BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.
User ID: 628
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
Don't watch porn, don't vote green, go outside into the fresh air. Be confident.
All smart and sensible.
And above all don't believe you need to be nice and soft.
Eh, there's a lot you can get done by being nice and soft if you're good at social manipulation. I'd say from experience it's easier to leverage nice+soft into getting what you want than disagreeable+hard.
Real men stand on the far right. Real men are patriots.
And now you've completely veered off into the deep end.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
The negative long term societal impact of poor people having children
Some people here may have heard about the short story The Egg by Andy Weir. It's really brief and takes about 2 minutes to read; spoliers below so Caveat lector.
The central premise of The Egg is about a human being ("You", it's written in second person) who just died and is taken to see God. He is told that the whole universe was created specifically as a learning experience for You (who is actually a God in training) and that every single human being is infact a different incarnation of yourself. At the very end God explains to You that "Every time you hurt/helped another you were hurting/helping yourself" with the author's intended moral being something like "therefore you should always help others and be generous etc. etc.".
Naturally being a terminal contrarian I completely disagree. Being someone who wants to minimise the total amount I suffer integrated out to inifinity if I truely knew that I would live eventually every single human life the best thing to do would be to prevent those incarnations of myself most likely to produce progeny who live shitty lives from reproducing in the first place.
Sure, forcibly sterilising people would inflict suffering upon them (and therefore myself) for some small number of years before the reverse hedonic treadmill runs its course, but preventing three kids who were probably going to lead shitty lives were they to be born from existing just saved me two centuries of misery in expectation. This is a trade I'd make again and again until it got to a situation where only well off/intelligent people were allowed to have children for the next generation. By doing this I'd prevent the existance of most of the shitty human lives I'd have lived in the first place, plus the lack of deadweight from these shitty existances needing subsidy from productive humans would mean I could race full steam ahead to grow the economy/research technology without a horde of poors needing to be bribed with gibs so that they don't burn the cities down.
This course of action would basically be the fastest way to create heaven on earth, and when I got to that point I could proliferate an arbitrarily large number of top end humans living in complete bliss (eugenics from controlling who could breed basically filtered out the shitty variants long before this point). Note that the process doesn't require You to be perfectly good at choosing who to sterilize, accidentally sterilizing the wrong people has negative impacts (or even worse, not sterilizing those you should sterilize) but you still get benefits as long as you're dispropotionately sterilizing low value humans.
The story doesn't make You live out your lives in chronological order on earth so basically I could ensure >99.9999% of my time is spent living in one of these complete bliss lives only punctuated by very small amounts of time in a less nice (but still comparatively nicer than if everyone was allowed to have kids, no matter how shitty their lives would have been) existance. All in all it'd be a pretty decent ride, certainly far better than the counterfactual with no forced sterilisation.
I suspect that Weir, who describes his views as "socially liberal" wouldn't quite like this "degenerate" solution to the universe he created. Regardless it remains true that "sterilize shitty people for a better world" is just as valid a moral to take from the story as "help others and be generous".
But this is all just a short story set in a hypothetical universe that doesn't have much to do with our own. However the more I thought about my solution the more I realised it applied to our physical world too, regardless of whether or not we're all secretly one single soul sequentially reincarnating into all the human bodies. For instance right now people on the left complain about "Child Poverty" and how this is a Big Problem That Society Needs To Fix.
The left's preferred solution (like it is often elsewhere) is something like redistribution from those who earn a lot/have wealth to those that don't. This isn't the only solution though, because if e.g. people living below the poverty line all suddenly stopped having kids child poverty would hit 0% very quickly. Not only this but since poors are disproportionately likely to make bad/absent parents this would ensure the average child is more likely to be born into a family situation conducive to good childhood and less likely to lead them into becoming a burden on the state when they grow up.
Of course even suggesting that we should discourage (not even sterilize, merely discourage) poors from having kids is something that makes these very same people on the left quite angry, even though it would go some way towards solving child poverty. Plus the saved money from not needing to subsidise the poors as much could be easily diverted into investment and research, thereby improving humanity as a whole.
Equally people complain about wealth concentration amongst the rich and inequality. Once again if we had a society which encouraged the rich to have children while discouraging the poor we'd get a situation where richer people would on average have larger families and therefore when it came to time for the inheritance to be dished out the wealth of the rich would get diluted while the wealth of the poors would pass on mostly intact.
And of course if rich people had more kids on average compared to poor people we'd get the standard eugenic benefits of the next generation carrying fewer shitty traits on average than the previous one, reverse idiocracy if you will. While the effects of this would be minor on human level timescales when you zoom out to multiple centuries they add up quite quickly.
I've only talked about a few areas here but most modern day western problems can in some way be linked to poor people having kids. We'd all be a lot better off if governments around the world nudged them away from this and instead encouraged the rich to have kids instead. Of course since we live in a fallen world this is basically the opposite of current policy in the UK where if you earn too much your childcare benefits get taken away. Faceplam moment...
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
the Marubo are already grappling with the same challenges that have racked American households for years
They don't have a hope in hell, do they?
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
That's not insider trading as it's usually defined. Insider trading is more like knowing your company had a good quarter and so buying shares before publicly releasing this news.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
It certainly seems like wokeness has traveled far enough down the barber pole that my age cohort is starting to lurch rightwards
None of this implies we can let up in our fight against it. Wokeness is like kudzu, if you leave even a single vine intact it'll come back, and faster than you think.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
If you explained the crime in a few sentences to George Washington, would he say, "what? I don't even understand why that is a crime in your era." Or would he say, "Of course that is a crime."
You don't think insider trading should be considered a crime?
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
In a just world both conservatives and leftists would be forced to live each other's vision of society.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
Honestly SPX needs to take a hit to bring it back down to earth compared to the rest of the world's equity markets. US equity valuations are insane and not justifiable when comparing to the rest of the world.
Yesterday I had a special smile on my face because the US markets went down while the UK's market went up. It's a rare day when this happens but always one to be pleased about.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
Compared to the rest of the Anglosphere Americans still have it good (while simultaneously earning a lot more).
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
To make a prediction closer to home, we're now certain to cross 1000 posts on the weekly thread.
Damn the numbers have fallen. I remember times when the thread would cross 1000 comments by Tuesday morning.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
There's a >1 SD difference in shape rotation skills between the average woman and the average man. This is half as strong an effect as the male/female height difference in SD terms.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
And then the same Americans howl loudly when the EU fines American tech companies large amounts for minor mistakes (not saying the EU are justified in what they do, but sauce for the goose and all that).
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
The US would be well served by adopting the Australian method: A relatively easy points based system to get in if you're a skilled worker plus a guarantee you'll be detained offshore and never be allowed into the US ever again if you arrive illegally.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
The steelman of the Greenpeace argument would be that allowing patent-encumbered GMOs will be a foot in the door for pushing more GMOs on rural farmers which will eventually result with Monsanto owning the small farmers
Monsanto hasn't even been a thing for the last 6 years (seriously, they wound up in 2018). You'd expect the greens to have noticed by now...
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
6mo ago
And for the love of God, do NOT buy gold miners.
Second this. Gold has done very well over the last few years but gold miners are basically flat. The market doesn't expect gold miners to be able to keep a lid on their production costs in the medium term (which might tell you something about other firms).
Not having your demented mother-in-law around the house: Priceless
A simple question then: Why would you marry your wife then if you can't stand your mother in law? Sounds like the western courtship and mate selection process has some issues if mother in law problems are so common. Remember when you marry someone you're not just choosing your spouse but rather you're choosing your inlaws too. We also have lots of mother in law issues in our cultures to the point that the wife/mother in law tussle is one of the staples soap writers use for their dramas, but it's never seen as OK to throw out your elders and generally eventually people find a compromise all the parties are happy with.
Plus your children will get 25% of their DNA from your mother in law, which means they'll probably be somewhat like her. Choosing a mother in law you dislike is indirectly choosing your children to be more predisposed towards traits you dislike compared to a mother in law you like.
Also you do realise that some day you will be the parent in law getting booted out of the family home to be "cared for" by strangers, yes?
All this reminds me of the opining lines to Gertrude Stein's "The Making of Americans":
Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop!” I did not drag my father beyond this tree.”
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
6mo ago
A genuine question I have for the people who don't like immigrants here: In your ideal world what would you have the immigrants who come to the west do when they get here?
I've heard people complain about immigrants drawing welfare when they don't work; I've noted all the complaints about immigrants driving down pay and making the job market more competitive when they work normal people jobs and I've sure as hell seen all the attacks launched upon them when they come and take over the very top of society to rule the natives beneath them.
So my question very simply is: given that immigrants aren't going to stop coming any time soon, what should they be doing that will make them acceptable in your eyes?
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
6mo ago
In addition, I happen to be a pretty strong proponent of genetic engineering anyway.
I too very strongly support genetic engineering. However I expect that even if we did this the low grade whites left wouldn't be partcularly happy about the enhanced negro who is now better than them and starts taking his new rightful place in society. I expect they will still complain just as much about that state of affairs as they do about the current one (much like how they complain today about black Nigerian Elites).
And even if you raised these whites to the same level as the upgraded blacks the complaining still wouldn't stop. What were litanies against people sucking on the welfare teat will become jeremiads against the minorities driving wages down.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
6mo ago
How about stopping welfare full stop? It fixes so many things...
Hamlet Towers
Tower Hamlets, the place is called Tower Hamlets (and no it's not a complete shithole, the bourough includes Whitechapel which yes is pretty bad but also all of Canary Wharf which is the No 2. main finance center in London).
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
6mo ago
"What it would look like" in Europe would probably be the forced population swaps
These aren't going to happen and if they were going to happen it's far more likely it would be whites getting booted off to Madagascar or someplace instead of non-whites being the ones kicked out.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
6mo ago
Yes, the proponents of capitalism are completely correct here.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
6mo ago
Imagine if they added in some reverse diversity and allowed you to play as a white dude running around killing exclusively black people. The volume of seethe generated would probably be considered by engineers as a novel energy source for electricity production.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
6mo ago
but Odyssey first told you how sexist the Olympics were and then let you participate in them as a woman anyway
LMAO. Funnily enough there were Ancient Greek Panhellenic games where women could compete in their own events: the Pythian games held at Delphi two years after the Olympic games allowed women to compete in athletic (and artistic) events.
Regardless even ignoring the Pythian games and restricting to just Olympia there were the Heraean Games held every four years where women ran the footrace against each other.
A company that prided itself on historical accuracy really should have known better, espeically when historically accurate alternatives existed.
The best defense Canada has against getting annexed by the US is to import an extra 20 million South Asians (even better: an extra 40 million). The magnitude of the poison pill the US would have to swallow to get the land for itself would make even the staunchest American imperialist balk and puke.
In fact a large portion of these 40 million people will want the US to annex Canada because it means they get full access to the US jobs market!
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