domain:slatestarcodex.com
Throwaway05
1d ago
I absolutely hypothesize it's this. I'm getting older now and while I still go to the gym the numbers are much lower than they used to be, I hear my younger friends brag and I mourn the old days.
Ask me to actually do something and I smoke them.
Presumably because I have a bigger frame, more practice, and more experience actually using my muscles in manual labor.
roystgnr
1d ago
There are enough stories about the laziness and incompetence of ordinary law enforcement work out there already. "Here's a video of the guys who burgled my house driving away; their license plate number is clear." "Well, we can't prove the owner of the car was the one driving the car, so our hands are tied." "Can you at least check out their garage, where my AirTag says my stuff still is?" "Huh?" I don't want to call this all routine incompetence, since surely I'm only reading about the worst cases that made it through social and news media selection bias, but it's at least repeated incompetence. (these examples also aren't necessarily law enforcement's fault - e.g. if they can't get a judge to issue a warrant or a DA to prosecute in situation X then it's hard to blame cops who just give up on X)
But the incompetence of enforcement of extraordinary cases, with the death toll up to six here, is still shocking to me. Rationally, I know the US homicide clearance rate is down to 50/50, and I know that's in spite of the low average intelligence of people dumb enough to commit murder, but I still like to pretend to myself that cops are just too busy to stop the little crimes because they're on the case on the big ones.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Of course, this is not the actual logic. What's actually going on is plain old sympathy.
pbmonster
1d ago
They weren't strong
Often, they were extremely strong a decade (or two) ago, and are now in a chill, but meticulously managed decline. Especially if they managed to avoid long injuries, their muscles might not be bulging anymore, and might be covered by a layer of fat, but the muscle mass is still mostly there. Advanced age and sinking testosterone levels makes building muscle much more difficult, but careful maintenance is doable.
It's even more apparent in the endurance sports. If you look at 10k/half marathon/marathon times of senior/grandmaster division runners, they often maintain impressive amateur times into their sixties. The real performance cliff only seems to come in the late sixties.
but they knew how to leverage what strength they had.
This is, of course, also true.
FistfullOfCrows
1d ago
What are the lore implications? Do these Native American Kangz have a Yakub of their own?
Eetan
1d ago
I think it deserved to be a bigger deal than it largely was.
If so, it is to highlight the routine laziness and incompetence of ordinary law enforcement work. (Yes, you can shoot your parents, do the minimal work to do not be caught at the crime scene and you will get away with it. Yes, if you are wanted, you can just let it know you died in boating accident and TPTP will let it slide)
The Zizians were anything but 180IQ master criminals from pulp fiction, but the limited smarts they had were sufficient to get away with everything for long time.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1d ago
On the one hand, replacing every American with a higher-IQ Chinese or Indian person might raise the GDP by 15%, but it's weird to say to say it would be good for "America."
I've seen people who would argue this, in two different types. First, there's the open borders set; the sort who, when someone talks about how current trends will, say, destroy France, respond with "What, is it going to sink into the ocean? Iberia will be turned into an island somehow?" To them, "America", or any other country, is just a chunk of land, an arbitrary geographic division marked by "imaginary lines," utterly independent of the people living on it. That the job of a country's government is to provide administration for the Universal Human Rights, both "negative" and "positive", of all people within its particular arbitrary domain, without discrimination — they have a duty to treat equally everyone who happens to be living there in any given moment, regardless of how long they've been there, or any arbitrary fiction like "citizenship." Further, their view generally sees the existence of separate countries as a historical mistake, a remnant of the xenophobia of our ancestors, who failed to see past superficial cultural differences to our universal humanity, and thus drew borders instead of politically unifying into a larger and larger multicultural polity that would come to embrace all humanity; and thus that existing nations should at the very least, in practice, be reduced to mere administrative subdivisions of a de facto or de jure one-world government.
(There's also a slightly more libertarian-leaning technocratic subset, who see the duty of the state's administration as less about the welfare state, and more about maximizing their territory's GDP. A corporation's leadership has a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, thus, if a CEO thinks firing the entire workforce of the company and replacing them with new hires will make it more profitable, he isn't just allowed to do so, he's required. Analogously, if a government thinks replacing the "legacy" population of the country with immigrants will increase total GDP, well then, 'line goes up equals world more gooder.')
Then there's the people who would reject the idea for other countries, but would make the case for America specifically, because the USA is not like other countries — "America" is an idea. America is a system of government, laid down by the Founders (some argue via divine inspiration), and enshrined in the (sacred) Constitution. Wherever those ideals exist, there is "America." So, yes, you can replace every American with a higher-IQ Chinese or Indian person, but so long as the structures of the federal government remain, so long as the Constitution is still there, then it's still "America."
Eetan
1d ago
My theory of crypto value is that most of the coin gets stolen every few years
It is lost and misplaced, not stolen, and it is not most, estimated number of lost BTC is about 10-20% of total supply
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1d ago
Moonlight Relic: Guardian of Aster Fall Book 3 by David North.
So I've been looking at my family history recently and can't help but notice that some of my personality traits are exactly what you would expect given where I come from. I can't prove my hypothesis is true, but the suspicion is unshakeable. My question is: Do groups with merchant history have consistently different behaviour from other groups?
I'm about three-quarters Hokkien and one-quarter Cantonese, and while I haven't been able to trace the ancestries of all of my grandparents I know at least one of their fathers grew up in Quanzhou. It was an important port city for four hundred years during the Song and Yuan dynasties, and many people there were traders - in fact, the name for "satin" comes from the Arabic name for the city. Given its importance, it saw merchants from all over the world and played host to many religions - it was a place where Buddhists, Confucians, Taoist, Muslims, Christians, Hindus and even Manichaeans would have congregated (many of these religions, including Manichaeism, still exist in Fujian). A gigantic proportion of overseas Hokkien trace their history back to Quanzhou, and it is likely their ancestors would have been involved in a whole lot of trading and seafaring along the Maritime Silk Road. (As previously noted, I'm not sure where my other two Hokkien grandparents trace their ancestry, but it's not unlikely they trace it back to some similarly large trading port like Amoy which became the hub in Fujian after the decline of Quanzhou. And Cantonese were also, unsurprisingly, big traders and merchants.)
Five months ago - before I started looking at any of this - I had written a post about my inexplicable need to wander, and in that post I even mention the romanticism and pull of the Maritime Silk Road. When I was six or seven I had claimed ownership of many of the travel books my parents owned, and placed Post-Its in these books to mark destinations for future reference. I have always lacked a need for human interaction and connection, while also possessing an unusually high openness to experience as well as a deep longing for exploration and novelty. Some part of me has always wanted to be a nomad of sorts, and the idea of being tied down to one place doing the same thing for the rest of my life - even something I like - actually sometimes induces low-level panic. It feels uninspired and uninspiring. It feels domesticated. I recently watched a video where an old hippie recounts his time travelling through Southeast Asia on the Banana Pancake trail, and couldn't help but feel nostalgic and wistful while watching it.
I've seen this urge in other male members of my family too, who seem to have this compulsion to travel and wander and see new things. I don't know if this is real or if it's just me inappropriately pattern-matching, but it's weird and disconcerting to look back into your history and come across a glaringly obvious selection pressure that might have produced your specific pattern of behaviour.
Eetan
1d ago
Eetan
1d ago
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1d ago
Western democracies are designed to make it difficult for politicians to directly control the judiciary.
Which is yet another reason "Western democracy" needs to go. Bring in an Augustus who will solve this swiftly and decisively.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1d ago
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
DOGE didn't ultimately succeed in shrinking the government, but it eliminated the security of government employment.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I guess the play would be to release an actual AI generated version of the same picture, so that everything is confused as to what they're looking at and what was the original.
since the mantra of most owners is to buy and hold.
That's not necessarily it. I used to know a guy that donated 1000 BTC to a minor-mid influencer, back when the price was in single digits. It later came out that the recipient lost his wallet key, without selling a single coin.
Either way, I don't really is see the problem. The pathologization of savings always struck me as economist cope.
pbmonster
1d ago
The clothes themselves seem to be pretty standard ones, similar to what I see in every store, not some junk or second hand ones, so they must cost something? How these costs are covered? How are they ensured against loss or theft?
The answer to all of that is that those clothes cost almost nothing when you directly import them from China/Bangladesh/Vietnam. Single dollars, often cents, per item. It's all mass produced plastic garbage.
Go onto shein.com and sort cloths by "price, ascending". Bulk is even cheaper than that.
pbmonster
1d ago
The clothes are sourced from others in the community, maybe a couple of whom acquire big volume discount merchandise from discount store closings, perhaps wholesale outlets etc, then sell them on.
And frequently, it's just the same plastic garbage Shein/Wish/AliExpress is selling, imported in bulk.
On vacation, my wife tried getting a cheap beach dress from those stands, the only criteria being "cotton or linen" and "kinda fits". The entire operation was abandoned because the first 5 people we tried didn't have a single piece of clothing not made of plastics.
pbmonster
1d ago
That's also probably the ideal vessel for a sail system. Transporting bulky rocket parts below deck makes mounting the sails/masts straight forward, the low density cargo doesn't require a large displacement hull, and the ship probably doesn't need to run on a tight schedule. Container ships would have much more trouble finding room for the sails, and with more draft comes more hydrodynamic resistance, and so a requirement for much larger sails.
But maybe bulk carriers could get foils mounted cheaply and quickly. Even 0.1% fuel savings are a big deal in the industry.
Now I'm wondering what happened to all those startups that tried lashing a robotic kite to cargo ships...
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Directionally, I am okay with that, provided that the long term consequences for the CEO are real, which seems doubtful. On the other hand, having a fat bank account allows for a much nicer prison term ('work' release etc), and having a nice life despite a criminal record.
As another example, suppose someone kills a kid in a DUI crash. If it is their own kid, then it seems very likely that the killing will haunt them for the rest of their days. If it is some unrelated kid, it will not affect the median person as much. So I am fine with giving the filicide a shorter prison sentence.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
1d ago
Just finished The Reverse of the Medal.
Jack Aubrey displays his characteristic gullibility on land and walks right into a trap laid for him by his father's political enemies. Practically the entire book is set in England which makes for a nice change of scenery after having most of the last three books set in the Mediterranean, South Atlantic and the Pacific seas. Really interesting novel that plays more like a spy thriller than a naval adventure, and I can see how its in some people's top 5 for this series.
After a bunch of ????? happens that I don't want to spoil (but includes someone accurately insulting Maturin as a cuck), our heroes end up on The Surprise bearing a letter of marque and sailing as privateers. I'm looking forward to Letter of Marque, because while there's plenty of ink spilled about pirates, there's very little about pirates that are endorsed by their legitimate government.
Haven't been commenting since most of this has been simple evolutionary-biology stuff I'm already intimately familiar with, but you stated last post that part 3 would ruffle some feathers - in contrast, I see the conclusion this part comes to as transparently and obviously true. The very way you view and perceive the world is strongly genetically-linked, this would have been clear to people in some way or other until the Enlightenment idea of tabula rasa fucked most people's conceptions of this basic truth (though there was prior precedent in earlier concepts of mind-body dualism as well as the Christian concept of everyone being equal in the eyes of God). I don't think most people on TheMotte would disagree with this though, except for maybe Hlynka who is long gone.
The fact that human mental architectures are just irreconcilably different has always been plainly clear to me, since I strongly suspect that many personality traits of mine lie somewhere around two or three sigma from the mean. I have always found the way most people form their moral and factual beliefs, as well as how they experience the world, to diverge so significantly from mine that they may as well be lizard people. That applies to members of my family as well in spite of the shared genetics (albeit marginally less so). As I've grown older I have since learned to model the minds of other people, but I have always been an individual without a clear tribe or any place in which I "belong", and am perpetually mustering up a facsimile of normal human interaction in order to get by.
EDIT: Your post is also related to a thought I've been having recently, detailed here.
I think most of the gym strength vs labor strength comes down to this.
On a practical level, most construction workers will have the added advantage of having both much higher work capacity in the movements most relevant to their work - gym strength is not commonly built by doing hundreds of reps (per hour, for 10 hours, in the sun) - and by having already built the mental fortitude necessary to complete hundreds of reps (per hour, for 10 hours, in the sun).
The laborer will of course turn that around. The inability (in work capacity or mental fortitude) to lift all day is the same as not being "all that strong at all" - no matter what the little numbers on the plates say when they get moved around for a grand total of 10 minutes every other day.
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