domain:gurwinder.substack.com
Jiro
2d ago
We can just look at the text and see how they made significant additional distinctions for one and not the other.
Exactly what distinction did they make? They certainly didn't say "the bill of rights applies to things that are sort of like what we wrote, but everything else is absolutely literal".
I don't think your two meanings make a difference.
Yes they do. There's a difference between "long after the Constitution was written" and "long after we invented the thing we're asking about". At any rate, the problem is that if you mean "after the Constitution was written" you have no choice but to be arbitrary. If the Constitution just said "the military" you could claim that the Air Force only became part of the military after the Constitution was written, so this is still after the fact and "the military" should be read so as not to include it. There's nothing that could possibly have been put in the Constitution that by your standard wouldn't allow someone to say "you can't count the Air Force, that's after the fact".
We have specific rules (that are different) for Armies and Navies. Which set of rules applies to the Air Force?
You ask yourself "in what ways is the Air Force similar to an army and in what ways is it similar to a navy. Do what is appropriate based on the similarity."
As I noted, this isn't a perfect process. People may disagree on which is more similar or exactly how to apply a rule meant for the army or navy. But it's not unlimited discretion either; there are things that this just doesn't allow.
faceh
2d ago
I am somewhat familiar with Nate Silver's approach to modelling and prediction.
And I'll reiterate the general critique.
If you damn well know your model is going to be inaccurate, include error bars, express how much irreducible uncertainty there is. At least acknowledge that the number is most likely incorrect and is subject to large revisions, downplay confidence.
Actually, it looks like they DO have that option on display and HOLY CRAP the bars are really large on some of these.
Maybe its not a particularly useful estimate if businesses are looking for something something reliable to act upon.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
Trump is also fucking with the Fed, labor statistics, and is demanding drug prices be lowered.
Trump's drug price demands seem to be in response to anti-market demands from other countries. He's not wrong about other countries essentially demanding by law that their market freeloads on the American one.
The actual text, for anyone interested (link from twitter):
(2) Grant award certification.
(a) By accepting the grant award, recipients are certifying that:
(i) They do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, DEIA, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws; and
(ii) They do not engage in and will not during the term of this award engage in, a discriminatory prohibited boycott.
(iii) They do not, and will not during the term of this award, operate any program that benefits illegal immigrants or incentivizes illegal immigration.
As for Fuentes, I think the meaning of 'fed' in these online circles is rather more broad than it ought to be (almost every political radical with a substantial following will deal with the state or states in some capacity), but I don't think he takes himself seriously enough not to be able to justify full cooperation. He has ways of justifying it to himself, as with his Kamala support.
Blueberry
2d ago
https://acoup.blog/2025/08/01/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-iiia-family-formation/
The marriage patterns of high elites in a society are often quite different from the marriage patterns of most of the society. The classic example of this is to note that students are often mislead by European aristocrats in the medieval and early modern periods marrying very young and so they assume that everyone in medieval Europe married very young, but in fact, as we’ll see in a moment, medieval western Europe is notable for very late (mid-twenties for women, late twenties for men) typical age at first marriage among the general population.
Discrimination towards Israel is a convenient legal hammer for Trump to pound on adversaries.
Under 42 U.S.C. § 5151, the President’s regulatory authority is limited to ensuring that all disaster assistance is distributed “in an equitable and impartial manner”
Trump is using Israel because he needs to find a credible example of 'partial' behavior by local govts. The American system has special carve-outs for provable hate crimes. There is decades of precedent on methods for associating anti-Israel-movements with antisemitism and therefore provable hate crimes.
Trump's govt (and the project 2025 playbook[1]) are strategic about finding loopholes for executive overreach. For universities, it was provable affirmative action. For local funding, it's Israel.
[1] I have not read project Esther in detail. But at face value, it seems to be the guiding document on how to use antisemitism as a cudgel to beat opposing institutions into submission.
Israel is effectively a forward deployed state of the USA. They do the dirty work on the vanguard, and shield America from criticism. For ex: I don't believe the Israelis could have developed Pegasus without a soft go ahead from the Americans.
I've commented on the issue of Lotharios having an outsize (negative) influence on the pool of 'marriageable' women before.
I had the 'insight' that yeah, these types literally optimize for attracting young, sexually inexperienced women, they know exactly where to look, what to say, how to present themselves, and how to string such a woman along without getting in so deep they can't escape. Its a game they get really good at because they are playing it over and over and over again.
They do it a few times and then it becomes second nature, and since they never stick around, they can keep running up enough of a body count in a relatively short period of time to have a noticeable impact on the local singles market.
And some portion of them, I reckon, fetishize the act of despoiling an innocent girl with no intention of committing, but also take some pleasure from knowing she's been ruined for any other partners that might come along.
I am actually willing to consider straight up execution for such men, IF ONLY for the deterrent effect.
The nature of the problem is that a young woman, without having SUBSTANTIAL oversight, can't tell one of these guys apart from a more committed partner, and if one of these guys gets her first (and as stated above, they're VERY GOOD at this game!), as her first relationship experience it can pretty much ruin her ability to identify and trust a 'good' man, and might make her bitter enough to think all men are like that.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2d ago
This ended up on the cutting room floor and didn't get into my post, but Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire, had sex with barely illegal girls not because that was his kink, but because he got burned having sex with a regular escort.
If you're a celebrity or a politician and your good friend Jeffrey invites you to his island for some frolicking and debauchery, you will want whoever participated in frolicking and debauchery with you to keep her mouth shut and not to blackmail you or to go on a talk show crawl peddling her newest book How I Fucked Bill Gates and Why He Isn't Even in My Personal Top 50. So good friend Jeffrey needs someone who honestly thinks she will get in trouble if people learn what she has been doing with her various orifices.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
2d ago
So maybe because I've worked in public health this is not particularly bothersome.
I considered it for a time, but was put off by many prevailing attitudes. I regret that now; I should've went into the field to try and counterweight the worst of those attitudes. I didn't and don't have the thirst for attention to do so, though.
Are you sure that it would be the wrong decision to push more vaccines that way, even if all we were looking at was deaths prevented?
This would be one of those times where how you discuss a problem is incredibly relevant even if the downstream effects are approximately the same, and I should've quoted the offensiveness instead of leaving it (for once!) unquoted.
So I would like to say you have convinced me there is a way that the different prioritization is actually defensible. I can see why one might, especially early on, distribute vaccines in a racially biased manner. As is so often the case, the pseudonymous rando is a much better advocate for a given cause than the credentialed experts cited in the Paper of Record.
Unfortunately, that is not the way the credentialed experts in the Paper of Record described it and so, I present the source of my everlasting hatred for them:
Harald Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities. “Older populations are whiter, ” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”
What a putrid soul it must take to think and speak that way.
Marc Lipsitch, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, argued that teachers should not be included as essential workers, if a central goal of the committee is to reduce health inequities.
“Teachers have middle-class salaries, are very often white, and they have college degrees,” he said.
Their goal is, as they stated themselves, not to save lives. It is to "reduce health equities." In the way of that equity cartoon, you can hand the short man a ladder or machete the tall man at the knees. Their choice is to machete the tall man at the knees, and for that they should be condemned. They are the primary reason I have an immediate and vehement distrust of anyone using the phrase "health equity."
I see no viable defense and, frankly, have no interest in a defense of such people, any more than I would have interest in a defense of King Leopold's actions in the Congo. For better and worse, people rarely receive the fate they deserve.
For what it's worth, the article taken as a whole is interesting, and the author was clearly deliberate in positioning the back and forth of good argumentation versus abject horrors.
faceh
2d ago
Ah so they did pretty much put the pieces together for the reader.
Also this was very prescient of the "forum of obsessives throws wacky theories around and analyzes tons of evidence and manages to stumble upon something close to the truth" phenomena that sometimes occurs nowadays.
TwiceHuman
2d ago
Closing loopholes affects everyone, not just bad actors. You degrade the whole system in order to harm a subset. Every rule and regulation does, at least when these rules and regulations only place new restrictions. I'm not sure about the effect of restrictions which limit other peoples ability to place restrictions, it's harder to solve the general case of that question.
Rules tend to limit things to the lowest common denominator, this doesn't just protect those below, it also harms those above. We're also part of a dynamic system, and these tend to balance themselves. If you find a way to make X half as dangerous, then people tend to be half as careful when they do X, and then you're back where you started. This "you're back where you started" seems to explain why introducing new rules for centuries haven't gotten us anywhere. We made laws in the 1500s to combat theft, and even today we're making new laws to combat theft. I think it's safe to conclude that laws do not work, and that further laws also won't work.
I recommend an entire new way of looking at these issues. Some rules are better than others, but I think we should look at these issues in a different perspective, one which is so different that our current perspective doesn't make any sense. I like this quote by Taleb:
"I am, at the Fed level, libertarian;
at the state level, Republican;
at the local level, Democrat;
and at the family and friends level, a socialist"
If the optimal level of trust in other people is inversely proportional to the size of the system, then the optimal system is different at every scale. And one way in which you can lessen restrictions is through decentralization (running many small systems in parallel). This is merely my own answer to the question, but it seems correct. After all, the amount of rules a system has (and perhaps needs) seems to depend on its size. Family members don't usually make rules for one another. This also explains why Reddit got worse as it grew larger, until themotte had to move to its own website. And this website is largely independent from larger systems (decentralized). If this website grew in size and popularity by a factor of 10 or 100, it would either need more rules and regulations, or be shut down.
Of course, this mathematical property is not set in stone - 4chan had few rules for its size at every scale. This is either because 4chan users are more tolerant of the tradeoffs of freedom, or because the social power of moral arguments was smaller on 4chan (less moralizers = less people suggesting that you ruin everything for everyone to prevent some kind of abuse going on).
These websites are merely examples, I'm trying to solve (or model, since no solution seems to exist) the most general case of imposing restrictions on behaviour order to prevent exploitation of a system. My conclusions so far are "there are only trade-offs" and "what systems are possible depends just as much on the people inside said systems as it does on the design of said systems"
Sorry, which one of the entries is about dating? There is a lot of them and the search doesnt help.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2d ago
I think even the label of "ephebophile" is an artificial one. It probably encompasses almost all men. The average man cannot tell, at least by looking, if someone is 16 years old or 18 and a day. If they've got tits and a nice figure, they'll make just about everyone sexually attracted regardless of age.
Let's say there are two women you met in a bar: Alice is your age but has the face and the body of an 18-year-old. Barb is in high school, and she also has the face and the body of an 18-year-old. Both are making eyes at you. Which one would you (well, the Rawlsian you) rather take home?
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2d ago
Idk I've heard a lot of bad about Stephenson. I feel like I might have read some of his stuff in the past and liked it? Hard to remember.
faceh
2d ago
My favorite entry in this particular genre has to be the Anime Miniseries Blue Sub No. 6, where you have advanced submarines duking it out with mutated whales and weird hybrid creatures.
And the morality occupies a bit more a gray area than Cameron dares portray.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2d ago
Ahh yeah I saw while I was commenting. Can't say I'm surprised but I am a bit sad. He brought it on himself I have to admit, but I liked his fighting spirit. If only he could've been a little less aggressive about it and showed some willingness to back down.
birb_cromble
2d ago
large revisions have been made quite often, both downward and upward, for decades.
I feel like you're burying some of Reuters own commentary there.
The combined downward revision for the two previous months - May and June - was larger than anything reported outside of the pandemic era. Indeed, the estimates for the two prior months combined have more often than not been revised higher. Since 1979, the median two-month combined estimate change was an upward revision of 10,000.
Yes, revisions have been made quite often, but this one is noteworthy and unusual. I'm not yet willing to ascribe it to malice, but we should acknowledge that it's peculiar.
ulyssessword
2d ago
Thanks, I chuckled. Hadn't seen that one before.
When I say "account for that in planning", I don't mean you adjust your forecasts downward X% from the report because they always overestimate by the same margin. Consistently high is not the same thing as 'always high' or 'consistently high by the same amount'. It just means that on average the estimator is greater than the true value (or, really, the quick estimate tends to be higher than the slow estimate).
If the estimator is wrong consistently but in a predictable way... they should be able to be wrong less often?
Not necessarily. Estimation is always dealing with real world constraints liked limited resources and time frame for gathering and analyzing data, sampling bias, unknown unknowns, etc...
I encourage you to read the Nate Silver article I linked. He talks about this significantly more articulately than I can.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
2d ago
In the 1980s dozens of cities and states had taken economic action against South Africa. It's not a Civil Rights issue.
ulyssessword
2d ago
Yeah.
Put bluntly, children looking at taking care of a Down's Syndrome child won't have a good idea of what it would take for an adult to take care of a Down's Syndrome adult. It's very overdetermined:
- adults looking at taking care of a Down's Syndrome child won't have a good idea of the requirements to take care of a Down's Syndrome adult. Children are even worse at predicting those differences.
- Children looking at taking care of a normal child won't have a good idea of the requirements to take care of a normal adult (including themselves). This is just a standard part of growing up.
Same goes for any other developmental disorder, of course. I'd take them even less seriously than if they wanted to be a princess or an astronaut.
Isn't that basically the trend of adopting children from Africa or Haiti? It's weirdly popular among white Christians, eg. Amy Coney Barrett and her husband adopted two children from Haiti.
TitaniumButterfly
2d ago
This assumes that laws of physics are universal and immutable which we are not in a position to judge.
Funny enough, I excluded video games as a class, because a ton of absolute BANGERS have come out in that period.
And there's at least a couple counterpoints to Baldur's Gate, like the Harry Potter game that achieved MASSIVE success despite an attempt to boycott it, and Stellar Blade going all in on the conventionally attractive female PC.
I enjoyed the HELL out of Armored Core VI, and that one didn't try to inculcate me with identity politics or carry any overbearing political message, even as it sort of makes you feel bad for certain decisions you make during the course of the game.
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