roystgnr
18hr ago
""When I think of a really rich man," says a Boston blue-collar, "I think of one of those estates where you can't see the house from the road." Hence the name of the top class, which could just as well be called "the class in hiding." Their houses are never seen from the street or road. They like to hide away deep in the hills or way off on Greek or Caribbean islands (which they tend to own), safe, for the moment, from envy and its ultimate attendants, confiscatory taxation and finally expropriation. It was the Great Depression, Vance Packard speculates, that badly frightened the very rich, teaching them to be "discreet, almost reticent, in exhibiting their wealth." From the 1930s dates the flight of money from such exhibitionistic venues as the mansions of upper Fifth Avenue to hideways in Virginia, upper New York State, Connecticut, Long Island, and New Jersey. The situation now is very different from the one in the 1890s satirized by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class. In his day the rich delighted to exhibit themselves conspicuously, with costly retainers and attendants much in evidence. Now they hide, not merely from envy and revenge but from expose journalism, much advanced in cunning and ferocity since Veblen's time, and from an even worse threat, virtually unknown to Veblen, foundation mendicancy, with its hordes of beggars in threepiece suits constantly badgering the well-to-do. Showing off used to be the main satisfaction of being very rich in America. Now the rich must skulk and hide."
Paul Fussell, "Class: A Guide through the American Status System", 1983
I wonder how much of this is ignoring the effect of changing crime rates. The NYC homicide rate nearly doubled during the Great Depression, and although it came down again, any families scared out of their Fifth Avenue mansions could have felt pretty smug when homicide nearly quintupled in the 60s.
Other crimes you might have wanted to hide from, if you could afford it:
"Efforts to address the increase in prostitution, especially by juveniles, were derailed by the arrival of crack cocaine to Times Square in 1986. As a result, crime rates spiked and continued to increase through 1989. The addictiveness of crack made it an especially insidious drug, as users focused their energy and resources on scoring the next ‘hit’. Crack dealers, junkies, and the cardboard encampments of the homeless took over the streets."
(from the Times Square Official Website - imagine how an anti-NYC-biased description looks!)
I also wonder how much of Fussell's analysis has now been obsoleted by further changing crime rates. NYC homicide rates plummeted rapidly, back to "at least no worse than the Great Depression" levels, in the 90s, and then dropped back to the previous baseline in the 2010s. I've never been acquainted with more than a couple high-paid New Yorkers, but I get the impression that having a second home out in the countryside is now just a way to better enjoy days off with the kids, not a desperate attempt to hide wealth out of sight.
roystgnr
21hr ago
Ancestry obviously matters (squibs are very rare, and muggleborns even rarer considering the large denominator, to the point that "infidelity" and "genetic mutation" might explain them all) but it might matter in a mostly trinary way. If there's something like a simple Punnett square for wizardry, with WW wizards and ww muggles and Ww squibs, then obsession with ancestry in the "don't marry a squib unless you're fine with half your kids being squibs!" sense would be descriptively correct, but obsession in the "Our purebred W alleles are better than their muggleborn W alleles" sense wouldn't be.
roystgnr
1d ago
This was once the subject of a major inter-faith debate. The priest's position was "Type AB-positive", because He is the universal recipient of all our souls. The pastor was a "B positive" person, because that's what the Good News means to us. And the rabbit was just a "Type O".
roystgnr
1d ago
those 'hundreds of bombs' were actually 8 standard propane tanks bought from a store
about a hundred
Wiki claims 99 bombs, including 15 converted propane tanks, but apparently only 4 of those were full standard 20-pound tanks.
just assumed that detonating those is a rather easy thing to do
Yeah, that's the "not all killers are capable of bomb construction" category. The strength of the tanks wasn't even a big deal until the second time the murderers tried to set them off (with other bombs and/or guns); the initial failures on those were just bad timers.
Digging into the details does make me have to retract the claim that "their biggest bombs could have had hundreds" of deaths. There were nearly 500 kids in the cafeteria when the bombs there were supposed to detonate, and there was a Sheriff's report claiming that "Computer modeling substantiated by field testing indicated that had those two large 20-lb. propane bombs detonated with a cafeteria full of students, most would have been killed or severely injured by the resulting blasts and subsequent fireballs." ... but that claim seems to be depending pretty decisively on "detonated". Even if the cafeteria bombs had gone off it seems to me that it would have been a conflagration but not a detonation ... at most! One of their other big propane bombs was supposed to be a "car bomb", but (when the bomb squad finally set it off; its timer also failed) it didn't do much more than blow out the car windows.
Are you referring to the pipe bombs they made earlier but did not eventually bring with them?
Some were left around as diversions, but Wiki claims they brought enough with them to be "throwing pipe bombs in several directions, including onto the roof" while outside, along with multiple separate pipe-bomb throwing incidents in the hallways.
I think those are only marginally useful.
As far as I can tell that's correct and even "marginally useful" is an overstatement. Their distraction bombs caused "a small fire", their first pipe bomb outside the school "only partially detonated, causing it to give off smoke" that was interpreted as a prank, and most of the bombs didn't detonate at all. I can't find any sources unequivocally identifying a single wound from a bomb! Even the few reports of "shrapnel" I find seem to be talking about a teacher and two students who took indirect impacts from debris like splintered wood kicked up by near-miss gun shots. The bombs were just distraction and delay in the end; they could have brought a ton of smoke bombs and just called in a phony threat of real bombs and the consequences would have been the same.
roystgnr
1d ago
not all killers are capable of bomb construction.
The Columbine killers constructed something like a hundred bombs, but are only remembered for their mass shooting "backup plan" because their bombs mostly failed to detonate. It's hard to call anything about a massacre "lucky", but although the mass shooting had dozens of victims (including 13 deaths), their biggest bombs could have had hundreds.
There's also killers who are too capable of making a bomb detonate. Bombing victims are often immediately bombing suspects, because even murderers who can make working bombs have a tendency to bomb themselves with one sooner or later.
roystgnr
1d ago
He walked me through a read of the Anarchist Cookbook once and taught me why it’s not a good reference to use at all. “If you do this… followed by this… what happens is that… and creates a mixture of this… at which point, you will die.”
That kind of homebrew activity was the norm. Byproduct of a different time.
I hit high school right around the time that online networks (not even the internet yet, just garbage like AOL) were growing like mad, and the sharper adults had figured out that most kids now basically had unfettered access to anything that could be encoded as a text or image file. My chemistry teacher begged to help any of us who might actually try an Anarchist Cookbook explosives recipe, also based on the proposition that too many of its recipes were suicidal if followed as-written. I don't think anyone took her up on it, though; the wildest homebrew reaction I ever ended up seeing was a friend's thermite in college.
I wouldn’t know as far as manufacturing standard munitions for firearms, how difficult that would be.
From what I've read, even modern powder isn't too hard ... though some of the precursors are supposedly in the "legal, but bulk purchase will bring men with badges to your door for a friendly chat" category. The tricky chemicals to manufacture without killing yourself are primers.
I was reading about this in the course of post-apocalyptic-fiction background research, though, looking at the context of a setting where people would eventually have to redevelop manufacturing capacity for everything. In the modern US, reloaders can buy a box of 1000 primers online for under $100. Chris Rock's bullet control routine was hilarious, but essentially impossible. Even if we focus on the difficulty of making your own primers, there's no way to effectively ban something that's been sold in billion-unit-per-year quantities and can be shelf-stable indefinitely.
roystgnr
1d ago
What did we/they learn? There's been one trial of a Uvalde officer so far; he was acquitted of all charges.
Which ... was predictable? I think "police aren't legally required to do jack" is solid settled precedent in the US. I wanted to see a trial over their incapacitation of the parents; that was where a line may have been crossed from "failing their duty" to "accomplices".
roystgnr
3d ago
Lambert. I don't recall her having any conversations with Ripley without other crew members included too, though.
roystgnr
4d ago
That's very fair. Jordan's problem before the illness wasn't lack of interest, it was so much interest that every book seemed to get 25% longer than the previous despite covering 25% less ground.
roystgnr
5d ago
You and a lot of other people. Larry Correia often rants about how badly this has ruined the market for new epic fantasy authors, though for some reason he blames GRRM rather than Jordan.
roystgnr
5d ago
but the scene isn't typically described
Oh, sure. I'm not wanting to know how Tolkien would have described defecation, just whether it should have logically had some impact on the story that was ignored because not intending to describe it led to not even considering it. Off the top of my head: Is the mood turning even more dour because after the Black Riders nobody wants to risk wandering far enough away to get some privacy? Is Frodo's departure in the Breaking of the Fellowship considered unremarkable because they have been in the habit of wandering far enough away for privacy?
The Orc thing you mention would be comic relief, so might fit in somewhere.
I'd say that's the problem. They're tracking the orcs because of Merry and Pippin's capture; it's a horrible time for comic relief (or bathos, if it comes off as comic accidentally) to ruin the tension. There's no safe place to comment until like half a dozen chapters later when the characters are safe and getting each other caught up, and at that point there's no reason for more detail than a quick euphemism about "the smell" or maybe at most "leavings".
roystgnr
5d ago
It is, but the unforeseeable future is still up for grabs, and there's so much more of that.
roystgnr
5d ago
Can you imagine LotR with an aside about the logistics of Gandalf having to go Number 2 while fighting the Balrog?
That specifically would be silly, but I can imagine Fellowship with an aside about how discomfited the hobbits are (or aren't? Bywater to Frogmorton looks to be an 18 mile stretch with no rest stops...) to be "roughing it" in this sense too. I even think some of Fellowship and the Two Towers might actually be improved by a brief mention of how careful the fellowship tries to be after they realize they're being hunted and tracked, or of how much easier orcs' disgusting habits make tracking those.
Yes. That's not obvious?
Children making false accusations is a thing that happens sometimes, though almost certainly not in this case. For a politician to hold that belief here is evidence that they're either uninformed or wasting their intelligence on rationalizing their own mistakes. For a politician to share that belief here is evidence that they're politically incompetent. You wouldn't want to vote for them, but if you find yourself in the same room you should probably talk with them and see how amenable they are to reason.
Children deserving to be raped is not a thing that happens sometimes. For a politician to hold that belief would be evidence that their souls have been lost to the service of evil. For a politician to share that belief would be evidence that they've had a full psychotic break. You wouldn't want to talk to them, but if you find yourself in the same room you should probably be wary and ideally armed.
roystgnr
6d ago
Biden may have been a bit demented (if only in the "sundowning", "good days and bad days" sense), but I was referring to Harris (endorsed in the link) as "retarded". She obviously wasn't literally retarded (or even subnormal, I'd bet) by "average human being" standards, but she kinda was by "average human being who should risk campaigning for President of the US" standards. I get that the competition was a guy who thinks the dementia screener he's been acing is an IQ test, but my advice for Republicans could be flipped around for Democrats and would still be 100% applicable: the goal is not to hang on to a candidate who seems to be a tiny bit better than the competition, the goal is to come up with a good candidate.
(Well, to be fair, the goal is to come up with someone who would be a good candidate and a good President, which is harder - Harris was probably even worse by the second criterion, even if Trump again set us a low bar)
Granted, by 2024 it was too late for the Democrats to come up with a good candidate, perhaps because the task of "convince the declining elderly person of how badly he's declining" leads to a veridical paradox where the better your evidence is the harder it is to use. But in 2020 it probably wasn't too late for Biden's team to ensure they filled the "person who becomes President in an emergency" slot with a person who would definitely be a top choice for more than (literally, not a typo:) 844 of their party's voters. 20% of US presidents have died or stepped down in the middle of a term and left their Vice President in charge. This is not a wild unforeseeable happenstance, and in modern politics the "don't betray Big Chief!" attitude is bipartisan enough that whoever's in charge when the next election rolls around is generally the presumptive nominee, even in "normal" cases where the handoff isn't mid-campaign.
roystgnr
6d ago
The rest of us are leftists, pretending to be rightists
Nah. You'd expect a lot more "Guys, we have to join the web of supporters of the fugitive child molester! It definitely won't destroy our electoral chances while sending our souls to hell!" false flags if that was the case. Instead, so far at least, I've only seen the one...
We know this forum is spiritually leftist because if constantly fails the moral circles heatmap meme.
Nah, it's spiritually focused on truth. It was founded by fans of an actual retarded-communist-may-be-the-lesser-of-two-evils leftist, just one who became popular with rightists too for prizing truth above leftism.
I know emotionally our hunter-gatherer hearts really feel like there's Our Tribe versus Their Tribe, and if only we can get all one hundred of us to collectively stick our fingers in our ears and pretend Big Chief and Little Chief have no faults then morale will stay high and Our Tribe will win, but that's just not how it works. With a hundred million people there's going to be someone who won't go along with the ruse. The people you really need to win over are swing voters who are never going to give Little Chief the kind of love that you're wasting on him (instead of sublimating it into Yankees fandom or something, like you're supposed to do to keep your head clearer for politics), and a "who cares about a couple molested kids anyway" attitude does not win over swing voters.
It doesn't even seem to be a winning play among many MAGA voters. Remember when that was all about stuff like avoiding war with Iran and exposing child abusers like Epstein's network? But now here we are. You beat the retarded communist last time, but the victory was narrow and Pyrrhic, and there's a lot of time and even more crazy developments coming up in between now and 2028. So, if you want to pull it off again, then we may need an actual competitive primary that filters out bad candidates, not just a princeling's coronation. You might think it would be impossible to sink so low that normal people will prefer the kind of candidates that the Democrats come up with these days, and it really should be impossible, but it's not. It's really not. It's not even impossible for the modern Republicans to just sink that low by default, in the absence of conscious effort to avoid it, much less in the presence of conscious effort to resist avoiding it.
roystgnr
6d ago
I would guess it won't be long before it's easy to create AI-generated "reenactments" of culture-war sensitive events.
I've seen two examples tweeted within the last week. I can't find one, but here's the other, when it came up on Reddit several months ago. The post photo is reportedly AI, though based on the real (probably? hopefully?) video linked by some of the commenters.
For example the sexual encounter at issue in the recent Cornell fiasco.
Neither example was of a drugged-up orgy, thankfully.
It seems that if it fits their tribal allegiance, people will even accept "fake but accurate" materials.
The Reddit comment to this effect, "its not misinformation, it happened - the "photo" is ai, the story is not.", is only slightly net upvoted, but IIRC it was even worse on Twitter.
roystgnr
7d ago
Ha! Egg on my face. I'm so sorry, I just utterly misparsed your sentence.
You intended "(women who only date men) identifying as bisexual"; somehow I read "women who only date (men identifying as bisexual)".
I figured maybe this was the latest stage of an anti-cis-hetero-men purity spiral somewhere but you were exaggerating it.
I hope no citation is needed for the claim that men are much less squicked by female bisexuality than vice versa.
True, but there's some squick! 20% of young men in that poll. I suspect that the demographic of women considering self-identifying as bisexual don't think they want to date any of those men either way, though.
roystgnr
7d ago
but at the bottom it’s all g
Well, it's nearly half g anyway. There's a seeming-paradox where, although you can estimate g from two different sets of tests and get a correlation of .99 between the estimates, that's entirely due to having each set be broad enough not to be too swayed by any individual test, because correlation coefficients between g and individual tests (including in test batteries designed to measure g!) hit .82 (g explaining 2/3 of variance) at the very highest and go way down from there. It's possible that some people just don't spend their time using their g for e.g. "Subtraction/Multiplication" (correlation .59; presumably they used their g for evading the elementary school truancy officer instead?), but a more likely answer might be that Moravec's Paradox has implications for human intelligence alone, not just when comparing human to non-human. Enough general intelligence can augment or compensate for weaker special-purpose systems, but that doesn't mean the special-purpose systems aren't there.
Or maybe they’re too stupid for logic but can figure out how to get a picture to look good (using cause and effect AKA logic). It makes no sense.
The predicate "makes no sense" is binary, not unary. The history of human progress is a series of discoveries of observations that made no sense, to us, followed by formulations of theories that revealed why the observations had sense behind them after all.
In this case, we observe (repeatedly! this one seems to be surviving the replication crisis!) that most people are unable to solve an abstract logic problem which is isomorphic to non-abstract logic problems they are able to solve. This is even more shocking than being able to catch a baseball without being able to solve the differential equation predicting its motion from observations, but it doesn't seem like it's a difference of kind, just a difference of magnitude. It's been less than 2500 years since humans first classified which possible syllogisms of deductive logic are fallacious; that is not the history you'd expect from a hundreds-of-millennia-old species which has inherently mastered logic and obviated the need to find other ways for our brains to solve logic problems.
roystgnr
7d ago
Citation needed? Last data I saw was that half of straight 18-34yo women in Britain were "unwilling" to date a bisexual man. Presumably some significant percentage of the remainder are at the "bisexuality is a negative, just not an utter disqualifier" level.
That "unwilling to date a bisexual" percentage is dropping fast from generation to generation, but I'd be very surprised if there was any age group for whom "unwilling to date a non-bisexual" exceeded it.
roystgnr
8d ago
For a game of that scope I wouldn't worry about the price. If it's worth spending 30+ hours on then it's almost certainly worth spending $30 on too.
Subnautica is a very different game than SOMA, despite sharing some "mysteries of The Deep", "Weird Science", and "monsters that might be best avoided rather than fought" vibes, though. Subnautica's nonlinear exploration is more fun than SOMA's story-on-rails, but the horror is even less horrifying (though whether that's a good thing or a bad one is a matter of taste), and the crafting+construction mechanics might be to your liking (it really does enhance the exploration and make a playthrough feel like your playthrough) or they might not (yay, the 18th most popular survival+crafting+base-building game on Steam - hope you didn't get sick of the genre by #17!). I liked Subnautica better overall but YMMV. It's probably worth trying, at least, especially because Subnautica 2 has multiplayer co-op and those are often the best games to play with the SO and/or family.
roystgnr
9d ago
Did you like it from the start after the time skip, or did it take a while to grab you? I think I might have read 5 pages before deciding I had other things on my to-read list, which might have been unfair.
roystgnr
9d ago
Last third felt like a worldbuilding exercise without a clear point.
I feel like I can't nominate something for AAQC if the audience for whom it hits home is as narrow as "readers who thought the first two-thirds of Seveneves were fine enough but gave up on the last third but also are Neil Stephenson fans and thus wonder if they shouldn't have given up". But speaking on behalf of that group (singleton? is it just me?), thank you!
The effect size for IQ-vs-getting-caught is pretty huge, and it runs the whole IQ gamut, and it can't be solely selection bias. There aren't enough unsolved violent crimes for every IQ decile to be committing them at the rate of the lowest one!
There's got to be some selection bias, sure. I wonder what we could do to actually estimate how the discrepancy between "criminality" and "convictions" varies with IQ. Plot IQ vs "time and crimes elapsed before getting caught", then try to fit a distribution that would give us a "hasn't gotten caught yet" tail size to estimate? I doubt we have enough data. It would probably vary from crime to crime, too - e.g. how much of the lower clearance rate for property crimes vs violent crimes is "more violent crimes have a witness and are naturally easier to clear", and how much is "smarter criminals stick to crimes where there won't be a witness"?
Even a definite correlation between stupidity and criminality wouldn't necessarily imply a correlation between stupidity and evil. It's possible that smarter evil people tend to avoid getting caught, not by planning the perfect crime, but by realizing the expected value of the crime is negative (both because they're better at such estimation and because they tend to have more socio-economic status giving them more to lose) and just not committing it. Such people would still be evil in the sense that they'd do evil if they could definitely get away with it, but since they can't they just don't try.
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