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coffee_enjoyer

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joined 2022 September 05 11:53:36 UTC

				

User ID: 541

coffee_enjoyer

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4 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 11:53:36 UTC

					

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User ID: 541

I don’t think I care. Huberman (afaik) has never offered moral advice or implied moral superiority. He’s a neuroscientist who gives professional advice, which is different from a Jordan Peterson or a conservative podcaster who gives moral advice. If he’s lying to women to have sex with them (not a new phenomenon in the history of Man) that’s a personal matter. It’s more effective to just warn women not to dedicate themselves to high status men without assurances, as that is literally what marriage is for. Huberman is 48 by the way, that’s probably the more surprising aspect of the story. Impressed by both his time and testosterone management.

Texas Governor Abbott signs law attempting to ban free speech at universities whenever the speech criticizes Israel in certain ways (described below).

The Executive Order requires all universities to —

  1. Review and update free speech policies to address the sharp rise in antisemitic speech and acts on university campuses and establish appropriate punishments, including expulsion from the institution.

  2. Ensure that these policies are being enforced on campuses and that groups such as the Palestine Solidarity Committee and Students for Justice in Palestine are disciplined for violating these policies.

  3. Include the definition of antisemitism, adopted by the State of Texas in Section 448.001 of the Texas Government Code, in university free speech policies to guide university personnel and students on what constitutes antisemitic speech.

Section 448.001 reads

Examples of antisemitism are included with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's "Working Definition of Antisemitism" adopted on May 26, 2016

And this definition includes (among other things) —

  1. Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis

  2. Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

  3. Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

  4. Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.

These examples are intentionally ambiguous and can be weaponized by politicians or the judiciary against critics. The first example simply bans anyone from criticizing Israel in the same way that Israel routinely criticize others, by comparing them to Nazis. This cuts off a whole spectrum of political comparisons from ever applying to Israel. The second example could imply that you are antisemitic if you criticize Israel for things without also criticizing other nations in the same breath, however culturally and politically distant the nation. The third implies that an ethnostate cannot be considered racist if it is Jewish. The fourth implies that no one — not a single politician who is Jewish — can be accused of being more loyal to his self-defined homeland than America.

IMO this is a clear affront to freedom of speech. I find it embarrassing that any conservative in America would sign a law like this. The ambiguity is dangerous because it could be used by biased politicians or judges in its broadest application. While I don’t think it’s good public rhetoric to compare Israel to Nazis, that should be legal because (1) Nazis are everyone’s go-to villains, (2) Israel was recently the subject of an ICJ inquiry regarding genocide, (3) ethnonations should be extra scrutinized for genocide, (4) ethnonations with a history of genocide (Kitos War) and who fondly remember their nation previously committing genocide in their Holy Text should be super extra scrutinized for potential genocidal acts. The holocaust, like it or not, has no actual relevance to the current conduct of the Israeli regime. In real life, multigenerational ethnic groups do not swear off the same violence that their grandparents were victims of. So comparisons are fair game, if usually in bad taste.

“Dopamine detox” in the sense of abstaining from hyperstimuli and distractions and lesser pleasures is something everyone should do. It’s a spiritual practice in every religion. There are basic psychological reasons for how it works: the mind is limited, so learning something undesirable takes the place of something preferable; the mind is efficient, so it will choose easier pleasures over difficult pleasures; the mind is habit-forming, so it will form habits around easier pleasures rather than difficult pleasures; the over-justification effect will reduce your motivation to do difficult things after satisfaction from easier things; the difficult pleasures in life are vastly more satisfying than the easier pleasures, but we can’t easily grasp this with our limited mind, so we have to accept it on faith until we are mystically resurrected from the dead presented with these high experiences.

Trivial examples:

  • two bored kids in a math class, and one can use his phone. The bored and abstaining one will eventually and sporadically have his interest piqued by math, because that’s the only interesting thing going on. The one with the phone has no such motivation to ever pay attention in the classroom.

  • A man’s friends and crush are on the other side of a mountain, while he sits bored in a cabin. He will, one day, trek the whole mountain out of sheer human need. If he instead has a ton of distractions and drugs, he will never take those steps on the narrow path.

  • One person’s friends are reputable and wholesome. They give each other attention and affection for their good works. Another person’s friends are disreputable and corrupt. They only have fun being edgy and doing drugs. The former person’s character will change because only prosocial activity is reinforced; the latter person will be dragged down by his comrades, and wind up ”learning” that deleterious things are important — some of his mind is essentially worthless now, those months were a write-off.

  • One man is captivated by a virtuous crush, and molds his life so that it is aligned with what the crush wants. Another man is captivated by promiscuous women who just want to have fun. The former is going to be better for the longterm character and life of both.

The term “dopamine detox” is misleading, I think everyone here knows that, we can just call it mental purification or something, or mental detox. It’s not so much about longterm lowering of dopamine as purifying and filtering cognitive expenditure for that stimuli which leads to the highest reward. There’s no reason at all to bring in neurotransmitters here especially when we barely understand how dopamine and serotonin synergize.

like when you remove sugar from coffee

Agreed. Alas, I must confess that even coffee is a superstimuli which staves off the boredom.

True Crime satisfies the mostly female need for wives’ tales and gossip — women evolved to keep their bodies and character safe from bad men. It’s true that some women also fantasize about serial killers but this is because of the paradoxical evolutionary desire to fuck really good killers who also happen to be handsome and charismatic. Why is this not found in Latin America? Their culture still has good old wives’ tales and gossiping, and they have soap operas where the characters’ continually fall into calamity.

Anyone have any thoughts on the 2001 anthrax attacks, particularly whether the accused perpetrator was truly guilty? If this is something you have researched let me know.

Hence

without duress

Plenty of ways to genuinely convert an unintelligent terrorist.

The evolution of humanity requires increasingly prosocial status games. For women, the status game can be intelligence (see the high STEM rate among Iranian and Saudi women), inner beauty (acts of compassion in a community, singing, poetry, see the ancient world), external beautification (beautiful prosocial religious or quasi-religious art), and fidelity (to some social principle, like anti-consumerism).

The status games we have concocted for women today are bad. Placing poison on their face, wasting their money under false allusions, social media, music festivals, tRaViLiNg… all bullshit. Because for some reason we let for-profit corporations infect the minds of the impressionable.

Bullshit male status games should also be illegal, of course.

The recent attack on Moscow has me thinking: the best anti-terrorism measures against Islamic terrorism is to do everything possible to make the terrorist an apostate, and then to record him stating his apostasy without duress. This is the only thing that would fully counteract the motivation to commit terrorism; the terrorist is motivated by a reward from god, but apostasy is an inexcusable sin. This, more than any physical retaliation or sentence, would make a Muslim terrorist afraid to commit terrorism in your country.

Trademarks are for authenticating products

That’s not what trademarks are for in practice. They are for signaling status. Any visible trademarked logo you see is for status. I’m all for manufacturer authentication, just not visible externally or too small to be noticed by someone else.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/how-the-stanley-cup-went-viral

In 2019, the brand’s now star product, the forty-ounce Quencher, was selling so poorly that the company had stopped restocking or marketing it. A partnership with the Buy Guide, an affiliate-marketing site based in Utah, where the Quenchers were popular among Mormon mothers, saved it. Coached by the Buy Guide, in 2020, Stanley launched a new Web site and an affiliate-marketing system through which fans could make money by driving sales

Outsourcing marketing is marketing

What might appear to be an organic phenomenon, though, is actually an engineered corporate crossover. Companies prepare carefully, and expensively, to cultivate their moments of ubiquity. They leverage our attention, the same way an influencer does, to convert online viewers into fans and customers.

I answered it but I understand you need clarification and don’t mind.

why does mdonald’s not need to lower for Wendy’s, but does for wholesale

Grocery stores will always need to have lower prices than an expedient restaurant like McDonald’s, otherwise few would eat at home. Consumers are more likely venture far away for groceries, because it can be cost-saving to do so. This is different from having only a few fast food places to go to on your lunch break. There may be dozens of grocers, some of which will not know their competitors’ pricings. And because the food is already purchased in bulk and perishable, grocers need to sell some food at a discount otherwise they lose more money in the whole. This is all very different than a fast food place with very efficient supply chains.

But if you’re wondering, “according to your argument, we should still see grocery stores pricefix with other grocers!” Indeed, we do:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_Canada

retailers and supermarket chains reached a secret agreement among themselves to artificially inflate the price of bread at the wholesale and retail levels from late 2001 to 2015[1] (some sources stated that the price fixing continued into 2017[2]). The Competition Bureau of Canada alleged, in court documents released 31 January 2018, that seven Canadian bread companies committed indictable offences[3] in what journalist Michael Enright later termed "the great Canadian bread price-fixing scandal" of 2018

the scheme inflated the price of bread by at least $1.50

The retailers who participated in the scheme, including Loblaws, Walmart Canada, Giant Tiger, Sobeys and Metro, allegedly "demanded" that the bread suppliers manage actively their retail competition by co-ordinating bread prices between the retailers.

Retail customers would call threatening to reject a price increase if another retailer was offside in terms of pricing alignment. None of them wanted to be the first to implement the price increase. There was always a negotiation process going back and forth between the four retailers where the supplier was trying to coordinate it, because somebody had to be the first to move.

I promise you, if grocers can negotiate price increases amongst themselves over a period of 15 years in secrecy, they can surely decide not to lower prices unless their competitor does so (guaranteeing rarely-lowering prices). So you need a place like CostCo whose entire shtick is an ugly experience for lower prices. Even then, CostCo makes 30 billion in profit.

https://archive.is/eZbUv

A new analysis from the White House Council of Economic Advisers suggests that elevated profit margins among large grocery retailers could be contributing to the stubbornly high price of food on store shelves. The analysis, which relies on Quarterly Financial Reports data from the Census Bureau, found that food and beverage stores had increased their margins by about two percentage points since the eve of the pandemic, reaching their highest level in two decades.

I’ll edit and reply to other points in a bit

Trademarks should be used to compensate for the cost of innovation. The reason Stanley profited so much from their product is that they succeeded in manipulating female buying preferences by associating it with high status. That’s it. It’s a grotesque waste of resources and predicated on manipulating the public imagination. So in the case of stupid cups and other status items, there should be no trademarks (maybe a small number on the bottom of items to guarantee quality with a trusted producer only).

It’s funny that this is where the buck stops with capitalists. No no no, you can’t regulate like this, you need to regulate like that! Changing how we regulate is unthinkable!

I agree with you that repealing IP laws would increase competition and lower prices significantly — look no further than Stanley Cups, why should one company make so much profit on cups just because they have the funds to psychologically manipulate the public’s desires — but economies of scale come in and demand centralization. One or a few factories producing Ozempic will always be more efficient than a dozen or two dozen, no? It could be this way with fast food giants, as well. McDonald’s and a couple other giants simply due to economies of scale and accumulated institutional knowledge can uniquely lower food prices, but it’s unlikely this will ever happen because nothing enforces the competition past a certain point (“lower than grocery stores and not painfully higher than competitors” is all their profit needs to be, but they will never willingly race to the bottom for prices because they can anticipate lower total profit as a result)

I appreciate your advice to look at Khan Academy. I will look for a cost-efficient reading comprehension program to suggest you.

but how's that relevant to why McDonald's wouldn't set their price to $10

That wasn’t in the reply I replied to. You are asking me why my explanation for X does not reply to the non-existent question Y. In fact, you asked Y three posts up, and to that I replied

They can’t charge an amount that is so noticeably higher that you remember it and buy a pack of water for 1/20th of the price at a store.

Now clearly this answers your question as to why all fast food locations can’t arbitrarily raise their prices to infinity. They compete with grocery stores, which have more competition over prices due to the variety of bulk retail outlets, online grocery orders, and so on, and which the consumer plans trips to in advance. This is different from having a limited number of expedient food options near your work.

why is my experience[…]

I have no idea, you could have googled it

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-mcdonalds-prices-are-wildly-different-from-one-location-to-another_l_65665af4e4b03ac1cd17b7d9

From the article:

At the moment, according to the site, the cheapest Big Mac in the country is being sold in Oklahoma for $3.49. The most expensive Big Mac in the U.S. will run you $8.09 in Massachusetts. That’s more than double the price of Oklahoma’s.

What you can do as a consumer is do research and, perhaps, support local stores,” Klyman noted. “Giant global chains are sometimes not being honest and bringing up their price 200% even though their cost hasn’t gone up at that rate, so do your research, and you might find that local stores and restaurants won’t upcharge you as much.”

Back to you:

Even if the private company earns so much profit by simply making an amazing product everyone wants to buy and can't produce enough supply to meet demand even when they try, e.g Ozempic or Nvidia?

We have to ask, (1) should the developer of Ozempic make as much money as possible, or (2) should the developer of Ozempic make approximately the amount of money that a reasonable developer would consider justifies his research. My position is the second one. (If this is too many words of commas let me know and I can rephrase). Imagine how evil it would be if the scientist who discovered penicillin tried to maximize profit.

How is it possible that you don’t understand that it evades the point? That’s shocking, because it’s a very clear case of arguing against the substance — which should never be done because it wastes time (hence my terse reply, and now I have to waste time clarifying something so simple). It’s not just bad argumentation, it’s damaging to the whole discussion because of that.

  1. We are talking about the overcharging of goods with water as an example. The one example is not the substance of the argument.

  2. If someone wants a bottle of water they should be purchasing it at a reasonable price. Tap water has nothing to do with the claim. It’s not always possible to drive with an open cup of water in your car, depending on cupholders and road conditions

  3. If some locations allow free cups of water, what does this have to do with the locations which do not? Even if points 1 and 2 don’t apply, the simple fact that there are locations which do not give free water makes this whole argument a wasteful tangent. See here, here, here

move the goalposts

it’s crucial to understand the difference between substance and trivial details

to the substance that is single most responsible for the American pre-diabetic and diabetes epidemic.

Are you trolling?

This isn't just poor argumentation

I will read the rest of your post if you can confirm that you’ve understood why you are incorrect per the above

There’s a concept called “profit” and we look at profit when determining whether things are overpriced, not just gross expenditures

many companies that could've succeeded fail due to bad leadership

This has always happened. Even very highly paid corporate CEOs screw up companies.

Dockworkers rightfully fight automation because they know that there are not other jobs for them with high pay as many other jobs lack unions; the “efficiency” goes to just a few at top. This is different from a scenario where unions are the norm across industries — suddenly the benefit of being a dockworker would not so large as to prevent them going through with automation. But even if for some reason dockworkers maintain a disproportionately high salary, we can imagine a system where the union of one industry negotiates (and can be overruled) by a broader “related-industry” or “affected industry” greater union body. There are many ways to incentivize efficient economic decisions which involve unions and cross-union negotiation.

cup of water for free

This just evades the point, try again but for soda

New businesses typically lower prices so that consumers try out their business, as consumer behavior is based around habits and attachment to routine — lower prices break this cycle. If you’ve noticed this is why newly opened stores have sales / deals. McDonald’s also may be over-pricing an item and at the same time a new competitor can’t compete due to economy of scale

How would private investment into companies work

Thy will have to invest based upon the idea that the business they invest in is actually valuable to society. If it is valuable then it will grow and profit for a period, and if the profits are too extravagant than the Government steps in — and this is a good threat because it makes investors vote for boards that lower prices themselves, lest the government step in.

Why are you quoting me McDonald’s PR as if it means something? Are you going to quote me Wendy’s selling $1 burgers next, after their PR disaster of announcing a plan to do surge pricing?

Kempczinski didn’t offer details on the timing or size of any price cuts. But his focus on affordability marked a shift from just a few months ago, when he boasted that US menu prices, which went up as much as 10% in 2023 alone, weren’t deterring sales.

They may as well continue doing this cycle, raising then lowering when publicity gets bad / people notice.

They can’t charge an amount that is so noticeably higher that you remember it and buy a pack of water for 1/20th of the price at a store. But they can (and do) overcharge on water, understanding that they can get away with it because it’s an inconvenience for you to get it elsewhere. That’s extremely economically inefficient, because McDonald’s surplus profit goes disproportionately to already-wealthy individuals. (It’s better for a nation to have more people with more money, versus some with extraneous wealth that doesn’t provide any benefit in terms of happiness or entrepreneurship or invention or culture.)

It would be more efficient if, for super-sized corporations, an agency stepped in and “auctioned” off the corporate positions and ownership according to who will do the job for the least amount of money, then pass the saved money to consumers. If that’s too much government interference, then allow the employees to form powerful unions, because the employees are more likely to identify with the interests of the consumer and stand to gain less as individuals from purposeful economic inefficiency.

There are a lot of problems with communism. People should be paid up to 10x more than median wages for performance, because humans have an instinct to be rewarded according to performance, that’s deeply evolutionary. Humans also have an instinct to care for things they own, and you see this in small businesses and entrepreneurship. The answer is a balance that accepts the importance of human instinct while also realizing that primitive capitalism can get harmful, antisocial and inefficient. For large corporations, no one should feel like they “own” it, and these trend toward pseudo-monopolies due to institutional knowledge accumulation and established supply chains. For a problem like used car dealerships, we should have some kind of Honesty Regulation akin to Cicero’s grain merchant at Rhodes thought experiments. The policy should make it so that even a very dumb person can immediately tell that something isn’t in his economic best interest.

Large companies have zero incentive to reduce prices when they know that their competitor will do the same. McDonald’s has actually sued 12 of the major national meat suppliers for price-fixing simply based on the fact that each supplier knew the others’ pricing due to a shared analytic tool. All it takes is one reasonably intelligent analyst at the meat supplier board room to ask “so what happens if we lower our prices” for all to realize it’s an unprofitable move.

https://www.fooddive.com/news/mcdonalds-sues-meat-companies-pork-price-fixing/637572/

https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/ag-ferguson-s-price-fixing-lawsuit-nets-105-million-washingtonians-tyson-foods

https://www.agriculturedive.com/news/agri-stats-sued-by-DOJ-for-role-in-meatpacking-antitrust-scheme/695196/

If you are McDonald’s and there’s a Wendy’s across the street, you have two options. You can both keep your prices high and split the pool of consumers 50/50, knowing that stressed American consumers will continue to buy your slop because it is time-efficient and they have formed a habit to your addictive slop. Or you can lower your prices, which the competitor will do next week, which leaves you back to the first option only with less profit. Of course they don’t do this. But if a brand new competitor moves in who doesn’t play ball, perhaps they will do this to squeeze him out — no new competitor can compete with the supply chain and the institutional knowledge of McDonald’s.

It’s an entrenched mythology of capitalism that companies lower prices based on competition. This hardly ever works in the real world. There’s no reason, for instance, for OnlyFans to rake in billions of dollars when anyone can create a similar site. But OnlyFans isn’t profitable because their service is better, but because the pornographer who operated it made the site a meme among the public (a kind of psychological rentseeking), because he had the previous institutional knowledge and capital to do this. And you see with car dealerships, there’s no reason for any used car dealership owner to make tens of millions. But in an intensive competition what they do is compete over psychologically manipulating the vulnerable, so the car dealerships compete over misleading pricing plans, overpriced itemization that the customer doesn’t have the knowledge to dispute, etc. It is horrifically inefficient and immoral as a system and it is only maintained due to various mythologies in the public imagination.

2022 is recent enough, though. It’s unlikely they can recruit 10,000 fighters in just one year, one third of their entire force. But they could still just be wrong about the numbers.

In no previous conflict has the Gazan Ministry of Health overcounted mortality figures — they have proven reliable in their counting based on history. You need to prove that Hamas has taken control of the ministry of health when we know that the leadership of the ministry is more affiliated with other groups like Fatah and Palestinian Authority. If the ministry has a finite number of trained officials to verify deaths, which is probable, then the number of verifications has a ceiling. They would not be pulling random Hamas fighters in tunnels and putting a white coat on them and telling them to verify deaths.

the Shifa bombing hoax

Run a google search of my comments on that if you want. Did you forget that a month after this hospital bombing, the NYT put reporters in another hospital and were able to verify Israel bombed that one? Or did you forget that the hospital administrators — a hodgepodge of anglosphere Christians — confirmed that Shifa was attacked by Israel days before and warned of an impending attack? Israel and US claim it is a hoax, there has been no evidence that it was a hoax.

appeared to actually be a comparatively small explosion in a parking lot

The parking lot which we know, from tweets made before the event, hosted sleeping refugees. I made an archive of that tweet and you can find it in my original comments on the event.

30k

DNI disagrees with you

almost metronomical linearity

is what you would expect if the total number of daily deaths exceed what can be confirmed by a finite number of personnel in a given day. If a week-long heavy wind wipes out 3000 poles a day, and I only have the personnel to confirm 2000 a day, then we should expect almost metronomical linearity in the reporting of fixed poles. The article states that “the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%”, and that’s enough variability to align with the above.

on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported”

This only make sense if boys those under 18 are not sent by their mother to obtain goods. In fact, these boys are much more likely to be targeted by Israel when they are gathered in a group without women present. Additionally, per the above, there may be separate areas for corpses based on age — usually they try to keep the children alive as much as possible, or rescue them first, etc

Another red flag, raised by Salo Aizenberg and written about extensively, is that if 70% of the casualties are women and children and 25% of the population is adult male, then either Israel is not successfully eliminating Hamas fighters or adult male casualty counts are extremely low

There has never been any evidence that Israel is targeting Hamas fighters. They may very well be targeting the extended families of those who they believe could possibly be Hamas fighters. Israel has dropped 30,000 bombs just by December, whereas there are only 20,000 Hamas fighters. They could literally be targeting whoever they think are the smartest Gazan residents and we would have no idea because there is no evidence or verification of their attacks’ successes.

I forgot he posted on substack originally, you’re right.

In the thread there’s the tweet:

dude is The Vitalist on the site that must not be named

And I think this phrase alone will bring a few thousand to the forum

acting like they're too cool

I think it’s totally reasonable to deny association with the forum given the content that is sometimes posted