ExercisesInFutility
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User ID: 1374
ExercisesInFutility
2yr ago
There are only two rules:
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Be attractive.
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Don't be unattractive.
ExercisesInFutility
2yr ago
The reason why places like Goose Island or Elysian agree to be purchased by AB-Inbev is usually so they don't have to brew their most popular beers
The reason people sell their companies to multinational conglomerates is money, any other reason is a post-hoc justification to save face.
ExercisesInFutility
2yr ago
"The ironclad rule is that there is always going to be a cost." I'd have ended the sentence there. TANSTAAFL.
ExercisesInFutility
2yr ago
I think you're spot on, and it's not cynical at all. Most people do in fact just want to grill.
ExercisesInFutility
2yr ago
From an engineering perspective, this isn't viable without a gun or gun surrogate mounted on the drone. Piercing a car tire is difficult; it requires a lot of force. A multi-rotor drone simply isn't able to generate enough horizontal force to do it with just the use of it's propellers.
ExercisesInFutility
2yr ago
I think that people feel poor because they have a ton of exposure to people more rich than them. Status is always relative, and the advent of social media (and really modern media in general) has made the wealth and lifestyles of the very rich extremely legible to the middle class. It's that differential that drives people "feeling poor", imo.
ExercisesInFutility
2yr ago
The idea that protests/riots are correlated with the police violence rate any more than very tenuously is, imo, obviously untrue. Protests/riots are a result of media coverage, not policing.
ExercisesInFutility
2yr ago
Definitely yes, but it needs to be strenuous exercise. Half-assing it doesn't get the good brain chemicals flowing for me.
ExercisesInFutility
2yr ago
I personally know several people who have injured themselves at a "can't lift for 2-3 weeks" level squatting less than 250 lbs. I don't know what to tell you, there isn't some threshold under which it's impossible to hurt yourself.
ExercisesInFutility
2yr ago
In The Bell Curve, which I think can safely be called one of the seminal works in HBD discourse, Charles Murray states that evidence shows intelligence is between 40-80% heritable, and he puts his personal estimation in the middle at 60%. HBD as usually presented does not require that heritability be the dominant factor in determining intelligence, just a major component. If it's 40% heritable, that still has significant explanatory power.
ExercisesInFutility
2yr ago
All squats are heavy when you're weak.
ExercisesInFutility
2yr ago
You're not likely to hurt yourself doing squats.
This is very, very much not true. Bad form in heavy squats will print you a one-way ticket to pain city real quick.
ExercisesInFutility
2yr ago
I don't think I could answer better than naraburns' (not sure how to ping users on the new site) post here:
Say that HBD beliefs about human intelligence are more or less accurate; it's genetic, it's heritable, and you can build a pretty accurate ethnic hierarchy of average IQ.
Okay. My comments in what follows will take this stipulation seriously, so please bear that in mind before forming opinions on what it is that I actually believe.
My question always is, OK, what comes next? Do we impart that hierarchy explicitly into our laws and economies and societies? Are we as a society able to keep hold of the notion that all humans deserve dignity and respect? Does society become more racially stratified than it is now? My thoughts are, we're already not that great at this whole racial harmony thing; introducing a scientifically-objective caste system into the mix will not help things.
The most important thing that comes next is, we stop wasting money trying to "uplift" people through social welfare programs.
The fact that this is totally distinct from e.g. arguing that someone doesn't deserve dignity or respect, is a point that seems to be completely lost on the critics of HBD folks like Charles Murray. But here is how the received welfare narrative functions on the Left:
If you have a shitty life, it's because someone fucked you. If nobody fucked you, personally, then their ancestors fucked your ancestors. Nobody's life is irredeemably shitty, it's just that the patriarchy or the colonizers or the 1% would rather fuck us all than share their boundless wealth and power actually improving the human condition. And if we just give people with shitty lives enough free housing, nutrition, education, and income, then we'll break the cycle of poverty, we'll smash the school-prison-pipeline, we'll wreck the pattern of abuse, we'll repair the damage of slavery, whatever historical thing it is that is to blame for your shitty life, we can fix it, and then we'll all start from a "level playing field" and everything that happens after that will be legitimate and just.
This narrative is entrenched in extant justifications for social welfare programs. Sandra Day O'Connor once voted in approval of Affirmative Action on grounds that after 40 or 50 years, it would be unconstitutional again because once a generation of fair racial or gender representation was forced into existence, this would sufficiently address the wrongs of the past and future generations would have proportional representation emerge organically. The whole premise of slavery reparations is "bad stuff continues to plague black communities because of the legacy of slavery, reparations will put an end to that."
If you believe in HBD, then you know why Sandra Day O'Connor was wrong. There is no more affirmative action for women in law schools or medical schools, because once they were told that they were allowed to do these things, women did them. But women were also told they were allowed to do particle physics and philosophy and drive garbage trucks and become plumbers, but for some reason women didn't choose to do those things as often as men did. And affirmative action for racial minorities doesn't seem to have actually solved anything; in many cases, things were made worse, as universities and businesses hired token minorities who failed to succeed because they were not equipped to succeed in the first place. Reparations won't stop bad things from happening in black communities, because black communities will still be filled with young men who murder each other and catch others in the crossfire, and slavery will still have happened, and giving them extra money won't change any of the things that actually matter.
So if you are building enormous social welfare and education programs on premises like "everyone can succeed," "all kids deserve to go to college," "nobody is born stupid," then you are lighting piles of money on fire. It's not a problem of dignity; it is a problem of having false beliefs and acting on them in ways that never deliver the promised utopia and then refusing to recognize that your beliefs about race are destroying resources that could be used to actually make things better, if only they were directed to projects that could possibly succeed.
Notice that we could totally say, "people of X race have lower IQs on the whole, so it shouldn't surprise us if they don't earn a lot of PhDs," and still accept members of that race into PhD programs when they show themselves to be a statistical outlier. But when that person says "I would like for this profession to be less Asian/Jewish/white/whatever," our answer should not be to, by hook or by crook, make the place less Asian/Jewish/white/whatever, our answer should be that, until we build some IQ-boosting gene therapy, they are just going to have to make their peace with being an outlier.
If you combine this reasoning with e.g. Bryan Caplan's Against Education, you might notice that there's a lot of money being poured into inner-city schools to try to lift them above miserable failure, and it doesn't work. The Obama administration demonstrated this extremely well by pouring billions of dollars into "fixing" failing schools, with no substantial impact. You can't pay teachers more to fix kids who are constitutionally incapable of learning algebra. No amount of money will give them cognitive capacities they lack at a genetic level. Frankly, it's cruel to try.
And you can't even fix the problem by, say, liquidating social welfare and issuing cash payments. But maybe we should do that anyway; once we've accepted that some people are going to have shitty lives, not because someone fucked them, but because they are genetically disposed to have shitty lives, we can worry a lot less about fixing everyone's shitty life. Better yet, this may actually improve people's lives, in those cases where the real problem is a poverty trap, or where the solutions they need are discoverable by individuals outside the scope of regimented bureaucratic "solutions."
The main reason we don't go this route, I suspect, is because it shatters the illusion of government as solution-maker. If the nanny-state can't actually solve our problems, then why would anyone support having a nanny-state? Of course it is transparently obvious already that the nanny-state can't actually solve all our problems, but if you entertain false beliefs that everyone could be an upper-middle-class professional if only they were given the right handouts, then you may refuse to notice that the nanny-state can't actually solve all our problems. Or you may even admit that the nanny-state can't solve all our problems, but insist counterfactually that it can at least solve these particular problems.
This, as I understand it, is kind of Charles Murray's whole shtick. He sees that first-world nations are sorting people into IQ clusters before they have a chance to form long-term reproductive relationships, and he sees why that is bad for populations over time. He sees first-world nations trying to fix problems ostensibly caused by "historical injustice" rather than by genetic disparity, and he identifies why that's not going work. And yet most people I meet who even know Murray's name just have him pattern-matched as "that dude who falsely believes that black people are inherently stupid." Not only do these people have a false belief about Charles Murray, it is a false belief that protects their other false beliefs.
So when you suggest that really understanding the truth of HBD is just an intellectual dead-end where certain people get to feel smug and other people have to feel sad and nothing more can be said, all I can say is that you are operating from a stereotype of HBD, one that has been primarily crafted to preserve a politics (egalitarian leftism broadly, but certainly SocJus leftism) that is empirically untenable. You're right that, humans being humans, some people who learn the facts about disparate racial IQs draw bad inferences from that data and become racists in various horrible ways. But far more harm is already being done by the lies that we emerge from the womb as mental equals, and that such suffering as persists among us can be done away with if only we can implement the right pattern of resource redistribution.
In short, if HBD is true, then the premises of distributive egalitarianism are false. That's a very, very important consequence, far more important than any worries you might have about the way people are made to feel by hearing the truth.
ExercisesInFutility
2yr ago
Sexy and adult: John Ringo's "Ghost" series. Full over the top 80's action movie stylings. Yes, this isn't exactly "fantasy", but it sure as hell is a fantasy.
Family Fun: Hand-animated adaptation of Brian Jacques' "Redwall" series.
ExercisesInFutility
2yr ago
If there's one thing you should take away from this story, it's that this is the painting that inspired the whole debacle. I think it reveals more about the people involved than all ~8k words of that article:
ExercisesInFutility
2yr ago
Re: LARPing, I really like this Alex Kaschuta article: https://alexkaschuta.substack.com/p/all-the-worlds-a-larp
Embrace the LARP.
ExercisesInFutility
2yr ago
New DIM album, great news.
ExercisesInFutility
2yr ago
Why do you think it would take so much longer for the used car market to normalize?
ExercisesInFutility
2yr ago
"The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
That's because you sense the trap: the answer is obvious, but saying it out loud would discredit your position.
Many such cases.
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