Zephyr
13hr ago
Sabriel (and Liriel/Abhorsen) were really good books - I stayed up way too late reading Sabriel when it first came out, and the scene in the reservoir was so creepy that I didn’t get any sleep at all that night.
Zephyr
17hr ago
There is a saying that men are the more romantic sex, masquerading as the more pragmatic one, while women are the more pragmatic sex, masquerading as the more romantic one.
From speaking with my female friends, vs my male ones, there are dramatic differences in how they talk about their partners/potential partners. My female friends, specifically, tend to literally talk about how much the man makes, how good of a partner he appears to be (as in, if they were out in public, how well would he make them look), and how high status he is (expressed as what would their parents/friends think about him); whereas my male friends tend to be a lot more about how their partner makes them feel (some of which is appearance, but it also includes things like how she thinks about them, or does them little favours, etc). A book I read by a female author (The Black Magician, by Trudi Canavan) had a line in it that was something like "People in the slums tried to find a man who could provide, but often married for love instead" (in the context it was in, it was presented as a contrast to the well off people in the city, who married specifically for providers).
Actually, come to think about it (and it's a little bit of a tangent), one of the things I've noticed from reading a number of books is that you can always tell from how the romance is presented whether it was a female or male author, even if the rest of the book passes fairly well for either gender of writer. Off the top of my head:
- Male writers tend much more towards smaller age gaps between men and women, and try to avoid power differentials; female writers definitely do not. It is extremely rare for a male author to have a male character date his students, proteges, trainees, etc. - whereas I'd almost say it's the reverse for female writers. There was a period of time in the fantasy genre where every single book being written was "male assassin trains younger man, and ends up dating him" - which were all written by women. There's a series by Tamora Pierce in which the main character is raised by a man in his twenties, and when she's 16 ends up dating him which seriously squicked me out when I read it.
- Male writers often have the man doing all of the work to set up the relationship - with women it tends to range from the woman being actively seductive (see Tamora Pierce, above), to being closer to equals (Robin Hobb has this with Fitz and Molly in Assassin's Apprentice). Even in examples written by male authors where the woman is much more seductive in nature (I'm thinking here of Shade's Children, by Garth Nix), the actual 'event' tends to have the male character taking more of the lead.
(I do realize all the books I mentioned above are both YA and fantasy - I'm trying to maintain a tiny bit of opsec here, even if I've basically given everyone enough info to identify who I am with even a trivial amount of work).
Zephyr
1d ago
So the reasoning behind it in my eyes is that the government keeps doing things that (almost) no one wants. Like, I don't doubt it's popular with the actual people in office, but most people would be very happy to cut off a large amount of foreign aid (especially to Israel).
Up here in Canada, we had a recent bill (C-12 I believe, but it may be C-2) which was basically "close down the borders, but also give warrantless search powers to cops." Our most recent budget included lines that basically said "our government can arbitrarily exempt any business it wants from following the laws." I think a bit of stalemate when the government tries to spend money is a good thing.
Zephyr
2d ago
I will admit, I've wondered before about the feasibility of making the people into the "fourth house" of government. I feel like introducing an app where the people get a veto on all bills, budgets, etc. and make the margin for blocking a flat 50% of those who vote on the bill. I guess the major problem is that it introduces a bias to inaction, but I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing.
Zephyr
2d ago
One thing that’s important to remember, and that I feel a lot of people don’t remember, is that governments don’t fund anything - they direct funds towards other people. Taxpayers fund things.
You don’t want the government to spend money on social welfare - you want your fellow Americans to do so. Unfortunately, a large portion of your fellow taxpayers feel like they are footing the bill for the destruction of their lifestyles. They feel that the spending is both excessive and directly against their interests.
Social welfare has always been something the right wishes to reduce - mostly because social welfare is too indiscriminate towards those it helps. Many taxpayers don’t want to spend money helping an unrepentant fuckup, but would be fine donating it to someone who is down on their luck. The government being in charge of distribution removes this discretion, and (considering both this story and the story of FEMA workers refusing to assist Trump voters) actively works against their intuition of who needs help.
Zephyr
3d ago
I really dislike the trend of companies playing around with sick and vacation days to force more work out of people - this and unlimited* vacation days are both horrible policies.
*if your supervisor approves them, which they coincidentally will not because more vacation makes them look bad to their supervisors.
Zephyr
3d ago
So apparently, according to a random article I read a while back, testosterone does increase the severity of illness (I’m on my phone or I’d dig up the citation). For the record, no one in my family except my brother gets super sick (minus migraines, which everyone but my father and sister get).
Zephyr
6d ago
GDP doesn't just measure goods and services produced in an area, it measures imaginary fabrications as well, without regard for the desirability and quality of the activity in question.
An old joke: Two economists are walking in the forest, when they come across a pile of dog shit. The first offers the second $1000 to eat it, which he does. They continue, and encounter another pile of dog shit. This time, the second offers the first $1000 to eat it, which he does. The first says "You know, we're back where we started, but we've both eaten shit. I can't help but think that we didn't do anything of value." The second replies "That's not true - we increased GDP by $2000."
Zephyr
7d ago
There's a few other possibilities to explain it too:
- Some stuff is cheaper, some stuff is more expensive; if the more expensive stuff is essentials, but the cheaper stuff is everything else, people can feel squeezed by the economy without actually being squeezed. (Picture a toy model where someone has $10, food costs $1, shelter costs $1, and consumer goods cost $4 each; if the costs of food + shelter go up to $2 apiece, and consumer goods go down to $2 apiece, each person can individually afford more consumer gifts, while still having less space in their budget for consumer gifts).
- People are able to substitute goods for cheaper substitutes, which means that their spending is relatively unimpeded, but they are accepting a lower return on each purchase they make. (So for example, maybe I used to buy steak at $4.00/lb. Steak is now $8.00/lb, but ground beef is $4.00/lb, so I now buy ground beef).
- Everything went up by a specific percentage, including wages; wage increases feel like a benefit of me working hard, while price increases feel like people trying to take more money from me. As a result, I feel like I'm not doing as well, because my hard work to get more money was invalidated by everything else becoming more pricey as a part of it.
- People have given up on certain staples like housing; as such, instead of saving for housing, they're spending the money they would be putting towards it towards consumer goods.
- Some demographics are spending way more, while others are spending way less.
Here's what I would assume would be observable in each case:
- Breakdowns of spending will reflect higher percentages of household income spent on housing and food than per usual. This would be disprovable if the percentage is similar.
- "Budget" companies have their share prices improve, while luxury companies start offering more budget goods. Companies that only offer luxuries start struggling.
- Average income goes up by a similar percentage basis to costs. This should be observable based on the fact that people have published stats on average income for many years, so I assume that someone somewhere is observing it.
- The boom in consumer spending is almost exclusively in luxuries; it would also die off in a few months to years, but that's probably indistinguishable from the natural flow of the economy.
- Spending is concentrated amongst goods that some portions of the population use. For example, if healthcare spending is way up, but bars are struggling, I'd consider this to be met.
Zephyr
7d ago
Bigger screens for watching videos. As phones become more and more of a computer replacement, the incentive to maximize screensize goes up.
Zephyr
8d ago
How do you feel about photographers? Are they not allowed to take credit for their photo, given a senor put all the pixels where they are?
They can absolutely take credit for their photograph - what they can't do is call themselves painters. If self_made_human wants to call himself a prompt engineer, I'm not going to stop him.
Zephyr
9d ago
Meanwhile trans women usually report the opposite and their mental health is improved from the exact same hormones. Weirder anecdotal reports are cis men complaining of brain fog from taking oestrogen, while trans women saying the hormones actually lifted their brain fog.
Would you mind providing a link to this study? I've heard the opposite from the recent controversy over the "mermaids" charity and Cass review, so I'd be interested to see the other perspective on it.
Zephyr
9d ago
"you have to actually read and rewrite the AI's output"
I think one of the issues is that people won't read the AI's output.
So earlier this year, I was applying for jobs - originally, I wrote each cover letter individually for each posting. This slowly made me suicidal, as spending 15-30 minutes per job application where I was unlikely to even hear back from the majority of them was soul destroying. The next thing I did was take a "template" cover letter, and swap out a few things (so like, in my "accomplishments" section, I'd rewrite it to emphasize the skills the job requested). This took around 5 minutes per job application, and was still soul destroying, because I still wasn't hearing back from very many jobs. So eventually I started pointing ChatGPT at the cover letters, and I promised that I'd rewrite it every single time.
Well, that lasted around 5 attempts until I basically got sick of it and started skimming. I went and took a look at some of the cover letters I "wrote", and about a third of them have obvious ChatGPT-isms like emdashes, that specific phrasing half-fawning phrasing that ChatGPT uses, etc. Thank god resumes were being read by LLMs too, or I'd never have gotten a new position.
Humans are lazy - they're going to take the path of least resistance every time. They'll claim that they read the whole thing, and for some definition of "read", they will have - but they'll be stuck with the LLM's phrasing and concepts.
Here's an example I fed into ChatGPT for rephrasing (my words first):
LLMs will introduce their own biases into the resultant writing. If everyone uses them, this will lead to less ideological diversity as every person will be essentially arguing as an AI, not as a human.
Because LLMs impose their own biases on generated text, universal use could erode ideological diversity, with people arguing through an AI lens instead of their own.
You can obviously tell that the concept is the same, but there are subtle differences in the meanings. If I were writing a larger text, I'd probably accept the AI text as "essentially the same thing" - but they're not. My text is much more emphatic about it being what will happen, whereas the LLM text is downplaying it. Multiply this by a much larger text, and you have an entirely different emphasis.
Zephyr
9d ago
Found the link, if you're curious:
https://www.themotte.org/post/2732/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/358520?context=8#context
The quote I was thinking of:
Boys (believe it or not): They won't admit it, but they'll watch. When their sister’s watching it, they'll balk and act like it’s dumb, then they'll sit down and watch it. For the same reason Moms will find My Little Pony interesting enough to happily share with their daughters, the compelling conflicts, the strong characterizations, the silly humor and (most importantly for boys) the ADVENTURE, the boys will watch, too. Really
Zephyr
9d ago
To be fair, mine was supposed to be a joke about how many men exaggerate their - let's call it "physical attributes" - upwards.
Also, they generally don't take female oriented IPs and change them to make them more attractive to a male audience.
I know you said "generally", but I seem to remember reading (probably here) that the My Little Pony phenomenon was due to them doing exactly that. I vaguely recall reading something that basically said that the way they'd designed it to appeal to young boys was by including a lot more adventure/hero's journey elements than are usually present in girl's media, and I explicitly remember them mentioning something along the lines of "we know boys won't go out of their way to watch it, but if it's on because their sister is watching it, we want them to watch it too."
Which plays a lot more into @The_Nybbler's point - it is definitely possible to make media that is intended for men, and extend the appeal to women as well without compromising what men like about it. Which implies that they are making it woke because that's what they want to do, not to expand their audience.
Zephyr
9d ago
Also height is pretty easy to lie about.
My conspiracy theory as to why there are more men in the trades than women is that women constantly hear a bunch of false measurements, so aren't able to eyeball it (after all, if you always hear that 2.5" is actually 6", and 5'8" is actually 6', then how are you going to place nails every 8")?
Zephyr
9d ago
Zephyr
10d ago
The issue is that the more you push policies that are "fuck you for not having a girlfriend" at young men, the more likely you are to get young men who choose violence. If a man can't afford housing, so can't actually end up in a stable enough situation to attract a partner and have kids, then there isn't a good reason to not just rebel against the entire system.
If we're going to punish men who don't have a partner more than not having a partner is a penalty in and of itself, we're going to disproportionately be punishing men who are more educated (quick googling shows that men who have higher education levels are more likely to be both unmarried and virgins).
Zephyr
11d ago
Yes, it's sleazy, but c'mon: you've been telling us for years that he's sleazy and corrupt.
This is almost more important than everything else - Trump being sleazy and corrupt is already priced into him as a candidate. If you provide more examples of it, the base is going to say “so what?” - they already know all this.
I would agree except that it’s exactly the opposite for female authors - like, another Trudi Canavan book (Priestess of the White) has the exact dynamic of young girl raised by an elderly man in her village, and ends up with him in the second book.
It’s just not something men think about putting in their books in the same way women do. It’s hard to describe the exact difference, but a while back, I read a bunch of books that ranged from “romance” to “kind of smutty” to “basically just pornography” by both male and female authors (with the goal of comparing and contrasting how men and women approach the genre). With male writers, a dynamic like that is more of a “sleep together once,” while with female authors, it’s presented as a healthy relationship.
Seriously, it is very very easy to tell - the male smut novels were honestly kind of hilarious in how they immediately presented exact measurements of every female character who appeared - the female ones were much more likely to focus on how well dressed or wealthy they were.
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