domain:shapesinthefog.substack.com
sockpuppet2
1d ago
Porn, setting aside you saying both "porn" and "free porn?" No, inasmuch as that seems like the least of their problems, liberty aside. Everything that a state or municipal government may deem harmful to minors? Yes. (And California already has a law against advertising guns/shooting sports to minors.) And while it's easy to say "Well, I can't think of anything like that I want homeless people to have," it's presumptuous to think this category will remain small, with SCOTUS giving governments a favorable precedent, and presumptuous to think one knows what tools/services are best for the homeless (compare politicians who propose to "fix" the cash-based economies of the working poor). (And short-sighted to say "I don't care if homeless people suffer;" they're not going to suffer purely in ways that don't affect you, no matter how much some people hope this would be the case.)
sockpuppet2
1d ago
Money is, in principle, fungible... but is there clear evidence that Medicaid reimbursements "keep the abortion mill facility open?" (E.G., Analyses of natural experiments?) Pro-choice donors may say they're passionate about all low-cost health services, but are they opening their wallets to donate to non-profit sexual health/OBGYN clinics that don't provide abortions?
sockpuppet2
1d ago
Can anyone summarize and/or link to a summary of the supposed conflict over/between Gun Jesus (the Forgotten Weapons guy with the long hair and goatee) and whatshisface from InRange? I know whatshisface has a strong SJW-bent that puts off a lot of people, but Gun Jesus presumably kept the Brutality Match under the InRange corporate umbrella by choice (I'm guessing he and the others could have rebranded the format and registered their own LLC, had they wanted to) and the only reason I can think of to dislike Gun Jesus (other than the controversy over him planning to publish than cancelling the publication of a translation of a memoir by a foreign resistance fighter in the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine, which seems like a separate thing) is guilt-by-even-reduced-association with whatshisface, which would be a bit unhinged.
Mantergeistmann
1d ago
Yes, my understanding is that detergent a) never goes bad, and b) everyone needs. It's a very safe sale to make.
sodiummuffin
1d ago
That being said, overperformance of multiracial students would be consistent with heterozygote advantage.
If there was an effect like that it should be apparent in admixture studies on IQ, like this one on european/african admixture. Instead performance just scaled with percentage european ancestry.
I think the PISA results would mostly just reflect the specific racial composition, where the majority of multiracial-identifying people in the U.S. are "White and Hispanic" and often have little or no genetic difference from the people identifying as just "White". Looking at this Wikipedia page 13.8% of multiracial people identify as black and something else. If we assume they have 40% black ancestry (since regular African-Americans average 80% black ancestry), then by comparison the U.S. is 14.4% black so people who identify as multiracial have half as much black ancestry as the average American. There's also 7.2% of multiracial people who identify as "White and Native American", but most people who identify that way have much less than 50% Native ancestry. 6.1% identify with 3+ races, but that shouldn't shift aggregate ancestry that much. Since biracial self-identification is unreliable, there could also be a bias where more intelligent families are more aware of their family history or more likely to belong to communities where biracial identification is high-status.
ulyssessword
1d ago
That being said, overperformance of multiracial students would be consistent with heterozygote advantage.
I suspect that it's some amount of selection bias as well. Specifically, being multi-racial is higher class than being single-race, so people with X% of their genes from one race and Y% from another would answer differently on the survey based on their class.
hypocrisy
It's not hypocrisy. I can both advocate that we shouldn't be punching, and that ill gotten gains from punching should be rolled back, while at the same time acknowledging that we are in fact in a punching game, and god damnit, I'm gonna punch harder than anyone if that's the game we're playing.
The alternative is just being a loser, getting punched relentlessly by an opponent that believes in punching, while they mock you for not fighting back because it's not what you believe. Or mock you for fighting back because they claim according to your own beliefs (which they don't even share) you are supposed to allow them to punch you relentlessly.
No_one
1d ago
Alcohol is way too widespread to really ban, in addition relatively easy to make at home.
RenOS
something is wrong
1d ago
This is the case in germany as well for the most part, though it's as always more complicated. For the state universities, there are very few shortcuts, top degrees are kept highly selected & small, and it's free to boot - you just have to be good enough. The private universities, meanwhile, have the reputation that anyone can just buy their way in. It's gotten even harder for them since there's lots of new, easy-to-get degrees even in state universities nowadays. But most people know which are which, so they're only worth it if you can't get anything else.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1d ago
I'd be somewhat interested in other men's experiences of this.
Since you're asking, my personal experience was that puberty was smooth in many, but not all areas. WRT my own sexual awakening specifically, yeah, it was pretty smooth on-ramp, and no, it never got to be a consuming fire, but it was a fire that (while abstract) wasn't quite as simple as taking deep breaths and focusing on something else, for me, either. More like I was really eager to find the one and live happily ever after, including lots of hot sex. In retrospect, I feel like I obviously bought into the Hollywood movie version of sex and love way too hard.
Gaashk
1d ago
I guess I can see the appeal.
Our family skills are art and nature photography, and the daughter has become excited by the prospect of displaying her creations. She walked into a gallery and announced that she wants to have her work in a gallery. She made a figurine, and got all excited about the idea of selling it. It occurs to me that I don't have any sales and finding display space skills at all, I always gave things away, as did my mom. I think she tried selling her art once, and took my brother and I with, but even though she was next to her friend, it wasn't good enough for her to want to continue. It would be nice if I knew more about competitions or something.I always put stuff in the country fair, so maybe we'll do that in a few years.
anon_
1d ago
Immigration via refugee resettlement and other humanitarian programs are a small proportion of the increase in the immigrant population since 1965.
One faction (my faction, I suppose to acknowledge my obvious bias) of the anti-immigration camp is that while the {parole-in-place, resettlement, credible-fear and temporary protected status, etc...} are a small proportion of numbers but a huge proportion of problematic and highly net-negative immigrants as compared to the Sergeys and Elons of the world. You could call them selectivists but really it's absurd to thing that we even need to characterized "we don't need 100K Haitians" as selectivity.
I expect that when the anti-immigration camp was totally out of the zeitgeist in the preceding decade they didn't have to reconcile what they really meant because there was a strong external enemy and they were out of power anyway. Now the farmworker thing has crystalized the division and someone is going to have to mediate it.
It was easy to be against the Obama/Biden policies, it's harder to find one that satisfies the entire coalition.
Blueberry
1d ago
To be fair, I wouldn't expect to learn that much Spanish from Dutch Duolingo.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1d ago
I'm not sure what you're responding to exactly. Are you saying this seems inane and that school shouldn't focus on this, or that this doesn't seem like a hard academic competition to win. Is this even an academic competition?
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1d ago
Ah, gotcha.
Cannabis can induce outright psychosis and initiation of schizophrenic symptoms in people with genetic vulnerability towards it. The higher the dose, the higher the risk.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Surely people are aware that there's a difference between reality and fantasy? Movies teach me that with the power of friendship and snarky quips I can overthrow giant conspiracies and evil empires. But I don't try that IRL because the evil empire is actually very strong.
For most behaviors, minors are exposed to plenty of real-world examples. Even in a world where driving licences were not a thing, kids would play Need for Speed (or whatever car racing games kids play these days) but still get exposed to thousands of hours observing how actual humans in the world drive their cars. They see their neighbors drive their cars every day. The two areas where most exposure is fictional are grievous violence and sex -- they will likely never see their neighbor use a gun to defend her property or have sex with her husband.
For grievous violence, this is not a big deal, because thankfully most teens do not have strong urge to kill people, and are also living in a generally peaceful society where their misconceptions are unlikely to harm them. The ones which do end up in professions where they are likely to encounter violence can be taught why emulating Rambo is a bad idea.
For sex, things are different, because a significant fraction of minors will end up having sex. Now, not all of the fictional exposure is hardcore pornography, there are plenty of Hollywood movies with fade-to-black scenes implying sex, and unless kids are watching John Wayne exclusively, these generally depict a somewhat more realistic standard of behavior than porn.
Also, anything teachers or the state try to do will be extremely uncool and cringe. It'll be just like the 'informed consent, no means no' training that nearly every institution has but worse. Can you even imagine how groan-inducingly awful official state-sponsored pornography will be? How woke and diverse and uncool and stilted the dialogue is?
I am aware of that problem. Telling minors "here is an educational and super hot and naughty video about consent and sex" will by default be as successful as telling them "today we will have so much fun learning the 7 row in the multiplication table".
As I added in parenthesis, a better idea would be to just buy the rights to stuff which is both popular and also unobjectionable from a "displaying problematic behavior" perspective. The nice thing about porn is that there is an ungodly amount of it produced, so even if you filter out 90% as problematic, you still have more to pick from than you could ever afford to pay for (or that minors could watch before becoming adults due to the runtime).
A better solution would be punitively obliterating Pornhub and co with massive fines and lawsuits so they stop profiting off people trafficking and child rape.
I have two problems with that. First, will it change the outcome? So you ban the big free-to-view US sites. Does this mean that teens will go back to jerking off to pictures of women in swimsuits, as god intended? No, because the internet is literally full of porn. You would at least need a Great Texan Firewall, and even then, I suspect that horny teenagers will find a way.
The second problem is the claim that pornhub is making profits from sex trafficking and CSAM. In a very technical way, you are correct (at least about sex trafficking) -- since there is no good way to identify sex trafficking victims in porn videos, a fraction of the videos on pornhub likely contain sex trafficking victims and add to their bottom line just as all the other videos. But your framing suggests a moustache-twirling villain CEO ordering his underlings to get him more sex trafficking and CSAM because he wants more profits, which I think is kind of the opposite of what is the case. Pornhub will earn their cut whether the viewers watch free-range amateur porn, porn with sex trafficking victims or hardcore CSAM. They have zero incentive to dabble into the latter two, because this will bring the state down on their money-printing machine for sure. For CSAM, I would assume that they spend orders of magnitude more to filter it than they make on the odd video which makes it through before it is flagged. For sex trafficking, I will grant you that there is technically more that they could do to avoid hosting the odd video. For example, they could require a notarized statement about the identity, age, residence, location and travel accommodations for anyone in a video uploaded to their platform, and I am sure some anti-trafficking charities are calling them out to do such that. Obviously they don't do that because that would destroy their business. But that is different from consciously deciding that you want more sex trafficking videos.
Suppose I had an axe to grind against letter or parcel shipping companies (perhaps I think they ruin brick and mortar stores, or have some religious objection to cardboard boxes). Saying that parcel shipping is evil and should be prohibited, while it might be my true belief, will likely not convince a majority. Instead, I could go after something which is tangentially related and very unpopular: dark net marketplaces (for the record, I think DNMs for drugs are not very objectionable, and clearly better than dealers in street corners and all the violence that brings, but I recognize that is a minority view). If we take the reported gross profits of Silk Road (100M$/year), and conservatively estimate that drug vendors spend 10% of the Silk Road commission on shipping costs, this means that FedEx and co have made at least ten million dollars per year from drug trafficking!
This is your argument in a nutshell.
Of course, if I was Texas, I would not just outlaw these companies (which would be seen as partisan and un-American), I would simply pass legislation which forces these companies to do everything in their power to stop drug parcels, i.e. mandate that ever parcel is inspected with a CT scanner by a trained operator. Oh, you can't operate profitably under these conditions? Real shame, that, but we are not going to cut you some slack when drug shipments are involved.
Meanwhile, most of the drug sellers would just switch to use the US postal service (which is not covered in the Texan regulation) and send small quantities of drugs in letters.
Gaashk
1d ago
From the public school's perspective, the problem is that there are all these families where the parents don't read, and would like their kids to read better than they do, but don't necessarily do things like reading in front of their kids, making the whole thing much more difficult and tedious. And there are also kids with various processing differences, who have to be taught very concretely, but English is a bit odd phonetically, it takes up a lot of memory space, so they have to drill a lot.
My daughter just turned six, and has started spontaneously spelling things out loud. She'll say "that's good" and try to spell out the "g-o-o-d" part. I'll tell her the right spelling if necessary. This is not something I suggested, she seems to just want to do it, as a developmental thing. I remember being a teenager and was reading more than I was talking, so my internal monologue contained spelling and punctuation. But that's because my parents had a bunch of curated books in there house, and had designated quiet reading time because they actually wanted to read themselves, which a lot of kids don't have and the schools (not Alpha school, of course) are always trying and struggling to replicate that.
HereAndGone
1d ago
They don’t learn “public speaking”, they learn how to craft and deliver a speech and then submit the performance to the Moth to be judged by external parties.
Maybe I'm just dumb, but trying to navigate The Moth's website makes me think this is just a Gen Z version of Toastmasters. I mean, yay for "public storytelling" but I doubt they're going to be very hard on a bunch of elementary schoolers and since they seem to be aiming for podcasters, well okay maybe yeah they are training the new generation of social media influencers who will be hosting podcasts as a career given that AI will take every other job by the time these kids have speedrun the national curriculum and are ready to join the world of work aged sixteen.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1d ago
I'm hoping that is the total for all three and not 40K each because holy crap.
Without looking this up, how much do you think the state spends per kid in a public school in a major but not very high cost of living city?
Framing this as a win for principled anti-intervention rightists is ridiculous.
Who said anything about a "win for principled anti-intervention"? They wanted to do much more than this, but didn't.
Ground invasion of Iran is impossible and externally-forced regime change is impossible without ground invasion.
I'm sure all these calls for regime change were just kayfabe, as were Israeli attempts to break the cease fire.
Thanks to the cringy association with supplements and PUA bootcamps, I've been conditioned to automatically suspect anything whose name begins with—or is just—"Alpha" is a scam or will otherwise underwhelm. It's petty but this is why I'm putting off watching 28 Years Later, despite originally being hopeful about its release and having enjoyed 28 Days Later and parts of 28 Weeks Later.
While the author might be a bit extreme than most, in general it's amazing how much handwringing people do over the details of children's school curriculum design and teaching methodology (teaching content might be more understandable) when the heavy-lifting is done by your partner being smart, you being smart yourself, and keeping your children away from the riffraff. The rest is window dressing.
Doesn't the author know how much Nutritional Security and Socioeconomic Factor he's leaving on the table by not supplementing his children's diets with Alpha BrainTM?
aceventura
1d ago
A lot of noise, at least on Twitter, is being made about the birthright citizenship case, but the more meaningful victories for Reds are the porn and LGBT school lessons cases.
The real blackpill for hardcore immigration restrictionists is even if birthright citizenship is overturned for illegals, there won't be significant decrease in either the immigrant population or immigration inflow for two reasons:
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Deportations numbers are nowhere near where they need to be in order for millions of people to be removed within the next four years, and it's only going to get tougher as attention is peeled off to other matters, political capital is expended on other issues, and exceptions are made.
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The Trump administration has not indicated that they are going to pursue any meaningful changes to either family-based or employment visas, which combined, account for approximately 80% of how people acquire permanent residency. Immigration via refugee resettlement and other humanitarian programs are a small proportion of the increase in the immigrant population since 1965. Trump himself has historically been a pro-immigration guy, and his recent comments on DACA, H1-Bs, and Chinese students, combined with his willingness to compromise on which illegal immigrants are prioritized for deportation, suggest that millions of people will continue to acquire permanent residency and citizenship.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
The fact that the claims are symmetric does not mean the situation on the ground is.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
The other headline is that they progress 2.6 times faster on the state mandated curriculum, so they'll probably finish it all by junior high or so.
This bar is not quite as low as the Dead Sea, but it's at least as low as Amsterdam. The state mandated curriculum is supposed to be set up so that every kid gets through it in 12 years. It doesn't do that well, but the numbers are consistent with it working for kids down to more than 1SD below the mean. If you have a program that's almost certainly only going to attract kids 1SD ABOVE the mean and higher, going much faster should be easy.
Maybe someone can start a college that only accepts 14-year-olds (but otherwise has the same admission standards as regular colleges).
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