domain:forecasting.substack.com
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
10hr ago
One day some dudes with erlenmeyer tubes showed up, and they saved half the children. They saved half the children.
They also turned some of them into flippered mutants, so let us not act like Science has ever batted 1.000 here. Not the physical sciences, and certainly not the social sciences.
Grant_us_eyes
10hr ago
If you're exercising/working out while taking it, you should be fine. I'm on 21 weeks of semaglutide and haven't noticed any lack of physical capability while training martial arts. If anything, I seem more capable, and I'm beginning to wonder if semaglutide has a side-effect of blocking soreness, but this might just be psychosomatic on my part.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
10hr ago
Back to my main point: people covered in tattoos and/or piercings are the human equivalent of aposematism, change my mind.
As a middle-aged curmudgeon with zero tattoos or piercings, I agree completely.
I had wondered how these two knew each other:
[the defendant] had previously sent [the victim] a text where he threatened to chop off his fingers because of a drug debt which he at one point claimed amount to E2500.
[the victim] had texted him back insisting that he only owed him a couple of hundred euro
A horrible tragedy, yet there may be a lesson present about engaging in drug transactions with someone covered in face/neck/head tattoos.
One day some dudes with erlenmeyer tubes showed up, and they saved half the children. They saved half the children.
I’m not sure what precisely this is referring to (global reduction in mortality rate?), but I think if we can take anything away from the last 100 years it’s that progress in the physical sciences doesn’t necessarily (or at all) translate to progress in the social sciences.
I agree that women’s intuition is perhaps not everything it’s ginned up to be, but I would want something pretty good before I discount that intuition to nothing. Especially for the most visceral stuff like ‘do I need to hug the crying baby?’ Which is pretty much directly the result of millions of years of evolution optimising for healthy children and functional families.
More complex stuff may be downstream of bad socialisation and I would put less weight on it.
HereAndGone
11hr ago
So you want a serf/slave class of the "inferior" brown people because such jobs are below the dignity of the "superior" white people (never mind that white people all over the world used to, and still do, such jobs). We needn't be afraid that the browns will do anything, because we should (as the superiors) ensure they have no rights apart from being cheap disposable labour until robots can do the job and hence they will be debarred from polluting our culture due to not being able to influence it, and we shouldn't encourage white people to pick up the slack by doing these low-class jobs because such jobs are only fit for low-class people and we don't want low-class white trash, that reflects poorly on our superiority.
All white people will be middle-middle to upper-middle to upper-class, doing high-status jobs for Elite Human Capital because we are so much better, and all the shitty (literally) jobs will be done by the inferior brown people until the AI-powered robots take over.
Am I right? Because I'm blessed if I can understand in any other way the points you are darkly hinting at.
Pigeon
coo coo
11hr ago
It should obvious to anyone that the US in 2025 is not China ca. 1930.
China circa 1946, more like. The Nanjing decade was relatively stable for most Chinese people; the KMT lost an enormous amount of credibility from the general population during WW2. Mao has explicitly referenced this when speaking to Japanese officials.
07mk
11hr ago
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.
HereAndGone
11hr ago
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.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
11hr ago
I'll allow it. It doesn't matter if it's rare, if it happens at all.
No_one
11hr ago
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?
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
11hr ago
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.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11hr ago
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.
hydroacetylene
11hr ago
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.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11hr ago
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.
hydroacetylene
11hr ago
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.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
11hr ago
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.)
self_made_human
C'est la vie
11hr ago
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.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
11hr ago
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.
Corvos
11hr ago
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...
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
11hr ago
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.
Pigeon
coo coo
11hr ago
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?
Congratulations, ceasing nail-biting is very difficult. This makes me think you have a better shot at fixing your diet than a random obese person off the street, since you've already achieved one lifestyle change from willpower alone. I hope that you have greater success now that you have chemical assistance. Good luck.
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