wlxd
1yr ago
Defund higher education, focusing on female dominated degrees with little human capital value (eg. slash funding for psychology and education degrees to near zero, but things like medicine or veterinary are fine). Defund 3rd tier and below schools hard across the board, hopefully closing as many as possible altogether. Goals is to get people, and especially women, into adulthood as soon as possible.
Introduce very high tax benefits for married families with small children where mother is not working. Pair this with cuts in maternity leave benefits, might be needed to do these covertly to not increase uproar. Eg. cap the income paid out by social security, make it possible for small businesses to fire the employees who took the leave, in exchange for eg. making the paid leave period longer for the fired mothers, and restarting the paid period when another child is born during the leave. In short, the goal here is to make sure that get as many mothers out of employment as possible, so that they don’t have it lined up and waiting for them. When returning to work is not trivial as showing up at the end of the leave, you might as well have a second and third child, and only go back to work after you meet your fertility goals.
While we’re at it, high benefits and support to young married couples. Goal is to encourage people to marry early. This is the hardest part, not sure how to get good ROI here.
Covertly defund childcare subsidies for infants, and increase costs of private childcare by regulations. Freeze annual budget increases, regulate lower children-to-caretaker ratio to increase cost, increase credential requirements, compliance costs, reporting requirement etc. The idea is to make childcare by anyone other than mother rather silly and uneconomical choice for most people.
Overall, the guiding idea is to make people start having kids much earlier, and once they take the plunge, make having a second kid much smaller marginal cost/effort compared to returning to work ASAP. People should plan to first meet their fertility goals, before they start building their careers, because there is little to no support to having kids while you are having a career.
wlxd
1yr ago
Outdoors. It depends which city you live in but crime tends to be significantly lower than in the US generally speaking.
Nobody does this. Use Google Street View to walk through a random residential neighborhood in Europe, and count bicycles outside. Check out Torino, or Bielefeld, or Bydgoszcz, or Ghent... wait, actually, unlike the other places, Ghent does seem to have a lot of bicycles everywhere I check. After more searching, it seems to me that some cities do have outdoors bicycles everywhere, and other places have basically zero bicycles, and it very much depends on the country more so than on the crime rate. No cargo bikes, though, even in places which have lots of bikes in general. In any case, outdoors bicycle are not a thing at Europe in general, though they are common in Belgium, Netherlands and Denmark.
That said, I agree with your points that some naïve center-left Americans have a very rose-tinted view of how car-dependent cities are in Europe, even in fairly progressive cities.
I think a lot of it is that even if they have first hand experience with Europe, it is in places that are highly atypical, like Paris, London, Copenhagen, etc. Places like Bielefeld or Bydgoszcz are much closer to what the typical European lifestyle is like, and it does involve a whole lot of driving to get to places.
There's more than enough of "climate conscious" middle-class families with fairly comfortable incomes who may have a car for occasional usage, but who typically use bikes and public transportation for most daily needs.
This is somewhat true about people living in top metros, because driving and parking there is simply hell, but in more typical places (like Bielefeld or Bydgoszcz), public transit is shit compared to driving, and is only used by students and retirees.
There might be a lot of them in Europe, but they certainly are not evenly distributed. For one thing, nobody is riding a cargo bicycle in Eastern Europe. It’s simply not a thing. Babushkas are pushing carts like in these photos, middle aged drunkards carry vodka in plastic shopping bags hanging from the handlebars of their bicycles. Everyone who can afford it drives. If you can’t drive, and live in a city, you can walk 5 minutes to a grocery store that carries extremely limited selection of food, which is fine, because you can’t afford much anyway (otherwise you’d have driven to a proper supermarket).
Frankly, I often get a feeling that Americans seriously underestimate how much Europeans actually drive (especially ones outside London, Paris or Amsterdam, which is to say, overwhelming majority of them), and what makes them choose other modes of transportation than driving (spoiler: most of the time it is simply the cost).
Also, forgot to mention: where do you think people are supposed to keep those big, heavy cargo bikes? Most of the apartment buildings in Europe don’t even have elevators.
wlxd
1yr ago
This is indeed a problem Google has, but it was by no means a cause of them being scooped in this case. The Bard thing they announced has been in the making since before ChatGPT was released, and from what I can say, while it felt somewhat worse than ChatGPT, it would have still blown everyone’s minds, had their launched what they had in December 2023.
The real problem is what the OP said: they were loathe to release it, for couple of independent reasons. They didn’t feel it is good enough, for one thing, AI “””safety””” was definitely a major consideration, and finally they were afraid of it canibalizing their main business.
wlxd
1yr ago
I guess bigger culture war issue is if he was just trying to get his dick sucked and the media said that was false and it was a right wing terrorist then basically confirms a lot of peoples view that they are lying to us. (Nothing wrong with trying to get your dick sucked).
The "male prostitute" hypothesis is simply ludicrous, as I've already noted the previous time, but if you want even more evidence against it, then well, they released surveillance video where the DePape uses the hammer to break into the back door of Pelosi's house. This is not how you typically invite male prostitutes into your house, I believe. At this point, the only way I can steelman this stupid theory is that Pelosi asked him to "smash up his rear entrance" and DePape took it literally.
wlxd
1yr ago
Sure, most of the crime is committed in cities, and these have most impact on national statistics, but what I point out is still a death blow to your argument as stated above:
When you look at the UCR breakdown by county and municipality it quickly becomes apparent that it's not "America" or "Blacks" that have a crime problem, it's specific cities like Baltimore, Detroit, and Saint Louis, and in some cases (where the data is sufficiently granular) specific neighborhoods like South Chicago and Central City New Orleans.
The places you listed do most of work in bringing up the national crime rate, but it doesn't mean that there is no "crime problem" outside of these. Heavily black areas in the South have huge crime problem, with homicide rates often nearing those of big cities with lots of crime.
wlxd
1yr ago
Rural South has a lot more shootings and murders than rural Washington, Vermont, or Idaho. There are indeed pockets of extreme crime, but it is by all means false that all “crime problem” is concentrated there.
wlxd
1yr ago
Good point on the pardon.
Yeah, I know it’s on the books, but it doesn’t matter. We have a lot of laws are on the books but don’t really get enforced in a way books specify. What I really am interested about is actual figure. I know that this is really rare, and most incarcerated people are there for much more serious offenses, but how many people actually currently serve a sentence for simple possession of less than a gram of weed? 1000? 100? 10? Nobody?
wlxd
1yr ago
I suspect that these might have gotten a ride and an overnight stay, but are there people who actually serving jail sentence for less than a gram of weed right now? How many of them?
wlxd
1yr ago
This doesn’t seem to be true. See eg. https://www.laattorney.com/amp/what-if-i-get-caught-with-weed-while-flying.html which claims that it basically never happens in California. Does it happen anywhere else?
I am really interested in actual figures. Are we talking about 10 000 people currently being imprisoned for possessing less than a gram of weed? 1000? 10? 2 unlucky guys in Kentucky?
wlxd
1yr ago
And this was for a drug possession crime that US citizens are locked up in US jails for right now.
Actually, how many people in US actually are jailed for a possession of a less than a gram of weed? Does it actually happen in practice?
wlxd
1yr ago
It literally doesn’t matter; that’s the whole point here. Baldwin was also sure that the item he is using is a perfectly safe prop. How is he more culpable than the other actors who held the prop guns to other people’s heads?
wlxd
1yr ago
Pointing a gun at someone is not done as a regular part of making movies; guns are pointed off angle and camera tricks and editing make up for it.
I can scarcely believe this to be true. I have seen probably hundreds of scenes where a gun was literally touching against someone’s head.
wlxd
1yr ago
There literally is a whole community that is explicitly dedicated to sneering at us. They have their own forum, where they do nothing but repost things from here and other rat-adjacent spaces and mock them.
wlxd
1yr ago
What did they do with bull calves?
My grandparents owned a work horse, treated it like a tool, and when it got too old, they sold it for meat (which was apparently exported, because nobody ate horse meat in the old country, but they had no trouble with others doing so).
wlxd
1yr ago
At my grandparents farm back in Eastern Europe, they would let my cousins dispose of the puppies as a “fun activity”.
wlxd
1yr ago
She disappeared as soon as she was discovered, and then reappeared a couple of years later, said she is sorry about the whole thing, but refused to discuss it any more. Others didn’t pry, because after a few years has passed, people didn’t care so much.
wlxd
1yr ago
Woks don’t make much sense on induction (or electric) stoves. They are fundamentally designed to be used with gas stoves. Using them on electric or induction stoves turns them into very shitty skillets. Just use a normal skillet. If you like woks, too bad.
wlxd
1yr ago
Many years ago, I hang out on an IRC channel, another member of which was a gay guy in his early thirties. He was pretty cool, one of my friends from that channel became close friends with him. He had a Facebook page, instagram, posted frequently, people I did not know would comment to his photos referring to some shared experiences etc (this was during the time when using Facebook was still cool).
Then, after a slip in opsec, it turned out that the whole guy was completely made up by another channel member, a 19-year old girl who spent 3 years creating and maintaining his persona close to every single day, alongside with a dozens of other accounts dedicated to make him more real, and of course her own actual persona.
wlxd
1yr ago
This is the old stationary vs roving bandit thing. The Japanese don’t want to pirate so much that they stop shipping activity altogether, because this would be a loss for them. Instead, they want to introduce moderate tax, extracted by threat of their state approved piracy. This is, of course, bad, but this is not much different than the status quo, it’s just the tax proceeds will go to different recipients.
wlxd
1yr ago
It all violates a kind of value that I'm not sure people get instilled with on the modern internet anymore, no one is supposed to know we're all dogs.
Indeed, which is why I trained myself to completely disregard anything that aella says. I see her name, I scroll away. In general, if a poster is bringing up being a woman on a regular basis, I care very little about their output.
Basically, your words and ideas should stand on their own merits, instead of leaning on your personal status. This should really be a completely basic rule of online discourse. Worth comparing eg. /u/2rafa to the guy playacting the persona of a millionaire Irish VC in Bay Area (forgot which account he has now, he went through many over the years). I didn’t know that cimarafa was a woman for months, and when she brings up her wealth or status, it typically is rather loathsome instead of impressive. This is why I respect her. For comparison, the Irish millionaire persona would create a new account every few months, and very quickly start mentioning who he knows, with whom he hangs out, his literal hobby horses, his high status pastimes, size of his properties etc. Utterly disgusting.
In short, if I saw a photo of you on the internet (and I don’t go out and seek them), and you’re not ugly, I don’t care what you have to say, simple as that.
Yes, I do, but this is already a status quo. Fertility is already lowest in the top quartile of income distribution, only recovering among the very wealthiest. In fact, I think the current situation is worse: many women do not realize that they are facing this choice, and implicitly choose career over fertility, often realizing this very late. Women’s stated desired fertility is, on average, way higher than their actual realized fertility, and even if you chalk some of it up as social desirability bias, I believe that if given an explicit choice between fertility and career, enough will choose fertility to keep the TFR high.
That’s also why it is so crucial to slash higher education and promote early marriage: if you’re adult by 19 instead of 23, you might as well meet your fertility goals before you start your career. Have the 2-3 kids you want early, so that by the time you’re 26-27, the youngest is 4, and so is not such a huge energy and time drain. A bonus point is that it makes you more attractive for employers, because you won’t disappear for long maternity leave, as you already have that behind you. Most of higher education is worthless anyway, especially the degrees that most women are getting. This is also why tax benefits for married men with non-working wives are so important, to make delaying their own career more palatable for highly intelligent and capable women.
Point is, women will still be able to have careers in the model I propose, they will just start them 2-4 years later, after they meet their other important goals in life. Goal is to make the choice more explicit, rather than lying to them by pretending that they can put off having family and children for decades, and still have it all anyway.
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