ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2hr ago
ToaKraka
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9hr ago
There's contemporary cross cultural evidence, specifically from Europe, which shows that wealthy modern countries can do just fine with age of consent set at 14 or 15.
I do wonder whether scientists in these countries have done any rigorous studies regarding whether early sex has harmful psychological effects.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
10hr ago
In this particular case, the lying allegedly involves at least some conspiracy with Oxford, particularly its "deputy communications chief".
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
11hr ago
Scott posted a partial mea culpa last month when he realized that the most common use of prediction markets is negative-sum sports gambling.
Specifically, he said "Degenerate gambling is bad", citing this article from a different person.
Why is it that sports gambling, specifically, has elicited a lot of criticism from people that would otherwise have more laissez faire sympathies?
It is clear from studies and from what we see with our eyes that ubiquitous sports gambling on mobile phones, and media aggressively pushing wagering, is mostly predation on people who suffer from addictive behaviors.
That predation, due to the costs of customer acquisition and retention and the regulations involved, involves pushing upon them terrible products offered at terrible prices, pushed throughout the sports ecosystem and via smartphones onto highly vulnerable people.
This is not a minor issue. This is so bad that you can pick up the impacts in overall economic distress data. The price, on so many levels, is too damn high.
In turn, that person cites and rejects a pro-betting counterargument from a third person.
The headline result [of a recent scientific study]: legalizing online betting increases betting by about $25 and decreases investments in stocks by about $50 per household per quarter.
The claim that [the researchers'] evidence justifies stricter regulation on sports betting is far beyond what they can support.
The authors have strong evidence for people substituting investments in stocks for spending on what they call “negative expected value” investments. This name reflects the fact that sports betting is not a reliable way to make money. But neither is buying movie tickets or going out to eat. Sports betting is not an investment vehicle, it’s a form of consumption.
When a new product comes on the market and people decrease their savings to buy more of this product, that is evidence that their welfare has improved! When Taylor Swift came to Stockholm she decreased the savings of people there relative to those in Copenhagen, but everyone was glad to spend their money and go to the concert.
The authors of this paper say nothing about the consumption value of sports betting, so they have nothing to say about the consumer welfare effects of legalization.
The intuition that the authors implicitly rely on, but do not actually argue for, is that “financially vulnerable populations” overestimate the consumption value of gambling and thus make themselves worse off by consuming it.
ToaKraka
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13hr ago
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
17hr ago
The Washington Free Beacon has done two reports on Moore in recent months that are probably best considered bombshells and exclusionary: (1) His academic credentials appear to have been heavily fabricated; and (2) a widely told anecdote about his ancestor fleeing from the KKK appears entirely fictitious.
Wes Moore (current governor of Maryland) has quietly been dropped from top ten lists and is starting to be listed as someone who might not run.
He's still listed as ninth place on aggregator ElectionBettingOdds.com—but tied for 10th on Kalshi, tied for 11th on PredictIt, and 12th on Polymarket.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
Just being a good community cop who enforces the intent of the law isn't a thing. You're going to have to charge everybody with everything and let the magistrate decide what to do with them.
This is a good thing, though. If a badly-written law is on the books, it should be rewritten by the legislature. An executive who refuses to properly enforce a badly-written law is just kicking the can down the road at best, and enabling discriminatory enforcement at worst. Enforcing badly-written laws to the hilt inflames voter sentiment to make the legislature do its job.
I was thinking of orbiting habitats with spin gravity, as set forth in The High Frontier: 3,000,000 tons of radiation shielding, using Moon regolith launched by an electromagnetic mass driver to reduce lift costs, for a 10,000-person cylinder. But I haven't done any research into the topic beyond reading that book.
ToaKraka
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2d ago
There's been whole books written about diners, but I think it's probably expressways which were a large part of killing them. A lot of them were on old through routes (US Routes and similar, like the Conowingo Diner on US 1) that weren't limited access.
Civil-engineer nitpick: According to the official definitions (MUTCD ¶ 1C.02.03 items 83 and 91; probably also AASHTO, but I don't have access to that any longer and I don't care enough to look up a pirated copy), expressways are full-access (e. g., the parts of US 1 that you're talking about) and freeways are limited-access (e. g., I-95).
ToaKraka
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3d ago
I will register the unpopular opinion that I personally have no objection to being called "it".
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
Assume your debt is like credit-card debt and transferable.
What exactly do you mean by this? The 800-k$ mortgage would be, not secured by the 1-M$ house, but unsecured (and therefore carrying a vastly higher interest rate)?
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
Case where the US Supreme Court did something like this: 1 2
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If a child is born outside the US and out of wedlock to a citizen parent and an alien parent, then the child becomes a citizen only if the alien parent lived in the US for N years before the child's birth. By default, N is 10 under the law applicable when petitioner was born (5 under the law applicable today). But a separate law establishes an exception setting N to just 1 if the alien parent is the mother, implicitly making N = 10 applicable only if the alien parent is the father.
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Petitioner is born outside the US and out of wedlock to a citizen mother and an alien father. The alien father was present in the US for literally 9.95 years. Petitioner doesn't get citizenship, and sues.
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The Supreme Court unanimously agrees that the second law establishing a gender-based exception is unconstitutional discrimination. However, it is empowered only to strike down the second law, and cannot rewrite the first law to extend the 1-year exception to fathers. So the petitioner still doesn't get citizenship.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
Didn't you look at my Google Maps link? These houses barely have backyards in the first place.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
Basically, yes, if you look at the floor plans… except Internet Archive unfortunately failed to capture Lennar's original JavaScript-infested webpages properly, but luckily I downloaded the floor plan for the 660-ft2 Henley version back when the original webpages were still up.
Lennar, one of the biggest homebuilding companies in the US, caught some attention a few years ago for building and selling a bunch of minuscule 350-ft2 houses (visible on Google Maps here). So it isn't totally outside the realm of possibility.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
The Duolicious dating website (which originated on 4chan's /soc/ board) did something somewhat similar.
What we really did was ask ChatGPT to pretend to be an extrovert, then pretend to be an introvert [using one trait in the entire list of 47 traits as an example]. Then we made ChatGPT answer all 2005 questions in our question bank five times while playing those roles. Except instead of asking them as yes/no questions, we asked ChatGPT to answer on a scale from 0 to 10 (called a Likert scale, for you psychology nerds).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
There's a limit somewhere, though. Do Moon landings benefit humans? Obviously, as a step toward extraction and colonization. Do Saturn probes benefit humans? Maybe, if I squint. Do deep-space telescopes benefit humans? I personally don't see how.
ToaKraka
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5d ago
The Zanarkand Abes are a sports team in Final Fantasy 10.
ToaKraka
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5d ago
ToaKraka
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5d ago
Thresholder has just ended—on a huge anticlimax, but I guess readers should have been expecting that for a while. The author's postmortem thoughts and plans for the future are also available.
ToaKraka
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5d ago
I was introduced to Paradox Development Studio games through Europa Universalis 2. I was too young to actually understand how to play properly, so I just played as the Mamluks (the biggest blob on the map at game start), took out loan after loan to fund my massive armies, and got confused when I went bankrupt. I eventually found a cheat or a console command or something to give me infinite money, but the experience still left me very leery of taking out loans.
ToaKraka
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5d ago
Nothing is certain. Maybe I'll become unable to tolerate the moderators. Maybe I'll fly to Australia to fuck a prostitute and get stabbed in an alley by a thug. Maybe my depression will get worse and I'll shoot myself in the head.
I'm just another random fake person on the Internet.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
A cursory search indicates that "self-leveling concrete" can be used as underlayment, but I guess it's much less common than plywood.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
The Associated Press: In January 2025, Mexico passed a constitutional amendment banning the sale (but not the possession or use) of electronic cigarettes (vapes). A law to actually implement the ban was passed in December 2025. Naturally, the cartels have taken over the market.
I have been accused of posting sexual topics in this thread in order to satisfy a prurient interest. Let's lean into the accusation. >:-)
A cursory search for "skirt waist height" on Google* indicates that the waist of a skirt generally is supposed to be placed near the woman's natural waist/bellybutton. A cursory search for "skirt midriff standing" on Gelbooru indicates that this style is followed surprisingly often (with the skirt waist just barely below the bellybutton) even in erotic art, where the woman is skinny and there is no incentive to hide a bulging belly. I find this somewhat interesting in contrast with the normal practice for a man, who normally will put the pants waist way down at the hip bone, significantly below the bellybutton (at least in my personal experience), and will put it up at the waist/bellybutton only if his belly bulge is huge. (Or maybe I'm out of touch with men's fashion. But to me wearing the pants waist way above the hip bone seems rather uncomfortable.)
On a somewhat related topic, one item that has confused me for a long time in erotic art is the popularity of outfits (most prominently the iconic "bunny suit", but also many one-piece swimsuits and bikini bottoms) where the edge of the fabric rises from the crotch at a very steep angle (i. e., straight to a point lying above the hip bone), rather than a gentler, almost flat angle (to a point lying in the middle of the hip bone, or even below it) that to me seems much more alluring. But I guess it's just a case of differing tastes. (Also, I guess a predominantly-horizontal bikini bottom might have trouble actually staying up IRL, since a belt cannot be used with it.)
*Hilariously, most of the Reddit results of this search are from transgender and nonbinary subreddits, with only a few from sewing subreddits.
A few weeks ago, after dabbling with local LLMs, I tried my hand at (non-AI-assisted) pornographic fiction. The result was two of the most excruciatingly boring """erotic""" stories imaginable (1 2). However, it's somewhat interesting to compare these two stories from year 2026 to two significantly better stories that I was inspired to write back in 2018 and 2017 by prompts found on 4chan's /trash/ board. Probably, the entire difference can be explained by the hypothesis that my brain has been completely fried by depression since 2022.
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