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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4223 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 23, 2023

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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Probably a long shot, but has anyone here got a copy of the hpmor-affiliated song “Hermione’s Theme: Innocence”? It’s an instrumental piece uploaded to SoundCloud by a user called PurelySadistic. I recall listening to and enjoying it around 2015 or so. I think it might have been featured in the audiobook version of hpmor at some point, but it looks like song itself has completely disappeared from the internet. If anyone happened to download a copy of it and is willing to share I’d much appreciate it :)

is this it? used yandex (they maintain their own index, based, and probably filter copyright-infringing sites a bit less than google/bing), result 5 https://web.ligaudio.ru/mp3/hpmor%20%E2%80%94%20hermione%20theme%20is%20innocence

my 'process': try archive.org's audio section (nothing), then google (nothing), bing (nothing), yandex

It is! Thank you for digging this up!

I haven't heard the tune physically in a long time, so it's pretty interesting to note all the subtle ways in which the version in my head has drifted from the original. I was vaguely aware that Yandex had better results than US engines for e.g. piracy and culture-warrish topics, but it never occurred to me to use it to search for this song.

Yandex is censored regarding internal Russian politics, but for everything else, it's less censorious than the alternatives. This is a tip I picked up from Gwern's big page of tricks: https://gwern.net/search. Quite long, but I cannot overstress how worthwhile of a read it is for anybody who wants to do serious research online.

It's mentioned in the description of this youtube video which will presumably have dialog over it. https://youtube.com/watch?v=5HGJ05oSeYw

Good luck with your white whale.

Nailed my own a few years ago. When I was 15 or so, I downloaded this demo of a game called "Atomic Superball (The Chicken Edition)" and played the heck out of that thing. No idea how many hours. And then when I was 20 or so, it occurred to me: I could buy the actual game now.

Of course almost all traces of it had vanished. The website was still up but payment/delivery was non-functional, and no one ever responded to the email address.

More than a decade passed.

Still I thought about that game from time to time, and occasionally went digging for it. At long last, I found a couple of videos on vimeo or something of a dude playing with it. Commented asking if there were any chance he might still have his copy. Shared the story of how much I loved it and so on.

Surprise surprise, the actual creator of the game saw this and reached out to me. We talked about it back and forth over email for a while, and he was gracious enough to send me a copy.

It was... okay. The parts I liked from the demo were still awesome, but the rest of it, the levels, the unlockables, all that stuff, was kind of meh. After some soul-searching I decided to be honest with the guy about how I felt.

"Yeah," he said. "That's why we put that stuff in the demo."

Is the new season of Star Trek: Picard worth watching?

For the type of curmudgeonly old trekkie who had to stop watching Discovery after 1 season because it was genuinely too hurtful to see that done to something he loves, and has only experienced any of Picard through the noble sacrifice of the Red Letter Media reviews?

I stopped watching the RLM reviews halfway through this season because it seemed like it might actually end up worth watching the show, but the problem is now I can't check in to see their final verdict without having it spoiled.

Season 3 is at least as good as any of the TNG movies except First Contact (which is still miles better than any other parts of post-S7 canon). If they do a new generation show set in the 2400's (25th Century), this season will be required watching.

miles better than any other parts of post-S7 canon

"Sorry to disappoint you."

Sorry, I thought it was understood I was restricting myself to TNG canon: TNG movies 1, 3, 4, and seasons 1+2 of Picard. (Upon reflection, however, I’d put Generations above Picard S3.)

I haven't seen it all yet, but it's a sincere effort.

All of the new actors are at least trying to fit in, and it mostly works. Some of the character behaviour is bizzarre at times, and that can be very off-putting, but it isn't all the time. They manage to get some fire out of Patrick Stewart, and occasionally it comes at an appropriate time. The other TNG characters have done great.

Still has the problem of trying too hard to be something it isn't, and its underlying structure is still thin. But it hits the right notes consistently enough- it got me on the very first episode when it was riffing on The Wrath of Khan.

It isn't stellar (as far as I've seen, it isn't nearly as solid as SNW), but it isn't something that hates its audience or the art of storytelling, and it has some genuinely good moments with a much lower level of utter cringe than before.

Is SNW actually good? The few clips I've seen makes it seem like it would make you want to tear your eyes out.

It's quite good by the standards of modern Star Trek. Which is to say, compared to real Star Trek it's decent. It (mostly) steers away from being a thinly-veiled pretense for the writers to preach about their politics, the characters work well, and the format works well. I enjoyed it and will watch S2, and that's coming from someone who has hated the previous nuTrek shows.

It has the virtue of being a real show.

The characters work well together, they aren't pieces of paper who exist for the sole purpose of pouring out the writers' impoverished souls. It runs the gamut of (mildly) thought provoking to hilarious.

There's only one actor who seemed to come straight out of Discovery (had one episode and honestly wasn't bad), most of the rest displayed a shocking level of competence.

There's no silly plot points sending people on fetch quests (apart from maybe the doctor, but he gets better), no obnoxious mystery boxes.

It's filled with a warmth and thoughtfulness that can really pull one in. For a first season of a Trek, it gets top marks. It isn't perfect, but these people had fun working on something that had genuine merit, and it shows. I would recommend watching episode 2 first if you can't find much patience. Ahura's introduction is where it starts getting good.

Season 3 is watchable tbh. It's like night and day.

They liked it.

The new conflict that broke out in Sudan - anyone have a good low down on what is happening there, and why? Is this truly a proxy-war between the US and Russia (Rapid Support Forces being Russian proxy, I guess? And Sudan Armed Forces would be US allies..?), or is there something else to this?

Of course there is something else to it. Even a true "proxy war" is one in which the there is something else to it - a proxy war is one in which external powers each support one side, but that does not mean that the underlying conflict is not real.

If you are asking whether Russia encouraged the RSF to launch attacks, it is too soon to tell. And note that even if they did, there might be plenty of reasons that serves Russian interests, completely apart from great power rivalry.

Finally, there are other powers in the world other than great powers; regional powers have been far more involved in Sudan over the past several years than have great powers.

Why do we expect and encourage the unattractive to have relationships? Yes. Disabled and ugly people deserve a shot at happiness. But there's a hell of a lot of suffering and tragedy that goes on there, and it may well be imprudent to bring children into that. If you're a dude who is 5'4" the least-bad outcome you can reasonably expect is marrying a woman twice your weight and watching her wind up in a nursing home age 44 because she sprained her ankle and couldn't take care of herself after that. And it only gets worse from there: I've known short guys who were with women that were child abusers. Serious shit - as in 'attempted murder' serious. It's no better for unattractive women: there's rapists and abusers and shitbags aplenty. Single motherhood isn't nice either.

I honestly don't get it: if you're unattractive as hell, whether that's partially in your control or not, dating and relationships will suck for you unless you are genuinely exceptional. The only short guy I knew that did OK with dating was a neurosurgery resident with enough charisma for a career in politics. The autistic woman I'm friends with - an emergency-medicine resident in California - wound up enduring a couple relationships with predatory, abusive shitbags before finding a decent guy. Shit fucking sucks, and there's a good chance that the best you're going to get is going to be straight up tragic.

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How is this pint-size family remarkable? It is unusual as hell that these people are so small (I am slightly curious about their ethnicity, and where they are currently living). It is also unusual that they have found average partners. Like...are they all cultivating exceptional personalities starting in elementary school, mentored by their unusually charismatic pint-size parents? Who knows - maybe if these people were magically a foot taller they ought to start running for office and being a political family...honestly. I wonder if any of them are making a living off of being charismatic and really goddamn good at networking.

I would also honestly not be surprised if there was a no-bullshit genetic disorder - a mild one - running in their family. Hypochondroplasia or growth hormone deficiency or something like that.

I also wonder if there are some pint-sized guys in your extended family that are always single, and "focusing on their careers" or something like that...guys that weren't quite able to gain a politician's charisma and skill at networking. Maybe some mediocre-but-competent guys inherited their fathers' or uncles' networks and were able to find partners that way...guys who without that would've been single for life or nurses and purses.

if you're unattractive as hell, whether that's partially in your control or not, dating and relationships will suck for you unless you are genuinely exceptional

There are literally, and trivially, at least a million happy couples of bottom 10% attractiveness people in the united states. They are not difficult to find. I don't think happiness is the highest thing to shoot for in life, but your claims are facially falsified by even superficial engagement with your surroundings, whether that be a population statistics database or your local church.

I mean...I have seen a few? But quite a lot of them have lots of problems caused by what's causing the unattractiveness. I know a woman who had a stroke at 27; she's about 300 pounds. She's doing OK, but her boyfriend had to help her recover early on. If you're very unattractive, you're going to be dealing with hospitals and health problems if lucky, jail and rehab if not.

Most obese people aren't 300 pounds, afaik, (the obesity cutoff for female heights is <= 200 lbs) and most don't have strokes at 27. And even if both partners have serious health problems, one being able to care for the other when one is weaker and the other is stronger seems like an improvement on being alone?

This is poor health (obesity in this case) you're confounding with whatever other set of metrics you're using to define "unattractive" (shortness of stature also appears to be loading strongly on your own scale of undesirable traits, at least for men.)

Hmm. Poor health IS a form of unattractiveness, more or less. There are forms of unattractiveness that are mostly cosmetic (short stature if male, burn victim, unfortunate facial appearance) and there are ways to be unattractive through poor health (such as schizophrenia, other disability, morbid obesity). All of these make people less desirable for partners.

I also believe that there is a small but significant chunk of the population that is extremely unattractive, often for reasons beyond their control, that we do not see much after high school. The disabled. The mentally retarded. Whatever you call the population of people that are frequent flyers in psych ERs or regular ERs for overdoses or suicide attempts. The institutionalized, more or less. Those people are out of sight and hidden from public view. It's not just me that's saying this...Fussell was saying it in the 80s, talking about the "bottom out-of-sight" class.

If you're a dude who is 5'4" the least-bad outcome you can reasonably expect is marrying a woman twice your weight and watching her wind up in a nursing home age 44 because she sprained her ankle and couldn't take care of herself after that. And it only gets worse from there: I've known short guys who were with women that were child abusers. Serious shit - as in 'attempted murder' serious.

This is utter bullshit. I'm not telling you my height, but just in case you think I am speaking from personal experience as some kind of statistical outlier, I have known many short dudes who do just fine in the dating department, and have happy relationships. Yes, their dating pool is more limited because a lot of women will automatically swipe left on a 5'4" guy, but the number of women who won't (and who are not landwhales or child abusers) is not that tiny.

I gotta be honest, you sound like a fellow I was following on YouTube for a while (because I have terrible taste and I like watching trainwrecks.) He's an incel who wasn't even short, but he was overweight and utterly convinced that he was so ugly that "he got fucked over by genetics" and thus had no hope of a happy relationship with a non-hideous woman. (He wasn't hideous - he wasn't particularly handsome, but losing some weight and cleaning up a bit would certainly have made him presentable enough to get dates.) And his videos were mostly rants just like yours: "If you are fucked over by genetics (like me), the best you can ever hope for is a 3 or less or a hooker, and we should stop lying to kids and just tell that short/ugly 14-year-old boy that he's never, ever going to have a girlfriend."

He deleted his channel in a burst of tears (literally) because even his fellow incels started telling him to quit whining.

I mean...I might have been a bit too focused on the male side of things. But from what I have seen from my unattractive female friends...it is NOT any better for them. Did I tell you about my autistic friends that were raped by assholes and wound up in abusive relationships? About the friend I had who was burned in a house fire when she was three and only got guys that wanted one thing, and then with a bag over her head? Yes, she found a boyfriend, eventually. Then they broke up. I don't know whether dude was a sack of shit or not, but she hasn't dated since that guy, and that was about five years ago.

As for the short man who wound up with the abusive shitbag wife: he was no chump. The wife was decent-looking. OK exterior, garbage interior. I shit you not: he was a colonel in the army, spoke four languages fluently. Special Forces, too. You don't get to become a special forces officer while being a lazy chump or being socially incompetent, do you?

I might be rambling here. But I sincerely believe that there is a small but decent number of men and women that aren't good candidates for relationships. Some people have schizophrenia, some are disabled, some are alcoholics, some are abusive shitbags. Some of this is under people's control, but some is not.

I have known many short dudes who do just fine in the dating department, and have happy relationships. Yes, their dating pool is more limited because a lot of women will automatically swipe left on a 5'4" guy, but the number of women who won't (and who are not landwhales or child abusers) is not that tiny.

What is remarkable about these guys? I do know one short guy who's doing OK for himself: he's going to be a neurosurgeon and has enough charisma for a career in politics. The short guys I know that are medical students or residents and aren't going into neurosurgery are "focused on their careers"; internal medicine, family med, and emergency room ain't up to snuff if you're 5'4". Now. I do not see anything whatsoever wrong with this. A class of people chosen essentially by lot for celibate roles...maybe ones that do not mesh well with family...does not seem like a bad thing at all. That short 14yo boy might hit the books harder or learn to have a politician's charisma if people stopped telling him there was someone for everyone, not "My dude, your small ass has an Everest-size mountain to climb. And that's on a good day. If you want a decent partner, you're going to have to work your ass off and even then it's not nearly as likely as your taller friends. I understand if you choose not to date; there's ways you can be useful without having a partner, marriage, or kids."

We should stop lying to bullshitting kids, and just tell that short/ugly 14yo boy that he should probably be celibate for life for the greater good, as the partners he can get will probably be worse than being alone - unless he likes lights, sirens, and either hospitals or cops in his life. Life ain't fair, and we probably could use some more celibate life paths. Like...it's not about just cosmetic ugliness. It's about things like nursing and caretaking. It's about lights and sirens and traumatized kids. About nursing homes for 45-year-olds and strokes and what most would consider tragedy.

I might be rambling here. But I sincerely believe that there is a small but decent number of men and women that aren't good candidates for relationships. Some people have schizophrenia, some are disabled, some are alcoholics, some are abusive shitbags. Some of this is under people's control, but some is not.

That is certainly true, but I think being short or even unattractive (for men) is only a small contributing factor, if any. Being fat and unattractive is a pretty big disqualifier for women, but even there, I know a lot of fat, unattractive women, and very few of them stay alone forever.

What is remarkable about these guys?

Nothing at all. That's my point.

Being short, fat, ugly, etc., means your dating pool is smaller, and thus being patient (and capitalizing on what you do have) is more important. And no, you probably can't pull a 10. It doesn't make you unfuckable.

I do not believe you that you know a bunch of 5'4" doctors who can't get dates. Maybe they can't get dates with the hottest, tallest nurses in the hospital.

We should stop lying to bullshitting kids, and just tell that short/ugly 14yo boy that he should probably be celibate for life for the greater good

No, telling him that would be lying to him, and projecting your own issues onto a kid in a cruelly abusive way.

I don't know what your personal experience has been, but maybe you need to get out more, because my personal observation is that even short, ugly dudes and fat, ugly women do in fact find someone more often than not, and no, it's not only by settling for the dregs.

I do not believe you that you know a bunch of 5'4" doctors who can't get dates. Maybe they can't get dates with the hottest, tallest nurses in the hospital.

I know them personally. I live with one. They can't get dates with anyone that is not morbidly obese. Now. These are residents, not attendings; maybe that changes something.

Fat women often find partners, I'll agree. Short guys? My sample size is...eight or nine. Only one guy was with someone that was sane and not morbidly obese. The SF colonel and ER resident wasn't part of that group Only the future neurosurgeon with politician tier charisma pulled it off at 5'4". You need to be able to do something as demanding and lucrative as brain surgery AND have top 1 percent charisma...just being hardworking and determined enough to learn four languages and become a Green Beret and colonel in the Army ain't enough. You need that million a year or at least to be on track to it.

I know them personally. I live with one. They can't get dates with anyone that is not morbidly obese. Now. These are residents, not attendings; maybe that changes something.

I don't believe you. Sorry. I don't know what his standards are, if he has personality problems, or if he's rejecting anyone who isn't supermodel hot, but assuming he's setting his sights realistically (that does not mean "settling for morbidly obese women"), he is doing something very wrong if he's an otherwise eligible doctor whose sole drawback is being short.

I absolutely know 5'4" guys who are just average dudes who are married to decent women, and your 8 or 9 short guys you know personally, including Special Forces colonels and doctors, who literally can't get dates read like incel fan fiction to me.

The SF colonel could get dates. He just wound up making a terrible choice of wife. I don't know if he settled or not; I honestly think that the colonel got fooled by her when he was just a first lieutenant. The short docs? Yeah - they are "focused on their careers". Some are kind of quiet. One is an outdoorsy Asian guy that loves hiking and kayaking.

What does "setting his sights realistically" look like for a 5'4" doctor, if not being OK with someone who's morbidly obese...but still able to fit in seats, drive a car, hold a job and all that? Like...a BMI of 42, not 75. 75 is a sprained ankle from being bedbound or being in a nursing home. 42 is not. I'll give you that one of these docs turned down a single mom who was pretty attractive (and also sane); maybe that is genuinely having standards that are unrealistically high.

For what it's worth, only like three or four of the short dudes are doctors. Two, I shit you not, look like Greek godlets. They could compete in physique bodybuilding competitions, and one of them did. These godlets are with morbidly obese women. One's a personal trainer, another works as a lab tech. Another two short dudes are strong like bulls and built like fire hydrants. 5'5", around a buck seventy. I don't want to give out too much identifying information, but let's just say these guys are excellent powerlifters, deadlifting more than 500 pounds. I've seen video footage of their lifts. They do quite well for themselves at powerlifting meets. The bull-strong little guys work in IT; didn't go to college. Make OK money.

I am not shitting you. I have seen these dudes with my own eyes.

The SF colonel could get dates. He just wound up making a terrible choice of wife.

Okay. Lots of guys make terrible choices like that. Has nothing to do with height or attractiveness.

I'll give you that one of these docs turned down a single mom who was pretty attractive (and also sane); maybe that is genuinely having standards that are unrealistically high.

I mean, not wanting to date single mothers because you aren't ready to help raise someone else's kids isn't an unreasonable preference either. But if he could get a "reasonably attractive, sane" woman whose only drawback is that she had kids, then clearly he also was not undateable.

They could compete in physique bodybuilding competitions, and one of them did. These godlets are with morbidly obese women.

Maybe they actually like these women? I mean, did they tell you they settled because they couldn't do better?

All I can say is, if your stories are true, you live in a very strange bubble.

They didn't tell me that they settled; that being said...I only know one short dude that's with a partner that's sane and not morbidly obese. The charismatic future neurosurgeon.

What the hell would cause an autistic med student to live in a strange bubble like this? Like...what would somehow repel successful short guys from his orbit...while allowing taller successful guys to pass through? Shit's weird.

Ignoring the strangely binary classification you present, it is true that there are people for whom anything in life will be much harder than for others, through no fault of their own. I don’t think we should lie to them, but is it not the most noble expression of the human spirit to strive to overcome our own limitations?

Is it not better to want to succed as Nick Vujicic has than to be a basement-dwelling NEET? Would it be a better world if no one other than Usain Bolt ran track or no one other than Elon Musk tried to start their own company? Do we not respect people more who earned what they have through the sweat of their brow rather than had everything handed to them on a silver platter?

would it be a better world if no one other than Usain Bolt rain track or no one other than Elon Musk tried to start their own company

Hmm. I mean. Running track is fine, but 99 percent of people aren’t ever going to make a living at it. Most high-school sprinters, even hardworking ones, don’t even get college scholarships out of it. Track’s fine, but don’t hang your hat on it. As for starting companies…some people shouldn’t even try it, it’s risky and a bad idea for them.

There’s a lot of variation in ‘relationship outcomes’ and I think there are a sizable number of people who simply do not make good partners. It’s like…the US Army doesn’t take people in the bottom 15 percent of IQ, because they can’t even make them into good cooks or something. There’s a similar phenomenon for relationships…something like social IQ or something like this.

I think he’s a bit extreme, but he has a point. And it’s not just that they’re going to suck at dating or whatever, but that we as a society for whatever reason in most aspects of life oversell it, and while most of us get it quickly, for those with deficits, it can be extremely frustrating because you’re told it’s possible when it’s not. We tell kids who can barely do high school math that they can get rich doing something they love. Probably not true. A LD kid especially as we move into an AI world is probably going to be doing menial labor for very low wages. An autistic kid is told that he can date a good looking, well adjusted woman when realistically, no he won’t. Americans just seem to have a problem in general admitting that not everyone can have a good life.

I mean, fundamentally it isn't the job of society as a whole to give people this advice because society includes groups of people who need to hear contradictory things. People who are too assertive need to be told to be quiet and people who are too shy need to be told to assert themselves, people who are smart but lazy need to be told to buckle down and study engineering and medicine and people who are too dumb to master such subjects should be discouraged from going into STEM, etc. It should be the responsibility of one's parents, other relatives, and friends to give such targeted advice in private, but I would agree that among all the peoples in the world Americans seem uniquely unable to do so.

One cynical answer is that someone is going to have to have to do the dissuading, and most people see that as too cruel an act to want to engage in themselves. Another cynical reason is that keeping people oriented in a hopeful direction is much better for society than whatever the pit of inceldom will produce (though there are some good critiques of society in that sphere).

And non-cynically, young men have a tendency to fall into despair that doesn't reflect the real difficulty of their situation (though for sure things are more difficult than they used to be) but they tend to grow out of this with age, and maybe some encouragement is going to help them to do that.

I mean...the problem is kind of a lack of meaning. Keeping some poor short bastard grasping for a brass ring he cannot reach is also not the best thing, when he comes to believe - rightly or not - that it was all just bullshit.

Become remarkable, or decide where you want the ambulances - if you want a partner at all.

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I think the bar for "only possible relationships are so bad it's better to be single" isn't so high it covers the merely ugly.

Short men and ugly men have a hard time, certainly, and I'm grateful that even if I'm average in terms of looks, I'm tall and get by there, but you'd have to look for some really shitty partners to end up in those straits.

And since you're presumably talking about Western uggos, they've always got the option of saving up and visiting a third world destination like Thailand or the Phillipines to pick up a new bride, or mail order them in if that's still a thing.

It would take being short+ugly+uncharismatic+poor+ill for a person to probably end up entirely with options worse than being single.

Couldn't ugly but not literal child murderer men get with ugly but not literal child murderer women? Senseless cruelty, height and facial beauty are not on some shared axis where you get one or the other.

Yeah - short guys looking like Greek Gods can get with women two or three times their weight. Enjoy being 48 and having a 450lb wife that is a sprained ankle away from a nursing home. That might be the least-bad option, and 'we will choose some men by lot to be a kind of insurance plus nurses and caretakers' doesn't seem terrible. I don't know why you would want to raise kids in that kind of dysfunction, but maybe it is not really that bad. I've known decent people raised by shitbag parents, and watching Dad go buy a mobility scooter and extra-large van might not be too bad.

Women send love letters to literal child murderer men all the time (this applies to most serial killers that make the news, for that matter); that whole "life without parole" thing kind of gets in the way of the conjugal visits, though.

Women send love letters to literal child murderer men all the time

Phrased like this it sounds like this is a hobby for most women.

People rarely mention the loads of letters non-serial killer celebrities get in the same breath, too.

Almost as though there were an obvious implication that, according to common understanding, serial killers ought to be exceptional in some sort of way that other celebrities are not.

No one is encoraging them. They just happen to get relationships through market sorting mechanisms. Revealed preference yada yada.

Its like why do shitty products exist? Well because some people buy them. And some products are shitty enough to be a pain to use.

Other "products" are worse than useless and only bought by fools and the desperate. They're chinesium at best and death traps at worst.

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The child survived, for what it was worth, with no lasting physical injury. They're gainfully employed and have a clean record. Yes, there are ugly people with good hearts. Yes, some people are in and out of institutions through absolutely no fault whatsoever of their own. Do you want a partner who has some kind of terrible autoimmune disease that means that they will never live independently or hold a job? That, too, is tragic; that is no one's fault. Upthread, someone compared it to driving. You might be a terrible driver because you like to get hammered and do 100mph down residential streets. You might also never be a good driver because you had the bad luck to be born blind or epileptic.

Simply being ugly is one thing. Being in and out of some kind of institution or other is quite another. Where do you want the ambulances?

Why do we expect and encourage the unattractive to have relationships?

It's a basic human need. It's also tied to other basic human goods (e.g. more social links tend to buffer people against swings in fortune, depression and a lack of life satisfaction). The assumption is strongly held that You can't get rid of it, it's why we're here.

Also, to be more cynical, people don't say this (even if they think it) because it implicitly carries the message that you see such societal dregs as less-than. I've never heard a well-adjusted male be told to give up or to perform some ubermensch-like act of will and dispel their desire for companionship. Even the women who say it are usually playacting. It would be alienating to the person. Might as well say the polite thing -"there's someone for everyone" - and let them sink or swim on their own.

I honestly don't get it: if you're unattractive as hell, whether that's partially in your control or not, dating and relationships will suck for you unless you are genuinely exceptional

So what? If you're not a genius working will involve some level of hardship. Does that mean you shouldn't work?

Also: there's no reason why you should exist on the same package as an "exceptional" person? Nobody would buy or be happy in a house if that was the metric.

I've never heard a well-adjusted male be told to give up or to perform some ubermensch-like act of will and dispel their desire for companionship.

Perhaps I was a maladjusted college student. But I was told - in college, by a man who I considered a friend - that it was best if I never had a partner; he believed that all I could get was basically prostitution on a long-term contract. I've had other friends tell me similar things. I understand desexualization. I understand the idea that some people are just shit partners and garbage in, garbage out.

Also: there's no reason why you should exist on the same package as an "exceptional" person? Nobody would buy or be happy in a house if that was the metric.

No. But if your choice is between living in a tent in the woods, and living in a house that's fucking rotting and condemned, full of rats and black mold...the tent seems like the better option.

It might be a basic human need...but is it better to be alone, or to marry and have children...only to find that your wife tried to kill one of them? Or to be with an abusive alcoholic? All of these things suck: are relationships truly the least bad option here?

Who does not work, does not eat. I suppose you could argue that some people are destined to work extremely dangerous jobs out of pure desperation and run very high risks of being killed and maimed, and that's better than nothing.

It might be a basic human need...but is it better to be alone, or to marry and have children...only to find that your wife tried to kill one of them? Or to be with an abusive alcoholic? All of these things suck: are relationships truly the least bad option here?

Obviously most people don't go into it and get that binary choice between a potential relationship and a baby killer. You might as well ask if it's worth driving if a semi might crumple your vehicle.

And, yes, our psychology is tilted such that we are broadly driven to downplaying those risks (some of which, like matricide, are relatively small here) and driven to be less satisfied with a parlous social network. Precisely because the benefits are manifold.'

I mean. The case of someone that is very unattractive attempting a relationship is like someone who is in the bottom few percent of driving performance considering driving. It may not make sense for them to do so - the risk of accidents is simply too great. With driving...we don't let blind people drive, we don't let people with more than a certain level of visual impairment drive, we don't let people with seizure disorders drive, we make people pass basic tests of roadworthiness before getting their license. "Don't suck donkey balls, or have a condition that means you're going to suck donkey balls, and you can and probably should drive a car."

You're assuming there's a correlation between how good looking someone is and how they are in a relationship. I could just as easily make the argument that attractive people are horrible partners because they never have to work for it and just assume the companionship of other people. Hence, attractive people are all self-centered jerks. Unattractive people, meanwhile, have to have great personalities to compensate for physical defects, so unless all you're interested in is sex you're better off with someone from the bottom of the looks distribution. It's not for nothing that Jimmy Soul sang back in 1963:

If you want to be happy for the rest of your life

Never make a pretty woman your wife

So for my personal point of view

Get an ugly girl to marry you

In all honesty I doubt there's any real difference

I mean it is more than just looks. Are you better off being a nurse and caretaker for your partner? What if they're unattractive because they're homeless and addicted to meth or some shit like that? If they're living on the street because they've got florid, untreated schizophrenia? It's not just unfortunate people that are still capable of working jobs and living independently. It's the 500 pound person in the mobility scooter. The paralyzed man with cerebral palsy that says he's going to kill himself because of despair at his homelessness, and winds up in the local psych ward five times a year. The really unattractive people? They're either at home or in institutions of one type or another. They're Fussell's bottom-out-of-sight people.

It's not just looks - many people would be very happy with someone who had a facial deformity but could work a job, any job, and live independently. It's about the goddamn ambulances and other institutions. It's about watching someone die, possibly to avoidable things like addiction, and being powerless to prevent that.

Getting beat up by the ugly stick is a very different kettle of fish to needing a nurse and caretaker. For the gentlemen: they are indeed looking down the barrel of a life of nursing and caretaking if they want partners. And that is the best many will do. For the ladies, it's even worse.

Surely the number of ugly-but-not-violent/requiring-a-nurse males and females is roughly equal? Can't the ugly dudes just find a nice homely girl and settle down?

Surely the number of ugly-but-not-violent/requiring-a-nurse males and females is roughly equal?

No - women have more central tendency. Guys have more champs and way more chumps. Unattractiveness ain't just looks. It can be 'being a criminal shitbag', 'being a drug addict', 'being autistic', or any number of things that are more common for dudes.

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This is almost certainly not true actually. Females have a roughly standard distribution in most traits, where most are about average. Males have a bimodalish, flattened distribution, where most males are either above or below average. Because of this, there are more men at either extreme. The peaks of humanity, and the dregs of it, are something like 10:1 male:female.

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This underestimates the value of patient persistence in finding a suitable mate.

I think real despair and frustration can be mitigated by simply giving less attractive folks realistic expectations.

"Realistic expectations" means "Become exceptional, or decide where you want the ambulances". It means figuring out how to be OK with either experiencing terrible shit, or watching terrible shit happen - maybe preventable - and being unable to do anything about it. It is a hell of a thing to expect a woman to be OK with winding up with abusive rapists a few times as she learns how to date. It isn't quite as bad (but still bad) to expect guys to be OK watching their partners slowly kill themselves - and that's one of the better outcomes. Imagine coming home to find out that your wife's tried to strangle your nine-year-old son. Do you think that this causes any less despair?

More of a Friday Fun post, aside from my minor questions, but here are some updates on the mining:

Winter slowed things down, but I now have a shaker table, a jaw crusher, a propane furnace, a non-functional ball-mill, a 55-gallon drum of sulfuric acid, and a ramshackle shack.

First concentration runs with the table were interesting, but not particularly good. Managing angle and flow across the table is harder than I expected, and I seem to have lost about as much good material as I got. Regardless, I ended up with some buckets of concentrates to play with which will hopefully inform me what's in the rock or extractable.

Acid leaching is honestly shockingly simple and easy. I've got blue crystals containing copper and other metals now, and was able to melt them into small nuggets of a pinkish copper/silver/gold mix, with swirls of color throughout. Biggest issue would be scale. Doing it in small trays is easy, but IDK if I'd want to deal with larger amounts of acid. Does anyone know if there's a market for small irregularly shaped blobs of metal, maybe as a craft thing?

As I progress, I'm becoming increasingly aware of the daunting task of metal extraction that's coming up. I can get some basic amount of mixed metal blocks by furnacing, but actually separating the different metals is much more chemistry than I'd like to have on my hands. Which brings me to my main question: does anyone here have knowledge or experience shipping concentrates to a refinery? If I could simply do the concentration as I have been, either through acid or crushing and tabling, and then sell it to the professionals, I'd be sitting pretty. I've been away from polite society for a good while, so I've been putting off sending emails. Maybe ChatGPT can help.

I'd try to find a blacksmith making trinkets on YouTube. Then form a partnership where you make videos on metal extraction, he makes videos on making trinkets out of blobs of metal, then you sell the results on Etsy or something.

There's more of a market for videos of interesting hobbies than for blobs of metal. You could even just make keychains or something yourself and sell those as merch.

You'll never be competitive on price compared to metals produced on an industrial scale. However the process sounds interesting to watch.

That shit is beyond me or anyone I know.

The only thing I've seen is a furnace version of a fractional still in the boondocks of central America; where they would melt down scrap and pour off whatever floated to the top till they ended up with something approximating iron.

I was wondering about you. Glad to hear that you got a shaker table setup going. I have no further suggestions but I'm pleased to see the update.

This is in between Small Scale Sunday and Friday Fun...

Refuse to pay for Twitter has become a culture war signal there. Even going so far as the #BlockTheBlue hashtag.

Elon appears to be trolling prominent accounts by giving them free blue checkmarks.

It's quite amusing.

Dril has been going nuclear in response, last time I checked he'd finally shed the blue, and was implying Elon was a pedo. I guess that's one way of ensuring Elon loses interest!

Ah, this suddenly makes a lot more sense. I thought it was some form of sarcasm I wasn't getting.

Also, unless there really are so many people who bought a twitter subscription, Nitter seems to have joined the culture war by giving the checkmark to literally every account. It's a bit annoying. I'd prefer it if they just took it away from everybody because the damn thing is distracting.

I'm also starting to be surprised how much Elon can dick around with Twitter without it having much of an impact on the company / platform. I mean, I always thought their monopoly position gives them a lot of leeway, but my eyebrows are beginning to rise at just how far he can push it with seemingly no repercussions.

I'm also starting to be surprised how much Elon can dick around with Twitter without it having much of an impact on the company / platform

I'm not. Woke Twitter tried to make a break for it but the network effect pulled them right back in, especially because (apart from things like this) they were never actually banned from the service nor did their ability to enjoy its platform degrade ("I had to see an opinion I didn't like" is a fake complaint). Elon seems to have predicted (correctly, in my opinion) that the modern public square is enclosed simply by the apathy of said public.

It's not like Tumblr (and soon Imgur) where they basically banned everything worthwhile about their service, and it's not like the Digg to Reddit migration (or the larger phpBB to Reddit migration) because the Mastodon mesh is strictly worse than Twitter (ActivityPub is a fundamentally flawed system due to the way it prioritizes operators over users, it's difficult for even technical people to understand, and the clients are still garbage).

Update: after a day of browsing I finally ran into a bunch of accounts with no checkmark, so it's not nitter. Probably not a representative sample, but Jesus, it looks like Elon is making bank off this.

Who's behind those really weird Facebook recipe videos? The ones that always start with some sort of (even beyond) innuendo, and then are just insane? Cabbage stuffed with ground beef wrapped with bacon, with a "cheese cream" (not cream cheese!), heavy cream, and pickle sauce, for instance. Aside from the use of non-American names for things (afore-mentioned cheese cream), all I can tell is that they use grams with ounces in parentheses.

Eastern European "content" farms. Freddie deBoer had an article about the overoptimized for virality content enviorment we are in with short form videos. And a video doesnt need to make to make sense for it to go viral. What boggles the mind is who is watching and sharing this nonsense though, I know it happens its self evident but i cant comprehend the sheer mass of subhumans who derive "entertainment" from this shit.

There was an Economist article about this sort of thing a while back: https://www.economist.com/1843/2022/07/28/hocus-focus-how-magicians-made-a-fortune-on-facebook

In summary: Weird stuff gets people to watch long enough for an advertisement to play, which earns the creators money. Weird stuff also gets people to comment, which increases reach in the algorithms.

I think they’re LLM generated, bout a month ago one went viral because it’s hilarious.

These videos have existed long before LLMs. Just because LLMs are the hot thing right now doesnt mean they have to be shoehorned into every discussion, in less annoyed terms dont fall for the Bader Meinhoff effect.

I genuinely had never seen a fake or ridiculous recipe before seeing a chatgpt generated one about a month ago. I know it was chatgpt because the poster explicitly called it out.

Just because there’s some fancy psychological effect about it doesn’t discount my anecdote, sirrah.

Huh. I distinctly remember thinking the “life hack” videos were sufficiently alien to be AI.

The sticking point, of course, was always the video itself. Someone went to the trouble to film these cursed life hacks, regardless of whether it was a human or an AI churning out scripts. Insert usual doomerism about plausible fake footage, now.

Looks like it's possible to monetize Facebook reels if you're popular. So I'd guess it's people from poorer countries trying to make videos just weird enough to keep people watching.

There's also a trend of making troll cooking videos for lulz.

Although that recipe doesn't sound that crazy from your description.

What makes cabbage rolls insane? Or do you mean that they hollow out a cabbage head and fill it with stuff, kind of like a bread bowl?

Cabbage stuffed with ground beef wrapped with bacon, with a "cheese cream" (not cream cheese!), heavy cream, and pickle sauce, for instance.

Yeah, are cabbage rolls somehow unfamiliar to Americans? It's a pretty normal Finnish recipe, I haven't heard of people using cream cheese and pickle sauce in them but sounds like a pretty logical modification tbh.

I'm from Pittsburgh and they're definitely not unfamiliar in areas that have historically had heavy Eastern European immigration; they're occasionally called "Hunky Hand Grenades" and are a staple of weddings, graduations, communions, or any other large gathering. I can understand, though, that someone from the South or West might not be familiar with them since they don't seem to have had the same level of penetration as, say, Italian food, though I'm sure I'd be surprised on that front as well.

But it's hardly only those places that eat cabbage rolls though. Its common in northern and south eastern Europe as well, in addition to Asia and the middle east.

Surely people have at least had steamed cabbage rolls at a Chinese buffet at some point?

Just seeing this now, but some things just don't have the penetration you'd expect. For instance, in Pittsburgh, Italian bread is a grocery staple. I rarely buy anything other than Italian bread, unless it's rye or something. Every grocery store large enough to have a bakery has fresh, unsliced loaves made the same day, even national chains like Wal-Mart (where it's attractively priced at a buck and a half). The deli has the local brands that some people swear by, Cellone's and Mancini's, and even the bread aisle has inferior but still acceptable mass-market versions from Nickles and Schwebel's. Then a couple years ago friends who had moved to North Carolina some years prior were visiting and mentioned how they needed to grab a loaf of Italian bread before they left. Apparently, the stuff is virtually unheard of in the South, even in major metros like Charlotte, and it's not the kind of thing that lends itself to ordering online. Even Schwebel's and Nickles, which I had long assumed were major national brands based on the volume they sell here, are evidently only regional. All kinds of stuff you'd think other people would know about, they just don't know about.

Since most American parties feature a meal there isn't as much of an emphasis on heavy appetizers as there may be in other places. The only real universal appetizers that a host is more or less expected to provide are light stuff like potato chips, peanuts, pretzels, etc. The two big deli items that are available pretty much everywhere (or at least everywhere in Western Pennsylvania; see above) are the Gibson Tray and the Veggie Tray. The Gibson Tray isn't usually called as such but that's what the deli labels it as so I'll go with that. It's a platter with cheese, crackers, and cured meats, usually salami and pepperoni in store-bought versions but homemade ones in Pittsburgh usually have kielbasa (pronounced kabossy by any true mill hunky), along with mustard for dipping (usually spicy brown mustard but honey mustard and sweeter "dipping" mustards are also common). The veggie tray is self-explanatory and is served with ranch dressing or something similar. Shrimp cocktail is also popular but its expense makes it less common, though it's available pretty much everywhere. In the past ten years buffalo chicken dip has become a standard item, but it's always homemade and thus not something you can just grab at a grocery store. In fact, lots of other appetizers are pretty common to see, it's just that people make them themselves rather than buy them. If in a real pinch you can always pick up tortilla chips and salsa or guacamole.

Cabbage rolls are the sort of thing people in the south are familiar with but consider exotic.

I wouldn't say they're unfamiliar, but cabbage rolls are uncommon outside southeaster meat + 3s.

Largely, Americans consider themselves "above" cabbage which is crazy cause it's so cheap.

Not to mention incredibly tasty.

On October 25, 2020, I tried my hand at the prediction game, registering a prediction elsewhere:

Supposing that Joe Biden is unambiguously held by the mainstream media to have won the 2020 election, Donald Trump will accept his defeat by December 7, 2020, and will leave the White House on January 20, 2021, with 96% probability.

It had been clear by then that the election results would be a mess, but I'd been strongly convinced by the narrative that Trump would make a ruckus for a few weeks to appease his supporters, then lie low until he runs in 2024. Needless to say, I was very surprised when he kept contesting the results well past the Electoral College vote in December; I accepted its legitimacy as coming directly from the Constitution, and I'd thought Trump would similarly respect it. I suppose he simply isn't as much of a traditionalist as I'd judged him to be, given MAGA and all that.

Anyway, being disillusioned, I stopped keeping track of anything Trump-related after January 2021. But given that he apparently intends to run again, does anyone have any good, informative summaries of what he's been up to since then?

I believe he's been posting mostly on the social media Truth Social where he's been growing even more deranged. It seems like you need an account to view posts there so I don't know exactly what he's been doing except for screenshots.

then lie low until he runs in 2024. Needless to say, I was very surprised when he kept contesting the results well past the Electoral College vote in December;

He left the Whitehouse without incident on January 20, so he upheld the Constitution in that sense, where it mattered most. The whole 'election was stolen' narrative was to embolden supporters, raise funds. There is nothing inherently unconstitutional about believing the election was stolen or contesting the results.

What is the most gene determinant that evolutionary psychologists have went with human behavior?

When thinking about my dog and dogs before her, I’m just struck by how affixed their behaviors are by genes. Not just aggression and desire to socialize, but their needs for physical activity, the particular ways they like to exercise, what they like to do outside.

Then I think about myself. Could human genes be so determinant? Do humans have an essentially fixed type or category of activity that they must do to be happy, which is informed by their ancestral background? And I just wonder how specific these could be. Should farmer ancestors spend more time around dirt and animals? Do those who have musical genes need to be musical to be fully happy? Etc. How specific are these gene-determined affinities?

Do those who have musical genes need to be musical to be fully happy?

IME yes.

I dimly recall that people do better eating ancestral diets, i.e. Asians are healthier eating rice and Europeans on wheat.

Other than that, I can't think of anything that doesn't generalize to * all* humans, such as a need for socialization.

For a trivial example, human infant behavior in the first hour after birth seems pretty strongly genetically determined. Pretty much all healthy infants do the same things in the same order (see table 1 here).

See also the field of evolutionary aesthetics:

When young human children from different nations are asked to select which landscape they prefer, from a selection of standardized landscape photographs, there is a strong preference for savannas with trees [...] There is also a preference for landscapes with water, with both open and wooded areas, with trees with branches at a suitable height for climbing and taking foods, with features encouraging exploration such as a path or river curving out of view, with seen or implied game animals, and with some clouds.

That's a very specific type of landscape, and it does in fact seem to be pretty tied to our genetics.

What’s up with Tyler v. Hennepin County?

Next week, SCOTUS is hearing a case from Minnesota. The county foreclosed on a home with $15,000 in tax debt. It made $40,000 from the sale and kept all of it as a windfall in accordance with state law. The 94-year-old owner sued on takings clause (and due process, and 8th amendment) grounds.

The district court dismissed all claims. The circuit court affirmed. What gives?

It feels like there should be protections against the state profiting off the difference from tax debt and market value. Is this just one of those situations where it turns out there are no rights? Am I missing something?

It feels like there should be protections against the state profiting off the difference from tax debt and market value.

To further put a point on what I said below, the amount the state realized for the property was likely far below the actual market value of the property due to the circumstances under which delinquent properties are necessarily sold. First of all, the only liens guaranteed to be cleared are property tax liens, and the title is uninsurable, so unless you have the time and skills necessary to do your own research you run the risk buying the property and then finding out that there's a mortgage attached to it for another $50,000 that the bank hadn't foreclosed on yet for one reason or another and if you don't pay it off in cash right now the bank will foreclose on it and you'll lose it. You can't inspect the property prior to purchase so you run the risk of serious damage. You can't get it financed so the pool of prospective buyers is limited to those who have the requisite cash. And I mean cash because they don't accept personal checks (though it is common to get a bunch of $500 cashier's checks and use those like $500 bills). Due to some redemption rules you can do all the work to prepare to buy the property you're interested in only to find out on the day of the auction that the property has been redeemed and won't be up for bid. Under others you may buy the property at auction but have to wait three years to take possession while you wait to see if it gets redeemed. And once you get title to the property you may have to file a separate ejection action if the prior owner refuses to vacate the premises.

I’ve got family in the foreclosure business and can confirm that there is a significant discount. Plus significant additional labor in ejection or making use of the property, which is the whole reason the state outsourced to the private market.

I was also thinking about an extreme case where the state forecloses based on a small fraction of the property’s value. If the state got it for (hypothetical) $1, there’s no reason they should have to play realtor only to hand a surplus back to the previous owner.

So yes, I’m fairly convinced at this point.

In the linked decision, § I lays out the background, and § II.C.1 explains the important part of the reasoning. tl;dr:

The government gave to the property owner three years of notice prior to the seizure, and even would have permitted her to buy back the 40-k$ condominium for the 15-k$ amount of the debt (with a lump sum or with an installment plan) during the four months between the seizure and the sale. But she failed to avail herself of those options (clearly communicated by personal service), and she has not presented any evidence that she was unable to do so. In that context, there is no unconstitutional taking.

[T]he United States Supreme Court has unambiguously declined to recognize a former property owner’s “fundamental interest in the surplus” by virtue of her prior ownership of the forfeited property. To the contrary, Nelson [v. New York (352 US 103)] held that the former owner has a property interest in the surplus only if a provision of a constitution, statute, or municipal code creates such an interest. Like the Oregon statute at issue in Reinmiller, Minnesota’s statutory scheme gives the property owner no right to the surplus.

My reading of that ample notice section was that it was forestalling process claims. I didn’t realize it covered the takings option too.

There's a timing issue here because the compensation given to the state for the delinquent tax was the property itself not the proceeds from its sale. The landowner has no interest in the surplus because the surplus didn't exist until after the state had taken title to the property and subsequently sold it. Therefore, you'd need some statutory provision to establish that a prior owner was entitled to a surplus.

Think of it this way: Suppose the state had condemned the property under eminent domain for a value of $15,000, and the landowner neither signed off on the sale nor challenged the condemnation in court. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the court awarded the state the property for the $15,000 they had initially offered, and they mailed the landowner a check. Subsequently, the project the government condemned the property for never materialized, and they sold it to a third party for $40,000. Does the prior landowner have a right to the surplus? It would be hard to argue that she does, unless there's some kind of statute saying she's entitled to it.

Quote from the Supreme Court decision:

[W]e do not have here a statute which absolutely precludes an owner from obtaining the surplus proceeds of a judicial sale.… What the [government] has done is to foreclose real property for charges [several] years delinquent and, in the absence of timely action to redeem or to recover any surplus, retain the property or the entire proceeds of its sale. We hold that nothing in the Federal Constitution prevents this where the record shows adequate steps were taken to notify the owners of the charges due and the foreclosure proceedings.

Home seizure is one of the canonical examples for illustrating "substantive due process" versus "procedural due process." This is (and probably always will be) a pretty hotly contested bit of American jurisprudence; procedural due process is "was the procedure followed" while substantive due process is more about law-in-equity, i.e. "was justice truly done." If your city or state craft ordinances that, through totally procedurally sound action, works a clear injustice, it's not usually all that difficult to get people to agree that something has gone awry. Based on the Court's posture toward asset forfeiture in Timbs v. Indiana (they decided it violated the Eighth Amendment as excessive), I would not be at all surprised to see Hennepin County definitively lose this case.

However, the main question in my mind is that this is a "tax" case, rather than a "fines" case, and Chief Justice Roberts famously saved Obamacare by giving "tax" status to something that essentially no one thought of as a "tax." Remember that without the Sixteenth Amendment, income tax was clearly an unconstitutional taking. (Personally, I'm very comfortable with the proposition that the Sixteenth Amendment was deeply immoral, and that most taxation is indeed simply theft, but at least it is a kind of theft that was given special exemption in the Constitution.) Strictly speaking, so long as they aren't violating any state laws on the matter, a U.S. county has the power to levy as much property tax against your property as they wish, which could have the practical effect of confiscating anyone and everyone's property for government use (by setting the tax well above the value of the property).

I would hope that, in such a case, the courts would quickly call out the tax as a pretext to seizure and thus declare that it falls afoul of the Fifth Amendment! But courts are remarkably skittish in every case that tends to expose the fact that all taxes are inescapably coercive and confiscatory, with thin justification.

Chief Justice Roberts famously saved Obamacare by giving "tax" status to something that essentially no one thought of as a "tax."

Better yet Obama and his administration stridently argued that it wasn't a tax.

essentially no one thought of as a "tax."

Wait, what? Who thought that? My sense is that everyone knew it was a tax, but that label had been avoided by proponents of the bill.

It sure felt a lot like a tax, given that it was a box to check or uncheck when filing a federal tax return which changed the amount of the check one had to write to the treasury.

I never thought of it as a tax. It was pretty obviously (to me) a punitive fine designed to force you to purchase health insurance.

The government started giving a bunch of money to companies, and telling individuals they must do the same; I didn't give any money to any companies so the IRS made me give them money instead. Questions to determine the amount I had to pay were based on things like AGI, part of my tax calculation, and the resulting amounts were entered back into my tax calculation. If I increased my withholding, I had to write less of a check in April--but I only ever wrote one check, to the same people I'd always written checks to when paying my taxes.

Is there any other thing where one can be "fined" or punished for doing nothing? Aren't negative consequences usually to deter behavior, not compel it?

Is there any other thing where one can be "fined" or punished for doing nothing?

Of course there are. If you don't pay a parking ticket in time, you owe an additional fine. If you don't return a library book on time, you owe a fine to the library. And so on. It's perfectly possible (and common) to use negative consequences to compel behavior.

But in those cases, I've parked somewhere, or broken my contract with the library--there is a punishable action.

No, there is a lack of action you were supposed to take. It's the same thing as the Obamacare fine.

Your examples are actions one is duty-bound to take by the terms of the contract that was entered into, by parking in the spot or by checking out the book. Don't you see the difference?

"Breaking a contract" is an "action", and in either of these cases is directly comparable to petty theft of the equivalent funds--the library has a loss of the use of its book, or the city has loss of its parking space (or remuneration therefor). Someone who never did anything but sit at home, and consequently never used the streets or the library, would never be subject to those fines.

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that label had been avoided by proponents of the bill

Right, when Congress itself functionally says "this law is not a tax," the Court has historically deferred to that. It's similar to the shenanigans (still) pulled by many cities who levy "fees" and "fines" that often seem more like taxes (compare also state universities who are sometimes forbidden from raising tuition, who then raise "fees" instead). When neither the proponents nor the opponents of the bill claim it's a proper tax, that makes the class of people thinking it's a proper tax pretty small (analytically, limited only to those who both don't care either way and for whatever reason have a strong opinion about calling money collected by the IRS "taxes" rather than "fees"). Roberts' decision heaped motivated judicial reasoning atop legislative shenanigans. To his credit, I suppose, that has been the primary function of the Supreme Court for most of the 20th century, but that doesn't mean it's a good way to do things.

When neither the proponents nor the opponents of the bill claim it's a proper tax

I'm not sure if you're making a distinction with "proper" tax, but opponents, heck even Democrats, definitely claimed it was a tax, and it was a live enough question to get addressed in a one-on-one (sorry, it's an amp link):

STEPHANOPOULOS: That may be, but it's still a tax increase.

OBAMA: No. that's not true, George. the -- for us to say that you've got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase....

STEPHANOPOULOS: But it may be fair, it may be good public policy...

OBAMA: No, but -- but, George, you -- you can't just make up that language and decide that that's called a tax increase.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I -- I don't think I'm making it up. Merriam Webster's Dictionary: Tax -- "a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes."

OBAMA: George, the fact that you looked up Merriam's Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you're stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise, you wouldn't have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition. I mean what...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/ThisWeek/Politics/transcript-president-barack-obama/story%3fid=8618937

Stephanopoulos in that exchange appears to be saying that requiring you to pay for insurance is essentially a tax. Look at Obama's claim:

...for us to say that you've got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase...

What SCOTUS decided was not that paying for insurance is a tax, but that the resultant penalty if you don't is a tax--even though fines are not generally regarded as taxes. So this sound bite is not on point; they're literally talking about something else.

They're not talking about something else, though. Did you read the full conversation? I just quoted that bit (and elided some) because I found Stepho's pulling out a dictionary and President Obama's swift about-face on "words have a meaning" amusing. But prior to that bit, it's quite clear they're discussing a penalty (Shared Responsibility Payment, "responsibility" being the buzzword) for not buying insurance:

STEPHANOPOULOS: ...during the campaign. Under this mandate, the government is forcing people to spend money, fining you if you don't. How is that not a tax?

OBAMA: (evasion evasion)... we've driven down the costs, we've done everything we can and you actually can afford health insurance, but you've just decided, you know what, I want to take my chances. And then you get hit by a bus and you and I have to pay for the emergency room care, that's...

STEPHANOPOULOS: That may be, but it's still a tax increase.

OBAMA: No. That's not true, George.

You're correct that in 2012 SCOTUS ruled the penalty (which is what makes the purchase a "mandate" rather than a friendly request) a tax--it's the only way Congress has power to impose such a thing. It's simply amusing because of how hard the administration has pushed "it's not a tax!", then subsequently had to go to court and argue it was a tax.

then subsequently had to go to court and argue it was a tax

But even then they didn't really argue that it was a tax. The Obama administration argued that the penalty--and they definitely continued at that point to call it a penalty--was constitutional. There is an attenuated sense in which they claimed it was a "tax" at this point, in that they made an argument in the alternative that even if the penalty was otherwise inappropriate, it was permissible under Congress' taxation powers. That's the (stupid) argument Roberts seized on in seeking to preserve Obamacare, but until his decision came out, the "it's a tax" argument was widely regarded as pretextual at best. When I said that "essentially no one" thought of it as a tax, I don't mean "literally nobody floated this argument ever," I mean I was up to my eyeballs in debates (mostly with other lawyers) about this issue at the time and I just never encountered a serious and well-developed claim that the question turned on "it's a tax." This was surely in part because opponents wanted Obamacare to fail entirely, and proponents (like Obama himself) had very vocally insisted that it's not a tax.

But this is all a weirdly autistic tangent anyway, given that even if I just had a wildly idiosyncratic experience at the time, and you are totally correct that there was some substantial contingent of people who believed the penalty was a tax all along--then my warning about the weird directions SCOTUS might take the Minnesota case is all the more true.

the "it's a tax" argument was widely regarded as pretextual at best.

Again I'm gonna have to differ here, and I think the Stephanopoulos interview bears me out. George brought out a dictionary and Obama handwaved away the meaning of "tax", for gosh sake.

was up to my eyeballs in debates (mostly with other lawyers) about this issue at the time and I just never encountered a serious and well-developed claim that the question turned on "it's a tax."

What question, precisely? "Can Congress make people pay this" or "Is a penalty for inaction constitutional"? Because, if it's the latter, your lawyer friends missed the forest for the trees, I'd say.

this is all a weirdly autistic tangent

You know, I seem to be called/implied to be autistic fairly frequently online. Maybe I should get checked or something. Is there a test? To me, if it was important enough for you to use as a point in your post, it's important enough to warrant accuracy, or further exploration if needed. If we retcon the shit out of history, we can't learn much from it.

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The ACA tax/fine was presented from the start as a fine (a punishment) against those who chose not to purchase a product from an ostensibly private or nonprofit health insurance company. That’s blatantly illegal and unfair, and is one of the main reasons conservatives fought it so hard.

That the fine would be collected through the tax system was seen not as a clue to its true nature as a tax, but rather as a sign of a corrupt system which really wanted the money.

How are taxes different in their coercive nature from any other government action? Even in a direct democracy, if you are on the losing side of a vote you are coerced by the government to abide by the terms if the winning vote.

How are taxes different in their coercive nature from any other government action?

I mean, they're mostly not. I am very broadly in favor of government taking substantially less action than it does today.

Even in a direct democracy, if you are on the losing side of a vote you are coerced by the government to abide by the terms if the winning vote.

"Even in" is an interesting framing. Direct democracies are historically terrible for pretty much this exact reason. The strongest limiter on coercive action in the American tradition is individual rights. If the majority votes to kill you, your fundamental right to life is supposed to cause the government to stand against the majority. Collective action is often likened to a deaf, dumb, blind leviathan, overwhelming in its capacity to destroy individual lives and insensitive to the nuances of individual human existence. We erect such leviathans out of a sense that our individual lives may be better protected thereby (if nothing else, from the leviathans constructed by others), but the idea that they have great potential to get out of control has led to the Western tradition of hobbling those leviathans in various ways.

Taxation is just one way in which the leviathan extracts sustenance from its constituent members. Some taxation is presumably inevitable; at minimum, the provisioning of a stable financial system seems like something people participating in that system should be willing to support through taxation of one kind or another. Likewise the maintenance of military and police protection. Anything that plausibly benefits everyone in a country more-or-less equally is at least simpler to justify as an expense worth occasional coercion of the recalcitrant; robbing the collective Peter to benefit selective Pauls, on the other hand, is quite difficult to justify on any moral grounds that respect individual rights. (Importantly, utilitarianism does not respect individual rights, Bentham himself regarded rights as nonsense, and this is the central critique of utilitarianism as a moral system.)

Your celebration of individual rights seems to me, however, to be just a different shade of pink. When individuals' understanding of their rights differ, either the more powerful of the differers or some other more powerful authority (like a government) will assign an outcome, and coerce the other (or both) to abide by the decision. I'm not sure which of these two is the greater moral failing.

I'm not sure which of these two is the greater moral failing.

It's not at all clear to me that they are even commensurable. "The Government" is just other people, ultimately. Diffusion of responsibility can create the illusion that the individuals acting on the government's behalf are somehow insulated from blame for morally impermissible activities, but anyone who has seen A Few Good Men knows how thin that illusion can be.

When individuals' understanding of their rights differ, at least one of those people is probably wrong. The realpolitik (or what are sometimes called the "facts of power") are a different consideration; you are right that powerful individuals or groups will often simply impose a view, but that doesn't make it the morally correct view. And often, powerful individuals or groups will regard themselves as bound by morality in ways that are not explainable on the reductive account you've offered here. Your concern has been expressed since ancient times (e.g. Thrasymachus in Republic), and very few moral theorists find it compelling, because it does not appear to capture the way that most people experience morality.

What then does make a morally correct view? And, assuming such a circumstance can or does exist, who is to recognize it? I also don’t see why it follows that one person is likely morally wrong (in some objective or universal sense) when two disagree on their rights. It’s as likely, it seems to me, that they could both be wrong, or both be right based on incomplete information.

Sticking just to the constitution of the us (including the bill of rights), I’m not persuaded that even all signatories agreed what it meant. And that’s an arbitrary, defined set of rights and relationships. I happen to agree with a particular interpretation of much of it, partly due to conditioning and partly to sharing certain values with some of the drafters (could also be due to conditioning, tough to tell). But my interpretations differ widely from many others. Have so far been unable to persuade a sufficiently powerful group to my point of view, and so I remain coerced into abiding by understandings with which I disagree. Is this a moral outcome? How am I alone to determine that? How are you and I? How are we as a polity?