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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   2444 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 2, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I am trying to find a post from either here or the subreddit about the Russian revolution, and specific horrific details of the Red Terror. Details included pouring molten metal down the throats of priests. I'm guessing it was on reddit, because I can't find it using the search here, and reddit's search doesn't give me as many options as this one does. I think either gattsuru or FCfromSSC wrote it. Edit: I am pretty sure this comic by Existential Comics made a feature in the post, and it was juxtaposed against the actual horrific details of the revolution.

Here

Thank you very much.

This is a PSA?

Three months ago I responded to @TowardsPanna's post about data removal services.

In that post I linked to a video by Dan Saltman, the owner of Redact.dev, discussing shady practices in the industry.

It has recently come to light that Dan Saltman is, allegedly, using the Redact.dev database to doxx individuals' private information. Apparently, this is an intimidation tactic to help cover up the accusations made against the political streamer Destiny, who allegedly filmed and distributed non-consensual intimate recordings of multiple women.

No data removal service can be trusted.

Do not use Redact.dev.

I've occasionally heard people allude to the idea that "dyslexia" isn't really a discrete medical condition, but rather a sort of cope that parents use to prevent their kid feeling bad about being a bit on the slow side, or lacking in verbal comprehension. For example, Freddie deBoer:

Let’s set aside whether dyslexia is one thing or many things and whether or not it’s simply a term that we came up with to say that some people are poor readers, as a matter of compassion.

Is there anything to this? Is dyslexia a real medical condition, or a contested one? Is it generally sensibly diagnosed by qualified professionals, or is there an epidemic of self-diagnosis muddying the water?

It can be both.

Unfortunately the sort of hard data to show correlation is precisely the sort of thing that is most likely to be affected by political suppression.

Anecdotally: I've met people in all four categories of that particular powerset.

Personal anecdote, but:

Dyslexia is absolutely a real thing, distinct from generally being bad at reading/verbal reasoning/whatever.

I have mild dyslexia. I have never had any problems in school because of it (I was very good in school in general) except specifically with spelling -- if I mix up an i-before-e or something like that, I simply cannot see it.

This was true in school, and it's still true now, many years later. I work as a programmer, and before I installed a spellcheck in my coding enviroment, I had repeated issues with pull requests where I would misspell a variable name, use it hundreds of times (including in comments and documentation where there wasn't autofill or anything), and never notice. The code would work just fine, but my PR would inevitably have a comment to the effect of "this looks good, but you misspelled name everywhere".

If it's pointed out to me, I still can't see it until I stare at it for a few minutes, at which point the letters will almost physically rearange themselves in my perception and all of a sudden it's obvious.

Note that my dyslexia was never so bad as to make reading difficult -- I only ever swap one or two letters at once in the middle of words, and that doesn't really effect reading, but the 'letters physically rearange themselves in my perception' is definitely a real thing, and I can imagine a much higher degree of rearangement would make a lot of school really hard.

Given that my son has a severe language acquisition problem, I don't doubt that dyslexia is a medical condition. If you think about it, being able to interpret strings of symbols as meaningful words is a completely unnatural skill. If you don't get enough practice at the right stage of your brain development, when you already have well-developed speech but the rest of the brain is still pliable, it's going to be much harder to develop the skill to the level when you don't have to expend any conscious effort to read.

If you're asking if dyslexia is more like flu than like hypertension, then I have no answer. Does it matter, though?

Dyslexia severity is dimensional, but I'm pretty sure that difficulty differentiating letters with near-congruent/similar geometry (e.g., b, d, p, and q, in this font - you can look up fonts intended for people with dyslexia) is a distinct phenomenon from other learning disorders. is what I wrote, before double-checking the wikipedia page, which I interpret as stating that dyslexia is in the "all neuro-cognitive-developmental badness is correlated" cluster of poorly studied weirdness. But why didn't you read the wikipedia page, before asking?

I did read the Wikipedia page, but I'm also distinctly aware that, for any contentious topic, Wikipedia is ideologically captured and cannot be relied upon to provide a neutral answer. If there were a lot of psychologists, psychiatrists etc. who privately agreed that dyslexia isn't a real illness, and if there was a large community of people diagnosing themselves with it, I'm not sure if I'd trust Wikipedia to say so.

I am an unaware of any large body of psychiatrists considering dyslexia not a real illness. Nobody I know in my professional life has voiced such an opinion either.

My the-type-of-layperson-who's-interested-in-this-sort-of-thing-and-posts-here impression: There are enough examples of people with normal or even exceptionally good visual/spatial reasoning/general cognitive abilities and a specific inability to read (for a famous example, Jackie Stewart never learned to read, but was an international skeet shooting champion/Olympics alternate and one of the all-time great racecar drivers and claims to have developed a very good memory in compensation for his inability to read; less famously, New Zealander architect and engineer John Britten; also, many artists in both visual and non-visual media) that it seems to be proven that a neurological deficit that's fairly specific to reading exists. However, this population and populations with less-specific neurological deficits may not be natural kinds and, depending on the purpose/context, the less-specific deficit(s)/manifestation of the deficit(s) in common may be more salient.

You may get better answers in the SSC subreddit or ACX open thread.

I'm not sure what would be the difference? Some people are, for some reason unique to them, bad at X. Is it a "real medical condition"? It certainly seems to be real, it certainly seems to be a "condition" - as in, describable and identifiable phenomenon, as for whether it's "medical" I'm not sure that's a robust term. Can you take a pill to cure it? Currently probably not, but there are hundreds of problems that have no pill to cure it. Do we know a sufficiently reduced biological or chemical level cause? Probably not again, but again hundreds of problems without known causes reduced to chemistry or cell biology. The distinction sounds like a political question - e.g. "should people with condition X be covered by ADA and subject to reasonable accommodation provisions, or you just can fire them at will if they're bad at X and you need somebody who's good at X" - but those are impossible to answer objectively. So I think "simply a term that we came up with" describes a lot of things that also absolutely real conditions.

Say you have a condition that makes your leg muscles be 20% slower than average, and that makes you suck at running. If we call that "disrunnia", is it a real medical condition or just a cope parents use to make kid not feel bad for coming last in every race?

I guess my question is more along the lines of "is dyslexia distinct in any meaningful way from a lack of skills in verbal reasoning?"

I don't understand how it could not be distinct? Dyslexia affects reading, so why would that be related to verbal reasoning?

Grammar aside the answer is yes. My sister is pretty badly dyslexic, I remember it took a ton of effort from my mom to teach her to read. But she does just fine in all other language things (and always did), it was purely reading (and spelling) which gave her trouble.

Completely. I've known people with dyslexia for decades and they have normal or better than normal skills in verbal reasoning. They just have a specific dysfunction that causes easily problems with reading and writing that are easy to recognize and have a specific pattern to them.

To me it sounds like asking "is migraine distinct in any meaningful way from having a headache?" or "is depression distinct in any meaningful way from feeling really bad all the time?" Like yes, I can find a way in which these descriptions might be different (e.g. you can feel bad without being depressed, etc.) but why it would be useful, that's what I am not getting?

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread?

Yes. Why is Trump going all out on executive orders despite Republicans controlling congress? Next time a Dem wins it can all be undone, and if Dems win the midterms, there will be zero chance of passing legislation. Are there too many Never Trump Republicans? Does all the important legislation require a 60% majority? Is the Trump admin working on legislation that I've missed? What's up?

Because it's much harder to stop an EO that does X than pass a law that authorizes the executive to do the same. Trump's EO's are within the acceptable range of what the GOP in congress approves of, but they are not their preferred solutions.

Loud Democratic opposition to the EOs may galvanise congress to pass the same thing as bills. That's more or less how Brexit got through - the original vote was fairly split, as was parliament, but the sheer scale of anti-democratic pushback galvanised a 'fuck you' landslide at the next election.

It's not so much never Trump Republicans as it is that the majority in the House is narrower than the number of total wingnutz who won't reliably agree to anything at all in the Republican caucus.

We're just over a week into the administration. Legislation doesn't move this fast. Further, it seems to me that these actions can serve as a proof of concept, which congress can then cement at their more measured pace.

Further still, while the GOP has largely been conquered by MAGA, there are still significant pockets of resistance to be mopped up. Try to do all this through the legislative branch, and you drastically increase your attack surface.

Also, EOs are much more flexible and dynamic. You can make EO today, see how it goes for a week and amend or rescind it in a week. You usually won't be able to do anything like that with legislation.

But some of it it's not easy to undo. I.e., for example, if Trump closes USAID, in 4 years democrats may create another one, but it won't be the same one as they have now, they'd have to work for a long time to rebuild it to match what it is today. Same e.g. for DEI in federal government - it took years to build all that bureaucratic infrastructure, and if it will be gone, it will take years to rebuild. And Trump has 4 years to try and make the law preventing it that would survive judicial scrutiny. There's no rush in that.

We're just over a week into the administration. Legislation doesn't move this fast.

Specifically, this page shows that literally zero substantive bills have even made it out of committee so far.

(Votes have been taken on a few dozen relatively minor bills by suspending the rule that requires a bill to be approved by a committee first. You can see the details by clicking on one of those bills—e. g., the Wounded Knee Massacre Memorial and Sacred Site Act—and selecting the "Actions" tab.)

Thanks. Using EOs as trial balloons for future legislation make sense to me.

Why isn’t Tesla stock crashing? The intersection between the set of people who care enough about the environment to buy an electric car, and the set of people who don’t hate Elon’s guts doesn’t provide much room for growth.

Hype about self driving, hype about robots, and a call option on Elon.

As Peter Thiel said, never bet against Elon.

In other news, yesterday it was revealed that X is making a healthy profit now.

Do you need to care about the environment to get an electric car? My brother is big into EVs because he's... I'm not even sure what to call it, mechanical tech nerd? Like he's obsessed with electric cars, electric unicycles, fancy powerful flashlights, and stuff like that, rather than computers and programming.

You don't have to pay for gas, you can use regenerative braking and stuff, it runs really smooth and quiet. The only reason to buy a gas car is because they're cheaper up front. For now. If Teslas can continue to improve technologically and get cheaper then they have a real future among normal people buying them for practical reasons, completely divorced from ideology.

You definitely don't. My wife got an electric car for her latest car, and she's not really that concerned about the environment. She just wanted electric.

I live in pretty red area and I see quite a number of Teslas and recently some Cybertrucks around. I don't think it's only hardcore wokes who buy them. Tbh, if Tesla changed some of its approaches to control design (like relying on complex screen-driven interactions instead of large simple tactile physical controls) I'd be open to getting one myself (a Tesla, Cybertruck is too ugly for me). Electricity is not that expensive here, and for short commutes (which are like 80% of car usage for me) it makes total sense.

It's been 15 years and we still don't have an electric car that's focused on driving, and perhaps emblematic of this, there are no electric convertibles.

I just want a Roadster 2 (with the same level of tech and type of controls the original had) but with 4 seats and 1000 km of highway range: basically, I'm waiting for someone to build an electric Mustang (and not that stupid Mach-E crap). I'd feel much better having Coyote performance for the price of an Ecoboost and could accept a 30-minute charge time if my car performed that way, and I also want the paddle regen that some of the Hyundais have where you can choose how much engine braking -> weight transfer you want. At that point I might accept a screen for configuring those features only.

This isn't a complicated problem. Just offer me a regular car.

Wait, but a convertible is not a regular car. A regular car is Honda Civic.

I mean, they offer Mustangs as coupes, too.
In fact, the Mustang is the only car Ford sells (and the only car any American automaker makes); so if that isn't a "normal" car I'm not sure what is.

(Why anyone would buy the coupe model when a convertible exists is anyone's guess, since the rear seats in a coupe are much less useful than those in a convertible because you hit your head on the roof if you try to use them, but I digress.)

the Mustang is the only car Ford sells (and the only car any American automaker makes)

Are you working off an unusual definition of "car"?

It is not unreasonable to exclude crossovers and SUVs from the word "car". The US government calls them "light-duty trucks" and imposes on them more-lenient fuel-efficiency standards.

For me the reasons to get the coupe over the convertible:

  • I don't want to have to devote a precious garage space to protecting the soft top
  • Not being able to leave anything in the car when out
  • The superior performance from the rigidity of the coupe
  • IRL I'll hardly ever drive with the top down. Your girl will think it's fun for 5 minutes, then be annoyed her hair is all tangled.
  • Generally not having to worry about leaks or a surprise rain storm destroying the interior of my car
  • No Greg, I can't drive us all to lunch again. I have the coupe today. We'll have to put miles on your leased Infinity if you want to go to lunch.

(1) The Honda Civic is a bit bloated nowadays (base price 24 k$). Some people would say that a "regular car" is more like a Mitsubishi Mirage (17 k$) or a Nissan Versa (19 k$ with CVT).

(2) Cheap Civic-ish cars used to be available in convertible form. See, e. g., the Geo Metro.

Some people would say that a "regular car" is more like a Mitsubishi Mirage (17 k$) or a Nissan Versa (19 k$ with CVT).

Surely a "regular car" can't be one of the two cheapest cars on the market? One of which is discontinued due to lack of demand?

Surely a "regular car" can't be one of the two cheapest cars on the market?

I still see a lot of cheap 20-year-old Civics on the roads. And the US market is not the only market in the world.

One of which is discontinued due to lack of demand?

If the government has made all the regular cars unprofitable to sell, and effectively mandated that only bloated, expensive vehicles be sold, do the bloated vehicles become regular cars? I think the answer is "no".

Cheap Civic-ish cars used to be available in convertible form

A wide variety of cars used to be available like that. Now there are only two that sell for less than 50K new, and one of them only seats two.

An electric Honda Del Sol would be pretty fun!

It’s a meme stock. If you’re looking for how research analysts are justifying their hold ratings, it’s by suggesting that the AI and self driving stuff will all pan out perfectly.

  1. Much of their revenue and until recently all of their profit is based off of various government regulatory schemes for selling pollution credits to other automakers. Elon seems... Unlikely... To remove those particular government boondoggles.

  2. They are genuinely amazing, class leading, genre destroying pieces of machinery.

  3. People just think of it as investing in Musk. His stock is up, I'd imagine.

I hate to do this but can you provide a source for claim #1? “Much” of their revenue seems like a stretch. I’ll define much as >20% but I’ll accept 10%.

https://www.axios.com/2025/01/09/tesla-clean-credits-trump

It's less of their revenue than I thought, only around 5% anymore, but still makes up 43% of their profits for 2024, which is much higher than I'd think. We're talking about $2bn in 2024 and ~$10bn to date. It's not a small amount of money.

ETA: Probably the sentence would be more accurate as "derives much revenue" than "derives much of their revenue"

I think this was very much true in the past. Net income rather than revenue circa 2021:

Net profit reached a quarterly record of $438 million on a GAAP basis, and the company recorded $518 million in revenue from sales of regulatory credits during the period.

So in the early part of the 2020's, more than all the net profit was driven by credits.

But with a current TTM PE Ratio over 100, I assume >90% of the "value" of the company is in future expectations.

Edit: The "until recently" is sort of load bearing though. The 2024 annual report gives $2.8B in regulatory credits, $97.7B total revenue, $7.2B net income on a GAAP basis. So single digit portion of revenue but >1/3 of the net profit last year.

My understanding is that Tesla stock has always been at the intersection of memestocks and greater-fool, hype-based speculation. (Something along the lines of Musk running Tesla as a tech company that just happens to make cars and the market analyzing its stock more like that of a tech company than that of a car company.) However, there's also something of a sales floor, in that their head-start on EV design and direct-to-consumer sales model keeps the cars competitive, and EVs are equal or superior for many use cases.

Does Tesla's stock price have much to do with their sales? I thought the P/E ratio was already absurd.
I think most of the value comes from the assumption that libs will follow through with the gas car bans they've already passed, making people's desires irrelevant.

I think it’s unrealistically optimistic to think that those polities care more about global warming or the consumer experience than they do about keeping Elon Must out of their business.

San Francisco deciding we must roll coal to save the planet from evil billionaires would be the last straw for me putting on clown makeup and moving into the sewers

What do young people's signatures look like?

Everyone I know has a signature based on cursive script, but apparently schools aren't teaching it anymore, so what do young folks do on forms? Just print their name and draw some stars around it like Krusty the clown? I remember hearing there was a high level of ballot curing in Nevada because "young people don't have signatures anymore" but idk what that even means. Or even more broadly, is bad penmanship going to create legal problems because nobody writes things down anymore, they just type them?

Millennial here. I just write my name down in cursive. For a while when I was a teenager I tried to half-ass a real signature by adding come curves on top, but I gave up on that years ago.

Signatures, like wax seals, are an obsolete relic of an age before instant telecommunications and cryptographic security. The idea was to have unique glyph that was easy for the owner to recreate and easy for other people to read and compare with other examples of the same glyph but hard for other people to forge.

These days it basically works on the honor system; I have never seen anybody compare signatures against an example on file before authenticating a transaction.

I have. A colleague who persistently couldn't match his signature to the one a bank had on file was a constant pleasure. Then again, we mongrels used fax machines up to 2020 that I know for sure, and probably are still using to this day as well.

Kids just write their name as fast as possible until it starts to look like cursive. Only the initials have to be legible. There's not much thought into it.

In compulsary education, a student is probably going to be writing their name on paper 3-8 times a day from 1-12th grade. I don't think this will ever change for as long as we have paper tests and paper homework.

Schools in my country still have cursive last time I checked.

I simply write my name in my own brand of scrawl that's so bad even my own signatures don't look alike.

my own brand of scrawl that's so bad even my own signatures don't look alike

Yeah that seems like it would be a problem. Here in the US when you vote they compare your signature on your ID with the one you put down on record at the ballot place. If it's insufficiently similar I assume that means they can tell you to take a hike or something

I had a minor kerfuffle on a major bank transaction due to my signature not matching. Wasn't the end of the world, but did result in some hassle.

(That was also the day I found out my signature is notably different when writing with a felt-tipped pen.)

I just print my name. I can write cursive script, of course, but I usually don’t day to day: it’s either messy or time consuming.

Realistically signatures have always been forgeable.

How can I escape the tilde character on this site? Backslash does not appear to function in actual posts - just in the comment preview.

test test
\test\ test
/test/ /test/
test test
~test test
test test~~

lol

strikethrough_regex = re.compile('''~{1,2}([^~]+)~{1,2}''', flags=re.A)

Used here

# turn ~something~ or ~~something~~  into <del>something</del>
sanitized = strikethrough_regex.sub(r'<del>\1</del>', sanitized)

Anyway maybe like ~this~?

Which looks like &amp;#126;this&amp;#126;

In unrelated news I'm not sure how much I trust the variable named sanitized to contain what it says on the tin.

ETA: In accordance with the new rules on AI, disclaimer that the escape sequences for tildes was AI generated (and then I verified that the proposal worked).

Ah, the wonders of HTML character entities. Thank you!

~test~

`~test~` ~test~  
`\~test\~` \~test\~  
`/~test/~` /~test/~  
`~~test~~` ~~test~~  
`~~~test~~~ ` ~~~test~~~  
`~~~~test~~~~ ` ~~~~test~~~~

Huh. Doesn't work in the comment preview, but does in the final comment.

Also I really don't trust that comment-parsing code you linked.

On inspection it looks like the "strip disallowed html tags and attributes" step happens after all the sketchy regex stuff so it's probably fine.

Wait, it gets worse. It appears to have escaping problems even inside code tags? For reference, the source of the prior comment was:

`test` test  
`\test\` \test\  
`/test/` /test/  
`test` test  
`~test ` test  
`test ` test~~

...assuming pre works, at least.

EDIT: nope, pre doesn't work either...

Looks like your top-level comment about formatting is filtered.

fixed.

One of the comments in the Quality Contributions Roundup was @Dean's comment about domestic surveillance and bomb-making/terrorism. Assuming we're all already on three-letter-agency watch-lists (i.e., damage done), can anyone elaborate and/or provide sources on what bomb-making materials are surveilled or controlled? (The US Army's TM 31-210 Improvised Munitions Handbook (pdf) is probably a good reference for what materials were available to a motivated person in 1969.) My understanding was that the biggest technical challenges of bomb-making were that:

  • Ordnance experts are delighted to tell their fellow chemistry enthusiasts everything they want to know about explosives... except the practicalities of triggering them.

  • Many of the low explosives (Tom Scott video on the difference between high and low explosives) that can be made with minimal chemistry knowledge and experience are more volatile than the application demands, thus are liable to decompose or be unintentionally triggered before they can be deployed, e.g., TATP.

But, so far as small-scale bombs go, I never learned what technical or operational barrier there is to a black powder enthusiast buying x, y, and z from their local home and garden center and assembling such-and-such or this-and-that.

(Have any of you given the agents who monitor you names?)

Edit: Fixed a couple words

Making your own black powder is entirely legal. IIRC, the manufacture and storage limits are something like 25 pounds before the law requires licensing, though I'd imagine your home insurance might have some objections in the event of a house fire claim. Tutorials on making high-quality powder are available on you tube.

I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.

The obvious question is then how good is 25 pounds of black powder compared to just driving a car into a group of people?

It's not like you can easily pack it very tightly against a building etc since it's, well, 25 pounds, so just slightly smaller than 2 gallons of water.

I'm no expert, but purely by the numbers, the energy density by volume of TNT is only about 33% higher than that of blackpowder, while TNT's combustion speed is 3-6 times higher. I'm not saying that BP is harmless, but constructing a bomb for terrorism purposes using it instead of modern explosives probably requires a much different design.

I'm not saying that BP is harmless, but constructing a bomb for terrorism purposes using it instead of modern explosives probably requires a much different design.

Depends on what the goal and/or target of the terrorist is. Is there an effective difference between dozens and hundreds of causalities? How important is successfully evading law enforcement before and after?

A relatively small number of standard pipe bombs or nail bombs - each containing a couple of pounds of black powder - are devastating in crowds, i.e. the classics in modern terrorism: packed bars, Christmas markets, street events/demonstrations. The chance to escape after is higher than with a truck attack, and the chance to evade detection before is higher than with most more modern explosives.

But yes, if you want the headlines to contain "hundreds" or "thousands", you don't want an empty truck, and you don't want black powder.

Why is it that a person can prefer someone who disagrees with them politically on more items than someone who disagrees on fewer items that are a strict subset of the other person's disagreements, so that it cannot be explained by priority of items?

Let me give a toy diagram to clarify. Suppose we have six areas where the people in question can disagree: ABCDEF. Now, if Alice cares mostly about A, I can see her preferring Bob, who agrees with her on A, but disagrees on B-F, over Carol, who agrees on B-F but disagrees on A. But what I'm talking about is when Bob disagrees with Alice on all of A-F, while Carol agrees with Alice on ABC and disagrees on DEF. Carol's disagreements with Alice are a strict subset of Bob's disagreements with Alice, so there's no way of prioritizing items that should make Alice prefer Bob over Carol…

…and yet, I've found people who express exactly this sort of preference. What is this?

Maybe Carol is an asshole.

I think it would be easier to respond if you used concrete examples.

My basic response is that I don't like or dislike people primarily because of their politics, nor am I arrogant enough to think that the virtues I do rate people on inevitably lead to one political conclusion or another.

On multiple occasions, I've had conversations with older "small government conservative" types talking about how we need to "loosen up" on the social axis to try to ally with people in the "small government social progressive" left-libertarian types. I then pointed out, each time, that that "quadrant" in the four-way economic axis vs. social axis space is the least populated, and we'd have much better results appealing to the opposite quadrant of "big government social conservative", which is rather underserved (including pointing to polling data on Hispanic voters and why, despite being Catholic "natural conservatives," they vote Democrat), by letting up on the anti-government, anti-regulation dogmatism in exchange for wins on social issues.

Every time, the response has been horror at the suggestion, and replies about how it would be better for the "communists" in the Progressive ("big government social progressive") quadrant to win, and for us to lose on both social and economic issues, than for us to win on just the social issues. Most the time, they've not been able to give a concrete answer as to why they'd prefer to lose on both axes than win on just the social axis. Just a lot of vague handwaving about how social conservatism without the whole "drowning government in the bathtub," deregulated free market über alles, would somehow be the worst possible outcome, in ways they can't articulate.

(The one time I did get a clear answer, it was that the people in the Progressive quadrant are Communists; but since the alternative to the whole "small government, free markets" side of the economic debate is socialism, the proper term for the combination of social conservatism with socialism is National Socialism, and just as we allied with Stalin to defeat Hitler, Communists are always preferable to Nazis.)

My suspicion here is the same as my general answer below:

There is some other important issue or group of issues here that you are missing in which "small government conservative" aligns more closely to "big government social progressive" than "small government social progressive". Likely one where the matter is not publicly debatable for one reason or another. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the 'communist' backlash. Your final assertion there is precisely the sort of thing that can be seen as falling into that category...

You're assuming people can only disagree in six areas.

It may well be that the underlying value-set that shows A-C (but not D-F) also expresses !G, whereas the underlying value-set that shows A (but not B-F) also expresses G - and the person in question values G highly.

This goes doubly so when G vs !G is something that is unlikely to be publicly visible for one reason or another.

(This assumes there is only one such value-set. In actuality it's more like "is heavily correlated with".)

There are probably hidden links between the items. Consider "The government shouldn't subsidize college" vs. "The government shouldn't subsidize college for white people" vs. "The government should subsidize college". That's 61% in agreement vs. 0%, right?

Reading downthread, social issues vs. government size don't have as clear of a link as equality under the law, but it's easy enough to come up with a few that wouldn't make it into normal conversation. Maybe: Small conservatism is "don't take people's money", large progressivism is "give people money", large conservatism is "give businesses peoples' money" and small progressivism is "abandon the core functions of government".

Are you thinking of near and far groups?

Because usually they have other things than their opinion in common, for example class, upbringing, faith, worldview, sex, hobbies, interests and so on.

Most intellectual online reactionaries would find discussing politics with a leftist like Sam Kriss or a liberal like Scott Alexander (both of whom are intelligent, very familiar with online political debate, twitter dissident right arguments, are well read etc) more entertaining than discussing it with a random intellectually disappointing groyper who can only reshare the same 10 /pol/ infographics.

Isn’t that the heretic-heathen, traitor-enemy, outgroup-fargroup distinction?

Probably some of it. But when we add in, say, Dave, who is the opposite of Carol, and agrees with Alice on DEF and disagrees with her on ABC, and Alice thinks Dave is indeed preferable to Bob — rather than a heretic/traitor/outgroup — this can't be the whole story.

Let's see if I can make a table for this:

￢ABC ABC
￢DEF Bob Carol
DEF Dave Alice

Where Alice's order of preference for the other parties is Dave > Bob > Carol, rather than something like Dave > Carol > Bob (that makes more sense in terms of preferring agreement), or even Bob > Dave > Carol (that prizes the heathen/enemy/fargroup Bob over the heretics/traitors/outgroups Dave and Carol).

The table is helpful, thank you.

Consider the following case:

  • I weakly believe ABC.
  • I strongly believe ABC implies DEF.
  • I weakly believe ~ABC implies DEF.

Under this example:

  • Overall I believe {ABC, DEF}, so I am Alice.
  • I weakly disbelieve Dave (he disbelieves ABC, but the rest of his logic is sound based on the different premise)
  • I moderately disbelieve Bob (he disbelieves ABC, and also disbelieves that ~ABC implies DEF).
  • I strongly disbelieve Carol (she disbelieves ABC implies DEF!)

This would result in precisely the order of preference you are puzzled by, no?

Alice is worried Carol might be a prion. She needs to be either refolded correctly like Dave or completely denaturalized like Bob.

Are A-F correlated in any meaningful way? I prefer the interlocutor that just disagrees with me in a consistent, predictable way to the guy that says, "I like to think through each issue" and winds up with an incoherent dog's breakfast of views.

In the case I'm thinking of, yes. Here, "ABC" stand for social issues, "DEF" for economic/government size issues. Specifically, I'm referring to certain "small government conservatives" who express a preference for "big government social progressives" — whom these same conservatives regularly call "socialists" or even "communists" — over "big government social conservatives."

Sounds like the object-level positions are secondary to some underlying value or ethos that is perceived to be shared with Bob but not Carol. In Walterodim's read, this value would probably be "logical consistency." But it could just as well be a certain type of class consciousness: both anarcho-libertarians and socialists have a kind of working-class, artisanal sensibility that values the individual worker's control over what he creates. Or a perceived character feature: maybe they're small-government conservative because they value tight communities of mutual aid, which socialists could also be perceived as chasing even if they go a bit astray with it.

Because people aren't rational. Carol probably smells better, or Bob looks a little creepy.

"Carol" and "Bob" are meant to be stand-ins for groups more than specific individuals — and you got them reversed — but that does kind of fit what I've observed, in that part of disapproving of "Carol" despite her being less in opposition than "Bob" is that "Carol" has a bad reputation, while "Bob" has a lot of PR on his side (see my reply to Walterodim above).

If you were living through a societal breakdown/apocalypse (well, the kind that doesn't immediately kill you) and you had to pick a canine companion, what would you opt for?

It would definitely be a German shepherd for me. Loyal to a fault, smart and intimidating to strangers without being bloodthirsty. I miss mine a lot, but he had a good life and that's what counts. I'd expect a GSD would do a good job keeping you safe.

It certainly wouldn't be my lab, I tell you. An absolute lovable doofus who traded brains for brawn, turning out 50% larger than the average lab.

If I could disable friendly fire against my party and me by training it (because everyone who’s not a doggo racist knows it’s the owner, not the breed): a pitbull.

Not only would it provide excellent deterrent and defense (offense can also be the best defense), it would be a constant heatseeking missile for small game animals, thus providing recurring sources of food. And well, perhaps an occasional baby or child here or there, but hey, meat can be scarce in this apocalyptic wasteland; if they didn’t want to get nannied, they shouldn’t have triggered my sweet velvet hippo by making a sudden noise or movement, or breathed. Even if we don’t consume the long pork, we can use it for trading.

I’d name it Zeus, Rocky, Nala, or Luna and forage for a flower crown for it to wear. It’d be so cute and wholesome 😊

If I had time to train them before the SHTF, a female Rottie.

The well-trained Rottie bitches I have met have been the sweetest, most caring, best behaved dogs I have had the good fortune to spend time around. I didn't piss them off, and I don't want to know what would have happened if I had done, but I am well aware that some ne'er-do-well who threatens the owner's family is going to piss the Rottie off, and have a bad day as a result.

I don't know how much harder it is to train a male Rottie, but I haven't met one I felt entirely safe around.

Generally, male dogs are more territorial and female dogs are more people-protective, with male dogs having the edge in aggression and usually a higher prey drive. That makes a female dog a better choice for a mobile apocalypse survivor but a male a better choice for a determined homesteader.

They were bred to hunt semi-independently, so they don't have the temperament for military/police work that German Shepherds and Malinois are prized for, but Rhodesian Ridgebacks are be another good breed in the "won't freak out and attack family or other non-threats like a pit bull might (I don't want to come across as overly anti-pit bull), but would protect family 95% as effectively as a pit bull" category.

Looking at a combination of size, strength, and controlled aggression, Rhodesian Ridgebacks are some of the most badass dogs I have met. But I wouldn't want to own one.

They're a great breed for households that can handle dogs in that size and energy range, but dogs in that size and energy range and/or with a hunter's prey-drive aren't for everyone.

German Shepherd is a good, overall choice. I'd go for a Husky if I'm in a cold region.

I think a German Shepherd is a really strong choice for the reasons you've mentioned. They're also great pack carriers - I have a friend who backpacks with his. A pitbull isn't going to be able to travel long distances with you as well, and border collies / Austrailian shepherds just aren't vicious and powerful enough as a defensive weapon.

Probably a good yeller dog- trainable, loyal, mostly look after themselves, and boy howdy do they tree game. I had one in high school, just a bit gun shy.

Belgian Tervuren/Malinois.

That's just a GSD with a French accent, but I can get behind that choice haha*

*Assuming original GSDs didn't pick up a mix from living in Alsace.

Behaviorally and mentally, they're completely different dogs, with completely different issues that need to be accounted for.

Plus, I tend to 'click' better with Malinois and Tervurens, from experience. Dunno why.

My lab actually seems like a pretty good choice. She's easily trainable and has natural hunting instincts that are useful with almost zero prey drive. While she's surely not as adept in a combat situation as other dogs, I'm probably already in deep shit if I've arrived at that point, but she's large enough to make someone else an easier target. Their cold tolerance is impressive, they're great swimmers, and they're about as adaptable and flexible across a wide variety of roles as any breed. Ultimately, I think flushing and fetching prey is probably the biggest thing a dog can bring to the table after protection.

Dogs: companions during good times, food during famine. That's what I tell my mutt. She'll have to learn to share the voles and frogs she hunts, if times turn bad.

A poodle. Not as smart as a border collie, but smarter than the vast majority of breeds. At the same time, no one will try to shoot or steal a fucking poodle.

An interesting choice.. I admit that if I ran into a lone survivor in the apocalypse who had made it that far with a poodle for a companion, I'd be second-guessing myself.

Standard Poodles are hunting dogs. Not miniature or toy Poodles of course, just the original ones. Their silly haircut was to keep them cool when running, but with warmed joints.

Don’t the French use full sized poodles as police dogs? They’re crazy smart, I knew one and it was like having a huge furry toddler walking around.

That's why I'll be the guy going through the apocalypse with my bunny. Anyone who'll see me will think "If this guy hasn't resorted to eating the bunny yet, he's got his shit locked down tight and isn't someone to fuck with".

The bluff is worth skipping one paella.

Wait we're skipping paella? What kind of hellscape apocalypse are we expecting here?

A really bad one, for anyone who tries to eat my bunny.

I have no idea of how dogs work. Must I really? I'd probably pick the first one I managed to cooperate with.

Someone please explain how to dog.

A beginner's guide to dogging.

A more intermediate guide can be found here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MXzaVOk_Ydk

This is unhelpful.

So, what are you reading?

I'm still on The End of Faith. Going through Kuehnelt-Leddihn's The Menace of the Herd, which I can only describe as an oddity, both judgemental and insightful. Backlog is moving slowly.

Almost done reading The Richest Man in Babylon. It's pretty good. Goes to show that most of the wisdom in this world has been discovered by someone, somewhere, long ago.

What's it about?

Going off memory. Change your worldview from saving's as a denial of your income to instead that of "Paying Yourself First". Your saving's are something to be smiled upon and take pride in. Not a prevention of your ability to consume.

For the average person, get out of the cycle of living on whatever is your current income and instead get into the simplest of all possible budget plans.

Save 10% of your income. Pay off your debts. Then, once stable, invest.

It's a bit folksy. Often it's advise is outdated from an era of "just give him a good handshake and explain your situation". But humans intuit stories better than raw lists, and the advise is great for someone who is otherwise winging it at life.

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Saving, investing, paying off debts, becoming rich and staying rich, teaching simple wisdom to others, improving your city's wealth.

It uses named characters from actual clay tablets from ancient Babylon to tell stories as a vehicle for financial advice.

Spice & Wolf in the original. It's pretty difficult because the wolf goddess speaks in such an antiquated manner and because the setting is Medieval Fantasy Europe and therefore very far from slice-of-life Japan. I never read it in English so I'm following along as best I can.

And here I never even finished reading the translated version. Did you think about reading the TL in parallel to help with the difficult bits? (To the extent it's a faithful translation anyway...)

Update: I tried it. It's good as a lookup for when I totally lose track of what's going on, e.g. for a discussion about currency manipulation, or when there's a sentence I just don't get. Reading in parallel doesn't work though, it's annoying and the book doesn't read well in English IMO. The translation is too faithful, it makes the prose beige and the sentence structure kind of choppy.

Thanks for the suggestion, it's good to try new methods.

Back when I started studying Japanese, I made a rule for myself: if it's in Japanese, you do it in Japanese or you don't do it. I can probably relax that a bit now, 8 years after I started, but I'm wary that if I let myself take the easy way I'll never get back to doing things the hard way. I'll give it a try and let you know.

Working on Feersum Endjinn. It's a pity that it's such a slog, but it really is. Mainly because much of it is written in a quasi-phonetic script. It's just far enough from English that I can't just immediately run my eyes over a sentence - I have to stop and focus on individual words. My kingdom for an English translation...

I keep finding myself going 'wait, is this what functional illiteracy feels like?'.

Love in the Time of Cholera. Fiction, and art in general, is capable of articulating sentiments which do not come around often in real life. The artifice is far from "artificial" in the modern sense. So far (I'm only about 80 pages in), Marquez is saying a lot about love and its counterfeits. I'm eager to continue.