domain:web.law.duke.edu
rockbier1218
5hr ago
Thanks for the write-up, great read.
What was your playlist?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
5hr ago
It is trivial to change TFR
It's not even close to trivial -- you're just flatly using the wrong word here. If it was trivial, then most countries would have done so by now. Changing people's behaviors is already tough enough, but changing them on a wide scale and with something as nebulous as social standing is going to be monumentally difficult. The word you probably want instead is "obvious", that it's "obvious how to change TFR", and I'd agree with you there that this will almost certainly be the most effective method. Perhaps it would be the only effective method, at least assuming societies aren't suddenly willing to plow 50% of their GDP into natal subsidies.
No responsible adult would violate a custody order.
EDIT to flush out:
Willfully violating a custody order will just get your ass thrown in jail and the custody order enforced and discredit further attempts to challenge it. Which, if it's a bad order, just makes it a lot worse.
This makes about as much sense as "if a police officer is violating your 4A rights, try to steal his pepper spray". I absolutely am not denying the predicate here: officers do sometimes step over the 4A, just that reacting in that way is straightforwardly counterproductive.
quiet_NaN
6hr ago
I would argue that all of these benefits (which I do not dispute) can be captured very well by the QALY/$ picture -- just add a term for quality of life effects on people other than the patient.
From a purely medical system costs picture, they are all externalities.
Still, from any non-terrible POV, GLP-1 drugs will at the latest be worth it at least when the patents run out and they can be sold for what it costs to produce them.
rockbier1218
6hr ago
I also like Past Lives and was excited for the movie but felt it was a snooze fest.
I think the main problem is simply that Dakota Johnson is not charismatic enough or good enough of an actor to be a leading lady in this kind of rom-com/drama. I also agree on Chris Evans being miscast, although he’s a much better actor than Johnson.
It’s maybe a bit of an unfair comparison but imagine this same film with Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant, the rom-com duo par excellence; you may actually have a fantastic movie.
Recently I’ve been on a rom-com kick and watching many of the old and new classics. Notting Hill, a movie with the aforementioned pairing, is completely ludicrous and when examined in depth the script is somewhat lackluster and the cinematography is nothing special. But when you have the equivalent of Ali vs. Tyson as the main event then nothing else matters.
For romantic movies the chemistry of the duo or love triangle is essential. Without it even the script of, say, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, or When Harry Met Sally won’t be enough to make the movie good.
quiet_NaN
6hr ago
it seems odd that my tax dollars payed for the research, and now I would have to pay the Danes, as it were, to use it.
I don't see the contradiction. Basic research is mostly funded through taxes of Western countries, and here the US was most prolific. This research is then made available to the public (though sometimes you have to pay Elsevier, which sucks).
Pharmaceutical companies then use that basic research to discover active ingredients and go through the long, grueling and expensive process of getting them approved as pharmaceuticals. In return, they get temporary monopolies ("patents") on their active ingredients. There is a lot to criticize about how this system works. Details about what can or can not be patented, and how the latter means that nobody will pay to turn it into approved pharmaceuticals. Drug pricing both generally and within the US in particular. That the financial incentives make it much more profitable to sell lifestyle medication to rich Westeners than to cure debilitating diseases in the developing world. The general role of the medical priesthood as gatekeepers which determine which substances I can or can not put into my body.
Criticizing that in this case, one of the companies which holds the patents is nominally Danish (Eli Lilly is nominally US -- but at the end of the day, most are publicly traded and probably have campuses in multiple countries) seems rather low on that list.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6hr ago
letting pedophiles run rampant
It feels to me like 1985 all over again.
Thanks to a legal system that often fails to draw (and often fails to even attempt to draw) a distinction between children who have been kidnapped by strangers, children who have voluntarily run away with strangers, and children who have simply been moved by a responsible adult but in violation of a custody order, it's nigh impossible to say for certain how many pedophiles are out there snatching kids... but "run rampant" does not appear supported by the evidence. I am... skeptical, let's say... that the people "working for free to rid their platforms of predators" should be allowed to do that, because I suspect there are many, many more vigilantes (and aspiring vigilantes) out there doing real and serious harm, than actual child-snatching pedos.
Of course we needn't get all the way to child-snatching; simply exposing children to various forms of degeneracy probably has long-term psychological impacts that are worth considering. But the research on this seems to be hopelessly muddied by culture war matters; moral panic over children's media exposure reaches all the way back to Plato (at least!). I expect we are all shaped by the media we consume, but not always in the most obvious or expected ways.
zeke5123a
7hr ago
Yeah — the other poster who is anti Trump believes Trump’s policies will be bad and therefore Trump’s voters will abandon him.
That is not unreasonable for anti Trump person to believe but isn’t necessarily the best reflection of reality. Take tariffs. Suddenly Democrats hate tax increases*. But it’s far from obvious how much of a tax increase it will be for American consumers. First, tariffs are on the import price which often is a small fraction of the overall price. Second, some of the incidences of the tax will fall on non Americans or capital. To the extent the tariff revenue is used to shrink the budget deficit, it could on net help consumers. Doesn’t mean tariffs are good (or this will work) but the idea that it’s the end of the world doesn’t make sense (especially by people who were pushing for mark to market taxation and significantly higher corporate and individual tax rates).
Take immigration as a concrete example. Jobs are meh but the mix of the jobs were foreign less and natives more. A dem would point to “limited job growth” whereas a Republican would point to “our people are getting jobs.”
I would bet all things equal life is pretty similar for a lot people on 2028 as it was in 2024. I think the one thing Trump could do to change that is passing some kind of massive zoning reform (he is stealthy doing some of that for large projects via the EPA).
*there are of course arguments that tariffs are bad kinds of taxes precisely because they are easy to avoid and therefore people will make non economic decisions. But this second order thinking is always absent in democrat plans so hard to take it seriously.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7hr ago
At some level though what OP is positing is equally mixed: libs believed that torture was bad, that it wasn't useful (delivered no usable Intel), and that even if it did it would still not be worth the compromise in morals. The degree to which the middle term is driven by motivated reasoning is the battleground.
Similarly, anti immigration folks claim immigration is net negative in every way, pro immigration folks tell me it's positive in every way. The degree to which motivated reasoning, or per op simple dishonesty, is present is the battleground.
I don't think the broad mass of conservatives are motivated purely by economic concerns. That isn't contradicted by somebody popping up and saying well actually me personally... And even you yourself admit that some of it is cultural for you, so once again we're in the battleground.
zeke5123a
7hr ago
Of course. But you made a claim about the mass of conservatives. I think a big piece is that there will be a net decrease in utility. Some of that is eco ionic and some of that is cultural.
2rafa
7hr ago
Yeah, with the exception of people who get extreme leeway after long, successful careers (Nolan) or who can cast whoever they want because all actors want to work with them (Wes Anderson) I think it’s usually the studio and/or major financial backers who have the say on casting. In romance/romcoms especially the only way to make profitability even somewhat likely over the last fifteen years since the bottom fell out of the genre has been to cast famous people, whether it’s Fanning/Hemsworth/Pascal in this, Roberts and Clooney in that one a couple of years ago etc.
5434a
7hr ago
If you spend too much time online following the culture war I think you'll enjoy watching Eddington.
I don't want to say too much about it as it's probably more fun to go in blind.
2rafa
7hr ago
As a franchise, it’s a single conceit. It’s like The Matrix.
There’s the original, and then the straight remake (Jurassic World), and then a collection of average (for popcorn movies) to bad to very bad spin-offs.
DiscourseMagnus
8hr ago
And more importantly there is no way a world on the verge of extinction with massive attrition due to a constant multi-generational war against monsters is going to end up progressive, especially with regard to gender roles. They are going to want women pumping out as many kids as possible so they don't go extinct. Or rather, any subculture which chooses to be progressive in any way that reduces birthrates (as opposed to some free-love variant that encourages promiscuity but discourages birth control) will quickly die out and be replaced under such strong selection pressures.
This sounds like you're gesturing to a plausible culturally-prescribed use of such a spell that would be quite anathema to both our trads and our progs: fix your society's undesirable sex ratio with magical sex change as opposed to (or in addition to) war.
Botond173
8hr ago
Can I ask why you routinely resort to such snark? What he very obviously meant to say was that the majority of GULAG prisoners were common criminals as opposed to political prisoners i.e. thiefs, murderers, bandits, rapists, average thugs and bums etc., which was indeed the case if you look at the data.
quiet_NaN
9hr ago
I often see people making arguments of the type of "we need to get fertility rates (across the board, or maybe just for group X) up otherwise human civilization will collapse".
I do not think that this is true. Amish civilization would probably be sustainable with a few million humans. And even a technological civilization could probably work with less than a billion people (though with higher friction -- tech development would take longer, and there would be less entertainment with very high production costs).
Also, not having kids is something which is very strongly selected against both in biological and cultural evolution. If TikTok caused 90% of societies to stop reproducing, human civilization would still be fine in the long run.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
9hr ago
And then the characters make some offhand comment about a magic spell that lets you switch gender which certain people who were "born in the wrong body" use to cure their condition. And then MC from Earth explains how in our world those people are oppressed and everyone shakes their heads about how unenlightened that is.
Surefire giveaway that the author is trans themselves, or at least moves in social circles where they have to interact with a lot of them. Really common in recent years for some reason.
aaa
9hr ago
judge the social value of girls and women exclusively by their aptitude and progress in motherhood
As if you can snap your fingers and just do it. As if you can make women incapable of looking around them and seeing every large family poor and miserable. How many instances throughout world history can you find where social status was not tied to material wealth?
The reason the Haredi female TFR is so high regardless of country or income is because they do this
Is that the cause? Or is it that they are a welfare class engaged in a holy war?
The reason the Gypsy TFR is 1.5 to 2x the national average of whichever country they live in, despite being urban-dwelling, is that they do this
Is that the cause? Or is it that gypsy children are an economic resource to gypsies?
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
9hr ago
I have yet to see any of the modern Jurassic park type movies. Closest I got was playing the Jurassic World Evolution video game on steam. Which was basically a park management game, with a few fun sidebits with dinosaurs breaking out, and a photo mode that encouraged you to take cool pictures.
Good decision. The last trilogy is a travesty. The video games? It's been a while, but I recall having a pleasant time.
I wonder how the next JWE game will handle the new re-extinction of dinosaurs outside the tropics. Very inconvenient, isn't it? I imagine they'll just pretend it never happened, or have a sub-plot about the need for AC and covid vaccines.
My only redemption is in movie trailers. I do watch all of the movie trailers. I think some people might misinterpret that as "I watch a lot of movie trailers". No, I watch all of them. I'm subscribed to multiple channels that just show movie trailers on youtube. I would rate Jurassic World Rebirth trailers as top tier. Cool action shots, a general sense of the plot, and a diversity of shots displayed throughout different trailers.
The world really has all kinds! I'm bemused, but I guess you're not missing out on much haha.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
10hr ago
You are correct! I'm impressed, my dad used to be fluent in Sanskrit, and the unexpected formulation threw him for a loop, so I'm surprised you noticed.
Crowstep
10hr ago
Hefting his mace, he swung at her as hard as he could
Is that changing tenses? Consider the sentence 'While running, he saw Steve'. 'While running' modifies the verb 'saw', but it's not present tense on its own. It could also be written as 'He saw Steve while running' which makes it more obvious.
StJohnOfPatmos
10hr ago
I'm fine with human civilization ending. I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization continuing. And I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization ending.
This kind of intellectualised lack of care and concern for the world has the pretension of being a serious opinion with some form of philosophical caché, but can really only be understood as a spiteful lashing out at life itself by someone who feels slighted and betrayed by their own expectations at what human existence should be. It's juvenile, provincial, extremely transparent in its self-loathing origin, and can only stem from a position of weakness and defeat.
The inherent good of human civilisation goes without saying - we are the only species in the entire known world that does not solely operate around cruel instinct, we can peer beyond the vulgar material veil of constant frenzied self-preservation and extract beauty, love, and meaning from the violent chaos of the natural order - only in the world of Man can a living being pass away with a semblance of dignity and comfort. No animal in nature dies peacefully. We can create abstracted systems that bind otherwise distinct people and groups together, pool our labour and knowledge into cohesive willpower, and turn base matter into magic. Modern medicine, high-speed global transportation, satellites crowding the stratosphere, the welfare state, not to speak of the surplus of beauty and meaning we have added to the world by means of artistic endeavours. The pleasure of good food (not raw meat torn straight from the spine of a wailing animal), good company, lovely music, light-hearted conversation, a charming landscape, the sound of cicadas on a summer night, its all there for us to enjoy and cherish and compound our fates upon.
For 4 years, I lived in an apartment in Paris that shared a courtyard with an elementary school. Every day, I would hear children playing during their lunch break - laughing, shouting, exclaiming, crying, giggling and scheming in exactly the same way my childhood friends and I did when we were small, and doubtlessly in exactly the same way the children of the Persian Empire, the Neolithic, or the Early Modern period did in their times. I felt an endless cycle of joy and curiosity and willpower and ecstasy at the world and the gift of live we were given to be in it and a part of it, unchanged since the first day of Creation. To look over this vast and endless sea of human joy and pleasure at being in the world and to claim to see nothing inherently valuable in it one way or another is not an intellectual or philosophical position - on the contrary, it is the spiteful grumble of the slave who considers his own wretched existence to be the Alpha and Omega of all human experience. It is the position of a self-loathing man to cowardly for suicide, so he demands the entire world should commit suicide in his stead.
Remember Goethe - "the world a man sees around him is nothing else than the world he carries in his heart". The world I see around me is a big, flashing YES - YES to beauty, YES to pleasure, YES to friendship, YES to love, YES to the bountiful harvest of our labours, YES to the innocent sincerity of a child at play, YES to drunken dancing on summer nights, YES to music, to painting, to cathedrals and to operas, YES to the gift of life, so precious, so explosive, so free.
My cup runneth over - doth thine?
Markass
11hr ago
So Roblox is getting a lot of press lately, and it's been very negative. They're ostensibly a place for kids, but it's been known for years that pedophiles and child predators are on their platform, they keep grooming and raping minors, and barely anything is done about them if ever. Lately they banned Chris Hansen 'To Catch A Predator' style stings, banned and sent a C&D to someone who has gotten multiple pedophiles arrested using those stings, and defended their ban by *checks notes* saying "vigilantes" are just as bad as predators. As a result, they're being sued by the Louisiana attorney general, and even Chris Hansen is getting involved (by making a documentary).
It's too early to tell what the outcome of all this will be, but some people are concerned about potential government overreach, especially with recent pushes for mandatory online ID verification (and we all know people doxing themselves like that never goes wrong) and other laws passed in the name of children's online safety (like the UK's Online Safety Act, which proved to be too burdensome for a hamster forum to continue operating). Especially because Roblox isn't the only platform with a predator problem that isn't getting better.
I think that ID verification is bad, but pedophiles are also bad. My take (if slightly conspiratorial) is that people in positions of power are deliberately letting the pedophile problem grow out of control so they can justify implementing draconian ID verification measures. The public sees this false dichotomy between letting pedophiles run rampant and ID verification, and chooses ID verification as the lesser of two evils, when that's far from the case. Roblox (and Discord) had people working for free to rid their platforms of predators, and all they had to do was let them be. Yet they deliberately went out of their way to ban anybody who got pedophiles arrested, meanwhile doing little to the pedophiles themselves. It's a huge WTF moment and makes you wonder what the end goal is.
I disagree. If the court got it wrong somehow, no responsible parent would let their kid stay in an unsafe situation just because the law said they had to.
Of course plenty of irresponsible parents think they're responsible, so it's almost impossible to tell from the outside without an investigation and trial.
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