stuckinbathroom
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User ID: 903
stuckinbathroom
5hr ago
It's beautiful hearing the Battle Hymn of the Republic, seeing soldiers march to it. Same with Glory, Glory Hallelujah.
Uh, isn’t the latter just (part of) the chorus of the former?
stuckinbathroom
4d ago
Not totally sure what you mean by “get worse” here; you mean both sides will only continue to experience more and more casualties in future, because of their above-replacement TFR resulting in net positive population growth?
stuckinbathroom
5d ago
I’m sorry, did you mean “main’s house with the main’s tools”?
—GitHub, probably
stuckinbathroom
5d ago
Funnily enough, I had the exact opposite impression: I rather wonder whether this will be picked up by the far right as a way to legitimize opposition to immigration, in normie eyes: “Real diversity” means preserving the native people and culture of $WHITE_WESTERN_COUNTRY, who are a tiny, beleaguered minority in global terms.
One man’s modus ponens and all that.
stuckinbathroom
6d ago
Could it be that this is Trump getting revenge for Bibi not backing up his election fraud claims in 2020 and instead calling Biden to congratulate him? I vaguely recall Trump saying “Fuck him” (in reference to Bibi) at the time. For someone as vindictive as Trump is said to be, this seems like a reasonable hypothesis.
stuckinbathroom
6d ago
Not quite sure who the “brown people” would be in a Ukrainian context though: ethnic minorities/foreigners in the Russian military (or mercenary groups fighting alongside them)? That would make some sense, but they wouldn’t really constitute a “ghetto”
Alternatively, if the intended meaning is “ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine”, I’m not seeing where the “brown” part comes from.
stuckinbathroom
10d ago
stuckinbathroom
10d ago
He believed he could create a genuine intellectual movement, like the early Progressives, winning people over to his cause through reasoned argumentation and leading by example.
My initial reaction to this quokka-esque faith in reasoned discourse was “lol, lmao even”
But then I realized that Taylor is the product of a different time, a time when public intellectuals really did have some cachet and, even if they weren’t household names per se, they still had some power to set the conversation and shift people’s opinions through logos. The Mont Pellerin Society, for example, was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the Reagan/Thatcherite revolution of the 1980s.
I wonder if Taylor will embrace the new meta, or if he will cling to the antiquated ideals of the Ivy League debating society to the bitter end.
stuckinbathroom
12d ago
The better analogy would be, suppose the US broke up and, say, Texas and California became independent states (in the international relations sense), with California internationally recognized as the “successor state” of the US.
Would formerly-US nuclear weapons, located in Texas for the purpose of deterring an invasion through Texas’s flat and quickly-traversible terrain, manufactured by personnel from all over the former-US (including California), but maintained and operated primarily by Texans, become rightfully Californian overnight? What about all other formerly-US military hardware/personnel in the former-US?
Anyway, back in the real world, the point remains that no signatory to the Budapest Memorandum ever provided Ukraine with any kind of “security guarantee”. Indeed, the Americans were well aware of the military obligations such wording would entail, and thus specifically insisted on the weaker “security assurance”.
stuckinbathroom
12d ago
whose security they have guaranteed in the 90s
I assume you are referring to the Budapest Memorandum, by which Ukraine surrendered all of its nuclear weapons. That Memorandum famously did not use the term “security guarantee”, but rather the utterly toothless “security assurance”.
stuckinbathroom
12d ago
Indian subcultures are basically carrying out hits against each other for beef back in India, and the government just kind of let it happen
Surely it was lentils, perhaps mutton at most
stuckinbathroom
13d ago
Crusader Kings meets Infinite Jest, indeed (please, someone make this mod)
stuckinbathroom
14d ago
No joke, I once saw an “In this house we believe…” sign that said (among other left-ish takes) “German is a Yiddish dialect”
stuckinbathroom
16d ago
Disagree: other employers can pay the clawback (probably with their own terms and conditions attached) or buy out deferred comp.
stuckinbathroom
17d ago
Of course, if you really want indentured servitude, I believe that clawback provisions on training costs are legal.
But even this is not sufficient to guarantee employee retention: the new employer could just offer to pay the employee’s clawed-back training costs when he leaves the old employer, perhaps with some clawback provisions of their own.
Indeed, this is how a lot of young Singaporeans in Big Tech got their start: they went to elite American universities to study CS on the (Singapore) government dime, but were obligated to go back and work in the civil service for a period of some years or else repay the cost of their education. FAANG was all too happy to foot that bill (with some strings attached, naturally) in exchange for that sweet, sweet engineering talent.
stuckinbathroom
18d ago
It’s going to make for a banger trivia question in a couple of decades, though: who was prime minister when Queen Elizabeth II died?
stuckinbathroom
18d ago
Relevant username if I ever saw one
stuckinbathroom
18d ago
Hmm, what was the black percentage before they went test-optional (which was of course also pre-SFFA v. Harvard)?
stuckinbathroom
18d ago
Not necessarily; it depends on your definition of merit.
By way of analogy (which sadly is no longer on the SAT), we can say highest-SAT-score-ism : meritocracy :: utilitarianism : consequentialism
Consequentialism says that one should act so that the consequences/outcomes of one’s actions are maximally good, but does not itself define what it means for an outcome to be “good”. Utilitarianism is one specific form of consequentialism in which “good” is defined as “utility (of all people in the world, e.g.)”
stuckinbathroom
19d ago
In a big lecture? Almost certainly nothing, assuming you can get into the building without a student ID. In a small class? You’d probably get found out because your name wouldn’t be on the attendance sheet. But even then, I wouldn’t be surprised if a passionate instructor turned a blind eye out of respect for your dedication to learning for its own sake.
The reason why approximately no one does this is that you don’t get a diploma out of it at the end.
stuckinbathroom
19d ago
(Then of course there are the more common objections that some last-minute transfers from other life paths, gifted-but-lazy types and "slow but deep thinkers" are in fact also beneficial for the intellectual ecosystem and need a path to admission, which is of course also more cope.)
I agree with all of this except the jab at “slow but deep thinkers”. I think that with regard to mathematical talent specifically, there really is a pool of talented/high-IQ individuals who punch below their weight in math competitions where speed is important, like the AMC and AIME. This is a shame, because the USAMO and IMO are much more “slow but deep”-loaded, but you can’t qualify for them unless you get past the AIME. The USAMTS (a proof-based exam taken over the course of multiple weeks) helps alleviate this disadvantage somewhat, but it still only helps you skip the AMC level; I wish there were a second round of USAMTS for skipping the AIME and advancing to USAMO.
To be completely fair, I think the absolute cream of the crop in mathematical talent are both fast and deep, and hence the current system of contests will correctly identify them. We are certainly not at risk of being unable to field a competitive IMO team, or of failing to identify those who are most likely to become HYPSM math faculty in a decade or so.
But the “second string” of talent tends to be underserved until their strengths shine through in late undergrad/early grad school—assuming they stick with math that long, which sadly many don’t because they incorrectly think (on the basis of math contests) that they’re not good enough for graduate-level math research.
The specific mechanism by which being “deep” helps with research is having a holistic understanding of how different concepts in math relate to one another, and having a greater ability to perceive similarities/analogies between disparate things, which is important when bringing techniques from vastly different subfields of mathematics to bear on unsolved problems; this happens all the time in number theory, for instance, and it’s also what Grothendieck did when he revolutionized algebraic geometry. See also: the Langlands program.
“Fast but shallow” thinkers, on the other hand, are good at quickly pattern-matching problems to known solution techniques, which is also important: you won’t get anywhere in math without a well-developed, organized, and quickly-accessible stock of knowledge in your noodle. But they tend to be unable to generalize/extend/apply those techniques to very different domains.
Full disclosure: I was a “slow but deep” thinker with regard to math when I was in school and I may be just a little bit salty about my lackluster performance in time-constrained math contests.
stuckinbathroom
19d ago
What I would give to see the president of Harvard standing in the schoolhouse door to block qualified Asians from enrolling
stuckinbathroom
19d ago
You could settle in Vancouver, Canada, which is certainly 100% BC. Or you could build a Time Machine and travel 2025+ years into the past.
(Aside: if you’re in the UK, wouldn’t you be a BurdensomeEarl?)
stuckinbathroom
20d ago
I often wonder this about the justice system in general: if it means placating the mob, is it sometimes worth committing an act of injustice to a single individual?
The Ones Who Walk Away From Rittenhouse
More seriously, I think the general framing of this question—not mob placation necessarily, but “good” consequences as a potential reason to bend or break the rules—gets at the heart of act-utilitarianism vs. rule-utilitarianism, as well as deontology and other ethical schools. As for my opinion on the matter, fiat iustitia ruat cælum
Also a Japanese nursery rhyme (TW: exactly what you would expect, dead_dove.gif)
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