domain:npr.org
Jesweez
Humane Labor and Reeducation Camps for Right Wingers
4m ago
can join the military, or you can go to a national forest to survey land for a year.
Bringing back the civilian conservation corps would be cool
Lewis2
5m ago
Sticking with the Simpsons, I’d love to see the nature film “Man vs. Nature: The Road to Victory.”
Lewis2
8m ago
You probably already know this, but “What’s My Crime” was a parody of the popular show “What’s My Line,” which originated in the United States, but which also spawned over a dozen international versions. Almost all known surviving episodes of the US version can be found in their entirety on YouTube.
Ioper
10m ago
I actually found it comparable to a lot of the early GPT3 written content. The models were able to produce grammatically coherent text that mostly stayed on topic, it just didn't go anywhere and after reading a few paragraphs you get pissed having been duped into reading essentially verbal diarrhea.
This music is much the same, there is no purpose and it doesn't go anywhere. Its like 10 second segments stitched together without much thought except having smooth transitions and staying in the sameish genre.
Perhaps there are decent songs produced and it's down to prompting and iteration, but I haven't heard them yet.
Ioper
19m ago
Another possible error here could be that the weaving the compensation is intended for isn't actually skilled labour.
Basic weaving mass producing basic cloth isn't skilled labour. It's extremely simple and repetitive. You could be shown how to do it in 10 minutes. Furthermore, it's not physically strenuous (unlike the farmwork you describe) or dangerous and you can do it indoors.
Given the above the relative compensation makes sense.
There is weaving that absolutely would count as skilled labour but that is explicitly excluded.
rae
20m ago
3-5% would be exclusively gay men, 37% would be the number that had any homosexual experience regardless of their orientation. It might actually have been more common in the past because there were more male-only spaces and since being gay was so taboo, there was paradoxically more leeway. Friends I know who went to single-sex schools reported a lot of “gay stuff” happening despite most participants being straight, with the motivation being hazing, power dynamics, sexual frustration due to lack of women, etc (see what goes on in prisons).
Ioper
31m ago
I meant in the sense of hiring someone to do it for you. There is such an insane overproduction of these kinds of competences and it's been going on for like 50 years.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
37m ago
I think you're of the age where your school experience was a "last chopper out of Saigon" situation.
Grievance politics is larger now, although I strongly suspect it's incredibly school and teacher dependant.
In "generic suburban highschool #42 outside of Boise, Ohio" I bet it's similar to what you wrote. In "MLK Jr highschool in Bushwick" I bet it's a lot more grievance-y
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
39m ago
What level of incompetence and acting like the elite in Versailles is required for the constitutional right to fight back to take effect?
It's simple. If the person fighting back is part of the in-group, they are based and understandable, if maybe a bit over the top.
If they're in the out group... They are horrible borderline terrorist individuals who are wholly representative of the entire out group, justifying why the out group sucks and must be crushed into impotence.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
45m ago
Why do you hate fun?
"Oh no, hundreds of millions of humans will be able to express themselves artistically in ways that were never possible before, resulting in an explosion of creativity and human expression"
You don't have to scroll the Facebook newsfeed or Tiktok brainrot. Both of which were absolute slop even before ChatGPT 3.5
It's not like HBO is going anywhere. In fact, I would assume AI lowering the cost of VFX, etc will result in more prestige TV, not less, as lower costs allow for increased scale and more risk taking. Plus lower barriers to playing with art may mean more people discover/develop latent artistic talent and get into the industry.
Low quality fan fiction has been available in infinite quantities for decades, and yet there are still high quality books being published. Low quality digital art exists, and there are still excellent artists. Quality art will always rise to the top (AI will probably help you discover it).
All I can think about when people get cranky about AI art is how portrait painters sneeding over how cameras aren't real art because it requires no skill as the camera does it for you.
Browser
48m ago
Dude was a medium autistic edgelord living in bumfuck nowhere Utah. I don't think he was prime steer in that heterosexual dating market.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
59m ago
My benchmark is an actually good language learning tutor LLM. The task seems pretty much perfect for the current crop of LLMs, and there is infinite VC funding for literally anything that involves LLMs. As long as something so obvious isn't mastered yet, LLMs are hardly more than a gimmick imo.
SkoomaDentist
1hr ago
Meh. That just sounds like a collection of shitty djent cliches.
chooky
1hr ago
But children of the 90s are like 40 now and would have also grown up entirely under the post-1970s paradigm, while the rise of incel culture (and various other apparent symptoms of dysfunctional romance) seems like a phenomenom of the past 10-15 years. I am having a hard time ascribing this to the 1970s rather than technology shifts (Tinder, etc), high pace of housing inflation (which reduces incentives for household formation and makes it much harder to not rely on also-expensive daycare, aka the two-income trap), or the transition of church and religion out of mainstream (which I would argue began to rapidly occur during Bush 2 and was basically complete mid-Obama).
rae
1hr ago
I’m really struggling to understand how having a hard time finding a girlfriend can make someone want to dress up as an anthropomorphic animal and have sex with other men in similar costumes. I can understand having those urges, getting into a relationship and it being too embarrassing to share so you just suppress it (although I’m sure many still explore them in porn), or being single because you have non-standard sexual interests and can’t find someone that fulfils you.
I do get that the internet/porn amplifies underlying fetishes and makes you seek more extreme stimuli, but I don’t think it can make a straight man gay or vice-versa, or a vanilla person interested in furry fandom.
Mantergeistmann
1hr ago
That's... remarkably similar to what I was taught; same time period. And I moved around the country and went to both public and private schools, so it wasn't just localized.
2rafa
1hr ago
It’s flawed for sure, but there is substantial anecdotal evidence that the percentage of men willing to engage in homosexual activity, especially in substantially or entirely male communities (men at war, men in prison, all-male boarding schools, male-only religious institutions) is probably higher than the 3-5% estimates of gay men.
2rafa
1hr ago
Many male porn addicts seem to be in sexually active relationships though. Besides, I don’t think it’s clear that men with trans ‘girlfriends’ couldn’t find female partners, that seems spurious.
FistfullOfCrows
1hr ago
Tell me you haven't listened to The Alex Jones Prison Planet without telling me etc...
2rafa
1hr ago
My understanding of the data we have on sex and partner count is that you had the sexual revolution in the 60s, which took until the ~late 1970s/early 1980s to filter down into mainstream society. From that point (ie the youth of Gen X) everyone has been having pretty similar amounts of sex. Millennials weren’t much more promiscuous than GenXers, and Zoomers are as or less promiscuous than millennials.
The emergence of apps, online dating, social media, none of these seem to have substantially affected population-level promiscuity, only shifted it. The (heterosexual) people hooking up with dozens of people on the apps are the kind of people who would hang around dive bars and clubs until closing time to pick up the best option left had they been born twenty years earlier.
I think it may be different for gay men, although large parts of that are surely increased social acceptability and the fact that HIV is no longer a death sentence, but even then, my guess is many people racking up 4-digit grindr body counts would have been anonymous bathhouse regulars back in 1977 too.
kky
1hr ago
One of my little hobbies is examining historical evidence and trying to make a reasonable guess at the truth of things. I thought an example of such might be fun enough for people here, so here you are.
Bret Devereaux writes of Roman weavers:
That said, while the production of clothing was an essential task, it was not a well-remunerated task. Regular weavers – not specialized in rare or fine fabrics – are some of the least well paid individuals in Diocletian’s Price Edict, paid just 12-16 denarii per day (20-40 for those working high quality linen, 25-40 for those working on silk), compared to 25 denarii per day for an unskilled farm laborers, mule drivers, shepherds and 50 or more for skilled artisans working wood, stone or metal (Carpenters: 50; mosaic workers, 60, wall painters (fresco, one assumes): 75, shipwrights, 50-60, blacksmith or baker, 50, etc.).
First, the reason this passage drew my attention: that an at least partially skilled laborer could draw half the wage of a farmhand does not pass the smell test. Why would such individuals not simply up and leave? The farms await with their great bounties. Such a discrepancy demands explanation. Bret attempts one, but his is that capital ownership was much more important in the labor-rich premodern environment, and that therefore the earnings of weavers could be driven down. This explains nothing of the discrepancy between weavers and presumably equally disenfranchised hired hands. So what could account for this?
First, background on Diocletian’s edict. Normally we think of price controls as a minimum cost or wage for this and that, typically as a socialist dictator’s ploy to stay popular. Diocletian was setting a maximum to try and halt inflation. So in each of these, we should consider: given an environment where labor is in a relative position of strength, Diocletian forbids the worker demanding a wage beyond a certain amount. If labor is not strong, and currency is not too greatly debased, then we should expect actual prices to stay lower than these marks, or else for wages to float beyond them on the gray market.
In the edict itself, however, low-grade weavers were not paid by the day, but rather by the pound. This is likely what is generating Bret’s estimate range here, as it’s hard to know exactly how much a weaver can weave. But there’s another confounder here, which is that the edict does not specify the quality of the weaver, but rather the quality of the wool, which is coarse. Wool’s weight per yard is not fixed, but varies on the thickness of the thread - so a weaver using coarse thread is simply going to be producing more pounds per yard and per unit of labor than one using fine thread. Flax is finer than wool, and presumably is going to be priced higher per pound.
And since our estimates on historical productivity are at best sketchy, we really can’t rely on our figures here. Modern estimates are typically given by historical reenactors. Not to put too fine a point on it, these are amateurs and historians who are bookish and unlikely to be either driven or particularly skilled with their hands. Premoderns, on the other hand, were going to eat or starve based on their productivity, and starvation was not so very far away. They would be working hard (perhaps 12h/d instead of 8 max), and with no end to practice, and likely with more dexterity than book learning. We should expect their productivity to be substantially greater than our contemporaries. And, given that we know Diocletian was trying to set reasonable price caps to halt inflation, we can assume that he was working off of estimates to keep the overall income of these similar workers in line. The farmhand shares wages with a water carrier and a mule driver. The equivalent for the wool weaver would be the day-wage linen weaver, who made 20d. That should actually make us strongly suspect that a weaver of coarse wool fabric was making a pound and a third, or a yard and change, of cloth a day, rather than making much less money. (Also interesting: women make much less a day, down to 12d. Was this because women worked slower, because they were expected to work part-time alongside childcare, or because they were understood to be exceptionally vulnerable without a working man and therefore easy to exploit? The wage gap persists.)
Lastly, a couple considerations on the nature of the work. Farmhands are presumably not sharecroppers, but rather hired help during the backbreaking and urgent plowing and harvest seasons. They would not be needed the rest of the year. In contrast, given that thread does not spoil like food, a weaving workshop can operate year-round and would likely prefer to so distribute the work in order to fully utilize workspace and looms. So our farmhand is hired for a few weeks of brutal but reasonably paid work, while our weaver is steadily employed throughout the year. Even though the farmhand likely picks up additional work to cover the gaps, the needed rest after these periods means he is all but certain to average below his sticker price. How much lower is a hard estimate, but 20% of the time out of work is sufficient to bring his wage down to the linen-weaver. And we have to assume that Diocletian was completely aware of this fact.
So, in summary: looking at the actual numbers and the actual purpose of the edict, alongside some reasonable assumptions about the comparable nature of the work and our own limited ability to produce, yields a plausible interpretation of the evidence where the astonishing anomaly of Bret’s assertion that weavers were paid like women (on its own an anomaly) vanishes. And this is a technique, for what it’s worth, that Bret has used himself for things like military equipment weight, so I think he most likely is just less familiar with this field and took someone else’s uncited estimate as gospel instead of examining the strange details like he would for military matters.
If something doesn’t make sense on the roughest estimates, that’s almost always because one premise or another is false or misunderstood. This mutation of syllogistic reasoning holds quite broadly.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
There were two sexual revolutions and they both had major social instability coming in about forty years later. Can I explain it entirely? Not really. But the 2010's social chaos occurred roughly the same timeframe after the sixties/seventies sexual revolution as the sixties/seventies social chaos occurred after the 20's/30's sexual revolution. Perhaps we'll see in the 2050's some chaotic results of something LGBTQ related, history rhymes.
As for the forty years timeframe, I would suggest that it's when children who grew up entirely under the new paradigm are reaching the age to start making bad decisions. Social change is slow even if at the surface level it looks like lightning.
Here is the thing. The US is still, for all its flaws, democratic.
When people got fed up with the DC elites, they voted in Trump, who at least set a new baseline for corruption and nepotism.
If you have a good majority (say 60%) of the citizens behind you, then you do not need to shoot at the feds, you can simply elect one of your own as the next president.
If you do not have such a majority, then using violence to enforce your norms seems bad. I will give you a pass if your group is oppressed to the level of the Jews under the Nazis, but whatever the rules about trans people in gendered bathrooms your society has are, they are insufficient reason to start planting bombs.
If I endorsed a "constitutional right to fight back" for minority positions, then I would have to endorse proponents of mutually exclusive policy proposals to use violence to settle their difference, because saying that violence is only justified whenever I personally think that the advocated policy would be a good idea does not universalize.
Violence sucks very hard. It does not show who is right, only who is left. It can paralyze societies, and is a habit which is very hard to kick even after your side has won. The French and Russian revolution are both cautionary tales here. A democratic process, even as flawed as the US one (FPTP, EC, gerrymandering and so on) is much preferable to bombs and rifles.
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