domain:novum.substack.com
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
If we arrange the world to "protect" people like that, we make life worse for all the rest of us. A lot worse, because these people are so incapable. Just as a world without fast cars and sharp knives is worse than one with them, so is a world without (or with very limited) credit cards or any of the other things those people can hurt themselves with.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2d ago
I do not value the wretched above all others. I value God. I think there are plenty of ways in which we should make life harder for the poor, in fact. Like restricting healthcare and social security and such. That being said, I still don't think that promoting ruinous usury is a good.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2d ago
Yeah I agree the openly defrauding was inaccurate. I'm angry about it. But you are right it's not fraud, though still immoral imo.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2d ago
Not everyone, but the vast majority it seems.
daguerrean
2d ago
I doubt that beards in specific pose any problem. But I can easily imagine that having strict grooming and fitness standards pay dividends even if the exact contents of those standards are largely arbitrary and unimportant. If I had to make up a BS but plausible sort of justification, I imagine that these things foster a sense of pride, unity, and brotherhood as belonging to a special class, and it is not hard to imagine that such things are actually beneficial to functioning according to a sort of “broken windows” theory of organizational functioning. Like, if you can’t even hold standards around something low-cost and easy to police like hair, what hope do you have of maintaining standards that are much more critical and harder to police (like courage under fire)? Of course I have no proof it actually shakes out this way but as I said it seems plausible and directionally correct. As a civilian my impression of the military is that it is made up of mostly literal cuckolds, 4’10” fat latinas and idiots that had absolutely zero job prospects outside of what amounts to a government make-work program. They would certainly do well to start combatting that perception because I doubt I’m alone
In 2009 or so, a little after Chase purchased my bank WaMu, they fucked up whatever data transfer the acquisition involved. My debit card ended up pegged to a backup savings account (with like $500 in it) rather than my chequing account (with $50,000 in it). This all happened completely silently, and obviously without my consent. I didn't find out until they finally declined a transaction - after charging me $350 in overdraft """protection""" (man, you're right, that is such an evil name) for around $50 in small purchases. Like you, I didn't even know it was on by default, because there was no chance I'd ever need it.
When I went in to, very angrily, get them to reverse this, they a) told me that it was too large an amount for the agent to easily refund, and b) still took the chance to upsell me on other services. Sigh. I think I finally got it through their stupid heads that they were about to lose a customer (and possibly get sued - not sure how practical that is for a mere $350, but I sure hope the system is set up so that banks can't simply steal money without consequences).
I can only imagine how poorly it goes when somebody who's barely scraping by gets screwed over by these people. The modern world is just too complex for humans.
Lewis2
2d ago
Clean-shaven privates just look better. I’m pretty sure that’s all there is to it.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
Like the Tylenol thing, this smells like a special interest. I’ll guess that there’s some lobby, somewhere, which has been clamoring to remove this exemption. I can’t imagine who would care so much, but that describes a surprising amount of Trump II.
Even if this turns out to be a pet cause of the Daughters of the Confederacy, is it going to change anyone’s mind?
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
2d ago
Everyone gets Flanderized even people who are ostensibly playing themselves.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Debit cards violate the whole "need to trust the merchant" thing. Fraud on your credit card means the bank is out the money. Fraud on your debit card means YOU are out the money until the situation is resolved.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
The reason I see it as pretty central is that basically the Trinity goes back pretty far in the historical record, and was dogmatically declared around the same time the New Testament was canonized. It’s really hard to claim one without the other. If you’re calling the New Testament without reservations The Canon as opposed to other writings, it’s really hard to consistently also say “but they are wrong about these other things.”
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2d ago
I struggle to think of a practical justification for this policy.
It could be a plan to purge the military of Muslims. (And Sikhs, although I imagine they’d just be collateral damage.)
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2d ago
And yet, like you, tens of millions of responsible middle class people go their entire lives without ever deciding to blow their credit card limit, get a second mortgage and put it on the roulette table, or put their retirement savings into extreme out of the money options recommended on /r/wallstreetbets.
Hmmmmm, I wonder at that assumption. Not many people wear their net worth on their sleeve, and lots of people finance what on the surface looks like a stable middle class lifestyle. They might not take out a second mortgage on their house to bet it on black. But they do take out a variable rate HELOC to remodel the kitchen for a dubious increase in home value.
Mine tricks people into signing up for "overdraft protection" (even the name is Orwellian!) with a story that it will save you from embarrassment at the grocery store if your card declines or something, and doesn't tell you anything about the $35 fees (and how they are completely silent so that you have no idea you are in the red until you actually remember to log in and check your balance, so it is very easy to overdraft several times and get nailed with a fee each time). I went online and turned it off once I figured it out, but that was years after I got my first bank account.
I mean, he could have used unicode and abbreviated the error function 𝒩 or φ, and the cumulant Φ which is perfectly usable notation. Would have saved like 80% of the chars and 90% of the parens. Not that I would object to having better math support here.
A cutoff of 123 does correspond to a (rounded) average value of 130 by my calculation (for a population mean 100). I didn't understand the need for a CAS though. Seems like something that any modern programing language can numerically solve for. Or just Newton's method if you're too lazy to open up the documentation for your favorite solver and can only remember one root finding algorithm like me.
Edit to add the calculation in case anyone doesn't trust my math (nullius in verba, etc):
f <- function(l) { 130 -
integrate(function(x) { x * dnorm(x, mean = 100, sd = 15)},
l, Inf)$value/
integrate(function(x) {dnorm(x, mean = 100, sd = 15)},
l, Inf)$value
}
(l <- uniroot(f, c(100, 130))$root)
# 123.5779
scales::percent(1 - pnorm(l, 100, 15))
# 6%
The next circle out is what I term 'Jesusism', which includes any religious tradition in which Jesus Christ is the central or decisive figure: this includes Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Iglesia ni Cristo, Hong Xiuquan, and so on.
None of these other guys believe in the atonement, though, or that Jesus is God. Really LDS is just its own thing, not neatly slotted into a category of churches that see Jesus as a cool holy guy.
This is all reasonable and I’m very sympathetic to it. But then again, I don’t feel that someone too stupid to understand compound interest and with a time preference too high to understand saving money and/or not maxxing out every loan facility they have should have the same power over the direction of our shared society as me.
Because there is nothing stopping me, besides 20 years of inflexible habit and discipline, from just YOLOing with the nearly $40k of available credit they make available to me.
And yet, like you, tens of millions of responsible middle class people go their entire lives without ever deciding to blow their credit card limit, get a second mortgage and put it on the roulette table, or put their retirement savings into extreme out of the money options recommended on /r/wallstreetbets.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2d ago
As a beard enthusiast, I can assure you they get in the way and are suboptimal. I'm typing this between sets of military presses, and my fucking beard keeps getting caught in my grip between reps. To say nothing of the care I have to take when I'm in the wood shop around heavy machinery. If my daughter didn't break down in tears (and my wife grumbles a good bit too) I'd be at least attempting a clean shaven look these days.
samiam
2d ago
I assure you, the women I am dating in those communities don’t have a strong opinion either way about the age of the Earth. These churches are not the kinds of churches to have lectures on things like “20 proofs the Earth is under 10,000 years old”.
If you’re making an argument that people still seriously believe the sun rotates around the earth, that kind of nonsense only exists on YouTube, and I’m pretty sure flat earth advocates are actually trolling us.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
Even for non-catholic groups, they were still Christian.
I think you substantially underestimate the intensity of Anti-Catholicism in 19th century Protestant nations. Nowadays the Protestant-Catholic conflict is pretty much dead outside of a couple of marginal weirdos, but that wasn't true 150 years ago. It obviously wasn't as spicy as it was in, say, the 17th century, but Anglo Protestants were liable to view Catholicism as backwards and politically threatening.
Also, uh, there's presently an incredible amount of animosity directed towards overwhelmingly Catholic Latino immigrants.
I think it's harder to assimilate now because people are showing up with basic values structures that are either vastly different than even the most modernized (not progressive) pop culture American values or, more commonly, without a functional values system at all.
I think the claim that contemporary immigrants are not assimilating is not really in evidence and (to the extent it's not just a gloss on general nativism) rests on an incorrect view of historical assimilation as being far less contentious amongst natives than it actually was. Intermarriage rates are high, language uptake is faster than ever, etc... I strongly suspect that most of the angst over immigrants not assimilating is not actually based on immigrants failing to assimilate but a) fearmongering from the subset of anti-immigrant types who really do just hate immigrants b) more importantly, proxy concerns over domestic culture wars. Like, Indian and Chinese immigrants assimilate superbly, but they mostly assimilate to the Blue Tribe.
The claim that many immigrants don't have a values system at all strikes me as absolutely wild - where are these deracinated sociopaths coming from?
People like to sneer at the white underclass because they're getting outcompeted by recent immigrants.
People like to sneer at the white underclass for a lot of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with immigration, but with respect to immigration they get sneered at because they've opted to use immigrants as a scapegoat for their own problems.
Same, brother, same.
Well, except I didn't opt out of credit cards because I saw people in my life abuse them; I opted out because I didn't like the complexity and I have low executive function and I am sure I would forget to pay off the balance if I actually got one; I have gone months without checking my bank account when I was depressive. But I still have managed to amass almost six figures worth of savings in my checking account just by being frugal over the years, which makes my finances better than all those people who apparently cannot afford a sudden $1000 expense. But, nope, landlady still wants to see a fucking credit score. I had to show her my bank statement to convince her to rent to us. If I ever decide to buy a new car, I'll just get a cashier's check and pay up front.
For a somewhat lower stakes culture war topic:
The culture war aspect here is twofold:
- "The Department must remain vigilant in maintaining the grooming standards which underpin the warrior ethos" - SecDef Hegseth
- Waivers are primarily issued to black soldiers (who are more prone to shaving-related skin issues)
To the first, I have never been particularly impressed by the "warrior" posturing. Most proponents of it that I've met been underwhelming human beings (at best), but that might be forgivable if it cashed out in superior performance. However, if the performance of the Russian Army (or the IJA or...) is any indication, boring competence and logistical capability seems to heavily outweigh posturing about warrior spirit when it comes to combat performance. (These are not strictly in tension, but leaning into "warrior ethos" seems to go hand in hand with disdain for unglamorous organizational work).
It's also not really clear to me how beards compromise warrior ethos (especially since vets seem to love them), but I've also never been in the military, so it's possible there's a piece of experiential knowledge I am missing.
To the second: while I strongly doubt this is a scheme to purge the military of black soldiers, I struggle to think of a practical justification for this policy. The traditional rationale is for gas masks, but that doesn't apply to special operations forces (who are presumably so high speed and low drag that they outrun the poison gas) and beard-compatible respirators already exist.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
I don’t think it would work unless you can seriously curtail the democracy and liberalism involved. The general conceit of democracy is that people can and should be making all of these decisions themselves. But it also means that those people will almost always vote for things that make them feel good rather than what is actually good for society. The People, it seems tend to think like teenagers when the votes are aggregated, and thus you really can’t say no to allowing stupid people to ruin their lives or no to allowing whatever dangerous, destructive, or socially harmful thing that the public has decided it really wants to do.
In the past, limitations of technology and communication prevented things from getting too out of control. In the past, you might not find out about an important bill until it had already passed. You thus couldn’t weigh in on it. If you did, you were limited to telephone calls (and you’d have to know the name of your congressman and how to find the switchboard number) or mail (which took longer and again required you to know who to address the letter to and to know the specific bill you want to pass or fail). Now you have instant access to the information and you have access to those government officials in your social media, and thus weighing in is easy.
In everyday life as well, I think limited options because of technology were a benefit. When you could only gamble in Vegas, in an actual casino, there were natural limits to how much gambling you could actually do. Unless you live there, you can only afford to go there a few times a year, for a week or two at a time, and then you had to leave. Now that the casino is in your pocket, blowing all of your money is easy. You don’t need pants, let alone to fly to another city. Anywhere you happen to be, if you have a phone with the app installed, that place is a casino. And it’s the same with other things like shopping. It’s much easier to overspend when everything on the planet is offered for sale in your pocket, any time and place you want to open Amazon.
I feel like really the biggest problem of modernity is the degree to which it allows people to engage in their Id with very few restraints and how good it is in removing both physical and social barriers that held those Id impulses in check. I think this is the thing most people have a hard time dealing with. Not that they cannot cognitively understand that some Vice is a bad idea. People know gambling, porn, overspending, overeating, and overuse of screens are bad. They just need a bit more of a natural limitation on getting access to those things. Personally I think even for high functioning people, having natural friction around doing those kinds of things is helpful. For lower functioning people, it’s a losing battle as they keep indulging in bad habits because it’s just so easy to do.
It is definitely a case where technology (batteries and motors) has outstripped politics, but drones don’t really compete with firearms against undefended targets. Other than aircraft, I guess, which is where we see the leading edge of regulation.
Handguns are useful for personal violence in a way that drones can’t ever be.
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