domain:reddit.com
Why am I (and others of an older generation) so horribly prejudiced against perfectly normal people covered head-to-toe in tattoos and piercings? Why do we cling to our outmoded beliefs that tattooing of that extent reveals low-life trashiness?
Well, cases like this, for one. Add in drugs (but of course drugs were involved) and it's a mess. Why, how can I look at the photos of this productive member of society and think to myself "that's a crazy dangerous person?"
Because he is a crazy dangerous person.
Also, while I'm at it, let me give out about the members of my own sex who hook up with crazy dangerous guys and still persuade themselves that this is the human equivalent of a velvet hippo cuddlebug pitbull who won't ever bite their own face off:
Jurors took just over four hours last month to unanimously convict Mr Scannell of the murder.
He struck Mr Baitson from behind the left knee with a sword at the Eurospar car park on Newtown Road in Cobh, Co Cork on the evening of March 15, 2024. Medical evidence revealed that such was the ferocity of the attack, the samurai sword cut through muscle, artery and bone and partially severed the leg.
... A letter from his partner, Alison Roche, was read to the court which said he was a devoted and loving father and partner.
She said her partner had battled alcohol and drug addiction issues but that everyone deserves a second chance at rehabilitation.
"Addiction is horrible," she wrote.
Mr Scannell has 11 previous convictions, one from July 2016 for assault causing harm in which he received a two year suspended sentence from Cork Circuit Criminal Court.
So let me get this straight: he's covered literally to his head in tattoos, he sells drugs, he's a drunk and a junkie, he's violent with the criminal conviction to back that up, and he just straight-up violently murdered a guy with a samurai sword over a disputed drug debt. But he's such a loving partner and father!
I honestly don't know why some women are so stupid. Yeah, loving and devoted up to the minute he swings at you with a sword, you silly girl.
Back to my main point: people covered in tattoos and/or piercings are the human equivalent of aposematism, change my mind.
I'll allow it. It doesn't matter if it's rare, if it happens at all.
The thing about .280 is that it's not a good GPMG round
Most militaries are now using two rounds, an intermediate one and a full rifle one. Why would switching to a .280 or something a little smaller wouldn't have made sense then? Manufacturing 5 million rifles is really not that big of a deal, especially if you did sensible things like looked at the Stg.44 and derived the appropriate lessons.
that could be retrofit to replace both
How many rifles or machineguns were re-barelled to use .308 post war? Some Garands. PPS-43 isn't really 'quasi intermediate', the effective range tops out at about 150m, maybe. It's also a relatively small and light bullet. Even the strongest loadings top out at under 1000J from an SMG barrel.
(who never fought a war -> didn't matter),
...what? 90,000 British fought in Korea. They also put down the communist insurgency in Malaysia and then in Brunei. I guess that doesn't count, right?
Did I strawman the Right? Let's ask Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the United States secretary of labor:
This is exactly why we have the rule,
Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible. General groups include things like gun rights activists, pro-choice groups, and environmentalists. Specific groups include things like The NRA, Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club. Posting about general groups is often not falsifiable, and can lead to straw man arguments and non-representative samples.
Making top level posts "responding" to specific users without using the "reply" button instead is kind of obnoxious, but this is downright antagonistic:
I expect that @RandomRanger will withdraw his claim
Don't do that. Ideally, unless you think someone would like to get an alert from you, don't @ them.
If you want to talk about what Lori Chavez-DeRemer thinks and why it is stupid, or not stupid, or whatever, like... have at! And really, there are contexts where referencing "Left" and "Right" is fine, where it would be stilted or misleading to speak differently. But you have been moderated several times in a fairly short period, mostly for antagonism, and you seem to be making kind of a hobby horse of weak manning "the Right" or some portion of it you perceive as worthy of scorn. I don't know if you're subtly pursuing a kind of consensus, or if you're just trolling, but you don't seem to be here to move past shady thinking and test your ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases.
Do better. Next time I see you pulling this, you get a ban.
There are reasons to “uplift the in-group” and you need to articulate why this is an innoble goal in and of itself
I never said it was. I think uplifting the in-group by getting them jobs sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain is pathetic.
They are raised with values that are de-socialized by our ridiculous mandatory education culture, and this isn’t the kind of thing you can arbitrarily re-socialize at will
The fundamental difference between me and you is that I like white people more, which extends to liking first-world societies that white people built. I'm not concerned that these Guatemalans coming across the border are going to out-compete whites because they have a "better" culture.
Lots and lots of people believe their ideas are common and the normie sheeple are just waiting for a spark to fly.
TENS is mostly commonly associated with skin (it's in the name, after all) and maybe the lungs but in cases with intestinal involvement the intestinal epithelium sloughs off as well. So if you're willing to stretch the claim...
It's also not an infection but a hypersensitivity reaction (potentially from an infection), but losing the epidermis does pretty heavily predispose to (further) infection.
I think the way I’d put it is that it’s not just IQ, though sure, until you reach a reasonable threshold for IQ the chances you’d live independently go down to near zero. But I think in rational spaces especially, you end up ignoring the gifted Reddit user base who have decided to spend their lives in mom’s basement posting long paragraphs about things nobody cares about.
But I think the over identifying the idea with literal BCE slavery in whatever form is unnecessary, as other forms of control, and even relatively invisible and gentle forms of control are possible. You can use debt or consumption to get people to have jobs. You can enforce things through social structures (make it socially necessary to have a job). You can tie necessary services to jobs (like the USA does with health care.
As opposed to the 10 people who demonstratable were willing to do a decade in prison over a non-false-flag attack?
You think you could find 10 right-wingers or just mercenary guys willing to do 10 year in federal prison, on a lie?
the sort of tacti-cool that serves as an even greater indicator of cell incompetence t
Go to a serving infantry soldier and tell him LMGs are 'tacticool' and 'not actually very useful'. AR rifles are fairly controllable in full auto, and with a bipod they're probably extremely controllable. Whoever they'd have been shooting at would have been dead. Swapping out mags isn't that hard either.
I have friends who were assaulted by Song at a protest in ft worth in 2023.
The use of AR-15’s doesn’t tell us anything; it’s the most common rifle in America and you can buy them over the counter at probably a dozen locations within two miles of the facility, and hundreds of not over a thousand in DFW. For an operation like that you want something semi-consistent and obtainable, even if you’d rather get some bespoke battle rifle. Likewise, black is just the antifa uniform, and any street trash is going to pick up on radios and getaway cars. All the ‘markers of competency’ mean is someone planned this, not that the planner was competent.
Does that make your guts come out? I would hope not! Without looking it up, I believe it's a rather superficial, if widespread, infection.
(You're Japanese, so I apologize for raising the specter of radiation poisoning in your presence.)
We have very few guns. That makes mugging much harder, you can run away from a knife most of the time. Mugging is very rare in these parts too, never happened to anyone I know.
In the US, being poor in the first place is a far stronger sign of serious dysfunction and inadequacy than it would be in India, where the majority of people are poor. So you have many more industrious, hard working poor people around and fewer degenerates, in relative if not absolute terms.
Of course, I think the Texan approach to such things is laudable. I'd be happy living there, even if California still has my heart.
I don't have a sufficiently strong intuition about what the typical base-rate is in the West to have a very helpful answer.
If I had to guess, I'd say it's nowhere near as bad as say, a bad neighborhood in SF, where leaving something expensive in the car is incredibly foolish. Copper stealing isn't as bad as in a ghetto in a big city, maybe.
I've never had to worry about my car being broke into. Never happened to any friends or family. I've never had the power go out because someone stole the cables. I probably wouldn't leave a large amount of gold bullion visibly sitting in the backseat, but I'm sure you wouldn't either.
I think it’s fair to say that nobody proposes that Americans are jumping at the chance to do the worst possible jobs.
You have people who accept that jobs like fruit-picking and taking care of incontinent elderly people need to be automated or done by sufficiently-incentivised Americans because the alternative is endless mass-immigration as each new set of second-generation immigrants refuses to do the scut work their parents came to do.
You also have people who believe that some of the jobs being done by immigrants are perfectly decent, okay-paying jobs that Americans are being priced out of or excluded from. Semi-skilled factory labour. Coding.
I appreciate your going and looking for an actual quote but DeRemer’s phrasing is very vague. I suspect she’s talking about the latter category, and your analysis of the rest of the interview seems to confirm that. I certainly think that
sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain
is not upheld by the quote, though she may think it in private. Regardless, who do you think is actually going to do these jobs? Do you think that America can continue to rely on illegal labour to do these jobs for the next 50 years without serious consequences? 100?
Building on this- the problem is what the nature of that debt, and the collapse of housing investments for future returns, implies for future economic development.
For example, the implication of the private household debt is how it shapes China's ambitions of escaping the archetypical middle income trap. The classical understanding of the cause is that a country makes good money as an export nation working the lower value chain, tries to work its way up the value chain, but the main basis of national growth (a productive low-cost but also low-income manufacturing worker class that produces exports) goes away before the worker class is able to transitions to a higher-income level of productivity that corresponds with the higher value chain. Some of the country does, but not enough (proportionally), resulting in more stagnant growth, both in terms of national economy and average wages. It's not 'bad,' but it's, well, middling. No longer economically viable for the thing that made it good.
The classical theory of how the higher income countries escaped this is that they transitioned from a manufacturing-export economic model to an internal-consumption model. The internal economics for wages and such are driven more by how the country spends and consumes within its own market, rather than how it exports to foreign spenders and consumers. Ideally, it's to some respects self-reinforcing, for the typical economic multiplication effects that let commerce grow the economy.
This was the basis of the economic question of if China would get old before it got rich. It was referring not to the country GDP as a whole, but to the wealth of the population and its ability to power a consumption-economy model. Could the Chinese public get rich enough in their economically productive years to power a transition to a consumption-based economy, before they grew so old that their savings were instead consumed in end-of-life support?
Well, that's a great deal harder for a family to contribute to if a family's lifetime of savings and investments no longer exists. Like, say, because it was invested in buying an apartment that never was built, or was built and torn down before it could be sold, or which lost its value due to the property crash.
China may yet escape that. It's unclear if the middle income trap is an issue of proportion or absolute number, in which case a proportionally small core of rich-enough Chinese could maybe drive a system. But the middle-income trap would be a lot less likely if a lot more Chinese had a lot more of their lifetime investments have a lot more value.
And, of course, if losing investments didn't contribute to the vicious cycle of ongoing deflation. Which is generally agreed to be bad, but makes individual actor sense if you recently lost much of your money but now find yourself in a position where things look like they will get cheaper the longer you refrain from buying them.
The Chinese local government debts, by contrast, are a bit 'simpler.' These are debts by lower governments, or government enterprises, that the Chinese national government is ultimately likely on the hook for. That's not a macro-economic-structure crisis, 'just' the official debt numbers being radically off and at risk of a liquidity crisis if ill-structured debts create bank runs. Which, technically, might be solved by simply printing more money and forcing the mostly Chinese holders of the debt to accept it, but...
For countries which are not China, it seems that there is a bit of a "market correction" for tariffs: high US tariffs reduce demand from the US, tanking the exporting country's exchange rate to the dollar, which makes those imports more affordable, after which point the prices don't seem so high anymore even including tariffs. The Fed estimated that this feedback loop reduces the effect of tariffs by about half. Trump's recent announcement of tariffs on Korea and Japan increased the exchange rates there by about 2%, which is the TACO-inclusive correction.
In the case of China, though... well, they tend to try to peg the RMB to the dollar (although it hasn't been pegged directly since 2010), so I imagine the effect will be much worse for them.
Maybe it makes your skin fall off and your guts come out while leaving you in crippling agony (I'm like 50% certain there's an actual disease like this, but it's probably something that happens to premature infants. That, or acute radiation poisoning I suppose).
TENS might be close enough?
If the chatbot doesn't quite have your 30 years of memories, but can make an impression that would fool anyone else, what's the difference?
It makes a difference to me. I'm the customer here! If I'm physically around to evaluate the claim, then presumably there's some kind of non-destructive mind upload going on. I wouldn't consent to a destructive one unless I had no choice, or if I was sufficiently convinced by evidence that it highly accurately captures almost all behavior and internal state.
If I died without hope of recovery, then I have no control over what others get up to. If they want to run a fine-tune of GPT o5 that mimics me via text, in an unending simulation of The Motte, and names that thing self_made_human, what can I do about it? Even I think that's a strict improvement over being dead and entirely forgotten.
It's just that I feel like your arguments prove too much, as the expression goes. If there can be such a thing as "not enough data", then indeed how can you place a cutoff point? There's never all data. You of today don't have all the data on the you of yesterday.
As far as I am aware, there is no principled and rigorous way to answer that question, at present.* It rarely comes up in normal life, because humans can't trivially clone themselves with their memories.
Some people think they live on through their children. Some think it's the books they write, or the good they do? That's good for them, or at least good enough. Highly inadequate for me.
And the prompting question was why I seek immortality, proper immortality and not word-play. That's my answer.
*I have strong intuitions on the matter, and seek to see if science and engineering can make them rigorous. I strongly believe that there's a meaningful and objective way to compare similarity between minds, in the manner you can generate embeddings on text.
If I go to bed right now, and wake up again, the new self_made_human and I will be virtually indistinguishable, even to ourselves. So we have no qualms about calling ourselves the same person. If you want proof, ask me this question again tomorrow, I guess.
The same holds for SMH from last week, less so from last year, even less so than 20 years ago. It will also continue to become less true with time. But I consider such divergence both unavoidable at present, and also entirely acceptable. I want to be able to grow and improve, ideally in a self-directed fashion.
There are operations I could undergo that wouldn't preserve identity. Say developing Alzheimer's, or having a lobe of my brain removed.
Even a clone of me with no shared memories would be a very similar person. We'd get along well, I'd treat him like family. I'd probably give him money if he asked. But he wouldn't meet my threshold for being the same person.
Shopkeepers often do defend their property. Wander around in the ghetto; you’ll see stores which have prominently posted photographic evidence of this as a deterrent to thieves.
How are opportunistic thefts in India? I’m thinking of the equivalent to vehicle break ins(not car thefts- a smash thé window to steal a purse in the car type thing). How about copper theft?
There are reasons to “uplift the in-group” and you need to articulate why this is an innoble goal in and of itself. They are citizens; they have more in common with you if you are a wealthy white person; for evolutionary reasons, it is natural to have an interest in uplifting those that are similar to yourself; for reasons of national security, you do not want so many citizens who believe that the American project is not worth investing in; they may have a higher IQ than Hondurans; they may have different levels of compassion or a different taste in aesthetics which may be informed by genetics.
Is there any wonder high-income whites are moving away from the Republican Party
College-educated White males lean toward Trump. It’s just women who shifted a lot toward Harris.
Working-class whites, too, don't want their sons working casual labor
This may have something to do with the millions of migrants brought in to undercut wages, the exact thing we’re talking about. No, you can’t ever compete with them, because —
-
Remittance payments mean that they can afford a higher quality life while temporarily living a lower quality life in America
-
They are raised with values that are de-socialized by our ridiculous mandatory education culture, and this isn’t the kind of thing you can arbitrarily re-socialize at will
-
They often live in illegal accommodations, requiring less funds, and these require a network that natives aren’t a part of
-
They live within a culture where the women expect to marry laborers
I’m also not sure if you’re agreeing with him that it would increase wages, and just disagree that this is important, or if you think it won’t increase wages.
Your yikes are worth nothing. Your female intuition, less than nothing. Mother’s intuition, female intuition, ancient wisdom and tradition, they all did parenting for thousands of years. One day some dudes with erlenmeyer tubes showed up, and they saved half the children. They saved half the children.
Kids today, or at least middle class kids upwards, are a lot more isolated. "The newborn is in a crib in the nursery and we monitor via babycam"?
Parents now spend far more time with them than they used to. You think parents used to wake up 8 times per night for two years to take care of one baby, plus the dayshift? They had actual work to do. I have a lower class family story: Neighbours of my grandparents who had 8 kids, put alcohol in the babies’ bottles to shut them up because they had to work the fields in the morning.
Because if caught in the act, the perpetrator would be rather unceremoniously beaten to a pulp
If you are caught stealing from an individual in Texas, you can expect severe bodily harm as a reasonable consequence(criminals are, contrary to popular belief, smaller and less fit than average), and it is explicitly legal to kill thieves here.
We still have plenty of petty theft, although not mugging(because muggers are killed off by their victims). I suspect the difference is that strong trad families(like India has, and poor people in the USA rarely do) are pretty good at keeping their members from lives of crime.
Why would you think anyone enjoys his wife committing serious and stupid transgressions like this? I mean I suppose it’s possible, but the default assumption is not that.
Also apropos of nothing, this reminded me of how so many pro-trans-rights-activist comics I've seen on social media just feature a punchline of someone of the wrong opinions being murdered, and how their slogans like "punch a transphobe" or "throw bricks at transphobes" tend to be along those lines. My pet theory is that this is due to TRAs being dominated by people with far more testosterone than a typical woman but also who have a tendency to indulge in their emotional urges as is the common stereotype of a woman in contrast to a man.
More options
Context Copy link