WhiningCoil
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User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
19hr ago
I remember even 15 years ago, when all this seemed like a fever dream, the activist claims that "If a child decides they want to, they can just resume a normal puberty" seemed insane to me. My mind automatically went to all the wrestlers I knew in highschool who's growth was stunted from constantly having to make weight for 4 years. There was no catching up on that growth after they quit wrestling. The chip on their shoulder manlet former wrestler stereotype exist for a reason. They were tricked by their coaches into peaking at 15, and sacrificed the stature of an adult and the romantic successes that come with it.
I doubt your typical highschool female athletic encounters this, but I know with Olympic level female gymnast (and other sports) who've been lifers, they often struggle with fertility, though I think it's an open and debated question how much of that is permanent. There does seem to be some risk of permanence if the condition occurs at the wrong time or for a long duration.
So I mean, in the context of these pre-trans examples around how important healthy puberty is, and how you don't get a do-over, it was shocking to me that anyone believed the activist lie that it was "fully reversible".
WhiningCoil
20hr ago
Interest travelogue. I went to China with my Kung Fu school about 10 years ago to visit the home school, along with a dozen other places with a tour guide. How's the insane levels of smog these days? When we visited, we could see no more than 3-4 city blocks in Beijing before the smog obscured everything, and even visiting the Great Wall, the mountains were quickly obscured in smog within a mile or two. I'm told it's better these days, but I can't tell if these are flagrant lies from the CCP.
One thing that has fascinated me about Chinese culture is trying to square Chinese Communist ideology with a culture that at every possible angle seems to celebrate success and laud becoming wealthy. I like these people. They strike me as spiritually more American than most of the people I've met in Europe. American rightists would find themselves more at home here than American leftists.
This also struck me when I visited. There was a "Greed is good" sort of shamelessness that was disorienting even for a "Rah Rah Capitalism!" sort of guy like myself.
Locals stare, and kids keep staring even after you stare back. Some of them have never seen a white person in the flesh. I'm not offended by this at all, just an interesting experience. No one is aggressive or rude, just curious. Almost no one here speaks any English unless they've retired from elsewhere.
When I went with my tour group, we had a black guy with us. Random people straight up wanted to take pictures with him, he was so rare. Outside of that, can confirm the staring. Especially when we ventured into the more rural parts on our Kung Fu pilgrimage. One funny thing was, we did get random groups of people out at night coming up to our group, wanting to practice their grade level english with us. We also had a few more worldly, though unable to speak a word of Chinese, people with us who helped us along purchasing things and navigating using the universal language of pointing, shouting, and holding up fingers.
I visited before the CCP fully devoured Hong Kong. Are they still doing separate Visa's for Hong Kong and mainland China? That was certainly an experience for me when I had to do it. Super hot day, one guy was throwing up in line all over my luggage. That sucked.
Super fascinating to read more of an insider view of the region and culture than what we got.
WhiningCoil
1d ago
It's very schizophrenic. A coworker of mine told me a story about a base he worked on. To finish a step in acquiring your clearance to work there, you had to log into a secure system. You could not log into the secure system because you hadn't completed all the steps in acquiring your clearance. Therefore, someone who was already cleared had to log into the system for you, so that you could finish all the steps to get your own clearance. This itself was a violation of the rules for both the person who logged you in, and yourself.
Nobody cared. Everyone knew the system was bullshit.
But it's hard to imagine having to break the rules to get inside the circle of trust a clearance represents doesn't input a certain fundamental disrespect for said circle of trust.
WhiningCoil
1d ago
I don't know if you remember being a kid, and had somebody fuck with you (steal your toy, punch you, cheat off you during a test) and then to add insult to injury they also successfully lied and got you in trouble for it?
That's all this is. It's virtually inconceivable these people don't know who's really committing the rapes and knife crime in the UK. This is just the victory lap of their conquest, presaging how'll they'll write the history of the genocide of the Anglo-Saxon's.
WhiningCoil
1d ago
So, one thing I keep wondering about, is does the US have a massive cultural divide with the UK over pornography, or is UK media completely unhinged and unrepresentative?
Like, in the US, it's currently a minor flashpoint that conservative state governments are requiring age verification for pornographic websites, and the websites are choosing to block access from those states instead of implementing age verification. Liberals seem to be low key against this? At least I've seen liberals like Krystal Ball act like Republicans are harming people's sexual health by "banning" pornography in her state of Virginia. It's not exactly a hill they'll die on, but they'll spend some breath on it from time to time. Like liberals seem to be pro pornography, or at least in some sort of weird hyperposition between being pro some abstract form of pornography that's good for sexual self discovery, and against some abstract for of pornography that degrades women.
I know... I know... just.... moving on.
So anyways, a lot of US left coded Narrative following shows seem to be very laissez-faire about pornography, especially with lots of "safe horny" scenes of diverse peoples and sexualities having sex on screen.
A lot of what I can only assume are left coded Narrative following shows produced or co-produced in the UK (Broadchurch, Inside Man, Black Mirror) have as their central conceit that pornography is the singular corrupting force behind evil patriarchy and violence against women. The consumption of pornography repeatedly leads to a chain of events where men rape and/or murder women.
Is this actually a view that the UK public holds? Or is it just more of the same top down forceful lies that gets pushed in the US media, totally out of touch with the people who watch it?
WhiningCoil
4d ago
I could have easily been swayed if I didn't have the luxury of a bigger budget that can't be better spent elsewhere.
Kids these days. There is always the S&P500 :P
Seriously though, enjoy your prestige build.
WhiningCoil
4d ago
How much future proofing you trying to do?
Only thing I'd recommend is make sure you have extra memory slots to expand to 64gb in the future. I noticed recently that Doom: The Dark Ages has 32gb as it's recommended amount of ram. So you know, the 32gb you are getting is enough. Probably be enough for the next few years. But I built my PC at the tail end of 2019 and I put 32gb in it then. It's starting to feel like it's getting to be about the time to future proof with at least the option of 64gb in the future.
Also, if you ever plan on abandoning windows for linux, maybe go with the AMD card? Drivers are supposed to be better, and this latest generation seems to have finally got it's shit together in terms of ray tracing performance. Still lacks a lot of features like ray reconstruction or frame generation, and DLSS is the superior upscaling technology. But I'm currently taking a 20-30% haircut on my FPS for raytraced games in Linux that use DX12. I'm under the impression AMD does not have this problem.
WhiningCoil
4d ago
I believe this is known as fed-posting.
Yeah, don't fed-post. It might feel good, but one day you may have to actually resort to violence. And you don't want to end up like the Charlottesville guy where a bunch of private, semi private, and anonymous online conversations were used against him while he was railroaded in court.
WhiningCoil
4d ago
The rule compliant way to express things in both cases is "dont hate the player, hate the game".
"The progressive ideology has ruined libraries for me. It seems to ruin everything it touches. I wish the ideology was dead and buried with other past terrible ideas."
Do you promise? Cause I can just quote that word for word when I short circuit in rage and disgust.
Yeah, children's books are fucking terrifying these days. Our local library, that our daughter's school occasionally takes the older kids too, had a bit of a kerfuffle with them pushing inappropriate books on kids, Gender Queer chief among them. There were protest, the usual mealy mouthed euphemisms about "book burning" to dodge the issue of graphic novels with graphic depictions of gay sex being recommended to children. Instead of removing the books or putting them in an "adult only" section, they created some fake "New Adult" section, which really changes nothing? Because their terminal goal seems to be showing pornographic material to children.
Turns out the library was being run by an NGO despite being funded 75% by the county. The conservative county has now forced a conservative board onto it by threatening to withhold funds. So I guess sometimes you can vote your way out of problems. At least until the state or the feds decide to steal the institution away from you, or some interloper in a black robe decides "Actually, making pornography available to children is mandatory".
I could swear having LGBTQ themes is now mandatory in children's publishing. I made the mistake of wondering into a random bookstore with my daughter in my state capital, and virtually every book was queer. A curious girl falls in love and kisses a mermaid. A curious girl falls in love and kisses another girl. A curious girl pony falls in love with another girl pony and they kiss. Some lesbian unicorns, etc, etc. Basically there was a book for every type of little girl with the subtext of "Have you considered being gay?" With rainbows and sparkles, and god damnit the mermaid one really caught her attention because she loves mermaids. It was virtually every book prominently displayed cover out instead of spine out. That and some picture books proselytizing about Taylor Swift. Weirdest fucking shit I ever saw. Had to distract my daughter with something shiny behind her and then make an excuse about needing to be somewhere.
My wife, who does more of the shopping and the picking out of books notices this shit a lot more than I do, and virtually every day she comes home with tales of what she saw in a kid's section today.
Just, what the fuck? It's exhausting all the directions this shit keeps flying at us from. And then some parent you've been friendly with the last few years of your daughters school invites you to see a "family friendly drag show" and you wonder if all the people in your life have been replaced by pod people. There was a before time right? Like.... 5 years ago? 10 years ago? I'm not imagining it, am I?
Edit: Upon further research, the library in my anecdote chose to have their funding cut rather than accept a more conservative board of directors from the county, and ceasing showing pornography to children. I guess some thing you actually can't vote your way out of, and these.... people get to destroy one of the oldest libraries in my state. Alas.
WhiningCoil
8d ago
I don't know who this mythical normie is that would be offput by doing a victory lap on Biden's demented half corpse. You are basically plugged into the MSM narrative and have forgotten all the gaslighting about Biden being "sharp as a tack" and the hilarious lies about him running circles around people at the White House, or you have a memory longer than a goldfish are are furious. There is not a lot of in between.
Well, I guess there are the liars who covered up his dementia for 3.5 years and are now writing books about the coverup, like they weren't a part of it.
WhiningCoil
8d ago
Trump announced in a post last night that he was considering voiding the last minute preemptive Biden pardons of Fauci, members of January 6 House committee, and others, because an "autopen" was used to sign the pardons. Presidential authority to grant pardons is very broad, and apparently autopen has been used by prior presidents; looks like a losing case if it goes before the Supreme Court.
It's not because of the autopen, it's because of the accusation that Biden was too incapacitated to even know it was happening. That the broad authority to grant pardons was not, in fact, being exercised by the president at all. And I for one would love to see Biden deposed about, well, anything having to do with these pardons and see what he remembers.
WhiningCoil
8d ago
I think the Maxwell connection makes Israeli Intelligence unavoidable. The only open question is whether it was a collaboration among several agencies, or they kept him all to himself. Wouldn't be unprecedented. I recall a cyber attack (Stuxnet?) on Iran's nuclear weapons program that had the fingerprints of US, Israeli and German intelligence agencies.
WhiningCoil
8d ago
Yeah this is plausible I suppose... but dude if the intelligence agencies are covering up for huge pedophilia rings like... what the hell?!
I keep meaning to read Chaos about how the CIA "created" the Manson Cult. Supposedly it's very well researched, and if it's somehow all smoke and no fire, I'd be amazed.
WhiningCoil
11d ago
It's a funny theory, but I see memes where apparently every liberal politician's wife (except Hillary Clinton) is a tranny. Macron, Obama, Chuck Schumer (who's wife is very unfortunate looking), other random liberals I've never heard of. I even saw one random "uno reverse" meme trying to say Melania Trump was transgender.
Frankly the plurality of these memes kind of disproves all of them. One high profile liberal married to a transgender woman I could believe. Virtually all of them? Are there even that many middle aged transwomen that would have transitioned 20-30 years ago?
WhiningCoil
11d ago
I'm pretty sure he's a post turn of the millennium kid, so to an extent, when he talks about "90s" games, he's being exposed to cherry picked games from that era. Namely the absolute classics, the ones that stood the test of time, and thus were what were recommended to him when he was older.
Honestly I don't buy this. I think some genres have, by all objective measures, gotten increasingly worse with time.
Take 4X for example. Once upon a time, you bought a 4X game for retail price, and that was that. You got a complete game. Now the average 4X game has dozens of expansions where they piecemeal out mechanics or factions that would have been included in the base game. Sometimes we even know this for a fact because the previous iteration of the game did in fact have those exact mechanics or those factions in the base game!
I forget the exact comparison, but some meme went around with Avowed getting compared with Oblivion or Morrowind and not looking the better for it. Some 10+ year old game had more interactivity that some cutting edge AAA game that aspired to it's style of play. There are good odds Avowed could be the highest profile RPG released this year. Top 5 at least. And by most of the talk I've heard, it significantly misses the mark made by games that are old enough to drive.
I think possibly the only genre of game which might be "better" is the highly competitive sweaty kind of game. If your jam is the sort of global competitive network where you can definitively prove you are the top 1% or even 0.1% of players, we had nothing like it in the 90's or 00's. Factorio style games too. There were some economic games, but nothing like the sort of logistics/programming involved in Factorio.
I have mixed feelings about Boomer Shooters. I haven't exhaustively played a ton of them. Dabbled here and there. I think a lot make noble efforts, but many are still afflicted by the desire to include some sort of meta progression systems trying to hook into the compulsive part of your brain, because that's just how you get people "engaged" with your game. Lets call this one a draw.
WhiningCoil
11d ago
Yes, games were better back then. Post mobile game design is all based on farming engagement. There is zero reason Doom Eternal needs weekly quests, or a bajillion cosmetic unlockables, or a weird meta progression mechanics. It's just more shit trying to hijack the compulsive part of your brain. Because game devs now are either evil, or stupid. They know the difference between compulsive and fun, and try to get you addicted out of selfish desire, or they don't and they just follow along because it's what is done.
Also, games were more responsive back then. On a console hooked up to a CRT TV, or a computer with interrupt based input (PS/2) and a CRT monitor, input to action was virtually instantaneous in a properly programmed game. These days there is a distinct fuzziness to game input, and many games actually allow you to input commands late and have them still count to compensate for this. I recall watching a video about some rogue like that let you jump a few frames after you had already walked off a ledge because of input lag.
WhiningCoil
12d ago
Never successfully. But they were invited into the Empire with the full expectation they would be Romanized like the Gauls, Hispanics, North African peoples, Celts, etc. The Emperor would declare them friends of Rome, and expect them to cultivate the lands and pay the taxes, often of areas thoroughly depopulated by civil wars, disease and famine. They expected to be able to levy troops from these peoples. This was largely a fiction since the Empire lacked the manpower or resolve to really keep them out, so they would just decree that these tribes were being made Roman subjects. Some, like the Goths, took this pledge maybe halfway seriously?
It's just that by that point, either the Goths, Vandals, Saxons, Franks etc were a unique challenge, or the empire had lost whatever mojo it had that got the people it ruled to Romanize.
WhiningCoil
12d ago
I mean, on the one hand, I'm with you 100% about the school system treating young boys like defective girls. But if the problem is a fundamentally matriarchal school system that doesn't understand boys needs for physical activity, hands on learning, and stern discipline, I'm not sure more matriarchal bureaucracy is the answer.
WhiningCoil
12d ago
I mean, if you're going to bring up the Romans, you can't get away from the collapse of the Roman empire, and it's eventual failure to keep "Romanizing" the people it ruled, eventually collapsing into a bunch of basically ethnic nations. Debates about how much the Huns, Franks, assorted Goths, Vandals, Saxons etc were distinct ethnicities, or banner bearers for tribal confederations aside.
WhiningCoil
12d ago
I've just let it ride. Im still up over 20x. I may rebalance at some point this year and divert some into my S&P fund, but paying the 15% cap gains tax doesn't seem worth it at the moment. I may harvest some losses off Intel with it though.
WhiningCoil
12d ago
Don't worry about it. I first started my 401k in 2006. A year later I saw a shit ton of it poof and vanish in the 2007 financial crisis. It might have been $6000-10,000. That shit hurt. I panic sold the bottom, left it in some inflation protection fund for too many years, and missed out completely on the recovery. Learning this lesson is best when you are young, so by the time you are middle aged and have real assets, you have developed diamond hands.
Now I have a seven figure portfolio. I'm down almost six figures. I honestly don't give a fuck.
Let the S&P 500 and the tech ETF ride. In 20 years you'll be alright. Don't sweat the $1000 you put into relatively riskier plays, so long as the 10x leveraged option can't wipe out the rest. Leverage can be scary like that.
You're a student, and provided your degree is of any actual use, you'll have your entire adult life with an income to keep contributing to a portfolio. There will be more bull markets, there will be more dips. Investing is a marathon, not a sprint.
WhiningCoil
12d ago
shop classes
Random thought, is shop class even a thing anymore? I mean I remember a shop class in middle school every year, and I think my freshman year of highschool too? But that was 20-30 years ago now. Even then it was pretty meager because of the safety aspects of working with power tools. I think there was a drill press we were allowed to use in middle school, and maybe a band saw in highschool? I remember the class being 95% "nothing" or stuff I don't remember, and 5% getting a supervised turn on the drill press. That and sanding. Every time you asked the teacher a question about your project, the answer was always "You should probably sand it more" and being pointed to this giant box of worn out scraps of sandpaper with random grits. I have no memory of a table saw, but it might have been there but verboten on account of how dangerous they are even for experienced woodworkers to use.
I'd love for there to be more shop in school, but I'm not sure the risk profile of working with power tools sits well with most moms.
WhiningCoil
12d ago
I had a friend who used to be a teacher. He was all in on virtually every neoliberal shibboleth of teaching. Against school choice because it took resources away from public schools. Always making snide comments about what will happen to special needs kids if schools got fully privatized.
Naturally, his sons all have some non-specific emotional/behavioral problems that lets him game the system for them to have personalized education plans and extra resources. He's always been good at gaming the system like that.
We're currently struggling with some shitty behavior our daughter is tracking home from school. My wife is adamant that it's something the school should be "fixing", and I keep asserting it's not their job. It's our job. So our daughter is currently grounded.
I donno man. I guess there is some theoretical intellectually in tact individual that needs extra resources either because of a physical disability or idiosyncratic mental problem (like dyslexia) that if gotten over the hump of not being able to help themselves, can go on to utilize their education for the betterment of society. Personally, I've never seen one. I mostly only see parents pushing their parenting duties onto teachers through fake special needs, or fake special needs students becoming fake special needs employees, expecting all the same accommodations around their emotional needs and learned helplessness.
I do expect lots of malicious compliance around this though. Totally normal shit like just wanting to have a conversation with a teacher about how to help your child in an area they are struggling with becomes "Sorry, Trump said I'm not allowed to."
Not particularly? Or maybe properly informed parental consent is good enough? You see this a lot with football now, where the concussion risk is so high that parents won't let their kids play it anymore, and instead encourage other sports.
I'm of two minds about it. I'm a huge proponent of fitness, and I fucking loved the decade I spent in martial arts. The concussion I got from it was not so much fun. Nor the spots I still have in my vision, my torn ankle that aches at night if the sheets are tucked in, or the fact that I broke my right hand twice and the knuckles on my right hand line up different than the knuckles on my left now. But I suppose for a 10 year amateur career, that's not horrible, and those were the choices I made largely as an adult. Nobody rode my ass, I pushed myself exactly as hard as I wanted to, until I didn't anymore. And I wouldn't fault anyone for wanting their kids to do a sport, within the boundaries of safety and reason.
It seems somehow more sinister when coaches are pushing children beyond the limits of safety and reason, with health outcomes they would be in a unique position to be aware of, but which they ignore. And if there were programs or coaches that systematically abused children in that way, I would like to see them banned.
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