domain:ryandv.substack.com
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
6hr ago
You're mixing things up a bit; the depressed places don't have the high housing prices and until the next advance of the progressives, we're still America where even (or especially!) the poor eat meat.
But you see the difference between:
Name: Sarah. Sex: M. Gender: F.
and
Name: Sarah. Sex: M. Auxiliary Note: Transexual / Female-identifying
right? Regardless of whether you agree with the latter.
In short, there is a difference between 'female' and 'female-identifying'. One is a reified claim about what someone is, one is a note about their beliefs.
HereAndGone
6hr ago
more start-ups and entrepreneurship rather than chaebols eating everything
I think that is the way for the economy to survive, instead of emulating Japan which in the 80s was the Coming Economic Global Superpower (remember the movies about Japanese companies buying up America?) but look at where it is today.
zeke5123a
6hr ago
There are literally professional athletes who only started their sports a few years before they went pro. Of course, they are largely massive physical specimens.
Similarly, there can be some degree of cross training due to playing multiple sports. For example, soccer (barely a sport) does teach foot eye coordination. This is helpful for hockey (a real sport) since you sometimes need the puck to go skate to stick.
Sure, I agree. Which is exactly my point. Rationalists are deontological cult of reason with a lot of let's say idiosyncracies. I just noted that they love this Sagan's quip and cite it quite often as some kind of mantra. I do not deny its utility for their ideology, but it is still a little bit cringey in many contexts. It is equivalent to some religious believer just writing that Jesus the way, the truth, and the life randomly in the middle of some argument about healthcare or whatnot - exactly like the OP of this thread felt the need to write the sentence as part of his argument.
Actually I think it is even worse for rationalists. The religious believers are mostly self aware to the extent, that they do understand that it is a religious statement and that nonbelievers or Muslims etc. will disagree. Rationalists can sometimes forget that it is just a mantra with symbolic meaning, and they may take it too literally - as if it is actually a good argument to present in a debate.
zeke5123a
6hr ago
Maybe there’s a difference but I learned guitar after 12 (largely because I noticed girls liked the guy who played guitar).
"Oh I had to invite her to a dance six times over two months before she finally said yes." etc
That's basically easy, if you're seeing her every few days at communal social events and you've known each other all your lives and everyone of both genders agree that men are supposed to be persistent. Embarrassing, yes, but not that embarrassing.
Today, lots of men know few or no women, and are taught from birth that anything more than a very indirect one-time-only approach is sexual harassment. I am a perfectly well-adjusted adult and yet I haven't spoken to a women who wasn't a friend's wife for months. When the bar is so very much higher, it's no surprise that people seek easy alternatives.
HereAndGone
7hr ago
I’m just not convinced that these are strictly superior qualities to develop for the specific class of people who are genuine candidates for the Ivy League in 2025.
Yeah, but despite the best efforts of the government, there is not going to be "100% of this year's graduating student body from high school are going to an Ivy". For the vast majority, having a summer job of some sort is beneficial, and for a lot of kids, a 'manual labour' job that Alexander is sneering at is the kind of work they will eventually, in some form, end up doing; if you're going to do a pink collar/lower level white collar job that deals with the public, for instance. If you end up working a lower level government job taking in and processing application forms from 'clients/customers' as the new terminology favours, then by God having worked in retail or some other public-facing job will be a great preparation for how dumb/frustrating/'how on earth did they not fill this in right?' that work can be. It'll also give you an opportunity to learn how to fake the Customer Service Smile when dealing with unreasonable demands from the public and your superiors.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7hr ago
Unsolicited advice--just take the training wheels off, and take the pedals off, too. Lower the seat so their feet easily touch the ground. Basically you're improvising what is sometimes called a "balance bike," except that once they have the balance down, you can just put the pedals back on rather than buy a whole new bike.
Armin
7hr ago
My thesis was the temporary victory of cultural conservatism that was necessary because of war struggle, collective action and anticommunism + tech innovation and huge economic growth. Delete the low hanging fruit of recovery and growth, and then in the 68 eliminate the antileftist culture, and you have it.
Any man can become president. That's still a very bad life plan to be offering to people as a whole because all of them except one will be disappointed. It matters that the majority of people have decent lives.
This seems low-charity. @AlexanderTurok doesn't want the government to encourage people to take up low-class jobs or to make policy that increases rather than decreases the number of such jobs.
Specifically he seems to think that the Right is full of people who haven't done such work and fail to see just how awful it is - his knowledge seems to be more hands-on than most of us here and most twitter commentators, so I take him seriously on this note even though I don't necessarily agree.
Now, frankly I have no idea how he does want these necessary but awful (by his lights) jobs to be done, and would very much appreciate hearing that directly from him. I would also, honestly, really like him to make a top level post where he lays out his own, explicit, positive ideas about how he wants the economy and culture to work.
honestly you shouldn't bother remembering theorems - you should be able to quickly prove them on the spot when needed
If you have that particular ability. Not everybody does, and it's not just "oh well that's because it was taught badly in school". Some people can't math, that's the sad fact (I am one).
Literature - change the books that are studied and kids will read them and fast.
And then we find they can't understand books that are not the "relevant to the youth" ones they read.
Who the hell needs to understand Dickens today? Sure, that's a point. But what do you do when it's a text for the workplace that isn't Dickens but is also not "The Hunger Games"?
This study is even worse than I first thought, because while I had sympathy that American kids of today wouldn't be familiar with 19th century British law terms, then I find they were allowed to look up unfamiliar terms and couldn't even put it together then for the joke about the dinosaur (bolding mine):
This paper analyzes the results from a think-aloud reading study designed to test the reading comprehension skills of 85 English majors from two regional Kansas universities. From January to April of 2015, subjects participated in a recorded, twenty-minute reading session in which they were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House out loud to a facilitator and then translate each sentence into plain English. Before subjects started the reading tests, they were given access to online resources and dictionaries and advised that they could also use their own cell phones as a resource. The facilitators also assured the subjects that were free to go at their own pace and did not have to finish reading all seven paragraphs by the end of the exam.
It's even more depressing, because these kids got into college to do an English degree with a poor starting level of English:
The 85 subjects in our test group came to college with an average ACT Reading score of 22.4, which means, according to Educational Testing Service, that they read on a “low-intermediate level,” able to answer only about 60 percent of the questions correctly and usually able only to “infer the main ideas or purpose of straightforward paragraphs in uncomplicated literary narratives,” “locate important details in uncomplicated passages” and “make simple inferences about how details are used in passages” (American College 12). In other words, the majority of this group did not enter college with the proficient-prose reading level necessary to read Bleak House or similar texts in the literary canon. As faculty, we often assume that the students learn to read at this level on their own, after they take classes that teach literary analysis of assigned literary texts. Our study was designed to test this assumption.
They wanted to study English literature without the ability to even read Dickens. This would be like me trying to do a degree in Mathematics. You'd have more luck teaching a dog to walk on its hind legs, pace Dr. Johnson:
“Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” ― Samuel Johnson
Syphax
7hr ago
I don't know about the spanish part, I went to a Wendy's in Chantilly right before covid and noticed the staff were entirely Indian women. I only remember this because they royally fucked up my order (It's plain! Just meats, cheese, and bread! And where the fuck is the bacon?), and served a bun that was somehow 1/3 rock hard stale and the rest was fine.
HereAndGone
7hr ago
Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character.
Especially funny since Kamala mentioned working at McDonalds.
Ms. Harris’s campaign said that she was an employee of the McDonald’s on Central Avenue in Alameda, Calif., in 1983 during the summer after her freshman year at Howard University, working the cash register, french-fry station and ice cream machine. It has provided little information beyond that, including how long she worked there. She also mentioned her job at McDonald’s when she ran for president in 2019.
Well, clearly her low-class parent who fetishised manual labour should have emulated the Asians!
Er, wait...
zeke5123a
7hr ago
Biden advertised as a moderate but governed like a radical. Style aside, Trump is still a Clinton Democrat.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7hr ago
I think this is probably more accurate, and really of society as a whole. The dominant position seems to be “if you didn’t get college credit, it doesn’t count.” I get it for job skills, as college credits and degrees mean someone verified that you actually did the work. It never made sense to me in art, literature, history, or other liberal arts. Those things can be easily learned by simply reading tge texts, or practicing drawing or writing. If I had a kid who wanted to be a writer, im not sure I’d make him go through university— in fact it’s a waste of time. Instead, I’d have him write on substack or some other blogging platform and learn to communicate with an audience. Same with art. There’s enough instruction out there that you could learn the techniques of your chosen medium, and the rest is down to practice and getting feedback. But it seems like so many people want to get those kinds of degrees even when they don’t make sense.
But our society somehow bought the university marketing that told them that only learning something in a university classroom taught by a TA who has 500 students a day counts. If I pass a course on WW2 history, that counts as learning history. If I read every book I can get my hands on for that topic, read first hand accounts, looked at raw footage, etc. it doesn’t. Problem being that I’ve actually done a lot more work than the kid sleeping through their lectures in Turner Hall. And unlike him, I’ve actually done all the reading.
HereAndGone
7hr ago
Depends on the Asians, I know the stereotype of Indians/Pakistanis in the British Isles is "own the corner shop" (to the point where a 90s band named themselves that, their big hit) and for Chinese people it's "run the local takeaway".
In the US I suppose it's "Indians and Chinese work in IT, Koreans own the corner shops"?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7hr ago
Tokens aren't everything. While you can fit an entire novel inside the theoretical token window of an LLM, that doesn't leave it much room to do detailed and coherent output, especially as your requests become more detailed.
As for epubs, yeah, one of the steps in my app is being able to read from docx and epub files and extract context from chapter headings, for example.
Most automatic epub generation tools suck. For that matter, I have seen professional published epubs that are just terrible slapped-together artifacts. I taught myself to make properly formatted ebooks using Sigil and I'd make a business of it except it wouldn't pay shit (too many people offering to do it on Fiverr for ten bucks).
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
7hr ago
The celebrities aren’t the big deal to me. If a foreign country was involved in using Epstein to gather intelligence and to blackmail, then the public should know that. If the foreign country is so influential that they can do that without ever facing repercussions, then the public should definitely know that so they can change their priorities accordingly.
As the child of two undocile people, it’s because in a two-person system with no rank or higher outside authority, such people rip each other apart the moment they have a real, serious conflict. Temperamentally neither is equipped to back down gracefully or elicit sympathy from the other, so the relationship ends up either in prolonged turf war or divorce.
That’s not to say you should be marrying a cocker-spaniel instead of a woman, just that if you find yourself a male born with an undocile temperament (many such cases!) your relationship is going to do a lot better with a laid-back girl than with a spitfire or a girlboss.
The opposite scenario is also true, but proportionally less likely for biological reasons.
On a broader case, I think this extends to a principle that we can encourage women to be assertive OR have a tradition of equal, gender-neutral gender roles, but not both.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7hr ago
I mean, yes you improve past age 12, but if I started violin at 6-7 and you start at 13-14, I have somewhere between 6-8 years of practice ahead of anything you could do in the time between 14-18 and I will be much better than you. It’s that way with sports. If you want to have a chance of playing high school sports, you have to be playing select sports by 8 because otherwise you’ll not get enough quality practice to compete with those who did.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7hr ago
I don't care if all men can do it, I care if any man can do it.
Y'know, I scrolled down fast and didn't see the author's name on this post, but when I hit this bit:
the right fetishizes hauling boxes and cleaning pools
I went "Oh! Alexander!" and scrolled back up and whaddya know, I was right!
there's no reason to make him work manual labor because some conservative writer who attended a third-rate university told you it's an "American folkway."
It wasn't "I must study politics and way so my sons can work a cash register and be in touch with the working-class."
Friend, mate, old buddy, old pal - learn a new song? "Righties are dumb and smelly and low-class and have too many bastard kids and are way too sympathetic to the low-grade low-IQ blacks and browns who have too many bastard kids" is getting boring now. The pure despite and contempt you have for those who make it possible for you to live a comfortable life is astounding. Oh, you don't like the grubby proles who work the cash registers? Don't worry, supermarkets are working fast on self-checkout so now you can do the job of being the grubby prole who works the cash register for free!
Even for those Elite Human Capital who are going to waltz into whatever high-status white-collar job you think most desirable will do better if they have some experience of summer work. Granted, it'll probably be an internship with a company of one of Dad's golf buddies, but some experience of "this is what work looks like" is much better than none. Otherwise you end up hiring people who have all the right qualifications on paper but need to be hand-held every minute of the day since they have no idea what to do on their own (I see plenty of smart people who haven't a clue about "okay this is my first job, how do I sort out my tax?")
You really do want all the low-class (by your metric) people, regardless of colour, to just disappear so you don't have to interact with them, don't you? No more manual labourers. No more people on the tills in shops. No more unsuitables that can be confused with you, the striving wannabe, by the elites you so desperately want to belong to.
Quite apart from the crimes, it seems that Epstein was himself a pervert. Getting sex tapes of celebs seems exactly like something he'd do. And then we factor in the blackmail angle, which every pimp and madam (it seems) uses as insurance policy, save for the very few who maintain discretion even after arrest. Isn't this what the entire furore over the "Epstein list" and whether it exists or not is about?
More options
Context Copy link