins with insurance, both their own malpractice insurance, and medical insurance that pays for these therapies.
cjet79
5d ago
"Is talk therapy medicine?" seems like a very easy question to answer.
Is it licensed and regulated by a state or federal level medical board? If yes then it's medicine, if not then it's just speech.
cjet79
5d ago
The constitution was a political document. The distinction you are making seems meaningless to me.
I'd describe the divide on preferred gun policy or preferred speech rights in the same way.
cjet79
5d ago
I don't read Twitter. Patton Oswalt's comments got picked up off Twitter space, that's how I know about them.
The kid in the incident successfully sued/settled with two news agencies over how irresponsible they were in reporting on this.
cjet79
5d ago
A comment below compared this to enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act. I actually had the same thought, and wanted to expand on it.
Lets get this out of the way first: I don't think they are morally equivalent, escaping human slavery is not the same as escaping a crappy country. Being sent back to a crappy country is not the same as being sent back to a crappy country.
Where they are similar is in the political situation at hand. The fugitive slave act was meant to bring a recalcitrant north in line with the south's slavery policies. Now the divide is more between cities and rural, and the different policy preference is on immigration levels. In both cases local enforcement is needed everywhere to maintain the policy. In both cases the different policy preferences means that some areas are just not interested in carrying out the law enforcement needed.
Slavery is perhaps about 80-90% of why the civil war started. These kinds of issues do have the power to tear a nation apart. But I don't think immigration will do it. Not because of the geography of the situation. Sometimes civil wars have clean geographic dividing lines like north and south. But plenty of modern examples just have a pervasive insurgency hiding in plain site among civilians.
The reason I don't think immigration will be a lynchpin for a civil war is that most civil wars have competing groups of elites vying for power. And there are no elite groups in America that actually want to limit immigration. Academics don't want that. Business owners don't want it, immigration is great economically. Politicians don't truly want it (as someone else pointed out Trump is very conveniently ignoring the many illegal migrant farmers that keep food prices down).
cjet79
5d ago
I also don't care about whatever algorithmic rage bait slop event you're talking about.
This is what he is referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Lincoln_Memorial_confrontation
I'd not describe it as rage bait slop.
It was genuinely upsetting that much of twitter at the time came to the conclusion of "this kid should be punched in the face". I specifically remember the comedian Patton Oswalt saying something along those lines.
cjet79
10d ago
Mach 3 Gillette razor. Shave in the shower usually about once a week. 2-4 full shaves per razor. Only go about an inch at a time, by then the razor is clogged with hair and I need to wash it out. If I've waited longer than a week I'll use a trimmer to shorten the hair and make the shave easier. I use to do this at the sink instead of in the shower. Shower made cleanup easier and faster. I've been shaving for 20 years this way. Cuts are rare.
cjet79
10d ago
This and the Barbarian from Dungeon Soup are my favorite https://youtube.com/watch?v=817E64rtzj8?si=LtWw7xAHo5gKIjM8
cjet79
11d ago
The canary thing is new and something I've never heard of. Does that just do it for your own text or all subsequent replies?
I'm sure most datasets are hopelessly corrupted by some terrible ideas in their training data. When getting to billions of tokens for training data I don't get the sense that you can be super picky about what goes in.
cjet79
12d ago
Just to be surei understand you, do you believe in a right to self defense?
Like are we disagreeing that this is a fundamental right, or are we just quibbling about whether guns fall into an extension of that right?
For example, if what for me looks like innocent religious worship to which I am entitled through natural rights looks to you like depraved demon-calling which threatens the lives of your neighborhood, you would well be within your rights to use violence to stop me, and I would well be within my rights to use violence to oppose you.
Solve for equilibrium, and this is roughly equivalent to saying that there is only one right, which is to use violence to do whatever you want.
This is absolutely not the equilibrium. If we are gonna use the terms of economics I'd say there are very high transaction costs for violence.
The equilibrium is more like: you can use violence or the threat of violence to protect a few things that you greatly care about. The things you can protect or enact with violence are heavily limited by what others are willing to protect with violence.
cjet79
13d ago
I think I understood the latter half of that and it was a fun ride, thanks for writing it.
cjet79
13d ago
Nobody I am aware of argues that 2A describes an inherent, inalienable and unconditional right.
I would say that the right to self defense is an inherent, inalienable, and unconditional right. And I'm definitely not alone in that belief.
The second amendment is just an offshoot of that right, as guns are one of the best tools for self defense.
Just like freedom of speech is mostly useless if the government says "you can say whatever you want, just not in a newspaper or online or anywhere we can see it".
cjet79
13d ago
I did find another paper by that org that says they were using a standard definition of 4 victims not including the shooter.
https://nij.ojp.gov/library/publications/nij-special-report-public-mass-shootings-research
Same paper: The 5-year running average for such events hovers around 5-6 incidents per year. And apparently the most common location is at workplaces, so more of a "going postal" situation.
cjet79
13d ago
It turns out that "imaginary" numbers are actually at the root of reality, and most functions we're interested in are rooted in analytic multivalued functions, visualizable in ℂ×ℂ. That's a 2-complex-dimension space, so it's 4-(real)-dimensional, so we're screwed. Best you can usually do is to switch back and forth between plots of output magnitude and phase (or between real and imaginary components of output), or plot magnitude as height along with phase as color. Fortunately we don't have to be able to visualize something to describe and compute with it, but I feel like it could have helped a lot.
I don't think I understood any of this.
The "bag of holding" trick is clever, it gets you the topology of a 3D manifold that can't be embedded in less than ℝ⁴, but to me it "feels" like a very fixed geometry - two parallel 3D spaces, with the "hole" of the bag's opening connecting them.
Its the simplest 4D space I could think of, but I think our touch perception would still work just fine on the most complex 4D space available. In an unobstructed 4D space your 3D senses would continue to work just fine, just as in an unobstructed 3D space your 2D sense of vision works just fine. Its when the space is obstructed that the lower dimensional perception becomes difficult or confusing. A wall obstructs 2D vision. But if there are no obstructions there isn't much to perceive either. In 3D outer space you can turn any direction and see infinite nothing (except the stars). In 4D outer space you'd be able to turn more as you twist into that 4th spacial dimension but you'd feel nothing different. You could do some visually weird things like phase your hands through your own body. But the actual sensation and mental model of you doing that wouldn't feel weird. You can sort of do it right now if you have a big enough beer gut, just press your hand into some soft tissue and move it out of the way, your hand is now where your body normally is. The only difference is that in 4D you wouldn't have the dual feedback of the skin pressing against each other.
I think the best spacial sense would work something like knowing the fluid shape of the area around you. Going back to fantasy, imagine a slime monster. A gelatinous round ball that can only feel its "skin". For a slime navigating any dimensional space is all the same. If you magically found yourself in a 4D space you might be best off acting a bit like a slime by closing your eyes and feeling your way around. Your eyes will lie, your touch won't.
cjet79
13d ago
I made a post on this not too long ago about gun rights being civilization rights. If we don't trust Hassan to have a gun we don't really trust him to exist and live in our civilization.
I suspect this equivalence is true for most people:
(Number of people you trust to own a gun around you) < (Number of people you trust to live in society around you) < (Number of people actually in society around you)
The gaps in those numbers pose very thorny problems, and I think most people would prefer to sweep those problems under the rug.
I think someone like Hassan should be imprisoned and removed from society. We currently keep a bunch of criminals in prisons, and thus prisons are very terrible places to be. I would not want to condemn Hassan to such a place. Mental institutions used to be the kind of prison that would house people like Hassan. I don't think they were pleasant enough either. Either the nicest prison possible, or he remains a ward of his parents/the state.
cjet79
13d ago
Having some thoughts about 4 dimensional spaces.
I've heard it said before that humans can't conceive of or perceive 4d spaces.
I was thinking that this isn't a mental limitation it's a perceptive and specifically a visual limitation.
Vision is basically a 2d sense, so it is limited in that it can only accurately perceive 2d environments (like a map). Our brains are able to do some juggling and work this 2d sense into perceiving our 3d environment. And it helps to have more than one eye to convert the 2d senses into a 3d understanding.
Some of our other senses are what I might consider 1d. Hearing and smell are just intensity detectors. They aren't really for navigating our 3d environment so we don't often think about how limiting they are in that way. Hearing doesn't feel 1d because we have ears that alter the sound and allow our brain to figure out directionality.
Here is the fascinating thing: we do in fact have a sense that it is 3d. Our sense of touch or our basic bodily self awareness.
If you try to imagine 4d spaces visually they make no sense, but if you instead imagine being able to contort your body inside a 4d space it can seem a little weird but not 'my brain is totally broken' levels of weird.
Simple exercise:
Imagine a bag of holding from dungeons and dragons. It's a small 6 inch round bag. But if you reach inside there is about a circular yard of space. This is a 4d space. Visually it's confusing as all hell, especially if you imagine the outer material of the bag being see-through. But imagining reaching in their with one arm while your other hand holds the bag is not all that confusing.
So by string together multiple 3d senses, via our sense of bodily space and touch, we can perceive 4d environments. We don't really have 4d environments so our brain doesn't have any built in hardware to make this easier.
5 spacial dimensions is where things might actually go off the rails. I have no idea how to even describe such a space. Certainty nothing as simple or widespread as a bag of holding. Curious if anyone else can think of 5 dimensional spaces used in fiction?
cjet79
14d ago
The lines are often blurred between state and non-state actors. That is usually part of the problem with corruption, that the state hasn't fully locked down a monopoly on violence.
I was mentally thinking of France and Scotland when I thought of corrupt state actors.
It's been the longest amount of time since they were bad about corruption, but they absolutely were not free of it in 17th and most of the 18th centuries. The king of France would sell these tax collector positions that were basically approved banditry. In England it was difficult to run anything larger than a family business without the backing and often bribing of a noble. These places were absolutely corrupt in a way that we would all call "third world".
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There are more special interests that benefit from complex tax systems than just H&R block.
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