domain:doyourownresearch.substack.com
zoink
17hr ago
There is little to be gained by a man expressing transient physical discomfort. If you have a reputation for toughness, you can express mild preferences in limited circumstances - rarely in the moment - and it must always be clear that you can perform when needed.
Tenaz
17hr ago
I hate to say it, but the "it's antisemitism" theory seems to have greater predictive power than many of its competing alternatives.
Nah, this is just the media and culture war riling people up, plus recency. You could argue that maybe media coverage is due to antisemitism.
TIRM
18hr ago
Something wrong with crime? Sorry, all the high agency people have simply moved to a higher income area.
I (we) cannot fix crime. We can flee it though. I do what I am capable of, not what is hypothetically possible if hard coordination problems were solved.
I really enjoyed Blue Prince (Blueprints... get it? get it? aha). If anything I would love to see more games like this despite its flaws. It took 8 years to create the interlocking lore and puzzles. Unfortunately this means we're unlike to see a puzzle game of this quality any time soon.
The game has some frustrating quality of life problems and grind related to getting the right combination of elements through RNG. The later is terrible when you want to test obscure theories of interactions between rooms and items, or worse, a particular reading of a possible clue. While up until the first 'ending' (which is were they roll the credits and probably marks around 30% of the games content) this isn't a huge problem as there are multiple leads to investigate on any given day. If you don't get the RNG for a particular combination of elements you are likely to have another that will allow you to make progression. Later on in the game progression really slows down while you wait for the correct RNG combination which is very frustrating.
For all the above, the game was like crack to me, particularly in the early game up until the first ending. I'm glad to see someone talking about it as I think it would be a good fit for a lot of the gamers on here.
Gaashk
18hr ago
I'll tell you what the real scissor statement part of that story is - I can't possibly have been the only guy to read this guy explain how he told his girlfriend he was cold and immediately think 'cuck' can I?
I wouldn't take it that far, but do also feel that stealing a scarf because your man is cold seems more snarky than caring. Could be in a fun, flirty way, it would depend on specifics.
If it's actually cold, because it's cold out and he isn't dressed warmly enough, go into the hotel and drink a coffee with him. A scarf won't help all that much. What, the hotel happened to have one of those enormous chunky knit wool scarves on hand that's kind of a long blanket? Really? If he's not particularly cold and is just saying stuff, the way everyone in Phoenix mentions that it's hot every day, then a scarf will also not help, there's nothing to be helped. I have a lot of scarves, and do like wearing them as wraps, but no man would be willing to do anything like that unironically.
EDIT: I no longer endorse this post. USA Today and NPR for Northern, Central and Eastern Kentucky have both run stories that confirm that the Jackson, Kentucky NWS office was staffed the night of the tornado:
Fahy said Jackson workers were called in May 16 work the overnight shift to coordinate with emergency management personnel and issue warnings throughout the night. The Jackson office had a full staff that he described as an “all-hands-on-deck” situation due to the extreme storm.
“The deaths were not attributable to the staffing cuts,” he said. “Everybody was there last night. We had a full team.”
In a statement, the weather service said the Jackson office had additional staffing and support from neighboring offices through the weekend.
As USA TODAY reported before the Kentucky storms, the weather service has had to scramble to cover vital shifts. For the first time in decades, not all forecast offices have “24/7” staffing, according to the weather service union.
I still believe it is irresponsible to leave offices unstaffed, even if there is some ability to move neighboring employees around when they're expecting storms, but this is much less bad than I initially believed. I think I'm going to take a break from the Motte for a bit. I do love this community, but I have not been doing a very good job contributing to it.
On May 15th, the New York Times ran a story about how DOGE cuts had left parts of Eastern Kentucky vulnerable while it was under moderate threats for extreme weather:
Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the union that represents Weather Service employees, said the office in Jackson, Ky., was one of four that no longer had a permanent overnight forecaster after hundreds of people left the agency as a result of cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency, the initiative led by Elon Musk that is reshaping the federal bureaucracy. (emphasis mine)
This morning, May 17th, it became apparent that eastern Kentucky had been hit by an overnight tornado that killed dozens.
I was honestly speechless when I read that.
This is what London, Kentucky looks like after the tornado. To quote someone who put it much more eloquently than I can:
Of all the disasters I’ve studied, tornadoes scare me the most.
They come with little warning and can erase entire communities in minutes — even seconds.
There’s no four-day lead-up to prepare like we often have with major hurricanes, and the winds of these storms can far exceed the most violent tropical cyclones.
In those few moments before one hits, especially if you’re sleeping, you’re at the mercy of your local weather station.
If someone is watching, they can issue a warning in those critical minutes before it’s too late.
Those few minutes after an emergency alert is issued are the difference between life and death.
[...]
Tornado warnings were delayed because of reduced staff. Those critical moments — a midnight warning to your phone waking you up, giving you precious seconds to find shelter — came too late for some.
My political stance has been evolving, but I'd describe myself as a state capacity libertarian.
To me disaster preparedness and relief are obvious, bread and butter, parts of the federal government. Sure we do stupid, wasteful things like give people flood insurance that lets them build and rebuild houses in the same vulnerable spot over and over again, when we should probably just heavily incentivize them to rebuild in a less risky area. Sure, with any given disaster there's going to be criticisms about how Biden did this or Bush did that. But I've always felt mostly positive about my tax dollars that go to disaster relief and preparedness.
I've had a growing sense of unease over the last few months as I saw reports of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announcing Trump administration plans to end FEMA, and reports about National Weather Service cuts back in April. I'm gutted that the easy predictions of these moves leading to unnecessary deaths has come true.
A part of me had hoped that Trump and Musk's Department of Government Efficiency would cut a lot of genuinely unnecessary spending from the government. When it was drag shows in Ecuador, even I as a rather Trump-skeptical person could admit that even a broken clock is right twice a day. But it was also clear to me that they were cutting with a chainsaw, not a scalpel. The images of Elon waving a chainsaw at CPAC feel a lot more hollow now. The man has blood on his hands. 27 people are dead in Kentucky because DOGE and Trump thought that it was "more efficient" to just let people die, instead of keeping overnight forecasters on staff.
Back in 2020, FEMA estimated the value of a statistical life at $7,500,000. By that standard, when doing the cost-benefit analysis the government bean counters are supposed to value 27 deaths as a loss of $202.5 million. I wonder how much it costs the government to staff permanent overnight forecasters in eastern Kentucky?
Which social media do you trust, and for god's sake why?
That's not really an effective disarmament tactic for scissor statements anyway (which is another reason they're so effective), because it doesn't matter whether the story happened or not - nobody really gives a shit about that scarf or the hotel or whoever really owned the scarf, they care that there are other people talking about it who don't share their values and have the audacity to judge them despite being sick, perverted scarf stealers/opposed to manic pixie dream girls/insert-your-own-description,-I-can't-take-this-seriously.
I'll tell you what the real scissor statement part of that story is - I can't possibly have been the only guy to read this guy explain how he told his girlfriend he was cold and immediately think 'cuck' can I? Aww is the widdle man cold? Does he want some mittens for his fingies too? If it was really that cold you would only have to wait a few minutes for hypothermia to kick in, and then you'll feel warm again you bitch! It's a damn sight better than letting a woman see you being weak when you haven't even jizzed. That's the only time you should ever show a woman weakness - only after she's seen you bang can you let her see you whimper.
That's how it always starts, by the way, first they steal a scarf for you, next thing you are walking funny and telling people pegging can increase a couple's intimacy.
If it was me on an imaginary date with Agent Scarf Stealer I'd have autistically insisted on trying to get the exact scarf she left at the hotel, and thought the genius part was her suggestion that one scarf is much the same as another. I'm very used to quirky nonsense though, in my defence.
Edit: iprayiam, I should have guessed you'd tackle the real issue, high five! I swear your post wasn't there when I read this thread earlier though.
doglatine
19hr ago
But this is cheating for you, which is a little different. I can totally see the appeal of a Bonnie & Clyde romantic partnership where you places your mutual interest above other moral concerns. “Felt cute, might violate the Geneva convention later.”
FtttG
19hr ago
Whose coverage did you watch? We watched on ARD. I miss Terry Wogan. Tried Graham Norton on the BBC after Wogan died, Eurovision is gay enough without the extra help.
Just a YouTube livestream, but one of my friend's friends was this bitchy gay guy who had us falling about the place laughing with his snarky comments. It was almost like having our own personal Norton.
Greek performer appears on camera with her huge glasses
Guy: "She looks like she's dressed for the wedding of someone she doesn't like very much."
(on the Swiss singer) "She's hot by the standards of women who work in accounts receivable."
Israeli journalist appears onscreen to announce the results of the Israeli jury vote
Guy: "Who's this IDF slag?"
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19hr ago
If you're prepared to go in and steal scarves, why not steal from a self-checkout machine? The corporation is not going to miss the $20. But when everyone does it, stores close and we have to go back to cashiers rather than an efficient, human-free experience.
Why not just torrent games for free or get repacks? I'm not totally innocent on this but it's still bad to do even if I'm tempted to say 'oh well the marginal cost of distribution is zero and i probably wasn't going to buy it anyway'. When everyone does it, all we get is AAA slop catering to people too stupid to torrent.
Consequentialism should consider the long-term consequences of behaviours.
AvocadoPanic
19hr ago
It's as if the vast majority of the voters aren't interested in attractive women. The Austrian homosexual hapa won. Hazel had joke during one of the set changes about the prevalence of homosexuals at Eurovision.
Whose coverage did you watch? We watched on ARD. I miss Terry Wogan. Tried Graham Norton on the BBC after Wogan died, Eurovision is gay enough without the extra help.
My wife was surprised by the seeming overperformance of Isreal. In her experience the majority of European homosexuals are pro-Palistine.
My favorite were the Icelandic boys. I enjoyed seeing Baby Lasagna again, I still think he was robbed last year.
anti_dan
19hr ago
Before getting to the stealing, I'm more stuck on my aesthetic distaste to the vignette of a man on an early date telling the woman he's cold, and her giving him an article of clothing to comfort him (among the more feminine articles to boot). It's too perfectly set up as a subverted cliche, that I am 50-50 (edit on reflection, 70:30) that it's made up. I suspect many if not most of the people defending it are doing so on those very aesthetic grounds, and it's not remotely about agency, morals, or consequentialism. This is basically a manic pixie dream girl scene that crossed with light 'gender swapped' tittilation.
I also am struggling to get past the cold man part of the story.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
20hr ago
If you're an arthritic, 50 kg woman without a gun, you shouldn't try to enforce rules you and your friends invented the other day on a 200 kg heavyweight boxer with a 20 mm autocannon in his back pocket just because your friends also have big muscles, autocannons, bazookas and miniguns. It puts stress on your relationship and raises tensions.
It's obnoxious behaviour to go 'oh you need insurance to sail in these waters' and 'oh only we provide acceptable insurance, we'll sanction whoever provides insurance'. Sanctions are one thing, trying to mess with freedom of the seas is another, it's like a passive-aggressive blockade albeit 90% passive. This kind of behaviour is how you get your car keyed or your airspace violated.
FtttG
20hr ago
Someone who'll cheat with you will also cheat on you.
Someone who'll steal for you will also steal from you.
Stellula
20hr ago
Because the scarf wasn't stolen from me. I lost it.
If I lost something useful, I would prefer that somebody find it and uses it rather than it going to waste completely.
Here's a slight rotation of this: if I buy something online and don't end up needing it, instead of throwing it away I usually post it on a "buy nothing" group, or put it in the alley so that somebody who wants it can take it. It feels like less of a waste than if I throw it in the trash.
5434a
20hr ago
You can't make a display of enlightened magnanimity out of shitting in your own pants.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
20hr ago
Could it possibly be a misremembered version (or local variant) of Temiya, the Mute Prince? The overall story arc is there for sure, where the son pretends to be mute despite many many attempts to shock or persuade him out of it (not singing though), all in order to get out of being made king so he can do Buddha things instead. He eventually speaks after the king orders his death and he tries to fake his own death, and he successfully sheds the responsibility.
The other candidate I have for your consideration, more of a long shot but still fits the general pattern and with a sudden twist involving a chicken, is The Decapitated Chicken. A woman has 4 mute, unresponsive, almost insensate sons, who are only entertained by loud noises and bright lights, eventually neglected, and then finally a normal daughter is born who gets all the attention. Later, the sons witness a chicken beheaded and get fixated on the blood, and re-enact it by suddenly murdering the daughter, horror-style. It's not clear if this is truly a "fix" though.
Both seem like decent bets, considering how memories can be altered, misremembered, or conflated if it's been a really really long time. Or, could it have been more of a joke than a story? A children's book of some type? Dunno if I would have found it if so.
Pigeon
coo coo
20hr ago
What’s the cultural distance between Spain and Latin America compared to the USA (I assume this is where you are)? I speak both Japanese and Chinese but not Spanish (and have only ever visited the United States), so I may have a skewed view, but it seems like the cultural distance between the States and the East Asian countries is larger than the States and Spain or Latin America.
It might be worth learning the East Asian languages if you want to expose your child to a significantly different culture as part of a broad liberal-arts-ish education.
I know I used to entertain learning other languages to read their literature. Who knows, I might try to pick up another language even this late in life!
Barfknuckle
20hr ago
Is scarfgate just salty sour pusses hating on a highly agentic women? Or are there deeper issues here?
Yo I'm just gonna speak my deepest monkeybrain here and tell you that this little story about stealing a scarf is either gross or adorable depending upon how hot the girl was and what the vibe felt like. Like imagine it twice, once with like peak Wynona Ryder getting her crazy stealies on, and then once again with some ugly broad. Yeah you know what's up.
iprayiam3
20hr ago
it'd be such a pleasant surprise for a girl to take the initiative to increase my comfort level instead of penalizing me for the gaffe of bringing it up
I mean sure in theory, yes. People don’t need to stick exactingly to red pill gender roles, but this anecdotes is so on the nose as a gender bent reversal of the cliche of all cliche examples of the ‘female comfort test’ with an outcome that digs into the gender reversal (he ends up with not just a scarf, but the “nicest” scarf), it has to be made up.
The Eurovision Song Contest was held this evening, which I haven't watched in about twenty years. A friend of mine suggested that we watch it, but was unsure if she'd be able to host, as her flatmate was insistent on boycotting it in light of Israel being "allowed" to participate. In the end her flatmate was out of the house so we were able to watch it in her flat.
I'd assumed that, given the absence of her anti-Zionist flatmate, we'd be able to enjoy the Eurovision as the trashy, campy experience that was intended, without politics intruding. I was mistaken: my friend, her boyfriend and one of her friends insisted on turning off the stream during Israel's performance and made innumerable derisive comments about them during the night. I'm a coward who wants to keep the peace so I held my tongue for the most part.
Israel received modest double-digit votes from the national juries, but after the audience vote, they rocketed up to first place with an astonishing 357 votes, total. In second place was Austria with 258 jury votes, and in the end Austria clinched it. (I honestly cannot say who deserved it more as, as previously mentioned, they turned off the stream during the Israeli performance. I found the Austrian one a little annoying, and if it had been up to me, based on the performances I actually saw, I would have given it to the Germans.)
I was rather dismayed with how quickly my friend retreated into semi-ironic conspiritorialism: saying that the Eurovision would have to investigate their voting procedures next year to ensure no ballot-stuffing was taking place, or attributing Israel's massive success among the audiences as the result of concerted, strategic voting efforts by "the right". (The idea that foul play must have been involved seems to be a consensus opinion, if /r/Ireland is any indication.) The possibilities that a) normie Europeans legitimately liked Israel's performance on a musical level more than the other countries; or b) normie Europeans voted for Israel for political reasons because they're more sympathetic to the Israeli cause than the Palestinian - seem not to have occurred to her.
I am growing increasingly dismayed by the level of ambient nominally pro-Palestinian (but really anti-Israeli) sentiment in Ireland, but it's comforting to be reminded that it's quite the outlier among European countries.
Things took an even weirder turn when Armenia performed and the conversation turned to the Armenian genocide of the 1910s. My friend's Turkish boyfriend, who'd been enthusiastically participating in the Israel-bashing, suddenly became rather defensive, explaining how it wasn't a genocide but merely ethnic cleansing, and anyway forced marches are completely different from genocide, and anyway how do you even establish intent to exterminate a particular ethnic group, and it's hypocritical of European nations to accuse the Turks of genocide when they've done things that were just as bad if not worse* (it was a real mask-off, vino veritas moment, and even my friend seemed to be a bit taken aback by how worked up he got). I felt like saying - it's a bit rich of you to accuse Israel of genocide on the basis of their having killed ~110,000 Palestinians in the span of 75 years, but dismiss the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians in one year as "mere" ethnic cleansing. My girlfriend, who's nowhere near as sympathetic to the Israelis as I am, admitted that I had a point here. I hate to say it, but the "it's antisemitism" theory seems to have greater predictive power than many of its competing alternatives.
*On this point I agreed with him: the Armenian genocide is at least as reprehensible as, to pick one example, Belgian conduct in the Congo.
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
21hr ago
As @quiet_NaN said below, agency (that is, the ability to be an independent agent) is not necessarily correlated with asociality (that is, the tendency to devalue/neglect the collective good). While there's a degree of social conformity that's required to maintain the commons, a dearth of distributed agency/agentic elite causes a society to follow the path of least resistance, usually to its detriment. Some(well, most) societies are built to require less distributed agency/more social conformity (e.g. East Asia), but they tend to be outcompeted by more individualistic but still commonwealth-respecting societies (e.g. the West).
Quantumfreakonomics
21hr ago
My first thought when I saw that was, “wouldn’t the higher-agency thing be not forgetting your scarf in a hotel room in the first place?” My brain couldn’t comprehend the concept of portraying dishonesty like this as a positive attribute.
What if there was no scarf? What if the cleaning lady was already on thin ice and then had to answer for allegedly stealing a scarf?
Addendum: You never sit in the car because it’s too hot or too cold if a tire needs changing. But you also don't want to be a tough guy to the point of becoming a liability. Being prepared is a finer line, and you can definitely cross into being an overly equipped “EDC Boy Scout” dork.
A story: Late this winter, we went to a cabin with a group of friends. An admittedly complicated snowfall occurred the night before we were set to leave. A friend ended up putting his car in a ditch. Trying to be a “tough guy” (in reality, embarrassed and rushing), he refused to wear a jacket, attempting to dig out the car, hook up pull straps, and put on chains in just a t-shirt. He started shaking uncontrollably, his hands stopped working, and I had to yell at him to get back in his car to warm up. He then sat there as my wife and I did the grunt work to get his car to the highway.
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