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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   2621 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 29, 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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So! There's a tiny chance I'll be booted out of the US because 5 decades ago my parents were illegal immigrants and the SCOTUS might agree they were foreign invaders, thereby yanking my birthright citizenship.

Meanwhile, right-wing nativist Chuds in my parents' country have decided they think bloodline-based citizenship is the actual menace and are taking steps towards ending it.

I don't really want to live in the old country, but to add insult to injury it's narrowly possible I'll lose residency in the US while my kids become ineligible for residence in the old country and navigating that sounds really unpleasant.

This is really speculative of course. But for peace of mind, are there any decent countries that I can buy a citizenship in? Either cash money or via "investment"? The obvious contenders like Cyprus and Portugal seem to have scaled back the enticements recently.

thereby yanking my birthright citizenship.

I don't think it's how it works. See for yourself: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/protecting-the-meaning-and-value-of-american-citizenship/

Specifically section 2(b):

(b) Subsection (a) of this section shall apply only to persons who are born within the United States after 30 days from the date of this order.

I don't know when exactly have you been born, but I assume it was before February 2025, right?

Sure but if this is brought before the SCOTUS they may rule the POTUS only has the authority to do this because the 14th does not confer birthright citizenship to illegal immigrant children.

They might, but it still does not apply to anyone who already has the citizenship, and in fact anyone who has already been born. Moreover, SCOTUS already decided the government can not revoke a lawfully acquired citizenship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroyim_v._Rusk so unless you voluntarily decide to denaturalize, Trump can't do much here.

THIS order doesn't apply. That doesn't mean that three months from now there might not be another order that does.

Five years ago birthright citizenship wasn't on the table.

That way of thinking easily leads to unbounded paranoia. Yes, Trump didn't issue an executive order to round up all foreign-born people into camps, but he might do it. Yes, SCOTUS made it pretty clear they don't like the government to revoke the citizenship retroactively, but they might change their minds. Yes, there's no official state-sanctioned cult of Trump The Divine with five daily kneeled prayers and mandatory floggings of non-citizens, but there might be. I mean, no known physical law forbids it, and even if they did, there might be new law discoveries that allow things that we consider impossible now.

You have to stop this somewhere, otherwise it will lead you into madness. Worrying about things that might happen if the world became completely unlike the world we're living in now is not the way to live in the world we're living in now.

Dude, there are literally thousands of people being removed from the country weekly who, in the world we lived in last year, were in no danger of deportation. Many had some form of legal or protected status, others had simply been living here for decades.

The world now is, for those people, completely unlike the one they lived in last year.

So yeah, research into alternatives is a reasonable thing to start doing on the off chance we see similar changes by next year.

Dude, there are literally thousands of people being removed from the country weekly who, in the world we lived in last year, were in no danger of deportation.

Yes, those are illegal aliens. If you are one, it's very much the time to prepare a plan B. And nobody made a secret of it since the beginning for Trump campaign, which is years from now - one of the major promises Trump made was to deport illegal aliens. He run the whole campaign on it. He never made a promise to revoke citizenship from existing citizens.

So yeah, research into alternatives is a reasonable thing to start doing on the off chance we see similar changes by next year.

If that's what you want to do, don't let anybody to stop you. Some people prepare for alien invasion (the Mars kind, not the Guatemala kind), some for the rapture, who can forbid one to prepare for Trump revoking citizenships? I am just providing some data on how realistic this scenario actually is, where to take it from there is one's own business.

Meanwhile, right-wing nativist Chuds in my parents' country have decided they think bloodline-based citizenship is the actual menace and are taking steps towards ending it.

What is the reasoning here?

Your report was obnoxiously unfunny and we have to deal with enough spurious and bad-faith reports on posts.

Normally I'd leave it at that, but you have a history of this kind of obnoxious trolling, so banned for a day. Knock it off.

Too many undesirables from Brazil using it to resettle, apparently.

Fascinating. Are they agitating to reset jus saguinis?

I can see that being a valid approach for a Westphalian nation-state, every couple hundred years or so as its culture slowly shifts.

โ€œEveryone who is here right now, and has some percentage of original stock blood, gets to be a citizen. Everyone outside that circle, you are more not like us than you are like us so we donโ€™t want you anymore.โ€

Presumably you would get some churn in the population genetics without experiencing a total overturning of the original culture.

Could work out.

Doesn't seem like the best idea if you have declining fertility because you can't even get your own domestic original stock bloods to reproduce.

You eventually have to make up the deficit with foreigners and it's better to have foreigners with domestic great grandparents than no relation at all.

I will just say that I think fertility is a bit of a crisis in a lot of places, but not necessarily in the way people think.

If the concern is โ€œLowered fertility makes the GDP line stop going up,โ€ thatโ€™s not a crisis. GDP lines should be allowed to fluctuate up and down as populations grow and shrink. Itโ€™s not the end of the world, especially in the nuclear age.

From that standpoint, there is no deficit that needs to be made up with foreigners. The native population will organically wax and wane over time if not interfered with. Itโ€™s only when a lot of foreigners are brought in that a native population might begin to feel pressured to spur increased fertility rates as a way of not being boxed out by invasive newcomers, which creates a fertility crisis.

Are there any decent countries that I can buy a citizenship in?

A search for "golden visa" reveals lots of options. 1 2

Doesn't necessarily equate to a passport and/or a useful passport

I know we have some American lawyers around here. Question for you: is law school still a good move?

For context, I'm at a juncture of my military career where I either charge ahead (with uncertain results) or get out. If I went the law school route, it would likely be fully covered by my GI bill, and I have plenty of savings, plus my wife works, so money is not a key motivator.

I already know the basic pros and cons, but want to hear the perspective of the kind of people who enjoy this website. Lawyering, yeah or nay?

Money is the main reason I always tell people it's not worth it. If the GI Bill fully covers it, then that's not a problem.

Have you done any legal work? Did you enjoy it? The vast majority of legal work is terrible, and you're working with and/or against terrible people (other lawyers). If you haven't interned at a firm or government agency specifically doing legal things to see if you like it, then I advise doing that first.

Pay is often mediocre. There is a strong bimodal pay distribution. Unless you go BigLaw, there are probably many ways a vet can make more money working in defense contracting or consulting or something as opposed to legal work.

Substack has a feature where the creator can view the original sources of any traffic to a particular blog.

So far, it was mostly a curiosity, I was used to seeing Reddit, or "Email", those being places where I'd personally shared my writing. I'm not sure what links posted on The Motte show up as, but presumably "Direct" since I strip out the usual tracking IDs out of courtesy.

My latest post did numbers, at least by baby Substack standards. I'd seen a decent amount of traffic from X, and the site's abysmal search did find someone of decent repute shouting it out. A few large Substack authors reblogged it to boot. Someone big even wants to interview me, though my desire for online pseudonymity might make that a no-go.

But then, when I checked back later today, I was immensely surprised to see Gwern in the list. I mean, he's a big name, but surely he doesn't have an independent listing? I dug in, and to my immense pride, I saw that my post had been deemed worthy of ending up as a link he'd rounded up on his personal site.

I'm very chuffed, but I find myself chagrined by the fact that the number of people I know IRL I can boast about this to round up to zero. The only way I could be more pleased is if it caught Scott's eye, but I've managed to achieve that once before so it's off the bucket list.

Motherfucking Gwern-senpai noticed me. I knew that obsessively tracking down links and literature reviews as well as digging into neurophysiology would pay off. Now I feel awful about not adding a dozen footnotes and citations :(

Anyone else ever catch the eye of their heroes?

I never have, but that's still really awesome! Congrats!

Thank you!

Anyone else ever catch the eye of their heroes?

Yeah, by walking right up to them and asking them "hey, do you have a few minutes to talk about your writing/fencing/programming"? (Or sending them an email, anyways.)

By accomplishment? Hell no.

I'm very chuffed, but I find myself chagrined by the fact that the number of people I know IRL I can boast about this to round up to zero.

I know the feeling all too well.

  • My latest post was restacked by this woman who applies data science principles to online dating. Kind of like a less overtly titillating Aella, and, in my view, far more physically attractive. I was flattered.
  • It was also restacked by Sarah Haider, whose name I vaguely recalled seeing previously and who has her own Wikipedia page, which is cool.
  • "Contra deBoer on transgender issues" was shared by Helen Joyce, I think it was shared by Eliza Mondegreen in a paid subscriber-only links roundup (she definitely liked it), and also liked by TracingWoodgrains and Freya India.
  • Freddie deBoer commenced one of his duh-of-course-I-support-trans-rights articles by quoting a comment I'd posted on one of his previous articles and ostentatiously announcing how "profoundly uncompelling" he found said comment, in a tone which to me strongly suggested he doth protest too much.

The only way I could be more pleased is if it caught Scott's eye

I shared my latest post on the Slate Star Codex subreddit, and Scott showed up in the comments to complain about how I'd characterised him in the article. I dutifully apologised and rephrased the offending passage. In the list of things that made me feel ashamed of myself this year, this was in the top five.

I shared my latest post on the Slate Star Codex subreddit, and Scott showed up in the comments to complain about how I'd characterised him in the article. I dutifully apologised and rephrased the offending passage. In the list of things that made me feel ashamed of myself this year, this was in the top five.

My condolences. If that happened to me, I'd be driven to drink.

Kind of like a less overtly titillating Aella, and, in my view, far more physically attractive.

(Presumedly) white men really not beating the allegations!

(She is pretty, but I found this particular photo profoundly disturbing. To be fair, now that I actually opened it, it's AI generated on purpose)

(Presumedly) white men really not beating the allegations!

It was game over as soon as I watched Mulan.

Anyone else ever catch the eye of their heroes?

I'm half-convinced that link 5 on this article by Scott is based on this comment by me. Admittedly, they are three months apart, but I'd like it to be true. It would also prove that Scott lurks here.

Funnily enough, I have a comment saying pretty much the same thing, but that was over a year back. We can only hope that Scott hasn't forgotten his estranged children over here. He's still got his account, though it's been inactive for a while, at the very least he's aware of our existence.

I need help finding an old post. I think I remember the phrase "dark organic society" followed by either "theory" or "bullshit". It was about the idea that society organises itself in certain ways regardless of explict, program-driven organising, and interpreting parts of progressivism as a despair reaction to that. I thought it was on baliocs tumblr, but google disagrees that its on tumblr at all. /u/gattsuru because you might have been the one that linked me back then.

Hm. Don't remember that phrase. Maybe this or this touch on similar themes, but they don't have that word specifically. And while it's definitely the sort of discussion Balioc goes over a bit, the phrase itself feels more like raggedjackscarlet or the-grey-tribe... except they don't have it either.

Do you remember about how long ago it was linked? Pre-COVID? Pre-split-from-SSC?

siikr.tumblr.com can be better for searching if you know the tumblr's name than either google or tumblr's built-in-search, though it's still not good.

Not either of these unfortunately. Definitely post-split, likely post-covid. My top guess is that it was linked in theschism. Will play with the search engine, thanks.

Mini-rant of the day (am I repeating myself or do I have deja vu? must be getting old): While I appreciate the intention behind occasionally using "they" as a gender-neutral pronoun in cases where the gender is unspecified, the amount of reading fatigue it generates is underrated. First let me say that my actual preference might be a somewhat stupid-sounding but actually refreshing/mildly helpful habit of simply using the opposite pronoun as a habit. For instance, in the financial column "Money Stuff" (great reading BTW) the author when talking about an imagined or generic CEO will use "she" as the pronoun. I'm not really a believer in the whole micro-aggression literature, but I can still see that subtle and low-key (non-mandatory) attempts at gently pushing back against stereotypes can be nice. Handy little reminder not to jump to assumptions. For fairness, this should be more generalized: teachers are mostly women, so use "he" as the general form. Doctors are mostly men, so use "she". College grads are mostly women, so use "he". "They" can still work in a pinch, or perhaps in official documents, but I feel like the tradeoffs involve are favorable on the whole.

But nonbinary people in fiction? That's a whole different story. Consider the following sentence ripped from a story I am reading:

Mirian and Gaius took turns instructing Jherica on soul magic. They would be the weakest of the time travelers, so it seemed best to give them some means of self-defense against the one they couldn't simply die and recover from.

This sentence is a total mess, and a nontrivial cognitive load, for no good reason. Well, not zero good reason, but here the tradeoffs fall very strongly against a generic pronoun: the loss in clarity, the mental burden, the flow disruption, the forced "backtracking" through the sentence to clarify meaning are absolutely terrible. The first "they" isn't immediately clear on the subject - is it the two people, or the nonbinary person? Okay, contextually, we figure out it's Jherica. But then we have an implied subject (who is doing the giving?), the next "them" needs context that takes a moment to process (Jherica again), and then another "they" also referring to Jherica, but needs double-checking. The wonderful thing about this sentence if Jherica were given a normal gender is that "they" clearly refers to the pair of people and not the individual. It's a useful tool in sentence mechanics that is completely ruined. "She" or "he" might induce a small amount of confusion (did the author accidentally chop up the pair and is referring to just one of them?) but partly that would be the author's fault for substandard sentence construction, and I still don't think it is quite as bad. It's far from uncommon to be referring to a group of people alongside an individual, and super useful to be able to casually and implicitly differentiate the two via pronouns.

To be clear, the story is wonderful, and there isn't any big deal or mention made about gender here at all (at least if there was I have no memory of it), and authors can make mistakes especially when self-edited (as is likely the case here). Or, in fact, I'm not even positive the author did make said character non-binary in the first place, since the author occasionally uses "he" in the next chapter, but not always. So it's not some massive culture war thing in this particular case. I think the point remains however that some progressives have tried to gaslight people (including myself) that gender-neutral pronouns are a minor inconvenience at best, and leverage already-existing rules of English. It's true that "they" already can serve this purpose (e.g. "Who's at the door and what do they want?" when it is fully unknown) but there are still some significant burdens if it becomes popularized.

It seems that it really shouldn't be a big loss to perform some nonbinary erasure here. Many forms of fiction already do things to make it easier on the reader (and I always notice when they do) such as giving main characters names that begin with different letters, or in anime they will color the hair differently not just for aesthetics but to make characters more differentiable. Sure, these semantic and visual 'collisions' happen IRL quite a lot (e.g. two Joshes on your team at work), but it seems to me the loss in realism is more than offset by the practical benefits. Note that this isn't purely an anti-woke position, in my book: I think giving characters some identifiable traits can make them more memorable. So there might be good reasons to throw in an unrealistic number of non-straight or mixed-race people into your TV show beyond deliberate representation! I don't think I'm advocating for anything too extreme.

John McWhorter suggested that we conjugate verbs differently depending on whether we're using the singular they or the plural they. They (Alice and Bob) go, they (Alice) goes. It's a good suggestion, doubt it'll catch on though.

Incidentally, yesterday I encountered the most annoying use of the singular they I've ever seen in real life. My colleague is going on maternity leave and I'm covering some work for her. On my annual review, my boss referred to this colleague as 'they'. As in 'Crowstep will cover his colleague's work, while they are on maternity leave'.

I sort of get it, in that 'colleague' is a gender neutral term. But this person has a name, which everyone reading this document knows, and she's going on maternity leave for God's sake!

"Excuse me boss, I have a question: How can I cover for Tina if I'm also on maternity leave?"

"Hilarious! You're fired."

What annoys me, and has become quite common lately, are people who write in to advice columns who deliberately obscure the gender of everyone mentioned in their letter. They, spouse, sibling, child, partner.

Since I was in college, I've read every advice column I've been able to get my hands on, as a way to make up for my complete social cluelessness. Dear Abby, Ann Landers, Miss Manners, Carolyn Hax, Care & Feeding, Captain Awkward.

I try to picture in my head the people involved in these situations. But I cannot picture a genderless person - my mind short-circuits and just gives me a sentient cloud of fog!

If I were writing to a public forum, asking for advice about my lurid love affair, Iโ€™d take any opsec I could get.

I should probably do more here.

Something I ran into today: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/epic-cplusplus-coding-standard-for-unreal-engine#inclusivewordchoice

Good thing I can now code Boomer Wish Fulfillment, Minority Slayer 2000 and Dubiously-Consensual Intercourse Simulator in a fully inclusive style. Thanks to whoever wrote that coding standard!

I get the idea of using inclusive language in the UI, but I'm confused by what they mean when they start talking about how to name classes and other programming constructs. Am I somehow missing hordes of developers using racial epithets in their variable names?

I mean you should keep that in mind. Getting called into a meeting with your manager because GenericUserIsRetardedError showed up in a stack trace for an end user isn't fun.

Told you you should have went with Redot ;)

"Unreal isn't woke", they said!

Did you follow Redot further, btw?

Didn't code anything in it (wait, I lied), but I'm following their Twitter. Seems pretty active.

It's not just advice columns. People do this in real life for some reason!

The speaker almost always has a common gendered relationship in mind - daughter, boyfriend, wife, etc. - but are deliberately choosing not to reveal that info when it would be harmless, and help the listener understand the situation better.

I thought it was bad in Brisbane, but then I went to Sydney. Everyone down there has a partner, everyone has a child - it felt like I was talking to aliens.

It's in the water. People do it without even knowing.

I'm remembering a 1954 movie, and it's worth a chuckle pretending that them refers to giant ants.

Especially when these people use gender neutral pronouns when the gender is already specified.

It's because of habit.

For instance, in the financial column "Money Stuff" (great reading BTW) the author when talking about an imagined or generic CEO will use "she" as the pronoun. I'm not really a believer in the whole micro-aggression literature, but I can still see that subtle and low-key (non-mandatory) attempts at gently pushing back against stereotypes can be nice.

Tbh I've arrived at the opposite conclusion. As a teen I used to like characters that go against stereotypes - and to some degree I still do, as long as they're done carefully and thoughtfully - but combined with the ubiquitousness and increasing importance of fictional stories in people's lives, it seriously distorts their worldview. Stereotype accuracy is one of the best-replicating findings of sociological research, yet many people I tell this - most of them quite smart and educated - are completely dumbfounded. Of course this is especially due to the nature of their education, but the fictional stories they surround themselves with just reinforce their biases over and over. This can get quite comical, such as women who worry something is wrong with them because they aren't as assertive nor sporty nor as interested in engineering/math/etc. as their heroines.

I've been musing an effortpost about this, but I think that law and order has been an incredibly negative influence. It completely messes with peoples sense of how common things are in society and what the problems are with the justice system.

A crime and law drama that conformed better with the realities on the ground would be a good thing.

I've considered writing something similar in the more general department of how fiction affects peoples' worldviews. I see it a lot in terms of discussions on criminal justice in particular.

My impression from the sources I've read that seem to accurately reflect the "average" case rather than cases or regions cherry-picked for some particular reason is that around 90% of all people charged with crimes in the United States are guilty as sin and busted dead to rights. Meanwhile, huge numbers of people seem to believe things like that most people are innocent or crazy serial killers are everywhere or something like that, because all their knowledge comes from fictional media optimized for drama, and documentaries that cherry-pick outrageous cases and exaggerate how outrageous they are.

I can't find the interview now I'm afraid, I think it was an extra on one of the season box sets, but this was part of the reason Vincent D'onofrio lost interest in Law and Order Criminal Intent. He tried to get Balcer and Wolf to incorporate more stories where the cops or attorneys fucked up or where it just didn't matter, justice was thwarted before they even began, but Wolf was strongly opposed. Fuck I will try and find the interview, it was fascinating. If you make an effort post on this topic please let me know.

Hard to say without the quote, but it wouldnt be surprising if Levine is just making fun of Elizabeth Holmes.

I've seen some guides for getting cheap Ozempic but they seem specific to the US. Is anyone here in Canada? Have you gone through the process to get some and how did you find it?

Some will ship to Canada.

Not sure what the rules are for this so I don't want to give direct links here.

The general shape of it is you want to find vendors that sell peptides for research purposes only, and also ensure they get their stuff independently tested including with links to the test lab report that you can verify yourself. Additionally, they will have robust Telegram communities where customers will get together in a group for each batch and randomly pick a few to send their samples to a lab as well.

Has anyone done work for Data Annotation or other similar online AI labeling jobs? I have a PhD in math, and have spent the past few years doing mathematical modeling in Postdocs only to realize that I don't really like writing and publishing papers. Some combination of not feeling like the work matters, getting bored of working on the same project for a long time without any feedback, and then eventually finding out that nobody thought my paper was interesting. Mehhhhhhh. And then I lose motivation and do lower quality work and my next paper is worse. I need to get out of academia. But I also don't really know what else I want to do. I'm good at math. I'm decent at programming, but I don't have experience making truly functional consumer-facing apps, all of my coding has been mathematical models that I run myself and keep tinkering with to add features whenever I want to experiment with what happens when different features or parameters of the model get tweaked.

I'm also settled down in a medium-sized town with existing but limited local career options. I have a house, and a wife who is very attached to her job and family, so remote work is vastly preferable. I'm also pathologically terrified of getting stuck in a boring 9-5 office job that eats my life away. I very much like the flexibility of working from home.

So... at least for now, Data Annotation looks promising? The advertisement claims that it pays $40/hr for Math and Programming talents, which I think I can do (unless they're super ultra competitive and only give the good work to people better than me?). The internet consensus seems to be that it's not a scam, but you might have trouble getting enough work to do it full time. And I could work my own hours, and work on discrete completable projects that feel more gamey and give feedback.

Does anyone have direct experience with this and can provide a more accurate and detailed account? Also, I think there are a couple of other similar companies that do this, so I'm not sure whether I should apply to one of those instead if they're better somehow. Or if I should apply to multiple and split my time between them in order to get a better pickings of the higher paying work? Or do you just anti-recommend the entire thing because it's not worth it? I'd like to hear thoughts and opinions from people who have either done this or know people who have done this, or know of similar remote work for someone with my talents.

It's not a scam. A friend of mine did this as a full-time job for about a year, although he didn't do any of the skilled work that pays $40 an hour, since he doesn't have a STEM background. Another friend did it part-time. I've signed up but haven't yet gotten around to doing the programming qualifications or any of the projects yet. If I do, I can let you know how it goes.

The feedback they gave was that it was pretty mentally exhausting. The tasks are not easy and require careful thinking. The friend who did it full-time really liked it though because he could work whenever.

The biggest problem seems to be that the tasks were running out, though the first friend did a lot of qualifications which made a lot of tasks available to him.

Do some Kaggle (or maybe Topcoder if they still have good DS comps?) and call yourself a data scientist, start sending out resumes -- you've already got a PhD (from a Western university?) and published papers, so you are honestly probably a better hire than at least half of the candidate pool that I've seen.

Lack of direct experience might have you applying to moderately lowend DS jobs -- but that would be in the $100-130K USD range rather than $40/hr and scammy (again assuming you are in the US) and WFH is still common.

If your medium sized town is south of the Mason-Dixon line and you don't mind occasional travel I might even be interested -- I need to hire somebody in the next couple of months. Feel free to send a PM.

I'm decent at programming, but I don't have experience making truly functional consumer-facing apps

If youโ€™re smart enough to get a math PhD then youโ€™re smart enough to code. Might take some time but you can do it if you want.

I'm also pathologically terrified of getting stuck in a boring 9-5 office job that eats my life away.

Thatโ€™sโ€ฆ the majority of what awaits you outside of academia. Especially if youโ€™re restricting yourself to opportunities of the form โ€œtrading my STEM skills for financial compensation received at regular, reliable intervalsโ€. Are you sure you want to leave academia? The grass ainโ€™t always greener.

There are always people on LessWrong from bespoke AI research institutes posting about their work and sometimes even advertising open positions, maybe you could explore something like that? (They tend to recruit from within their own social circles but itโ€™s worth looking intoโ€ฆ)

No, run. Treat those โ€œopportunitiesโ€ as lava. Theyโ€™re but rebranded and/or higher class Mechanical Turk.

Know Your Worth is a cliche, but for a PhD in Math, $40 an hour is an insult. For an hourly position with no benefits, it should be deep into three figures an hour before a conversation even begins.

I and many of my acquaintances get regularly hit up with Exciting! AI! Opportunities! From LinkedIn-and-the-like thotsโ€”or excuse meโ€”professional women with photos where they feel most confident to best position themselves for marketing purposes.

We used to chuckle at them like โ€œhot girls in your zip code,โ€ but we donโ€™t anymore given the lack of novelty.

How do I accurately evaluate my worth? I'm too heavily confounded by impostor syndrome that I can't tell where it ends and my true value lies. I'm definitely below average for a Math PhD in terms of accomplishments. None of my grad-school work ended up getting published, and I've published 1-2 papers per year in my postdocs which have gotten ~5 citations each. I seem to work a lot less than my peers, and my advisor/bosses have been too busy and/or easy-going to push me, so I've kind of been coasting. That said, I am smart enough to learn stuff when I do try, and got a Math PhD, and know how to hack code together into something that compiles. I don't know what that's worth. What I do know is I'm not willing to put in the 60+ hour per week that the professors I've worked under seem to do writing grants and managing grad students and whatnot. At least not consistently, I would put in a couple long weeks if I really had to.

And I don't want to move, which drastically reduces my options. But on the other hand, the cost of living is not very high, and I'm currently DINK, so technically could survive on just my wife's job, but that wouldn't really be fair to her. On the work-life balance front I heavily lean towards the life part. Work is there so I don't starve and can afford people to do stuff like house repairs that I don't want to do.

I'm sure someone with my intelligence plus work ethic and ambition that I don't have could easily be making loads of money. However, given my constraints, is $40 an hour still an insult? My ideal position is remote, high pay per hour, few total hours, and meaningful/satisfying/moral, (I'm not phoning it in on a job that my employer expects more from), but I'm not sure what that is or if that's too many variables maximized simultaneously and I might need to compromise on some.

I'm a just-received-tenure CS/math prof at a top rated teaching college. I've put in way less work than the traditional R1 faculty (but probably a bit more than what you describe). One thing I've learned since graduating is that the phd/postdoc life really only prepares you to think about R1-style academic work. But there's a huge world beyond the R1 research world that is much less intensive.

For example, there's definitely community colleges around where you live that have teaching positions you'd be qualified for. At community colleges, these positions are mostly non-tenure track these days, and won't pay a lot, but they'd definitely support a decent DINK lifestyle and give you the flexible hours to enjoy it. Based on what you described as your qualifications, there's probably proper 4-year colleges near you that you could teach at and get tenure as well.

I've been on a handful of hiring committees too at this point. If you want to PM me a CV, I'll take a look and provide more detailed feedback.

So, what are you reading?

I'm adding Shapiro's Contested Will to my list.

Just finished Norman Mailer's The Fight

I'm currently in the middle of reading, with three different people, All the Light We Cannot See, Infinite Jest, and Original Sin (the Jake Tapper book about Biden's dementia, not the probably forty seven thousand murder/romance books with the same name).

Next, I'm between continuing with Junger kick with Marble Cliffs, continuing with war stories with Band of Brothers, continuing with Mailer and war with The Naked and the Dead.

Listening to Nickel Boys on audiobook and am reading The Fixer.

It Starts with the Egg by Rebecca Fett, a book I literally found on the side of the road and which, serendipitously, is uniquely germane to a project I'm conducting research into.

Tell us more.

As documented in the Tinker Tuesday threads, I recently completed the first draft of a novel which began as a project for last year's NaNoWriMo. On Friday the 11th I'm going to start working on the second draft, and I've been doing some additional research in the interim.

*Imperial Wizard 5: Seeds of Corruption (Arcane Awakening) by J Parsons.

That sounds either kickass or pornographic. I could believe both.

Haha, I didn't think about it that way but you're absolutely right!

Srlsy, tho, it's a pretty straightforward fantasy setting that has some development and big battle stuff and some stuff I think of as setting things right. At $5 a pop, I've enjoyed them more than enough, though my usual caveats of being a cheap date on Kindle still apply.

Prompted by the discussion about aphantasia I started in on The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks.

I really enjoyed that one.

Starting on The Sword of Christ by Giles Corey.

Immediately piqued my interest with the combination of the title and the obvious pseudonym of the author.

a PDF of this book is immediately available on a first page DuckDuckGo search. It is the homepage of Kevin MacDonald who wrote the forward of the book so thats ... interesting ... if Corey / MacDonald are trying to make money.

Anyway - how seriously researched and planned out is it? Or is this a "should've been a blog post" style reactionary writing a la Jim's Blog?

LOL. This is very online "it's da joos!" conspiracy theory midwittery.

Is it a heavy read?

Interesting premise let us know how it is.

Can anyone summarize and/or link to a summary of the supposed conflict over/between Gun Jesus (the Forgotten Weapons guy with the long hair and goatee) and whatshisface from InRange? I know whatshisface has a strong SJW-bent that puts off a lot of people, but Gun Jesus presumably kept the Brutality Match under the InRange corporate umbrella by choice (I'm guessing he and the others could have rebranded the format and registered their own LLC, had they wanted to) and the only reason I can think of to dislike Gun Jesus (other than the controversy over him planning to publish than cancelling the publication of a translation of a memoir by a foreign resistance fighter in the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine, which seems like a separate thing) is guilt-by-even-reduced-association with whatshisface, which would be a bit unhinged.

I don't know if you're particularly interested in the "foreign resistance fighter memoir" thing, but I did actually read that book. In my opinion, it was a moderately interesting memoir with very little in the way of actual political opinions at all, aside from an opposition to Russian expansionism. I don't see any reason at all to "cancel" it besides ridiculous hysteria about "nazis".

Which of course completely reversed overnight when Russia did actually invade Ukraine full-scale, at which point Azov battalion suddenly becomes glorious heroes, regardless of how much Nazi imagery and terminology they use, and the Canadian Parliament gives an award to an actual Ukrainian Waffen SS member for fighting against Russia in WWII.

ThisIsSin covered it pretty well, the only thing I would add is GunJesus tries very hard (and succeeds!) at not taking sides in the culture war and keeps his videos and other endevours open to all. In this day and age, thats a very admirable thing and one of the main reasons he is universally respected.

Karl, on the other hand, at least by going off social media posts, rather vocally and militantly left wing, and not in a family friendly way either. (Drinking cum out of skulls is, uh, certainly a choice).

GunJesus tries very hard (and succeeds!) at not taking sides in the culture war and keeps his videos and other endevours open to all. In this day and age, thats a very admirable thing and one of the main reasons he is universally respected.

It's great. Paul Harrell (RIP) flirted with a sign-off phrase along the lines of "the difference between citizens and subjects is that citizens are armed and subjects aren't" and I'm glad it was temporary.

Drinking cum out of skulls is, uh, certainly a choice

uh, did he actually do this, or is this a meme a la "Vance masturbated with his couch?" I looked at his channel, yesterday, and the SJ content was "Why Juneteenth Deserves To Be A Holiday" and "Why Is 'Guns Are For Everyone' Controversial?"

did he actually do this

There's a FB video of it somewhere, amongst all of the other Satanist content (not derrogatory, he is apparently a practicing Satanist). Lacking a FB account, i cant actually log in to find the specific one. But he posted it himself.

Now i personally dont give a fuck what he does, but for branding purposes he's sort of pigeonholed himself into a very specific niche that a) most gun owners and gun curious people probably dont align with, and b) would definitely affect the squeaky clean image Gun Jesus cultivates.

specific niche

This weekend, I stumbled into a crossover post 1) between my favorite world-war-punk logistics MMO and 2) Steel Panzer. That wasnโ€™t the weird part. Apparently the mod author had commissioned unit art from a Twitter artist with the following bio:

I may be drawing furries, femboys, NSFW, and guns. I realize some of you may not be comfortable with one of these.

I suspectโ€”but I can never be sureโ€”that the guns are supposed to be the dealbreaker. Twitter is a foreign country.

I don't have a FB account, either, and I don't regret not joining more social media sites/apps.

(Drinking cum out of skulls is, uh, certainly a choice).

This guy is a reverse duke nukem.

lol, whatshisface

Anyway, that's pretty much it; if there was a serious conflict I think it would have been a more immediate split. Actually, the arc of the channel is like that as well- born of match footage, they made a competition gun that nobody was really considering at the time [and single-handedly ended the AR-15 Bad Because Muh Vietnam meme], and then drifted apart.

I think that the ultimate problem with Karl is that he honestly doesn't really do very much on his own (I believe he thinks he's quite a bit smarter/more switched-on than he actually is) and is prone to flying off the handle at times; his channel took a very noticeable drop in quality after the split and hasn't recovered (there was promise, but since none of it delivered after the split I think that's a pretty clear sign the brains of the operation left). The totally-not-sponsored-sponsored-content (half the time it's the KE Arms show) sections are more technically interesting, which I think is an issue.

Karl's views match those that traditionalist gun owners (i.e. Fudds) tend to express- because progressivism is [morally speaking] just traditionalism with the valence switched (which you'd think he'd be able to figure out considering he's a Satanist, but again... what he wants to be and what he is are two different things). Ian is, far as I can tell, clearly not like that- while he can run into too-big-for-britches problems (depending on who you believe) that's relatively normal for those in his position- not like he has time to do that anyway.

lol, whatshisface

I would have guessed "Kevin," so I got the first letter right!

they made a competition gun that nobody was really considering at the time [and single-handedly ended the AR-15 Bad Because Muh Vietnam meme]

What does this mean? I know they did a "mud test" of both the M16 and AK, but not any other relevant thing.

but not any other relevant thing

The mud test is just one of the "sacred cows" that that channel was designed to challenge- that being "AKs aren't as good as you think they are, and M16s are far better than anyone thinks they are".

That's what their 'WWSD' rifle was designed to showcase, and the myths it was designed to smash: AR-15s are the best rifle system developed to date and don't need some stupid piston to "increase reliability and fix its fundamental flaw" [actually it makes the gun less reliable and heavier], pencil barrels don't shift zero any more when hot, plastic is just fine for parts that used to be made of aluminum provided they're manufactured with that material in mind, guns don't need to weigh 11 pounds to be good, and Chinese optics really are Just As Good.

After that paradigm shift they... just petered out, and became more of a social club to support Brutality matches (which I will note have changed the competitive shooting landscape significantly). And then 2020 happened and Karl went full conservative Progressive at that point- it wasn't really apparent (IMO) until then.

'WWSD' rifle

Oh! Yeah, that were cool.

Brutality matches (which I will note have changed the competitive shooting landscape significantly).

How, other than dropping shotguns?

How, other than dropping shotguns?

More physical challenges. Practical shooting prior to this type of match (IPSC/USPSA, 3-gun/UML) demand more choreographed physical movements- you basically dance through the stages. Step here, shoot here, reload here, most accurate within the fastest time to last shot fired wins. At its worst, it's a memory game; at its best, it's exhibitionism shooting. This is why the use of shotguns is compatible with 3-gun, since those matches are more reloading contests than anything else (using a shotgun that you don't have to do that with puts you in Open division, where you're competing with people wearing 15,000 dollars of equipment).

Brutality matches are a lot more "perform this physical challenge over these obstacles, then shoot the gun", "run 400 yards then shoot a spinning target 300 yards away so many times it goes all the way over" (3-gun has some of that but not a lot), "throw this kettlebell and wherever it lands, shoot, then do that again until you get to the end". It turns out that it's quite difficult to shoot after significant physical exertion- that's why biathlon and (to a lesser extent) pentathlon are as challenging as they are.

Oh! Yeah, that were cool.

The project, and what it did to the rest of Guntube, form the genesis of my understanding of rifles in general. While 9HoleReviews and Ivan (the gun-printing one, either on his own or as part of Fuddblasters) are far more intelligent than IRTV is now, I wouldn't have the requisite level of understanding without them.

But has the physicality (or LARPiness) of brutality matches been adopted by legacy competitions?

Just finished my fourth annual reread of Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson, which is perhaps the best one volume history book about the civil war ever written. Some random thoughts from my reread below.

  1. It seemed like the war was coming long before 1860. At least the South seemed ready to leave the union in the 1850s. So why was there no preparation for this war in terms of stockpiling weapons, encouraging military training/enlistment in the US army? Maybe these things would have been too obvious, but at least pro-secessionist leaders could have encouraged things like the strategic localization of ammunition factories, diversification of agriculture away from cotton, and investment in railroads. Nope, instead we have cope about how feminine mechanized labor is, and how the only real work is overseeing a plantation. This society deserved to lose.

  2. I think Lee is overrated. He managed to win a ton of really impressive tactical victories, but never seemed to effectively follow these up to destroy the enemy army, which is what all the tactics is supposed to be in service of. In fact, Lee's tactics ended up shredding his army much more than his opponents, and he arguably only won because of northern inability to deal with taking casualties, especially under General McClellan.

  3. It's interesting how much the rich man's war, poor man's fight theme seems not to be true, in contrast to most modern wars I can think of. It seems like a general on one side or the other dies in almost every engagement (Albert Sidney Johnston, Stonewall Jackson, James McPherson, to name a few off the top of my head). In fact, generals were something like 50% more likely to die than privates, which is a wild statistic.

  4. Struck by the respectful treatment of Army of Northern Virginia by Grant/Chamberlein upon Lee's surrender. Yes, the South fought for a horrible cause, but still can respect the valor, leadership, and conduct of people you really strongly disagree with. Perhaps an argument against tearing down confederate monuments/renaming forts. You don't beat a man when he's down. Modern politicians could learn a thing or two from this.

  5. Insane levels of delusion by Southern leadership in Late 1864/1865. How did Hood think that assaulting breastworks head-on was going to work in Franklin/Nashville? How did Davis think the government was going to continue the war after the fall of Richmond?

  6. Cool to see how much of the technology of this war would presage WW1. Importance of rail lines and logistics to Northern victory. Also shift to destruction of ability to wage war/armies rather than necessarily capturing territory. Arguably this started with Napoleon too.

  7. I'm getting loads out of revisiting this book every year. Figures and battles are becoming a lot clearer in my mind, and I think I can start to talk about a lot of the issues of the time with nuance and perspective.

On 1), the south believed the war would be a quick war of maneuver and thought the north would sue for peace with limited war.

On your 1, I have had some related thoughts that I posted on at greater length here. What mean is I think saying basically "the South should have industrialized more in the 1850s" is a hindsight thing that wouldn't and couldn't have occurred to anyone at the time.

"Couldn't" because at the time of the leadup to the ACW, warfare was, I don't know if this is the best term exactly, but stuck in the pre-industrial ways of war. Winning the day was much more dependent on individual courage, daring, and clever maneuvering of units. The South was actually pretty well-equipped to fight this sort of war against the North already. Industrialized warfare basically hadn't been invented yet at all. The Union stumbled through making it up as they went, eventually figured it out, and proceeded to crush the Confederacy under a mountain of manufactured goods, as all future wars would entail up to the Nuclear age. I don't think anybody had sufficient foresight, or confidence in any such person's foresight, to attempt to optimize for industrial war in advance before it had ever been tried.

"Wouldn't" because, even if we granted the proto-Confederates perfect foresight, to admit a need to optimize for industrial war leads to an inevitable conclusion that plantation slavery is already obsolete and will go onto the old ash-heap of history one way or another before long. In which case, why bother fighting a war for it at all?

There was a group of so-called "Cotton Whigs" who were in favor of industrializing the South, but they operated under the assumption that slave labor could be used in factories just as it could on farms. Whether they were right or wrong about this is subject to debate, but it's useful in examining the arguments you see sometimes from amateurs that had the North laid off the slavery question and focused on industrialization the institution would have died on its own. Like I said in my other comment, we know that know, but it wasn't obvious at the time, when advocates like James De Bow were talking about the ways slavery could be used in an expanded non-agricultural economy.

But altogether I think you're correct in the sense that an industrialized South doesn't view the expansion of slavery as necessary for self-preservation. I think the more interesting hypothetical is what would have happened had the South considered the slavery matter settled, whether by extension of the Missouri Compromise line, popular sovereignty, or some other mechanism.

To attempt some answers:

  1. It seems obvious now because we know it happened, but you have to put yourself in the position of someone who would have been observing things at the time. For most of the 1850s, things were looking pretty good for the South. There was a string of Northern presidents with Southern sympathies, who weren't about to rock the boat on the slavery question. Dred Scott happened. The Whig party collapsed. Democrats had a 2 to 1 advantage in the Senate and Congress. There were certainly huge problems, but it wasn't until the 1860 election where the Democratic party split along sectional lines and the Republicans swept the North that the writing was on the wall.

  2. Lee is certainly overrated. Jackson is as well; both he and Longstreet are examples of guys who maxed out their own competence. Jackson was good at semi-independent commands but didn't have the political skills to be in charge of an entire army, and didn't do well when fighting directly under Lee. Longstreet was the opposite, in that he was a good general when serving under Lee but not so good independently.

  3. The "rich man's war poor man's fight" thing didn't have so much to do with who was taking casualties in the army but who was fighting in the army itself. The perception arose that thousands of men who would never be able to afford a single slave were fighting to retain an institution whose primary beneficiaries were plantation owners who weren't serving and who had an inordinate amount of political power.

  4. There's a difference between treating your enemy with respect and going out of your way to honor him. I doubt there are any statues of Petain in France commemorating his work in WWII.

  5. The commanding generals in Virginia take up most of the slack for the idea that the South had better generals than the North. In my opinion the opposite is true, with the North's generals being somewhat better on the whole. In Hood's defense, he didn't really have a choice at this point, as the war in the West was already lost and he had to do something. It's like a runner at third trying to score on a sac fly to left field when the team is down 7โ€“2 in the 8th. Bad idea overall, but sometimes you just need to get something going. As for Davis, I think he had the idea that he wasn't going to cave until he absolutely had to. Most of the Deep South and large parts of the Trans-Mississippi never came under Union occupation, and I think the idea was that he'd make them fight for every inch, because the Union couldn't really claim victory unless every state came back.

  6. Yup

  7. It's easily the best single-volume work about the Civil War ever written, and it's required reading for anyone who wants to claim familiarity with the war. It's of "read this before you begin to discuss it" variety. The Great Courses series by Gary W. Gallagher covers similar ground, but in more depth, and he and McPherson seem to be like-minded about most things, so it makes an excellent supplement if you're looking to go further without risking running into a dud or something controversial.

  1. Right, hindsight is 20/20. Much of the upper south didn't even secede until after Sumter, so it was by no means a sure thing. I'm thinking of a lot of the rhetoric of the firebrands from states like South Carolina who seemed to want to secede in the 1850s even when things were going well. But these people were ideologies who can't be expected to seriously plan things. The actual talent in the confederacy (Davis, Stephens, Lee, etc.) all seemed to have been caught a little off guard by secession. And like others point out, this is also making assumptions about what kind of war we know that the civil war was, rather than the war that people thought it was going to be. Although there had been examples of total war (end of the Napoleonic wars, and the Crimean War) in the recent past, the mindset of the ruling class was very much that of limited war, which the south could have won.

  2. Totally agreed. Jackson's legendary performance in the valley and at second Manassas is offset by his terrible performance during the seven days, and the extremely high casualty rate of his division. Longstreet is a general I'd like to learn more about: I know he was vital during second Manassas, and seemed to see a lot of the problems with Lee's plan at Gettysburg, but I don't know much about his performance at Chattanooga, or about his time in the Republican Party after the war.

  3. It's not only the casualty rates, but the enlistment rates largely don't reflect the rich man's war, poor man's fight either. I don't have the statistics on the top of my head, but MacPherson states that the only group that was actually underrepresented in the army was unskilled labor (and also immigrants interestingly enough in the North). The South did have some weird exceptions to this (the overseer exemption from the draft for example), but even in the South, the planter class was at least proportionally represented in the army. Some planters, like Wade Hampton, spent significant amounts of their own money furnishing entire brigades for the army.

  4. This is true.

  5. Agreed that Hood had to do something, but his tactics in these battles were sorely lacking. That whole army might have been much more useful opposing Sherman's March to the Sea or something. Also good point about the Trans-Mississippi: most of Texas was completely unconquered, and after the disaster of the Red River campaign, most of Western Louisiana was safe too.

  6. I'll have to check this out! I'm currently going through Bruce Catton's trilogy, and a book about the battle of Fredericksburg in particular.

I think Hood is underrated, but only to the extent that he was merely a bad general and not in contention for the worst the Confederacy had to offer. What frustrates me with a lot of Civil War discourse, especially online, is the same thing I mentioned earlier about judging actions with knowledge of the outcome in place. Yes, Hood's actions look bad when we know they were unsuccessful. The problem is that, at the time, it wasn't obvious that these actions were worse than any of the realistic alternatives.

To put the whole issue into proper context: In the spring and summer of 1864, the overall Confederate strategy was hold off the Union until the November elections, in the hope that war weariness would usher in a new administration with a mandate to make some kind of deal. To this end, it wasn't critical that they score any major victories, but it was critical that they prevent the Union from getting any of their own. Ever since losing Chattanooga the Joe Johnston playbook had been to stake out a defensive position, only to abandon it after getting outflanked. He'd given Davis repeated assurances that he'd hold behind this river or whatever, then not like his position and retreat. After several weeks of this Sherman is on the outskirts of Atlanta, a city the Confederacy can't afford to lose, and Johnston is talking about giving it up.

At this point Davis, who didn't like Johnston to begin with, is getting fed up and is probably getting deja vu about the Peninsula campaign, where Johnston did the same thing around Richmond, which probably would have fallen if Lee hadn't taken over and changed strategy. So Johnston gets cashiered in favor of Hood, who has a reputation for fighting and will at least make an attempt at fending off Sherman and saving Atlanta. Hood, true to his word, launched a series of ill-fated assaults against Sherman that do nothing to stave off the inevitable and only serve to inflict casualties he can't afford to lose. Buffs like to argue that Johnston would have at least kept his army intact, but an intact army is useless if it isn't going to defend anything, let alone something as critical as Atlanta. There was pressure from the president, the state legislatures, and the public to do something, and Hood at least did something. I'm not going to comment on whether what he did was ideal because I'm not an expert on battlefield tactics, but the buffs who criticize Hood aren't criticizing his execution.

So now, to get closer to answering your question, we get to the fall, after Atlanta is in Union hands and Sherman is aiming to push to Savannah. Hood didn't attempt to stop him because he knew that the endeavor was pointless. He could have slowed the march but not stopped it; he would have fallen farther and farther back, desertions and casualties increasing with every passing mile, and there would have been nothing left of his army by the time Sherman got to the ocean. Furthermore, there would have been no reason for Thomas to keep his troops in Tennessee. He could have either invaded Alabama unopposed, or joined up with Sherman to give him 120,000 men to Hood's 40,000. So Hood made the decision to move toward the Alabama line, cutting off Sherman's communications. This would purportedly compel Sherman to leave Atlanta and divide his army, sending one wing to protect the threat to Tennessee and the other to hunt down Hood, who would get the opportunity to fight the remaining forces in Georgia on the ground of his choosing.

Sherman did indeed give chase, and Hood found the area he wanted to give battle, but Sherman showed up with his entire army, which was more than Hood could handle. At this point, Hood was stuck; if he took up a position, Sherman could do the same, and hold him there while Thomas came down from Nashville to hold him while he turned toward Savannah. Or he could hold him while he sent Thomas into Alabama, before turning toward the sea and forcing Hood to give chase, which wouldn't do anything but waste Hood's time. So instead he decided to give up Georgia and head north to Kentucky, hoping he'd have better luck where he wasn't at such a numerical disadvantage. If nothing else, it would keep the Union out of Alabama.

It's worth also noting that the Confederate army was having serious problems with desertion at this point, largely driven by the hopelessness of the situation. The buffs who talk about how Johnston would have at least preserved his army don't realize that no one wants to spend weeks putting his ass on the line in rear guard actions defending land you intend on giving up in a few hours without any immediate prospects for taking the initiative. On the other hand, if you go to Tennessee where you can win a few battles and keep the Yanks out of Alabama, there's much less temptation to desert. If nothing else, it might force Sherman to pursue and backtrack out of Georgia.

For Hood's part, he was wildly overambitious, thinking he could march straight into Kentucky, replenish his army with locals, and force Sherman to abandon Georgia to keep him from crossing the Ohio or, alternatively, that he could march from there into Virginia and hit Grant in the rear, crushing his army. Fantastical, yes, but at this point in the war, the only way to keep morale up and preserve any chance of winning is to go for a knockout blow. Even defeating Schoefield would have been enough to effect a short-term reorganization of Union priorities. Again, we can argue about whether poor tactical decisions led to Hood's downfall and the destruction of The Army of Tennessee, but criticism of Hood isn't that he blundered away good opportunities; to the contrary, if anything good is said about him it's that he was a competent corps commander under Lee but was too aggressive to command an army. His actions were all failures, but it's not like there were a ton of obvious alternatives.

There's a great FCCfromSCC post...maybe on reddit about confederate monuments...

Ope not FCCfromSCC, but here you go: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/71ydqb/comment/dnfdfl3/?context=3

Fascinating watching Redditors from 7 years ago argue.

Wait, does the API search work again?

Nope just remembered I had saved it one reddit

Is there a new cheating epidemic?

  • Some major game titles are now unplayable in the higher rankings because of cheating: CounterStrike, Call of Duty, Tarkov. This occurs to a comical degree

  • High school teachers say most essays are now written with AI

I can't speak to academic cheating with confidence, but I can about videogames. First, there are more opportunities as time passes as more and more players get into online games so the whole number is going to go up. This matters b/c these are all potential customers of the next part of the problem. Its never been easier to cheat at online games. Used to be, back on the 00s, it was much harder. You either needed to be a programmer yourself with knowledge of the game engine and build your own hacks, or you needed to know the right people or be part of fairly insular online communities, the Warez scene probably being the most prolific. There was a lot of overlap between the game cracking/piracy scene and the online game cheats scene, both of which were almost never just stumbled upon by normies. Now that much larger numbers of people play these very competitive games, they are large enough to constitute a customer base worth trying to get the attention of. People are also much more comfortable with paying over various apps now, so its much easier to sell to them. Prices are wildly variable with the specific game, but for anywhere from $10 to $200 you can get a download link to a fully contained .exe that you run with the game, there is a relatively user friendly interface, and you money buys not just the download of the exe, but also updates as the sellers of the cheat engines try to stay one step ahead of the game devs and other anti-cheat service providers like VAC. In addition, the people using the engines are much, much sloppier with using them, not even bothering to try to hide it most of the time. To accommodate this the same groups that sell the cheats also sell various ban-evasion packages, helping you make new accounts, teaching you how to use a VPN etc, or in many cases just selling you a pre-made, clean account to get right back at it. A few more infamous ones over the years have also had inside people at the game studio who would just remove the bans for money. Money changed everything with videogame cheating. I don't think any of this applies to online chess, which is its own strange world.

Haha we had an interesting discussion on this two years back., so before LLMs were ubiquitous.

The fishing tournament example stuck in my mind enough that I still remember it from time to time as an example of something that's just absurd to be dishonest about, but they do it anyway.

I might broaden it to it just being an epidemic of demolished social norms and declining efficacy of shame as a behavioral deterrent. Being utterly unrepentant and impervious to most social shaming is in fact an adaptive trait in the current social environment.

I hesitate to say a rise in sociopathy, but perhaps now there's a default assumption that all the rules are just there to hobble you and if you choose to follow them whilst everyone else is 'defecting' you're just a sucker, where the only thing that's really 'wrong' is getting caught. Or, perhaps, getting caught isn't the problem, if you can avoid punishment it'll all still be worth it.

Zoomers have been raised in an environment where every aspect of their performance and social status is tracked, by default. Using EVERY SINGLE advantage, licit or illicit, that you can possibly find and implement is presumably seen as necessary to remaining competitive.

My generalized prognosis is that we're in the throes of transitioning to a low trust society

Quoth Betteridgeโ€ฆ

Iโ€™d like to see real data rather than relying on (years-old) reports from a notoriously punishing game.

I canโ€™t say I understand the conflation of academic and game cheating, either. The dynamic isโ€”or should be?โ€”completely different.

I donโ€™t think itโ€™s possible to find real data about this, because the only way to determine cheating is for a reasonable observer to watch footage (otherwise, the algorithms would quickly catch them). You canโ€™t generalize that across time for obvious reasons, and you canโ€™t trust a cheater to answer a survey for obvious reasons. The next best evidence is to see what high-reputation people in these niches think about the question, and Iโ€™d guess most of them across different games would say cheating is out of control.

In CS2, nearly all of the leaderboard: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6GA4AM1Szxc https://youtube.com/watch?v=m8wsCU0NR38

In Trackmania, nearly all of the leaderboard (I think this is the most competitive racing game): https://youtube.com/watch?v=yDUdGvgmKIw

Chess . com : https://youtube.com/watch?v=SG5PMVyCi8U (though here it is significantly easier, almost trivial, to find and ban cheaters)

There are also many in the speedrunning niche.

I canโ€™t say I understand the conflation of academic and game cheating, either

They are similar from a psychological perspective involving honesty and rewards. You want to win in order to gain status and feel a sense of success. Among males, video game success translates into reputational benefits, bragging rights, plus the basic biological pleasure of defeating an opponent in a bout. This is no different from academic success, except perhaps that the rewards of academic success occur on a longer timeframe, making the rewards of cheating a little less salient.

The anti-cheat services compile quite a bit of data but its generally not released to the public beyond limited disclosures to try to sell their services to game studios. Valve anti cheat is one of the bigger ones. Its expensive, but customers will get access to the "rap sheets" as it were for various online credentials. IPs, UBID, steam installs, accounts related by payment method, hardware IDs etc. You don't get large data sets to just browse, but you can see the history or reports and flags for clients that connect to your game, substantiated or otherwise. You can set up auto-bans for known cheat engines or bad actors.

Hmm. It might be possible to get trendlines for something like CS2. But then, I understand valve has a long history of detection vs ban waves. Itโ€™d be very hard to measure.

Perhaps survey companies that sell cheats to try and keep skin in the game? I seem to remember seeing a retrospective from, like WoW gold farmers or something. You might be able to measure revenue vs. player base for a common game.

Intuitively, I doubt that video game cheating is worse today than it was in the mid-2000s era of PC CoD hackers and the like. Or the golden age of Minecraft servers, maybe.

I think the college level cheating stuff is kinda overblown. Kids have always looked for shortcuts up to and including hiring other students to write essays for them. We made college about the degree and get big mad when kids know thatโ€™s what matters and min max the system like old school rpg players would minmax Morrowind.

I donโ€™t get cheating at a game.

High school teachers say most essays are now written with AI

They should also be banned with the Geneva convention. Making students write essays is probably the most wasteful way to use a functioning brains.

Why? Writing essays is the most directly applicable skill I learned in school, moreso than AP Computer Science (java) - and I'm a backend java dev. Concise, precise communication is a critical skill. Design docs are super important. (At least to the promotion committee.)

That said, I'd love if we make the essays be on more useful/interesting/self-selected topics, have more persuasive/technical writing, etc.

That clip from step by step perfectly illustrates my opinion on what essays usually degrade to https://youtube.com/watch?v=l9RPNH7YhtU

And don't get me started on Java. My opinion of the language and the ecosystem is not as high as the one about the essays.

University students should all learn:

  • How to write an email to dispute a claim including supporting evidence
  • How to write an email summarizing action items from a meeting
  • How to write readable, unambiguous instructions for performing some technical process
  • How to write a well-formed request when asking for help

because even senior managers and execs all seem incapable of doing some or all of these.

Cheating with AI in school is trivially solvable on an object level. Itโ€™s just that the bureaucracy and or faculty donโ€™t want to.

Whether thatโ€™s due to laziness, head in sand, politics, profit, or some sense of โ€œinequityโ€, or any other misaligned incentive is up for debate.

I assume the inequity part is a decent amount of it. If you start actually forcing measurable accountability, it will take away other subjective safety nets.

This will effect pass rates and almost certainly have some disparate impact.

But the point is that anybody with even a little bit of intelligence could think up a plan to counter AI cheating for any given course or learning objective.

Mass AI cheating would fix the achievement gap and make it so the students who have fallen behind don't look like they have fallen behind. Ubiquitous AI cheating is potentially a massive gift for schools and universities. I guess with universities there is a risk it might destroy the reputation of the university. but this is a problem someone else will have to deal with in 5 years time. The current administrators are free to set fire to the schools reputation and enjoy all the rewards that come with it.

As someone involved with teaching college students, it's even more simple than this: Teaching (and marking even moreso) is a nuisance appreciated by no-one (least of all the students, who often just want their piece of paper and be done with it) at this point, so you just go through the motions of doing the absolute minimum. For one class I work together with literally the most popular professor, who has won multiple student-led prizes for teaching at our university. His assignments and exams? "I have done the same for a decade now, why change anything?" His policy for passing students? "I would pass them during the oral exam anyway, so why should I make myself the work by not letting them pass the written exam?" He is a really nice guy, his classes aren't bad and he is always helpful when you ask him for anything, so I have nothing against him; But if that is the mindset of the best, woe upon the rest!

I once had a professor who knew psychometrics so well, including its history but many ways as well that statistics could be used within methodology, and why, and when, and which types were preferable and which types to avoid and which types revealed nothing, that he seemed eerily erudite. He taught us the ins and outs of SPSS and Winsteps (R was just coming in) and we were eventually doing structural equation modeling. The last of his classes I took was my introduction to Bayesian reasoning. He really was brilliant and made me want to rise to his expectations.

But as a teacher pedagogically he was pretty bad. I didn't really understand his grading. He'd answer questions in such a way that I would become even more lost. But I was probably a better student in his doctoral class than I had been in the entirety of my (years earlier) time as an undergraduate.

I don't envy those whose job it is to evaluate teachers. I suppose a pre post assessment of student ability (at whatever), averaged across a large enough population, might be one way. Just looking at post scores or student evaluations wouldn't be enough.

Of course a school's PR team might likely be more concerned with shiny markers such as popularity with students. That certainly doesn't threaten the school's funding.

IMO this comment is way too uncharitable. It's like, 80% solvable, but you're right that solving it requires work. But it's actually a decent amount of work. I'd hesitate to call it laziness. I think a lot of people underestimate the typical teacher workload. Many teachers would probably do much better work and especially more efficient work if you increased pay by 30%, staffing by 30%, and reduced class sizes by 20%. (Part of this could be offset by slashing the administrative/pseudo-support staffing by 60% or more, but this still might require a net investment). This would give them much more time to plan lessons (instead of rolling out the greatest hits over and over without adapting to the times) and importantly, assign (and create) tests and homework assignments that are AI-resistant, if not AI-proof. It's just that these types of assignments and assessments are much more time-consuming to create and grade, plus as I mentioned the requirements to create them custom-tailored to your class and curricula make for the need to constantly be tweaking them (which again, most teachers don't have sufficient time budget to properly perform).

With that said there are certainly some school districts and even some teachers who are scared to fully grade work, but IMO most of the resistance is more from administration or parents, even, than the teachers themselves. A lot of teachers probably would prefer to hand out bad grades more, not less, current philosophy alleging this is psychologically damaging somehow notwithstanding.

IMO this comment is way too uncharitable...I'd hesitate to call it laziness.

To clear this up, I didn't call it laziness, I just listed that as a possible pragmatic blocker. My point is that it's trivially solvable in technical sense. It's really really easy to think of ways to evaluate students or have them practice learning in scenarios that AI cheating could be mitigated. It's not remotely unsolveable in that sense. But there are, to your point structural and indivdual reasons that make implementing such a solution harder.

I have sympathy for these defenses, but not infinity. If it's something any homeschool parent could solve without any innovation, then the school system needs to be able to react to in order to remain a legitimate concept. We can't just 'oh well...' cheating at scale. It needs to be treated as existential to schooling, if it's really this widespread.

There is no legitimate reason an institution of learning, can remain remotely earnest about it's mission as a concept, and still allow graded, asynchronously written reports.

Now of course many of the blockers to reacting to this are an outgrowth of similar challenges schools have faced for decades: The conflicted, in-tension-with-self mission of schooling in general. as described in the excellent book, Somone Has to Fail. Schools simultaneously trying to be a system of equality and meritocracy will fail at both.

But AI has stopped the buck passing; like so many other things, AI is a forcing funciton of exponential scale. I think if the can gets kicked any further, ever single semester, every single assignment, the entire idea of schooling massively delegitimizes itself.

I think you could honestly do it much more easily then that; for example, you could keep all of your existing assignments, but simply tell people that you will be asking some number of random students a question about their essay/assignment/whatever at the start of the class in which you return their assignments. There's been a recent study which shows a lot of people do not retain a lot of information when they use AI to write essays for them. This would catch a good chunk of AI submitted assignments with very minimal work.

If they "cheat" and use AI anyways, but memorize enough of their assignment to answer a question? Mission accomplished; the nominal goal is to teach students the information, so we shouldn't actually care about how they learn it.

There's been a recent study which shows a lot of people do not retain a lot of information when they use AI to write essays for them.

A teacher I know says that the kids (except the really smart ones) use Chat GTP for everything and don't give the impression that they even read the output beyond a cursory look to make sure it was in the general ballpark of answering the question, so this shouldn't be too hard.

I used ChatGPT once to do a required writing task that I thought was useless and didn't want to do. I did edit it for some semblance of accuracy, but did not exactly read it, nor do I remember what it said. If I thought it mattered or was a useful thing to do I would have written it myself, I like writing essays, including college essays.

High school teachers say most essays are now written with AI

This is also a problem at universities.

Take-home essays were always a stupid idea; there was nothing stopping past students from having a big brother or a stranger from Craigslist do the actual writing, so they unfairly penalized anybody who was honest and did not have a big budget. All graded assignments should be done in class; AI simply made this clear.

there was nothing stopping past students from having a big brother or a stranger from Craigslist do the actual writing,

Well, nothing besides integrity.

I went to a smaller school that often had take-home essays and even exams (up to the professors, more common in smaller honors classes). While cheating might have happened somewhat, it is possible IMO to instill a culture that expects people to follow the rules even when they aren't being watched closely. But it was occasionally enforced by expelling violators.

Rather, they unfairly enabled the unscrupulous to get ahead. I realize that the two look very similar in terms of outcome, but accurate framing is important.

Homeowners of The Motte -- what would you differently if you could do it all over again?

I plan on building a house in the next 12 months on a lot about an hour away from the Gulf of Mexico America. It's going to be a two-story 5BR house with porches on the front and the back, built in a traditional Southern style.

I'm a bit overwhelmed as I don't even know what I don't know about building, and I want to avoid making costly mistakes that I'll have to pay to renovate later (or worse, be unable to fix at all). Happy to hear both from people who built and people who bought.

Things I'd want when building my home;

Storm shutters you can lock from inside. You'll have to deal with both Hurricanes and severe weather. Thank me later. They can also act as a way to block out direct sunlight and cut down on heat reaching your interiors.

Propane generator wired into your electrical system.

Extensive foam insulation to save on cooling and heating.

If you want any sound-deadening put into interior walls, think about it now.

Personal preference, but I'd be installing wainscoting on the interior walls to help with potential issues with flooding(you have checked the flood maps before hand, right?), and they look neat.

Be very critical when picking your kitchen sink and outlet. Make sure you pick one with minimal back-splash, or just say 'fuck it' and get one that looks more apt in an industrial kitchen. (A friend of mine has a family that did catering and they did this. It's wonderful.)

Consider putting up wood/plywood on walls that may have drainage and/or seweage pipes for easy, later access as needed, rather than having to rip down sheetrock.

Damn, this is gold. Thank you.

How does wainscoting help reduce flood damage? We're not in a flood zone, but along the Gulf Coast you can never truly be sure.

Why minimal backsplash for the kitchen sink? How does that relate to selecting the outlet and sink? We cook a lot at home, almost every day, so we're planning on shelling out for a nice kitchen.

Did you build or buy? Did any of these items add significantly to cost?

The problem with sheetrock(which 99.99% of new homes built nowadays use) when exposed to water is that it creeps. Even if you get a small amount of water in your home, you're probably going to have to rip out atleast 2 feet, if not more.

When I install wainscoting, what I'll do is put in water-resistant plywood, then ontop I'll use 1/8th plywood stained/painted the color I want, with the appropriate baseboard/edging that I chose. All screwed in. This does multi-duty - it looks nice, I can swap out the 1/8th plywood/trim later if I want to change the color up, and if I need quick access for whatever reason to the wall interior behind it, said access is fairly painless - just unscrew and do your work.

As a plus, you now don't have to worry about anything running into said wall and making dents in the sheetrock(it's solid wood), and you can screw in hooks/hangers/shelving as needed, should you choose to do so. And installing the sheetrock on the remaining 4 feet of wall is now piss-easy - you just put the sheetrock ontop of the plywood and screw it in.

From the sound of things, you probably won't have to worry about the above installation, hiring others to do the work, but this is just my experience doing all the above myself.

Why minimal backsplash for the kitchen sink?

This is just my particular pet-peeve with the kitchen my father had installed in the family house - it's just small enough that when using it to clean dishes, water back-splashes everywhere, including behind the facet, making cleanup a pain. I'm not sure if there's a way around it in terms of sink/faucet combo, but when I finally get around to building my own kitchen, I fully intend to find out.

Build or buy

Generator system should be around... 16,000 or so? for propane, which I would suggest, given you'll be in the South. Foam installation - trust me, it's worth it. Just make sure you get someone you can trust to install it. Never priced shutters - that's just a wishlist item of mine that I've wanted to have on-hand SEVERAL times in the past.

The wainscoting above I did all myself when it was done, so I couldn't tell you off-hand what it would cost. Most builders nowadays would proably look at you funny if you request it, or do a 'faux' wainscot that's just pure looks/appearance. Any future home I build I plan on doing the interior myself, so I don't consider it to be something weird to do.

If you want any sound-deadening put into interior walls, think about it now.

IRC appendix BG (Sound Transmission)

The Architectural Graphic Standards have a really nice multi-page table listing a bunch of different interior-wall cross sections, including their sound transmission class.

I own a 100-year old house myself, but my friend who has built new strongly recommends installing central vacuum lines during construction.

I lived in a house that had these once when I was a kid. It was pretty cool, you just plugged a tube into the wall and could instantly vacuum. But as an adult I'm wondering how on earth you'd clean and maintain such a system. I imagine I'd have to pay the manufacturer to clean, and after 10 years they may no longer be in business. I hate the idea of "dead tech" being embedded in my house, outdated gadgets look ugly and silly. I'll have to research how it works.

But as an adult I'm wondering how on earth you'd clean and maintain such a system.

It is self-cleaning.

While it is inevitable that some dirt settles at seldom-used outlets (especially those at lower points in the plumbing run), that problem tends to solve itself as soon as you connect a hose to that port by consequence of what the system does. And since when you're vacuuming an entire floor you'll use (almost) every port at least once, the remediation for ports seldom-used is "connect the vacuum line and run the system briefly".

Additionally, the hose opening tends to be a smaller diameter than the vacuum lines. So if you suck up something absurd, like a plastic bag, if it'll fit through the hose, it'll fit through the lines just fine. It would be wise to leave a couple of access ports, though.

The only real fail points are:

  • the central unit itself (generally quite reliable, it's just a nicer Shop-Vac- solution: replace unit if it burns out somehow, hookup is standard)
  • the hose between the vacuum head and wall (generally, electrical outlets are installed right next to the vacuum ports so you can run the vacuum's power head; the cord for that is embedded in the hose and will degrade with use- solution: replace hose, they're all standard)
  • the access ports (just a sufficiently-airtight door with 2 low-voltage electrical contacts, both properties can degrade over time; when you connect the hose, the circuit is bridged by the metal and the vacuum starts up- solution: replace door)

The central units are generic and easy to get, cost only a little more than a nice portable unit, and the sweepers generally conform to one of only a couple standard types. The rest is just plastic tubes and wall ports. Biggest advantage is that the central unit can exhaust to outside, so heavy filtration is not needed to reduce fine particles and dust, and the power of even a low end central unit can't be matched by any kind of portable vacuum cleaner. The central unit typically has a collection bin you can remove and empty, like a shop-vac.

Given your description, I'm guessing this is a semi-rural to rural area. Double check your utilities connections- if this is in Texas, there may be a difference between oncor(electrical grid monopoly) or a utility coop, depending on where you are. For a house that size I'm guessing 100 amp service and two air conditioners? Also, if water comes from a well- do you have a filter already budgeted for? And what's your plan for backup power in the event that a storm knocks out power to the pump(and btw- pumps are already expensive and you more or less get what you pay for. Get a long lasting, quality one.). You're close enough to the gulf that hurricanes are a realistic concern; do you have a plan for them?

Will you be having a conventional built house or a prefab(much cheaper)? Do you plan on a pier and beam(better foundation but you need pest mitigation strategies) or slab?

I highly recommend, given the climate- screen in one or both of the porches. This is near tropical America and you're going to want something to keep bugs out.

Luckily it's in an existing neighborhood in a residential area at the center of small town, so I don't expect to have much trouble with utilities.

I need to do more research on what I'd need for hurricanes, as I'm only planning on adding storm shutters and a generator. I assume your recommendations about the pump only apply to houses that rely exclusively on well water?

We're looking at a conventional build. I was thinking of building on a slab for insulation and because the idea of a crawlspace in the deep south horrifies me. Also termites. We're not in a flood zone (officially), but I want to double check the soil to make sure it's suitable for a slab. I should probably ask my future neighbors about this as well.

We label turn off valves. For us, this has been sharpie on walls, but I would go for a nice label option in a home I built. When the house is flooding a nice label with an arrow pointing to a handle you last looked at when you moved in 5 years ago is a good thing.

When we do repairs we add turn off valves if possible. I would rather turn off the water to one room than turn it off for the whole house, if possible.

When I was a kid my parents tried to build but there was weird neighborhood approval of plans required and they eventually gave up and sold the land. Hopefully you don't run into anything like that.

If you're not modifying existing plans, the architect should go through all that with you. Some architects are hacks, but those ones don't generally do custom builds. Assuming you want an architecturally correct Southern style and not some ersatz version, an architect excited to dive into the details of the exterior will be more than competent to guide you away from making the kinds of mistakes that end up in builder designed houses.

Not a hoomer, but some thoughts:

  1. Get Your House Right is a really good resource for basic design questions (proportions, moldings, layouts, etc). You might also see if Brent Hull has any videos on southern style houses.

  2. Lever handles are much better than doorknobs IMO. I fairly often need to open a door with stuff in my hands and it's way easier to do it if the door opens with a lever handle.

  3. Think seriously about room ventilation. The house should be set up so that you can get cross-breezes going.

  4. Make sure you put in a skookum kitchen hood that's sized appropriately for your cooktop. I've lived my life in places with underpowered or non-existent hoods and it sucks.

  5. Try to avoid making the garage a major part of your house's facade. May not be possible depending on your lot, unfortunately - but it looks much better if you can make it happen.

  6. Put some thought into sealing your garage to keep insects out.

  7. If you end up with a small bathroom, consider installing a pocket door. I have a bathroom right now where the room door and the shower door open into each others' space and it sucks.

  8. Two sinks in the master bath is a must.

Thanks, these tips all make a lot of sense. After living in houses both with and without, I strongly suspect two sinks in the master bath correlates strongly with lower divorce rates.

I am very glad that the person who built the house I own:

  • Installed a metal roof
  • Planned ahead for water flow, and intentionally designed the landscaping around it.

A big house like that might be hard to cool in the summer. I don't have any specific suggestions -- we can't afford a full house air conditioner, so we're all in the main room with the window unit in during summer afternoons, and use open windows and fans at night.

I was hoping you'd reply as IIRC you have three or four children too. I responded here regarding house size. What do you think? I was thinking we might also just make the rooms smaller in general so that there are the same number of rooms but less enclosed space to cool and clean.

Water flow is definitely important for us where we will live as mild flooding can happen even just with a bad afternoon squall.

Specific random things, because most things are going to be covered by smarter guys than me:

  1. Plan one entrance to the house with no steps. Almost nobody does it, because it's difficult to handle the architecture/landscaping to make a ramp look good, but you totally can if you plan it from the start. Elderly people fall on steps all the time, and often hurt themselves. Also convenient for heavy stuff in general. If you plan for it now, you'll have it forever; if you have to rerig it later it will look bad, especially if it's at a time when you yourself are older/less capable.

  2. Anywhere water comes into your house will eventually leak. Plan for that now.

  3. That's a big house, think about how you're going to use the rooms. A lot of people end up with a big house with four rooms that are all variations on "couch and we watch TV in here;" or they all started as bedrooms and got adapted.

  4. Think of the repair guy. Don't put anything in a place where it will be difficult to extract when (not if, when) it needs to be serviced or replaced. Make it easy to reach the air handler, the water heater, the septic system, etc.

  5. Take pictures of the inside of all the walls before you close them up. Write notes and measurements. Store them in multiple places, hard copies, in the home, for the future.

Re. 2, how do you recommend planning for it? Do you have an example?

Re. 3, we have four kids and may have more. Our thinking is:

  • 1 master bedroom
  • 1 home office (wife and I are WFH)
  • 1 older boys' room
  • 1 older girls' room
  • 1 younger kids' room
  • Guest bedroom somewhere, maybe? The design we're looking at is 3,300 sqft. Do you think it would be possible to get away with less house? I'd actually prefer not to have to clean, cool, and maintain a huge house.

Re. 2, how do you recommend planning for it? Do you have an example?

Primarily by placing mechanicals (well pump, expansion tanks, water heater, air handlers, the first drain the septic system will back up into) in places where when they do leak, they won't destroy anything. Waterproof flooring, floor drains, leak protection, don't stack all your valuables and important paperwork right next to it, etc.

Do you think it would be possible to get away with less house? I'd actually prefer not to have to clean, cool, and maintain a huge house.

I've always been a fan, if not always a practitioner, of segmenting the house in ways that let you heat and clean selectively. I just have a ranch house, but the basement is on its own mini-split system, and as such we can keep it at a different temperature than the rest of the house, saving money. We also don't need to keep it as clean as it is primarily used as a hosting space other than the workout room. There's a lot of clever solutions to this. Though anyway, I'd imagine with five kids you shouldn't have problems getting chores done for cleaning the house.

Re. flooding, that makes sense, thanks.

Re. segmenting the house, after living in a place with poor insulation, I can definitely see the value. That house was at least designed so that you could essentially separately heat and cool different floors. They did this by adding a sliding door on the staircase landing. It sounds like I might need to work with an architect to accomplish this though.

The design we're looking at is 3,300 ft2. Do you think it would be possible to get away with less house?

I can fit your stated requirements into 1301 ft2. Use your imagination!

I can fit your stated requirements into 1301 ft2. Use your imagination!

Congratulations, you just invented the double-wide trailer!

lol, well, we could all technically live, Gilded Age style, in a single room, but I don't want that, so I suppose I have more requirements than just minimizing enclosed space. I'd want a garage, a living room, a space for a dinner table, and ideally a porch. I'm also trying to do a 2 floor build because I want to minimize the footprint on my lot.

But point taken. After this thread I think I need to hire an architect.

We could all technically live, Gilded Ageโ€“style, in a single room, but I don't want that. I'd want a living room and a space for a dinner table.

Clarification: That big central room is a combination living/dining room, as permitted under IPMC ยง 404.5.2. (I was just too lazy to label it.) A width of 7 feet may seem small, but under IRC ยง R312.2 it is permissible, and Architectural Graphic Standards for Residential Construction fig. 2.24 indicates that it is sufficient for a dining table to fit, as long as everybody sits on the same side. (If I'd had the book in front of me when I made the drawing, I would have made the living/dining room 8 feet wide, so that people could face each other across the dining table. With that mild augmentation, the area rises to 1347 ft2 + 94.5 in2.)

I'm also trying to do a 2-floor build.

Note that the IRC's prescriptive design assumes that the second floor will contain only bedrooms and implicitly bathrooms. (Compare table R403.1(1) note b with table R301.5.) If you ignore that assumption, you may have to pay extra for an engineer's services, since the architect will not be able to just copy-and-paste from the IRC's tables.

Here's a design that meets your new criteria. (I'm assuming a detached garage, and not bothering to draw it.) (Whoopsโ€”swap the office and the kitchen.)

After this thread I think I need to hire an architect.

Come up with your own original design first, before letting an architect mess stuff up. Doodling random floor plans is fun!

Also, I think you should go straight to a homebuilder (which will have an in-house architect), not to an architect. I tried hiring several architects, and did manage to get one to help me pick a lot, but they generally didn't seem very interested in me. Presumably they have bigger fish to fry, such as designing larger commercial, industrial, and apartment buildings.

Plan one entrance to the house with no steps.

Specifically, in accordance with ICC A117.1 ยง 1104.2 and ch. 4.

That's a big house. Think about how you're going to use the rooms.

Architectural Graphic Standards for Residential Construction pp. 40 and 46โ€“48 have some nice diagrams of bedrooms, living rooms, dining rooms, home theaters, and home offices, including typical furniture dimensions and clearances.

Take pictures of the inside of all the walls before you close them up. Write notes and measurements.

Or just keep a copy of the construction/as-built plans!

Or just keep a copy of the construction/as-built plans!

Redundancy is key! Don't keep just a single copy, and don't keep it in a digital format that might be difficult to access later. Don't count on others to keep them.

Because the house will be up for thirty or fifty years when you have a problem you need to deal with.

I would really want to have rooms wired, with conduit and pull strings in the event that I needed to pull something which wasn't already there. It's a complete pain in the dick to wire things after the fact, and I have often wished that I had wires for networking, for speaker connections, etc.

Ah yeah, good call. I am 100% sure I'll get Ethernet everywhere but I hadn't thought about installing conduit just in case.

Just to emphasize: conduit and pull strings. You want both, because even with conduit it's easier to use the string than to run a fish tape.

I'm interested in following your journey. A few questions:

  1. How are you financing the construction? Are you working off a loan or cash saved?
  2. Did you design the house or did you work with an architect?
  3. Why did you decide to build instead of buy an available house?
  4. What was the timeline between buying the lot then building the house.
  5. How much government red tape did you have to navigate to build a home on your land?
  6. Given the risk of extreme weatherโ€”hurricanes and floodingโ€”in the region near the Gulf of Mexico, why did you decide to build a house there?

We're still at the very beginning, so my answers aren't very interesting, but:

  1. Working off a loan, but we also have enough investment money that we could make more aggressive payments if needed.
  2. We've picked a plan off of a builder's site that we liked. We're not really "dream house" people, we're pretty practical. We've actually like most rentals we've lived in that were just cookie cutter designs. The only times we were unhappy was when we lived in a place with poorly sealed windows overlooking a street (lots of traffic noise) and when we lived in a house with poor insulation in a place where the temps varied between 15F and 95F over the year. That said, I'm still thinking about getting an architect and doing a custom build.
  3. A few years ago, I picked out a great lot in the heart of a small, fast-growing middle class town on the outskirts of a larger city. The neighborhood is perfect and everything is walkable. Tradeoff is that we have to build now.
  4. It will probably end up being 4-5 years.
  5. TBD, but it doesn't seem like there's much in that area.
  6. I have family in the area, and I was very careful to avoid flood zones and flood zones adjacent properties.

We've picked a plan off of a builder's site that we liked.

Note that architectural plans are copyrighted, so if you want to use that plan you have to also use that builder, unless the same plan has been licensed by multiple builders from a separate architect.

Thanks for your response. I appreciate the insight.

Not the same person, but:

(1) I'm paying mostly cash, since I have it and I generally dislike the idea of taking out gigantic loans just to have the bank second-guess everything. Of the 220-k$ price tag, I already have 110 k$ of investments, and my brother has agreed to lend 40 k$ to me. While construction is ongoing, I expect to make up the remaining 70 k$ with my salary and (if absolutely necessary) a 35-k$ unsecured loan and my two 10-k$ credit cards.

(2) I drew up a rough design on my own, and then hired an architect to double-check the suitability of a few lots that I found on Zillow. The builder's in-house architect then made some small changes.

(3) I like insulation and heat pumps, and dislike closets and non-flat roofs.

(4) I bought the lot in February. I expect to get a construction schedule in the next week or two.

(5) The permit process has not yet started, but I don't expect much hassle. This lot does not have any environmental entanglements (such as a floodplain), and I certainly don't need any variances.

(6) (not applicable in Pennsylvania)

Re. 2, how did you draw up your own plans?

My rough designs generally were drawn on paper, in GIMP (at 1.5 in or 6 in (3.8 cm or 15.2 cm) per pixel), in QCAD, or (for full 3D) in OpenSCAD.

On building or remodelling, what I will say is that one of the absolute most visible parts of the work is the drywall/trim finishing. Most GCs sub this out, and most subs are horrible. Since this is close to the final stage of construction, it is hard to have the patience to make them do it right, but it is what you will notice every day even if the rest of the work is great. If a remodel, the drywall stage is an absolute nightmare due to the obscene amount of dust that low quality contractors create. I recommend stressing to GC that professional drywall finishers are a must.

Does this add a significant amount of cost?

I had bad drywall subs, so I am not sure. Theoretically, a high quality drywall crew would work faster (so not a big cost increase) and cleaner, but drywall is considered shitty entry level work so it is very hard to find a high quality crew.

But basically what happens is that the painters blame the trim (who blame the drywall) or drywall people who blame the framing (which cannot be redone), counting on you and GC to just run out of patience. GCs dont think drywall is real work, so they sub it out without much quality control. Also, at this stage the GC is counting money and will probably try to get some margin by cheaping out on drywall. Results are probably a lot better with new construction than remodel.

Good to know, thanks. It sounds like I'll just need to keep an extra close eye on the GC towards the end.

I don't even know what I don't know about building

You may want to buy a copy of the Architectural Graphic Standards for Residential Construction. It's a bit pricey, but absolutely comprehensive in terms of design.

Highly relevant is the International Residential Code. This link leads to the 2024 version. Your jurisdiction probably uses an older version, but you may still want to tell your builder to obey parts of the newest version. In particular, ch. 11 (Energy Efficiency) has undergone major changes recently, such as ยงยง N1102.1.3 (Insulation and Fenestration Criteria: R-Value Alternative) and N1108.1 (Additional Efficiency Requirements). Appendices NE (Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure) and NG (Energy Efficiency Stretch Code) may also be of interest to you.

International Property Maintenance Code ยง 404.5 (Overcrowding) also has some handy guidelines for design, and ICC A117.1 (Accessible and Usable Buildings and Facilities) ch. 11 (Dwelling Units and Sleeping Units) has information on the different levels of accessibility that you may want to meet in order to facilitate "aging in place".

t. in the process of getting a two-bedroom custom house built for 220 k$

Since this is the stupid question thread -- what should I hope to learn from those books? They appear to be reference books about regulations. Should I study them so I can keep my GC honest or double check his work?

What should I hope to learn from those books? They appear to be reference books about regulations.

The Architectural Graphic Standards include a lot of helpful guidelines and drawings in addition to regurgitation of (an old version of) the mandatory codes.

Reading the Architectural Graphic Standards and the codes enables you to draw up on your own a rough design on which the builder's architect has only to put minor finishing touches, rather than describing what you want to the builder's architect and having him draw up from scratch a design that probably will require a bunch of iteration.

Ah, okay! That's really useful, then. Lazy question, but how did you draw your designs? I'm pretty miserable with pencil and paper, and I imagine there are a million software tools for this sort of thing. Any in particular you liked?

Edit: I see you've already answered this here.

How did you draw your designs?

See response here.

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