domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
20hr ago
I'm only conversant in aikido, which is more like action yoga or something. In that, I've been thrown (usually into a subsequent roll) by guys who were very skilled, and also brutally slammed into the mat by guys who seemed to be channeling a different martial art. At my size (about 177cm, 73 kg) there are women who are both taller and heavier (fewer in Japan) of course. The very skilled akiidoka can move you (me) even if I resist, male or female. The regular rando is like an unbalanced sack of oranges. Reading your updates makes me want to try BJJ though the prospect of abject humiliation is always mildly daunting.
JarJarJedi
20hr ago
I've heard this being said, well, everywhere since late 2024 at least. It's kind of an obvious point to make, so a lot of people made it.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
21hr ago
Salary load can be notable in some industries, but I think it only rarely takes down entire companies (more than capable of causing problems on a per-location basis of course) because it's not often actually the biggest cost on the balance sheet (just the most "controllable" which is why so many emphasize it a lot). It is pretty "sticky" though, so it can compound otherwise controllable problems when a major financial shock happens (this has happened to a few airlines, for example). That's not quite a single point of failure, though it might depend on how you parse the question.
The big thing to note is how the problem used to be worse when pensions were a thing. Many, many companies would go down because they didn't have enough in the bank earning investment return to cover pensions and didn't have enough from revenue to pay it either. Part of why so many companies dropped pensions in favor of the 401K as soon as they could. But even then, you'd still have legacy stuff - GM in 2009 comes to mind, Wikipedia says "For each active worker at GM [in 2006], there were 3.8 retirees or dependents in 2006". Yikes.
The other failure mode is start-ups who hire too much too fast, but that's not really what we're talking about.
gattsuru
21hr ago
Yeah, there's a basically no chance if they (or even a not-joke Republican candidate) split the not-Mamdani vote. The sane option to my eyes would be organizing behind Adams, sad as that sounds, but it's also a massive coordination problem. But I don't get why they tried Cuomo in the primary to start with, so maybe there's something that would overrun the 'already lost this fight once' problem. And my low opinion of Cuomo is part of why I don't think they can coordinate.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
21hr ago
For additional fun have one of the contestants secretly be a trained MMA fighter.
I don't think it's much fun if it's secret, it's more fun when everyone knows what's up. Does the MMA fighter take a pissant attitude around the house, being unafraid to step on toes because he knows no one will challenge him? Does he have trouble getting anyone to accept his own challenges, since there's less shame in avoiding him than in avoiding someone who has an "unfair" advantage? Also, in my ideal libertarian-hellscape version of this contest, the contestants would be allowed to choose any amateur ruleset to fight under. So they could choose boxing, wrestling, kickboxing, kyokushin, MMA, muay thai, etc. So maybe you know that so-and-so wrestled D1, so you challenge him to box. Etc.
We have very limited data from the "enforced violence" dates which occur roughly once in each season of The Bachelor/ette. Every season the contestants are forced to box, wrestle, or otherwise scrap on one group date. Notable observations:
-- Women give credit to the winner of the boxing tournament even if he outweighs the other guys by 40lbs
-- Men don't care who wins.
-- Only one contestant, to my knowledge, has ever refused to participate on principle, during the Covid season in 2020. She was summarily given a terrible edit and booted off the show.
-- On the other hand, it's nearly always a good move during a rugby or football date to claim an "injury" preventing you from participating, which will allow you to hang out on the sideline with the Lead.
I'd imagine there'd be alliances formed early with the best fighter, but then later some betrayals as they try to get him removed. Maybe you have 4-5 guys each throwing down challenges to the same dude forcing him to decide if he wants to lose some face or actually fight each of them in a row. I'd bet that under almost ANY circumstances, sleeping 5 dudes in a row buys you immense status points.
I suspect we wouldn't see that many fights, with the fights primarily being used to settle "drama" problems in the old fashioned way: camera cuts to Chris telling us "Trevor told Kaylee I said X but I TOTALLY DIDN'T SAY THAT; Trevor must meet me on the field of honor or yield his argument!" If Trevor isn't willing to get in the ring, then he doesn't really think that X was said, does he? If he persists in lying, but refuses to back it up, Trevor's probably headed home, right? At the same time, if Chris keeps whining about Trevor lying about him, but never challenges Trevor, then Chris is probably headed home. And if they both get in the ring and bang around with no clear winner, does it overly impact either of them, positively or negatively? They both showed they were willing to fight to defend their honor, and both put up a good showing, is that enough?
But then the structure of the show is that there's normally out of 24 guys only about 6 Kaylee is actually interested in, and as the show winds on you'll also see challenges made in desperation, from guys who are about to be sent home because Kaylee doesn't like them. Trevor, who is definitely going home soon, will challenge Mike, one of the frontrunners, making up a bullshit offense as a reason and trying to get some juice out of the fight to get attention. Does Mike feel like he needs to accept the challenge, given that Trevor is so far beneath him? Does Kaylee feel that Mike needs to accept it, and will lose attraction to him if he doesn't? What if Trevor is much bigger and stronger? Might Kaylee choose to send Trevor home immediately, for trying to pick a fight without cause, or just to protect her favorite boy?
And because you get a wide range of size, strength, skill in fighting, and toughness in your contestants, do you get a white knight? Trevor, a former college football tight end, picks a fight with David, a scrawny software developer, and intends to challenge him publicly. Thad, a former amateur boxer who has made friends with David but also needs the attention, steps in and challenges Trevor first. Who does Kaylee end up falling for in this scenario?
JarJarJedi
21hr ago
As far as I know, they did not, and continued to use cannabis despite the loss of this case. Eventually the policy of USDOJ changed to a less insane one towards medical marijuana patients (thanks Obama), so the feds stopped harassing them. The SCOTUS decision, however, remains as another milestone in the long road from the limited federalist government to "you got only the rights that the feds want to give to you".
Homies Ride or Die update
Been consumed by that rendering bug where the lighting seemed all wrong on the tires and I began to suspect my model data was fucked up.
I was using this ancient format for loading 3d models (".obj") that I downloaded from sketchfab.com but it turns out when it says this format is the native format uploaded by the artist and the other formats are derivative, it's kind of lying. A few 3d people have told me you want to get the ones in .glb or .gltf format, even if sketchfab says these were auto-converted . (I do not know how to make sense of what sketchfab says)
Anyway I thought maybe the .glb models would have more reliable model data and they do seem to. So then I got the .glb model loading mostly working (using tinygltf) but I was getting this random error where the car would render fine for the first frame and then vanish. I spent about 4 days trying to debug the bgfx state machine until I realized I was creating vertex and index buffers in the GPU and sticking handles to them in a class, and then I created a destructor for each class that would free those handles up. Fine, except I was not realizing I was copying the class around and the old class, a transient object, was getting destroyed which was deleting the memory held by the handles.
Since the handles are like, integers into a GPU resource table and not pointers, I wasn't getting any kind of pointer derefence error. It was just accidentally working for one frame and then failing to work after that.
I had to spend a long, long time staring at this stuff and remembering C++ copy/move semantics before I was able to track this down. Lesson (re)learned: don't put things like file/resource handles in object destructors unless you're extremely careful.
Finally making progress again. I'm getting a lot more texture data and the tires look a lot more realistic now, matching what's on sketchfab. Maybe I'll get spinning tires and stuff working again by next update!
I mean yes, I was handicapping myself significantly. Which is actually true in like 1/4-1/3 of the rounds I spar most days, I'm a large man and there are a limited number of opponents that I can go 100% against, and then even the ones I could go 100% against often choose to go light. I go light against smaller men, though less so than I do against a woman, and I go easy on people less experienced than me, though there aren't a ton of those, and I roll light with guys who want to roll light due to injury or to work on something. I've miscalculated against new guys before and gotten tapped out for my trouble. But never against a woman!
This is entirely a case of me underestimating her ability and overshooting the amount I had to handicap myself in order to have a productive round with her. But that's still me discovering something, in that up to this point I wasn't entirely sure there existed a point at which I would have handicapped myself too much to escape from a woman's submission hold. She had that sucker sunk, there was no way I was going to be confident in getting out of it. Which genuinely, I couldn't believe, I sat there (not) breathing for a couple seconds just sort of stunned before I tapped. Because up until this point while I occasionally let a girl get a dominant position, if I turned up the strength slightly I easily found my way out of it. But there's some point of advantage at which that would no longer hold. This was a discovery.
Unfortunately, up until now I've only rolled with women who I was close to even with in technical skill. I hope at some point to have the opportunity to roll with a female opponent with a significant experience/technique advantage over me, so I can fill out that quadrant of the square. Obviously strength is good, but I get tapped by guys I am bigger/stronger than regularly. What margin of experience would be enough to worry about? I'm pretty sure I couldn't take Adele Fornarino, but where does the line sit?
Also, closing your eyes is useful when rolling in that it trains you to grapple by feel. When you're locked up on the ground in guard, there's a lot of stuff you can't see because it's behind you or because the motion is too small to really perceive a difference, but that makes a big difference. I can't necessarily tell what my opponent's hands are doing behind my back, or how his weight is distributed between his legs, with my eyes. But I can feel it, and if I can learn to feel it and react to it that's more information I'm gathering.
I actually managed to hit a few sweeps and one triangle choke on other full grown men with my eyes closed. Which, among other things, allowed me to talk shit on them about beating them with my eyes closed.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
21hr ago
They've also allied with Hamas, which is primarily Sunni.
There's a global jockeying for status among Islamist groups. Part of that will involve actually killing each other, part of it will involve harming Israel/USA or drawing the attention of Israel/USA and proving their ability to take a hit.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
21hr ago
I think on some level the truth is almost always “both”, which has made things like “is X biological” a bit harder to come to a solid conclusion on. You can have predisposition to just about anything you can think of, but often the truth is that it’s biology meeting just the right environment. People are much taller than they were in 1700, as anyone who’s been in a historical home can tell you, as the furniture is designed for people much shorter than we are. Humans didn’t suddenly evolve to be taller, it’s just that we have more food and better quality food and therefore grow taller.
I suspect some of the increase in gay/trans is down to environmental factors. Some of it is the endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment, some of it is cultural influences that not only don’t discourage them but often celebrate them. But biology still has some part. It makes some people much more susceptible to those influences.
No_one
21hr ago
IRGC helped put down ISIS and unlike Americans,never provided CAS for them.
They're not friends of 'jihadis',they have their own league.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
21hr ago
But I'd bet a lot are getting in over their heads on payments up front, which is starting to show up in delinquency rates.
I think some people are just not good with money and they buy cars that make them look good but I really don't know how to translate the status and affirmation points having a really nice car gets you, into a dollar amount.
Absolutely, but this is a general financial intelligence/literacy/freedom of choice question, not one specific to pickup trucks. From long experience of trying to explain to Red-Tribe Pickup-Truck-Shoppers in my immediate circle that they don't need to spend all that money, they aren't cross-shopping with a Toyota Corolla or even a Rav4. If they didn't blow $50,000 they didn't have on a pickup, they would blow it on a Land Cruiser, or a Mercedes E Class, or a tarted out Jeep Wrangler. "Why do Americans like pickup trucks?" is mostly a separate question from "Why do Americans go into too much debt to buy vehicles they can't afford on loans that will bankrupt them?" The former is about the traits of the pickup truck, the latter is about the traits and cultural choices of individual Americans.
Or, generally, we can ask "Why do companies like Dodge Nissan and Land Rover continue to exist when they consistently sell inferior products?"
Maybe if one reads the 10th amendment broadly?
I suppose the real question is about what relation the founders would have intended the common law to have to the state governments, and what would they have considered to lie within their powers.
JulianRota
22hr ago
What I haven't seen much commentary on yet is, will Adams and/or Cuomo run against him as an independent? I figure, winning the Democrat nomination makes Mamdani a shoo-in by default in the general. To have a shot at defeating him would probably require a temporary alliance between a very substantial number of more centrist Democrats and pretty much all of the Republicans to all vote for one particular alternate Democrat running as independent. Having a shot at that actually working seems much less likely if both Adams and Cuomo run, especially if they start openly attacking each other.
You have described a reality dating show that I might be willing to watch.
Every single contestant has a glove or gauntlet they carry around to throw down a challenge. There should be a board that tracks challenges made, challenges rejected/accepted, and fights won or lost, but yeah, no other consequences than that.
For additional fun have one of the contestants secretly be a trained MMA fighter.
I'd imagine there'd be alliances formed early with the best fighter, but then later some betrayals as they try to get him removed. Maybe you have 4-5 guys each throwing down challenges to the same dude forcing him to decide if he wants to lose some face or actually fight each of them in a row. I'd bet that under almost ANY circumstances, sleeping 5 dudes in a row buys you immense status points.
(Most TV shows or sports could be improved by allowing contestants to fight it out)
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
22hr ago
I have no idea what anything you just said had to do with anything I was talking about in this post, bro.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
22hr ago
Nothing wrong with a girl having a front headlock, it's a bad position nowadays as wrestlers are better at front headlocks than submission guys. Sometimes going too light makes your game worse wherein you end up caring about technical details more than you should.
I personally hated being in a front headlock, it's one of the worst positions out there. Plenty of good wrestlers use front headlocks like submission guys use a guillotine to make you shoot less. A good guy to study on this topic would be Luke Rockhold as his entire game was built in chewing up wrestlers with wrestling and enough submission threats honed specifically to beat wrestlers.
Women have no clue the difference between strength of the sexes. Someone who's proficient at basic subs whilst already strong might as well wear a cape. I never got tapped out by front headlocks. It's a terrible place since it's more cranking than choking I guess. Craig Jones, world's second best grappler ever and bali loving degenerate taps out the moment he goes to a new gym so that people don't get egos involved. The front headlock thing is a new thing, we don't have much of an idea of these positions the way a wrestler would.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
22hr ago
The queries fetching the content are finally officially unretarded, which had a few fortunate downstream effects for things like fetching tweets with tweets along with their responses. Managed to move on to unretarding the import queries as well as fixing some minor bugs.
How are you doing @Southkraut?
felis-parenthesis
22hr ago
British Leyland was a bit of each. Good wages, and sleeping on the job. Holding on to your job when you do not do it is also a form rent extraction, so it doesn't change the point that capitalism has some internal defences against rent seeking. (The system has defences, the individual companies just fail.)
"protecting poor performers" reminds me of the Brezhnev era joke We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us. I claim that the "slacking on the job" form of rent extraction is present under both capitalism and socialism, supporting my main claim that rent seeking is not specifically capitalist.
Grant_us_eyes
22hr ago
And if you're not willing to listen to roughly 2 minutes of said video, it basically disproves everything what you're stating. Sorry, no one's buying your entire 'everything was worse in the past' claim any longer.
ABigGuy4U
22hr ago
I think there are definitely external factors that contribute to mental illness. There are twin studies that show that in twin pairs where one has schizophrenia, there’s only a fifty percent chance of the other twin having it. So clearly it’s something beyond just base genetic predisposition. Nobody wants to admit that because the idea that madness is something you can catch is an extremely disturbing idea. Almost Lovecraftian.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
22hr ago
· Edited 22hr ago
Many young Christians I know, of various stripes, play DnD. I’m sure there are some boomers still railing against it but millennial and zoomer Christians are generally in agreement that fantasy stories are cool, and fantasy roleplay is a fun hobby.
Now something has to be responsible for the increase in Wicca and various forms of witchery over the past couple decades, but that seems concentrated within new agey women and not the geeky introverts who played DND in the 90s.
It turns out the real problem was the dawning of the age of Aquarius the hippies and their intellectual descendants after all, though I will certainly stand firm on the proposition that occasional atheistic/countercultural men were more than willing to invoke the occult if it meant getting inside some witchy panties.
I think the problem was social conservatives conflated several different countercultural groups who all rebelled against the moral majority, and couldn’t tell the fantasy roleplay apart from the new age cults. This hardened a lot of hearts, which was a shame.
But I still see the spread of witchcraft among women as an unresolved historical question. But I suppose people on the other side would say the same about the spread of conservative Christianity among men. Dissatisfaction with secular materialism is startlingly widespread, a fact I find hard to diagnose despite being a part of it. But if I had to make a diagnosis, perhaps it’s because technology increasingly feels like it limits human freedom rather than enhancing it. (Let’s not start another debate about the automobile or social media.)
The invocation of supernatural forces of any kind becomes a kind of trump (no relation) card that lets people feel like they have control over their lives, or at least have a direct line to someone who does. I suspect that magical thinking and superstition also load on neuroticism, because neurotic people often feel like the world is dangerous and they’re too weak to face it. Supernatural powers serve as a means of personal protection against a world they feel like they cannot control. Occultism spiked during COVID, where people felt like they had little power to control the situation (whether because of state authority or fear of the disease itself). Hence you get people panicking over the election of Trump (relation intended) and trying to trump (no relation) his political power by casting hexes on /r/witchesvspatriarchy.
Sometimes I wonder if being so morally concerned about the occult in the 80s and 90s actually was the cause of increased occultism. It certainly demonstrated that getting into occult things would really piss off conservatives! So if you're a young lady and you hate conservative Christianity, and you want to express in strong terms your contempt for it, well, you might go reaching for the very things they said were deeply wrong. In particular, this might go some ways towards explaining how massively popular these things are among gay people.
Perhaps if conservatives had mocked occultism and superstition the way a lot of skeptics did instead of getting incredibly angry and treating it like a real thing, we wouldn't live in a world where 40% of young women believe in astrology. Mockery and indifference kills ideas; outrage reifies them.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
22hr ago
Did they die?
faceh
22hr ago
People buy a car primarily for what they want to look like, not for what they need or want to do.
Probably.
But I'd bet a lot are getting in over their heads on payments up front, which is starting to show up in delinquency rates.
I think some people are just not good with money and they buy cars that make them look good but I really don't know how to translate the status and affirmation points having a really nice car gets you, into a dollar amount.
I've only ever driven Honda or Toyota for the last 15 years since their engines cannot be killed by conventional means and I do NOT like large unexpected expenses from my vehicles.
I definitely don't need to tow or tote stuff around on a regular basis, and its pretty trivial to rent a truck for a while for when I do, so it never made sense for me to buy a truck when I have other things I'd rather do with the spare money.
Any chance anybody has a direct link to it? I am not surprised by people getting on the train to cancel somebody, for a while, but I thought Scott would know better, given his own history with cancel mobs.
More options
Context Copy link