domain:archive.ph
Sunshine
19m ago
If Israel were to do everything they could to kill as many Gazans as possible without losing what remains of international support,
See, now we've gone from talking about facts to reading minds. How do you distinguish someone who wants to kill as many Gazans as possible but is held back by the international community from someone who acts in line with the attitude of the international community because they're part of it? You're essentially blaming them for things they aren't doing, but which you assume they want to do.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
19m ago
I tried finding Scott's real name before the doxx and eventual official reveal. No luck at the time. Where precisely was it revealed?
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
22m ago
I looked into PRP, and it's worse than I thought. It has a decent evidence base and moderate efficacy for orthopedic procedures, such as knee issues and rotator cuff repairs. For cosmetic purposes? A mire of tiny, biased/sponsored studies and a lot of nulls.
The face has a lot of blood circulation. From first principles alone, I doubt just putting more of it back in would help.
gattsuru
45m ago
That's fair. Do you have an example of a community that is a) left-leaning, b) claims to be fundamentally opposed to political violence in all forms, and c) exists?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
46m ago
If Israel were to do everything they could to kill as many Gazans as possible without losing what remains of international support, what would they do differently than what they are currently doing? They know they can’t actually bomb everyone immediately, all at once. But they can bomb as many as they can get away with, keeping everyone in semi-starvation, causing maximum trauma, destroying every dwelling, and so on. They can kill them all slowly in this way, to reduce international outrage.
gattsuru
47m ago
Ah, if you've got a familiar mentor, it's less serious a problem. I'd still recommend putting your root directory and home directory on different partitions (in a laptop) or even drives (on a desktop), but almost all serious issues are pretty solvable with a familiar expert.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
48m ago
I have a pretty high floor on the amount of intelligence, beauty and ideally wit I want in a long-term partner. I'd say that my ex before my last one was the closest to marriage material, barring what I strongly suspect is undiagnosed BPD. There's such a thing as too crazy to handle, no matter how hot.
Of course, these are, to an extent, fungible. But I still have strict floors. Too dumb but hot? Okay for a fling, but I'm not risking my kids coming out with my beauty and her brains. As I humbly explained in another comment, I had a hot model with a loaded family begging me to stay back in India and marry her. She was, unfortunately, very dumb. I could have taken advantage of her by promising marriage and then screwing around like her exes did, but I have some personal ethics.
Similarly, I'd love my partner to be intelligent, more than me? Even better. Helps the kids and makes them more engaging. I'd probably not go for someone brilliant but horrendous, being ugly is a severe disadvantage for future kids.
Think of where you'd compromise on a perfect partner, would you want them a little dumber, a little uglier, a little less sexual, a little meaner? You will also get some of that compromise, because you won't be perfect for them. What does a woman's willingness to compromise on a trait say about them? A woman willing to compromise on attractiveness a bit might care more about who you are. The part of you she cares about might vary, money, intelligence, humor, etc. But it's not necessarily a bad sign.
I can accept tradeoffs on any of those axes. I don't feel like any of my partners to date had to settle. While I'm not outright handsome, I at least look decent enough that it's not an outright detriment, just neutral. Unfortunately, the universe is unfair, and there are other men who are both smart and handsome to compete with.
A woman willing to compromise on attractiveness a bit might care more about who you are. The part of you she cares about might vary, money, intelligence, humor, etc. But it's not necessarily a bad sign.
I'd expect the sum of everything other than my looks to still be decent, but they certainly haven't dated me for my ravishing appearance. I do agree that it's better to have them attracted to me for my personality or wit, but eh, the real world is messy.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
51m ago
From the article:
The nation desperately needs this sense of proportionality in dealing with its educational and cultural institutions. Harvard, as I am among the first to point out, has serious ailments. The sense that something is not well with the university is widespread, and it’s led to sympathy, even schadenfreude, with Mr. Trump’s all-out assault. But Harvard is an intricate system that developed over centuries and constantly has to grapple with competing and unexpected challenges. The appropriate treatment (as with other imperfect institutions) is to diagnose which parts need which remedies, not to cut its carotid and watch it bleed out.
Fact is, the right has tried that, most recently with SFFA v Harvard, which Harvard essentially thumbed its nose at. And Pinker himself, by his own testimony in this article, has tried that. It did diddlysquat; Harvard doubled down on the bad behavior. So either those opposed to what Harvard is doing must back down, or they must escalate.
Also, universities are committed to free speech, which includes speech we don’t like. A corporation can fire an outspoken employee; a university can’t, or shouldn’t.
FIRE (not a right wing organization) listed Harvard as the worst US university for free speech two years running. And it got the worst score EVER for any US university in 2023. Harvard cannot credibly use a commitment to free speech as a defense for anything, because it lacks one. Yes, I know Pinker objects to this ranking, but not really credibly.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
58m ago
Indeed I work in industry, not academia, but I don't see it as any way bad if foreign students use American academia as a stepping stone into American industry. It's still a net benefit to the US.
Had they not come these jobs would have still been filled (probably at significantly higher cost, but if that’s the cost of a more equal society, so be it).
It's unlikely that these jobs would have been filled at a higher cost on account of the cost already being very high. It's more likely that the job would have been not filled or filled with inferior people.
An example of the top of my head - all but one of the authors of Attention is All You Need are foreigners. I don't know if you count Google Research/Brain as a "fairly standard job" but it's pretty obvious to me that there aren't seven foreigners on this paper because they're cheap.
In my experience, the typical elite undergraduate student is a capable smartish rule follower, regardless of if they're international or domestic. Dirt poor internationals don't ever make it to elite schools, and dirt poor domestics rarely do. The dirt poor domestics aren't particularly brilliant.
The occasions where someone is brilliant are rare, and they tend to be children of middle class professionals, regardless of if they're international or domestic. They do attend at higher rates than typical universities.
Technical PhDs are always smart. Masters students are universally idiots.
SkoomaDentist
1hr ago
Linux development is heavily biased toward prioritizing server requirements over desktop requirements when they conflict.
Often to a ridiculous extent as seen in all the schedulers where huge benefits in desktop use are rejected from mainline in favor of 0.1% throughput increase in servers.
I have very high standards for the quality of partner I would marry and entrust to give half their genes to our kids. By virtue of being more attractive, I have a wider pool to work with, and can winnow them with more care. To the extent that hot, smart and successful women demand the same in their partners, I can only work towards making myself better at them all. I wouldn't want to marry a bimbo, what if the kids come out with my looks and her brains?
In other words, I can pretty easily find someone to marry. I could do it tomorrow, my family has had feelers put out by Indian families, here and in the UK, who would put a ring on it. Even by dint of my own efforts, I think about 20% of the women I dated over 3 months (before going steady with one) wanted to marry me, and were serious about it. One of them was a very hot, rich professional model, but she was dumb as rocks. She begged me to stay back in India and marry her. I turned that down. I could probably have taken advantage of her, screwed her and fled like her exes did, but I try not to be an asshole.
I hope that makes my point clear. Investing in my appearance (and I've worked on everything else) by getting work done and working out increases my appeal on the dating market - - - > increases pool of women to sleep with/marry - - - > increases the odds of finding the One. I'm not worried about getting married, that's trivial, I want to marry someone who makes me feel great about that choice.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
Are you saying that the SJ left has not been very successful with their strategy of going through the channels and enshrining DEI into federal law, and leave the enforcement to the justice system?
There are places where the best way to enact change is to pick up an assault rifle and form a gang. The US is very much not such a place. Instead, you want to cooperate with existing institutions to get the behemoth of the US military on your side.
BurdensomeCount
Messenger Status: Shot
1hr ago
Harvard is top tier in the life sciences , same league as MIT.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
but no one thought it was no big deal or worse, something to be encouraged.
Here, seconded by another gray/blue-leaning Mottizen. I will not pretend that I would not be happy if Trump dropped dead from natural causes, but the erosion of political standards inherent to his assassination would not be to the benefit of anyone who likes peace. (Besides, I think a dead martyr Trump would be a great boon for the MAGA cause, while from what I have seen so far this year, a live Trump who might even insist to run again in 2028 is much more of a mixed blessing.)
That being said, the prime example for the left applauding a political murder is not Trump, it is that UnitedHealthcare CEO. I have to confess that while I am against murder as a policy, especially when it is unlikely to solve the underlying issue, I am also not particularly upset about that one. A drug dealer can at least defend himself by saying that he is simply serving the forces of the market, while someone offering health insurance to employers is serving a twisted parody of a market mandated by US law and kept in place through continuous lobbying efforts. So sure, I am slightly less sympathetic than I am to some homeless person who gets stabbed by a psychotic homeless, or whatever the median sympathy murder is. Mostly, it is a distraction, what is wrong with the US health care system can not be fixed by shooting any number of CEOs.
I will grant you that it is hard to measure the real level of support for that killing by the average person on the street, but left leaning social media generally rejoiced.
Lizzardspawn
1hr ago
Trump is good at identifying problems. Terrible at implementing solutions. Rise of china was fueled by hollowing of the rust belt, Europe is not paying for it's defense, multinational companies do take disproportionate profits from US and so on, immigration and birthright citizenships are loopholes, the universities are too woke ... he just doesn't have the proper managing capacity to solve them right. And he is just using brute force and clumsily.
Mantergeistmann
1hr ago
They've already been bombing Gaza intensively, that's not what a precision air campaign looks like.
Intensive and precision are not opposed. I'd say it looks roughly like what I'd expect a targeted campaign against a foe deliberately and firmly embedded in infrastructure to look like.
What is Israel supposed to do against the Houthis? Israel doesn't have any navy worth caring about. The US navy, bigger and better in every way, has proven totally unsuccessful at beating the Houthis or bombing them into submission.
Israel is far more willing to hit targets of vital import (pun on "port" not intended) that the US is unwilling to hit. Remember when everyone complained about how horrible the US was for hitting a fuel port, which is about as close to a military target as you can get without it being a guy in uniform? Israel is under no such constraints, and that's the sort of thing that would degrade their capabilities properly.
they're a fundamentally small power with a foreign policy that presupposes access to vast resources that don't actually belong to them. Pakistan has nukes too, Iran probably does. They're hugely outnumbered. Israel needs to get more realistic in their aspirations. They can't escalate out of this.
Weirdly, it's possible escalation is their only possible strategy. As you said, they're outnumbered and surrounded. You don't win that one by letting your opponents build up their strength, coordinate, and keep chipping away at you with rockets and low-level proxies. And if option a) is "negotiate with people who are on record as wanting us all dead", and "fight to survive"... You don't worry much about building hearts and minds with the current regimes.
As I said in my comment above, I believe that academics should be incentivized to support a smaller number of students who they actually mentor and otherwise invest in. I might not have been explicit, buts my experience is that most work completed by graduate students is of relatively low quality and the point of the exercise is to train people so that they are equipped to do actual science. The foreign students I have interacted with are usually at around the same level as the domestic students but are more desperate because they are trying to escape from a shithole. Automatically giving green cards to people would just make the situation worse by further increasing the pool of labor available for exploitation.
As for the ones who stayed, how many of them are actually doing science? I bet the majority of them used it as a pathway into the us labor market and are now working fairly standard jobs. Had they not come these jobs would have still been filled (probably at significantly higher cost, but if that’s the cost of a more equal society, so be it).
cjet79
1hr ago
Personal belief: The things you select for in a partner are going to end up being the things you get selected on.
How much do you select for attractiveness? If the answer is a lot then any improvements you can make are probably going to be worth it. If the answer is something like "it matters but I care more about personality, compatibility, and intelligence" then I don't think it will be worth it to you and may be actively harmful.
Think of where you'd compromise on a perfect partner, would you want them a little dumber, a little uglier, a little less sexual, a little meaner? You will also get some of that compromise, because you won't be perfect for them. What does a woman's willingness to compromise on a trait say about them? A woman willing to compromise on attractiveness a bit might care more about who you are. The part of you she cares about might vary, money, intelligence, humor, etc. But it's not necessarily a bad sign.
Some things to think about, because finding a partner isn't always a straightforward "be better in every category".
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1hr ago
Hanania in particular. It baffles me that anyone takes that creature seriously.
Harvard Related piggyback: Steven Pinker published a mostly defense of Harvard in an NYT opinion piece titled "Harvard Derangement Syndrome". I call it a mostly defense, because I don't think the title is appropriate. While the purpose and conclusion of the article is to defend Harvard against Federal interference the meat is more rational examination.
Some pulled paragraphs:
Finally, our students are not blank slates which we can inscribe at will. Young people are shaped by peers more than most people realize. Students are shaped by the peer cultures in their high schools, at Harvard and (especially with social media) in the world. In many cases, students’ politics are no more attributable to indoctrination by professors than are their green hair and pierced septums.
A poll of my colleagues on the academic freedom council turned up many examples in which they felt political narrowness had skewed research.... In climate policy, it led to a focus on demonizing fossil fuel companies rather than acknowledging the universal desire for abundant energy; in pediatrics, taking all adolescents’ reported gender dysphoria at face value; in public health, advocating maximalist government interventions rather than cost-benefit analyses; in history, emphasizing the harms of colonialism but not of communism or Islamism; in social science, attributing all group disparities to racism but never to culture; and in women’s studies, permitting the study of sexism and stereotypes but not sexual selection, sexology or hormones (not coincidentally, Hooven’s specialty)...
Universities should set the expectation that faculty members leave their politics at the classroom door, and affirm the rationalist virtues of epistemic humility and active open-mindedness...
If the federal government doesn’t force Harvard to reform, what will? ... Universities could give a stronger mandate to the external “visiting committees” that ostensibly audit departments and programs but in practice are subject to regulatory capture. University leaders constantly get an earful from disgruntled alumni, donors and journalists, and they should use it, judiciously, as a sanity check. The governing boards should be more tuned in to university affairs and take more responsibility for its health. The Harvard Corporation is so reclusive that when two of its members dined with members of the academic freedom council in 2023, The Times deemed it worthy of a news story.
Pinker concedes much. Too much for the NYT commenters who might lambast him more in other contexts. He likely doesn't concede enough for those that want to see Harvard suffer. His position negates neutrality, though he attempts to refute this conflict of interest with with his own demonstrated principles.
I find the antisemitism weapons repugnant. I would consider it a good thing for student-activists and campus administrations alike to learn the value of viewpoint diversity, limitations of protest, boundaries of conduct at university, what an education is meant for, and so on. That's not going to happen regardless. Pick your poison.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2hr ago
This is the problem with fighting a genuinely genocidal country like Israel: you can never surrender because they admit they want to replace you on your land.
If this were the case, Israel never would have unilaterally withdrawn from Gaza, including demolishing Israeli settlements. Evicting Palestinians from Gaza has only become a serious option after the latest round of bear-poking.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2hr ago
the us tax payers is funding efforts to educate a bunch of foreign nationals who then leave.
Do they leave? I work with tons of very smart foreigners who got an advanced degree at an American university, so they can't all be leaving. We'd definitely be worse off if we can't brain drain the world anymore.
And let's not forget that Trump once proposed a drastic solution to retain international students:
You graduate from a college, I think you should get, automatically as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country. That includes junior colleges, too.
A couple years ago, someone here claimed that the risk stats were thrown off because of that. Essentially, that the reports were looking at:
When I looked into it, it fit with the raw text of the data analysis, but surely they can't be that bad, right??
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