BANNED USER: antagonism
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100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
Banned by: @Amadan
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
24d ago
VDV barracks
A deep, yet topical pull.
I appreciate the important addition of age as more than an additional variable, but a whole new (and indispensable) axis in the very rough model my first post attempted to sketch out.
It leads, I think, to some uncomfortable confrontations with reality in today's world. We just had an election where the sitting president knocked himself out of it by being himself at the first debate. One of the internet's most famous Guys Who Says Stuff asserts "many of the problems of Western society are caused by ... privileging the old over the young.".
The classic RETVRN concept of a patriarchy fails to reconcile the fact that, for most of human society, men reached their wise and philosophic years starting at 40 or so. Then, they were expected to move their talents to the afterlife in their 60s - and this for the luckiest!
Most of us reading this forum will probably live to see extreme scale issues of care for elderly folks in their 80s and 90s with tragic yet real cognitive decline. Obviously, we should not be deferring to their collective "wisdom" in any domain.
I don't have good answers. As much as I have emotional sympathies and inclinations towards a kind of traditionalist social redoubt, the world only moves forward and you have to live in it (but not of it) the way it is.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
25d ago
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
25d ago
I'll admit imprecision here was a mistake.
I should've said that the group organization mechanisms present in prison are what "pure" or perhaps "raw" male organizational systems look like. You are correct that the general character flaws of most prisoners are not representative of society at large.
Widening the aperture to the military, we see the patterns continue; explicit hierarchies with unambiguous leadership. Strict behavioral codes that, when transgressed, are met with physical violence or, at least, extremely high tension verbal intimidation. College fraternities reduce the propensity for physical violence (mildly) because they still exist in the context of civil society - if you beat up your Frat Bro, you're still probably getting arrested.
The point is this is how men organize themselves when female organizing principles are absent or extremely muted. I'm not an expert on how, say, the eastern Saudi tribal folks organize their extremely patriarchal societies, but I'd be willing to guess we can see some continue through lines there as well.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
25d ago
I was being deliberately hyperbolic using the word "RUBE" (hence, the capitalization).
It's not that you and people like you are stupid or being tricked, it's that you're paying the freight on those who defect socially (degenerates) and paying more than your fair share when considering that the elites shield themselves from taxes.
I should note that I am not in favor of some communist Elizabeth Warren style "wealth tax." That's confiscation by the government, clearly unconstitutional, and would also destroy markets overnight. Mostly, I'm in favor of cutting both corporate and individual income tax and making new capital and business formation easier. You say that hypothetical businesses require "seed capital [you] don't have" - yet you say you're investing in ETFs / Mutual funds (presumably). I'd love to a scenario in which you and a couple buddies, over the course of a few years, collectively save maybe some level of money and are then allowed to make a bet on a new startup or something. Right now, setting up an investment firm to do that is cost and regulatorily prohibitive if you aren't starting with at least $20 million or so (and that's a micro amount). If you're investing personally, you literally have to be rich enough to be allowed to do that (see "Accredited Investor"). This in the same country that allows any adult to literally gamble on their cellphone 24/7.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
25d ago
I appreciate the well thought through feedback. I think it adds a lot to the discussion of the topic.
But women can both love and hate their friends, bicker about them in front of some mutual acquaintances and stand up for them in front of others.
May I request you go into more detail here? A lot of men would see this kind of behavior, in a male group, as sowing dissent and/or destabilizing the group. This could prove fatal in a situation in which group cohesion is necessary (i.e. some sort of intergroup violence). Thus, "talking shit" in male groups is dealt with severely.
Why is this not the same in female groups? Genuine question, not trying to lead anywhere.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
25d ago
In my analysis, the core of the difference between male and female social status arrangement is the locus of the evaluation rubric.
For men, it's an external, verifiable, and discrete measurement - performance. Who scored the most points? Who brought in the most dollars? Who got everyone to show up for the party/vote/heist? While there is certainly haggling over who should get what percentage of "credit" for a particular success, there is still a "thing" that happened and that everyone can point.
For women, it's the constantly in flux consensus mechanism for status. You're "cool" because enough other people decided you were. Why or how did they decide that? Irrelevant they just did, and at a critical mass that those who disagree with the coolness assessment are necessary in the minority (perhaps not in number, but in social capital within the group). I think you see this in a lot of female coded activities - fashion, art, food, entertainment. Anything that is governed chiefly by the hard to define concept of "taste." There's no discrete external rubric for what makes this year's pants/tops/shoes "in" yet, somehow, everyone seems to know (or is forced to accept) what is "in." Interestingly, this creates a constantly updating mechanism wherein whatever is current in terms of taste sets up its own demise by creating the opportunity for an opposition to develop. You can't get whatever is "in" right just once, you have to update lest you fall "out."
This, to me, is why you have the infamous gender specific difference in neuroticism. Why bitches be so crazy? do women, as a group in general, exhibit higher neuroticism? It's because their constant task is to covertly poll their social groups for the days' social standings which are, in turn, based on subtle expressions of taste (fashion, style, memetic currency etc.) without explicit voicing of opinions by the group members. Male or female, if this was your life, you'd be a little stressed, no?
I'd implore anyone reading this to avoid plunging into normie-feminist rage responses. I tried to describe what I see as differences while doing my best to avoid any implicit value judgements. The female means of determining social status is critically and necessarily important to human families, communities, and societies. A world without women? The closest approximation we have to that is roughly prison. I'll take a daily "mean girls status market" over a daily "avoid random lethal violence" roulette wheel. Furthermore, I do believe women have outsized importance in building and maintaining culture. Politics flows from that, and laws from politics. Many societies have tried to sequester women away from culture and politics - universally, I would say, to their existential risk and eventual death.
But the problem of our time, I'd argue, is that the west has, for 30+ years now, actively fostered cultural developments that try to maximize female styles of behavior, communication, and social status regulation. In the past 10+ years, it has risen to the level of doing so in explicit opposition to all male styles of behavior, communication, and social status regulation. But, wait, please don't think I'm saying "What about men?!". Far from it. The insidious and tragic result of the rise of extremist feminism has been it's disastrous effects on social order as a whole and women specifically. We eat our own with the best and most earnest of intentions.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
25d ago
(tagging @jeroboam as well)
It gets even worse when we consider nerdy economist concepts like marginal utility and opportunity cost.
Those of means who contribute more to social security than they will receive from it are also not using their monthly payroll contributions to social security to invest in other areas. Likewise and conversely, those who do not contribute much to social security during their "careers" but then receive disproportionate benefit should they make it to 65+ are often - date I say - engaged in activities that may be net socially negative. This ranges from the pleasantly degenerate (drinking to excess, casual illegal gambling with friends, other high risk activities) to the actively and proudly felonious (violet semi-organize criminal activity).
We take meaningful amounts of money out of the hands of the pro-socially engaged and demonstrably more capable in capital allocation during their highest earning years in order to subsidize the poverty-lite elderly years of people who have had a rocky relationship with society and community for, perhaps, decades.
I'll admit I'm painting with broad strokes here and will further confide that I spent too much time this past weekend looking at how taxes, transfers, and social programs actually shake out in the US. I, therefore, am still riding a hell of a rage high on this particular topic.
Still, the basic (and good!) arguments against social security still fail to adequately capture just how perverse it has become. It is no longer a "help out the small amount of old folks who make it to such an advanced age" program. It's a multi-generational ponzi scheme complimented by a massive DEFECT, DEFECT, DEFECT incentivized prisoner's dilemma. Throw in the deadly sisters of housing, education, and healthcare costs and the picture gets even more grim.
The economic tragedy in America is that, today, the dutiful "middle class" career person or family who pays all of their taxes, saves responsibly but without being monkish about it, and tries to setup a self-sufficient future is actually the RUBE. The equity owning elites use the various tax loopholes to keep cash that isn't income but "dividends" and the devotees of social degeneracy simply enjoy a taxpayer subsidized orgy of irresponsibility from their earliest adult years all the way through silver years' death, if violent calamity does not land on them in the intervening decades. The government pursues monetary and fiscal policy that inflates the dollar to oblivion and takes yet more of those dwindling dollars out of the hands of the earnestly, albeit naively, pro-social.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
I'm sort of getting the feeling that it's going to get a whole lot worse before there's any hope that it'll get any better
My prediction for failure mode of us healthcare;
-
Good doctors (most, not all) become too frustrated with the insurance regime and become cash only concierge providers for the wealthy.
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The surging demand paired with vanishing supply for those who cannot afford out of pocket healthcare creates healthcare gridlock (look at the British NHS for an example of this). No one can get seen in a timely manner, the care that is provided is perfunctory, follow up visits are non-existent.
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Amateur and grey market pharmacology takes off and we see a spike in accidental overdose deaths. These stats, however, are probably laundered by calling some of them suicides, some of them related to pre-existing conditions, or even more blatant cooking of the books.
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Eventually, Federal laws do change for "low level" or "routine" medical care; You can do visit local clinics to get band-aids and aspirin and not have to get it from a doctor, but some sort of glorified EMT. This expands to cover most types of prescription drugs as well.
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Medical insurers become financially insolvent gradually as the healthy and wealthy drop out of the system. Eventually, some tech company figures out how to create non-insurance-insurance wherein they can deny you based on risk factors (like insurance used to work). The work around is that they aren't technically insurance, but function as some sort of mutual liquidity market (you're, very technically speaking, exchange mutual contracts with other individuals to help defer costs of medical care at an undetermined date in the future, the tech company in the middle just provides a digital marketplace ... something along those lines).
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All of the Americans who want health insurance have it (Obamacare: Hooray!) but all of the Americans who have health insurance cannot actually see a decent doctor in any timeperiod less than 1 - 2 years. Most simply rely on long term prescription drugs for pain management and placebo effect.
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Americans without healthcare (and without independent wealth) create this wholly new side industry of non-insurance-insurance and, in so doing, create new demand for medical care provided by doctors, perhaps, not from this country originally - or ever (i.e. medical tourism partially or fully covered by the not-insurance-insurance).
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People (not yet doctors) see that they can pursue medical careers without going to the traditional medical schools or passing boards. A whole new shadow-doctor industry staffs up. After 5 - 10 years of this group demonstrating not only equal, but superior health outcomes, the traditional Medical School cartel is finally broken up.
I think this takes about 20 years, starting roughly the time the Social Security Trust becomes insolvent.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
but most florists are the female version of model train enthusiasts,
Excellent analogy. And fucking scary. I once met an actual "foamer" and my spidey sense went off like an air raid siren.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
- Politicians and "domain experts" craft exams for all sorts of things
- People take this exams, often with more "domain experts" arriving to act as add-on guidance.
- Simulators, complex liability forms, probably several legal loopholes about informed consent and procedural integrity.
At this point, we're just living in a "light all of the tax dollars on fire" fantasy land with a ballooning bureaucracy to boot (who else administers all of these very involved exams).
I can't think of a worse hell for personal liberty.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
Well sure if you already assume the sociopathy.
I do.
It would be like saying “I think Person X is a sociopath. He did something that generally would not be sociopathic but because I think X is a sociopath he must be doing it to hide his sociopathy.”
This is a good point. It made me think of my own post on conspiratorial thinking and I think that I might be a victim of that in this Altman case. I'll reconsider.
Rejoice, ye mods! The spirit of the Motte lives.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
Yes!
Although there is still a body of evidence before the kid that would point in that direction.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
Who would approve the questions and composition of your "Rational Adult" exam? State legislatures? The Federal government?
I'd like to request a straightforward answers. Are you saying that bureaucrats and/or elected politicians will be granted authority to prepare an exam that deems be sufficiently "rational"?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
There is a categorical difference between an employer requesting you put in ear phones or get a health check up (both of which you can refuse) and agreeing upon incubating a human inside of you for nine months in order to receive payment. If you're saying "No, it's just a difference in degree" then we have an intractable disagreement.
Regarding job quality and relative value, my response was when you asserted "we all pay an emotional toll" - which I think is incorrect. Some people do, absolutely. All of us do not.
I can't quite follow your thread on McDonalds PhDs etc. It seems to me your argument is roughly "find the best mix of compensation / perceived labor / emotional stress" and go from there. Valid enough, but I'd argue there are jobs that may in fact be pay well, be low in labor requirements, and have limited emotional stress that you shouldn't take - drug dealer, pornstar etc. (although, I'd also argue that those "jobs" specifically have high emotional stress - those that do not feel emotional stress in those "jobs" are perhaps demonstrating dissociative or anti-social mental states)
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
How so?
To be explicit; I think it is probably (further) evidence he is a sociopath who will use people and deceive people to further his own ambitions.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
The conservative project relies on an idyllic view of the past and of conservative families
Well, no. I don't know what you mean by "conservative project" but conservatives don't simply register the past as "idyllic" as a rule. There's plenty of bad stuff in there! Communism, Nazism, the origin point of modern conservatism was Burke's response to the French Revolution.
The point is that conservatives point to pro-social behaviors, practices, and traditions that over hundreds and thousands of years have repeatedly shown themselves to be unquestionably beneficial to humanity and society. These are the very concepts, ideas, and traditions we seek to conserve. We don't believe in radical and accelerated experimentation with these. Within living memory, we went from "boys shouldn't hit girls" to arguing that more boys should be allowed to pummel girls for money.
My grandparents ‘s generation were all very religious, and so it was common for spouses to hate each other all their life.
Then I'd argue they weren't people of genuine faith, but scrupulous virtue signalers who used organized religious practices - and voiced adherence of them - to assuage their guilt for being shitbags. This is extremely common in evangelical circles and in the online RadTrad and OrthoBro spaces. It is astonishing how people who truly, deeply live the principles of their faith come across as intensely normal, pleasant, and happy people.
‘all mothers love their children’
This is not a core conservative claim unless you add in "should" between "mothers" and "love"
‘all men feel the need to protect women and children’
See above.
‘all people have a god-shaped hole’
Ah, well, credit where it is due. I think this is probably a core conservative claim and one of the big wedges between conservatives and "libertarians" (although, personally, I find the term "libertarian" to be close to meaningless.) For instance, one can't help but smirk at the fact that the "Rational" community has re-invented the concept of Satan as Moloch....when Moloch is literally a Biblical demon.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
We all sell our bodies and limited time under the sun to make ends meet.
I've never had an employer or customer put something inside me for even a moment, let alone nine months.
And we all pay an emotional toll for it, unless you're lucky enough to have a job that you'd do for free.
I wouldn't do my current job for free. But I also enjoy talking about it - and find no shame it doing so - with my friends, family, and other acquaintances. Sometimes I have stressful days, but I don't end every day or week thinking, "A what a fucking emotional toll I had to pay!" In fact, I'm quite excited about my job because it lets me do all these other cool things with friends and families - and I feel like I really am creating some tangible value on a day to day basis.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
If I'm allowed to daydream, everyone old enough to vote takes a Rational Adult exam, potentially one that's subdivided into multiple ascending tiers of difficulty. The more you pass, the more you are allowed to do, because the presumption is that you've proven yourself intelligent enough to be responsible for yourself. For an existence proof, look at driving tests.
Maybe have people pay for bonds. Maybe allow insurance companies to charge them more for risky behavior. Tax negative external ties and strongly punish anything that spills out of personal bounds.
So, you don't like "blanket illegality" for heroin, but you are totally ok with a kind of authoritarian state evaluation (with follow on coerced financial behavior) of your intelligence, psychology, and ability for self-determination.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
I disagree.
The threads around the OpenAI coup attempt highlighted multiple inside sources who have stated that Altman is a unique kind of sociopath. He's a non-technical non-founder. He is the networker's networker.
Him having a child, unfortunately, points to one of two pretty extreme scenarios; either he's in the midst of a pretty big change of heart about Techno-post-humanity and does believe in the future in a "people should have kids an invest in them" sort of way. Or...
He's had a surrogate child (who he can easily support as a billionaire) as a magic talisman to deflect precisely these "you don't care about a human future" attacks. "Sure I do!" Sam says, "Look at this human infant that I now pay for! Is this not our culturally agreed upon signal indicating my allegiance to the future of humans?"
Ask yourself if a billionaire sociopath is capable of this.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
Serious question; could I write a surrogacy-style contract for a woman I am married to so that, when we have a child, she gives up all maternal rights to that child?
If I could find a woman willing to sign such a contract - even though we are married - could any state conceivably allow such a contract to stand?
If the answer to both of these questions is not "yes", then I cannot see how all surrogate mothers do not still possess some sort of maternal benefits claim over their surrogate children, despite any contracts signed.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
Where this gets even more hilarious is when a WM-WF sniffs around the WMAF couple to determine they're probably kinksters, invites them (the WMAF) to some sort of sex party - and then horribly out-freaks the WMAFs.
The two dudes have to join different run clubs. Sad.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
All of the FFANGS discovered that the top performers from Land Grant Flagship universities were nearly as elite as CalTech/MIT years ago. In fact, one of the draws for FAANG was that the NAME on your alma mater didn't matter as much - what counted was work product like a GitHub portfolio, or performance in some of the CS / Cyber competitions etc.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
So, I'm not talking about earmark at all. Try to be less stupid.
Here's a CRS report on NIH funding for instance
To the basically literate eye, one would find a table with the following budget authorities:
Institutes/Centers
Cancer Institute (NCI) Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) Dental/Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) Diabetes/Digestive/Kidney (NIDDK) Neurological Disorders/Stroke (NINDS) Allergy/Infectious Diseases (NIAID) General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) Child Health/Human Development (NICHD) National Eye Institute (NEI) Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)
Those aren't the only ones. There are more, but it's easy enough to understand the breakdown.
Moving money from NCI to NIGMS, for instance, would require congressional approval. How money within NIGMS is spent is more discretionary, sure. But your contention is either a deliberate misunderstanding of my original outline of the problem, or a weird semantic gotcha. Either way, it betrays a profound level of ignorance (intentional or otherwise) of how Congressional appropriations work. But I repeat myself. Your use of the term "earmark" in a wildly inappropriate manner betrays you.
The result of this is grant applications for this money have to include some section about how their research is related to study of cancer, and this is enough for it to qualify.
Fraud is generally not covered by Congressional appropriations.
I appreciate the effort in attempting to try "make the government numbers work." Spoiler alert: they seldom do.
Welfare programs that try to hypertarget one subdomain of life are hopelessly naive because they fail to accurately model individual financial realities as what they are - a complex system. As an analogy, it's like looking at an estuary in Mississippi that has run dry and saying "I'll solve this! By dumping this one bucket of water into the Mississippi river. In Minnesota"
Food stamps are only a part of a household's budget - yes, even for food. And it's not as if these kind of households are carefully categorizing different budget allocations. It's much more of an ad hoc "use whatever you pull out of the drawer" situation. In my experience, a poorer couple with or without kids has an income that's a mix of legal and grey market. One or other of the couple has a totally "straight" job with W-2 income or, at last, 1099 income that's being accurately reported. The other picks up a lot of cash odd jobs and semi-work and/or cash-tip heavy jobs. Sliding down the scale, you have strippers and onlyfans (I'm not really joking about this) and light "community" drug dealing.
The straight job is used on paper for a lot of these benefits programs and for apartment rental needs. The cash is used to finance a lot of the "operations" of the household - food, car and gas, clothing purchases. Savings aren't non-existent per se, but "savings" as a concept is just different. When you have leftovers from dinner, do you consider that "food savings?" No, that's just some extra that didnt' get consumed today but probably will in the next 1 - 3 days.
So SNAP and WIC are just other handfuls of money (albeit arbitrarily limited to grocery stores). They aren't conceived of or employed as the cornerstone of a family diet, or even supplement diet enhancement.
Beyond the raw numbers, this is the larger failing of government "assistance" programs. They are all built and deployed with these actuarial and academic economic concepts of complex systems of behavior. "Of course these folks will recognize the marginal benefit of this proportional 8.7% increase to their income for primary goods!" Not only is this elitist, it's stupid (a frequent pairing). The endemic illness in poverty is the mindset that sprouts within in [^1].
And this "mindset" argument is where progressive and liberal policy thinking really goes off the rails. "They need help! counseling! therapy! They've never been told how to make a budget etc. etc." You can see the surface level attraction here. People love to feel like they're doing something in the face of a problem wildly out of their control (hashtag Ukraine Flag). But run the thought experiment out; anybody who's sitting around going "Gee, I really wish there was a better way to organize my money so that I could maintain some consistency month to month" is miles ahead of the median reality - "I want food now. Food time!" Impulse control and (slightly) delayed gratification are things typically developed in later childhood and refined during adolescence. Yet the very people to whom we send SNAP and WIC "benefits" are those who fall on the sad end of the distribution of these traits!
Government cannot (and absolutely should not) be in the business of trying to re-shape an individual's character. State mandated virtue ethics? No, Thank you. This is a duty that falls to families and local communities. And, therein, we get to one of the stickier realities of poverty - it has areas of hyper concentration. Almost as if some folks revel in it. The very communities that most need to shape the character of their children are those most suffering from long term degeneracy in family formation, social and civic engagement, and long term consistent employment.
But here's $9.50 / day for Dr. Pepper and Hungry Man.
[1]: To some extent, it never totally exits a person. My father, now a boomer-multi-millionaire, stashes large boxes of raisins in odd spots around his house because he remembers what hunger felt like. It's a benign enough eccentricity we mostly joke about it, but it's plainly unnecessary - I've seen him order uber eats when he doesn't feel like cooking. This has precisely zero percent impact on his retirement budget and future year allocations.
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