domain:natesilver.net
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
But I'd bet a lot are getting in over their heads on payments up front, which is starting to show up in delinquency rates.
I think some people are just not good with money and they buy cars that make them look good but I really don't know how to translate the status and affirmation points having a really nice car gets you, into a dollar amount.
Absolutely, but this is a general financial intelligence/literacy/freedom of choice question, not one specific to pickup trucks. From long experience of trying to explain to Red-Tribe Pickup-Truck-Shoppers in my immediate circle that they don't need to spend all that money, they aren't cross-shopping with a Toyota Corolla or even a Rav4. If they didn't blow $50,000 they didn't have on a pickup, they would blow it on a Land Cruiser, or a Mercedes E Class, or a tarted out Jeep Wrangler. "Why do Americans like pickup trucks?" is mostly a separate question from "Why do Americans go into too much debt to buy vehicles they can't afford on loans that will bankrupt them?" The former is about the traits of the pickup truck, the latter is about the traits and cultural choices of individual Americans.
Or, generally, we can ask "Why do companies like Dodge Nissan and Land Rover continue to exist when they consistently sell inferior products?"
Maybe if one reads the 10th amendment broadly?
I suppose the real question is about what relation the founders would have intended the common law to have to the state governments, and what would they have considered to lie within their powers.
JulianRota
2d ago
What I haven't seen much commentary on yet is, will Adams and/or Cuomo run against him as an independent? I figure, winning the Democrat nomination makes Mamdani a shoo-in by default in the general. To have a shot at defeating him would probably require a temporary alliance between a very substantial number of more centrist Democrats and pretty much all of the Republicans to all vote for one particular alternate Democrat running as independent. Having a shot at that actually working seems much less likely if both Adams and Cuomo run, especially if they start openly attacking each other.
You have described a reality dating show that I might be willing to watch.
Every single contestant has a glove or gauntlet they carry around to throw down a challenge. There should be a board that tracks challenges made, challenges rejected/accepted, and fights won or lost, but yeah, no other consequences than that.
For additional fun have one of the contestants secretly be a trained MMA fighter.
I'd imagine there'd be alliances formed early with the best fighter, but then later some betrayals as they try to get him removed. Maybe you have 4-5 guys each throwing down challenges to the same dude forcing him to decide if he wants to lose some face or actually fight each of them in a row. I'd bet that under almost ANY circumstances, sleeping 5 dudes in a row buys you immense status points.
(Most TV shows or sports could be improved by allowing contestants to fight it out)
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I have no idea what anything you just said had to do with anything I was talking about in this post, bro.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
2d ago
Nothing wrong with a girl having a front headlock, it's a bad position nowadays as wrestlers are better at front headlocks than submission guys. Sometimes going too light makes your game worse wherein you end up caring about technical details more than you should.
I personally hated being in a front headlock, it's one of the worst positions out there. Plenty of good wrestlers use front headlocks like submission guys use a guillotine to make you shoot less. A good guy to study on this topic would be Luke Rockhold as his entire game was built in chewing up wrestlers with wrestling and enough submission threats honed specifically to beat wrestlers.
Women have no clue the difference between strength of the sexes. Someone who's proficient at basic subs whilst already strong might as well wear a cape. I never got tapped out by front headlocks. It's a terrible place since it's more cranking than choking I guess. Craig Jones, world's second best grappler ever and bali loving degenerate taps out the moment he goes to a new gym so that people don't get egos involved. The front headlock thing is a new thing, we don't have much of an idea of these positions the way a wrestler would.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
The queries fetching the content are finally officially unretarded, which had a few fortunate downstream effects for things like fetching tweets with tweets along with their responses. Managed to move on to unretarding the import queries as well as fixing some minor bugs.
How are you doing @Southkraut?
felis-parenthesis
2d ago
British Leyland was a bit of each. Good wages, and sleeping on the job. Holding on to your job when you do not do it is also a form rent extraction, so it doesn't change the point that capitalism has some internal defences against rent seeking. (The system has defences, the individual companies just fail.)
"protecting poor performers" reminds me of the Brezhnev era joke We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us. I claim that the "slacking on the job" form of rent extraction is present under both capitalism and socialism, supporting my main claim that rent seeking is not specifically capitalist.
Grant_us_eyes
2d ago
And if you're not willing to listen to roughly 2 minutes of said video, it basically disproves everything what you're stating. Sorry, no one's buying your entire 'everything was worse in the past' claim any longer.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
I think there are definitely external factors that contribute to mental illness. There are twin studies that show that in twin pairs where one has schizophrenia, there’s only a fifty percent chance of the other twin having it. So clearly it’s something beyond just base genetic predisposition. Nobody wants to admit that because the idea that madness is something you can catch is an extremely disturbing idea. Almost Lovecraftian.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
2d ago
· Edited 2d ago
Many young Christians I know, of various stripes, play DnD. I’m sure there are some boomers still railing against it but millennial and zoomer Christians are generally in agreement that fantasy stories are cool, and fantasy roleplay is a fun hobby.
Now something has to be responsible for the increase in Wicca and various forms of witchery over the past couple decades, but that seems concentrated within new agey women and not the geeky introverts who played DND in the 90s.
It turns out the real problem was the dawning of the age of Aquarius the hippies and their intellectual descendants after all, though I will certainly stand firm on the proposition that occasional atheistic/countercultural men were more than willing to invoke the occult if it meant getting inside some witchy panties.
I think the problem was social conservatives conflated several different countercultural groups who all rebelled against the moral majority, and couldn’t tell the fantasy roleplay apart from the new age cults. This hardened a lot of hearts, which was a shame.
But I still see the spread of witchcraft among women as an unresolved historical question. But I suppose people on the other side would say the same about the spread of conservative Christianity among men. Dissatisfaction with secular materialism is startlingly widespread, a fact I find hard to diagnose despite being a part of it. But if I had to make a diagnosis, perhaps it’s because technology increasingly feels like it limits human freedom rather than enhancing it. (Let’s not start another debate about the automobile or social media.)
The invocation of supernatural forces of any kind becomes a kind of trump (no relation) card that lets people feel like they have control over their lives, or at least have a direct line to someone who does. I suspect that magical thinking and superstition also load on neuroticism, because neurotic people often feel like the world is dangerous and they’re too weak to face it. Supernatural powers serve as a means of personal protection against a world they feel like they cannot control. Occultism spiked during COVID, where people felt like they had little power to control the situation (whether because of state authority or fear of the disease itself). Hence you get people panicking over the election of Trump (relation intended) and trying to trump (no relation) his political power by casting hexes on /r/witchesvspatriarchy.
Sometimes I wonder if being so morally concerned about the occult in the 80s and 90s actually was the cause of increased occultism. It certainly demonstrated that getting into occult things would really piss off conservatives! So if you're a young lady and you hate conservative Christianity, and you want to express in strong terms your contempt for it, well, you might go reaching for the very things they said were deeply wrong. In particular, this might go some ways towards explaining how massively popular these things are among gay people.
Perhaps if conservatives had mocked occultism and superstition the way a lot of skeptics did instead of getting incredibly angry and treating it like a real thing, we wouldn't live in a world where 40% of young women believe in astrology. Mockery and indifference kills ideas; outrage reifies them.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2d ago
Did they die?
faceh
2d ago
People buy a car primarily for what they want to look like, not for what they need or want to do.
Probably.
But I'd bet a lot are getting in over their heads on payments up front, which is starting to show up in delinquency rates.
I think some people are just not good with money and they buy cars that make them look good but I really don't know how to translate the status and affirmation points having a really nice car gets you, into a dollar amount.
I've only ever driven Honda or Toyota for the last 15 years since their engines cannot be killed by conventional means and I do NOT like large unexpected expenses from my vehicles.
I definitely don't need to tow or tote stuff around on a regular basis, and its pretty trivial to rent a truck for a while for when I do, so it never made sense for me to buy a truck when I have other things I'd rather do with the spare money.
Turniper
2d ago
Why not just use one of the many existing commercial solutions? That's what we did last I dealt with OCR'ing PDFs, just used Azure's API and then processed the data. Would be surprised if a raw vision model is cheaper or higher quality.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2d ago
Two points
I tried not to be overly aggressive
and
I probably let her get it in a little deeper before we started than I would have let a man.
seem to be illustrative here. Now I know nothing about BJJ and I expect I'd be out squatted by Mrs. 5hr. But in my experience, at least in cases where there is clearly a size difference (as you describe), the woman gets the advantage from the tenderheartedness (for lack of a better term) on the part of the man. There's no way around that I think unless you just turn that off (which I don't know how to do short of rage, which is unhelpful). Closing your eyes is probably instructive in a sort of Obi Wan way, but I suspect hobbles you as you lose an important sense. Interesting though.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
2d ago
it's just that to institute such a system you just need to explode half of Europe.
You don't make yourself rich by making other people poor.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
If I were obscenely Bezos-Musk-Gates tier rich, I would organize a season of the reality TV dating show The Bachelorette with every contestant having the option to challenge every other contestant to a formal sport-rules fight at any time. The fight would have no non-social impact on the competition: the loser doesn't have to go home, the winner can be sent home by the lead; and the challenged competitor doesn't have to say yes, it can be turned down without being sent home automatically. So the season would be a real-time experiment in how women (both the lead and audience reactions) feel about men engaging in violent duels. Is challenging someone attractive or unattractive? Is it deadly to refuse a challenge? Is it sexy to fight even if you lose, or are you better off refusing if you think you might lose? How much sexier is it to win? Is there a point at which winning too hard is actually less sexy, because you look like a jerk?
I don't know the answers to these questions, though I can guess. But I want to know! I think we'd watch two dozen former college football players invent the code duello from scratch as they went along!
I'm also of the opinion that paparazzi, and anyone else filming anyone in public, should be subject to physical violence by those they are filming.
Normalizing personal violence is agency-producing: men who get into fights learn that they can fight, men who never do fear that they can't. It allows people like landlords and shop owners and teachers to engage in self-help when dealing with jerks. It will improve society in numerous ways!
And I'd still hope to never get into a fight.
veqq
2d ago
How do you get women (e.g. an aunt) to address structural issues like TikTok dependency?
CrispyFriedBarnacles
2d ago
In my experience, anti-wokes are more likely to entertain the possibility of race and sex differences being biologically intrinsic, but they shy away from applying biological explanations to LGBT, preferring instead to endorse social constructivist theories
Is this an accurate description? I mean, obviously there are a lot of strands of anti-woke. But it seems to me that a slightly more nuanced read on this might be more like this, and I'm going to dip into analogies here...
Teenage girls being prone to anorexia in the 90s, or teenage girls being prone to cutting, were not biologically determined in the sense that there was a specific "I want to cut" gene that was being triggered, exactly, and cutting was those girls "true self". BUT it was almost certainly the case that many of the girls prone to cutting, or to anorexia, did have some other, background biological traits that made them more likely like to be susceptible to those manifestations of whatever else was going on with them on a deeper level. They had their own hardware, but the social ways it manifest were absolutely a kind of social software, and broader culture played a deeply important role in making those behaviors manifest the way they did... and different broader cultures could absolutely dampen or accentuate harmful behaviors.
Likewise, it is very likely that most school shooters have some biological things going on internally that worked against them. But it was obviously the massive coverage of Columbine that put a giant spotlight on "school shooting" as the cultural pattern that that kind of biology got channeled through subsequently.
I am no expert on HBD and black people, so I'm going to just sort of shrug on this topic. But I will say, because it's quite an interesting detail, that violent, destructive riots by black people in the 20th century has been a largely northern phenomenon in the U.S. Southern law-and-order has been much less coddling of such things, in general, but also, at least historically, Southern blacks were much less successfully targeted by radical activists with immigrant backgrounds from continental Europe that spread a radical culture of violent rioting as a way to force social change and try to spark revolution. Whatever is organically, biologically wrong black people (I will be rhetorically agnostic here, as it's not my point), clearly certain cultural strands can serve to make it far, far worse.
I could do this all day, of course. I don't think most anti-woke types would disagree with me too sharply, or maybe that's just a guess. This is a way of saying "it's nature AND nurture!", I suppose, but I don't think that quite gets at the deeper orientation, which is more something like, "nature is real, a lot of nature is pretty bad, healthy cultures cut with the grain of nature and try to steer it towards better, more pro-civilizational ends, there are absolutely limits about how far this can be taken because of the reality of nature, and certain ideologies work as arsonists in the face of these facts and are anti-civilizational to the core". And even accepting these tenants in broad strokes, different people could come down on different sides about how much culture can actually achieve, versus how much nature cannot be evaded.
So, putting these analogies down, I have to imagine that there a lot of people who put a lot of LGBT pretty firmly in something like the above framework - it's no more real than cutting or being a Quaker (which is to say, it exists culturally, it's very important to some people, but it doesn't exist the way that helium does), it probably is a manifestation of something deeper biologically (like whatever it is that gets manifested in cutting or rioting), the fact that it has even those natural roots doesn't mean it's in any sense good (which is just the naturalism fallacy anyway), and the rise of Queer identification (or even the rise of "identity" as a conceptual orienting principle in the first place) is obviously cultural, political, and activist driven. And just like you can accept that some people choose to live as Orthodox Jews and can accept giving them space to do so (and giving them space to believe things about you that you wouldn't appreciate) while balking at having their belief system aggressively pushed by the state, media, and shared educational bodies, so likewise with the LGBTQ+ movement. In this view, the science and liberal tolerance might've supported something like decriminalization on normal liberal grounds (liberal society tolerates all sorts of things that aren't clearly good or bad that subgroups care about), but active promotion?
It seems to me, anyway, that the current pop progressive stance goes, much, much further than all of this. It's something like, Science shows that gayness is exactly like having brown eyes or being left handed, and it's totally natural, and Science also somehow proves the normative claims that it's entirely morally neutral or even good, and it has existed in exactly the form we now recognize throughout all of human history, but we've finally become enlightened enough, and made enough progress, to recognize this and encourage people be who they truly are, and all of this applies to all humans who have ever lived universally, past, present, and future - and all traditions or religions that have ever been wary about this were always emphatically both incorrect and immoral. And there are no possibilities, now that we have it all figured out, that there will ever be any negative consequences at all to our new progress. And anyone who dissents from this framing is a bigot and should be hounded out of polite society as an example. I'm being a hyperbolic, but to be honest, this does capture roughly how it often seems to me (although I suspect some people might admit a bit more nuance if really pressed on an individual level).
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Referencing the shortest AAQC I’ve ever gotten, that is because a same sex marriage is not real under historical understandings of marriage.
What the Supreme Court actually did was impose a new definition of marriage on the states.
Samizdata
2d ago
Got an interesting article to share, with a goofy-ass twist.
https://farhakhalidi.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-male-centered-women?triedRedirect=true
So, my first thought is that it is rare to see a writer lay out so explicitly their hang-ups with sex positivity. She makes the case that heterosexual men exploit the “unwritten rules” of the dating game to string along women for sex, and in doing so, traumatize them through sheer carelessness.
I don’t completely disagree with her assessment of the situation, although I’m confused as to what her policy prescriptions are, and I think she’s in a “Be Careful What You Wish For” scenario.
If you’ll indulge me as I put on my over-analysis hat, the heterosexual dating marketplace can be viewed through an economic lens, with men and women modeled as agents within the marketplace.
The author is making the case that the current status quo privileges men’s interests at the expense of women’s. Even if women would prefer a longer “runway” towards consummating a relationship, it’s the men who get to set the timetable, with their implicit threat of walking away otherwise.
The optimal behavior for women, operating collectively as a self-interested guild within the heterosexual marketplace is to coordinate to demand maximal investment from men in exchange for romantic/sexual relationships. In other words, to collude, act as a monopolistic cartel and engage in price-fixing schemes.
Like every cartel ever, this is hard to enforce because every individual member’s incentive is to undercut the group-set price. It becomes especially hard to enforce in cases of romantic relationships, where people are not fungible economic actors with identical goals of maximizing profits, but flesh-and-blood human beings with radically different goals, desires, and libidos.
The solution that allows women to set a “price floor” for relationships, in spite of both those factors, is to use social technology to align their interests. In this case, that technology would be “slut-shaming”. Any woman who engages in behavior that undermines the interests of Women as a Collective (like being willing to be Chad’s booty call) is declared persona non grata at Mimosa Mondays and banished from the bookclub.
None of this will be new to the average Mottizen, although God knows we never get tired of re-hashing the gender wars. What I find especially interesting in this salvo is the delivery source. In another essay, the author explicitly rejects the patriarchal norms of the conservative community that she grew up in. Despite that, she still converges on advocating for basically traditional conservative sexual morality in women’s dating life.
My concern is that I’ve never really heard of a secular society with those kinds of restrictions on sexuality; the only places that successfully curtail premarital sex do so explicitly through a religious point of view. The Taliban has successfully prevented Afghan women from traumatizing themselves from Hookup Culture, but whether this is better for Women As A Class is left as an exercise for the reader.
The punch line to all this? The author, Farha Khalidi, is an Onlyfans star! She is the bête noire of conservative patriarchs across the globe, and every social system (that I’ve ever heard of) that frowns on premarital sex would consider what she does to be much worse.
So it begs the question: what, exactly, is she advocating for? Quite frankly, I’m not sure. If I had to guess, I think she wants a secular, sexually conservative sororiarchy, where women watch out for their gender’s collective interests and stop each other from undercutting their bids. Either way, an interesting point of view.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
Thank you! I haven't remembered all the details from 20 years ago (the anniversary this month!). Re-reading it, the especially evil part is that the weed in question was absolutely undoubtedly for personal consumption, to treat a severe debilitating condition, with medical approval and supervision, allowed by state law - and yet Feds were absolutely adamant torturing a couple of women to death is what is right and proper to do.
I think that this "estrogen cures autism" analysis is false, for the simple reason that this reads like confirmation bias and (ironically) an attempt to systematize the effects of estrogen in a way directly counter to any notion of the author becoming less autistic. That being said, I'd assign something like a 1-5% chance that they're onto something, and that something would be really interesting if it was true, so for a bit I'm going to be arguing from that perspective.
Before anything else, let me establish that the "problem" with autism is difficulty communicating .That predictably leads to social deficits and-- guess what-- trans people report high levels of social isolation and loneliness (This figure includes FTM trans people too, which aren't what I'm talking about with autism, but I'll get to that later). Meanwhile, estrogen increases oxytocin and oxytocin reducing autism symptoms and oxytocin decreases the felt impact of social isolation. So immediately, there's a pretty compelling link between autism->feeling lonely->taking estrogen->feeling better that explains the "success" of the trans phenomenon, including the high rates of treatment satisfaction. This blog post goes one level deeper, and proposes an autism-schizoid axis that underlies the taking estrogen-feeling better link... and additionally, explains why trans people feel better even without taking hormones. Namely, if their problem is an excess of autistic traits, even just adopting the cultural behavior of a more schizoid culture is enough to make up for part of their social deficits-- and joining a dedicated community focused on doing the same thing reinforces that effect even further.
FTM trans people don't really make sense if you assume that autism compensation is the mechanism of action for transsexualism, but with the autism-schizoid axis they start to make more sense... being schizoid causes it's own form of social deficits that presumably testosterene helps compensate for. We know that testosterone encourages altruistic behavior under certain circumstances... I'm not sure how that would help it counter schizoid personalities, but it's certainly suggestive of something going on.
Put all that together with the fact that transexualism has increased pretty much in tandem with the simultaneous rise of autism/ADHD diagnoses and hormone disruptors like phthalates, microplastics, high fructose corn syrup, etc. and you can put together a comprehensive, self-consistent explanation for why this entire social movement in happening.
Again, I don't actually believe the article. Even if the author is right, I think their methodology is so wrong as to be useless. But it is interesting, and for that I have to respect it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Less than $3,000 over ten years on a $30,000-50,000 purchase is fairly unimportant. If you can't afford the maintenance on your Tacoma, it's unlikely that the extra $3k over ten years would save you.
Whether that is all worth it for the cargo capacity, towing, or extra performance, well, I dunno.
It all comes down to style. People buy a car primarily for what they want to look like, not for what they need or want to do. You can tell, because minivans are a tiny segment of the market these days.
I think if I had my choice, I'd own both a smaller electric car for local commutes and have a mid-size pickup for long haul drives or moving cargo around.
I've always been in a weird place with cars, I've always had multiple vehicles available to me. Having a truck available is the best, driving one everywhere all the time less so.
IRGC helped put down ISIS and unlike Americans,never provided CAS for them.
They're not friends of 'jihadis',they have their own league.
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