domain:rifters.com
FarmReadyElephants
1d ago
That predictably leads to social deficits and-- guess what-- trans people report high levels of social isolation and loneliness (This figure includes FTM trans people too, which aren't what I'm talking about with autism, but I'll get to that later). Meanwhile, estrogen increases oxytocin and oxytocin reducing autism symptoms and oxytocin decreases the felt impact of social isolation. So immediately, there's a pretty compelling link between autism->feeling lonely->taking estrogen->feeling better that explains the "success" of the trans phenomenon, including the high rates of treatment satisfaction.
Part of this satisfaction could also be gaining a new social group. You might find similar rates of satisfaction among people who joined a church, or who in past generation may have joined a music subculture (goth, emo, punk) instead of becoming LGBTQ++.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
Also, "Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life." - yeah, making major life changes, having a new project, and potentially a new social group, can do that for you.
I have an acquaintance from college who transitioned male to female. They once showed me a picture of a neckbeard with acne, saying "this is what I used to look like, then I transitioned and I'm so happy with how I look." Well, no crap my friend, you shaved the neckbeard and started taking care of yourself!
Whacking it to not being able to do math is a common AGP pastime.
Now I want to know whether "being forced to find the derivative of an integral" is someone's kink. Surely not?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
An older dude who used to do Aikido joined recently, and I will say he definitely learned something in the way of balance and body positioning from his aikido practice, he's very tough to off balance and he's got strong resistance. But at times he is a little goofy with his technical choices.
FarmReadyElephants
1d ago
Obviously this all has to be taken with a grain of salt, because the risk of confounding factors and psychosomatic/placebo effects in this case is high.
Yeah. "Girlish" traits like frivolity, stupidity/incapability, and artsiness are valued among AGP folks because it turns them on. Whacking it to not being able to do math is a common AGP pastime. There's an element of roleplay going on that is impossible to dissociate from the chemical element without double blind studies.
Also, "Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life." - yeah, making major life changes, having a new project, and potentially a new social group, can do that for you.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
including our very own Scott Alexander have gotten in on the game by describing his platforming of alternative views as "dangerous" and "irresponsible".
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.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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.
Do these people want to make me actively hate 'trans' people? I mean, I have some difficulties with how some strands of activism are playing out (particularly the rigid reinforcement of simplistic gender roles of the 'blue is for boys, pink is for girls' type) but I don't think I hate anyone.
And then I read shit like this and I want to get a gun and start shooting (in Minecraft).
"Ooh, I tried oestrogen and it made me so girly! I liked tarot and magical stuff and giggling and being all fuzzy brained!"
(And I say this as someone who likes playing around with tarot imagery but don't treat it as serious.)
I have been on oestrogen all my life (up to menopause) and if it made me describe my sensations like this, I would have preferred to jump off a cliff. "Oh gee, the reason I can't maths is because my little girl brain so soaked in hormones, gosh!"
I think there's a lot of "I expect X to be the opposite of Y, and if taking A gives me the sensations of X, then I will behave differently to how I normally behave" going on here. I think there may well be some physical changes, but mucking around like this is just annoying as all hell.
"According to these models, everyone falls somewhere on the autism–schizotypy continuum"
Yeah, and what makes these models worth more than a hole in the ground? "Hey, by our new model, everyone is some flavour of crazy and if you're not Stereotypically Male Brain Things oriented then you must be Stereotypically Female Brain People oriented".
Give me a break. Or a bottle of sherry. I feel the glittery pink girly need to get blind stinkin' drunk after being exposed to this.
EDIT: On a more serious note, why doesn't progesterone get any love? In cis females, oestrogen isn't there on its own. There's a balance between the two (and more). Do trans women/trans experimenters like our guy here ever dose themselves with progesterone as well to get the full female experience?
Oh, I see he did:
Passing a remark about "well duh you stuck a progesterone suppository up yourself all in the name of amateur hour endocrinology, I don't think it was the progesterone that made you stupid" would be too easy - oh darn, there I went and did it. But yeah: wanting the alleged results of oestrogen without figuring out the natural cycle of the cis female hormone levels does lead me to think that there's a lot of "I expect to feel like a, b and c, and I'm going to feel like that even if I have to imagine it!" going on here, I don't think there's a neutral/blind "let's see what happens" trial happening here.
EDIT EDIT: Clearly I'm coming at this from the angle of someone who naturally had these hormones all my life, so I can't speak as to what it would be like to experience the effects for the first time. But I have to say, all the "it's like being on mild psychedelics" - I've never tried psychedelics so I can't say if being female is like being slightly stoned all the time, but the rest of it - cutting down sensory issues, helping with sleep, etc.
Oh how I wish. I've had mild insomnia all my life, and the good old autism spectrum "this tag on the collar of my clothing will drive me insane if I can't tear it off right now" sensory issues. Oestrogen is not a magic cure for that, folks, so I strongly suspect some placebo effect going on, as well as the guy admitting he's doing/had been doing a lot of ketamine at the same time.
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