domain:youtu.be
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
11hr ago
Presumably the banks have an easier time beating money out of rich guys who default than I do.
To the extent that they can take collateral, sure. But the situation was a car, a depreciating asset. The collateral isn't nearly as valuable. Besides which, even having collateral doesn't mean there's no reason to try to lower risk further by only lending to people who are likely to be trustworthy.
Looking at the US situation from the outside it just looks like banks expect a consistent credit history only because credit card use is widespread, and credit card use is widespread because banks expect a consistent credit history.
That's not true at all. Banks expect a consistent credit history because they want to establish that you are a low-risk loan. It has nothing to do with credit cards.
SkoomaDentist
11hr ago
You keep spelling that with one too few *'s, you know...
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11hr ago
I'm sorry but when you see a pickup truck with two American flags on it, it's a red tribe supporter. You have to be really Galaxy brained to come up with something else.
Quantumfreakonomics
11hr ago
This could conceivably work, but the more-likely result is the same thing that always happens with affirmative-action, where there is a clique of “real” researchers doing “real” science, and then a bunch of affirmative-action hires producing slop that no one actually cares about.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
11hr ago
Have you considered opening a S***tack?
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
11hr ago
this place is just a hangout without pretensious ideals like Less Wrong
I am pretentious.
I doubt there's a lot of people who post here with the goal to blow lurkers' minds
I only ever post with the intention of blowing everyone’s minds.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
11hr ago
If you're baiting for a "please don't go", consider me baited. I'm yet to come up with the optimal way to converse with you, but I always enjoy your perspective.
gattsuru
11hr ago
Given theNybbler's environment, the first thought would be credit card skimmers. They're not common, but urban areas finding 'modifications' to gas stations happens enough I've seen it in person. Moving to NFC/smart card transactions rather than magstripe helps, but we haven't fully migrated over, in no small part because the US chip cards kinda suck, so we still have magstripe and a lot of card issuers having to deny sketchy transactions. Most people who do it get caught pretty quick, but only after doing a lot of damage.
Less common is the old analog loophole: someone writing down (or taking a picture of) a card number, name, and CVV code.
Most online vendors also need zip, too, but if you're stealing card numbers in a diner, you can make some educated guesses about zip codes pretty easily.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
11hr ago
Bro, this place is just a hangout without pretensious ideals like Less Wrong, I doubt there's a lot of people who post here with the goal to blow lurkers' minds, and the ones that do are probably eyeing a S***tack career. Anyway, if you're mainly here for consoooming instead of participating as an equal, you're probably doing it wrong.
quiet_NaN
11hr ago
The thing about people using violence to defend what they perceive to be their natural rights is that absent some consensus about what these other rights are and what the ground facts are, these claims will overlap.
For example, if what for me looks like innocent religious worship to which I am entitled through natural rights looks to you like depraved demon-calling which threatens the lives of your neighborhood, you would well be within your rights to use violence to stop me, and I would well be within my rights to use violence to oppose you.
Solve for equilibrium, and this is roughly equivalent to saying that there is only one right, which is to use violence to do whatever you want.
This is certainly a valid conception of natural rights, but also a rather trivial one: might makes right. It generally leads to long-lived feuds between clans and families which have wronged each other.
Hobbes speaks of "Judgement, and Reason", Locke of "to judge, whether they have just cause". This sounds to me like implicit prerequisites to the right to self-defense: if your judgement is obviously impaired, it seems unlikely that society will respect your right to self defense. (I still think they are overly optimistic if they believe that reasonable people will not make overlapping claims wrt their natural rights, but that is besides the point.)
Of course, we can argue if philosophically, a toddler or a psychotic has a right to defend themselves against what they perceive as violations of their natural rights, but pragmatically, all historical societies which I am aware of have avoided giving the means for effective self defense to these groups. The right not to get tortured or killed is a right which most civil societies bestow to any humans in their jurisdiction from the moment they are born. Other rights, e.g. the right to vote, or carry effective means for self defense, or consent to sex are granted conditionally. (Related potential scissor statement: "as the right to bear arms is a consequence of the natural right of self defense, illegal immigrants should be allowed to bear arms").
All societies consider trade-offs when it comes to enabling their people to practice self-defense. As @cjet79 has pointed out, guns are excellent tools for self-defense. But the kind of guns which are legal to own in the US are probably not what is always optimal for self-defense.
For example, consider tamper-resistant explosive vests as a weapon for deterring rapists. If a potential victim packing a firearm will deter 80% of the would-be rapists, wearing a well-known rape prevention vest which works by turning the wearer and anyone within five meters into bite-sized chunks whenever its sensors detect that a rape attempt is happening might deter 90% (all the ones who believe that they could startle their victim before she can draw). Yet despite offering marginal gains, wearing such a device in public would be illegal everywhere in the world, because societies will not consider the benefits in isolation but also the trade-offs. If the device blows up one subway car full of people by accident per three marginal rapes it prevents, that means that it has negative utility for broader society.
The difference between Texas, New York, and Germany is simply that the societies balance these trade-offs slightly differently.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
11hr ago
Be the change you want to see. Share some hot takes.
Talking about the same thing (the CW) for 10+ years gets old eventually.
I enjoyed the discussion we just had about Mormon theology. That was interesting and informative.
TheLoser
11hr ago
This meant that the man was forced to have a big stake in being a parent, but also was very rarely deprived of the father role (as part of an actual family, not the modern 'weekend father'). Nowadays, a man who impregnates a woman can never get the chance to be a father, or can easily be deprived of the father role when the woman splits up. So there is less reason nowadays for men to want to have children or to build themselves up to be a good father. Instead, a lot of guys prefer infinite adolescence.
It's just as likely that men who are forced to become fathers become inattentive or abusive fathers. Also, you are completely wrong on the fact that mot men don't want children; actually, more men want children than women do.
Women traditionally 'groomed' promising men into being good providers/fathers/etc. The taboo on splitting up meant that the risk of marrying a rough diamond was offset by the benefits of getting a better husband than the woman could get otherwise. But the ease by which relationships can be ended, resulted in women being increasingly picky and only wanting the finished product, since a perfectly groomed husband can just trade her in. However, the lack of grooming by women means that many men miss out on becoming this finished product, so everyone suffers.
First of all, why the fuck is this arrangement good for men? Why do men need to be "groomed" into being better people by women? This is utterly toxic and manipulative; most men would take the modern arrangement. Also, again, it's just as likely that the "rough diamond" stays rough, and the women is stuck with an abuser.
All the lies about men and women being equal, logically results in the conclusion that when men have different preferences from women, this is all just bad culture that they need to change. So in a way feminism was right when they coined the term 'the personal is political,' in that women increasingly politicize their relationships, and demand leftism in their mates, with the assumption that those men then share their preferences. However, this just drives men further into right-wing politics, who do allow them to be themselves, while women get in this spiral of blaming the right wing for their relationship issues.
I agree that women often politicize their relationships, but they don't blame the "right" for their relationship issues. They just blame men.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
11hr ago
This hardware is legitimately too old for it to be that. Its a K6-2 system only a year removed from its release date.
ControlsFreak
11hr ago
I'm starting to outgrow this place
I've been thinking on this exact thing for a little while now. That there may be others having the same thoughts at the same time perhaps leans me more toward thinking that the quality has just gone down. Only slightly, though; there's always just coincidence.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
11hr ago
My cash could be bound up in investments.
I don't know how American banks do things, but surely they'd take your assets into account as well? Worst case scenario, I'm sure they'd give you a loan against your investments as collateral? Isn't that how Elon financed his Twitter purchase?
What's the practical difference between "I can prove I have been earning $X/month for years" and "I can prove I paid back $Y/month of credit card loans for years"?
The former establishes your ability to pay given responsible behavior, the latter establishes that you had a pattern of responsible behavior, while providing some useful metrics on the size of loans you were able to manage.
ControlsFreak
11hr ago
this method
is undefined, so one cannot determine how generally scoped your claim is. My comment was very clearly making a scope argument (about your own argument), so this is just non-responsive.
Alternatively, the most natural of the charitable interpretations is that you agree with my scope claim and acknowledge that your own proposal suffers at least the same defects.
Slightly less charitably, you're just doubling down on misdirection and obfuscation. Bad faith argumentation stuff.
Drinniol
12hr ago
Can you?
Can the 55 year old accountant with a bum leg and asthma really be James Bond if he just REALLY tries?
Can he really be Genghis Khan? Would it be wise or even good if he could?
A high-speed car chase in VR is fun and thrilling. In real life, it's tragic and destructive.
But no, people can't have everything they want in life. A big part of growing up for most people, who are ordinary, is coming to terms with and accepting that you are, in fact, not special - and that's ok. You'll never be famous, you'll never make a great scientific discovery, you'll never make a speech that shakes the world, you'll never have 1 second let alone 15 minutes of fame. Hell, for most, you'll never even be an ordinary rich guy. Sure, people shouldn't be complacent and should work to get what they can, but don't pretend that there aren't limits especially for the 50% of the population below the median. Because that's the brutal truth: there is always a bottom half.
Why shouldn't they be allowed some escapism?
recovering_rationaleist
12hr ago
I'm currently adjacent to an R1 research university, and here's what's been happening:
- After the administration cancelled grants which contained diversity-speak, faculty who were supporting DEI due to social pressure have quietly stopped promoting it, while the true believers have started communicating by FOIA-untraceable means. Outreach and education programs which had been set up to give special scientific mentoring opportunities to black students have suddenly dried up due to a lack of faculty support; the minority of faculty who still want to support these programs are still running them, but at much reduced headcount. The programs are only discussed in meetings and not by email.
- Everyone is concerned about funding. NIH restructuring earlier this year will result in at least one full unfunded "gap year" between grants, if not more. Furthermore, the federal government has not been paying out on its existing grant obligations, so the institution has been covering staff salaries out of its endowment. This will continue during the government shutdown, but at some point the institution may need to dip into its investments to pay salaries (instead of funding salaries off the interest on those investments), and at that point layoffs are on the table.
- The foci of scientific research are shifting with the political winds. A faculty member who last year gave a talk about "the ethics of whole-genome studies on minority groups", which heavily implied that Native Americans are due some special degree of genetic privacy, this year talked about an actual study design and how they support study participants for long-term follow-up. A staff member whose poster last year was about diversity in science gave a poster this year about the opioid epidemic.
- "Diversity, equity, and inclusion" as a term has disappeared. Its institutional replacement is "inclusivity".
- Mandatory training was nice this year; it focused on harrassment and publication ethics, and HR lady removed the snide remarks about "white men".
- Racial and gender interest groups still exist, but they are no longer advertising their meetings in traceable ways. The departmental "women's cafe" is now advertised on posters in the corridors, rather than by (more FOIA-able) email and intranet.
- Humanities students remain absolutely woke-brainwashed; during class discussions, the younger and humanities students will try to shoehorn any and all concepts into DEI jargon, or derail the discussion to be about minorities. A discussion about "what makes teaching effective" ends in "Student learning depends on their identity and positionality."
- In contrast, older students (whose day jobs involve work in radiology or physical therapy) and engineers are more likely to remove woke jargon and project woke claims into a concept-space where things actually make sense and testable claims can actually be made.
- I'm editing an effort-post on this, but the actual scholarship for the DEI position is incredibly intellectually weak. Every intervention on behalf of diversity is claimed to have huge positive effects in multiple dimensions; the actual citations go to junk studies (small N, self-reported results, no control group) which only support a fraction of the broad claims made. I think this is due to the same effect which results in woke movies sucking: the focus on diversity is a shield against criticism which would otherwise improve the scholarship. There is also a survivorship bias for early-career faculty whose research supports woke positions.
Spookykou
12hr ago
I went to a Catholic church weekly for about 15 years and Jehovah's witnesses were never mentioned.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
12hr ago
To the extent it is a problem, (1) is a problem for any scheme of enforcement. (2) is another form of a "government is sometimes held by my opponents" problem.
Which is why this method cannot work.
If indeed the Trump administration is "coming around" to the idea that things like having ideologues pro forma swear they aren't doing things according to their ideology rather than the formal rules will help, the administration is screwing up.
stuckinbathroom
12hr ago
The over-performance of resident Asians means that UCs have large gaps between the median Asian/White and affirmative action candidates.
Hasn’t California banned AA in university admissions for nearly 3 decades now? I don’t doubt that university administrators/admissions committees will try every trick in the book to put a thumb on the scale in favor of “diverse” applicants, but there are hard limits on how far they can move that needle, particularly given Asian academic performance as you mentioned. The top 2 UC campuses (Berkeley and LA), for instance, are near-majority Asian and have vanishingly low numbers of Black students.
It’s a very inside-baseball military fashion debate. Muslims in some countries like Afghanistan don’t respect men without beards. They think it looks effeminate. To assist with winning hearts and minds and blending in with the locals, special forces units and CIA Special Activities Division operators started wearing long beards like Afghani tribesmen. The problem is that when a crack elite secret unit of secret and elite crack operators starts wearing beards, everyone in the regular army is going to want to wear a beard because of the cachet and cool factor. But if you let that happen pretty soon regular army units are going to start looking like an episode of Duck Dynasty and grooming and discipline standards will go to hell. This isn’t about secretly forcing out black or Sikh soldiers, it’s about stopping posers. Hegseth made this explicit, during his speech he said “if you want to wear a beard, join the special forces!” This kind of thing has already happened many times before: tucking your pants into your boots is a fiercely guarded privilege that only paratroopers can exercise. During the American Civil War and the European Victorian era, some special units got to wear a fez.
2rafa
12hr ago
When I was a young child, I cried every single morning for years because I didn’t want to go to school. Often my parents had to physically carry me out of the house before I begrudgingly accepted I was going, and I would cry the entire way.
But I loved school. Every day I had a great time and I’d be sad to come home and I’d tell my parents about who I spoke to and played with and how much fun I had. Much more than if I’d have stayed at home.
Adulthood is often similar. I was depressed for a year and stopped working because I was so sad and my life felt empty and meaningless. I got very lucky that an old coworker offered me a new job and everyone in my life essentially forced me to accept, and when I started I suddenly found things cleared up. I liked talking to people every day, I enjoyed working toward a goal, the sense of achievement after a long week, meeting new people, small talk about nothing in particular.
But if I hadn’t gotten lucky or had my arm twisted into accepting that lucky break, I fully know I could have spent another five years doing nothing on my couch, watching YouTube video essays and every Real Housewives franchise and reading and playing video games.
Not everyone knows what will make them happy. Even fewer can force themselves to do what will. Traditional institutions like early marriage and the expectation that couples produce children exist in part because sometimes it’s only with the passage of time that we realize the happiness and fulfillment these things bring us.
Let 10 year olds eat as much candy as they want, stay up all night to play video games and skip school and they will, no matter how much their future selves might regret it. Adults aren’t so different. If you give people basic income and infinite free amazing quality entertainment then certain consequences are inevitable, and if you care about the wellbeing of your fellow man (and I do) then that is suboptimal even if the machines can look after us.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
12hr ago
No, it’s a matter of evidence-based doctrine!
In Afghanistan, I could easily recognize which Afghan National Army officers had been on the losing Soviet side or the victorious mujahideen side during the Soviet-Afghan War based on their choice of Stalinesque mustache or majestic, freedom-fighting beard.
Definitely not. It's entirely internal reflection, and it hadn't even crossed my mind to actually mention it until I saw someone else say it.
FWIW, I've enjoyed our interactions (and your comments, generally), as well.
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