GBRK
11hr ago
- And if you did hire high IQ high conscientiousness people to do the work,
That's the illegal immigrants. Given the same IQ and conscientiousness, they're far more likely to do low-paid farm work than american citizens for what should be obvious economic reasons. If we got rid of the illegal immigrants their likely replacements would be stupider and less conscientious.
edit: I remembered that the electric unicycle community actually keeps a record of every single death (doable since there are so few of us). Looking over the list might be illustrative about what's actually liable to cause fatalities since it's possible to actually know the exact ratio of what causes deaths. Excluding the unicycle-specific stuff (cutouts, battery fires) most of these deaths seem to feature traffic going in a single direction and then things getting squirrely and the rider veering off course. The one big exception is the car that went too fast through a stop sign in a rolling stop. As a consequence I'll amend my opinion of rolling stops to specify that to qualify as a rolling stop the vehicle should be moving at a speed that's strictly unlikely to cause a fatality even if a collision actually happens. I've been hit by a car while on my bike at something like 5-10 mph and just walked it off, no biggie, so that's probably the threshold.
You should turn on your turn signal every time you switch lanes or otherwise would be expected to use it, even if nobody is around.
Yes. Trivial effort and keeps you in the habit.
Stop signs and red lights need to be fully stopped at, even if nobody is around and you know there isn't a red light camera.
This should be two different questions because red lights and stoplights are used in significantly different contexts. Red lights tend to be on busier intersections with faster traffic. If you want to go straight, you should always stop and stay stopped even if there is no other traffic around because the consequences of screwing up are very likely to be death. Though it you want to do a right turn (on a road where it's legal to do so) then it's acceptable to do a rolling stop instead of a full stop, due to that being intrinsically safer-- if traffic hits you, it's unlikely to be a head-on colission, and if they were coming from the opposite side (for example because of a left-turn signal) then an accident will happen in lower speeds.
Stop signs are used more in quieter areas with smaller speed limits. rolling stops are acceptable if no one is around.
Speed limits should be followed to the letter when possible.
No, because speed limits are deliberately set too low with the expectation that they will be moderately violated by even law-abiding citizens, so that cops have a pretext to stop people who are driving at the "optimal" speed for a given area but in an unsafe manner. As proof, in my state you don't even receive any penalties for going up to 5 over, so the speed limit is really "speed posted plus up to 5mph" which is much more reasonable. Going faster than that is also acceptable if done temporarily while passing-- reducing how much time you spend in a truck's blindspot is ultimately safer for everyone.
The left lane is for passing only
No for city roads. Yes for highways with some caveats-- if the road quality is much worse on the right side, or if you're going to an exit that's on the left side, or if no one is around anyway, it's okay to be in the left line.
if you are in that lane and not passing and someone cuts you off
Douchebaggy in proportion to the level of aggression and danger in the cutoff, but acceptable in many cases. Ideally they should have found a safer way to merge in but like... I get it.
or rides your bumper, that is fine.
No. Bumper riding is always unsafe and unnecessary. (And also, illegal-- I got written up for following less than two bumper lengths once. Lawyer got it dropped though, always plead to transfer to a nonmoving violation haha.) That's especially the case when it's at night and your headlights might be shining into their rearview, blinding them and preventing them from safely getting out of your way. People with either eventually figure out that they should move to the right, or alternatively if they're being assholes on purpose being an asshole back is just likely to cause an accident.
If someone does not make room for you and you need to come over (and properly signaled) you can cut them off guilt free.
Ideally, you should slow down instead and merge in behind them. But if that's not possible for whatever reason, and your merge won't require them to slam on the brakes, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. (You should probably still be a little guilty though.)
I can break some of these rules (or others) but other drivers should not.
Everyone should be expected to break these rules in a situation where that maximizes the overall safety of driving. And at the same time, everyone should be driving so as to minimize the need for others to break these rules, and not doing so forfeights the right to complain in inverse proportion to how safe other drivers are while violating these rules.
scissors statements
On quieter streets with good visibility, it's okay to U-turn like a motherfucker at any provocation.
Every driving test should include a LIVE segment on understanding and using hand signals. Aside from cyclists, I've seen cars use these when their turn lights are off.
Motorcyclists should be allowed to legally split lanes. (But if they die, they die.)
GBRK
6d ago
All his modern books have the same plot and the same relatively mediocre writing style but they're still fast, enjoyable reads. Grab on the next time you have a 3 hour flight-- they're peak airplane fiction.
GBRK
6d ago
Deficits aren't free money. You either pay for government spending via mostly property or income taxes now, or via an effective wealth tax-- inflation-- later.
If neiither the republicans nor democrats raise taxes, then the federal reserve will raise them on their behalf. There's no way out of paying the piper.
GBRK
7d ago
but that a good number of people would renounce citizenship and simply go to a place with good infrastructure and low taxes.
That's trivially (although I admit not easily) fixable. Just make it a US government policy to seize noncitizen wealth in or outside its borders. Make lettes of marque great again!
GBRK
9d ago
Evs are already superior than gas vehicles for a small but growing proportion of use cases. Fully 2/3rds of my trips happen by electric unicycle these days, and once i hit that my mileage goal (2000 miles, enough to pay for the uni by counting avoided gas spending and depreciation on my car) I'll upgrade to a faster suspension wheel and interested that proportion even further.
For a single person (or pair of adults) in an urban area, EVs and PEVs are great and getting better.
GBRK
9d ago
You briefly alluded to a system of culture classification i haven't heard of (cavellier, border). Where does it come from?
GBRK
12d ago
My girlfriend read a lot of werewolf romance when she was younger and in describing it I'm always struck by how she focuses on the fact that the main girl is always chosen by destiny, or outcast for being a runt and later discovered to be extra special, or fated to be the alpha's mate, or whatever. She spends virtually no time describing the werewolf himself. Probably she likes werewolves-qua-werewolves too, but the literary genre serves as more of a promise about what kind of main character you're getting and what story they go through than as a promise to feature long descriptions of buff, hairy men. (Even if they also include those.)
As pertains to marvel movies, marvel movies make a specific promise about what kind of plucky heroes will be on-screen for the audience to identify with. If those heroes then get into romances the audience doesn't care about they actually become less identifiable. So unless a romance is well justified by the characters and plot, it's more of a risk to include them then to not include them.
GBRK
13d ago
It's worth understanding that werewolf romance isn't about the werewolf-- it's about the girl. The werewolf is just backdrop for a fantasy about becoming materially wealthy and high-status through the interest of a suitor despite the attempts of rivals to interfere. It's the story older women have told younger women for the past hundred thousand years, with only modest embellishments for cultural fit. The distaff counterpart is the story of a young man getting mentored into performing a visible and socially valuable task and being rewarded with wealth and high status as a result.
As pertains to movies, and specifically thunderbolts, tentpole blockbusters typically attempt to have a variety of characters such that everyone in the audience has someone to identify with and follow the movie for. And in eras where characters (and audiences) fit into more traditional gender roles, having a romance was a space-efficient way to simultaneously satisfy the fantasy of the viewers who identified with the male and female characters. But in a movie like thunderbolts, the wealth and status fantasies of women are already intrinsically satisfied by the progression of the plot, and the wealth and status fantasies of men are satisfied by bucky barnes, buff asskicking congressman. A romance wouldn't necessarily detract from that, but the movie would need additional runtime to set one up, and a snappy action movie is very limited by runtime. That extends to a lot of marvel movies-- given that the plot of the movie itself already satisfied most status, wealth, and power fantasies, additionally having a romantic fantasy ends up just not being particularly necessary.
GBRK
20d ago
Women are more left leaning than men because they're more likely to benefit from government services (healthcare during pregnancy, support for children, longer lives meaning social security and medicare, etc.) There's no need to point to indoctrination when self-interest is already more than explanatory. In the same vein, most people go to college to become professionals in dense urban centers, which also happen to be where government administration and benefits tend to be the most concentrated. There's culture war stuff going on too, but that's basically a proxy for self-interest. It's a mirror of how conservative denial of climate change and performative love of big trucks is downstream of the fact they're more likely to be involved in primary industries, and that people who drive big vehicles long distances are more affected by the price of gas. Throw in people making costly signals of ingroup affiliation and we have the modern situation.
GBRK
23d ago
They have such little force projection that even terrorism would likely be kept within Democrat strongholds.
It's worth remembering that from the democratic perspective, they only actually need to control the democratic strongholds. That's where the preponderance of the nation's money and services are generated. Primary and manufactured goods are a different matter, but between the coasts, border with mexico, and great lakes, leftists can plausibly trade for those.
The federal government derives the legitimacy it uses to bolster its tax-collecting authority from being broadly popular in blue areas. If that stops being the case, blue areas can still ensure that their citizens receive welfare and medical care, but red areas can't ensure that blue areas will contribute to their economies or enforce their morality. The sanctuary city stuff is a clear-cut example of that. Blue areas wanted a cheap labor force, so they got one, regardless of red areas thought about being undercut.
GBRK
29d ago
They do this really really slowly and at a projected cost of billions of dollars.
And I'm going to guess that the vast majority of that money goes into the pockets of people who were educated as lawyers. The people working to block or enable it, the politicians pushing or decrying the project, the lobbying groups, the justices who review each project...
The real blackpill is that any society with laws will ultimately be put to the service of those who have the right to argue them. Retvrn to kritarchy; abandon ALL laws except those decided on by the arbitrary whims of respected community members.
GBRK
1mo ago
...because syria and afghanistan are illiberal shitholes and we should jump at the chance to strengthen ourselves while weakening them?
That's because migrants shouldn't get government welfare besides essential services (e.g., police, fire) and programs know to have a positive rate of return (e.g. childhood education) unless their host country admitted them specifically because they have an attractive skillset justifying recruitment and retention efforts. America is better than europe because most of our immigrants are illegal so we don't need to pay for their medicare or social security. Illegal immigration is better than regular immigration.
GBRK
1mo ago
-- It's not clear how accepting white south africans who want to leave South Africa into the United States can possibly be a bad thing for South Africa.
But it is? I'm extremely pro-immigration because immigration is imperialism. It hoovers up people self-selected for being ambitious and hardworking from other countries, thereby strengthening our nation and weakening our rivals at the exact same time. Academia might claim that immigration claim actually benefits both countries because of remittances, but that's just a classic case of privileging legible measures of contribution (in this case, the accounting value of remittances) over real, but illegible benefits (all the ways people improve their communities my living in them.)
To be clear, this church is full of racists and hypocrites. To believe only white people emigration hurts source countries indicates a massive level of paternalism and contempt for nonwhite peoples, while at the same time believing Afrikaners aren't deserving of humanitarian treatment is of course just pro facie racist against Afrikaners. But the specific argument they're making here isn't entirely wrong.
GBRK
1mo ago
Are you Catholic? And if so: were you raised by and around other Catholics?
Yes. Yes.
The performative outrage by my non-religious ingroup (liberals) is unnecessary and overblown, and I'm not super offended, but I think Trump's post was stupid, and annoying, and I didn't like it.
GBRK
1mo ago
In a post Sunday night on his Truth Social platform, Trump said he has authorized the Department of Commerce and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to slap a 100% tariff “on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”
Well I was never going to pay for the anime I watch anyways lmao.
I remember saying something that if trump actually wanted us to re-industrialize he'd say something like, "china doesn't respect our IP, so we won't respect theirs." I said that not expecting it would ever actually happen because I don't like him, but this could escalate in a really hilarious way. Actually, you know what? I'll make that my official position. If trump gets rid of american respect for foreign IP I will start unironically liking the guy.
GBRK
1mo ago
it's not about sexy new partners but a support system
That's it. That's the whole thing. Romantic involvement and religion are the only part of society modern technology and economics have yet to fully atomize. Polyamory offers both, in a way, to a certain kind of atheist. Polyamory forms a community and ideology at the same time. Of the rat/poly/atheist people I know IRL, two of them single mothers with apparently little to lose, and one of them actually tried Protestantism at an earlier point but couldn't manage to swing the "belief in god" part.
GBRK
1mo ago
It's funny when the ingroup jokes about the ingroup. It's disrespectful when the outgroup jokes about the ingroup. Simple as. Trump isn't catholic, so I don't want him making even relatively harmless jokes about my religion.
GBRK
1mo ago
Have you never seen the word "democratic" defined before? Google says:
a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.
Democracy is about how choices are made, not what those choices are. Nothing precludes a democracy from using force-- either externally or against its own citizens. In particular, the majority overriding a minority and imposing their will by force is so inextricably linked with the nature of democracy that the founders intentionally tried to temper it with anti-democratic republicanism. Argue against democracy itself if you want, but don't argue that sending the 101st to end segregation was anti-democratic.
GBRK
1mo ago
A woman who is genuinely worse off by all possible metrics has no option but to simply settle for less (or not settle at all.) Same logic as profoundly ugly men. But most people have at least something they're exceptional in, and can derive comparative advantage from. Maximize whatever that is. It doesn't matter if you're competing against X other women for X-Y men that care about that trait, it's better than competing against every other woman for traits everyone is looking and optimizing for.
(All of this logic works the same way swapping "women" and "men." It's what I consciously applied to find my current girlfriend.)
Depending on one's view of the soviet union, it could be categorized as either a hostile jungle or a laboratory, but in any case it is not a laboratory of democracy. America's special status, and special success, comes from the fact that both the experiments and the laboratory at large are managed under democratic principles.
They're in prison, living off welfare that illegal immigrants are ineligible for, or employed in sectors that actually have to check for employment authorization and consequently have pay more as a result. For example, cashiering at big box stores. Walmart actually make an effort to hire people with work authorization (though Warlmar's contractors are a different story.) American citizens have strictly more negotiating power than non-citizens so for the same level of intelligence and conscientiousness, they're eligible for better jobs. Or to restate that in another way-- for an equivalent job and pay rate, the noncitizens are probably going to be smarter and more conscientious (because if they weren't, the employer would just hire a native in their place.) See: every story about attempting to hire americans for farm work instead of illegals.
Actually, I can personally attest to this being true because I spent a few weeks detasseling corn as a teenager. The attrition rate for the program was incredibly high and included myself-- american teenagers just would not stick around. I found out later that the bulk of the work ultimately ended up being done by migrant labor. So self-evidently, the immigrants were more conscientious than the natives.
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