SophisticatedHillbilly
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User ID: 1964
SophisticatedHillbilly
30d ago
I think the answer there hinges on whether you’d vote for a pro-abortion anti-Griggs candidate or an anti-abortion pro-Griggs candidate if they were head-to-head.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
Objectively, pretty much just white men in the like 25-45 range (definitely blurry at the edges there) who are some combination of wealthyish, charismatic, and healthy (or maybe just agentic? I’ve always felt that was a bigger factor.)
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
Machine operator is a pretty basic role. If you’ve ever used a 3d printer and had to deal with leveling the bad, clearing stuck plastic, verifying that prints are proceeding correctly etc. it’s basically that but with bigger machines.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
Any proper system has to explain the machinist vs sheet-metal-worker divide (around a 30-point difference) and I have yet to see one that does.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
If it set the stage for Trump, then it sure does make sense for Trumpians to support a continuous long-term version of it.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
Two arguments here:
1.) Government spending: consider that the massive efficiency issue applies not just to bridges, but to nearly all government spending of any kind. While bridges alone are a small cut, it’s significantly more expensive to spend 10X or 100X for many different things.
2.) The issue goes beyond government spending to include government cost. Cost includes the expenses that are offloaded to the private sector, many of which are executive in nature. Rolling back a wide swath of administrative regulations could massively increase private wealth and save the public fisc indirectly. This also applies to the healthcare spending that makes Medicaid so expensive. That 10X multiplier is there as well (more than in most industries really.) Cut medical regs, increase doctor supply, etc etc.
The administration will have trouble with this politically though, since the second type of cost saving doesn’t show up in a straight “spending in 2022 vs spending in 2026” analysis
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
the US challenge on the budgeting sense is the automatic entitlement spending, not the bureaucracy administering it.
I’m not sure how true this is. Most times people complain about government spending it seems to relate to corruption, cost disease, and regulatory costs: Broadband programs that provide access to ~0 people for billions of dollars, bridges that cost 100X what they should, hospitals needing 10 administrators for every doctor etc. All of these are executive issues. The complaints about the actual literal entitlements ordered by Congress usually come up as complaints of vote buying, and regardless aren’t the core of the problem.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
The issue is that pay increases for government employees just means poaching talent from the private sector. You’ll increase government efficiency at the cost of lower private sector efficiency. There’s only so many competent people. Raising pay doesn’t make more of them.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
Making federal employees a higher tier of citizen is a horrible idea that would contribute to the Sovietization of society and is directly contrary to the American ideal. The government being generally low quality is fine (though the floor should be higher than it currently is) it just needs its scope massively reduced. If it had the scope reduced to match capabilities, then you don’t have to increase capability
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
We could have chosen differently
And in fact, some countries, or even states, did. I feel like this conflation of COVID with COVID-response is a huge issue.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
That leads to the obvious question: What is Trump?
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
It has largely worked for the woke. A large portion of the population has gone from fervently supporting color blindness to fervently supporting affirmative action, and so on for every other social issue. It doesn’t convert everyone. It doesn’t have to.
SophisticatedHillbilly
2mo ago
Yeah aren’t American conservatives one of the only non-hyper-religious groups left with an above replacement fertility rate? (only like 2.3 if I remember right but still)
SophisticatedHillbilly
2mo ago
You have to look at their predictions in aggregate. If they predict 20 elections with a 95% chance for party A, and A wins 19 of those 20 elections, then yes they were accurate.
Even if that 1 election was a landslide for party B, the prediction method is accurate. People who say otherwise just aren’t accepting that it’s a percentage chance and not a poll.
SophisticatedHillbilly
2mo ago
Human cloning: not enough people want it badly enough. Same probably goes for surrogacy, with the added fact that anyone who could afford the criminal price could just afford legal workarounds.
In the case of CP I think it results in similar behavior to drug prohibition. Extensive criminal networks, child trafficking and all the associated crimes, etc. the people who want it want it bad, will pay for it, and have no easy substitutes.
Deepfakes are currently too easy and still readily available even when technically illegal. No market when the supply is nearly infinite and demand is relatively low.
None of those things are comparable. A better comparison is bans on drugs, which do result in broken kneecaps and gang shootings, and bans on prostitution, which result in the same.
SophisticatedHillbilly
2mo ago
True. It was always unclear to me whether this worked for the whole food or included each component. I assumed the former (in the sense that after applied to spinach casserole, they will be fine with spinach casserole, but not with spinach by itself.) It’s not really applicable to when a kid just doesn’t like a particular food (in the case of spinach they might just have have really high taste sensitivity to bitterness) but specifically for the “will literally just eat one food and nothing else, potentially up to starvation if they don’t get french fries” type of kid
Also I understand not wanting to do this. Most people don’t like eating the same things repeatedly. I am not one of those people (my desire to eat a food grows ~linearly with the number of times in a row I’ve consumed it) but I wouldn’t blame anyone for not applying this info.
SophisticatedHillbilly
2mo ago
Every time I eat Little Caesars, I feel like I want to die. The pizza helps me here, because it makes me feel like I am actually going to die.
At first I start to sweat. I lose feeling in my limbs, my stomach aches in a concerningly numb way, and my eyelids become heavier than my crushing guilt. Actual ambrosia would not be worth the feelings it creates.
And yet I still crave the Caesar. Despite smoking many times throughout my life, I have never once failed to resist the cravings to do it more. Nicotine has nothing on that hellish pizza. An entire day’s worth of willpower is burnt if it ends up in my presence.
May Satan take that whole chain (but maybe I’ll have just one slice before he does.)
SophisticatedHillbilly
2mo ago
I’ve heard from multiple people and personally seen one example where the following is true:
It’s basically just overly low risk tolerance around food safety, built in on an evolutionary level. The solution is having the whole family eat the same thing repeatedly (for like a week straight) and nothing else. That food will then be added to their ‘safe food’ registry and they’ll be fine with it forever. Rinse and repeat with each food.
SophisticatedHillbilly
2mo ago
Those things all do say something about one’s character. Some degree of rebelliousness, courageous, or social obliviousness is required to do things in public you know will garner negative reactions. The fact the reactions are negative do not make the actions negative per se, but they do change what information you can gather from the action.
In your example: there are presumably other gay couples that don’t kiss in front of homophobes, and that allows you to judge them in other ways. Maybe they’re cowardly, or just very polite.
SophisticatedHillbilly
2mo ago
Any more info on this? I’d be very interested in getting an EU citizenship.
SophisticatedHillbilly
3mo ago
What are they, if you don’t mind sharing?
SophisticatedHillbilly
3mo ago
they can't bring themselves to fire these employees or disproportionately reward the people whose productivity increases.
Why is this so true? I would be happy to do this, but it seems it’s anathema to most companies. Any explanations?
SophisticatedHillbilly
3mo ago
How effective would nuclear weapons by a relatively small nation be against an invading army? It’s not a scenario we’ve ever seen play out.
The standard nuclear war scenario involves a 3-prong nuclear strike combined with standard missles to assist with saturation and eliminate all enemy industrial and military centers approximately simultaneously. Does Israel have the capacity to hit so many targets at once? Or is it more of a tactical-use scenario? Or maybe just a “whoever attacks first gets their political capital eliminated” scenario?
These aren’t rhetorical questions, I’m just genuinely not sure, and I feel like smaller scale one-sided nuclear warfare looks very different than the Cold War images most people think of.
I do think a lot would come down to how competent the Arab alliance could become in the lead up to an invasion. Even a comparatively old-fashioned but reasonably equipped army should be able to win by sheer numbers in this matchup, but they’d have to get the corruption under control and actually build a lot of equipment.
The last couple wars seem to show a severe lack of competence, but I don’t think that’s inherent or will always be true. After all there have been some very effective Arab conquests in the past.
SophisticatedHillbilly
3mo ago
Because actively destroying something is fundamentally different than preventing its creation? This is one of those things that is so intuitive I do think the onus would be on you to prove the inverse, but:
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The end result is not the same. Things that are destroyed leave ghosts, things that were never made do not. Memories, physical damage, emotional attachments, etc are all left behind and change the calculus.
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The process is obviously different, and processes have by-products and side effects. In the case of abortion, a case could be made that normalizing abortion weakens norms around the inherent value of human life, or the value of facing the consequences of your own actions (I don’t necessarily believe this, but it is just an example)
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Different rate of change. Abortion is quick, education and cultural change are slow.
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Different subgroup impacts. Sex education will likely have stronger impacts on the more educable, and abortion on the more avoidant.
This applies to basically every instance of prevention/elimination. Why prevent cavities when we can simply fill them? Why prevent infections when we have antibiotics? Prevention and elimination are only the same in the most spherical-cow utilitarian nonsense world imaginable.
From my anecdotal experiences (which weirdly enough include specifically receiving an MRI as part of a health sharing system) you pay out-of-pocket and that price ends up being equal or lower to the negotiated insurance prices. You may have to do some negotiating yourself, but it’s usually as simple as calling the office and saying “this is unreasonable, give me the real price” and then they do. The $5000 price is there because they know insurance will haggle, and so they can charge the government systems exorbitant amounts, insurance pays the $1000 price, and if you pay out of pocket it’s more like $500, then health sharing reimburses you. The amounts aren’t accurate but the ratios are.
The $5000 price is part fraud, but realistically mostly just because they have to recoup the cost of all the non-payers who receive care and don’t pay for it. It’s basically just backdoor government-funded healthcare for the poor, scummy (has money just doesn’t pay or pays like $10/month), or undocumented. The only ways to bring the costs down are to not allow those people to receive maximum care, which the public doesn’t have the stomach for, or to address the elderly medical cost issue, which is politically untouchable, or address the supply cartel issues mentioned above.
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