fluid_pride
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User ID: 621
fluid_pride
1yr ago
I remember that story, too, and I think it was in the post in which he talks about telling his patient to bring her hair drying with her on her morning commute. I want to say it was the post about whether you should reverse advice you hear?
fluid_pride
1yr ago
If you don't mind my asking, how exactly do you use ChatGPT? I mean, do you go to a website? Is it an app? Do you have to pay for it?
I'd like to try it out. Can you walk me through the steps to get it up and running? Or is this something I can easily search for using the typical search engines?
fluid_pride
1yr ago
In the past two years, every single time I or anyone in my family went to the doctor, we ended up with a bill months later, despite also paying something at checkout. It's ridiculous. If there is one Federal healthcare law I would support, it's "tell me exactly what this will cost upfront, just like my mechanic, and if you don't get the final bill correct as I'm paying during checkout, you can't bill me for the difference."
fluid_pride
1yr ago
The fucking President met with Dylan Mulvaney, on HD video, visible from the little clairvoyant in everyone's pocket. It's over.
Sure, and in 2083 this will get the same treatment as the "Democrats" in the KKK
(Byrd), and the ones who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the ones who voted to expand slavery into every new state at the 1860 Democratic Convention. To wit, "Those were actually Republicans."
fluid_pride
1yr ago
Allow me to introduce you to Letterkenney.
fluid_pride
1yr ago
I'm not sure that it's the socialist worldview that is so appealing as much as the fact that the people looking at alternatives are demonized as evil Nazis. Go look at imgur nowadays and you'll see the hivemind in action. 100% of non-progressive ideas are presented as evil with "the cruelty is the point" NPC comments updooting each other. Lefty tweets are presented as indisputable facts. To people in that bubble, it must look like only the progressive left is even trying to be compassionate and solve the problem and that everyone who isn't on the progressive left just loves oppressing black and brown bodies for fun and profit. Because of that, I'm not even sure that the people you're describing would even call their own thinking a "socialist worldview." From their perspective in the bubble, it's just the reality of caring people trying their best to fight against the forces of evil. Consider the recent tweets trying to use the barter system to defend "socialism". To the extent they would label their worldview "socialism", it's not related to the political system debated for a century and is instead just a mishmash of the hivemind on the current thing. It's not easy to break out of that mindset when everyone you know agrees with it.
fluid_pride
1yr ago
It is important to note that the honors classes did not have a "clear bias in terms of racial makeup relative to baseline." First, there was no suggestion of any "bias," there was only the observed result that the racial makeup of students in the honors classes did not match the racial makeup of the general student body. That "bias" was the first (and only) reason the school considered is a failure. Second, the disparity was laughably small. The school is 15% black and the honors class was 14% black. That's a rounding error.
There's a quote from one of the teachers saying that she looked at the class photograph and wondered where all the black kids were. That's the level of logic on which this school is operating.
fluid_pride
1yr ago
Well, it was virtually nonexistent in the military. The DEI crowd are doing their level best to pump those numbers up as high and fast as possible. The recent controversy over the recommended reading list for officers is one example that made it out of the filter bubble.
fluid_pride
1yr ago
governments are very motivated to prevent tax evasion by any means possible, up to and including totalitarian monitoring of all money flows
Absolutely. That motivation is why any hope of a non-totalitarian end state requires strong pushback on this kind of thing. "Money laundering" is the "think of the children" of financial regulation. If one could report drug sales as "miscellaneous goods" there would be no reason to go through all of the hoops of washing the money. If all the government cared about was tax evasion, it would allow an amnesty category to report any income one didn't want to specify. Instead, the tax department has been roped into the criminal enforcement department and it makes for ridiculous regulations that shouldn't apply to 90% of the population.
fluid_pride
1yr ago
I agree with what you're saying here, in general. And I think that even if the thirst streamers didn't exist, the ordinary streamers who are just streaming-while-female would still end up with subscribers just there to fantasize about dating them. Anytime a female does something on the internet, some guy will try to "send bobs and vagene" her. There's a hilarious example out there of a guy posting Botticelli's Birth of Venus on twitter and getting marriage proposals. With that in mind, deepfakes are inevitable. There are even deepfakes of Martha Stewart, after all.
At the same time, the rise of monetized streams and sites like onlyfans (spit) have really weaponized this tendency. That's bad for the guys whose wallets are getting drained, obviously, but it's also bad for the normie women who just want to share their hobbies. The thirst streamers are definitely part of the problem and they're making everything worse for everyone. Because of that, I have no sympathy for deepfakes of thirst streamers.
fluid_pride
1yr ago
"Structuring" (breaking up a deposit into smaller deposits to avoid reporting) being a crime infuriates me. This is another aspect of the war on drugs seeping into financial regulation and corrupting the rules. In another horrifying example, the IRS is trying to find someone $2.1 million for failing to file a disclosure form. https://reason.com/2023/01/23/supreme-court-declines-case-challenging-excessive-irs-penalties/ No crimes were alleged, it wasn't drug money, the IRS just wants to know if you have a foreign bank account with more than $10k in it and if you don't file the form, they can take half the money in it. It's terrible.
fluid_pride
1yr ago
And in the case of these popular female streamers, the fact that the pics/vids are being distributed basically means they are being forced to know that such content is being made of them. It would be like if 10,000 weirdos were constantly whispering in their ear that they jerked off to the thought of them naked, which is different than those 10,000 weirdos jerking it but not telling anyone.
It's a minor but non-trivial point that many of the female streamers flirt with openly encouraging guys to watch them based on their sexualized appearance. This dynamic is going to happen anyway--attractive news anchor has been a thing since TV started--but the streamers very often take it to another level. Pink cutsie hair, accentuated cleavage, tight pants and "accidental" butt shots, etc. To put it crudely, if their target audience is thirsty simps willing to pay for their streams, I think that should factor into whether they subsequently have a right to be creeped out when those simps imagine the streamers naked, beat off, whatever. 10,000 weirdos telling Martha Stewart that they jerk off to her is very different than 10,000 weirdos telling Pokimane the same thing. Pokimane is actively, if stealthily, cultivating that response in her viewers, Martha Stewart does not.
fluid_pride
1yr ago
Yes, and? It's still wrong, even if 100% of men did it.
I think it's important to flesh out why you think it's wrong. The assumed fact that 80% of men do this seems like strong evidence that it is normal behavior and normal behavior is not ordinarily considered morally wrong. It is my understanding that the Christian perspective on this is that imagining anyone naked is cultivating lustful thoughts, which will naturally lead to sin. In your system, is it wrong to imagine your wife and mother of your kids naked? Is it wrong to fantasize about eating at a buffet until you have to unbuckle your pants? Is it wrong to fantasize about winning the lottery? Someday getting a sweet oxen like your neighbor has?
fluid_pride
1yr ago
I would add to this the very common self-help advice to visualize the success you want to have. As in imagining yourself winning the race, award, promotion, etc. And one of those et ceteras is "get the girl." Is it morally wrong to imagine oneself asking out a potential partner? Getting a yes? Having a great conversation over dinner? The first kiss? These don't strike me as remotely creepy. Why is "we have a great time together" creepy when you add "getting it on?"
fluid_pride
1yr ago
Does it actually generate wealth and competence or merely attract it? If you raise a middle class kid in San Francisco is he going to be better off than the same kid raised in San Diego or San Jose or San Houston? If you found Twitter in Miami, does it do better or worse than if it were founded in San Francisco?
fluid_pride
1yr ago
Here's a long take from National Review: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/desantis-ap-african-american-studies-program-violates-florida-law/
I'll try to cut/paste it in case it's paywalled, which will remove the internal links.
/// by Stanley Kurtz
The College Board — the group that runs the SAT test and the Advanced Placement (AP) program — has launched a pilot version of an AP African-American Studies (APAAS) course, to great fanfare in the mainstream press. Although the APAAS pilot has received plenty of publicity, the College Board has clothed the course in secrecy. The curriculum has not been publicly released, nor have the names of the approximately 60 schools at which the pilot is being tested.
In various press accounts, College Board advisers and teachers — so as not to fall afoul of new state laws against the teaching of critical race theory — have denied that APAAS advocates CRT or indeed any particular theory or political perspective at all.
On January 12, however, the administration of Florida governor Ron DeSantis wrote a letter to the College Board informing it that Florida was rejecting its request for state approval of APAAS. The letter, from the Florida Department of Education’s Office of Articulation, goes on to state that, “as presented, the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.” At the same time, the letter notes that “in the future, should College Board be willing to come back to the table with lawful, historically accurate content, FDOE will always be willing to reopen the discussion.” In short, DeSantis has decided that APAAS does in fact violate Florida’s Stop WOKE Act by attempting to persuade students of at least some tenets of CRT.
As far as I know, this is the first time that any state has refused to approve a College Board Advanced Placement course of any kind. While there were serious expressions of concern by some states during the 2014 controversy over the College Board’s leftist revision of its AP U.S. history course, no state or school district actually refused to approve the course. So this is a bold and unprecedented move by DeSantis.
DeSantis’s refusal to approve APAAS is entirely justified. Although the College Board has pointedly declined to release the APAAS curriculum, I obtained a copy and wrote about it in September. There I argued that APAAS proselytizes for a socialist transformation of the United States, that it directly runs afoul of new state laws barring CRT, and that to approve APAAS would be to gut those laws.
Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, for example, bars any K–12 attempt to promote the idea that color blindness is racist. Yet most of the readings in the final quarter of APAAS (Unit 4: Movements and Debates) reject color blindness. One of the topics in that unit is explicitly devoted to “color blindness.” There, APAAS suggests reading CRT advocate Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, best known for his theory of “color-blind racism.” Overall, the readings in the final quarter of APAAS — the quarter chiefly devoted to ideological controversies rather than to history per se — are extraordinarily one-sided. They promote leftist radicalism, with virtually no readings providing even a classically liberal point of view, much less some form of conservatism. If DeSantis were to approve a course pushing the idea of “color-blind racism,” he would effectively be nullifying his own Stop WOKE Act.
Then there’s APAAS’s promotion of socialism. A state doesn’t need a preexisting law to decide that a course filled with advocacy for socialist radicalism is inappropriate. In my earlier exploration of APAAS’s curriculum, I described the neo-Marxist thrust of the course. This is evident enough from the readings. On top of that, however, we know that Joshua M. Myers, the member of the APAAS curriculum-writing team whose expertise covers the final quarter of the course, is an acolyte of Cedric Robinson, author of Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Myers’s writings on African-American studies explicitly call for the field to reject traditional concepts of disciplinary neutrality and adopt openly anti-capitalist radical advocacy instead. In short, for DeSantis to approve the APAAS course as currently configured would be to repudiate everything he stands for. It would welcome woke, not stop it.
The College Board’s decision to keep the APAAS curriculum secret is indefensible. At least during the 2014 controversy over AP U.S. history, troubling though it was, the curriculum was public. This, of course, is why the College Board is resorting to secrecy now. It is trying to get states to approve APAAS for high school and college credit before there’s even a chance of informed public debate.
Last October, North Carolina’s James G. Martin Center submitted a public-records request calling on the lab school of Florida State University, where we know that APAAS is being piloted, to release the curriculum and associated materials. Gavin D. Burgess, associate general counsel of Florida State University, wrote back in December refusing that request. According to Burgess, “The vendor, College Board, has asserted that the materials you are seeking are trade secret and confidential.”
Again, for the College Board to keep the APAAS curriculum secret while simultaneously asking states to approve the course for high school and college credit is indefensible. This secrecy validates long-standing concerns about the College Board’s acting as a de facto unelected national school board. By filling APAAS with Marxism and critical race theory, while at the same time presenting the course as a harmless exercise in African-American history, the College Board is trying to fool the public. In effect, the College Board has decided to go to war with the national movement of parents working to take back control of their children’s schools. The College Board is using secrecy and prestige to nullify democracy.
The tactic is nefarious, but politically clever. What governor wants to be attacked for rejecting a course in African-American studies? It takes guts to say no to a course that looks benign on the surface but is in fact filled with CRT and leftist propaganda. DeSantis has got guts.
The larger danger here is that once APAAS is approved, we will see the College Board devise AP courses in women’s studies, gender studies, transgender studies, latino studies, environmental studies, the full panoply of politicized “studies” courses that have balkanized and politicized higher education. This will drain off students from AP U.S. history and quickly convert high schools into woke bastions. But again, once APAAS is approved, who will be able to say no to the others? That’s why I hope DeSantis will stand strong against any “studies-style” AP course at all.
That said, Florida has invited the College Board to revise its curriculum. A radically reconfigured APAAS still has a chance in Florida. A successful revision wouldn’t necessarily require the complete elimination of readings based in neo-Marxism and CRT. At minimum, however, it would call for such readings to be fully balanced by traditional liberal and conservative perspectives. (See my earlier piece on APAAS for specific suggestions.) Promoting radicalism is one thing. Even-handed discussion of competing views is another.
Yet again, DeSantis is setting the mark for other states. Will red states now reject the current APAAS curriculum? What about Texas? What about Georgia? These and other states have CRT laws and Republican governors. To approve APAAS as currently configured would be to make a mockery of those laws. And why would any state — CRT law or no — approve a course plugging socialist radicalism?
We shall see how it all plays out—and whether the College Board maintains its unjustified secrecy. At a minimum, no state should approve APAAS until the curriculum is released and there has been ample opportunity for the public to assess and debate it. In the meantime, all honor to DeSantis for being faithful to both his word and to the law. Truly, he is doing what it takes to stop woke.
///
fluid_pride
1yr ago
In the comments further down, it gets pretty thoroughly dismantled, too. That alone was worth the click to me.
fluid_pride
2yr ago
if Cruz had told Trump to go fuck himself when Trump made that comment about his wife's looks during the debate or gone full scorched earth-on the Washington Post for going after his kids and their elementary school teacher, Cruz would have been the 46th POTUS. That he didn't, was interpreted as a sign that he lacked the 'grit' required to stand up for his own, and by extension his voters' interests, and that perception is ultimately what lost him the race.
100% agreed. "He fights" was the #1 reason people were willing to put up with all of Trump's other obvious faults. It doesn't matter if Cruz was better on every policy, failing to react to attacks on his wife and kids was fatal to an electorate who just wanted a candidate to treat the media like the hostile operatives of the Democrat party they are.
fluid_pride
2yr ago
+1 to this. I had a similar experience with the PS3 when an "update" added anti-piracy software that made my perfectly-working cloud library impossible to use. It didn't disable playback, it just muted the sound and put up a banner every few minutes if it did not detect the CD in the drive. Absolutely enraging.
fluid_pride
2yr ago
But that's the mechanism to get people to invest time and effort in these lawsuits. For individual cases, giving the lawyers a shot at a huge payoff is what enables them to fight big companies with lots of resources to spend on defense. And in class action cases, especially those where most of the class members end up with $20 gift cards or a year of credit monitoring, most of the money goes from the defendant to the people who did all of the work putting together the case.
fluid_pride
2yr ago
I will second this recommendation. I got my CTM shortly after college and it was an amazing experience. I met lots of interesting people and it did wonders for my social skills. No organization is perfect but the Toastmasters groups I've been in were pretty fantastic.
fluid_pride
2yr ago
there is in fact a legal definition of grooming in the US
That website is awful and looks like it was written by non-native speakers and definitely not lawyers. There may indeed be a legal definition of grooming in the US, but that website is not it. The citations in that article refer to anti-trafficking laws and, being Federal laws, require crossing a state line to be enforceable. It says nothing about grooming as anyone here has used the term.
I agree and also think Russ gave a fantastic example of how to interview someone. He gave EY tons of opportunities to explain himself, with hints about how to sound less insane to the audience. Over the course of the interview, I think EY started doing a bit better, even though he kind of blew it at the end. I was rooting for EY and ended up profoundly disappointed in him as a communicator.
After thinking about it a bit, I think what was most off-putting is that EY seemed to have adopted a stance of "professor educating a student" with Russ, instead of a collaborator exploring an interesting topic, or even an interviewee with an amiable host. Russ is not the sports reporter for the Dubuque Tribune; he's clearly within inferential distance of EY's theories. It was frustrating watching Russ's heroic efforts to get EY to say something Russ could translate for the audience.
For anyone whose only experience with Econtalk is this interview, I beg you to listen to him talk with literally anyone else. He is a beacon of polite, sane discourse.
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