aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
5d ago
Are there any alternatives that fit current events better?
For a few years now I've been predicting the populist conspiracy theorist realignment where maga and the DSA left join up and the technocratic democrats absorb the never trump republicans. These rifts seem to be where roughly all the actual energy is. Of course I might be biased because I'm putting most of the people I most disagree with in one party that I can efficiently oppose.
aqouta
5d ago
Uh, you can in my experience roll your eyes at the up the chain authorities when they're being unreasonable or making bad choices. I think some people take the office space metaphor too literally, in reality your boss himself can be in the same circle of people rolling their eyes at people up the chain. There is a balance of contempt you should have for the "When I wake up in the morning, I first think of how I can best generate shareholder value" mindset but there is also an understanding you have to have to have that, whatever dumb stuff they want you to do, they are paying you and you need to give like at least a 60% effort. People who get this balance wrong mostly make their coworkers miserable more than any "the man" that they rage against then their coworkers don't really want to share in their laughing at the higher ups circles. Also the 90s era boss hatred bred a generation of "cool bosses who are on your side" that were lame but then found synthesis in a "we're all in this together" attitude that is usually actually pretty decent. Of course this depends a lot on where exactly you end up.
aqouta
5d ago
according to a quick check Grindr does indeed have age verification, they ask you for your birthday when you join and check if it pegs you as at least the legal age of your region.
aqouta
6d ago
THIS IS WHY AGE VERIFICATION ON SEX/PORN SITES YOU MAROONS YOU MAY NOT LIKE IT BUT THIS IS THE HELL WHY.
Age verification on sex/porn sites doesn't do anything, that stuff is hilariously trivial to circumvent. Like you might as well try to ban drug by requiring people to say "I promise not to do drugs in here" every time they enter any building.
aqouta
9d ago
Did anyone actually believe this though? The Smollet case was notable for being so obviously wrong and there being many people who fell for it.
aqouta
10d ago
Why they thought this would be in their interest is anyone’s guess.
Depending on who "they" is. If it was your job to report on crime and there was a group of people who would hound you if you included the race when it was embarrassing to racial minorities and another group that would hound you if you excluded the race when it was embarrassing to racial minorities then removing your discretion is a strict improvement to your wellbeing.
aqouta
11d ago
I do want to object to the idea that athletes are necessarily jocks and not outcasts. As someone who did lots of sports growing up you get all sorts on the field and the asshole QB of 90s movies never really struck true in my experience.
aqouta
11d ago
If you know the rate of the complication and the cost change then a simple financial insurance product could normalize that cost.
I am the furthest thing from a socialist but I really do think medicine is one industry where our system just doesn't work. We don't have the stomach to let an actual insurance industry that can accurately price risk exist and exclude the sick poor and because we don't have that stomach we must have a universal insurance program and if we are to have a universal insurance program then that program will be a monopoly and the government is the least bad option to run that monopoly.
edit: as we're all airing our grievances with the medical system I had a new issue I haven't had before this year. Anticipating pregnancy related expenses this year I set up a healthcare spending account that got $150/pay period that I could spend tax free. No pregnancy and so minimal expenses and the money doesn't roll over. So I've got something like three grand that will just poof into nothing in a few months if I can't find something medical related to spend money on.
aqouta
14d ago
Yes, no one wanted them to keep those weapons, and yet giving them up seems an obvious mistake in hindsight.
aqouta
17d ago
Yudkowsky's Harry Potter reads like an MIT freshman, or maybe a dorky high school senior. He does not think or act like a child. Draco talks frankly about rape in his introduction.
I mean yeah, I don't think the idea of HPATMOR was that is was supposed to be a realistic protrayal of children. It was a vehicle for delivering Yud's philosophy. I found it grating myself but not really for this reason.
aqouta
17d ago
Perhaps an embarrassing fact about me: I listened to Harry Potter almost every single night from the ages of 8 to 18. I probably got through the series about once a year. This has given me almost no material advantages in my life, other than providing a very convenient series that I can use to supercharge my language learning.
This is actually nearly true of me as well actually. had them on tapes and fell asleep to them.
aqouta
17d ago
I think it's instructive that the debate has already baked in "coerce" and "means of reproduction and little else," though, which feel like complete non sequiturs. If women increasingly delay childbearing through (imho entirely reasonable) economic anxiety and difficulties finding a suitable partner, it's weird that people jump to "so dumb 'em down and marry 'em off by force, or if you don't want to, guess we'll just have to replace all y'all hoes with robot uteruses," rather than, you know, making it easier for moms to return to the workforce after staying at home through toddler years, or figuring out why young men are under-socialized, undermotivated and underpaid, or whatever.
Is it not possible that the fact that you think these are the bounds of the debate is the result of negative polarization in a world where practically everyone who has heard of the problem has spitballed their own cause and solution? People retweet the most ghoulish posts by their outgroup back to their ingroup, not the reasonable proposals.
aqouta
17d ago
Organisms that can adapt to their environment will reproduce. Those that can't will die off. So it always has been, so it always will be.
When the organism is a society the means of adaption is memetic. The ability to struggle about the birthrate and find a solution is fitness. Societal conversations and self correction isn't socialism, it's a much older thing that's at least as old as religion. I'm perplexed why you seem to want to bring socialism vs capitalism into the conversation, even by your loose definition of socialism here as when the government does things socialists do not have a better track record on birthrates and your remedy of evolution is not kind to their societies.
aqouta
17d ago
Honestly I think it's your definition of discrimination that is invalid, you seem to think it must have a negative connotation. A discriminating taste means you choose well what to include and exclude. Discrimination isn't inherently bad and you seem to reflexively think it is likely because you've internalized some progressive dogma.
My skepticism about what's going on with the trans phenomenon doesn't really depend on detransitioners as much as other skeptics tend to but this fits well within my model of things. The piece uses the term "identity" 33 times and I think defining that term is at the heart of this whole thing. Identity has a few factors and all importantly interact with what trans even is.
Rule in criteria: This is the most discussed one on this topic for obvious reasons. The whole point of much of the debate is what should be the rule in criteria of the identities man/woman. Which naughty bits you have is the traditional criteria but some want to identify with these identities that would be excluded by this criteria. But that isn't the only identity being discussed here. There is the general LGBTQIA++ bucket that practically everyone involved in any way in this study claims membership to. There is the identity of trans or TGD itself. I think the stickiness of these markers and the fear someone who went whole hog into trans identity would fear losing access to them and the community surrounding them is a big part of the dynamic at play. Being ruled out hurts especially to an identity that you had at one point held on to tightly.
Malleability: This is heavily contested and in the linked post referred to as fluidity. There isn't general agreement on the trans affirming side of the fence on whether gender is actually malleable. The medicalists claim the existence of a real fact of the matter that is gender where if your body deviates from it you should to experience gender dysphoria which acts as proof that your body is the problem to be corrected. Another, seemingly more dominant with LGBTQIA++ circles, sees gender as a kind of basic expression. The binary can and should be queered. If you were born a male but think the truest expression of your inner light is to identify and present as a bearded woman with bolt on tits and any other random assortment of gendered markers then that's what you are and people should respect it.
To the unmalleable medicalist detransitioning is troubling, you have a person who seems to have felt dysphoria with their birth sex and transitioned but found the grass was not in fact greener on the other side. The only thing you have to work with is this idea of gender dysphoria so it being able to lead you astray is terrifying. Because we're all only blessed with one perspective and can't directly compare experiences of things like gender dysphoria to find out if that person just had a bad understanding of what gender dysphoria is then from the perspective of a rational person who feels what they believe to be gender dysphoria what are you to take from the existence of people who claim to have tried what you are considering and report it didn't work or in fact was quite bad? Could the people reporting a happy transition be subject to the sunk cost fallacy and in a counterfactual world where they hadn't transitioned and learned to live with their birth gender they might be even happier? There's genuinely no way to know. But there wouldn't be a way to know if there weren't any detransitioners either, detransitioners are just evidence.
The gender queer people can handle the existence of detransitioners more easily. They were always of the opinion that gender can change and if some people went a little too far then that's fine, that's life.
Salience: Salience is how tightly bound up your self conception is in an identity. Two people born in the same city in Texas, one might bind tightly to the identity of a Texan, attend rodeos, wear a cowboy hat/boots and exaggerate their accent, the other might act indistinguishably from what one might expect from a midwesterner. Both are by rule in criteria Texans but one holds the identity much more tightly. The low salience Texan might move to Chicago and feel no real loss, the high salience Texan might refuse to even visit other, inferior, states. People can bind to identities with a wide variance of salience depending on circumstance and nothing seems to encourage tight binding more than opposition. As a young kid I once bound my identity up with not liking a certain type of food in response to my parents attempting to make me eat it. It seemed genuinely important to preteen-aqouta that I wasn't the sort of person who ate cheese burgers - cringe I know.
So another element to the trans question is how salient should your sex and gender really be to your identity? Trans activism seems caught up in raising the salience of gender, many of their detractors would like to lower the salience of gender. Detransitioning seems like a kind of crisis in the salience of gender in an individual. This can be very hard on a person, especially if they perceive the identity to be besieged and that losing the salience of that identity would give the hated enemy ammunition. I don't think this conflict happens consciously in most people.
Conclusion: So what should those of us on the outside think of the existence of these different types of detransitioners? It's hard to say. If we could be confident that there is such a thing as hard gender dysphoria then we should advocate for better screening of people who were led to believe they have it but don't really. But false positives are probably unavoidable. We should recognize that this same identity formation dynamic happens in many other areas of life, that it's confusing particularly from the first person and hopefully we can extend grace to people living through that confusion.
aqouta
19d ago
I guess I have this strange idea that if you have a very well researched argument for a position that you support, then you ought to release it to convince people. Apparently this is silly?
There's a type error here I think. When you're doing this kind of well researched work it's to make a bill that works well. It'd be like advertising a piece of software based on how the codebase is organized. At best you'd advertise it as faster or reliable. Public debate is on a whole different level of analysis. An effort post on a policy wonk subject will have the policy wonk providing both the argument and any nuanced pushback because the proponents are just going to ooh and ah and detractors object to the whole project no matter its design.
A policy wonk might have an advantage in a debate about whether their policy should be implemented because they can effectively rebut incorrect characterizations of it but that's a small part of debate, especially in a place like this where many/most disagreements are much much more broad than what the best way to deal with tax capacity of ITC credit consuming firms.
aqouta
19d ago
You just seem to have this strange idea about how politics works or is discussed in public. You are demanding the output of like lobbying firms, the groups that produce huge detailed reports for legislation but you want it to occupy the space of policy debate forums. It doesn't make any sense. Making the detailed plan about which specific regulations to cut/modify or how tax credits programs should be designed happens after you have some agreement what your goal and what the problem is. This debate happens amongst groups of analysts and lawyers employed in think tanks or lobbying firms where agreement on these topics have already been reached.
The discussions in these places are on topics like how the ITC tax credits inducing renewable energy build out by large banks have mostly been successful in getting renewable energy built out but there is a problem where these banks reach a tax capacity where they can't consume any more tax credits because their tax burden isn't high enough. A few years back the concept of a tax credit transfer was introduced and is getting some uptake but because the developers and syndicators on these deals need a guarantee that someone will be buying the tax credits the transfers are hard to set up because the institutional investors need to find companies with big and importantly reliable tax burdens to buy the credits which are hard to sell even at 95 cents on the dollar. and on and on and on.
But very little of this discussion even really needs to hit the public that is still debating whether climate change is a fake Chinese hoax or whatever.
aqouta
19d ago
Back to your earlier point, I shouldn't need to pay you a bunch of money because Left Inc already has tens of billions of dollars slushing around ten thousand NGOs and Think Tanks, and I very much notice that all of that produces approximately nothing that anyone wants to point to as a rigorous policy wonk argument.
Why would they even need to though? We can't even get the Jones act repealed which is straightforwardly and obviously harmful. What is a long detailed report, which I'm sure does exist written by lobbying consultants and never posted publicly because no one would read them, going to do if we can't even get the "don't even use your ridiculously efficient internal waterways for shipping so that a handful of special interest companies and unions can rent seek" act taken down?
Our problems aren't usually about what a rational governing body would do, they're about politics, they're about handouts and elections. We know rent control doesn't work, we're going to do it anyways in new york, how much more abundance agenda ink should we spill pointlessly on the ground?
aqouta
19d ago
I feel pretty real. We could argue tariffs or whatever if you like but the conclusion that broad tariffs are terrible trade policy is pretty uncontroversial so it'd be kind of a boring discussion. Targeted tariffs can be defended but tariffing your industrial inputs while trying to encourage manufacturing is just indefensible. autarky is a child's understand of economy.
And funnily enough I can imagine almost any of the antagonists in that story thinking they're the Peter Gibbons of the office story.
We recently had a guy come through that we had to terminate. It started off with him pushing back in a way that we actually mostly appreciated. We got flagged because one of our functional accounts that manages our ssrs data source used a non rotating password and we needed to vault it. Turns out there is no firm approved way to integrate ssrs directly with our password vaults. The solution that came down and he was asked to implement was to write a program that would run in the server, pilfer the key and cycle them manually. He rightly pointed out that this violated the whole purpose of a password vault, and we were on his side pushing for an exception. But when the powers that be declined to give us that exception he couldn't just shrug with us and do what needed to be done. He started getting into arguments with higher ups and in general bad mouthing our department. I don't know the exact thing that pushed it over the line but I heard actual threats might have been involved and eventually his credentials were apprupted deactivated.
He too probably identified with Peter Gibbons and thought those of us who just went along were hapless automatons because we were willing to degrade ourselves by implementing bad practices to get off a corporate naughty list.
In real life your office is full of real people living real lives. They're not one dimensional characters from a 90s movie about atomization. Some of them probably do suck to work with, some even in the ways lampooned in office space or the office. If you get too caught up in role playing Peter Gibbons you probably can succeed but it's not likely to make you any happier than he was in the movie.
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