domain:youtube.com
I expect, for example, if you put a bunch of Iowans in Gaza and Nebraskans in West Bank, both would swiftly approach or exceed Israel in GDP/Capita.
Why? What makes you think they'll exceed Israel?
Do you think the ultra Orthodox are dragging the gang down?
I was a den leader through cub scouts. The day we did Totin' Chip, the first boy showed up and I set him at the dining room table with my own boy, and then walked into the kitchen to finish gathering supplies. When I came back, not even 20 seconds later, the both of them were bleeding. It was one of those "I'm not even mad, that's almost impressive" moments.
But yeah, I get that this is likely a situation where my gut confidence is ignorance and arrogance. And yet...
Just like last year, I will point out that the server costs continue to be borne by about 25 patrons, making us the Internet's leading (possibly only?) independent user-funded (ad-free!) open political speech forum.
Petiton to pimp up Quincy, change the caption to "bitch better have my money", and equip him with that patreon link.
I think your high school physics class left out some important details about quantum mechanics. The point of the two slit experiment is that you're not just doing it with solid particles, like water... that would be a classical wave. It also works with photons, which have no mass and can travel through a vacuum like a bullet. It even works with just one photon at a time. You can see them arrive at the target with a detector, individually, and if you set it up right they'll still follow the same interference pattern of a wave, even though there's nothing for them to "wave" through. The famous Michelson-Morely experiment proved that there's no medium to carry light. It's a strange result that really does require quantum physics to explain- you can't explain it with just classical physics.
When you say:
We just can’t observe the operating variables so it only "looks" really mysterious
That's a very old argument, but this point pretty much disproven unless you allow for some even stranger results (like waves travelling backwards in time levels of weird). People have been trying to knock down the standard model of QM for a long time now, but it just keeps giving correct results... at this point you kinda have to accept that it has some truth to it, even if the math looks odd.
I do agree that there's a lot of cranks and grifters using the word "quantum" to sell nonsense, and that's really a problem. It's unfortunate that Penrose (who really is a respected scientist) gave them cover by writing a book that seems to agree with their woo. On the plus side, his book forces you to wade through like 400 pages of dense math about regular physics before it gets to the woo stuff, so I think most cranks wouldn't make it that far. He's also upfront that he's just offering some speculation about consciousness, not any sort of proof.
He paired up with a professional neuroscientist to develop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction. It's still speculative, but it's a lot more detailed than just "hey dude whatever the brain is, like, quantum..." They've done recent experiments showing there really are some strange effects going on in the brain in ways that you'd normally see in quantum mechanics, not classical. EG absorbing light more slowly than would normally be possible, and than re-emitting it in a higher intensity than normal.
Many people think that a room cannot count as a bedroom if it does not have a closet. However, no such provision actually is contained in building codes.
According to the Architectural Graphic Standards for Residential Construction, the typical closet is 8 ft × 2 ft (2.4 m × 0.6 m) for an adult or 5 ft × 2 ft (2.4 m × 0.6 m) for a child, with 14-inch (36-cm) shelves affixed to the rear wall.
Do you like closets? Or do you prefer movable storage solutions, such as wardrobes and shelving units?
Would you ever consider living in a house that has no closets?
But they also 'knew' that people aren't the kind of stuff that can fly.
"They didn't ACTUALLY transcend nature so it wasn't real vindication of hubris" looks like moving the goalposts to me.
Transhumanist thought, as I see it, lacks the inherent reverence that the religious mindset comes packaged with. (Yes there are Friendly AI worshippers and Roko's Basilisk doomers, but those are not the inherent parts of transhumanist thought.) In the end religion is not about entering Heaven or Hell, it's about using the promises of those states as a tool for society-building. I do not think transhumanism is about society-building first. I think transhumanism is about entering Heaven first (or Hell, according to doomers).
Happy birthday to the Motte! If nothing else, it is a good time to remind myself that I am bad at predictions and should never play the prediction markets, because I didn't think we'd last this long. But here were are today, entering year four!
Just like last year, I will point out that the server costs continue to be borne by about 25 patrons, making us the Internet's leading (possibly only?) independent user-funded (ad-free!) open political speech forum.
As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.
(Proverbs 27:17)
A classic, to my mind. Honestly it's a rare case of the movie being even better than the source material, and the source material isn't bad! Sadly, the sequel didn't really do it for me, and it's a high water mark for Chloe Grace Moretz on film (though she has done some solid voice work since).
I was reading through some of The Dread Jim's archives, and I saw that he recommended a film called Kick-Ass. So I took a look, and... where has this movie been all my life?
Everything is great. The writing is great. The action is great. The music is great. This is the best Hollywood action movie I have seen since The Matrix.
The film is bold and unapologetic, working hard to earn its R rating; characters get shot, stabbed, crushed, and burned. The dialogue pulls no punches, mixing wit and profanity without ever coming across as overly edgy or performative.
My new waifu, Hit-Girl, is easily the best character in the movie; watching her mow down a hallway full of mooks to the tune of "Bad Reputation" is a delight (and that's after she infiltrates the bad guy's base by dressing up like a loli schoolgirl; I had not realized that Americans could be this cultured!)
The only problem is that the MC, Kick-Ass, is not nearly as awesome as Hit-Girl and Big Daddy, but that's alright; he can be the Ishmael to the latter's Ahab. And, unlike so many spineless MCs, he continually grows as a character; by the end of the film, he has gradudated from using a "gay looking taser", as Hit-Girl rightly calls it, to dual-wielding miniguns while flying on a jetpack.
I just don't understand why Roger Ebert didn't like it.
Interesting. I really want to argue with your points, but since I don’t have any experience doing this (not in the US), I’ll cede the field.
Yeah, possibly the biggest barrier is the need for some seed capital and the willingness to take some counterparty risk on it. The guy seemed like he was juggling/transferring thousands of dollars per day to take advantage of the credit card bonuses and the cheap tokens. You’d probably need like 20-50k starting capital you’re ready to lose (although I think the risk is not that big), and, like you say, a considerable time investment, before you can earn his full one hour a day salary.
Anyway, if it's a hassle, or less lucrative than advertised, it's probably better to do something less zero sum.
Might have a Muslim father but still have been raised as at least a nominal Christian. It happens in the Balkans, Zlatan Ibrahimovic was raised as a nominal Catholic despite having "Ibrahim" in last name.
Ali is also a name in various non-Islamic cultures, generally short for Alexander.
-
While searching a drug dealer's house in accordance with a search warrant, police officers find the suspect's cell phone lying face up in his bedroom. The phone lights up by itself, displaying a text message from "Shana" in plain view of the officers. The officers know from their prior investigation that a person named Shana has been working with the suspect in his drug dealing, so they take a photograph of the text message and use it as the basis of a new warrant for a search of the phone.
-
At trial, the defendant moves to suppress as the fruit of an illegal search all evidence obtained from the phone. He argues: The last notification received by the phone occurred six hours before the officers searched the house. Therefore, the phone cannot have "lit up by itself" while the officers were there. In reality, the officers must have activated the phone's screen themselves in an illegal warrantless search and then lied on the application for the second warrant. The trial judge agrees with the defendant's reasoning and suppresses the evidence obtained from the phone. The appeals panel affirms.
Note:
-
There's a bunch of other evidence on which the defendant definitely still will be convicted of drug dealing.
-
The author of the appeals panel's opinion autistically changed nearly every quoted instance of "cell phone" to "cell[ular tele]phone".
-
A man is in jail, with pending criminal charges for abusing his romantic partner. In January 2024, the woman additionally requests a protection-from-abuse order, which is granted.
-
In May 2024, the man is charged with criminal contempt for having contacted or attempted to contact the woman from jail 343 times in 24 days. In June, he is charged with another fifty instances of the same wrongdoing, circumventing the jail's efforts to prevent him from doing so. In August, he is charged with eight more instances.
-
The trial judge finds the man guilty of all 401 counts of criminal contempt. Each count carries a jail term of two days (with the possibility of parole after one day) and a fine of one dollar, for a total of 802 days and 401 dollars. The appeals panel affirms.
Hmm. Alright. Thanks for replying.
Maybe that's the issue. A 12 year old girl can feign vulnerability and get in close for knifework.
But my mental model of a median 12 year old says I'd be more likely to accidentally hurt her trying to disarm her than to be seriously injured in the process.
You see, she doesn't even have to feign vulnerability, the biggest danger to you is your own desire to minimize the amount of violence. It's the American cop problem in reverse.
If you memorize the rule that you don't go for the weapon even if your opponent is a child, then defeating a knife-wielding 12-year-old girl in a fight is easy. Trip her or knock her down.
Nah, way before that there was Fallon Fox, an actual transgender, rather than male with DSD like Khalif, literally cracking an opponents skull.
True. I suspect it's because MMA is a comparatively niche sport compared to the Olympics, female MMA even more so. A cursory Google suggests that as many as 5 billion people watched at least some of the 2024 Olympics: if even 1% of those watched the Khelif vs. Carini match, that's 50 million people around the world watching a presumably male person punching a female. I'd surprised if as many as 10 million people watched the Fox vs. Brents match.
Imane Khelif, however, seemed to have really redpilled a lot of people. The sight of an obviously male person punching a female person and being rewarded for doing so triggers an intense emotional reaction which probably has a long standing evolutionary basis.
Nah, way before that there was Fallon Fox, an actual transgender, rather than male with DSD like Khalif, literally cracking an opponents skull.
You're not going to find a neat explanation, why this incident and not another. They just ran out of mana.
If extremely illiberal Muslims are supposed to be in our ingroup
That's not what western progressive leftists believe, though. To them, the Muslims aren't actually illiberal themselves but simply conditioned to illiberal habits by the illiberal societies that oppressed them, and having escaped to the liberal West, they are sure to adopt liberal norms if not swiftly then at least certainly over enough time (and any failure to do so is because our own Western societies have too much residual illiberalism).
The temporarily embarassed liberal muslim is supposed to be our ingroup.
who isn't?
The Nazis.
Obviously.
(Where "The Nazis" is anyone who actively rejects the leftist agenda.)
Let's be frank here - Lola and Ruby sound like straight-up hooker names.
I think this is addressed in the OP. The absurd beliefs of today (there is no difference in peak athletic performance between males and females, and all observable differences are the product of socialisation) are an overcorrection to the absurd beliefs of yesterday (men are physically superior to women on every axis, and women are so physically weak that they cannot even safely compete in long-distance running events). We're now belatedly arriving at a Hegelian synthesis, in which we acknowledge that men are stronger and faster than women for reasons that have nothing to do with socialisation, while still recognising that women can be plenty strong and fast on their own terms. While "the establishment" was once pushing the "men and women are the same" angle and are now pushing the Hegelian synthesis, the use of the collective noun disguises what a hard-fought battle it was to get them to sit up and take notice. Gender-critical activists spent innumerable thankless years trying to draw attention to the higher rate of injury when male athletes were permitted to compete in female sporting events, and were rewarded for it by being harassed, doxxed and called bigoted and even racist (?). It's only very recently that the Hegelian synthesis has undergone a respectability cascade and the establishment is starting to recognise just how absurd the "men and women are the same" framework is. It'd be curious to see what the catalyst was - I think Lia Thomas started to make a lot of people sit up and take notice, but "swimming speed" is too abstract a metric for a lot of people to care about. Imane Khelif, however, seemed to have really redpilled a lot of people. The sight of an obviously male person punching a female person and being rewarded for doing so triggers an intense emotional reaction which probably has a long standing evolutionary basis.
But then why is his name Ali? The world makes no sense.
Somewhere in between the progressive girlboss stereotype and the evopsych illustration described by OP there's a reasonable middle place in which women do fulfill their biological role and still live respectable lives in which they make their own decisions. I think there's quite a few modern women who do inhabit that place, though they are doubtless under much pressure to go elsewhere. Historically I think we've been to that middle place sometime in the latter half of the 20th century...but then again, by that time there was also significant movement to the girlboss place. So maybe western society was closer in earlier times. Early 20th century maybe?
Idle musings. Anyways. Do you disagree with any specific points of OPs reasoning, or do you just find the depiction of women distasteful?
Where is the muslim info coming from? In the first picture here he has a big cross as a tattoo. Gangster or not, a muslim wouldn’t have that:
https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/15276040/man-behind-dundee-knife-video-gypsy-gangster/
I don't think she's commenting on some averaged measure of QoL, or at least it's not the true substrate of her objection.
Throughout this post and the last, you've described the increased evolutionary pressure males have gone through to secure mates, in the process honing their intellects, physical skills, and cooperative acumen. Meanwhile, the females' dependence on the males has given them little incentive to develop their physical or mental constitutions, and what pressures they are subjected to is directed towards making them even more pathetic (to use your term) in a zero-sum struggle for male providence. From the picture you're painting, it's not hard to conclude that the masculine condition is fundamentally nobler, closer to the Imago Dei, than the feminine condition. Like with how you describe women's evolutionarily adaptive tendency to embrace their conquerors, the thought of such perfidy being engrained into the female psyche naturally lowers one's perception of them as a group and might justifiably invoke self-loathing of the type exhibited above.
Actually, this reminds me of something. I'm working on (for a very loose definition of "working") a post detailing my thoughts on the psychosocial consequences of HBD on the members of genetically disadvantaged races (spoiler: pretty devastating), and why the usual refrain of "you're [one of the good ones], why do you care?" is utterly ignorant. Your use of the terms "genetically inferior/superior" suggests that your thoughts on this matter might be more similar to mine than the median Mottizen, so I think you're better primed than most to empathize with HereAndGone's lament.
In all my years on themotte, the most valuable lesson I've learned is that checking your interlocutor's sources is a superpower. Nobody else will do it, and there's a fair chance he hasn't.
This was my point about the lack of a premium for eastbound supersonic flights (Because of time zones, eastbound flights are usually night flights and westbounds are day flights), which led to @_anon's most excellent suggestion of flying the Overture on a westbound round-the-world route.
More options
Context Copy link