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Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 22, 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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What are some interesting contrasts on the same issue in your personal policy views?

For me, I think it should be illegal to sell already cold beer for off premises consumption, because people use it to drink and drive- but also that lowering the drinking age would probably be a good idea.

Heavily against mass immigration, but many of my friends are new immigrants of the type that I don't want to see coming here en masse. This includes some of the women I've dated (some even without PR visa).

I've thought about this before and have compared it to Ayn Rand claiming welfare. I'm against the policy, but while it exists I will exploit it in my personal life.

-- I'm extremely personally non-violent, I haven't been in a fistfight in a good decade or more at this point and avoid personal violence, and politically I am typically anti-war; but we should vastly expand the legal and social acceptability of mutual combat and "fighting words" defenses to normalize fighting between men.

-- I'm anti-tariff, but I personally try to buy MiUSA (or at least MiFirstWorld) items, and think we should make it a goal to foster and preserve at least some American manufacturing across all categories of goods.

-- I'm in favor of high legal immigration, and of a fine-based or Jizya oriented path to citizenship for aliens already in the country; it's a national travesty to have illegal immigrants holding jobs and owning homes in the USA. Just not enforcing the laws and not living with the consequences of laws that have been passed is insane.

but we should vastly expand the legal and social acceptability of mutual combat and "fighting words" defenses to normalize fighting between men.

Same thoughts here. I've defended the concept of dueling in here quite a few times.

“Social media made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.”

― Mike Tyson

And ironically with cell phone cameras everywhere, its actually EASIER to have evidence of whether a given confrontation was in fact 'mutual combat' or not.

We've got a whole generation of kids growing up on the idea that you can antagonize people incessantly and then cry immediate victim if they retaliate... as long as you do it on camera!

I'm reminded of that one guy being let off by a jury after he shot a youtube prankster.

If it were legal to throw hands when confronted like this, you MIGHT avoid it escalating to shooting.

If I were obscenely Bezos-Musk-Gates tier rich, I would organize a season of the reality TV dating show The Bachelorette with every contestant having the option to challenge every other contestant to a formal sport-rules fight at any time. The fight would have no non-social impact on the competition: the loser doesn't have to go home, the winner can be sent home by the lead; and the challenged competitor doesn't have to say yes, it can be turned down without being sent home automatically. So the season would be a real-time experiment in how women (both the lead and audience reactions) feel about men engaging in violent duels. Is challenging someone attractive or unattractive? Is it deadly to refuse a challenge? Is it sexy to fight even if you lose, or are you better off refusing if you think you might lose? How much sexier is it to win? Is there a point at which winning too hard is actually less sexy, because you look like a jerk?

I don't know the answers to these questions, though I can guess. But I want to know! I think we'd watch two dozen former college football players invent the code duello from scratch as they went along!

I'm also of the opinion that paparazzi, and anyone else filming anyone in public, should be subject to physical violence by those they are filming.

Normalizing personal violence is agency-producing: men who get into fights learn that they can fight, men who never do fear that they can't. It allows people like landlords and shop owners and teachers to engage in self-help when dealing with jerks. It will improve society in numerous ways!

And I'd still hope to never get into a fight.

You have described a reality dating show that I might be willing to watch.

Every single contestant has a glove or gauntlet they carry around to throw down a challenge. There should be a board that tracks challenges made, challenges rejected/accepted, and fights won or lost, but yeah, no other consequences than that.

For additional fun have one of the contestants secretly be a trained MMA fighter.

I'd imagine there'd be alliances formed early with the best fighter, but then later some betrayals as they try to get him removed. Maybe you have 4-5 guys each throwing down challenges to the same dude forcing him to decide if he wants to lose some face or actually fight each of them in a row. I'd bet that under almost ANY circumstances, sleeping 5 dudes in a row buys you immense status points.

(Most TV shows or sports could be improved by allowing contestants to fight it out)

For additional fun have one of the contestants secretly be a trained MMA fighter.

I don't think it's much fun if it's secret, it's more fun when everyone knows what's up. Does the MMA fighter take a pissant attitude around the house, being unafraid to step on toes because he knows no one will challenge him? Does he have trouble getting anyone to accept his own challenges, since there's less shame in avoiding him than in avoiding someone who has an "unfair" advantage? Also, in my ideal libertarian-hellscape version of this contest, the contestants would be allowed to choose any amateur ruleset to fight under. So they could choose boxing, wrestling, kickboxing, kyokushin, MMA, muay thai, etc. So maybe you know that so-and-so wrestled D1, so you challenge him to box. Etc.

We have very limited data from the "enforced violence" dates which occur roughly once in each season of The Bachelor/ette. Every season the contestants are forced to box, wrestle, or otherwise scrap on one group date. Notable observations:

-- Women give credit to the winner of the boxing tournament even if he outweighs the other guys by 40lbs

-- Men don't care who wins.

-- Only one contestant, to my knowledge, has ever refused to participate on principle, during the Covid season in 2020. She was summarily given a terrible edit and booted off the show.

-- On the other hand, it's nearly always a good move during a rugby or football date to claim an "injury" preventing you from participating, which will allow you to hang out on the sideline with the Lead.

I'd imagine there'd be alliances formed early with the best fighter, but then later some betrayals as they try to get him removed. Maybe you have 4-5 guys each throwing down challenges to the same dude forcing him to decide if he wants to lose some face or actually fight each of them in a row. I'd bet that under almost ANY circumstances, sleeping 5 dudes in a row buys you immense status points.

I suspect we wouldn't see that many fights, with the fights primarily being used to settle "drama" problems in the old fashioned way: camera cuts to Chris telling us "Trevor told Kaylee I said X but I TOTALLY DIDN'T SAY THAT; Trevor must meet me on the field of honor or yield his argument!" If Trevor isn't willing to get in the ring, then he doesn't really think that X was said, does he? If he persists in lying, but refuses to back it up, Trevor's probably headed home, right? At the same time, if Chris keeps whining about Trevor lying about him, but never challenges Trevor, then Chris is probably headed home. And if they both get in the ring and bang around with no clear winner, does it overly impact either of them, positively or negatively? They both showed they were willing to fight to defend their honor, and both put up a good showing, is that enough?

But then the structure of the show is that there's normally out of 24 guys only about 6 Kaylee is actually interested in, and as the show winds on you'll also see challenges made in desperation, from guys who are about to be sent home because Kaylee doesn't like them. Trevor, who is definitely going home soon, will challenge Mike, one of the frontrunners, making up a bullshit offense as a reason and trying to get some juice out of the fight to get attention. Does Mike feel like he needs to accept the challenge, given that Trevor is so far beneath him? Does Kaylee feel that Mike needs to accept it, and will lose attraction to him if he doesn't? What if Trevor is much bigger and stronger? Might Kaylee choose to send Trevor home immediately, for trying to pick a fight without cause, or just to protect her favorite boy?

And because you get a wide range of size, strength, skill in fighting, and toughness in your contestants, do you get a white knight? Trevor, a former college football tight end, picks a fight with David, a scrawny software developer, and intends to challenge him publicly. Thad, a former amateur boxer who has made friends with David but also needs the attention, steps in and challenges Trevor first. Who does Kaylee end up falling for in this scenario?

I'm some places it already is illegal to sell cold beer for carry out. Indiana I believe, and maybe Oklahoma. Actually it looks like OK repealed it a few years ago. Some beer is also meant to be consumed at room temp, but the people that are into this type of beer are probably not drinking it in the car. Most of the degenerate alcoholics I've known, people who literally can't wait to get home and have to drink in the car, do not care in the least what the temperature is and have often also bought a half-pint which they downed in the parking lot before even getting back in the car.

Degenerate alcoholics with the shakes mostly have enough tolerance that their trip home from the convenience store isn’t that dangerous. There are simply people who will not follow rules they can easily get away with breaking(and you can’t visually tell a coke can from a beer can at distance- nor can you tell if someone has poured it in a big gulp cup[and I see construction workers doing this on their way home, regularly, in gas station parking lots]).

Why is it even illegal to drink while driving? If you can drive after having a beer, it should be fine to have it during, no? (I have also never heard of anyone doing this, but Im far away.)

Oh I know. My father ultimately lost his license after his 9th DUI. He started racking them up in the 60s, before they put increasing penalties on subsequent violations. He drove everywhere with a tallboy in the console. After he finally lost license around '94 he transitioned to drinking and biking. He'd be 2-3 cans into the case before he even arrived home. He had a sleave that he put around his beer can that made it look like a Pepsi. He could have gotten his license back with a hefty fine after 5 years but he knew he'd just lose it again. He had to choose between drinking and driving, and chose drinking. Some people will never stop. It ultimately killed him early, along with the smoking, at 62 via colon cancer. He actually started drinking more when he was diagnosed.

sell already cold beer for off premises consumption, because people use it to drink and drive

Do you think that the coldness of beer is a large determinant for whether or not people drink and drive?

I figured people were mostly driving to their friend's house, or a bar (or other location, such as fishing), drinking there, and driving home sooner than is a good idea. I've never actually heard of an American drinking in the car. There are lots of signs at parks about not bringing glass bottles, but I don't think I even disapprove of them buying a pack of cold beers, driving to a park, drinking it with their friends, then driving home -- just that they shouldn't be drinking the whole pack by themselves. Authorities clearly don't care about it, since they allow bars to serve not only beer, but hard liquor, in places that clearly need to be driven to, full of people who very obviously drove by themselves, and are not carpooling with a designated driver (nor is there public transport available).

I see, regularly, construction workers(you can tell by the clothes- expensive boots not taken care of, everything else absolutely cheap and dirtier than you'd believe, often with things like sheetrock mud that you can only run into on a construction site. Super casual but very high coverage.) walk into the QT or 7/11, buy a soda and a cold beer, then pour the soda out and put the beer into its cup before getting into their car and driving home. That's not counting those who buy it in a can, open it, and then drive off. Cops tell me they enforce open container laws semiregularly.

It's definitely class and ethnicity coded- lower working class(you can tell by the vehicles) hispanic men are most of the offenders.

Interesting, I wonder if there's any way to tell whether that practice is contributing to crashes very much.

My intuition would be no, in comparison to drinking tequila or vodka at a bar, but maybe I'm wrong.

Hispanic men have a reputation for poor and/or reckless driving at times when the lower working class is going home from work(3:00-3:30 end times are pretty typical), but there's no real indication as to causation- driving in Latin America is notoriously poor(as everywhere else in the developing world) so it might be continuing cultural stuff other than the idea of cracking open a cold one on the way home from work. Presumably if that was the common thread DR twitter would mention the open container violations in their regular noting of an immigrant getting into a wreck in a school carpool line he had no business being in.

My intuition is also that 1) drunk driving accidents are disproportionately from 'not going home from a bar(think friend's house, family get together, etc)' because the barflies a) have a tolerance and b) stay later so there's fewer other cars to get into accidents with, and non-barflies are likely to have a plan for getting home safely from the bar and 2) far less drunk driving is due to straight spirits than you'd think because American heavy drinkers sensitive enough to cost to choose straight hard liquor are also sensitive enough to cost to not be doing their drinking in bars much. IME regular heavy drinkers seem to have a code to stick to beer or mixed drinks in social settings, and there's very strong ethnic patterns to drink of choice to begin with that override maximizing alcohol per dollar.

There is something so grim about driving by a bar just off a highway with a parking lot full of cars.

Also grim in that no one even bats an eye at the implications

Obviously. The truly desperate might still drink warm beer and drive, but it would help reduce the numbers.

I think nobody drinks warm beer, yes.

How long am I driving? 20 minutes in the icechest isn't too long.

But people also use it to re-load for parties, go from the store to their event, enjoy their new beer when they get home, etc.

I feel pretty similar about Gambling.

Adults should be allowed to gamble.

But there should be some friction in order to participate, so I'd like to remove e.g. scratch-off cards at convenience stores and force all casinos into specifically designated areas.

I feel the same way, I don’t think online gambling (which in my mind includes buying loot boxes for regular games as well( should be legal simply because it removes all friction from the process and allows for much easier age check bypassing. By requiring a gambler to get into a car, drive to a casino and put a physical credit card into a physical machine, you force enough friction that a person would have a harder time gambling when they weren’t thinking about it. It’s also much harder for a child to fool an employee of the casino if they must be physically in the same building.

so I'd like to remove e.g. scratch-off cards at convenience stores

When I worked in a convenience store the people who would hang around the till buying and scratching cards until they were out of money were a big annoyance, the more inconsiderate ones would let a queue build up behind them while they did it.

Can't lie. At least part of my animus is from getting stuck behind people buying like 12 scratch-off tickets at a time, and oftentimes trying to claim winnings at the same time.

In my state you don't even have to scratch them off, the cashier has a machine they can scan the ticket on and tell you if you won or not.

At that point, where's any of the fun?

I know these folks would probably just find a way to get their jollies elsewhere, but seeing how gambling has penetrated every aspect of society now, I really do want to put this genie back in its bottle.

I'm so torn on gambling. I'm generally staunchly in the "let people do things" camp, and I dislike regulating things that will immediately create uncontrollable black markets because the demand is very strong.

But holy shit gambling is a fucking disaster for our society. The explosion of sports betting has made me firmly convinced of this.

Crypto at least is harder to get into and plausibility useful. Same with prediction markets

Gambling is very tricky for me because it doesn't usually create obvious externalities.

Other than being stuck in line while someone buys scratchoffs.

Its unclear what interest I have in whether someone is spending their money 'wisely' or not. There's an argument that someone who would gamble money away would probably do something else stupid with it, like play with options on Robinhood or fall for some crypto rugpulls, so really they might be better off giving up control of their money entirely.

But its increasingly clear to me that I don't WANT to live in a society where gambling is everywhere. I don't like the ads, I hate having the odds splayed across the screen constantly, I'm old enough to remember the time before this was ubiquitous, and sports gambling indeed had a sheen of shame on it.

The one time I went gambling in a Casino was a rush. I see why people get really into it, I felt an urge to return and try my luck for months afterwards.

The optimal amount of gambling in a society is (probably) not zero.

The compromise that seemed to mitigate the harms is to keep legal gambling relegated to certain geographical areas. This makes it easier to keep things restrained or dare I say 'regulated.'

Otherwise, every single business out there tries to inject some gambling aspect into their products and services to capture some of those sweet addict dollars.

And all THAT said, I'm also not in favor of having police raids on grandma for running a BINGO game out of her backyard.

The one time I went gambling in a Casino was a rush. I see why people get really into it, I felt an urge to return and try my luck for months afterwards.

Can you elaborate? I dont understand this at all. Some games of chance are fun games, but they are so also without staking money.

So I went into the Casino with the commitment to "only" risk $400 at most. That was my whole budget.

I sat down at the Blackjack Table with a $15 minimum bet size. I hit what the gambling community calls a "Hot Streak" and within like 10 minutes I'm up by $500. I pocket $400 worth of chips, Now I'm playing with house money.

After a bit longer, suddenly I'm up like $1500. I'm placing bets worth $500+ per hand. i.e. I'm betting more than the whole budget I had set out on single hands of blackjack. Its feels pretty awesome.

"Why don't you just cash in your chips and take the money?"

Well I wasn't there to make money, i was there to have fun. And its FUN to risk a whole day's salary on the turn of a card, its FUN to have the other players going hype over your success, its FUN to tip the dealer like $10/$20 at a time, its FUN to imagine somehow hitting it huge and walking out with $50k, it is FUN to have drinks delivered to you as you 'lock in' to try to keep the streak going. It is even fun to LOSE a big amount, when you still have a whole stack of chips to burn.

After, I dunno (literally, you lose track of all time), 30-45 minutes total, I force myself to take a break to 'cool off.' About then I notice my pulse racing and hands shaking. Not aggressively, just the little tremor. I've got about $600, plus the chips I stashed earlier. I stash another $400. Now my day is profitable regardless.

I wander for about an hour, then come back to the same table. It feels right. No rational reason for it, but why change? I put down my $200 in chips. And lose it all in, no joke, about 5 minutes.

Just like that.

So I leave with about $800 and one hell of a dopamine rush.

And for weeks I kept thinking back to that rush, and my brain keeps saying "holy cow remember how awesome that hot streak felt? I bet you could hit that again if you went back." My rational brain is able to quell that. "The house wins this is precisely how they get you," but neurochemicals are a helluva drug.

I could see myself doing something like that every week. Go in with $400-500, make it last as long as possible. Some days I'd lose it quick, some days I'd lose it slow, some days I'd double or triple it, and I'd be having tons of fun but it would basically be an addiction at that point, and I'm not sure I could keep myself limited to a small budget once I was hooked.

Have you ever actually gone in, and lost the whole budget quickly? I can understand that the experience of winning might override the knowledge of -EV, but thats definitionally not something that can happen most of the time.

Im especially wondering about the olde times when there was no house and its all peer-to-peer betting, where presumably the others want to stop betting as you want to keep going.

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You have described my feelings about marijuana. As with obesity, the real enemy is our culture’s allergy to moderation.

+1 on the marijuana thing. In principle, I want it to be legal to smoke weed because it's not my business what people do to their bodies. But in practice, it turns out that legal weed emboldens a bunch of jerks who think it's ok to smoke absolutely everywhere, so that I can hardly drive around my city (Denver) sometimes without having to smell their foul-smelling weed. I'm to the point that I would rather make it illegal again, which I know sucks for people who act reasonably. But I don't see how else we can make it so that the unreasonable folks don't get to make everything smell like weed.

That one seems pretty straight forward: no smoking in public, ever. Throw in tobacco while we're at it. Done.

The French (of all people) pretty much did just that.

Ding ding ding.

If gambling was a "once in a while, for fun" activity, or people smoked weed in their house and NOWHERE else, or people would only eat McDonalds once a week at most, then we absolutely wouldn't need any kind of laws in place, legalize it all.

But our brains didn't evolve that way, we want to gorge on certain things because in the ancestral environment times of true 'abundance' was rare.

My vice is fuckin' sugar. Right now I'm stuffing my face with candy that has 19 grams of it per serving. I work out like crazy to keep it from making me fat, but I'm well aware its just my caveman brain telling me I need to store up fat for the winter or something.

If we could just accept the basic idea that "willpower isn't enough", then perhaps the next discussion is what the appropriate time and place for things are, and how we should intervene to help those who can't control themselves well enough.

If weed was confined to frat parties and the bar district, and hippie retreats that normal people avoided for fear of public nudity drills…

But see, as a society, we have this arrangement set up for alcohol. We have it set up for sexually oriented businesses and casino gambling. But we don’t have it for porn, or weed, or junk food, or sports betting or any other of these modern vices. And there’s incredible resistance to it for these things- where alcohol and strip club laws are mostly uncontroversial.

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I'm for the dual-pricing system in Japan-- one for Japanese (or local residents) and a different, higher price for tourists, who are almost always disruptive and are seemingly everywhere in Osaka now. This could be charged to me unless I initiated some negotiating tactic, which would itself be disruptive.

I've seen some countries have separate (generally shorter) lines for locals at major historical/cultural sites, which is something I can get behind. It only makes sense that people get first dibs on experiencing their own history. It's a little annoying as a tourist abroad, but I would be more than happy to trade longer lines at the Louvre if it means my kids won't have to get in line behind a bunch of foreigners to see Yosemite, the Declaration of Independence, etc.

I'm sure you've seen the recent stories about tourists being squirted with water guns in Barcelona. As I was reading that story I could understand the locals' frustration (though were I to go to Spain again I would certainly be the one getting squirted).

The downturn of the yen, the very modern era attraction of live streaming from an exotic locale, the now-happening Osaka Expo, and perhaps a general interest in Japan fueled by anime/manga and Shogun and whatever else, have combined into a perfect storm where currently large areas of Osaka are bereft of Japanese people, though they are still full of people. At an outdoor bar by the river in Namba recently (I know, what did I expect?) the bartender didn't understand my Japanese (he was from Vietnam.) The shopping arcades are thronged with tourists. At least in such places one can adopt a sense of free-for-all and just push through. My commute, however, takes me through a hub on the way to an international airport, so the subway cars are routinely filled with giant suitcases rolling on casters and you see a lot of behavior that is notably non-Japqnese.

Yesterday at 5:50 am three British travelers were so loud on the train (just having a good time, but annoyingly so) that I could see the Japanese passengers were disturbed (though the British group probably had no idea they were causing any disturbance...maybe). A Thai woman was speaking extremely loudly into her phone while standing in a crowded, moving subway car. One group of New Zealand kids on some school tour made a crack about my suit (which I heard and then began to discuss with them).

Most behavior is very benign. Probably even just reading my descriptions of what I've seen as faux pas seems absurd, as if I am fretting over the most insignificant nothings in a world where bombs are falling. And this is true of course. But it reminds me how Japanese people probably regularly expect me to behave like an unschooled savage most of the time (and honestly, because I am always learning new Japanese I realize I probably screw up a lot still.)

The kicker is that generally no Japanese will ever say a word about this. The very first rule of 和 is that you don't talk about 和. I have been intending to write an effortpost about this but life keeps getting in the way.

Man... now I kind of want to not visit Japan, because I feel guilty about the prospect of making life suck for the residents there.

No, don't let me put you off. Anyone who is halfway self-aware and tries to do as the locals seem to be doing will be welcomed with open arms. It's everyone else that is tedious. There are also many places to go besides the usual tourist areas--and even they are not so bad if you go during off hours.

For what it’s worth, I was fairly neurotic about this before my trip to Japan; my number one concern was to not be the careless foreigner causing offense or giving Americans (even more of) a bad name. I got over that anxiety pretty quickly once I was there; since almost nobody speaks English and I could barely communicate with anyone, and because I quickly intuited that they would not honestly express their offense even if I caused some, I determined that it was a fool’s errand to continue to micro-analyze every action of mine to try and figure out if it had offended someone. I just decided to avoid making any obvious faux pas, to keep my voice down as much as possible, and to otherwise just act naturally and count on the majority of people to interpret my actions in a spirit of good faith. Which they mostly seemed to do! (Although, again, they could have all found me unbearable, and I’d never know!)

You have my vote, brother.

That sounds like it would only be enforced in major international tourist destinations - which could be a lynchpin argument for my long-term goal of never going to Tokyo or Kyoto again in favor of the places I actually like.

Kyoto during COVID and just after was as it should probably best be experienced. Only Japanese, no tourists whatsoever. It is currently a kind of hellhole.

I only went there as you describe once, some ten years back. I was very young and dumb and spoke none of the language so most of it was wasted on me. Most of my experience is of the hellhole sort… oh well. At least I met some very nice people each time I went!

I have done and been the same in various places on earth, and also Japan. The only difference is that, in Japan at least, I remained, and have to some degree matured, and, to some degree, have become able to reflect and revise my behavior.

Oh, I didn’t do anything bad there, I just didn’t have any of the experience I needed to enjoy it. Going back much later and speaking the language well enough to hold a (simple, very patient on the part of my interlocutor) conversation, I’ve had a much, much better time with the country. And in retrospect, I would have liked to explore a less-overrun Kyoto more using those skills.