Tree
15d ago
There are black women who’ve won legitimately(miss France, for example)
Bad example. Oldest miss france ever at 34. She finished first runner up of her departement fourteen years ago. So during a time where most women lose attractiveness, she managed to raise hers from regional contender level to national champion. And they just changed rules to allow women over 24, as well as married women or mothers, to participate. The rule change by itself is fine, but obviously it's just a way to put 'inspiring' 50 year old women up there 'with the most difficult job in the world'. Whatever, beauty contests are stupid anyway, they just got considerably stupider now that they're ugly.
Tree
17d ago
I don’t think the EU-US tariffs are preferrential, and I’m in favour of free trade, so I think the tariff on american cars should be 0%. The discussion on whether the tariffs are truly equal in a cosmic sense is essentially : ‘Yes, I have this special tariff(or subvention) on Y, but what about your special tariff on X ?’ ad infinitam. You think the tariffs are preferrential because when you cut a pie in two and give it to brothers, they will each insist they got the smaller piece.
I've largely said what I wanted to say. I’ll recap our points of disagreement (You think / I don’t think):
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trade deficits harm a country
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deficit countries subsidize surplus countries
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trade deficits are the result of unequal tariffs
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Therefore the tariffs with europe and china are preferrential, unequal and unfair to the US
Tree
17d ago
Maddison gives US gdp/cap in 1700 as below world average (which seems a little low, I admit), only catching up to the UK around 200 years later. French peasants, who according to those numbers were richer than americans, were always one bad harvest away from starving during the 18th century.
Tree
17d ago
the EU establishment has significant interest incentives to downplay, ignore, or reframe why US-EU tariff barriers are at the level they are.
That goes for the US as well, they have incentives to downplay, ignore, reframe all their own barriers(for example in the airbus-boeing trade fights). You said ‘military support for advantageous tariffs’ is an agreement. Doesn’t sound like the EU agreed to it.
No, European purchases of middle eastern energy is transactional. Notably, the Arabs are making a profit off of providing their good/service to the Europeans at market rates.
Of course they are, the question is what the europeans are getting out of it, since according to your view, the buyer (guy with a trade deficit, here the european) is just handing out ‘subsidies’. So if I buy oil from an arab, that’s a fair trade, but if you buy champaign from me, that’s a subsidy?
At the time, the European tariff barrier for automobiles was 10%, in a market about 260k US cars exported for around 6 billion.
You have a 25% tariff on light trucks including SUVs, which is the majority of the US car market.
Even if there was an entire category of X-but-small trade volume at 0% tariffs, that wouldn't mean the 'average' tariff was 5%.
I think it’s based on value of goods sold. So if the EU sells 100 B and the US takes in a total of 5 B tariffs, that’s an average tariff of 5%, whether some tariffs are at 0% and others at 50%.
I’ll agree that average tariff of the good traded does not mean that much since entire parts of the EU-US trade are high tariffed to zero trade happening, like a lot of agricultural products, cars.
As I said on principle I don’t mind equalizing all the tariffs (though I’ve just read the 25% light truck ‘chicken tax’ seems hard to repeal because of bipartisan support) , but it’s not going to help your trade deficit because the deficit is not caused by preferential tariffs.
The Europeans were embracing industrial policy as a systemic government priority well before the Americans, and won the argument.
No one ever truly wins these economic fad arguments, they wax and wane. It's true that european elites are fond of their dirigisme, and it always ends up being an expensive clusterfuck.
The question, as raised earlier, is what you are willing to offer to make it convincing to the Americans that it is in their interest.
Nothing. If they don’t think trade benefits them, I can try to argue that it does, but if they don’t see it, I’m not offering a bribe, they can just walk away. They’re a free country.
Tree
18d ago
Buying an item in the supermarket (or trading beans for bacon with my neighbour) is a mutually beneficial transaction. I don’t owe walmart military service afterwards.
Was this military-support-for-one-sided-tariffs agreement commented on by anyone at the time (preferably european)? These needlessly complicated ‘subventions’ breed confusions. Next time we’ll take it in cash, not in trade.
You’ve had a way bigger deficit against china than us for a long time. What did they agree to do for you in order to get this preferential treatment? We have a big deficit against saudi arabia – is that a subsidy too?
a systemic trade bias in European favor (thanks to higher tariffs against American goods than for European goods)
The average tariff between US-EU is 3%. I don’t mind equalizing if you find an ‘unfair’ percent here and there, but it’s not going to meaningfully change the balance of trade, because it depends on other characteristics of the economy. So Trump is still going to claim exploitation and raise tariffs 25 % and so the people, agreeing to disagree, will mutually consent to the unraveling of mutually beneficial trade.
Tree
18d ago
OK, so the main disagreement is that I think trade balance is irrelevant . Trade isn’t a zero sum game where the US sells ‘at loss’ because they have a trade deficit. It’s kind of the opposite really, given that trade surplus countries are accused of ‘dumping’ manufactured goods like electric cars or planes they supposedly produce at a loss.
The excellent american economic health has gone hand in hand with trade deficits, to the point that many have suspected that americans get free stuff while the rest of the world gets worthless dollars. I’m not saying it’s causal, just that trump’s domestic story of exploited americans might not play as well elsewhere, when he’s negotiating supermarket prices. Non-americans have their own exploitation story, and at least they're, you know, poorer.
Because I see trade as mutually beneficial, you can understand why trump’s threats look more like ‘blackmail’ to me , and I understand why to you or trump it’s just ‘putting pressure’.
Tree
18d ago
The US military umbrella, while nice, is unnecessary against russia’s second rate military (insert joke about joining the ukrainian military umbrella instead).
so Europe's entire pivot to China is gambling not only that the United States doesn't become hostile, but also that the US and China never go at it.
If the US and China go at it, it would be far better for us to sit on the sidelines than to be stuck in the US supermarket. The manager’s already raising prices in peacetime, we’d better get out before he turns desperate and asks us to pay in blood.
What is the threat of ‘the US becoming hostile’? Is the US going to double the tariffs to punish us from walking away because of the tariffs? Or is the threat war, blockade, invasion? If so , then the normal human pride reaction would be to militarize, get more nukes, and cooperate with US enemies, not accept US blackmail.
But neither I nor the rest of europe appears to believe that is a real threat – what you interpret as an inability to build a large army, I view as unwillingness because of a perceived lack of need: see minimal percent of GDP invested in the military, lack of nukes despite know-how.
Tacitus famously said that the Secret of the Empire was that an emperor did not have to be made at Rome . In other words, that the senate’s power was a sham and the ‘first senator among equals’ was in reality a military dictator.
Is the US secretly a military dictator, even though we peripherals pretend it’s a business partner, or worse, a friend? To me the strongest argument against is that allied US countries who could retaliate militarily after a US invasion (France, UK) have no meaningfully different politics and geopolitics compared to countries who couldn’t (Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan, etc). If anything, western nuclear powers seem even more eager to support the US, which is the opposite of what you would expect from 'hard' power relations.
Tree
18d ago
It’s a supermarket simultaneously raising its prices while rolling out an anti-competitive new policy where you can’t buy there if you also buy from the competitor. It assumes that the supermarket has infinite leverage, that it is so unilaterally indispensable that the customer has no choice. This kind of blackmail works until it doesn’t, like russia banking on europe’s gas dependency.
Psychologically, people prefer a less competitive supermarket to being coerced in that way. I think you overestimate your leverage, and how “rational” your customers are. I’m way more pro-american than average, and even I think US allies should tell trump to take a walk.
Tree
18d ago
But better yet would be if these countries join the movement themselves, align their policies with the (IMO more forward thinking) American policies
I assume you mean heavy tariffs against china in a futile bid to turn back the time and reindustrialize. I don't understand how diminishing trade between US and allies is supposed to convince them to end their trade with china. When one supermarket's closed, you go to the next one.
Tree
19d ago
The people in the town who can vote, voted by a nearly unprecedented margin "Yeah nah, it sucks". Like, that's not a lie with the specifics off. There was an actual vote, with actual numbers! We can check!
You’re grasping for the truth, clamoring for something to hold on to. It doesn’t prove that having haitians sucks. Springfield just voted that way, allegedly. And the legitimacy of the vote is something Trump has repeatedly attacked. He claimed ‘the actual numbers we can check’ were false. In that lie, those were the specifics that were off, which you dismiss here. In order to justify one lie, to diminish the truth-value of one statement, you have to rely on on the truth value of another statement, which your side has already destroyed. Lying’s been sawing the branch you’re sitting on.
I’m not a fan of haitian immigration. I’d just like to understand what you two (deep blue and deep red) are doing. You both apparently think lying is fine and advantageous for you, but immoral or counterproductive for the other.
Tree
19d ago
Your understanding of ‘the truth’ probably came from another guy’s statement where ‘the specifics were off’ too and it didn’t matter to him either. You denounce democrats when they lie, make their lies responsible for loss of trust in their institutions and their electoral defeat, but lying in favour of your side, that just works?
Tree
20d ago
judeo-roman wars, islamic conquests and ongoing jihad, ridda wars, shia-sunni wars, crusades in the levant, fourth crusade against constantinople, albigensian crusade, northern crusades, hussite wars.
Before the catholic-protestant wars, the best one for folamh3’s argument is the islam-christianity war, as a constant, religiously motivated conflict which never really ended and kept eastern europe and the mediterranean bloody for a thousand years.
Tree
21d ago
Not only is his art exquisite, but by cutting out the middlemen art galleries, like tesla, he has revolutionized the industry with his efficient way of doing business.
The ‘no staying power’ critique is revealing. It’s up to you if you’re going to keep thinking of a piece of art. When those critics get hit with the raw emotion of a Kincade, they immediately try to forget it.
I’m even more anti-taste than scott, in that I’ve decided that nothing you or anyone else could say is allowed to affect my tastes in any way, because that could reduce my enjoyment of mass-produced accessible art. There’s no upside to discriminating between good and bad art, unlike good and bad science or policy. So I consider this discussion pure edgy cocktail party bullshit without any stakes.
Tree
21d ago
If there’s energy, (whether from solar panels, a greenhouse or a nuclear reactor) people can live there. I’m positive star entrepreneurs could find lots of people willing to live in a cage, eating reprocessed gruel facing fearful odds for a hundred generations, because I’m not far from considering it. A lot of polynesians drowned, but in the end they got to most of the pacific.
No need for terraforming, just dig the equivalent of an antarctic base. Who needs fresh air anyway. Modern youth’s predilection for browsing dank memes over going outside will pay off on mars.
Tree
22d ago
Any Faang engineer can get married, given effort and low standards. Actually, that goes for almost anyone.
The Redpill view of attractiveness is imo very confused. Let’s say that women only cared about status, and men about looks. That still leaves two hierarchies of people with corresponding attractiveness, and nothing fundamentally different in the attractiveness model of the sexes. You say women can sense men’s status, but men can rank women on looks just as easily. And men all prefer a better-looking girlfriend, does that make them hypergamous? If half the men are too low status to be attractive, then half the women are too ugly to be attractive.
The main difference you identify is that most men would accept an offer of casual sex from most women anytime, while women only accept the offer from george clooney sometimes. This says more about the sexes relative enjoyment of casual sex than attractiveness.
I think desire for marriage is a lot more balanced between the sexes. You brought up that indian ‘divorce rape’ case (btw, I know the manosphere uses it, but it’s a terrible name. It comes off as a cheap attempt to ‘equalize’(‘you rape us we rape you’ – but of course most men don’t rape anyone so they don’t deserve this ‘retaliation’, plus rape is illegal, while this uses the legal system to fuck men over, so it’s more like the opposite, etc), and on that subject we agree.
Which leads to my question: let’s say promoting female chastity really does increase marriages … Why do men want the kind of headache that lead to that guy’s suicide anyway? I suggest that before we think of stopping our female overlords from fucking george Clooney, we stop giving them the legal right to steal all their husbands money and send them to prison.
Tree
22d ago
Most dudes are unattractive to be begin with which is why we have more female ancestors than male.
That's really not the reason, it's the massacre of patrilineal groups through the ages. The vast majority of men reproduced. But if it was true, I guess we'd all be Ken's sons while women would be descended from hags, so we'd win the intersexual beauty contest easy (but who would be the judges?).
You seem to be saying most men are so ugly we need to force women to date them, which is funny, and a little insulting. Those poor women lol. I’d be merciful and let her choose celibacy if it came to that.
Tree
22d ago
It’s extremely difficult to prove causation even if there was correlation here.
It could be modernity, or the million other things that have changed, it could even be the other way around: in the 60s, 70s and 80s promiscuity was celebrated and people had more sex, now with these sexual hangups, we see the rise in sexlessness.
Personally I think the lack of sex is more due to quality porn and entertainment and general ‘lack of needing others’. Men don’t need women to fulfill their sexual urges, women don’t need men to provide for them anymore, it’s way less boring to stay alone in your room than it used to be, and so on.
The Rise of The Incels sounds like a fantasy, whatever instability there is in the west does not come from incels, who seem more pacified with each porn-induced orgasm, a well-known soporific. By contrast, you imply the islamic world’s sexual restrictiveness has made it stable? I would dispute that.
Everything else aside, I just don’t like infringing on individual liberties, consenting adults and all that. I don’t think there was someone I forgot to ask.
Tree
24d ago
But can those alcoholics down a hundred bottles in a night? Any harm from promiscuity, if it exists, is comparatively tiny, harder to find and subject to more ifs.
Tree
24d ago
online trad redpill mra types always pretend that high status people marry whores regularly.
? No they don't. They say 'betas' marry them after high status 'alphas' 'pumped' them. Through the transitive property of the woman, this makes the 'beta' the 'alpha's bitch (imagine the woman in a sandwich where they all face the same way), reinforcing the sexual hierarchy they obsess over.
Tree
24d ago
Female promiscuity is completely harmless, as this stunt again proves. If you assume a linear no-threshold model of harm and she does fine after hundreds of men, likely ending up married to some banker or politician, then obviously sleeping with only a football team can’t possibly be harmful at all, the equivalent of one banana of radioactivity.
Tree
24d ago
Friendly reminder that the internet always, always advises dumping. Now they don't even need any disagreeable behaviour, pedigree suffices.
Tree
24d ago
Thanks for the sauce.
So I can only read the synopsis, but it appears the strongest conclusion of that study is that the authoritarian style is the worst. Then it compares a bunch of other parenting style categories (directive, authoritative, democratic, permissive, disengaged) which seem ill-defined, prone to bias and an invitation to p-hack.
Take OP’s original example of the teenager who won’t get off the phone. Baumrind’s definition of the two dimensions she uses to define four of the categories (see table), via wikipedia :
Parental responsiveness refers to the degree to which the parent responds to the child's needs in a supportive and accepting manner. Parental demandingness refers to the rules which the parent has in place for their child's behavior, the expectations for their children to comply with these rules, and the level of repercussions that follow if those rules are broken.
If some parents confiscate the phone over their daughter’s tearful pleas, it’s easy for the social scientist working off this definition to count that as “not responding to their child’s needs in a supportive and accepting manner”. That by itself would make them either ‘authoritarian’ or ‘neglectful’.
Baumrind’s preferred style– “authoritativism” - is an “authoritarianism of the gaps” where you act authoritarian until someone proves a part doesn’t work, then you pretend that part was always part of the ‘bad authoritarianism’ while you’re just practicing good authoritarianism. Your secret sauce is that you love your children while the bad authoritarians of the past didn't.
So the expert advice seems to be: “be authoritarian, but not too much. Too much is definitely terrible”. Which manages to be both completely useless and maximally anxiety-inducing.
As to why some studies show ‘permissive parenting’ to be less positive than her gerrymandered position, it’s largely genetic effects, nothing causative.
Tree
24d ago
Of course it’s fiction. But unlike countless other movies where the CEO sends an assassin after the hero, I find this one’s motive, means and opportunities frighteningly realistic.
As to the detail of the secret manual, I don’t find it that far-fetched. In my experience of the professional world, a lot of shit of questionable legality and morality goes on, but people have mouths to feed and everyone’s doing it, so they just get on with it. I’ve observed that most people, if their boss tells them to lie or to ignore a tax the company should pay, they do it without fuss. I'm not sure they'd put it in a manual though.
Not gonna happen. Even if AI is strictly superior at clerical/intellectual jobs to most people (and I doubt that), there is unlimited demand for dog-walking at 10$/hour.
The machines have long ago replaced human physical power, and animal physical power, and weaving and sowing and cobbling and copying and calculating and transporting and and and ... never was man left idle.
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