WhateverHappenedToNorman
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User ID: 3324
WhateverHappenedToNorman
2d ago
Honestly, if you meet the pre-requisites, get the eye surgery regardless. It'll probably be a QoL improvement across the board.
I've been twice, with extended family (as a teen). I think they get too much of a bad rap. It's an ok hotel with good-ish amenities that takes you to a couple of cities. It's not the best value you can get for a comfortable vacation, and definitely not for tourism, but if you want something that straddles the line, you can do worse.
I hear bad things about "cruise people", but I think that's an "Americans have infinity money" thing.
I mean, all the ingredients and cooking seems perfectly fine here.
As a fellow food enjoyer, the obvious problem seems to be portion size. You're going to eat everything because it's delicious, so just make less of it.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
8d ago
"Latinaos" I have never seen in my life.
"Latines", (and "e" as gender neutral in general) is indeed the form south american leftists actually use. It seemed ascendant for a while, but luckily there has been a pretty big pendulum swing, so I'd say we have at least another decade until it takes over normal life.
Wait, did the dresden codak guy (with apologies to the 2 trans motte readers) troon out? Jesus christ, talk about a fall from grace.
While one has to be clear-headed as to what life insurance actually is, I think for most people, it makes much more sense to get term life insurance: it's a hedge to provide for your loved ones in case of a tragedy and, ideally, by the time time you're old, your death won't represent a significant economic burden on your family. Whole-life is this protection, with some sort of inheritance scheme piled on top... unless you want to screw over one or more of your descendants, it doesn't make much sense to not just save the extra premiums that you'll be paying.
This, of course, assumes similar pricing practices and commission schemes, either product can be, in practice, a worse deal depending on market conditions.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
9d ago
I agree that people are often miscalibrated regarding safety levels, whoever, I think we tend to overfixate on murder as a crime statistic. Murder is, obviously (or perhaps not so obviously, given recent events), very bad, but it is thankfully pretty rare. Below some fuzzy threshold, people's feeling of safety will be more tied to overall crime rate than murder rate (particularly as murder seems to be very concentrated in certain areas and demographics).
WhateverHappenedToNorman
9d ago
although the Independent was plenty keen to tout the fact that the man who intervened was BRAZILIAN
Is that even remarkable? From my very limited experience, like half of Ireland's population is Brazilian already.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
11d ago
Joke's on you, we all read the "comments" feed. Debate me, nerd.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
12d ago
Will we see the narrative invert now that the shooter is a populist assassin, but a Meditations-reading, self-improving, ted-pilled populist assassin?
I don't know. I didn't cheer for the assassination (because murder is bad, because it isn't the solution to complex systemic issues, yadda yadda), but I did think it was very cool, and now I think it's cooler (though it would've obviously been even cooler if he didn't get caught).
I think most people who are already cheering for it will keep cheering: Some will justify it as "right thing wrong reasons", some will gain an interest in whatever the motivations of the killer were, some will pay absolutely no attention to any new information.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
12d ago
It refers to the Lindy Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
The basic idea is that something that has been going for a long time is probably going to go on for a long time.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
12d ago
but he seems utterly unburdened by any sense of loyalty since the election.
More cynically, since it came out that he'd been taking bribes from Turkey.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
12d ago
I thought a bit about this (more in the sense of "what's the leanest insurance company you could build" and "could you create an insurance marketplace with the least amount of intermediation"). I'd say you came to a similar conclusion that this:
And I've pretty much handwaved away the hard part which would be deciding which claims are legitimate to prevent bad-faith exploitation.
is the biggest issue. My thought was that the best product you could try this with is regular term life insurance, because there is a mostly pretty clean way of determining the validity of claims (a death certificate) and because people's desire not to die goes a long way to prevent fraud. You still have the problem with underwriting and adverse selection.
On the other hand, another problem is the matter of counterparty solvency, as an insurer you rely on the law of large numbers to smooth out premiums and claims, if someone in this decentralized network faces claims way in excess of the premiums they have collected, do policyholders get paid less in proportion of how much of their risk did this specific node assumed? You could have everyone put up capital for some sort of compensation pool, but the more things you stack over, the more you end up looking like just regular insurance.
The goal would be to remove the profit motive from insurance companies taking a cut as middlemen
Mutual insurance already exists! Some of the biggest insurance companies of today started as mutuals, I think Liberty still is one.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
14d ago
Okay, I'll bring a contrarian take to the table
Is crypto-skepticism contrarian now? I guess here it might be!
And unlike Gold it could in theory be forked to increase supply or otherwise devalue/debase itself if the miners so chose
This is, while unlikely (after all, bitcoin is an attempted "fork" from fiat, and it's been remarkably successful so far), is maybe a good thing, it means that if a change is considered good by a consensus of nodes then it can be implemented, less subject to the whims of a single government than fiat, more amenable to change than gold.
I'm not even asking what the 'endgame' is, its just, what does one 'do' with the BTC other than hold it, occasionally buy more, and maybe sell it if you ultimately need to transaction in USD?
The end game is that a significant amount of transactions are ultimately settled in BTC, and I guess also that a significant amount of reserves held are also denominated in BTC. You can argue that bitcoin is not good for day to day transactions between individuals, but it's way faster and cheaper (though the latter might be a matter of just not having a big regulatory structure above it) than the big movements that happen in the background.
Which I guess speaks to @faceh's objection: For all this to be "real", bitcoin's price needs to be a lot more stable. The simplest model of the value of bitcoin is something like p(it happens) * (total value of eventual transactions settled in bitcoin + all bitcoin eventually held in reserves), the idea being that, as p approaches 1, the price should start to settle. The thing is that the second factor is not constant either: Is BTC going to be used by developing countries? Is it going to replace the USD as the dominant currency? Is it going to just take over the world? The notion that further success begets more appreciation makes it hard for it to bootstrap its way into being a medium of exchange.
I'm not a turbo-optimist to begin with, but I guess you guys have managed to move me slightly to the more skeptical side.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
15d ago
Well, it's working for Saylor, so why the hell not?
WhateverHappenedToNorman
15d ago
I think the main blocker is that stronger Bitcoin adoption could be a disaster for the US, given that it's a direct competitor to its main export: US Dollars/Treasuries.
On the other hand, stablecoin adoption should thrive, for the same reason.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
16d ago
How It's Based To Marry Single Moms and Raise Another Man's Child
There is nothing wrong with raising another man's child (provided you have children of your own, or you're some sort of priest).
I mean, you can't keep track of everyone, but there is obviously a lot of overlap in the different rat-adjacent communities, so some names just stand out.
In this case, I guess it's a matter of knowing the context: Anonymous Coward -> Faceless Craven -> FCfromSSC
WhateverHappenedToNorman
16d ago
And then people wonder how Superman gets away with putting on a pair of glasses.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
16d ago
more than almost all violent criminals, rapists, homeless psychopaths and others who are an actual threat to civilized society. High sentences for “white collar crime” are just a way to try and manipulate the demographics of the prison population and make leftists who hate rich people happy.
This seems like conflating two things:
- Rapists, robbers and other riff-raff should have longer/equally long sentences than white collar criminals
- Long sentences for white collar crime are, essentially, virtue signaling.
I think most right thinking people would agree with the former, but I'm not sure what's the rationale for the latter.
Agreed on SBF, I buy the interpretation of the situation as "intentionally bad risk management intersected with unintentionally bad accounting", and while this does merit punishment, 25 years seems ridiculous. High profile cases like this and Shkreli's seem to end up influenced by some people just not liking the guys.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
17d ago
I don't think Pewdiepie deserves to be lumped in with these people. He was (maybe is? I have no idea) way more famous, and way less political, he just got targeted because he was non-woke in a then very liberal ecosystem.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
18d ago
I don't agree that very many jobs can be automated with today's technology. We may be close, but progress is already slowing down.
I think they can, not in the sense that you can automate away everything a single person does, but rather that you can automate part of what many people do, to the point that you can manage workloads with much smaller teams.
I think the reason that not that much of this automation is happening right now, is that fast progress in the technology means that you might be commiting a ton of capex into a system that might be "obsolete" in a couple of years.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
20d ago
Have you tried replacing Twitter with Substack Notes? It's clearly more bereft of content, and the algo isn't great, but at least I'm not getting a lot of porn in my feed.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
20d ago
I think this is simply a matter of watching being the price of admission for (productively) commenting. if you say "these new shows/movies are slop full of woke garbage", and your response to "well, have you seen them?" is "no", your argument loses a lot of weight, even if it's completely correct. As such, there is a complicated line to walk between "I don't want to waste my time with this" and "I don't want to cede this cultural battleground". The latter might sound unhinged, but if everyone refuses to engage, and the normie majority acquiesces as it is wont to do, then you end up in the state we've been for the last decade.
Harsh, but fair.
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