I_Smell_Mendacious
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User ID: 1016
I_Smell_Mendacious
1mo ago
Degrowth and environmental arguments will not be able to hold against the sheer awesomeness and vibrancy of space travel, I believe.
Anecdotally, I showed my wife the video of the Mechazilla catch yesterday. She was blown away at just how awesome it was. Previously, her opinion of Musk was "He's that billionaire that bought Twitter so he can troll people." After watching the video, she commented that if Musk was going to do amazing things like that, he gets a pass on all the Twitter trolling he cares to do. And she's not particularly "into" space flight and technology, it was just the sheer awesomeness that captured her attention.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1mo ago
I_Smell_Mendacious
4mo ago
Decimals upend people's naïve understanding that "more digits equals bigger number". My 6 year old still gets that confused sometimes.
I_Smell_Mendacious
8mo ago
Assuming they decide to continue operating in Canada, I have no doubt that given the choice between trying to toe the line and interpret the rules reasonably, and dialing up their content filters to 11, they will choose to play it safe and do the latter.
Is there any safety to be had? If I'm the person tasked with dialing up the content filters, I have a hard time imagining what level of filtering would make me confident we were successfully toeing the line. And even if you think you have identified the line, you never know where the next line is until someone accuses someone else of crossing it. Better hope it's not one of your users that reveals the latest in offensive language/imagery/facts. Six months ago, who would ever have thought to be concerned about images of watermelons?
I_Smell_Mendacious
8mo ago
From the perspective of cultural evolution, it only makes sense if the "abort females" meme is passed on more by fathers than by mothers.
The last time I looked into this, I came away convinced it was economics. Chinese men have (had?) a legal and cultural obligation to provide care for their parents that Chinese women do not. If you think you might only have one kid, it makes financial sense to insure it's a boy.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
if anyone knows the exact name of the type of chart in figure 3 here I'd appreciate it.
I'd call it a percentage bar graph, it's just horizontal rather than the more common vertical.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
I agree, there are lots of vestigial taboos/practices in many (most?) cultures that don't necessarily make sense any longer and could be usefully re-examined. Some perhaps never made any sense; I'd be curious to learn how a practice like widow burning ever came about. But that old saying "you can't reason a man out of a position he didn't reason himself into" seems to apply here.
I am amused at the idea of the future society that looks back at current bestiality with disgust because our sheep shaggers aren't using protection.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
I think in the specific case, it makes perfect sense that society developed a taboo against goat-fucking and not goat-eating. Widespread goat-eating is harmless, even beneficial if you lack other food sources; widespread goat-fucking leads to novel zoonotic diseases appearing. Social taboos don't develop as some representation of a society's shared ethical considerations, they develop as a mechanism to control the behavior of members of society. They don't need to be rational, they need to be effective in encouraging prosocial behavior and discouraging antisocial behavior.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
I wonder if the drop in recruitment is impacted by the drop in college enrollment by young men? I might be a victim of selection bias due to my social circles, but a lot of the people I know that went into the military did so as a way to pay for college. If tuition really was a significant incentive that drove previous recruiting, a decline in the number of young men interested in college would see a corresponding decline in the number of young men interested in using the military to pay for college.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
My house increasing substantially in value actually makes me slightly poorer. My city decided they needed to perform an off cycle property tax evaluation, so my taxes have now gone up by a noticeable amount.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
Bill Clinton sold trade agreements to the Chinese in exchange for buckets of Chinese cash. The manufacturers sold their capabilities to China in exchange for increased profitability. The American Consumer got cheaper goods and thus cheered it on.
The only people that got nothing in exchange were the manufacturing laborers, but their careers were a sacrifice the rest of us were willing to make.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
She told me that sometimes she needed her boyfriend to do some favor for her, and he wouldn’t, so she would cry – not as an attempt to manipulate him, just because she was sad.
I agree this isn't abuse, but it's definitely concerning behavior. An adult human being that gets sad to the point of crying because they were told "no" when they asked someone else to do something for them? Apparently on a regular enough basis to be considered a pattern of behavior worth discussing? If this person isn't lying to themselves (or Scott) about their motivation for crying, they have the emotional fortitude of a 5 year old.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
I’m hoping in the longer run also that I might lose my cravings for these things a bit as my palate adjusts.
That has been my experience, particularly with alcohol and ice cream. I don't crave them as much as I did when I would regularly over indulge. And these days, when I do indulge, it's to a much less degree. My body just won't tolerate the quantities I once found enjoyable to consume.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
get down on your knees or get flat on the ground with your hands out to the sides. Do you consider that humiliating? This is done to minimize the subjects' ability to put up effective resistance. It's to decrease the likelihood that they have to fucking shoot you!
I never have been in such a situation, but I imagine that I would in fact find it quite humiliating to be forced to kneel or prostrate myself in front of my assailants. The fact that they are (presumably) insisting on it to assuage their own fears wouldn't really factor into my emotional reaction.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
What's eerie is the increase in politicians now being so elderly
America is more elderly across the board now; median age continues to rise. I suspect if you managed to gather the appropriate statistics, you'd find there is an increase in age in most professions. Barring a few where physical capability is a requirement.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
There is an axiom in certain strains of Western feminism that male lust is inherently dehumanizing. That the male (lustful) gaze objectifies any and all women towards whom it is directed.
This academic paradigm has filtered out to the masses in various forms. Young men have all been exposed to the message that their sexual desires are in some way problematic and expressing them to women is in some way harmful to those women. "It is disrespectful to have any sexual desire for your female colleagues." is an unsurprising belief to come out of that environment. It obviously isn't a true belief, sexual desire and respect aren't actually linked in our psyche that way, but it's probably a useful belief in the post metoo era.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
If you mean that they want to become the opposite sex of what they were born as
My understanding of the "mainstream" trans view is that the claim is they are the sex (well, gender, but they also claim any distinction there is meaningless, so...) they claim at any given moment. Any biological reality that contradicts this claim is considered irrelevant to their essential gender identity, which is all that matters. Any claim they made yesterday that contradicts today's claim is considered irrelevant.
Obviously, there are lots of different views in "the community" about this, many of which contradict the others. Sometimes, you get multiple, contradicting views from the same person. What I'm describing is my understanding of the concept of trans embodied by Twitter/Tik Tok/Corporate Approved Trans, which seems poised to be the ideology that defines the community under it's singular umbrella. Or at least the main Cathedral, opposition to which will define the heretics.
From that point of view, there is no process of becoming the opposite gender; your assertion that such (once possible) will earn them the regard they want in your eyes inherently invalidates their belief that there is no process other than their own profession of belief.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
During Prohibition Era, you could get a doctor's prescription allowing you to purchase "medically necessary" alcohol. This went much like the recent medical marijuana policies in many states. The biggest difference was that alcohol prescriptions were more constrained, mostly only being available to the wealthy and connected at the time.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
The kind where lions sleep?
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
Assuming the potential payoff is the same, then no, the 1 in 500 scenario is worse. .002 * 50 = .1 years of lost freedom. .01 * 5 = .05 years of lost freedom. Twice the expected negative value.
Mathematically, going from 1 in 100 chance of 5 years to 1 in 20 chance of 2 years, the first one is a better risk. But I suspect most people would hesitate more at the 2nd one. What's sensible, I guess that depends on how you like to structure your risk, how many times you plan to take said risk, expected positive value, lots of factors really. But from a public policy perspective, it's more important to understand how criminals (mostly young men) structure their risk. Probably not utilizing game theory, so increasing enforcement rather than penalties makes sense.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
Theoretically what works elsewhere would seem to be shorter jail sentences but vastly increasing the chance of being caught
That matches my recollection of both being a young man and relevant psych studies. People, in particular young men, tend to be intuitively bad at expected value considerations in risk assessment. A 1 in 500 chance of going to jail for 50 years is more favorable from their perspective than a 1 in 100 chance of going to jail for 5 years. So increasing the probability of penalty, even with a reduced severity, would be a greater deterrence.
I_Smell_Mendacious
1yr ago
we were all grown-up adults who could evaluate the risks for ourselves and if a drug was risky, let us take the risk
A vital part of the FDA being less cautious about approvals is that I be allowed to exercise my own caution. Letting the FDA take bigger risks on approvals and then mandating I take the approved drug is not allowing me to evaluate risks for myself.
I_Smell_Mendacious
2yr ago
if "the long march through the institutions" is real, I wouldn't discard the theory that the role model crisis is an intentional plan.
Destruction of the nuclear family is an explicit goal of Marxism. Also, the self-proclaimed "Marxist trained" activists at the head of BLM caused a stir a few years ago by advocating for the destruction of the nuclear family. So there are some successful activists saying out loud they want to destroy the nuclear family, presumably due to their Marxist philosophy which they presumably learned in academia.
I_Smell_Mendacious
2yr ago
I wonder if it's a coincidence that the Young Earth Creationists believe the Earth itself was created 6000 years ago? Or is there some Bible verse or something that lends itself to the number 6000 that both of these theories are tying into? As you allude to, 6000 seems an arbitrary number to pick out - the fact there are 2 different sets of crazies that picked it seems interesting.
This is the problem, but not for the reason you suggest, at least in the US. The issue is funding - training residents costs hospitals money, which is covered by CMS. Technically, I guess hospitals could fund residencies above and beyond their CMS allocations, but then they are spending money to train a future doctor that may or may not work for them. The financial incentives aren't there for hospitals to fund residencies themselves, so we end up with the number of residencies CMS is willing to fund. That number was mostly static for over 20 years, until Covid made stark how lacking in medical personnel the US is. So they've slowly been increasing the allocations over the last few years, but of course, at a much lower rate than general population growth.
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