aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
7mo ago
Your mistake is comparing it to nuclear. It's not replacing nuclear. We don't build nuclear. It's replacing burning fossil fuels. As for why we're subsidizing them, even if they were slightly more profitable to run than fossil fuel plants the upfront capital needed to build them is high and if you want to put the foot on the gas to build out more asap then offering better returns is a good way to do that.
Now one can also push nuclear. I'm in favor of it and there was some stuff in the IRA to push in that direction but it seems to have shaken out that there wasn't enough.
aqouta
7mo ago
Claiming otherwise requires some sophisticated reasoning, like one that claims happiness or sexual satisfaction are of little value themselves, and only matter when done for in line with a greater purpose - in this case, marriage and having children. And since trans individuals imitate the appearance of sexuality without the fertility backing it, it's bad. I agree with something like that.
I think the cleaner reasoning is that the disease appears to be memeborne and validating the meme is part of its transmission. If the finger amputation thing catches on and 5% or more people start getting their fingers cut off then there is a real cost. The hidden cost in the treatment, especially the social aspects of the treatment, is that you're spreading the infectious meme. If people only develop the illness internally then sure, a case can be made for treating it it individually. But it's rather like approaching the flu as if it were a nontransmissible issue caused by an unfortunate accident at birth and encouraging people to hug and kiss people with the flu to show that we're all sorry for them.
BTW, thrilled to see whether you and the other people who reply to this will actually watch that video I linked earlier in this comment, or will offer some excuse not to.
We're here to have actual discussions, a multi-hour long video that can't continence objections is not at all what this place is about. If there is a smoking gun it can be shown with a single link and doesn't need three costume changes to express.
Linking a contrapoints video is not evidence, it's pointing to a whole different interlocutor.
aqouta
7mo ago
Did you overlook when I said I don't hold these beliefs? I don't want to go into detail on any of these individual critiques because 1) it's out of scope for pointing out that the original person I was responding to was totally failing to model their theory of mind and 2) there are several different groups of trans activists that would approach each of these critiques from a different perspective. A "born in the wrong body" explanation can cleanly tell you what a fluxberry is and define it but that definition is going to be pretty different to someone who sees gender as some kind of a fluid thing. I don't hold any one of these sets of beliefs so I don't have an affinity for one or the other and am not very interested in litigated them out.
aqouta
7mo ago
The above poster had a clearly wrong understanding of what trans advocates believe if they think they can't justify the term 'trans kid', they can. Whether the rest of the world view is actually reasonable is a different question.
aqouta
7mo ago
they would be unwilling to clearly answer the question, "what are trans kids?" without getting evasive and yet protecting that category is a moral imperative.
I have as much of a bone to pick with the trans activists as the next skeptical guy here but you're failing the intellectual Turing test spectacularly if you don't know what their answer is. In most of their their worldviews(there are several different factions with different answers) there is an intrinsic 'trans' quality that some people are born with. Every trans adult was once a trans child. The 'trans' quality frequently causes kids great distress around puberty because a central element of the condition is feeling as though they should have the body of the opposite sex and puberty greatly exaggerates these differences. If all of this was true and we could without error identify trans people in their youth it naturally follows that we should intervene and try to alleviate this condition through puberty blockers and cross sex hormones or at the very least allowing them to adopt the social social habits of the opposite sex. They further think that trans people are frequent targets of bullies and harassment.
I happen to be skeptical about the whole concept of trans as a quality and even granting it doubtful at our ability to diagnose it reliably in youth but their position and reasons for taking the stances they do are not mysterious.
aqouta
7mo ago
I am totally sure that knocking down the Chesterton's Fence of no-fault divorce will totally not have any negative side effects. Not.
Chesterton's fence is a fence that it's not totally obvious what the reasoning for construction is. No fault divorce is a chesterton's well documented power line. One can very reasonably argue about what the line powers and the downstream implications but there is no doubt on the original motivations.
aqouta
7mo ago
I don't even see a plausible way that this advances liberty. It's just a spiting of my enemy to no gain. The closest I can come up with is that a taste of their own medicine might make the left wake up to what they've been doing. But I find that justification very weak. Why help them build the weapon of a tyrant? I know how it will be wielded.
aqouta
7mo ago
We've had a decade of widespread attacks on freedom of speech, including popular public repudiation of the concept's core validity.
And before that your faction was the defectors from my perspective, do not claim this high ground, you've not paid the cost when it was dear. You being the conservatives it's not important to me whether you, @FCfromSSC were one of those principled libertarians. It's enough that you'd oppose us now on the side of those who opposed us then.
If you are willing to accept one side censoring
I am not.
If you want to argue that we should cooperate to secure free speech for everyone, I note that I am part of "everyone", and eagerly await the lifting of the censorship against myself and my allies.
Ground has been reclaimed. We feast wantonly in the valley of twitter. How much of a mistake it would have been to give control to twitter over to the bureaucrats in order to spite the social justice crowd only for them to cement control forever through the deep state.
If you want to help the people censoring me to not be censored in turn, with no actual plan for ending their own censorship, I am going to oppose you, because this is a conflict and you appear to have picked a side.
If it must be so, but should my side lost the ratchet will turn and it will be your own doing.
aqouta
7mo ago
This combined with an easy excuse to find the outgroup dishonorable allows you quite a convenient relationship with when you are bound by honor.
outside of a few truly principled libertarian types
I tire of this parenthetical being deployed to avoid grappling with legitimate calls to defend liberty. Yes, it's clearly not the prime value for some of the bigger ideological movements today. But it's deployed because it still carries weight and its call should be answered regardless of what slime blows the horn.
aqouta
8mo ago
I think the argument makes sense when you considered like a choice offered to society. If in the 00s we were given a choice to preserve TV quality in amber but they'd steadily become cheaper to where they're $50 today or let the price stay relatively stable but the quality improve to where they are today with far larger and clearer screens and more features then I think most, but not all, people would probably pick the second option. So when there are complaints about how we didn't get the first option as well it kind of feels a little ungrateful for all the improvements we did get.
aqouta
8mo ago
Do this but multiply the number by like 10x. That'd at least give the income to attract the most talented people and leverage up the effect enough that they'd meaningfully feel an improvement.
aqouta
8mo ago
Us talking. To be clear I don't think it's true that our democracy is a sham, but that's a very large subject and if it's the difference of our beliefs I don't currently have the time or interest to crack it open. For the most part it seems to me like the electorate gets what a large majority wants and is willing to loudly hinge their votes on. If the demand and anger was there to destroy the equal outcome status quo then it would fall.
aqouta
8mo ago
Except, of course, they don't need to convince you it's reasonable, they just have to have convinced EEOC bureaucrats, judges, DEI departments, and so on, and they'll force it on everybody whether you agree or not.
This is all technicality. We still live in a democracy, these people serve at our collective pleasure. All sorts of things have been the law carried out as written, been unjust and overthrown. Step one is to defeat the idea in the public arena, the rest follows.
aqouta
8mo ago
No worries about a ping, it's good to have another context to continue from.
I think @RandomRanger drawing some conclusions from HBD that make sense if you add some other values like that society's purpose is to do something like maximize capabilities that I don't really hold, or at least don't strongly hold. You'll see they don't even mention race, this is just the Idiocracy argument.
It does seem like our heavy investments in educational interventions could at least be better spent even going to improve the lives to those they're trying to uplift if we were a little more realistic and separated out the most gifted students with impoverished backgrounds for tracks and gave the less talents of all races something like a comfortable life. It doesn't strike me as particularly compassionate to spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to teach less gifted students subjects that they aren't capable of. In fact that seems quite humiliating, it makes the failing more personal if we assume that they're capable but some personal failing is causing them to fall short. Those resources could go towards making sure they have adequate housing and that their neighborhoods are safe. There is no reason our less gifted can't lead dignified lives. I suspect that because of HBD those living dignified but not demanding lives will differ in racial proportions to those living impactful lives. I think it will probably have different proportions of red heads and heights as well for much the same reason.
As for @Capital_Room's longer post, I find it pretty unconvincing. Yes, I know that those people are obsessed with disparate outcomes. No, I don't think that this is reasonable justification for racial discrimination. It's just the argument for Harrison Bergeron given without candor.
aqouta
8mo ago
With all the shitcoin pump schemes it really wouldn't be difficult to have some coin, dogeMoonDiamondCoinbirdDog2Coin or something created by the paying party. the recipient buys it on a decentralized exchange, the paying party fakes a bunch of trades back and forth at a higher price point, then the recipient sells their shares. Is it a little suspicious that you got lucky and picked the right moonshot coin? Sure. But people get lucky. Especially if you are smart enough to also have picked a bunch of duds as well.
aqouta
8mo ago
In case you think this problem is more intractable than it is. If you just block/mute these accounts when you see them after maybe 5 rounds the flood slows to a trickle. It's really not a lot of accounts doing it.
aqouta
8mo ago
I know you don't go for the rationalist memeplex but falsifiability of beliefs predates yud and should be an exception. Is there truly nothing I could do or say that would convince you otherwise?
aqouta
8mo ago
You know what angle I never see brought up in the "gamers are up in arms about X or Y" events? Most people who spend many many hours playing games aren't playing the traditional boxed story games that everyone talks about. The best selling game of the year might move 15 million copies and take up 80 hours of the average buyer's time. Meanwhile 151 million people will play a game of league of legends in the average month. Final fantasy 14(an mmo) and World of Warcraft have 2.5 million and 2.2 million active subscribers. Most hours played by games are not spent on these story games and yet it's all that is ever really discussed.
aqouta
8mo ago
I think it's possible, but to the extent that such people exist I do not believe that they are posting about HBD, or complaining about "blank slatists" on theMotte.
I'm not sure I've ever seen the "you don't actually exist" argument deployed before.
aqouta
8mo ago
I'm tempted to go point by point but am on mobile today so I'll be brief. There needs to be a way to describe the truth value of HBD without the baggage of the vile hateful racists and you describing the vile worldview with a portmanteau containing the word is not helpful. We cannot be this afraid of the truth. It's beneath us.
I support an Investment bank department. To my understand analyst is more rank than role and can do a wide variety of things depending on the department. The group of analysts I work most closely with are looking at the developers that have successfully won bids to build low income housing for Low income housing tax credits. LIHTC pay out over like 10 years and developers don't want to be in the business of keeping assets on their books, they want to build and move on.
So the analysts I'm working with are trying to determine what a good deal with one of these developers would look like, Most basically we supply the capital and our org gets to put our name in the proper place that lets us get the tax credits but there are many different ways to go about it, and then bidding on those deals. In practice you have pricing analysts that try and find the best deal, usually with an eye for price per tax credit. There are underwriting analysts doing something close to building up pitch books for the deal, turning the data we get from the developer in a comprehensive document and looking into things that might impact occupancy like nearby crime rate and the kind of special needs populations that might be serviced in the area as well as the various guarantees and business stuff. There are risk analysts that I know less about and I believe to be looking at the whole portfolio to make sure we're looking good from a risk perspective.
AI isn't really threatening our department any more than us tech guys already are by building out tools to make the process more efficient. In the end of the day these deals have big dollar amounts of them and making labor more efficient probably wouldn't have us cut head count as much as make us willing to go after smaller deals that we currently don't think are worth the time it takes to underwrite them.
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