domain:mgautreau.substack.com
That's not all that big of a gap.
No, it isn't. If he hadn't bothered to get any Botox or cosmetic surgery, I think he would have been entirely believable as a 37-year-old: even if he looked a little older, it might have made sense given that his character works unsociable hours, shares a crummy apartment with two of his mates and has a bad diet. But Evans is obviously sufficiently vain and/or concerned about his career prospects that he felt medical interventions were necessary, so we're stuck with this flat, impassive uncanny valley appearance.
I wonder how much control a director (vs the studio) has over this kind of thing (that is, the casting of the main actors).
I would be surprised if any of the three leads were Song's first choices for their respective roles.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
Legit, you see people on the forums suffering through issues that they could solve in 10 seconds with a debug_mode mod and "~"
Victoria 3 might actually be the worst for this too. I find myself constantly needing to tag over to other countries to fix whatever insane and dumb shit they (since 1.9, 90% of the time its France) get themselves into.
Also the WORST border gore, oh god the border gore.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
This seems to be a bedrock of how you feel about this topic. How did you first form this opinion,
Taxes
and what keeps you feeling this way?
I don't really see much difference between Reagan's welfare queen and the Walton family, whose business is only viable because the government enables them to pay below-livable wages with their welfare programs. Both parties simply exploited a bureaucracy.
Yes.
I don't know what to say. I have a visceral disgust reaction towards people who can't even support themselves. Taking my money to give to them, no matter how round about it is, just adds insult to injury.
Sometimes I think of the wisdom of say, giving out free food on Thanksgiving versus all year round. If the food is a one day thing where you get to enjoy a nice meal with some dignity, awesome. If it's a stipend that lets you indulge in the dangerous delusion that you're actually taking care of yourself, or capable to producing dependents, well that's another thing entirely.
But then you started circling the idea of bullshit jobs too, and how much work is actually productive. One man's blue sky research is another man's wasteful spending. Sometimes you get Xerox PARC or Bell Lab's Idea Factory, and sometimes you get whatever the fuck this is, NSFW btw. I might have a bullshit job. I might not. Gun to my head I might just be a bit player on the outskirts of an industry that may or may not generate some ecosystem of products that makes the world marginally better to live in. If I'm lucky. What can I say?
GBRK
1d ago
Are you a poor or rural republican? Your logic makes sense, but I'm looking for insights specifically into their psychology.
GBRK
1d ago
has made such "poor form" necessary for intellectual hygiene
That's cope and you know it. Either address my point or concede it. I'm not doing a gish gallop; I made an argument around a single point and provided concrete evidence to support it. I'm not trying to troll you-- or at least, as per the rules of the motte, you should assume in good faith that I'm not, and you should report me if you find evidence otherwise. It's fair to say that on the internet you need to be wary about expending way more effort than an opponent who just wants to provoke a response, but it should be obvious that that's not the situation you're currently in. You put in some effort to make an argument. I put in some effort to counter it, and a little on top of that to find a source. You can surely afford to put in a little little more, knowing that if I fail to respond after that point I have effectively conceded the argument.
If someone sincerely believed in the benefits of smoking and took the effort to post a source in support, the least I could do is post a single study countering.
Mihow
Lipstick on a guitar
1d ago
Awesome read.
I didn’t own a car for ten years in South Florida and bicycled 2 hours a day usually.
I always dreamed of doing something like what you wrote. But also reading what you wrote I realize that I don’t think it’s up my alley. It sounds amazing - but I just want a relaxed trip on a road with a pub at the end of a few hours.
What was your most relaxed bicycling trip been ?
cae_jones
1d ago
Yeah, this whole thread, I'm thinking, "someone mention that the costs are too high", and you got the closest. If you showed this thread to Trump, he'd probably argue that he's working on pressuring the drug companies to bring prices down. How likely that is to work is another matter entirely.
I suspect that, if prices don't come down, this will mean budget cuts for my workplace, and that will almost certainly result in some unpleasantness with supplies and their quality.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
This is a really well thought out comment, thank you for writing it.
I think I agree with most of it. I still think the "mechanism of action" for a cat-call vs skimpy shorts (or whatever) is far enough apart that they don't compare well, but I'll concede they're on the same spectrum of human behaviour/motivations.
I'm gonna read this again later when I'm not in motion, thanks again.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
1d ago
I was referring to Alligator Alcatraz, and how much of the most public support is brazenly transparent about how the current push against immigration is about race and genetics - and not just illegal immigration, but immigration of all types.
stop creating a dependent population with excessive charity
This seems to be a bedrock of how you feel about this topic. How did you first form this opinion, and what keeps you feeling this way?
I personally don't think that many people create much value for society. Big David Graeber fan over here. Furthermore, I think a lot of people who think they create value for society are in the best case simply leeches on the public welfare, and in the worst case actively harming society. I see eye-to-eye with many of the posts on Hacker News lamenting that an entire generation of our greatest engineers were gobbled up by big tech in order to serve hypertargeted advertisements - with a sprinkling of all the negative externalities that the attention economy creates.
It's funny, actually, as I think some of the work that (illegal) immigrants do create the most directly positive value for society, like harvesting fruits and vegetables and building and improving housing stock.
I don't really see much difference between Reagan's welfare queen and the Walton family, whose business is only viable because the government enables them to pay below-livable wages with their welfare programs. Both parties simply exploited a bureaucracy.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
The year is 2100. The US, China, even Brazil- all, faced with declining populations, they drain their hinterlands- not exactly demographically healthy themselves in lots of cases- for workers to maintain their economies. Vast swaths of Latin America are empty; the world's largest hippo population is now in lake Maracaibo, Venezuela, having expanded from their range in Columbia since the human population left the place empty, having walked to the US or Mexico or Brazil for better economic opportunity cleaning bedpans and pouring concrete and sewing jeans. Venezuela itself has not a single soul under fifty; they export all of them to be hired by Exxon and Pemex and then expat in their home country extracting oil. In China, Tajik and Kazakh workers earn a good wage in the factories, they fly back to their home countries on the holidays to build better hovels they'll retire in. The taliban still holds on in Afghanistan, having deported their entire Hazara population to Iran, desperate for young shiites to prop up the country.
India can no longer fill its sweatshops; Pakistan has attained conventional military superiority due to having more young people and retaken Kashmir. US backing is sufficient to keep Pakistan from expanding further south. In the middle east, Israel regularly conquers territory from its neighbors with declining population, and partners with Ethiopia to occupy Yemen and keep Egypt occupied. Further south in Africa, the megastates launch grinding trench warfare over resources they can trade for Russian or American or Canadian or Argentine grain. A small handful of western mercenaries can turn the tide for million man armies; the Afrikaner breakaway state in South Africa secured international recognition by acting as backer in several cases.
Wave_Existence
1d ago
brutal benefits cliffs
Very true, and in some states it's a cliff on both sides of the coin. In some states that didn't adopt the medicaid expansion portion of obamacare you can't get government insurance in a situation where you don't have a job yet if you had anything other than the very lowest paying job possible you wouldnt qualify anyway.
I understand the reasoning behind not wanting to subsidize jobless bum's insurance, but it isnt hard to imagine a case of a non bum falling into this crack and having to go into medical debt over a broken arm or whatever.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1d ago
That's a valid enough point. I checked for the governor, but didn't think to look at the legislature.
Regardless, there's no reason to think there's a connection to Trump and the OBBBA based on that article. This was decided at the state levels months before the bill passed, or was even finalized.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1d ago
One problem with family law cases is that the guiding standard is often "the best interests of the child." It's about as vague as one can get, and unless a state legislature has clearly laid out what counts as best interests and how to weigh factors against each other, it leads to judges speculating and pontificating on what those best interests are. Knowing the biological father, not knowing the biological father when knowing would upset the stable conditions of a lifelong relationship, avoiding the appearance of illegitimacy, taking the kid away from this dysfunctional trio and giving him to a high-income, photogenic couple who has already successfully fostered 3 kids, and a dozen other things could all be in the best interests of the child, but somehow judges are supposed to sensibly pick among them.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
This will probably be the Chinese when they eventually realize how easy it is to increase TFR
Uhh... Fertility is a coordination problem. Coordination problems are hard.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1d ago
At the time of filming he was a 43-year-old playing a 37-year-old character: looking at his face, I got the distinct impression that he's undergone a lot of Botox and/or cosmetic surgery to maintain a youthful appearance.
... That's not all that big of a gap. The average person would probably have difficult reliably telling those ages apart, and especially so when looking at Hollywood actors who presumably take good care of themselves. A 43yo playing a 27yo, or 53yo playing 40yo, would start to be more obvious.
Also, I had to look up who he is, because apparently Chris Evans, Chris Pine, and Chris Hemsworth are all different people but my brain had combined them.
Sadly, Johnson and Evans have very little chemistry with one another.
I wonder how much control a director (vs the studio) has over this kind of thing (that is, the casting of the main actors). A movie about romantic love with two leads with no chemistry is quite the miss.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
Who said anything about concentration camps? All most people want is to be left alone. Stop taking my money to provide for them, leave them to their own devices, stop creating a dependent population with excessive charity, and the problem, if it doesn't go away on it's own, will at least develop some sort of homeostatic boundaries.
But if we insist on having a welfare state... well... then we need to pretty aggressively determine who deserves to be a part of it.
Crowstep
1d ago
I do think there is highly significant asymmetry of discomfort between a woman being catcalled and a pious man seeing some legging-clad ass
An asymmetry, sure, but I'm not so sure we can definitively come down on either side. I find catcalling at best trashy and at worst threatening, and I like seeing semi-naked women on the street, but then I'm a guy who got laid when he was younger so I expect that affects it.
But for a lot of men I imagine seeing a semi-naked woman is like a homeless guy seeing me light a cigarette with a 20 dollar bill. Sure, I'm not hurting him, and he's not entitled to my money, but I can see how it would be painful for the homeless guy. In the same vein, rare is the woman who is relieved when she reaches middle age and men stop paying attention to her. Instead she desperately clings on to her youth and tries to stave off invisibility.
I think it's a mistake to see dressing in provactive clothing as a passive act, which is how a lot of women frame it. It's an act with plausible deniability, perhaps, but when a woman dresses like this she does so in the full knowledge of the effect it is going to have on men. All men, not just the ones she's interested in.
My suspicion is that a large part of the dislike of cat-calling (at least among adult women) is the offence that a trashy low-class man thinks he has a shot, as opposed to fear of violence, although certainly that's going to be common, particularly for teenage girls. What I really want is a truthful survey (probably impossible) on how many women feel like this.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
1d ago
Is there a law mandating that women-owned businesses must be X% of businesses?
Yes / no. In the YIMBY / NIMBY realm that I'm active in, a housing project will only receive funding (tax breaks, grants, etc.) if it can prove that a certain number of its contractors are women-owned businesses. So while it's not a law per se, it's the direct result of legislative action. You will miss out on business if you're not female-owned, which leads to the cliche loophole of wife-owns-husband's business.
My point is that this^ type of legislative action is different than creating scholarships for women that help them get the credentials that are seen as barriers for entry into leadership positions. Ends vs. means. Grouping all of it together as DEI is too broad of a brushstroke for me to not argue against it.
A lot of rural welfare users simply don't vote. It's extremely common.
The rural poor also understand that they're a peasant class and hate everyone who's in line ahead of them, which to be clear is most people. Given the economics of rural areas these people are a lot more dependent on local elites(who are very solidly republican) than the poor elsewhere; and a condition of that dependency is voting correctly.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
1d ago
How is this different from general misanthropy?
I could also define my own measure of utility for a person a declare anyone under a certain threshold as "dragging us down". My measure wouldn't be by skin color, of course, so it would be a lot harder to implement punitive measures for anyone below that threshold. E.g. I could say that all obese people have an extreme negative impact on the public welfare, but that doesn't trigger our tribal primate brains so no one is out there blackbagging obese citizens to alliteratively-named concentration camps.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Rural republicans are mostly people who are stuck 'in the gap' where they don't have medicaid to begin with- they make too much. Rural medicaid users might vote republican if they voted, but alas, they do not.
You are forgetting that medicaid is not actually universal healthcare. It's entirely possible to go without healthcare in the US because you don't qualify for welfare. There are some pretty brutal benefits cliffs.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
But Nestle and coca-cola are already losing a fight with the Trump admin; obviously someone can outcompete them if need be.
While they're not currently a net positive financially, there's a lot of invisible societal gains even for thin people.
-
Less fat people in general means a better looking world. You'll see less chubby kids with chubby parents while at the mall or the park or other public spaces and more attractive looking people. You'll have more hot women and men available for dating, no longer having to settle as much on looks for someone with a good personality match.
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Less fat people gives gains elsewhere like not ending up sitting next to a fat guy on a plane or being able to do physical activities with your formally fat friend. All sorts of little small annoyances and issues that will be alleviated by a thinner world.
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Resources can benefit even more from economy of scale when we can start assuming people are within a certain size range more often. For example clothing stores can offer larger selections in your size and not have to spend as much space on having XLs and XXLs and the like because the market demand for those will be much smaller.
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Your family and friends who are fat will be healthier and prettier and that's just a good thing too if you care about your family and friends.
And that's just on top of not currently a net positive financially. We might be able to improve on it more and get to the point where we have a world of thin hot people for cheap.
Also, for anyone considering Vic 3
The game has improved significantly with 1.9, but still has some glaring issues. I think by 1.11 it'll be an un-ironically good game.
I recommend buying vanilla on sale, as access to Steam workshop is MANDATORY (seriously, mods make this game so much better). It's incredibly easy to CreamAPI the DLC for free once you own the base game.
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