stuckinbathroom
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User ID: 903
Mark Koran, a Republican state senator and former tax official who has worked closely on the fraud issue for nearly a decade and who I met in Saint Paul, said that millions of dollars in such proceeds were taken to East Africa in cash.
Mark Koran identifies cash being funneled to radical Islamists? Nominative determinism strikes again!
stuckinbathroom
6d ago
the ever-intensifying gender war in China.
Can you tell us more about this? Has it reached South Korean levels of intensity?
michael_jackson_popcorn.gif
stuckinbathroom
8d ago
Not quite: the claim is that in any Turing-complete language, it is possible to write a program that cannot be algorithmically proven to halt on all inputs by another program written in a Turing-complete language.
stuckinbathroom
9d ago
Yep, essentially you have to give up Turing-completeness to get provable correctness: no unbounded recursion or loops allowed. To formally verify, using a Turing-complete verification language/proof assistant, the correctness of an arbitrary program written in a (possibly different) Turing-complete language is tantamount to solving the halting problem, which famously is logically impossible.
stuckinbathroom
9d ago
mad_men_i_dont_think_about_you_at_all.jpg
stuckinbathroom
11d ago
Depending on how you define “neoliberal”, not necessarily! As always the devil is in the details—I’m sure some self-described neoliberals would advocate for a measure of protectionism in industries relevant to defense and national security, for instance—but one plausible neoliberal response to a foreign country engaging in so-called anti-competitive trade practices (e.g. dumping) would be “Keep the goods flowing; why should we say no to their foreign aid?”
stuckinbathroom
11d ago
It’s a mercantilist take; as far as I know, the Austrian school has nothing against trade deficits and indeed would support even unilateral free trade.
stuckinbathroom
11d ago
lol, the sigh was intended in resignation, something like “Indeed, it really has been around for a long time: at least 12 years! And wouldn’t you know it, things are no better than they were back then”, rather than an exasperated “lurk moar scrub”
stuckinbathroom
11d ago
sigh Scott covered it in 2013 no less
stuckinbathroom
14d ago
(dowry is a negative bride-price)
Yes and no; it is an expense paid by the bride’s family, but it’s not necessarily given to the groom. In some cultures, the wife retains ownership of her dowry upon marriage, as a form of insurance against her husband’s death, infirmity, abuse, or other inability to provide for her.
stuckinbathroom
20d ago
Indeed, particularly in the age of DoorDash and Amazon, there are always delivery people coming in and out at all hours. It’s completely trivial to tailgate into the building behind one of them.
stuckinbathroom
21d ago
Half-out-of-their-minds meth junkies committing a family annihilation crime of passion during a domestic disturbance aren’t usually that precise. 70 stab wounds a piece I would buy, but not throat-cutting.
Only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise.
stuckinbathroom
25d ago
Southerners would often argue that Southerners could be friends with individual blacks but disliked the black race, while Yankees claimed to love the black race but couldn't stand to be friends with blacks, and I think there is truth to that.
I’ve heard this phrased: “In the South, the Negro can get as close as he likes, as long as he doesn’t get too high; in the North, the Negro can get as high as he likes, as long as he doesn’t get too close”
If I understand correctly, genes are an emic unit and alleles would be the corresponding etic units (since they are the concrete, reified variants of a gene).
Thus, Church One through Church Four would appear to be different surface representations of the thene that codes for “church as a social organization”. Not sure what to call such units though.
I do like the word. Thenetic disorders. Human Thenome Project. Epithenetics. Thenetic drift. Thenetic fallacy. The possibilities are endless.
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
I can't imagine what a similarly-constructed paper from a progressive view would even look like.
The obvious direct analogue would be a similarly-irrelevant appeal to the inerrancy of $OPPRESSED_MINORITY_CULTURE, in which trans and other gender identities are always considered unconditionally heckin valid
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Eh, technically true, but Manhattan in particular was more populous and much more dense in the first half of the 20th century. Not that anyone really wants to go back to that level of housing quality, though.
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
… except that in Chesterton’s original fence analogy, the naive reformer did not know for what purpose the fence was originally built. In this case, we do know, to some extent: we in the US have a bastardized mélange of rationales with the Prussian model of education as the basal substrate, plus a healthy dose of American civic religion, daycare services for working parents, and concessions to public sector unions and the DEI commissariat on top.
There is much truth to the Big Yud quote above, about how modern schooling isn’t optimized for any of the usually-stated goals (viz. the production of manual laborers, well-informed and civic-minded voters, intelligent and conformist office drones). But this is because the system has been pulled in different and mutually-incompatible directions over the years as the fortunes of the various interest groups involved have waxed and waned.
Returning to your point: Chesterton himself was OK with fence-removal in some cases, provided that the original purpose of the fence was known, as indeed it is. And moreover, we have decades of experience now with tearing down this particular fence in gradual, incremental, localized ways (viz. homeschooling, unschooling, and certain private or charter schools), which incidentally is exactly how Chesterton would advise us to begin the process of doing away with the fence.
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Russian dominance in the space-race, I guess?
One would think the prospect of Chinese dominance in the AGI race would be the present-day equivalent, but, well, gestures broadly at everything
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
I was like, what the fuck is an izzat?
My thoughts exactly; “The fuck izzat?” if you will
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Schilling fence
I assume this was meant to be some combination of Schelling point and Chesterton’s fence; otherwise I’m not sure what the pre-Euro currency of Austria has to do with fences.
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Diversity laundering?
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
If enough employers started using the "physics degree" strategy (and were allowed to use this approach)
Why wouldn’t employers be allowed to use this approach?
If the concern is “disparate impact”, that could apply even now, for employers using “any bachelor’s degree” rather than specifically “physics degree”—though I grant that the impact gets more disparate, as it were, as the IQ filter gets stronger.
I suppose employers are caught between the Scylla of needing to hire high IQ candidates and the Charybdis of needing to keep the filter as plausibly-not-disparate-impact-causing enough to avoid the baleful Eye of Title VII
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
What do you mean, you've seen this? It's brand new!
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
I don’t deny that TPTB have policy levers to Goodhart metrics like nominal GDP—for instance the classic Keynesian “pay workers to dig ditches and then fill them up again”—but this particular one doesn’t seem especially plausible, unless the government bails out the creditors, in which case the situation you are describing is just stimulus checks with extra steps.
On some level, it must be the case that the expected present value of credit card payments (adjusted for default risk) is positive, or else credit card companies wouldn’t be able to raise money (relevant xkcd)
Now, it’s entirely possible that everyone is wrong about these expected value calculations and in fact the rate of default is (or will be) so high that the credit issuers will lose money—in other words, that we are in a consumer credit bubble. If you really think so, then post stock portfolio or gtfo. Less snarkily, what’s your explanation for why, of the big bubbles of late 20th and 21st century history, none of them were primarily about consumer credit card debt?
Incidentally, based on your reading, would you agree with the pithy summary that someone else here posted/quoted a while back: “I [Kamala] didn’t not pick Buttigieg because he’s gay—I didn’t pick him because he’s gay and we only had 107 days”
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