whatihear
6d ago
Saudi is a great ally in terms of projecting power and influence in the region. They mostly don’t have internal insurgents we need to help them with and they project power externally against our enemies in the region. Ok top of that, they don’t make everyone else around them incandescent with rage at us for supporting their right to continue drawing breath, which is rather nice.
whatihear
7d ago
That’s not been my experience. I’m actually pretty shocked you’ve never encountered a tiny male Blackbelt who can beat up guys a lot heavier than him with ease. The toughest instructor at the first gym I went to was 130 pounds and would thrash everyone, 230 pound blue belts included. I personally am not that good, but I’m a little on the lighter side and will fight relatively evenly with guys 40 pounds heavier and at similar experience levels all the time. There are similar guys at most gyms though not always to that level. MMA training usually doesn’t bring people much past purple belt level bjj skill (I’ve heard I don’t train mma), so if you are doing striking as well there is a chance you’re just not encountering as many full grappling specialists.
Finding women with that level of skill is a lot less common, so it’s not that surprising if you have never met one. I’ve had to move around a lot which has exposed me to a lot of gyms and I only encountered one with women at that level.
In terms of advice to give to women, I completely agree with you. Getting to that level requires talent and sustained effort over years. If you’re not going to seriously pursue becoming at least semi-pro there is no way you should plan to be able to beat men in fights, and even then it has to be s a specific scenario. Thinking you can beat a man is almost always delusional, and if you can do it you’ll know because you’ll have done it a lot in the years and years of practice it took to do there. Non freaks of nature should just buy a gun.
whatihear
10d ago
If you think that’s the situation, you are mistaken. In college about five guys from the varsity football team came to the mma club to try out grappling. All of them were physical specimens, and when I rolled with them it would just be me submitting them every 30 seconds to a minute for the whole round. I just recently submitted a competitive college wrestler in practice (after getting thoroughly beaten positionally of course). I’m not a bad submission grappler and I’m not a 40 year old out of shape dad who just picked it up recently. I’m not a great one either, but I know my way around on the mat.
Bjj is just not something where strength matters nearly as much as untrained people think it does. There is enormous skill depth, on the level of chess or go. Given that it is something you can get good at by knowing things and making rapid decisions, it should not be surprising that some women are able to get good. Every gym has a 16 or 20 year old scrawny kid who has a great guard game and plays a good spidery high tempo defense against guys half again his weight. A athletic woman who lifts will have pretty much the same level of physicality as those kids, and if it’s not surprising when they hit triangles and heel hooks on everyone there is no reason to think a woman couldn’t either. Women’s minds are just as good at knowing things as men’s are (maybe modulo stuff at the tails which does not matter here).
whatihear
10d ago
The dude doesn’t have to be fat. I would consider myself a decent submission grappler and I’m not fat, but I will lose to this kind of woman.
I would say this is interesting, because it informs how realistic things like Hollywood movies with a female action star are. A tiny woman kicking the shit out of a bunch of dudes: pretty unrealistic. A tiny woman hitting a picturesque flying triangle, actually a little more possible (well maybe not because flying triangles don’t really work, but that’s what passes for grappling in movies). It’s a proof by contradiction that “no woman can beat a man” is false, which seems to be the position that some people are defending.
whatihear
11d ago
If you think you can win by just dropping all your weight one someone, it’s obvious you’ve never done submission grappling in a serious way. If someone with 50 pounds on me just drops their weight on me without any sort of skill behind it, I’ll be choking them in 30 seconds.
Takedowns are harder given a weight difference because wrestling is harder to do across weight classes than submission grappling is. I’m less confident that a very experienced woman could beat a dude who outweighs her and has a moderate amount of experience from the feet.
whatihear
11d ago
Bjj is what I’m thinking of. Of all the options, it is probably the best at letting skill overcome weight differences. A 120 pound woman needs a specific style to beat a 170 pound man (extremely high tempo position switches and constant attacks), but there are women who have that level of skill out there. It is very hard, and they essentially have to be at the level of high level competitors to be able to beat male hobbyists who outweigh them, but I have experienced it and watched it.
whatihear
12d ago
Unfortunately, Gracie combatives is taking over like a plague, bringing the mcdojo effect even to bjj.
whatihear
12d ago
I assume you mean at the highest levels of the sport. Female black belts can absolutely wreck even fairly experienced dudes with 50 pounds on them when it comes to grappling (not as effortlessly as a male black belt their size would, but still).
whatihear
16d ago
Part of that is just seniority. The line employees of space companies are the same multicultural mix of high caste emegrees or their children, hard working 2nd gen Asians, and whites that you’ll find elsewhere in tech. Citizenship requirements for aerospace do make the industry whiter, but the guys designing frontier chips can absolutely program FPGAs for space.
whatihear
22d ago
The Russians have actually tried a bunch of large armored assaults recently and they got shredded by drones and arty directed by drones immediately.
whatihear
1mo ago
Elements of the right have always wanted to be more openly antisemitic, and that’s been building steadily on the edgier corners of the internet for years now. Though Gaza isn’t a primary motivation for right antisemites, I do think it is closely related to why right antisemitism is bursting out into the open in a bigger way now. Previously, if the right allowed their antisemites any air they were handing the left a massive stick to clobber them with. Now, the hypocrisy of the left accusing the right of antisemitism would be too rich after the last few years of anti-Zionism from the left that quite frequently spills over into outright antisemitism. So even though right antisemites don’t give a shit about Gaza, it is very helpful for them because it provides a permission structure to come out into the open.
whatihear
1mo ago
But you’re a programmer, not a government fail project maker. You have a very general skill set. You could in principle take a job programming in industry right? Unless you are not a programmer and are in some way specialized only to government work, in which case your argument seems to have a bit more merit. I still don’t really consider any line employee who goes to work and tries their hardest at their job every day a parasite. Maybe some are on a strict economic level, but on the moral level I don’t think they are. The exception to this would be certain industries and specializations that are just inherently parasitic like DEI consultants or patent troll lawyers.
whatihear
1mo ago
That sounds personally frustrating, but I don’t think it’s the same thing as someone who does not sell their labor at all and just games the system. You are contributing to a market that helps generate enormous value for the economy even if your code doesn’t end up doing useful things. The fact that someone else is using the threat of violence to separate other citizens from their wealth and then buy your labor with it doesn’t mean you aren’t usefully providing labor to the software market. That capital allocation decision is on them, not you. If a sawmill sells their product to someone who just immediately burns the wood, I would still credit the mill workers and owners with being productive.
This kind of buying of labor that is not actually useful happens in the private sector as well. Sometimes it is just the luck of the draw. It’s really common among startups, but I still think founders and early stage workers are contributing more than I am as someone who just checks in to my corporate gig. They are part of the great beating heart that keeps the economy going in a more direct way than I am, even if they just work on a chain of unfortunate failures.
whatihear
1mo ago
Is it? We run steady deficits that we debt fund, but I’m pretty sure the majority of each annual budget is still paid by taxes.
whatihear
1mo ago
It would take a while to switch over, but definitely not on the order of 60 years.
Small states have definitely been tried, such as the American state before income tax, and it went pretty great from a growth perspective. The fact that no one in the modern age runs a tiny state doesn’t mean we can’t analyze it. We can look at the things run privately and the things run by governments and see which ones contribute more to GDP growth. There are basically no profitable government run enterprises. There are vast private industries serving government priorities, but that’s not really positive sum in the same way. All I’m objecting to is the idea that government spending is somehow essential to the economy and that we would all be poorer without it. Obviously switching costs would be significant if it was done suddenly, but it wouldn’t have to be. Besides “what would happen if this went away tomorrow” is the wrong question. We should be thinking about how things would look in steady state.
I’m actually in favor of a tax and spend redistributive state that fields an army. I just think pretending we get gdp growth because of it is silly.
whatihear
1mo ago
Net present value of their pension at the current fed funds rate is about 3 million. Stocks and flows of money can be converted back and forth. If you consider the fact that most retirees will aim to draw down their nest egg, we should actually count their equivalent net worth as higher. On top of that they haven’t even started to draw social security. The total value of their government benefits is probably around 5 million when compared with someone seeking to get the same income from their own investments.
whatihear
1mo ago
In the short term that’s true, but we’ve run lots of experiments to see if government can allocate capital more efficiently than the market over the last century, and the answer seems pretty clear. Once things had time to shake out, the economy would almost certainly be larger. There are lots of reasons to support government taxing and spending such as cool jets existing or reducing wealth inequality/pasification of the proles, but greater GDP is not one of them.
whatihear
1mo ago
Market efficiency generally refers to pricing correctness. I don’t think it has much to do with elasticity of demand or supply.
“If ROI is high then more people will want to buy,” is generally true, but it’s not a priori true. We have to know something about the demand curve as well. Most of the time, it will generate a sellers market and allow sellers to raise prices, but it doesn’t have to happen immediately. In the case of political bribes, the market is intensely opaque and potential buyers might not realize how to make a purchase or may not want to buy for silly reasons like honor. Over the long run I would expect more buyers to clue in, but it wouldn’t surprise me if bribes could remain really high ROI for a long time without changing market conditions much. Certainly I wouldn’t expect it to move as fast as oil futures.
whatihear
1mo ago
You are assuming that demand is infinitely elastic. It is quite possible that there are just not many marginal new buyers of potatoes even if they are a great deal. Demand being inelastic would not free the farmers from competition and allow them to raise prices.
whatihear
2mo ago
Tit for tat leading to large diffuse groups wanting to come to the table obviously happens. It’s so common and predictable that we have a term for it: “war weariness”. War weariness is not just leaders deciding to compromise, it’s an attitude shift in the entire population. It takes a lot of time and a lot of pain, but it does happen. Cancel culture may not be high intensity enough to induce war weariness between the right and left, but you can’t dismiss it out of hand.
whatihear
3mo ago
Japan has far fewer economic migrants than other developed countries. That has changed a little recently (and immediately prompted a turn to the right politically). Including them on this list seems unreasonable unless you count having any number of economic migrants at all. There is clearly a difference between what Japan has allowed and what Europe or the United States has allowed.
whatihear
3mo ago
I think they were saying that black activists are to the left as “the good ones” are to the right, not that they are the same group.
whatihear
3mo ago
The three body problems idea that aliens would want to destroy other intelligent civilization because of the potential for explosive technological growth on galactic timescales seems to make a lot of sense as a motive for someone to release death probes targeting less developed species to their immediate neighborhood.
Well they are the leaders of the “not Iran or Israel” diplomatic block, so they seem to have influence among the Arabs that want to build functioning societies and not be psycho. They waged a bombing campaign against the houthies about as effective as ours (not at all), which is something. It’s true that they don’t seem nearly as military competent and muscular as the Israelis or Iranians, but they are at least enough of a regional military power that Iran factors them in to their hegemony plans.
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