cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
6hr ago
Yeah all the steroids abuse by teen athletes seems like a natural experiment to look at. I'm not even sure steroids are as impactful as hormone therapy, but no one thinks steroids for kid athletes was good idea. The "medical" justification for both is kinda the same too, self hostage taking. "I'll be sad and kill myself if you don't let me take these drugs."
cjet79
6hr ago
It's partly that they flipped all the standards of evidence on their head.
Interventions were considered safe until proven otherwise. Masking young kids in school, widespread adoption of a novel medical treatment (MRNA "vaccines"), puberty blockers, etc.
Covid is basically a flu/cold virus. All intuitions about such things turned out to basically be correct. And there was good evidence that was true in 2020 but they spent nearly four more years dragging it on. Unless you were part of a BLM protest, and then things were fine.
Biology can often be weird and unintuitive I get that. But when it gets weird is when you need more evidence and research, not a political wall of silence saying "you are a bad person if you don't believe us".
I literally cannot imagine a non life threatening scenario where hormone therapies would be allowed for kids. Hormones are definitely one of those systems that we don't understand very well. We know that getting it wrong can even cause life threatening conditions. We correctly vilify anyone giving out steroids to teen athletes, this seems just as dangerous and permanent.
cjet79
9hr ago
This is one of the topics that really broke my trust with the medical 'experts', along with the covid stuff.
There are some basic common sense things to know about medicine and if someone is going to make a claim contradicting it they need to have a lot of evidence and some damn good explanations.
The idea that halting a major development milestone would be harmless breaks every bit of common sense about child health. The idea that infection with a sickness does not grant any kind of immunity is also insane.
cjet79
2d ago
You'll definitely love sublight drive. A bunch of parts in the first book go into explaining some of these ship differences that appear.
The separatists preference for missiles is because they don't have access to some of the high quality gas needed for better blaster weapons.
Some of the ships are specifically adapted from private usages which gives them unique advantages and disadvantages, like e-warfare capabilities, or badly armored locations.
Mostly neither side is on a war footing for production when the clone wars start, so there is a sense early on of throwing ships meant for fighting pirates against full on navies, and then later in the series those same ships are far less effective because manufacturing and fleet doctrine has caught up. But ultimately the core worlds have far more production capabilities so it feels a bit like the American Civil war where the north had advantages in manufacturing and manpower, and the south had advantages in experience.
cjet79
2d ago
Just slow role the 2000 pages and you'll hit the finish line by the time the last chapter comes out in a week. Or if your reading speed is not an excessive 300 pages a day then don't worry.
cjet79
3d ago
There are different degrees with different levels of capital formation vs signalling.
Even with technical degrees that seem very useful my experience and the experience of those I know is that half of it is useful to someone but 80-95% is still mostly useless to any individual because those careers require specialization.
The student loan program is mostly indiscriminate, and graduate and doctorate degrees are often funded in other ways.
cjet79
3d ago
That is a really cool post, thanks for sharing.
Can't say that this fanfiction totally follows along. There is something weird going on with the droids in the FF, buts it's never full elaborated on, and we are starting to get epilogues, so I assume it won't be clarified.
cjet79
3d ago
Sublight drive is a Star wars fan fiction. I started reading this based on a recommendation from either here or /r/rational. If it was here, thank you to whomever recommended it. Very enjoyable.
A person from earth is reincarnated in the star wars universe, and they are a ship captain with the separatists during the clone wars. The mc has some basic knowledge of star wars.
There is no boring lead up. It jumps right into the space opera action.
The characters are smart and facing very tough problems. But they are also not all perfectly intelligent. For example Jedi generals are often skilled in the force and have advantages that they use well, but they can often be outsmarted by other characters in fleet battles.
cjet79
4d ago
Sheepskin effects.
It's the finding that someone with 3.9 years of college education and no degree earns significantly less than someone with 4 years and a degree.
You don't have to ask anything of business. Just stop subsidizing a signalling game.
It's a bit like handing out stools at a concert so people can see over the crowd better. It's self defeating.
cjet79
4d ago
I think I like what @SSCReader said better.
And no I can't make any promises on moderation because someone will be obnoxious with it. There is a gradient from bad to good. Fed posting, and specific calls for violence are very much on the bad side. Trying to engage with people you disagree with, or at least targeting ideas rather than individuals is on the good side.
There are ways to make the bad side acceptable, I'm sure there is even a quality contribution that did it at some point. And vice versa there are ways to make the good side a bannable offense.
cjet79
4d ago
What's wrong with sight words?
I have a kindergarten age child. I am mostly happy with what she is learning in school, including some new math stuff and sight words.
The main reason I'm happy is that many of the concepts they teach are how I eventually learned to do things. But I learned them on my own after years of struggling to do it the "right" way and not making much progress.
Words like "the" simply don't make sense to "sound it out". In a logical phonetic alphabet, "th" would be a separate letter altogether since it represents a unique sound. So just teach it as a sight word, and memorize what those three letters together mean.
I don't have a specific example in mind with the math stuff, but it seemed similar when I went and looked at new math content. It's often teaching the shorthand that I had to figure out myself. The way they encouraged my generation to figure it out was to literally bury us in math problems. You either figured it out and math became easy, or you were labelled a 'struggling' student with potential ADHD because you didn't want to spend hours a day doing math problems the hard and slow way.
I do agree with your main point that the department of education sucks. I just think you would have seen adoption of some of these new teaching techniques without the department, since some of them are good.
cjet79
4d ago
Spelling out specific plans for violence puts us in a shit spot. It's very unlikely any of you carry out such plans, but if you were to and had posted about them what happens to the mods or other forum goers afterwards? Will victims sue us for not reporting it to the police?
Our solution is to not be put in the spot. Any expressions of preferences for violence puts us in this bind.
Expressing disgust towards people falls afoul of other rules like boo out group.
The rule compliant way to express things in both cases is "dont hate the player, hate the game".
"The progressive ideology has ruined libraries for me. It seems to ruin everything it touches. I wish the ideology was dead and buried with other past terrible ideas."
cjet79
5d ago
Pick out any decent books they haven't already destroyed, herd the board inside, bar the door, and torch the place.
I believe this is known as fed-posting.
leftist brain parasites
This isn't good for being boo out group.
You have been on thin ice. Normally I'd just make this a warning, but this needs to stop. One week ban.
cjet79
5d ago
Higher levels of education is only good if education is mostly capital formation. But if it is mostly signalling then it is doubly wasteful to subsidize it. From personal experience I'm inclined to think of it as mostly signalling, the econ literature apparently agrees with me.
cjet79
6d ago
If the college is going to reap the benefits of a lucrative degree program it might be incentivized to encourage them more.
A college that graduates a bunch of engineers that can go on to make 6 figure salaries is going to be better off than a college that creates a bunch of underemployed barristas.
With the way student loans currently work the university is getting the price of tuition and on campus amenities, and those costs are similar between different degrees. But the cost of teaching the more lucrative degrees is often more expensive, usually because professors that teach it have the option of better private industry jobs, so they command higher salaries at the university.
cjet79
6d ago
There are often problems that are made worse with more money.
There are generalizable circumstances that cause this to happen, and those circumstances often apply to government organizations but not exclusively to them.
- Principal agent problems. The money is being spent by an agent on behalf of someone else, and either due to conflicts of interest or lack of knowledge the money is spent in a way that actively harms the principal.
- Information gaps. The consumer and producer are not easily able to judge what is good spending vs bad spending in terms of solving the problem. This can cause money to be spent on costly or ineffective signalling items.
- Crowding out good money. A working market with a working and functioning incentive system can be thrown off by injections of cash from a misaligned actor. Producers go chasing the extra cash while not caring as much about the original consumer. And consumers do less research than they would if it was their own money being spent. This happens in medical insurance all the time.
I think student loans are actively harmful to many of the people involved.
I'd fix them by making them dischargeable in bankruptcies and making the university partially responsible for the debt in such cases. I'd leave parents off the loan. I'd maybe see them changed to loans where a percentage of post college income is owed. Right now they suffer from all of the above problems.
cjet79
15d ago
Trump voter and generally disappointed, especially with tariffs. It's not that any of his bad economic policies are a surprise. Its a bit of a toss up of whether he is worse than the alternative. The Democrats tend to have lots of dumb but relatively small impact bad economic policies. Trump just has the one big policy of tariffs that is very dumb.
cjet79
16d ago
I'm vaguely in favor of the death penalty, but not so much as a penalty.
It just seems that some humans are irredeemable and mentally broken enough that it seems like the only thing to do is to just remove them entirely.
If you had a tied up evil person (Hitler, Mao, Stalin, etc take your pick) and a gun in hand, what would you do?
For the punishment minded maybe they shoot the person in the gut and let him die a slow death over a week. I'd generally just shoot them in the head and be done with it.
If someone has personally wronged me I become all in favor of punishment. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite, but I feel that the emotional response is not a good guide for society wide policy.
cjet79
16d ago
Third kid arrived on Friday, little baby goblin. Slowly starting to look more like a baby girl instead. Still cute and makes my heart flutter holding her.
Just came home from the hospital. Babys two older sisters love and adore her already.
I'm doing my part to be above replacement rate for population growth.
cjet79
16d ago
Ya I find myself repeatedly drawn to games that have 30 minute to one hour play sessions. If they get much longer than that I have a good chance of dumping the game when real life forces me to quit in the middle of one of the long sections.
There is that old meme about gaming:
Young: you have skill and time but no money.
Adult: you have skill and money but no time.
Old: you have money and time, but crap skills.
I'm solidly in that adult phase right now. In many cases I've even downgraded to games that have 5-10 minute play sessions. Which often ends up being idle games, where I just check in on long running number counters and update a few things.
cjet79
19d ago
I don't think it is winning that matters as much as having a worthy opponent. Charles De Gaulle was pretty popular in France, despite the French getting their buts kicked during the war. Hitler took over Germany after experience in WWI where Germany lost.
War is one of the few areas where governments are stressed with competitive pressures. But not all wars are equal. Trying to stomp out an insurgency is different from fighting another world superpower.
A war between Russia and most of Europe would forge a military class in Europe with an ability to get things done. The current managerial and bureaucratic class that runs Europe at a lazy slow clip would end up being replaced or ousted over time, whatever rules of competition they setup in hopes of giving themselves an advantage they'd still get beaten. The average views of the people in charge would drift much closer to the views of veterans and officers from the conflict.
On the margin Europe is generally soft and a little socialist. I think they'd drift more towards hard and fascist. How much they'd drift in that direction would depend on the level of their involvement.
The costs of doing this seem horrific, I'd hope Europe and Russia don't get into a major war. It just seems predictable where things might go if they do, and it seems like the current political class would be bringing about their own future defeats.
Its important to remember that governments throughout history have always been controlled by those who wage war for them. Rome gave land and power to their soldiers. The feudal era was marked with feudal armies raised by lords and reliant on highly trained knights. The era of nationalism has been marked with a shift towards democracy and rule by the people, since it is large armies of men that won conflicts.
The World Wars and the wars since have been marked with the need for massive logistics and manufacturing capabilities. The Political-Managerial-Class has been in charge of and control of those resources, and they've taken political power. There is still a need for a tip of the spear that applies the weight of manufacturing upon the enemy. That tip of the spear has always been ground down into a fine meat paste for the last century. But the men willing to create that meat paste, and order around the unpasted meat are not a permanent class. The creation of that officer group will be what changes Europe, and the type of men that become in charge.
I'd also point out that just because someone is not a Veteran, doesn't mean they aren't representing those interests. Bad-mouthing veterans has been political suicide for as long as I have been alive. I think the Democrats have tended to rely more on military experience in their politicians just so they can field off accusations of "you hate veterans".
cjet79
19d ago
Domestic shipping is no longer essential, we made it that way through the Jones act. While every other form of transportation has gotten cheaper, faster, and more plentiful domestic shipping has gotten worse in all those ways.
In a counterfactual world where the Jones act never existed I'd bet that domestic shipping would look incredibly important. There are some very useful navigable waterways in the US and for the century or two prior to the Jones act they were absolutely essential to commerce.
However, we live in clown world reality, where a transportation method that has served humanity for millenia is denied to the US because of bad economic thinking.
cjet79
19d ago
I am against retaliatory tariffs. They are in fact shooting yourself in the foot.
1930s was the last time everyone went all in all retaliatory tariffs and it basically wrecked the world economy.
There are always economists in favor of bad ideas. They still can't even agree on the minimum wage.
What you'll find with economists that support bad economic policies is that they'll point to a paper or theory that justifies it in a very convoluted way. There are papers out there that justify minimum wage and tariffs, but they require a perfect set of market conditions and a government run exactly to the specifications of these same economists.
The most famous example of protective industrial policy in the US is the Jones act. It is stronger than a tariff because it represents an absolute ban on foreign products in certain categories. It has been a total failure. The US has instead just crippled its domestic shipping, impoverished its own people, and all it has to show for it is a sclerotic ship building industry.
Other countries like Brazil and India have also been trying to industrial policy themselves into success for a few decades. They've also only managed to further impoverish their people.
There is no cognitive dissonance. Just bad economic policy that we will trick ourselves into every few decades.
cjet79
20d ago
Most democracies integrate the soldiers into the government so it's not necessary.
US government agencies have preferential hiring of veterans. They have large bureaucratic organizations that hoover up former soldiers.
The other ones end up getting elected.
No where did I suggest they'd need to stage a coup.
From your conversation below. There is a difference between common sense medicine, and common sense applied to medicine. I am more talking about using common sense medicine. Things a practicing family doctor might take for granted after 30 years.
One of those common sense things is that a major medical intervention requires a set of good justifications:
There is a lot of elaboration and nuance for those points. But it feels like they were repeatedly violated for political reasons during the last decade. And it has drastically lowered my trust of medical authorities.
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