coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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23d ago
There’s an interesting study which found that “postponing a desire” reduces temptation more than swearing it off altogether. The postponing must be unspecific to be most effective: “I will enjoy this later”, without specifying a date. There are other studies that claim this result. The mechanism is in dispute but I think it has to do with the perception of scarcity and the belief that the enjoyment is easily obtained in abundance (just, later. Not right now.). If so this has lots of fun implications for culture. When Muslims say that the afterlife is filled with sensual enjoyment, are they raising up the sensual to heavenly heights, as is argued? Maybe not. If they believe that at some unspecified future time, they will get to enjoy as much wine and food and women as they want, then this may paradoxically reduce their desire for these things in the world: it isn’t scarce or urgent, it will be enjoyed in abundance, so no need to desire it so much. There may be implications for the reduction of casual sex too, where the emphasis should be less on “don’t do this pleasurable thing ever”, and more on “you get to enjoy as much sex as you want at an unspecified future date, so don’t worry about it now”.
I think there’s something to this. I mean, when companies want to induce desire they increase the perception of scarcity and rarity and urgency, so to reduce desire you decrease these as well.
coffee_enjoyer
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23d ago
It makes sense that Hamas members would be found working at the organization, as the org employs 13k Palestinians. This says nothing about UNRWA really, only about the nature of secretive political movements. Literally any organization that employs 13k in Palestine will have some of its members go on to collude with Hamas. A radicalization rate of 9 out of 13k is insignificant, and actually tells us they UNRWA does a good job vetting its employees. “0.007% of UNRWA were determined by the UN to be working with Hamas”is another way to put this. None of them in leadership position at UNRWA but just working as drivers or teachers. So this seems more like casus belli for cutting aid.
coffee_enjoyer
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24d ago
Rape fetishes usually involve implied consent. The “rapist” is the most attractive person in the erotica’s universe, and the protagonist usually knows that he would stop if she didn’t enjoy it. We should probably just stop calling it rape fetish altogether and call it dominance fetish or something. The phenomenon of the fetish is totally distinct from the real world phenomenon of rape.
coffee_enjoyer
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24d ago
It’s about creating a strong unconscious distaste for Trump by associating him with the most universally distasteful political “thing”. Its Cue->Response, pure animal psychology. My dog doesn’t leave the yard because she will get zapped; my sibling gets nauseous smelling cinnamon rolls because it reminds them of long car rides; the subject doesn’t vote for Trump because when his name is said by the TV the tone gets grim and they hear the word Hitler. I think that’s it. Vance weird, Trump Hitler, say it over thousands of trials across different contexts and it will stick. There’s no thinking required at all. How did Voldemort and the N-word become verboten? The same process: the word is said (cue), there is an immediate stimuli associated to it (response, the verbal response of others), this occurs over iterations until you are now afraid to utter the word.
But clearly some people really believe Trump is a Nazi
Truly believing Trump is Hitler would lead to the moral prerogative to commit illegal acts. Clearly, the vast majority of Dems do not believe he is Hitler, or even Hitler-lite, because they aren’t storing weapons and organizing resistance networks. “The resistance” political meme is like Star Wars cosplay, whereas if they really believed he was Hitlerly it would be like the IRA. You can draw a comparison to abortion. How many people really believe that abortion is murder? The same amount of people spending every weekend protesting it and being jailed in doing so. If the store down the street were massacring children by the dozens every month would you really be watching football on the weekends?
coffee_enjoyer
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24d ago
Young Latinos love KillTony and older Latinos from Puero Rico are probably critical of their home country. I doubt it changes their vote.
coffee_enjoyer
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24d ago
Well, do you think that Jeff Bezos would not have created Amazon if he didn’t expect to gain hundreds of billions of dollars? Do you think Bezos would not continue to run Amazon if a competitor popped up which reduced his profit by tens of billions of dollars? We would still have Amazon if we literally took billions of dollars from Bezos, so those billions are genuinely just wasted. Inefficiently allocated.
”People rationally decide things” is much better than “the whims of economic chance are magically right about how much profit the founder of Amazon should get”.
coffee_enjoyer
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24d ago
Tax deduction or credit to those earning less than 160k a year. Why not? I understand this is functionally just redistribution from wealthy to less, but if you call it a tariff more people will be supportive than “we are literally going to redistribute money now”. It has a nice conservative tinge. But also, this isn’t my steel-man of tariffs per the OP.
coffee_enjoyer
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24d ago
Which option are you talking about? I do not support a tariff where the revenue doesn’t go to those who have more use for the money. I don’t know the fine print of Trump’s “replace income tax with tariff plan”, but we can imagine a policy where the revenue of a tariff disproportionately benefits the lower through middle classes. Well, if everyone pays the tariff, and if wealthy people pay slightly more of the tariff because they import somewhat more goods, but if all the revenue goes to the lower and middle class, then the lower and middle class wind up having more money at the end of the day, implying that price increases pass on to all consumers equally and no American industry develops.
Unless I’m misreading you, then this doesn’t have to do with % income spent on tariff at all, so it’s simply a case of imported red herring to talk about % of income going to the tariff. Everyone pays tariff, and that total money goes to lower/middle class. I would support that. If that is what you were asking.
But the policy I support is a tariff so high that American industry develops. This has all the benefits of the aforementioned with one key difference: we now see wages rise because there is more middle class employment opportunity and employers must pay more to recruit workers.
The excess consumption of the wealthy is largely in the form of luxury services (personal cleaners, drivers, chefs, accountants, lawyers, etc.) or housing
Sadly it’s also in wasteful vacations, multiple cars, rolexes, foreign alcohol, cocaine, ayuahuasca retreats, multiple homes, homes that are too big, private jets and yachts, superfluous degrees. If we apply pressure on their finances they are likely to keep the stuff from your list but get rid of the truly crazy amount of inefficient resource waste from my list.
where most people are just unwilling/unable to buy that good any more
Before that happens the profit margin would evaporate, with the businesses owned by billionaires forced to cut into their profit margin.
coffee_enjoyer
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24d ago
I think so, yes, you need the tariff to be so high that it promotes American industry. Otherwise it depends what you do with the tariff revenue. If everyone pays the tariff but the revenue goes to the middle class, then it’s just a tax on wealthy people really.
coffee_enjoyer
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24d ago
I am alleging that this will increase purchasing power.
There is enormous economic efficiency in America because the super-wealthy have resources that they waste frivolously, when these resources would be better allocated to the lower-middle, middle, and upper-middle classes. These super wealthy people make money by selling people stuff made overseas. If you make them pay money to import their overseas stuff, they have two options: (1) reduce their profits and make their business more efficient; (2) attempt to raise the cost of their items. If they do (2), then things made in America can compete against them, which is great for all Americans but the super-wealthy, because your job’s wages are set according to the number of wage-competitive jobs available to you and your peers. Increasing the number of competitive middle class jobs increases all wages of the middle class, as well as the workers’ quality of life. Additionally, there’s a ceiling for the pricing of a lot of overseas items, because if a company like Nike prices them too high, fewer people will buy them and more will buy competitors. This means Nike, Nespresso, Shein, Temu, Alibaba, IKEA, and other sorts of businesses are not actually able to raise their prices in proportion to the tariff. Once their price is too high, people opt for a lower-cost competitor. Fast food is similar. We could tax the heck out of McDonald’s and they could never raise prices proportionately because once it reaches a certain high people will make their own food.
Be wary of talk about “economic efficiency”. If profits go to people who don’t need them then those profits don’t matter.
coffee_enjoyer
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25d ago
Torba is an OG alt-right influencer, founded Gab and is openly anti-Semitic. He’s like a slightly more refined Nick Fuentes. Chris Brunet is a former conservative think tanker who is now talking about too much Jewish influence at conservative think tanks.
Jared is, of course, orthodox Jewish, and he also has a hand in picking Trump’s cabinet, so that he followed these accounts around the same time is bizarre.
coffee_enjoyer
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25d ago
Why did Jared Kushner start following Andrew Torba and Chris Brunet on Twitter? Any theories?
coffee_enjoyer
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25d ago
Joe asked Trump how he felt when he entered the White House on his first day. Trump tells a story about seeing the Lincoln Room and having the reality of the presidency set in. He saw all the details of Lincoln’s real life, like the bed that was custom-made because he was too tall, and the small photo he kept of his son who tragically died. Lincoln was no longer a mythical figure but a real person, who lived in this real room, occupying the same job as himself.
I guess this is rambling but at what point is rambling just good story-telling? I mean, Homer rambled. Trump talks like a wise old East Coast relative who has lots of good stories. I also think there’s an element of Irish American conversational style he inherited from his mother’s side. Trump’s mom was born in the Outer Hebrides in a Gaelic speaking household, people forget this.
coffee_enjoyer
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27d ago
If they can be persuaded that what the founders intended precluded the children of non citizen fathers, then maybe all of them, why not?
coffee_enjoyer
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27d ago
The viable plan to ending birthright citizenship is to reexamine the legal definition of natural born citizen in light of earlier British jurisprudence which, in some cases, mentiins that the father must also be a natural born citizen. This is the kind of originalist legal argumentation that we find among Heritage Foundation guys and their SC picks.
We can do that, and then we can just restrict how many people can come in. Do a pregnancy test on women who come in. Lots of simple stuff. This issue is a failure of political will, not political thought.
coffee_enjoyer
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27d ago
“your town is unpopular” may mean that the quality of life of your family is negatively affected, as there is fewer investment in your town. It may also mean you’re individually doing something wrong, because you could be part of the problem of your town. But this doesn’t apply cross-nationally. Countries that are regionally unpopular (Israel) may still have high QoL. It’s only an issue if their safety is affected, which is distinct from whether the proles of Honduras have a distaste for your country.
coffee_enjoyer
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27d ago
Why would you consider voting for him if he 100% ended illegal immigration, but not if he merely increased the chance of ending it? This applies to your other issue (ending war in Ukraine).
coffee_enjoyer
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27d ago
epically fuck up what's left of America's standing in the world.
I don’t get this. I’ve heard people repeat it a lot. People respect and like countries that have a high quality of life. They want to move to countries that have high earnings potential and safety. They also like cultural products. America’s cultural products aren’t going away, so what we are left with is QoL, earnings, and safety. Is the candidate who supports DEI and more immigration going to increase QoL and safety?
But also, why the hell would you even care about what someone in Kurdistan, or China, or Bangladesh thinks about you? During the Cold War, much of the world hated America for propaganda reasons, and who cares? Lots of the Middle East hated us because of our wars, and yet… it doesn’t matter. I don’t think people should care about how “popular” their country is on the world stage. We should care about how popular it is among our citizens, which would involve not incessantly telling about racism, slavery, and oppressive institutions.
coffee_enjoyer
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27d ago
Which candidate is mostly like to effect the end result of deporting aliens? The one who talks about how terrible mass migration is, or the child-of-immigrants who celebrates indigenous peoples’ day by talking about how America was founded on genocide?
If you genuinely care about effecting an end to illegal migration, then there’s an obligation to vote for whoever moves the needle on effecting that change. Trump didn’t succeed in building a border wall but he did smash the borders of acceptable speech on illegal migration.
coffee_enjoyer
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27d ago
If you’re increasing everyone’s skill across the board then you haven’t made any domain more competitive. It would just be that everyone you come across is more competent. There would be the same amount of competitive within an industry, though it would definitely be harder to break into an industry in adulthood.
coffee_enjoyer
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28d ago
Hereditary profession is not quite the same thing as nepotism, at least that’s not how I took it. Hereditary profession could mean that a lawyer purposefully raises a lawyer and a composer a composer, and that this is expected; nepotism means that a lawyer hires and promotes his kin who are lawyers, and a doctor his kin. My proposal doesn’t entail anything about nepotism, but it would involve an element of hereditary influence on profession. I think 1 in 5 American physicians are children of physicians, and there are 3.5 physicians per 1000 Americans, so clearly the children of doctors are influenced to be doctors.
Doing anything to the exclusion of everything else is "unnatural." That includes mathematics. We don't know how those things would go because we haven't tried them
I don’t follow. Many people in history did one task repetitively for hours on end, eg farming or weaving or milling or fishing. We have cases of people focusing on one skill and they improve in that skill. They might nominally be in school, but they attend special schools that are online and not taxing. So we know that Magnus would spends hours a day on chess. We know pianists spend hours a day on piano. We know marathon runners spend hours a day running. Faker, the best strategy gamer, spent 10-15 hours per day practicing. So it’s been abundantly tried, and the results show that the more practice the greater the result. (With the right kind of practice, and with rest, and with diminishing returns).
if you want to take your kids and move to the Adirondacks and force them to learn math every day for hours from age five
How about you just place your kid in fun math contexts for 3 hours a day, and then an hour a day of challenging practice, and then the rest is for enjoying life and maybe some exercise? They will be better at math and they will have more free time. They won’t know about ovaries, orangutans, Ontario or Othello, but they will be better at math than anything else you could do. If they want to read a good book, they ask someone. If they want to know the capitol of California, they look it up. Seems perfect to me, just requires each specialist human to trust the other specialist humans. Adirondacks sound nice though. He can go there on vacation with the time and money he has saved up from not knowing about colonial period.
we certainly shouldn't be trying to specialize everyone in the world
Well you haven’t really shown why that is so certain. If my beloved friend is a trucker, I know that specializing in trucking at an early age will be better for his health, reduce accidents, reduce stress, and increase his earnings. I can’t think of a line of work that wouldn’t be aided by specialization.
coffee_enjoyer
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28d ago
I was just reading about a woman who loved novels and wanted to be writer but was pressured into going to an elite school for mathematics. That was Maryam Mirzakhani —
Maryam was not particularly interested in mathematics as a child (although she noticed that she could solve the homework problems of her older siblings quite easily). Her passion was reading novels, and her dream was to become a writer. Things changed when she moved on to middle school […] A specialized Farzanegan middle school for girls gifted in mathematics was opened in Tehran, and Maryam enrolled. She was initially taken aback by the steep jump in difficulty. Her first year was not great. But she persevered and realized that she could make fast progress when she made an effort.
The problem with whim is that it’s whimsical. For every person who ignores their passion and regrets it, there’s one or more who ignored their passion and thanks God for it. For every person who wishes they continued trying to be a famous actress, there’s a person who curses their life that they focused on something they aren’t good at, and there’s someone who loves their life because their parents told them not to be naive about an acting career. For every “society has gained a good mathematician, but has lost a great writer”, there’s “society has gained a mediocre writer, but has lost a universally important mathematician”. In college I knew someone who wanted to be a personal trainer. He studied for four years, and after graduating he suddenly hated it. I met him when he returned to do a new four-year degree as a computer science student.
we corral every child into is exposing them to various activities so they can make this choice for themselves
This does not take the thousands of hours of training we administer. This takes, like, three hours per subject. And I support that. Kids should try lots of things to find what they are good at and what they really like. And then they should attempt to balance the two. IMO it’s better to look what one is good at, find what is bearable, and then see if you can’t find enjoyment from it. If there’s still no enjoyment, then they should make a switch. But there are so many people in the world who enjoy making music but are terrible at it, and then there are excellent performers who actually dislike performing. There are writers who hate writing, then there’s a shitty novella published every hour by someone who should just work at a library. Life is weird.
coffee_enjoyer
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28d ago
I think chess requires creativity. But if business requires exceptional creative cross-domain understanding, then that “cross-domain understanding” should be included in the specialization training. It’s not every domain which enhances business aptitude, right? It’s unlikely that knowing Shakespeare, the hormonal cycle, and dinosaurs will enhance your business aptitude. Steve Jobs was exceptional because he took design philosophy and applied it to technology, but that’s actually hardly an everyman type of knowledge, it’s the conjunction of two skills which he mastered. He didn’t need to know about early American history, and it would even have been better if he read less eastern spirituality (resulting in his untimely demise through woo woo dieting).
The free exercise of religion is thwarted when the state mandates that you cannot exercise religion in public school, because the exercise of religion necessitates regular practice and study, and this necessity conflicts with the time schedule and obligations of secular education. 8am to 3pm every day of the workweek, with extra-curriculars extending that to 5pm, effectively abolishes religion if religion is not included in the classroom. A good solution is to allow the taxes of religious people to go towards their own religious education which is to take place in public or private school. The “separation of church and state” is a succinct phrase which helps explain why the free exercise of religion can’t be prohibited, but it shouldn’t be misunderstood to mean that the state prohibits religious activity in state facilities — if anything it means that it must allow all kinds of religious activity in state facilities. This includes religious activity in schools.
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