aaa
3d ago
And yet, 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon, 6 picas into an inch, 12 inches into a foot, 3 feet into a yard, 1760 yards into a mile and 3 miles into a league. But you will be pleased to know that you can, in fact, ask for half of a liter or a quarter of a liter if you like fractions (and many fraction lovers do just that).
aaa
3d ago
Ironically, these are the same people who tend to be fans of SI (popularly "the metric system").
I think opinions on DST vary a lot among fans of SI given that includes almost everyone on earth except citizens of the united states, the united kingdom and aviators.
Oh, so now you want to preserve a human-centric unit (like every system of measurement did before SI, metric or not) now that it affects you
There's nothing less human-centric about the SI the meter is just a standardization of the toise (also known as fathom, klafter and many other names), a measurement approximating the distance covered by a human's outstretched arms. If you wanted a unit of measure that wasn't human based you would invent something like the nautical mile, not the meter.
The other argument people make along these lines is about units of temperature but firstly nobody actually uses the Kelvin outside of scientific papers and is brine really a more human substance than distilled water?
Besides length and temperature nobody ever talks about anything else. Nobody ever argues that the pound is more human because the roman libra just exists in nature but the french bushel, precursor of the liter is an inhuman monstrosity. Or that the inch of mecruy just gives them a better intuitive understanding of pressure than the hectopascal.
aaa
18d ago
Also she does that stupid zoomer not using capital letters thing even though she's a millennial. Very annoying.
Not using capital letters is also an old internet thing. Jerry Yang, the old CEO of yahoo was famous for it.
aaa
18d ago
It's because conservatives live in rural areas, close to their extended families from which they receive millions of dollars in free child care.
aaa
19d ago
Another interesting example of high birth rates in non-African countries are central Asian countries like Mongolia and Kazakhstan. These countries seem to have been able to reverse, and not just slow down birth rate decline
Kazakhstan fertility rate is declining. You are thinking of Mongolia and Georgia. I already talked about them two months ago they are very unusual countries and the reversal in TFR is probably just a fluke.
The reason for the fertility rate decline is simple: the cost of children greatly outpaced growth in wealth for various reason deeply rooted in how modern western societies are organized. It can't be fixed without some deep changes nobody is willing or capable of making. Telling people something is high status doesn't work, you actually have to make them perceive the high status and in a capitalist society high status roughly correlates with more disposable income, therefore you either have to abandon capitalism or shower parents with so much money that having a child is a cash positive decision at any level of income.
aaa
1mo ago
I did look into some of those:
Stock market hits record high Bitcoin hits record high EU will buy U.S. gas not Russian gas Zelenskyy phones Trump & Elon
These are true.
Hamas calls for end to war
This is true but highly misleading, they want Israel to surrender, basically.
Qatar kicks out Hamas leaders
This is unclear, Israel says they did, Qatar says they didn't.
China wants to work peacefully with us
This is true but they say it after every election.
aaa
1mo ago
TIL that religions removed by centuries and thousands of kilometers from christianity worshipped satan because some internet christian believes their mythology is actually real.
aaa
1mo ago
satanic religions of old
There is no old satanic religion. Satanism was invented in the 60s by a topless bar manager.
aaa
1mo ago
as far as I can tell based on my ideological prejudices (yeah), the children most likely to want to transition are the children, especially male children, of left-leaning single mothers
Your ideological prejudices are wrong, the increase in trans youth has been concentrated mostly in females:
Adolescents assigned female at birth initiate transgender care 2.5 to 7.1 times more frequently than those assigned male at birth
(...)
In October, researchers at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine published a paper showing a 389% increase in gender-affirming chest surgeries performed nationally from 2016 to 2019 on patients under age 18. The total of 1,130 procedures during the period, nearly all of them for chest masculinization, represents a weighted estimate based on records from more than 2,000 U.S. medical facilities.
(...)
The predominance of patients assigned female at birth is a reversal from the past. For years, when very few minors sought gender care, those assigned male at birth accounted for the majority. But about 15 years ago, that began to change as care became more accessible and the overall number of patients started climbing, according to studies and interviews with gender-care specialists.
For example, at Amsterdam University Medical Center’s gender clinic, a pioneer in adolescent gender care, the proportions flipped. From 1989 to 2005, 59% of its adolescent patients were assigned male at birth, the Dutch clinic reported in a 2015 study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. Since 2016, about 75% of the clinic’s patients have been youths who were assigned female at birth.
aaa
1mo ago
I disagree with this characterization. Nick Fuentes has always run a vibes based group, his main victory was telling Ben Shapiro he wasn't conservative enough. He's also been calling himself a Christian Nationalist for years. Milo used to be a politically incorrect technocrat back when Allum Bokhari was ghostwriting for him but after getting cancelled by the mainstream conservatives and joining Fuentes (and then leaving Fuentes) he's publicly renounced his gayness and can be seen walking around with a breviary.
Despite their faith being obviously fake and ignorant I would still consider them part of the religious conservatives, although distinct from the main religious conservatives on account of being younger, antisemitic instead of philosemitic and almost completely irrelevant.
aaa
1mo ago
I don't understand. You consider Milo Yiannapoulos and Nick Fuentes (I assume that's who you mean, I can't find any relevant David Fuentes) to be politically incorrect technocrats?
aaa
2mo ago
At least part of this is that American ballots are fiendishly complicated
The complexity of the ballot is yet another weakness of the US electoral system. Having so many questions on a single ballot means that an attacker can deanonymize it and use this information to commit fraud. Complex ballots like that should be split into separate ballots, both because it makes counting faster and because it makes certain kinds of fraud impossible.
aaa
2mo ago
How are they lower? That link says it's 9% the 2017 study puts 10% muslim around 2035 in the "high immigration" projection. It looks much higher to me.
aaa
2mo ago
Why do people put any stock in happiness statistics? To me it looks like what it would be if we measured national temperature by feeling before the invention of the thermometer. Is Il Cairo very cold, cold, hot or very hot? In fact, it's even worse, because you have at least the possibility of moving somewhere else and experiencing another climate while you don't have the option of moving into somebody's else's head.
aaa
2mo ago
It's strange that people feel this way given that galenic temperaments and astrology were inextricably linked for centuries. They have the same origin (Aristotle making shit up, misunderstood by Galen which is misunderstood by arabs which are misunderstood by medieval translators) and the main purpose of astrology, for pretty much all its history save for the last 100 years, was to inform galenic physicians in how to fix humors.
aaa
3mo ago
There is a lot of sexual frustration, yes. However, while females committing mass shootings are rare, they are not unheard of. So you would need at least a few more datapoints.
aaa
3mo ago
There isn't anything damaging but if it came out close to the shooting, when everyone had their attention to it they would be all over Paige. Was it worth it? Probably not, but maybe it seemed so to the people who did it.
aaa
3mo ago
PS. I strongly suspect that the reason the diary wasn't released until today was to protect Paige from undue attention, given how prominently she is featured in the diary. There was no conspiracy.
aaa
3mo ago
There was some talk previously, here, about the "manifesto" of Audrey E. Hale, the 2023 Nashville Elementary School Shooter. The shooting happened in 2023-03-27 and the FBI hid the "manifesto" for well over a year, with only a few select pages leaking here and there.
Because the shooter was trans (female to male specifically) people speculated that the "manifesto" contained all kinds of nefarious ideological reasons.
Well, it's all out now. You can get it from The Tennessee Star or, if you don't want to give them your email, from the Kiwifarms.
Basically, there's nothing interesting to it. Alas, the mystery box strikes again: fantasy was better than reality.
A few observations in no particular order:
- the "manifesto" is really just a diary
- Audrey was 28 years old but reading the diary you would probably guess 14 instead, it's really immature (the spelling isn't great either)
- she initially wanted to do it on 1/17, then 2/17, then 4/17, then 3/17 and then finally settles on 3/27.
- she got scammed on the internet while looking for freelance designer work (think logos, illustrations), multiple times
- she hated her father, and also her mother, but mostly her father
- she wanted to have anal sex with a black girl but couldn't because she didn't have a penis, nor a black girl
The backstory is that she was in love with two (black) girls, Sydney Sims who died in a car crash in august of 2022, and Paige Averianna Patton, who is a local radio personality (as Averianna The Personality). Syd never reciprocated, Paige only briefly in high school. On the 27th of february Paige had her first live show (I'm not sure what kind of live show that would be), which coincidentally was also her birthday, so that's probably why the shooting happened on 3/27. This is what Audrey writes about said live show:
She knows who she is, and all the rest of the world in time will too, she's famous to me; a star to many, little does she know how we will soon share the same fate. She will live a legend and I will die a shooter - hopefully to become infamous (I will make history too). No one will forget neither of us. She will be the blessing, and I will be the horror to inflict pain.
aaa
3mo ago
The 10th percentile Swede enjoys a style of life far more comfortable and luxurious than the 90th percentile Nigerian, but Nigeria's birth rate is way above replacement.
You are thinking about this the wrong way. The relevant variable is not how much money you have but how much does a child cost. Nigerian children are cheap but a Swedish couple doesn't want to raise their child like the average nigerian does (and they can not because it is illegal).
aaa
3mo ago
Mongolia and Georgia are very different from the average western country. Both countries:
- have a large rural population (30%-40% compared to the 20% or less of western countries)
- almost everyone who is not rural lives in a single city (50% of mongolians live in ulanbator, 30% of georgian live in Tblisi)
- they both have net negative migration in living memory
- they both have low life expectancy at birth
Additionally Georgia's population growth has been negative for the past 30 years, if you don't count the bump they got in the last two years from the war in Ukraine.
In my opinion the fertility crisis is 100% economic in origin, it would be interesting to see where the increase of fertility is happening in Georgia and Mongolia. If it's concentrated in rural/low density regions then all it's doing is convincing a few people that live in very-low-child-cost areas (in the case of mongolia possibly in negative-child-cost areas) to have more. If that is the case trying to do something similar in the west will yield no result at all.
If you were going to increase the birth rate how would you do it?
What I wouldn't do is:
-
No child subsidies. We're never going to be willing to spend the kind of money needed to make them work. Plus they are dysgenic, to make them not be dysgenic you'd have to make a regressive social program (rich people get more) and those are taboo.
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Taxing the childless. This is the exact same thing as 1 just framed as to appeal to conservatives. The only positive thing is that you can make this not be dysgenic.
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Less schooling. Schooling is a big driver of child cost so reducing it seems to make sense. Ideally you wouldn't just get rid of college but bite into secondary education as well. Most people should be, by age 16, out of school and into a paid apprenticeship that offers a career path (so, not tomato-picker-forever type things). I think our world is too complex for this to be possible, we wouldn't be able to decide who's worth putting the apprenticeship training into.
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Push religion onto people. Religion is positively correlated to fertility so we can trick people into taking an economically bad deal (having more children) by brainwashing them into believing god wants them to. I think the correlation of religion and fertility is a mirage, more religious people just tend to live in lower-cost-of-child areas (living within an extended family both provides free child care and also makes people opportunistically religious). This is too long to explain but I think religion by itself suppresses fertility.
I don't think the problem is actually tractable. It's intractability is likely the true reason behind the big push for immigration we've seen in the past 20 years.
My extremely long shot proposal is this: socially normalize and encourage women to have children while in college, out of wedlock and with no expectation that the relationship will last and then dump the child on their grandparents (of the woman). After the first 3-6 months she's not going to see the child at all outside of holidays and a few sundays. This places the economic burden of children on people that are better positioned economically to handle it, who can live in less dense areas of the country (because they don't have to be near a job), it mostly removes the negative impacts on career (because she's still doesn't have one) and child subsidies can be added to the pension system and thus be regressive, because the pension system is the only social security system that is allowed to be regressive (hopefully nobody notices that we are doing this).
There is a strong social stigma against having children before finishing school, that it will make you forever poor (because it currently does do just that), so this is extremely unlikely to work.
The human mind can in fact adapt to 40 as "very hot" and "0" as cold instead of 100 = very hot and 32 = cold.
The point where numbers become blue is in fact completely arbitrary.
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