roystgnr
1d ago
Have you ever gone though an airport that sees through your clothing using a Rapiscan imager? You'd think that, at some point, someone would have spoken up to ask: "Are we sure everybody is going to read that first A as a short A?"
roystgnr
1d ago
Even if we acknowledge the lack of actual melody
I'd say we must acknowledge it, but in the "Pros" list rather than the "Cons" list. Try to combine it with any other lyrics or try to do an instrumental version and it would suck, but that panicked "I'm trying to escape from D-flat but failing" verse melody really works in the context of a story about a guy who's feeling like his life is falling apart in front of his eyes, and the contrast with the melodic "escape" at the end of the chorus makes the lyrics there feel like they might actually be admirable optimism, not just naive fantasy.
roystgnr
1d ago
The vast majority of books that get optioned don't get made into movies, but I'd bet "author with two books that made hit movies and a third that has two super-popular director/producers interested in it" has better odds than most.
IMHO Artemis was pretty disappointing. The Martian is one of my favorite books and my kids loved it too, and Project Hail Mary is one of my kids' favorites and I loved it too, but with Artemis I felt like it wasn't deep or creative enough to work as a mature novel but it also wasn't kid-friendly enough to turn into a family movie. I'm still mostly glad I read it and very glad he wrote it - you don't know how art will come out until you try - but I hope that the newly-and-properly-recognized demand for More Weir Movies has enough patience to wait and see what he comes out with next.
roystgnr
1d ago
The song is not about a girlfriend cheating on you.
"Choking on your alibis" at least gestures pretty hard in that direction.
Also, the guy who wrote it said it was about when "I went to the Crown and Anchor [a Las Vegas pub] and my girlfriend was there with another guy."
I'd agree that part of the song's magic is that it's not only about a girlfriend cheating on you, though. Most of it works very well with any kind of jealousy, and with envy. IMHO it even works well with unrequited love; other than the "alibis" bit the lyrics could be about someone realizing he probably missed his chance with a girl he never had the guts to make a move on. His attempts to reassure himself that "it was only a kiss" then sound like a man trying to be rational (she hasn't definitely fallen for his rival) rather than one trying to rationalize (she just did a little infidelity where I could see it!).
roystgnr
4d ago
if he said he would
He's at least 95% gay or bisexual if he would rape a male home intruder, but just saying he would sounds like the sort of gag I would have thought was grossly funny (in both senses of the adverb) when I was half his age. "You're gay?" "Nah, straight, but some people just need to learn their lesson, you know?"
It almost feels like an Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking gag. Did you know the woman-abusing Nazi-fan candidate also tells bad jokes!?!
roystgnr
5d ago
"Men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit, because gratitude is a burden and revenge a pleasure ... Benefits are only acceptable as long as they seem capable of being repaid; beyond that point, gratitude is replaced by resentment." - Tacitus, Annals
Perhaps Appalachia is more resistant to this psychological disease than elsewhere? But it's a disease stretching across millennia, and if some subculture really has stumbled into a way to avoid it en masse then figuring out exactly how is probably the best anti-SHTF action imaginable.
roystgnr
6d ago
According to their audio quality page, the free Spotify web player streams at 128kbps (which used to be standard bootleg-MP3 quality back in the day, although with those I could still hear compression artifacts), while the free mobile player by default auto-adjusts in a range from 160kbps "High" (where I can't hear compression artifacts in MP3s, but I'd bet others can) to 96kbps "Normal" (which would be awful for MP3; is it tolerable for AAC?) to 24kbps "Low" (presumably they mean this in the moral sense rather than just the numeric sense). Their Premium plan has 320kbps (at which even MP3s weren't humanly distinguishable from original CD audio) and FLAC options for mobile, though, and even 256kbps for the Premium web player ought to be good enough.
roystgnr
6d ago
On the one hand, "purchased" should probably have scare quotes when applied to stock that isn't on the open market and that is being assessed at a 0.1-cent-per-share par value instead of anything an economist would recognize as value. Confinity might have been a gamble in 1999, but it was not a "the market cap would have been $62K" sort of gamble. Nobody gave Thiel 1.7 million shares of stock because its worth was anywhere near $1700, or because they really needed the cash for a new (but-not-top-of-the-line!) PC, and at anything like a real valuation he wouldn't have been able to squeeze more than a fraction of those shares under the IRA contribution limits. Under the spirit of the law this was a total scam.
On the other hand, I'd guess it was perfectly legal under the letter of the law, partly because there seems to be no limit to legislators' unjustified faith in their ability to write complex laws without loopholes or to fix the inevitable loopholes with more complex patches, and mostly because if "ha ha par value counts" wasn't a loophole in this case then by this point you'd expect Democrats would be prosecuting it, not writing whiny ProPublica articles about it.
On the gripping hand, this feels kind of like the cherry on top of the perfectly foreseeable karma for the "we need to protect the little guy from those conniving rich people" crowd. Public offerings are regulated out the wazoo, so a ton of stock changes hands at hard-to-quantify values before companies feel secure enough to brave the gauntlet of preparing for an IPO, so many of the opportunities for gains during that time are restricted to conniving rich people and kept out of the hands of the little guy. And even after the fact, are any of them complaining that we couldn't have gotten in on the earliest stage of the PayPal boom? Nah, just that the taxman couldn't. They only got $73.8 trillion dollars of revenue in the first quarter of the 21st century, when they should have gotten ... well, an extra $2 billion from Thiel still leaves us rounding to $73.8 trillion, but it's the principle of the thing!
roystgnr
9d ago
I've kept reading to my kids before bed, long past the ages when it would help their reading skills or sleep schedule or anything, in part because I've discovered that their commentary recaptures for me the magic of reading something for the first time.
They say you can truly enjoy great books twice: once for mystery and then once for dramatic irony. I figured out how to sneak in a third pass.
roystgnr
13d ago
Thanks. I got my first tumor cut out a couple years ago, but it was only a basal cell carcinoma, which is like the yapping baby chihuahua of cancers. Fortunately, too; if I'd ignored anything actually dangerous for so long ("boy it's weird that this scar is still sensitive to any little scrape", I thought to myself intermittently for a year, as I literally put band-aids on my damned cancer) I'd be dead.
I'm not old yet but I've already had a life to be immensely grateful for. What's killing me (albeit only metaphorically so far) is that, as the name would suggest, bad genes are genetic. Not only did I get my dad's allele, so did at least one of my kids. Of all cancer's victims in my extended family so far, though, only one died really early, IIRC in her 40s; everybody else either died around 70, or got cancer in their 60s but managed to beat it for now. Even my dad almost managed to beat his; it looked cured and it didn't recur for a year. Hopefully we'll have made even more oncology progress by the time my kids need it.
roystgnr
14d ago
Also 25% of US adults under 40 have never married.
Not "adults under 40", rather "40-year-olds" exactly. This is a much stronger result, as it needs to be to support your theory. If the stat were for "adults under 40" I'd have been happily surprised the number was so low; it would be consistent with everyone marrying in their mid-20s!
roystgnr
14d ago
There's a classic joke (apparently usually aimed at German personality stereotypes?) along those lines:
An American couple adopts a little German baby boy. As the years go by, the parents become deeply concerned because the child grows to be four years old without ever uttering a single syllable. They take him to speech therapists, pediatricians, and specialists, but every test shows that he is completely healthy, intelligent, and physically capable of speech. He just chooses not to.
Then, on his fifth birthday, his mother serves him tea and a slice of chocolate cake. The boy takes a bite, sets his fork down, looks up, and says in a perfectly clear, advanced voice:
"Mother, this cake is altogether too dry, and the tea is a bit tepid."
His mother gasps, drops her plate, and bursts into tears of joy. "My God, you can speak! Wolfgang, you can talk in full sentences! Why on earth haven't you ever said a single word to us before today?"
The boy blinks, shrugs his shoulders, and replies:
"Well, up until now, everything has been satisfactory."
roystgnr
14d ago
I was only around 9 when I tried really hard (but failed) to get my mom to quit smoking. In later years she tried a couple times to quit unprompted, but only managed to cut her habit in half. I was around 36 when the lung tumors got her, while her last grandchild was still a baby too young to talk.
Ironically she managed to quit cold turkey as soon as she saw the blotches on a lung x-ray, though at that point the cancer had metastasized and she only had months left. I think if she'd known she really was capable of quitting she'd have managed to do it decades earlier.
My dad I never worried about until he had some major health scares starting that same year; he hardly touched anything more vegetable-like than iceberg lettuce or corn, but even after he'd retired he generally exercised (doing volunteer work) well enough to counterbalance his diet, and the cancer that got him was probably mostly bad genes on that side of the family.
roystgnr
18d ago
I'd go farther than that: he's not just a specific person, he's a specific current leading candidate for the US Senate. This isn't a nutpicking look at a particular jerk who happens to be a Democrat; he's a particular jerk who was trouncing his primary opposition so hard they dropped out and who is now leading in all the general election polls. It's good to have lists of hateable and mockworthy things said by leading candidates for some of the most powerful positions in the country! Those are factual content; they are not "just "He's on the other team."" Is it is possible that some of the underlying selection process here was actually just "He's on the other team"? I certainly can't deny that there are leading candidates and even already-elected federal officials of the Republican party who have also said lots of hateable and mockworthy things. The solution should be to list and hate and mock both groups' leaders gross misstatements, not neither group's. Folks of every ideology can join in on that process in general, and even on many of the same targets in particular! Platner first became famous for triggering a "Are We the Baddies" LARP, and there really are lots of unbiased and pro-liberal and pro-leftist and even pro-Democratic-Party reasons to worry about him.
roystgnr
28d ago
That's an important distinction, but it looks like the resulting epidemiology still isn't much different? Wiki claims the Andes strain is about 1/6 of the human hantavirus cases in Argentina, which would mean it's been responsible for roughly a couple dozen cases a year since the mid-90s. Having a dozen cases in the same cruise ship is creepy, and maybe it means this'll end up on the list of otherwise-obscure diseases that turn into serious risks in crowded semi-confined ship/barracks/dorm conditions, but it still doesn't look like the "first zoonotic/lab-leak appearance in humans, followed by exponential doubling in the general population every few weeks" we saw from Covid.
roystgnr
28d ago
If you get hantavirus it's a huge deal. But you won't get it. It just doesn't spread that easily among humans. "There are hantavirus cases!" has been true (nearly?) every year, in the continental US; this one is just special because it was in sufficiently cramped conditions that it infected more than just like one guy sweeping up contaminated mouse droppings without an N95.
roystgnr
28d ago
It's possible this is a high-water mark and maybe the GOP is losing and this redshift is all an affect of Trump.
It's possible this is a high-water mark and the GOP would be losing except that this redshift is all an effect of Harris. She came with a ton of baggage, and couldn't handle the most basic softball attempts to let her disclaim it. She did well enough among California voters, but when the Democrats actually last allowed her to lead a national candidacy she took 15th place, with (not a typo:) 844 votes.
Why couldn't a Republican Party sans Trump continue to win, say, a consistent 52-48 national victory.
In my incredibly biased opinion (registered Republican, but would have gotten drunk enough to vote Harris had I been in a swing state), a Republican party sans-Trump would be much better positioned to keep pulling national victories, but that's not really on the table. What we'll have is a Republican Party post-Trump, a party irrevocably changed by his performance (net approval rating now under -20%), with a back bench full of politicians who've often praised him and who won't be getting softball questions about that. I don't doubt that the Democratic Party can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory here (there's a lot of baggage there too, and it's grimly hilarious that Harris is still #2 on that list by the odds, and their #1 still spends more time than not underwater in national approval ratings), but the ball will be theirs to fumble.
roystgnr
1mo ago
I suppose that missionaries are explicitly or implicitly sorted for charisma/looks.
Something like two thirds of Mormon missionaries are male, and something like 80-90% of active Mormon young men go on a mission; not much sorting there. The percentage of active Mormon young women who go on a mission is rising, but still only at like 30% ... and (rude/speculative/half-baked/outdated thoughts you should probably ignore begin here:) because it's a self-selected 30%, it may select slightly against attractiveness. Young Mormon men tend to go on missions before seriously thinking about marriage (skipping it being considered a bit of a red flag among prospective partners), whereas young Mormon women are more likely to seek and/or get marriage offers early (I had a friend whose first was at 18) and the ones who get early offers aren't likely to leave their new fiance or spouse for a year and a half stretch.
roystgnr
1mo ago
It’s overrun with Somalis
Is it? Wiki seems to think they were maybe 0.7% in 2013, then down to under half a percent in 2022. Was there a more recent surge?
and welfare fraud now right? Easy enough to imagine a loss in that environment
This is where the scare quotes around "disabled" might be significant. Are any of Platner's benefits for anything other than mental health issues? Either the guy's 100% disability rating for those is legit, in which case it's reasonable to fear he may not be able to vigorously hunt down welfare fraud, or it's not, in which case it's reasonable to fear he may not be inclined to vigorously hunt down welfare fraud (whether because the odds of the optics backfiring are good, or just because game recognizes game).
roystgnr
1mo ago
can you point to some examples of art the Nazis considered "degenerate" that was obviously intended for and effectively executed on glorification of the Nazi state, but which was rejected due to the identity or chosen style of the maker
For identity, the closest thing I can find to an example is the famous one. Photography of a Nazi delegation to the League of Nations isn't intended to glorify the Nazi state, but it at least recognized them as newsworthy, and it seemed to be viewed positively enough by Goebbels before he learned the photographer was Jewish, then not so positively afterward. I would be surprised to find an example of exactly what you're looking for, but not because I'd expect the Nazis to have made "oh he's one of the good ones" exceptions for pro-Nazi art, just because they were clear enough about most of their bigotry that I wouldn't expect to see their targets making pro-Nazi art in the first place.
For "chosen style", you might be able to find something pro-Nazi, but expressionist, from before the Nazis came down clearly against non-realist art styles? Emil Nolde was apparently an anti-semite since WWI, and a Nazi supporter since the 1920s, but that didn't stop them from seizing a thousand of his paintings in the late 30s. His 1910 "Wise and Foolish Virgins" ended up in the "Degenerate Art" exhibition, and while one might imagine Nazis just recoiling from Jesus' parables like vampires from the cross, as best as I can tell their objection to Nolde was solely to the expressionist style. I can't actually find references to pro-Nazi paintings of his, though, just letters.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Am I just being stupid by not seeing that this is obviously a joke? In any other context I'd be sure it was, yet The Motte is the sort of place where we love to broadly speculate about even wild evo-psych hypotheticals, so I feel like I can't just dismiss an evo-boobs theory out of hand!
Famously some early emigrants to Utah walked there, pulling handcarts, which does seem like the sort of thing fat stores were made for. But that was only around 5% of even the earliest emigrants, and only around 7% of those died of exposure or starvation. Cutting out 0.4% of the gene pool wouldn't make much of a difference to anything, and in any case the strongest selection effect among that 5% would have been on whatever genes correlated with "go with one of the 8 handcart companies who planned semi-competently, not the 2 who didn't".
roystgnr
1mo ago
Credence is a probabilty measure, and even marginalizing it onto a single binary question gives you values on a continuum interval. Probability measures on a binary set are pairs (x,1-x), x∈[0,1], not binary values. Let's see if we can at least come to an agreement that there are more points along that interval than just the two endpoints:
If my wife said she could never kill anybody, and I continue seeing no evidence to the contrary, I would believe her.
If my wife said she could never kill anybody, and yet there was a suspicious death of someone she hated and circumstantial evidence pointing toward her, I would believe her.
If she said she could never kill anybody, but the police just arrested her for murder, I would believe her.
If she said she could never kill anybody, but the police just arrested her for murder and showed me surveillance video, I would be pretty paranoid any time I saw a stranger who looked like her, but I would believe her.
If she said she could never kill anybody, but the police just arrested her for murder and showed me video evidence and she had been weirdly missing during the time of death and her Google Maps timeline had an inexplicable gap, I would expect to believe her answers, but I would ask her a lot of questions.
If she'd said she could never kill anybody, but I had just walked in on her alone in a room standing over a dead body holding a bloody knife, I would initially believe her previous statement was most likely false, but in lieu of even more incriminating evidence I'd believe her "someone just dropped this knife and ran out the door, then I picked it up and wandered over here and found the body!" story.
If she was covered in blood too and I'd seen nobody leaving the scene as I approached, the story would have to be firmer for me to believe her, and the available evidence supporting it.
If also the room had a nannycam and its 4k recording showed her doing the stabbing, I would start looking to confirm my hopeful alternative theory that it was hacked and an AI-generated video uploaded, but until I found some evidence of that I'd believe she was probably guilty and I'd definitely be cooperating with the cops.
If I'd walked into the room just in time to witness her stabbing someone to death, I would end up asking a therapist about the possibility that I'd hallucinated the event, not just about trauma, but I'd consider the possibility that I'd gone mad too slim to say it was something I "believe".
If in the room was also a group full of people I trust who also witnessed the stabbing and who reaffirmed to me repeatedly afterwards that they all saw what I saw, I'd believe them, and it would take quite a bit later to convince me that I'd been having repeated distinct but coherent hallucinations.
So out of these 10 statements, considering my fraction of a point for statement 7 balances out the not-quite-a-full-point for 6 and almost-a-full-point for 5, my trust for her scores roughly a 6. In my defense and hers, I created a test that deserves a hell of a grading curve, and IMHO I'm pretty well calibrated at that "6". If I would believe her at even higher levels of this hypothetical I'd be too credulous; at lower levels I'd be too suspicious of her. It still seems fair to say I trust her, doesn't it?
I think some of our mutual friends and family would score a 5 here; IMHO my judgement of her character is better, but surely a 5 should be tolerable, even from family or someone very close? We shouldn't ghost or shun or disown anyone like that, right? It would still be fair to say someone trusts her, if they could watch a video that looks like her killing someone and say "we need to find the doppelganger". On this scale the cops' trust for her is only around a 1.9, and we could round that down to "don't trust her", but that's still a big step up from 0, right?
I don't think anyone should score a 10 here. They would be undeniably more trusting of her than I am, but would that make them better people than me, even to her? I wouldn't think a 7 was too gullible, but I also wouldn't think they were my moral superiors.
Trust is a prior credence. The more you have, the more contrary evidence can be survived by your posterior credence. There's no total order on probability distributions, so this is already a simplification, but even after oversimplifying: some people have a little trust, some have more, and some have a lot. Nobody who isn't utterly incapable of forgiveness (or of changing their mind) ever gets down to zero trust, and nobody who wouldn't stay in the Flavor-Aid line at a Jim Jones farewell party ever gets up to maximal trust.
I get that it's tempting to oversimplify. We don't even teach Bayes' theorem on discrete probability spaces in high school, much less how to compute or marginalize a posterior on an arbitrary probability space. So it's tempting to just reduce the options to either "I believe" or "I don't believe", and mostly that works well enough. The Pirahã mostly get by counting with "one", "two", and "many". Different strokes for different folks.
But please, don't try to turn oversimplification into relationship advice. There will be times when you or your partner are suspicious, about one thing or another. This will mean that you and they should ask and answer some questions, and ideally those answers will mean your trust for each other will increase (not from 0 to 1, but in that direction), because one of you was open enough to ask for reassurance and the other was understanding and open enough to provide it. This will not mean that your relationship is doomed.
Man, how did I forget to get "Your Soulmate will never make you feel untrusting or admit to needing help trusting you" on the list?!
roystgnr
1mo ago
I agree with almost all of this, but I think the major exception is load-bearing:
The state will do whatever possible to avoid taking that task. Partly due to the economic expense
If you type 60wpm, it took you 17 seconds to write this sentence and a half, over which period of time the federal government disperses an average of $2.2M in transfer payments, $250k of which are specifically for families and individuals facing economic hardship. Taking on that sort of task is something that the state already does, on such a massive scale that adding another hundred thousand kids' child support payments would literally be within rounding error on the commonly reported figures. Since our chief remaining worry is indeed
for the sake of the kid
then we want that kid's expenses to be at least backstopped by the almost-incomprehensibly rich state, which is guaranteed to pay, not by some random guy who might delay or evade payment. Once that's assured, our remaining concerns are much less pressing: justice vs deadbeat parents, and well-being for innocent taxpayers. We can fix both concerns by finding the biological father and getting him to pay, but can we improve either by squeezing a non-father?
Justice vs deadbeat parents can't be improved by punishing a non-deadbeat non-parent.
Well-being for innocent taxpayers you might think can be improved by getting some poor sucker to pay instead of them, but that poor sucker is in the set of innocent potential taxpayers, and the marginal utility of money decreases. A priori most people would probably prefer a certainty of paying a tiny amount over a tiny chance of being unjustly pushed into paying a much larger amount. And that's just considering the financial aspects; someone who's been cheated on in this way is paying to have those extracted finances managed by their victimizer, which is definitely negative-sum in well-being.
There is a more subtle problem with just letting the state pay in these cases: doing so removes all incentives the mother might have to help the state track down the biological father. That wouldn't necessarily be a new problem, though (why bother tracking down biodad if the guy you tricked is already paying?), just a still-unsolved one.
"We made a deal, but you never signed it or voted for it because it was before you were born, but don't worry about how much it's costing you because you'll get paid back by other people who still haven't been born, except of course that the demographic pyramid is now much taller and upside down and our accountants say there's no way you can't get mostly stiffed. Are you really saying you want to alter that deal?"
I believe the appropriate counter-meme here is the "Yes Chad".
I'm probably near enough to the peak "going to get screwed when the younger people wise up" age that I certainly can't be happy about the situation, but it is what it is.
I'm a bit of an AI doomer, but if we're going to insist that someone to do all our work and pay for our leisure without deciding to just let us all die instead, I think creating AGI to ask might still give us better odds than asking the ever-shrinking younger generations of First World countries. And just in case that Fully Automated Luxury Geriatric Space Welfare-Capitalism plan remains mere fantasy for too long, in the meantime it might be a wise idea to back off on the massive debt-funded entitlements gradually, before we add too much more risk that our creditors will decide to back off suddenly. In the worst case, there might be so much of a backlash that the "saved money is no good" contingent actually gets into power. It's dismaying how many young Americans hold favorable views of socialism, but if they perceive the status quo as "socialism, just not for you" then I can see how they might imagine they'd be upgrading.
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