MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
No bio...
User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
A quick google suggests that the same is true for secular Jews in Israel, leaving Modern Orthodox Jews (in Israel and the west) as the only group capable of maintaining above-replacement fertility in a way compatible with modernity.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Note that training dogs with only rewards and no punishments is possible, and is indeed the standard approach in a number of dog sports including the one I am most familiar with (agility). The trainers of serious competitive sheepdogs say that a combination of rewards and punishments is needed in their discipline, and I respect their expertise. But that is the very highest level of dog training, alongside police and military working dogs - and there is an ongoing dispute within the police/military working dog community about whether sufficiently skilled trainers get better performance with or without punishment.
The approach Heinlein suggests to housetraining puppies (or toilet-training toddlers, for that matter) does not work and creates traumatised dogs. You housetrain puppies by appropriately directing their natural instinct not to foul their own dens. A smart dog practically housetrains themselves.
So Heinlein wasn't on point - either he was an idiot or his character was. (Note that Heinlein was a libertarian, so we can be reasonably certain that he did not endorse the decidedly non-libertarian Terran Federation as correct about everything).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3d ago
The Gen Z term for a humanities degree is “Mom’s Basement Studies”.
This isn't new. Us Millenials had "What do you say to an English graduate with a job?"
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3d ago
The Assistant Secretary for Health (who is head of the Public Health Service, and therefore the direct boss of the Surgeon General who is head of the uniformed Corps) only wears a PHSCC uniform and uses a PHSCC paramilitary rank if they are a PHSCC member - and they don't have to join if they are not already one.
Looking at the list on Wikipedia, there have been 17 senate-confirmed ASHs since the office was established in 1963, of whom 7 had PHSCC ranks. Richmond and Satcher served as Surgeon General and ASH simultaneously, and Mason served as Acting Surgeon General while ASH, so they all had excuses. I am happy to accuse the other four (including Levine) of LARPing as a uniformed public health officer. Interestingly, the four LARPers are four of the five most recent ASHs - something changed under Obama, and didn't change back under Trump.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
Trump is after all a bog-standard democrat from the 90's,
I don't know why people keep saying this. Even if Trump was a bog-standard Democrat in the 90's, which he wasn't (per Wikipedia he first registered as a Democrat in 2001 after losing the 2000 Reform primary to Pat Buchannan), people can change.
In so far as we can see which substantial policy issues Trump actually cares about beyond "Donald Trump should be President", they appear to be:
- Broad-based tariffs, with other foreign policy goals subordinated to a tariff policy based on perceived US economic interests (rather than using tariffs to reward geopolitical allies and punish enemies, or to contain China specifically).
- Zero illegal immigration, a large cut in legal immigration, and removal of existing illegal immigrants.
- Reducing the US resource commitment to maintaining an international system where the US's allies are free-riding.
Any one of these could have got you anathematized by the 1990's Democratic party, which, if you check the date, was controlled by the Clinton machine. They would also have got you funny looks from Reagan Republicans.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
Sarah McBride passes well enough, arguably better than Nancy "manjaw" Mace. Nobody would notice or care if the Republicans weren't grandstanding about the issue. The whole point of the Congressional bathroom rule is to keep a passing transwoman who is not a threat to anyone out of the ladies' room in order to show Republican's disapproval of transgenderism.
In the absence of strong antidiscrimination laws which allow lawfare against people who don't let Jonathan Yaniv into the ladies' room, social enforcement based on presentation works a lot better than bathroom laws based on birth sex or anatomy. In the presence of strong antidiscrimination laws protecting men pretending to be women, neither social enforcement nor bathroom laws work.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
2 Warner bros Franchises (harry potter, Batman)
JK Rowling still has a significant amount of creative control over Harry Potter (both legally, and because the fandom care about not letting her setting become American-generic) so I wouldn't say it is culturally a WB franchise. Rowling is, of course, a basic woke leftie apart from her heresy on trans issues, so that doesn't change the big picture.
Throwing Rowling into the pit over her "transphobia" and having one of the nice rightists with cookies who hang out there befriend her would be a world-historical self-own for the left. Fortunately, the British left is less dogmatic on trans issues than the Americans so it didn't happen.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
I would rather say that the croc is retreating back into its cage, which is only mildly reassuring because it has already escaped the cage twice in living memory.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
He was planning to shift away from ad revenue and towards a subscription scheme before he closed the purchase.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8d ago
Where are the historic sedentary-by-modern-standards men full stop?
Based on my own calorie requirement, a "sedentary" lifestyle without a car requires at least an extra 500 calories per day compared to a US-suburban sedentary lifestyle.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8d ago
It looks like the specific departments where >75% of the employees were fired (primarily ad sales and content moderation, on my understanding) did fall over - ad revenue crashed, and content moderation is (quite deliberately on the part of Musk) no longer happening, except when Musk wants to ban one of his political opponents on a whim. There were also some moderately serious legal problems that looked like they stemmed from too many HR/finance/etc. staff being fired too fast. (If you fire the HR lady first, you replace her before you fire anyone else).
I think the fraction of the core technical staff fired was closer to 25%. And, per Jack Welch et. al, any organisation which hasn't been purged recently (which Twitter so hadn't been) can usefully fire the lowest-performing 20% of the staff - so the cull of the technical teams was no big deal.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8d ago
The non-flying car in its current form only exists thanks to a collective irrationality about safety - people (both individually behind the wheel and collectively as voters) treat life as being an order of magnitude cheaper on the roads than it is in other contexts. There is no comparably dangerous activity except driving where it is socially acceptable to do it in a public place with only $50,000 of liability insurance. If someone proposed cars, driven by ordinary citizens, as a new transportation technology then we would ban it - and by the criteria we normally use to judge dangerous technology we would be right to do so. Car crashes are the largest cause of premature death in most rich countries.
Even with the current regulatory environment, general aviation is about 10x more dangerous than driving. (We tolerate this because private flying is seen as an expensive extreme hobby in the tradition of yachting or snowboarding. Also because the regulatory environment makes it very hard for a pilot to injure other people through ordinary non-culpable stupidity. And even so a pilot with less than a million dollars of liability insurance is going to get the stinkeye from airport and hangar operators.) Another way of putting it is that the mean time between fatal crashes (slightly over 100,000 hours) is only slightly longer than a career (80,000 hours). If a job was as dangerous as an average licensed pilot flying a plane maintained properly by average licensed mechanics, then most people doing that job would not survive to retirement. A plane flown by someone with the skill level of the average driver and maintained by the average motor mechanic would be dramatically more dangerous.
The sequel to Where's my Flying Car should be called The Texas Planesaw Massacre.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8d ago
holds the high ground of the academy
The academy is the "high ground" in the sense that a defeated tribe can hide out in the mountains and wage guerilla war until a suitable opportunity arises (like Hilary wanting a way to attack Bernie from the left) - not in the sense that it is the key strategic terrain being fought over. That would be the government and corporate bureaucracies that actually implement cancellations.
A bunch of stupid nominally left-wing politics was defeated in the late 1970's, hid out in the academy for a decade, came out again as 1990's political correctness, lost again, hid out again, and came back as wokestupid in the 2010's. But wokestupid doesn't come out of academia - it comes out of tumblr - the changes from PC to wokestupid are very obviously driven by the need for social media virality. Academia was just a place where a parasite could be kept on life support until a new host turned up. If wokestupid is retreating into academia, it has been defeated (but not destroyed).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8d ago
The pro-life movement is funded and staffed by fundamentalists, and they wrote the legislation. By and large, the pro-life movement do support an exception for sufficiently dangerous-to-the-mother pregnancies . They don't support an exception for non-viable fetuses, which forms part of a pattern where pro-life Christians (particularly Catholics) support heroic intervention to keep non-viable babies like Charlie Gard alive for as long as possible, as well as their opposition to withdrawing treatment from effectively non-viable adults like Terri Schiavo. I think pro-life Christians are consistent in their attitude to these cases and that it reflects their religious beliefs, but I profoundly disagree with them.
I don't know why Ken Paxton chose to noisily go after a mother who wanted to abort a non-viable fetus, but he did. I hope the median general election voter applies condign punishment, but given the nature of Texas politics I doubt it. My best guess is that Paxton is positioning himself to run for governor, and the main obstacle is a Texas Republican primary in which the median voter is well to the right of Donald Trump. One weakness of the American electoral system is that in a 60-40 state like Texas it tends to elect a government that represents the median Republican, not the median voter. And given that almost 40% of Americans claim to be young-earth creationists when polled, I don't think that fundamentalists are going to be a small minority of Texas Republicans.
HB3058 doesn't cover non-viable fetuses, it clarifies two particular cases where there is a genuine threat to the life of the mother (as opposed to the fake threat to the mother's continued fertility that Cox's lawyers tried to use to work around the lack of an exception for non-viable fetuses). Unlike danger-to-mother cases where there is clearly a desire to produce workable rules that allow a reasonable margin of discretion to the doctor treating an emergency case without opening a loophole the size of a barn door, I see no movement from the pro-life right in the US on this point.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9d ago
I do not know what fractions of Haitians are educable, but I have worked professionally with educated Haitians who were able to perform the duties of a UMC professional job that normally requires a 120+ IQ. Of course Haiti, like most Caribbean countries, has a mixed-race elite and an almost-pure-black working class, and the people I worked with were from the Creole elite. So there is a separate question of what fraction of Haitians who are not already being privately educated are educable.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9d ago
Furthermore, wasting the talents of a full fledged doctor on walking into a room where a kid has a fever and runny nose and telling him he has the flu is a waste of the patient’s money and the doctor’s time.
Is it still a waste if the doctor is someone with a 120 IQ who would have got into medical school in the alternative system but ends up as a replacement-level software engineer in the US system as it is? The work of a GP in the British NHS, or in a well-run HMO where paid-for access to specialists is gatekept, does require more knowledge than an NP/PA, because you are gatekeeping access to specialists, so you need to know at least enough cardiology to know when to call the cardiologist etc. And the people doing that work don't seem to think it is meaningless - the complaints of British GPs are about pay and workload, not about the nature of the work. What it doesn't require is a gunner personality (except in so far as you need to deal with the rigours of residency) or a 130+ IQ.
FWIW, NP-equivalents in the UK are mostly people whose IQ is too high for nursing but were incorrectly sorted into it (I suspect, but don't know, that we make more errors of the "poor therefore stupid" type than the US does) and want a low-risk route to something better. My experience dealing with them (asthma care is handled by NP-equivalents, as is uncomplicated diabetes after initial diagnosis) is that they are as good as a GP within their scope of practice, as long as the understand the limits of said scope.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11d ago
I think people with androgynous physiognomy wearing female-coded clothing (such as Sarah McBride, or indeed Nancy Mace as Twitter trolls took considerable delight in pointing out) used to be able to walk into a woman's bathroom and pee in peace. Most of these people were and are cis women, and they shouldn't have to get their ladyparts out to prove eligibility before they go into a stall.
Bad actors using the wrong bathroom for nefarious reasons is a problem we have, empirically, managed to solve without bathroom laws for about a century. Assaults by strangers in public bathrooms are not exactly a common form of sex crime. It isn't worth creating a new problem of Karens harassing manjawed cis women in order to fix it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11d ago
"Littlepeople shouldn't be allowed to get in the way of their Randian overlords" seems to be both a core driver of Musk's politics and a conventional aspect of right-wingery.
Musk is right-wing, and he is eccentric, but the way he is right-wing is entirely conventional. On economic issues he is anti-spending, anti-regulation, and anti-union. On social issues, the views he expresses on X are whatever the right-wing version of the current thing is (even if it is obvious bullshit).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12d ago
I'm happy to believe that a court interpreted the document @hydroacetylene linked to to mean other than what it says, but I'm not wrong about words on a page. You can check by clicking the link.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12d ago
Conservative Republicans want to cut Medicaid and ACA subsidies. They haven't said where or how much by, but they're in government now and are going to have to start making decisions. I acknowledge that both GOPe and MAGA republicans like to talk a good game about cutting spending and not do it, but if you take the right seriously about their spending plans then ACA subsidies are on the way out and Medicaid is going to see deep cuts in order to protect Social Security, Medicare and military spending.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
13d ago
It's much safer to transport a pregnant woman across state lines than it is to lose your medical licence. (Which the State can take without the inconvenience of a jury trial). If you are trying to #resist, it's also more theatrical (providing the State isn't stupid enough to press criminal charges and attract the publicity associated with said trial). So people are doing that rather than fighting abortion bans.
If red states actually try to enforce laws against travelling to get an out-of-state abortion, then the shit is going to hit the fan in way which is unlikely to end up well for the pro-life movement, so they don't.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
13d ago
At least from reading the supreme court opinion, that is not the impression I got. Of course, most doctors won't read the opinion. Instead, they'll get their information from rags like ProPublica so you might well be right.
The doctors in this case got their information from the Texas attorney general, who publicly threatened to prosecute them if the lower-court order allowing them to perform the abortion didn't hold up on appeal (as, in the end, it didn't).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
13d ago
That's because the Texas authorities specifically intended (based on both the text of the law and Paxton's jawboning in the Cox case) to make women carry non-viable fetuses until medical confirmation of fetal death - or to term, for non-viable fetuses which don't die until cut off from the placenta.
The issue in the Cox case is that Texas Republicans want Cox to go through several months of pregnancy, an unnecessary C-section, and six figures of medical bills (which Texas Republicans think she should not get help with, because the government fucking you in the ass is just life, but the government taxing me to pay for the lube when it fucks you in the ass is socialism) in order to achieve the spiritual benefits of watching a baby die in an incubator instead of aborting it. SCOTUS in Dobbs correctly ruled that this is within the powers of the State of Texas, but it didn't rule that it was a good idea.
This isn't even a case where rare corner case is acceptable collateral damage in order to prevent the large number of elective abortions. Paxton's intervention was widely praised by the pro-life movement because this is a type of case they care about. (Obviously not enough to support parents of severely disabled children who would be eugenically aborted if that was legal, because socialism again, but enough to ruin lives because it's for the children works on both sides of the aisle).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
13d ago
It is worth noting that under these standards the loss of a limb does not constitute a medical emergency. The definition of "abortion" is strict so doctors who X-ray a pregnant woman with a broken leg are safe despite the risk to the fetus, but I can see why this sort of thing does not engender trust between the medical profession and the Texas authorities. [With this definition of "medical emergency" and fetuses entitled to 14th amendment protection as people, it arguably would be illegal to X-ray a woman with a broken leg because it irradiates a nonconsenting fetus, although I suppose the father could consent on behalf of the fetus]
There is also an interesting bit of drafting, in that the list of "major bodily functions" in section 4 is arguably surplusage, because section 3 says that only life-threatening conditions can count. A cynic would say that section 4 is designed to make the exception look broader than it is. There are definitely pregnancy complications which are not life-threatening but are sufficiently dangerous to the bodily functions listed in section 4 that a doctor could be obliged (by the usual canons of medical ethics, and EMTALA) to perform an abortion that Texas law prohibits.
I think commuting the sentence of someone who has already spent 19 years in jail is a very different thing to a pre-conviction pardon that ensures someone escapes justice.
Commuting a deserved life sentence to 19 years is a violation of the rule of law, but then any pardon except of someone who appears to be factually innocent is a violation of the rule of law. But I don't see how it can be egregiously bad compared to the standard issue lame-duck cash-for-pardons job.
More options
Context Copy link