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2rafa


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 06 11:20:51 UTC
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User ID: 841

2rafa


				
				
				

				
15 followers   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 06 11:20:51 UTC

					

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User ID: 841

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Cool. Why don't they just cut off all supplies to Europe and sell exclusively to the US at 20x the price.

Because they’re a European company. And I think you’re ignoring a major risk, which is that if the US tries to push for the same price, and the Danes say no, and the US says “fuck it, we’ll make generics”, the EU actually has a lot of leverage. A huge amount of US exports are intellectual property sold at zero marginal cost. The EU can make it legal to ignore those rights.

They absolutely don’t want it because yes, it will leave the pharma companies (many of which have large operations in Europe) with no choice but to substantially raise costs for their healthcare systems.

The entire US medical system is fucked. Higher drug costs are a substantial input cost, but another huge one is the AMA.

The steps for fixing US healthcare are actually pretty simple:

  1. Smash the AMA cartel by allowing unlimited immigration of doctors trained in Canada, UK, Australia, NZ and Ireland without any licensing requirements, re-doing residency etc. Allow doctors from other Northern European (not southern) countries if they pass a tough English written and oral exam that requires fluency. This will lower US doctors’ salaries (currently 300% or more of what they are in Europe) by half, to a more reasonable rate where surgeons are respectable PMC but not making a million dollars a year solely because the AMA lobbies to restrict residency places. Doctors should be paid $120-300k a year at the cap, with the high figure for the most elite surgeons in tough specialties. Why is the American middle class paying for anesthesiologists to make $700k a year when their equivalents in European countries that are almost as rich are paid like $150k? There are almost a million doctors in America, this overpaying adds up.

  2. Handle drug pricing centrally. Insurers pay a price negotiated by a trade association chartered for that purpose and which represents all US insurers (including the state for the VA etc), exempt from the usual rules around cartels. The trade association negotiates as a bloc and can therefore refuse to accept pricing that is any more than a basket of comparable countries (eg rest of Anglosphere) + 20% (at most). Pharma companies will essentially be forced to comply, since there is no other major wealthy market that would possibly pay more than the US. The reason manufacturers can charge so much is that (much as with doctor pay) so much of the cost is offloaded onto third parties (eg employers for most health insurance) in a way that causes huge economic drag but which is often not immediately visible.

Thanks for the post. I find parents who don’t discipline their kids kind of sad; I spent a lot of time with my grandparents growing up, my grandmother probably hit me twice and my grandfather probably three or four times between the ages of 4 and 12, but by god that made us behave. Kids need a lot of love but a little fear, I think.

More generally, I think significant introspection is a bad idea. The happiest people (unironically Donald Trump) seem to do very little introspection at all.

I don’t think trying to get laid is necessarily bad, but lying to people and giving them STDs surely is, as is infidelity more generally.,

Yeah Zionists are the ones sperging out about relatively milquetoast Palestinian activism.

The EFF polls around 10-15% now. The EFF is also much more leftist than the ANC or DA, its messaging isn’t solely about taking white money but also about redistribution from rich to poor generally, I don’t think it’s correct to ascribe anti-white animus to every EFF voter even if Malema obviously has it.

There’s no coherent definition of indigenous because whether, for example, South African Bantus or New Zealand Maori are indigenous depends on where you draw the cutoff line.

Sergey kind of has it although my impression is it’s with poly people. Eric Schmidt kind of has it, but only by leading on women about having a kid with him apparently. In general the status loss for a high status woman being a concubine is so significant it doesn’t happen often. To some extent if your definition of ‘high tier’ is young fashion models, Adnan Khashoggi had it in his prime, and he was a billionaire in the 70s and 80s when that was very, very rare indeed.

There's this weird strain of thought among some extremely online femcels that a man who talks with emotional competence is actually a crypto-abuser using therapy-talk to manipulate women.

I don’t think it’s this. I think it’s that many women realize that there is a subcategory of men who pretty ruthlessly optimize every aspect of their lives to get laid and who don’t really care about any moral or ethical issues, telling the truth or whether people get hurt along the way.

Increasingly I think the key to good politics is, in internet parlance, to make the enemy sperg out. You need them to get really mad, to feel the combination of humiliation, shame and rage that leads to acting out. Only then can you really destroy them by pointing out how ridiculous they are. (On a related note, Zionists doing this is why support for Israel is currently falling in the West.) It’s why a few swastika tattooed prison gang room temp IQ ‘grand dragon’ KKK-LARPers can be pushed to discredit large swathes of the far right with the public, but it’s also why leftists projecting “Glory to the Martyrs of Al-Aqsa” or whatever onto university buildings in American cities can make a bunch of centrist swing voters go ‘man these guys are kinda crazy though’.

Since almost every single leftist in America is strongly anti-Israel, while the vast majority of conservatives, even if they don’t care about or like Jews (as @hydroacetylene says) either support Israel for eschatological reasons or don’t give a shit, this is an effective way of singling out leftists. What every critical race theorist, marxist philosopher and academic ‘decolonize science’ poaster in America has in common right now is a 🇵🇸 flag in their Instagram bio. Even most Jewish leftist (rather than merely lib) academics are strongly anti-zionist, as seen by the various Jews sanctioned by their own universities for statements since 10/7.

Free speech absolutism on campus sailed probably a century or so ago.

I always think it’s funny when people imply that the America of the past had stronger free speech rules. Free speech in the US is less than a century old. A hundred years ago there was extensive state-led regulation of speech, art, lewdness and countless other things we’d consider 1A rights today. New York jailed people for writing leftist manifestos, or professing to be anarchists; California jailed people for flying the communist flag. During the wars the state banned publication of truths the government didn’t like, harassed and threatened journalists far more than it did now, and the idea in 1894 or whatever that the government couldn’t ban certain kinds of speech was seen as ridiculous. Free speech in the US is an invention of the Supreme Court in the twentieth century.

I think ‘from the river to the sea’ shouldn’t be banned at colleges or universities, and I agree that most people who use it don’t intend for it to mean the ethnic cleansing or murder of Israelis. (I also think most people, even at Malema rallies, who shout ‘kill the Boer’ don’t actually want to exterminate Afrikaner farmers, but they do typically quite transparently wish to dispossess them).

Nevertheless, as in that case, ‘from the river to the sea’ effectively means the large-scale murder of Jews, since no Palestinian one-state solution would tolerate a longstanding Jewish presence and because the democratically elected leadership of a free Palestine would almost certainly be an Islamist group that, like Hamas and the Houthis and bolstered by countless extremely anti-Jewish hadiths that have become more prominent in Islamist scholarship over the last forty years (gharqad tree etc), would in practice seek to kill any remaining Jews in Palestine.

You can draw the South Africa comparison, but the simple fact is that South African black people mostly have no personal animus toward whites. There is a politician grift complex and there is plenty of resentment that 30 years after apartheid ended many are still poor etc etc, but the primary racial hostilities in South Africa are between blacks and Indians, between indigenous black peoples (ie. Khoi-San) and Bantus, and between South African citizens and migrants from the Congo and elsewhere in Central Africa who are perceived as pushing down wages for the urban poor. This was substantially true even before 1994, and from the rich to the poor few people in SA actually think that kicking out whites will solve the country’s problem. Even today, polling in SA shows that:

South Africans say creating jobs and fighting corruption are much more important as government priorities than “racism”, or “land reform”.

By contrast, it is clear that the primary policy preference of most Palestinians in the Levant is hostility towards Jewish rule of Israel even at extraordinary cost to themselves, no matter how many bodies pile up. There would be no ‘debate’ on land reform in a one-state Palestine (unlike in SA, where whites still own 55% of prime agricultural land, the majority of valuable private enterprise and so on), everything would be taken. And given that this hostility is also a longstanding part of Islamic religious and cultural values, we can assume without any leaps of logic that the end of Israel as a Jewish state would also guarantee, in short order, the end of any Jewish presence in Palestine. Meanwhile, there are many African countries like Namibia, Botswana and Kenya that retain sizable white communities 50+ years after independence.

My first reaction is: why did he need to lie about this? He lives in the polyamory capital of the world? Surely plenty of women would be down?

He didn’t want to do poly because as the article either states or strongly implies, he wanted to be able to sleep with all the women but for them only to fuck him, hence the two (or six) timing. This ties into him regularly shouting at his girlfriend for having children from a previous relationship:

When they fought, it was, she says, typically because Andrew would fixate on her past choices: the men she had been with before him, the two children she had had with another man. “I experienced his rage,” Sarah recalls, “as two to three days of yelling in a row. When he was in this state, he would go on until 11 or 12 at night and sometimes start again at two or three in the morning.”

I wouldn’t date someone who had previous children, but I like to think I’d have the self-awareness not to do it and then rage at them because of something I’d known about for years, while also cheating on them with (at least) five other people.

Most not-absolute-bottom-tier women won’t accept being in an actual harem, even for a moderately successful man (because it’s humiliating and very low status amongst women), and so he ‘had to’ lie to them to get what he wanted.

We can say that the general male preference in romantic relationships runs like:

  1. I can fuck many beautiful women, they can only fuck me (harem)

  2. My wife remains faithful to me, but I can go out and sleep with other women (one-sided poly)

  3. I fuck one beautiful woman, she only fucks me (monogamy)

  4. My girlfriend/wife and I both fuck other people (ie poly/swingers depending on exact nature of relationship)

  5. My wife has more partners than me (eg classic poly cuck scenario)

Interesting. I suppose, though, that the daughter is still likely to continue your genetic legacy, while the son probably isn’t.

The problem is the application of downregulation theory to subjective experiences. The hedonic treadmill applies to opioids, the suggestion that TikTok is more pleasurable than some arbitrary other kind of media is complete, evidence-free conjecture, because unlike opium the amount of enjoyment obtained from media is very dependent upon many different factors. You’re also confusing the hedonic treadmill with novelty. They’re related but not the same thing. The hedonic treadmill is solely about returning to a biological baseline happiness, it says nothing about differences between media or why using TikTok everyday would make looking at a sunset less fun.

I think people are largely happy or unhappy, and the ‘hedonic treadmill’ is mostly about the ways in which that naturally unhappy proportion of the population cope.

This is intuitive. Reverse it: If things didn't work this way, wouldn't the average person be bored out of their minds 2000 years ago?

OK, reverse it again: why do people who have access to TikTok (ie. are not diligently disciplining themselves to avoid it) and who use modern social media still read classic novels or long-form, low-stimulus, black-on-white text at all? Why are we here? For some people it might be some heroic effort to strip themselves of any modern dopamine hits, like that guy who asked for help to make his screen black and white last week. But most don’t seem to have that issue. It just doesn’t take any effort from me to be here over TikTok; I’d rather be here, and that’s not because I think this place is ‘better’ for me, it’s because I think it’s genuinely more entertaining.

I think people extrapolate from the mouse orgasm-button experiment (?), but TikTok isn’t an orgasm, which is inherently more pleasurable than not-orgasm. That TikTok is more pleasurable than reading is unclear, scientists can measure brain activity but this doesn’t fully answer the question.

Yeah, I mean clearly the fact that we’re here reading 20,000 words a week of other people’s cultural commentary suggests wordswordswords can be as or more compelling than TikTok.

I don’t know much about this at all, but aren’t you really just describing how MMA moved from a free-for-all mix entered into by fighters of various background to what is increasingly a specific martial art of its own?

I suppose there are probably objective experiments that prove it, but I don’t know how true it really is that TikTok is hyperstimulus compared to books. Sure, sometimes I open a book and the words look like a blur and I don’t have the attention span to continue, but sometimes I scroll on these dopamine apps or play a video game and feel the same feeling, that I just don’t care to do it and everything’s boring.

I strongly suspect that while there’s a core of scientific truth, much of the whole theory surrounding dopamine up/downregulation is conjecture built around a kind of minimalist, de-stress, meditation-heavy wellness lifestyle that is largely a class signifier more than anything else.

It’s kind of like the moment in The Road where the kid who never grew up pre-apocalypse tries Coca Cola and it’s so good because he’s never had it before and is presumably used to much plainer and less flavorsome food/drink. We have this idea that if we live some ascetic lifestyle (forced or by choice) that even the ‘simplest’ pleasures - a good strawberry, a classic novel, an old black and white movie, a beautiful sunset - will be so much better because we’re not constantly experiencing pleasure.

I’m very skeptical that that is true. I think, instead, that some people are able to enjoy life more than others, and that this is likely largely biological/genetic.

I have a suspicion Trump’s sudden flip on TikTok after speaking to Yass is that Yass implied ByteDance or other Chinese investors might buy Truth Social if they didn’t have to divest. I don’t know if he could pull it off, but I can certainly see Yass suggesting it as a possibility. And a few billion is really a small price to pay for the Chinese. Trump isn’t fully loyal by any means, but he does have a certain sense of quid pro quo, he really would be a lot more favorable to China if they bailed him out. Provided Congress goes fully red and given the fact that as president he has de facto control over CFIUS, he might even have a chance.

I suppose, coming back to this topic, that the question is whether you’d rather have a failson or a whore daughter. My sense is that the latter is more preventable than the former, although I’m actually not sure.

I think it’s just Trump’s fans pumping the stock at retail. There are millions of true believers out there and as long as they keep buying and don’t sell, the valuation is going to stay unreasonably high. Most funds are going to want to stay away from short plays because after GameStop taking on retail is unpredictable and because it’s not worth becoming an official enemy of Donald Trump, being called out in a million angry tweets/truths™️ and in White House press conferences if he gets re-elected and getting harassed by his supporters. All this means the stock has a tendency toward exuberance, especially as Trump comes closer to returning to the White House and supporters see this as a campaign contribution that might even make them money.

Sure, I agree, but you’re talking about the 96/7/8th percentile or higher of male fitness if you’re talking about men who can bench 1.5x their body weight and have low enough body fat percentage to have visible abs while doing it. These people are probably right-leaning relative to peer group because hardcore lifting culture tends to the right, and young men with something to prove do also. Plus there are possibly hormonal or other reasons, as some have theorized.

The real problem in the West (and much of the rest of the world) is obesity and overweight-ness. The PMC DYEL guy who lifts once a week and does some cycling and squash while staying skinny isn’t the issue, if the whole country was as healthy as him we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. Actual bodybuilding is a vanity niche for a small minority of men. That doesn’t make it wrong or bad, but it isn’t really the ‘physique issue’ that is plaguing a lot of the world.

Huberman surely isn’t, he’s more of a granola lib with some lifting optimizer tech bro flavor.

Are young, wealthy, educated people in Alabama actually much fatter than young, wealthy, educated people in Oregon, though? It’s not like SEC sorority girls are (typically) fat. I’d be interested in @Walterodim’s opinion too. It’s true that the Deep South is much fatter than the Northwest and Colorado, but it’s also much poorer. There are also ethnic differences in obesity rates that obviously affect Mississippi’s rate vs, say, Washington.

Or, put otherwise, are poor, trailer trash, people-of-Walmart whites in Colorado actually much skinnier than their peers in Missouri?