domain:cafeamericainmag.com
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
51m ago
I think it has daily challenges, like Wordle
Botond173
1hr ago
Franco, like Emperor Franz Joseph, committed the grace political mistake of living too long.
Botond173
2hr ago
What I saw of Vinland Saga suggested a show that takes historical setting seriously while using it to explore themes about violence, revenge, and the possibility of redemption.
It should be noted though that the title is rather misleading as the plot of season 1 has nothing to do with Vinland at all.
Botond173
2hr ago
I was merely trying to illustrate how such seemingly innocuous and completely normal statements appear to Blue Tribe activists.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3hr ago
yeah it's a fine method of birth control
It's statistically a mediocre method of birth control. In my opinion, recommending it is somewhat colored by ideological bias (either anti-sex, or anti-western medicine).
I would generally assume the ideological spread most likely to believe this are Christian/right leaning.
I'd simply tell her not to have pre-marital sex
A statistically even worse method of birth control. Recommending this is 100% colored by ideological bias.
Same assumption as above but more certain.
I wouldn't even be mad if she got knocked up
This is just a value judgement, but one I overwhelmingly assume/associate with the Christian/right wing area of human beliefs.
philosoraptor
3hr ago
Vast oversimplification, but yeah, after 5 solid years of unbridled acceleration into identity politic madness, can you point to ANY particular piece of media, or successful ad campaign, or memorable (in a positive way!) pop culture event that got published/released that had any lasting impact?
The woke aspect does seem to have helped Baldur's Gate 3 a little, and it managed to both have those aspects and be a really good traditional-ish RPG. Though other than budget constraints, I don't see why it couldn't have had the elements it had and a PC option who was a conventionally attractive, more or less straight woman. (Shadowheart is at best an honorable mention in that regard.)
Lizzardspawn
3hr ago
Nope. This is from an old communist joke - I want to criticize comrade stalin. He is working too much, he strains himself too much for the good of the people. He needs to rest more.
Gaashk
4hr ago
I meant I only watched the first actual Avatar, not the other two actual Avatars. But if you haven't read A Fire upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, they're quite good.
You can argue they could have or should have chosen some other (likely even more miserable) grind, but you don't actually need to despise them.
This isn't meant to be a continuation of the conversation you're having, but my answer to this is: Porque no los dos? It's perfectly consistent to despise someone who defrauds others in predatory ways with huge psychological and possibly financial consequences for their target. Most people who do terrible things do so because of some prior circumstance; serial killers often have long histories of childhood abuse, mobsters and criminals often grow up in unstable and poverty-stricken backgrounds, that in and of itself doesn't excuse the act. Dysfunction breeds dysfunction. You can feel sorry for all of the above while also thinking their actions are beyond the pale, that it warrants serious punishment, and that it may not be possible to reintegrate them into a stable society.
My great-grandfather grew up shovelling shit in a Chinese village in Fujian, made his way into Malaysia, had his property confiscated by the Japanese (and his brother executed) during WW2, and was burned badly in an explosion at one point. His life would have been mindbreaking to many others, but he made his way up through honest labour and effort, and at no point did he resort to any such behaviour. In other words I think it's important to be able to recognise the circumstances that led to immoral behaviour while at the same time realising that people who do these things should be condemned heavily, and that one's agency doesn't automatically get suspended in such a case.
That said, on the remote chance that you really did get her pregnant, and she decides to keep it, and you can verify this, do the right thing and provide for your damn kid.
I could not disagree more with this moral dictum (which I consider to be exceptionally selective) and consider myself far more aligned with the responses of every other one of the commenters here. Especially if this was baby-trapping. OP should have mitigated risk more effectively, but I don't believe he has any obligation to support a family created entirely against his will, premised solely on the choice (and deception) of the mother. All choice goes to her, and all obligation goes to him regardless of whether he was duped or not. There is no world where that is an even remotely just outcome, and it creates perverse incentives in favour of patently undesirable behaviour such as baby-trapping which just results in more dysfunctional out-of-wedlock births, the very thing such a policy should ostensibly be trying to mitigate. The only reason why women do this in the first place is that they know men go for it.
It's particularly unjust in context of the widely-accepted ability of the mother to avail herself of safe haven laws regardless of the circumstances of conception; an abandonment option which unilaterally ensures that the kid will be left without any biological parents by default and deprives the father of any choice to parent if he wishes to do so. (Compare this with parental surrender; a hypothetical surrender-mechanism that still leaves said kid with one parent and lets that parent decide what relationship she wants to maintain with it.)
That being said, we've talked about this at length before and I suspect we're firmly at an impasse on this topic. Probably an example of one of these terminal moral things that's impossible to shift via argumentation.
EDIT: added more
roystgnr
4hr ago
I'm 99% sure you're asking "is the Vernor Vinge version of Avatar a thing", and my answer is a useless "no"; at least I'm not finding any hint of it on fan fiction sites.
But on the 1% chance you're unfamiliar with Vinge and asking "is this sort of science fiction universe you're talking about a thing", I feel like I have to speak up to tell you to go get a copy of A Fire Upon The Deep now. The way he weaves primitive and high technology together into one coherent and fascinating story puts Dances With Smurfs to shame.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
4hr ago
Something is clearly missing from your life you really desire and I want you to satisfy it, just not in a way which I think will lead you to disaster.
Besides the lessons learnt, this is the biggest thing to take away. Addressing the core need that isn't being met (intimacy) and consciously addressing it in a healthy way.
The five novel sequence from The Thirteen-Gun Salute through the The Commodore is where I most like to get lost in though. One just flows into the the next.
The sequences are one off my favourite thing about the series. I really enjoyed The Mauritius Command > Desolation Island > Fortune of War > The Surgeon's Mate where it takes 4 novels for the protagonists to finally return to England for a debrief. I also like how where the novels begin and end is fairly inconsequential as the series covers most of a career over the Napoleonic wars and the War of 1812.
Even though the film could never live up to the novels, I have mixed feelings about a sequel. I think they still did a beautiful job, especially with the sound stage. I wish we could have had more of at least the same quality, but I'm afraid that any sequel moves would be a shameless cash grab at far lower quality.
I'd hope instead that as AI improves, film production costs will drop and it would become viable to make a film or tv series that can adequately portray naval life in the Age of Sail. It's historically been notoriously expensive to film things like this and I think it led to the end of the Hornblower TV Film series. (Which btw is up on YouTube)
My dream is to either have an updated streaming TV/Film series with a new cast, or complete AI generation with digital likenesses of Crowe and Bettany (which someone else wished for on The Motte a few weeks ago). There's so much material to mine in a 20 novel series, but I can see how it might not have mass appeal.
TitaniumButterfly
5hr ago
Thanks btw; I actually missed the link and thought this was just a really tiny (but intriguing) prompt.
TitaniumButterfly
5hr ago
Is this a thing? Where can I find more?
Lorian_Aristedes
5hr ago
I don’t know where you live, but assuming it’s in the West, I would recommend searching out the more prestigious art colleges/universities in your state/province/region.
If it’s anything like my home then you’ll find that the graduate exhibitions display some pretty out there work, 90% of which is garbage with no value or meaning (you could argue that about the boomer hill paintings too).
Point is: the young are who drives the new directions in the art world. It might be limited to the “underground” world for 10 plus years but eventually someone will come along and commercialise/ruin it. So get in while it’s fresh!
EvanTh
5hr ago
Whether the air force is a branch of the army or not is really an organizational bureaucratic matter rather than constitutional interpretation.
Yes, this. The Army Air Force was originally part of the Army, and everything was clearly fine with the Constitution. Then the National Defense Act of 1947 changed some names for the Army Air Force and the rest-of-the-Army and hybridized the organizational structure of the Army and Navy, but how does that cause Constitutional problems?
/u/TrannyPornO has an article about getting cheap Ozempic from the gray market.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5hr ago
This reminded me of something that is not quite on topic, but close enough.
Towards the end of summer 2018, I broke up with my girlfriend. Given my age and maturity at the time, I, of course, took care of the most important things first; I hid all of our photos that we had posted together on Facebook.
Well, not actually all of them. All of the one's that popped up on my "wall" at the time (I actually deleted Facebook for good about a year later, so my appreciation for both the terminology and function of the site is now out of date. Apologies if what I detail here isn't how it works anymore). These were typical couples photos; lots of couple-selfies of us eating things or being in places or even eating things in places.
As with any millennial breakup, however, I didn't actually unblock or unfriend my ex. No, no. You see, there is etiquette to the Facebook break-up. Although there can be a a period of mutual blocking, you never hard delete one another. But you also never interact with one another. You simply cyber-stalk one another to see who rebounds first.
Being a career technology dude, however, I noticed something interesting. Within just one or two days of my totally-not-crying deletion of the various wall photos, I became aware that my ex and her friends were no longer getting prioritized in my newsfeed. This was a stark contrast to just a month before where every damn day my newsfeed was filled with whatever new photos she had posted that day along, often, with the goings on of her friends (whom I had friended on facebook when we began dating). Quite the abrupt shift! I double checked to see if anyone hand blocked anyone else. Nope. Should I navigate to any of these profiles directly, I could still click on stuff without any new limitations (pro tip: don't get caught liking a photo from six years ago).
The realization didn't take long to formulate in my head. It seems to me that Facebook detected the pattern of "relationship status change followed by rapid hiding / deletion of photos only featuring two people ... those previously in a relationship" and then quickly, and easily, followed the random forest down to "breakup protocol." To help spare my feelings, it began to algorithmic shadow-censor the new things my ex and her friend's were doing (why the friends? Probably just in case my ex popped up in their photos. A likely outcome).
But then I realized something else that really gave me an "oh shit" moment (and, happily enough, made me forget about my ex). Facebook must have hundreds of these kind of behavioral decision trees. Breakups, divorces, graduations, new births, deaths in the family ..... deaths in the family .... wait, what kind of deaths? old age, cancer, car accident .... suicide.
It then became apparent to be that Facebook likely has a fairly reliable (though probabilistic) means of identifying social media posts that evidence suicidal ideation. Then, thinking back on my own situation, I wondered if there was some sort of correlation between breakups and suicidal ideation (it's my understanding that, yes, there generally is. I think job loss is the other big one.)
So, in 2018, instead of doing normal break up related stuff, I'm trying to piece together how accurately fascebook can predict suicide, or drug overdose, or alcoholism, or intent to harm others (I stumbled across a bunch of articles about how cops would try to find ways to infiltrate private instagram feeds because, apparently, gangs would literally announce their intended targets that way).
And this is the bigger conundrum to me than just the collection of data. If the data available to a company could be used to make these reliable behavioral profiles and, in fact, probably is. Then, to what extent do we want them to take preventative measures for all of these potentially horrible outcomes? But think about what that is -- it's corporate sponsored Minority Report. Hell-the-fuck-no! The level of dystopia that comes with "Hi, we're the cops, facebook told us to visit you" is off the charts.
OliveTapenade
6hr ago
I've come to think of Avatar mostly as a passion project for James Cameron. He likes the blue aliens and the dumb 90s environmentalist message, and he's already made a bajillion dollars and has the credibility to do whatever he wants, so he's just doing what he likes.
I don't particularly like it myself, and I don't think it makes much sense or bears up to scrutiny, but he likes it, and that's all that matters. Probably this all resonates with something deeply personal and relevant to Cameron as an individual in a way that doesn't land for anyone else.
Well, there are worse things for an eccentric and wealthy director to do in the final phase of his career. Good for you, James. I sincerely hope he's enjoying yourself.
GBRK
6hr ago
That's an artifact of how we draw the groups. For example: america has pursued a strategy of making sure high-skill manufacturing and the production of prestigious goods happens internally while lower-skill manufacturing and production is exported elsewhere. But you can't do the former without the latter. Drawing the circle around our entire production chain would drop the average IQ and average wealth... and also make it obvious that the people on the higher-paying end of the chain benefit from having lower IQ people available to do more menial jobs.
Perhaps you mean something like, "Self-identified, self-organizing cultural group benefit from having a higher average IQ," but that's of minimal comfort because "American" (or for that matter "French" or "British" or "German") isn't and has never been the primary unifying cultural identity for all the people claiming it as a title. Individual subgroups-- whether ethnic, or religious, or ideological, or class-based, will look out for their own interests at the expense of others.
GBRK
6hr ago
Once we know how genetic variants that Nigerians have affect IQ in f2 hybrids in WEIRD countries, we can get much smaller samples of genomes of Nigerians in Nigeria and extrapolate what IQ they would have if brought to WEIRD countries.
Makes enough sense to me. That's exactly the kind of empirical question I want answered before I start accepting the conclusions of racial IQ science.
No, evolution doesn't work this way.
It doesn't work that way when there's no optimal phenotype. But sharks and dolphins have both converged in bodyplan quite a bit despite a massive disparity in how long they've been in the water. Yeah, there would be some noise-- it's highly unlikely that every population has exactly the same average IQ, and random mutations taking a while to filter out is a plausible source of noise. But if you want to postulate that there are different selection effects on intelligence, then optimal intelligence has to look different for any given group, which rejects the premise of a single "golden brain" that every group is optimizing for.
and had much weaker selection than past,
I'm embarrassed to be citing my dad here, but he is an expert (at least in plant genetics). And he's told me that population growth increases selection effects. Beneficial alleles reach fixation faster. (I used to think otherwise, that selection was strongest when populations shrunk, but he convinced me to believe otherwise.)
Therefore we can assume that the industrial age has been an era of increased selection. That doesn't mean selection specifically for IQ, but I wouldn't rule it out. I'm aware that implies we should find IQ differences between populations who were late or early to industrialize, and I'm not saying we haven't, or wont-- just, as always, I'm being cautious about assuming our data is valid until it starts pointing to a unified theory of how it all works out.
in probably existed at some point in past Poland and Italy had difference because Italy became agricultural earlier. Now effect of agriculture reached saturation.
This claim that "saturation" has or can be reached is predicate on my accepting this "golden brain" thing that I still haven't, and directly contradicts the "cold winter" theory you mention later.
Do you know Madagascar was populated long after agriculture and its population originated from mix of agricultural SE Asians and agricultural Africans?
No, l was more thinking about how it had an era of feudal kingdoms and metalworking, plus trade relations with the far east.
A large part seems to be explained by Cold Winter Theory.
I would be interested in seeing validation with within-ethnicity IQ variation over climate range... whether Southern Whites are actually dumber than Northern Whites, for example. At a glance I can't rule it out-- California and Louisiana have similar average IQs despite very different ethnic distributions.
Gaashk
6hr ago
I would be more interested in watching the Vernor Vinge version of Avatar, where it's heavily implied they're a downgraded planet that used to be in a higher zone. As it is, I only watched the first movie.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6hr ago
The average man on the street would surely think that it's fine for a state to have an air force, it's basically like a navy or an army (or a force of underground tunnelling vessels were such things invented). Nothing about the US constitution is opposed to air forces on a values level. Whether the air force is a branch of the army or not is really an organizational bureaucratic matter rather than constitutional interpretation. Legislators are allowed to make laws on it.
It's not like the right to bear arms or free speech vs hate speech. If you want to make constitutional arguments, make the strongest arguments that are most easily believable and inspire the most support. Who is going to get energized for the cause of making the air force subordinate to the army?
This seems counter to the actual world in which non-states are efficiently managing extremely capital-intensive technologies.
Corporations develop them but states manage them. States don't like human cloning, it's banned. States want to keep nuclear technology secret, it's secret. The EU decides that we need to click through pop-ups about cookies, millions of man-hours are wasted... The US allocates GPU access around the world, there are tiers of who can and who cannot have them.
I think this is confusing what it means to be a Classical Liberal.
If there are problems with implementing and sustaining an ideology (and there are problems with all ideologies), surely that's relevant in discussing its merits?
Forty-Bot
6hr ago
https://yosefk.com/blog/patents-how-and-why-to-get-them.html has a good overview of patents in the US
Why have you shaped your objection into one reddit-esque snark? The post would be more informative if you elaborated a bit more on each point instead.
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