domain:slatestarcodex.com?page=1
FtttG
1m ago
Well, now you're just straight up putting words in my mouth. I never claimed that volunteering in a foreign country doesn't count as meaningful life experience. Nor did I ever claim that working as a lawyer is exciting or meaningful, merely that it's clearly something distinct from writing.
Is a stint working as a busboy really that unusual? Is speeding? Surely someone in today’s Hollywood has cleared this bar.
I'm sure they have - but if it's significantly less common for successful screenwriters to have cleared that bar than it used to be, that could be one contributing factor towards the decline of writing quality that is described in this thread.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11m ago
In principle, I agree, though I think tarring and feathering and deportation is a little extreme...
That said, I absolutely believe #killallmen posters are almost entirely performative, whereas Joo-posters are not.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
12m ago
I literally do not know anyone who has been to jail. Or if they have, they've never told me about it.
I know lawyers who have been to jail (and I don't mean they were visiting clients). They did not go around broadcasting it. You might be surprised who has gotten to spend a night or weekend in jail without you ever knowing.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
14m ago
On the sensation of hunger and the specific wording I'm using "the sensation of hunger" and not simply the term hunger, this is part of the meditative practice that I think has allowed me to maintain the weight loss. In Buddhism we talk about dependent phenomena and conditional arising, and the fundamental emptiness of all such things. In this understanding, hunger is not an indication of needing to eat, or at all even related to the nutritional state of my organism, its a sensation like the temperature of the air, or ambient sounds. It never, ever, ever goes away. If I am awake, I am hungry. Starving. Even now that I'm "better", I'm hungry from the moment I awake until I return to sleep. No amount of eating of any type of food has any effect whatsoever on my sensation of hunger. In fact, eating generally makes me even hungrier, as well as exhausted. I could eat so much food that I had trouble walking, I would feel like I was on the verge of vomiting from how stuffed I was, and I was still starving. I think something like this drives the behaviors of many, if not all, obese people to some extent. I am fortunate that the same techniques I use to manage chronic pain work pretty well with chronic, inescapable hunger.
Could you recommend books on this kind of Buddhism instead of the typical pop-Buddhism?
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
19m ago
Tangential, but: https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/russian-peasant-life
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
20m ago
Sure. But what specifically are you arguing here? I don't want to go back and forth trying to figure out what you are hinting at (or not). Do you think Jewish success is the result of some special advantage they have that they are withholding from gentiles? Do you think it's the result of innate Jewish characteristics? Or do you think it's the result of historical events converging to put them where they are now, for good and for ill? Because the answer to "What should the gentile do?" depends on what you think Jews are doing.
No_one
26m ago
Around here (Slovakia), I'm not sure if @georgioz will back me up on this, putting children into daycare before age 4 is seen as wrong and harming the child, as the child needs stability and security, not be taken care of by strangers.
Communists briefly promoted it but it later came to be seen as unwholesome and wrong. I have a relative who was put into daycare from age.. 1.5 I think, or maybe 2 years and it seems she (and rest of family) think it was not a good idea.
Bartender_Venator
27m ago
I suspect a lot of people here are a third case: they don't pay a ton of attention to the private lives of other people outside of a small circle of family and friends. I could tell 5-10 stories of this type (of varying degrees, not literal jail) just from college, and plenty more from being involved in an art scene with lots of gossip. Suspect that small towns can be similar, but I'd have to hear from a ruralposter on that one.
gattsuru
44m ago
I'll second the fear bit. I'm a child of divorce, my current significant other is a child of divorce. My workplace is small and not hugely representative, but I've seen more divorces happen among people working here than marriages or childbirths combined. From the numbers, just under one in three children will watch their parents divorce before they reach adulthood; one in five of all adults are divorcees.
It'd be a different matter if most of these divorces were the advert model where a deadbed room and some court hearings lead to a couple parting ways, and 'amiable' divorces do presumably exist. But I've seen maybe one, and those close I've heard about are pretty far removed.
((I haven't actually seen the weekend prison stay, though I'll admit that's probably an artifact of class-and-culture stuff. I have seen everything from 'announcing divorce with a bulk withdrawal from a shared bank account' to 'left photographic evidence of infidelity in space with the teenage kids' to 'clearly false allegations to get the significant other fired', and those are just the claims that I'm extremely confident on. Nor, to be clear, is all the bad behavior coming from women, or even relationships involving women, even in this list.))
And that's the unofficial side of things. Amadan can critique the hypothetical worst-case scenarios, and does so with cause. Alimony is rare (although I'm skeptical of the 10% number that's going around, which seems to be cited from a Marquette University game-of-telephone from a study that was hilariously limited, page 75), income-limited to (often well-)under half of income, and usually time-limited. Child support is much more common -- though not strictly tied to marriage -- but it has caps too and depends on the existence of a child. The extremely rare cases where these combine to exceed half of income usually reflect either unusual changes in employment immediate around the divorce or bizarre situations.
But the official rules, while not as bad as the hypotheticals, are still absolutely terrifying, and they often break down badly at the edges.
There's a fair argument that these are controlled (if not _well-_controlled) detonations of a relationship that was already ticking, and I've watched a few where the divorce, ugly as it was, wouldn't have been as bad as a continued marriage: in addition to the classical physical abuse or addiction, there's the schizophrenic break, the propositions to an older child, the embezzlement. Yet I've also seen a number of cases that should have fallen into the 'amicable' divorce setting, falling apart over short-term infidelity or incompatibility or differing goals, and they've included many of the worst results. I don't have to talk about what the divorcees would have done in a counterfactual or with a time machine, here; at least a couple were Borderer enough to say if their partner was gonna cheat on them they wish they could have just exchanged some hall passes... months before the divorce proceedings plummeted into child service calls and severe drug addiction, respectively. Yes, revealed preferences and all, but it's still Not Great Bob.
It's not the only cause for the collapse of relationships, or even the only cause for fear of marriage specifically, but it marrs the matter heavily.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
53m ago
<eddie-murphy-tapping-head-meme>
can't be part of the class to sue to not be aborted if you're aborted before you're born
sodiummuffin
55m ago
It includes future children who aren't conceived yet, so by that logic it would also apply to preventing them from existing via condoms or abstinence.
The argument is that it will harm them in the future after they are born, which is presumably considered different from preventing them from existing in the first place. Like if a company was dumping a chemical that caused birth defects and you got a court to order them to stop on behalf of victims that don't yet exist. (I am not a lawyer and don't know if you can actually do that, but I'd guess you can.) Conversely I would be very surprised if someone distributing free condoms or putting up "Say No to Teen Pregnancy: No sex before marriage" posters could be sued on behalf of the counterfactual people who would have been born if they didn't do that.
Sunshine
55m ago
I'll speak for the Irish famine: It was an act of nature. There is ample documentary evidence of the British government taking measures to alleviate the problem, such as repealing the Corn Laws to make food imports cheaper and arranging for large quantities of cheap cornmeal to be shipped from America and sold in Ireland at below market rates. These measures were taken at great political cost. Sir Robert Peel had to resign as PM after repealing the Corn Laws (they called him Sir Robert Repeal, no I'm not joking).
The potato blight was a Europe-wide phenomenon and Irish agriculture was notoriously backwards and over-reliant on the potato harvest. The fact that there was a famine is not surprising and I see no reason to blame the British. Contrary to popular belief, Ireland was a net food importer throughout the famine. This is in stark contrast to Ukraine during the Holodomor.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
How am I supposed to interpret this, then?
These are not people who had traveled widely and read, they go to college to learn to write (or make films)
I think there’s a no-true-Scotsman where each of these boring, normal careers gets recast as something exciting and meaningful. Is a stint working as a busboy really that unusual? Is speeding? Surely someone in today’s Hollywood has cleared this bar.
High-schoolers can volunteer in foreign countries and people will wave it off as PMC strivers padding their resumes. But when a rich kid stumbles into film school he must have collected some valuable experience. It’s a double standard in service of the age-old complaint. Those darn kids just don’t respect their elders.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1hr ago
You are a mental titan, I am in awe of you
Well fucking done
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1hr ago
Quote from the opinion:
Respondents object to the inclusion of “future persons” in the class, arguing that “‘future persons’—i.e., persons who have not yet been conceived—lack either standing or capacity to sue”. As petitioners note, the fact that a policy will continue to harm future class members is relevant to numerosity.
Including future class members is no bar to class certification. Although the future class member children in this case have yet to be born, as soon as they are born, they will join the class and their claims will be ripe. In other cases involving children, the fact that some of the potential future class members had not yet been born was not a bar to certification.
Finally, more children will continuously populate the class as they are born, and, where “an influx of future members will continue to populate the class... at indeterminate points in the future, joinder becomes not merely impracticable but effectively impossible”.
Any ontology issues you've settled for preventing unborn future kids from losing citizenship is surely a settlement that you can use to prevent unborn future kids from being aborted since your life has even more moral worth than your citizenship.
FtttG
1hr ago
I don't think your examples really support the argument you're making. @MaiqTheTrue's argument, as I understand it, was similar to one made by Kevin Mims here: writers in the past tended to have some kind of life experience outside of writing which they could draw on in order to tell compelling stories, whereas modern writers tend to study writing itself, and hence have nothing to draw on other than other stories they've read by other people, resulting in their novels/stories/screenplays giving the impression of palimpsest. I did not interpret their argument to mean that "if you have a liberal arts education, your stories will suck".
Per the narrative above, Jonathan Hensleigh obviously falls into the former category, not the latter: he practised law for seven years, unambiguously professional experience outside of writing itself. Likewise David Mamet: he variously worked as a busboy and taxi driver in Chicago (imagine the kinds of crazy characters he must have met) before taking up writing full-time. Ed Solomon I'll grant - but if your first example to illustrate your point that "you don't need life experience to tell a compelling story, you can just go straight into writing professionally" is the dude who wrote the Charlie's Angels adaptation and Super Mario Bros. with Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper, it doesn't strike me as a terribly compelling one. (Obviously Solomon has written more commercially successful and critically well-received screenplays than those two, but it seems worth pointing out that the latter is widely considered one of the worst films ever made and one of the worst cinematic adaptations of a video game - and there is some seriously stiff competition for the latter accolade.)
So of the three examples you provided of successful Hollywood screenwriters, two of them did, in fact, have some kind of professional life experience outside of writing to draw on when writing their screenplays, which seems to affirm @MaiqTheTrue's point rather than contradict it.
I'll concede the point that studying film in college before going on to being a director seems to be a pretty normal career progression, and has been for decades - but given that this thread was about the poor standard of writing (as opposed to directing) in modern Hollywood films, that observation doesn't seem especially relevant. At no point did @MaiqTheTrue argue or even imply that films are worse now because directors study film in college instead of getting life experience first. While I don't doubt that having life experiences to draw on is valuable as a director, directing a film is an intrinsically more technical craft than writing one - the director needs to have at least a passing understanding of lighting, lenses, shutter speed, depth of field etc. in a way the screenwriter doesn't, and hence are well-served by studying these elements in a formal setting.
ChickenOverlord
1hr ago
I've seen in plenty in body cam videos, but the closest I have in my personal life is a great uncle who got screwed over by his ex wife. This was like 30 years ago and I hardly know this great uncle. He and his wife owned a business, she was cooking the books and ran off to a country with no extradition treaty while leaving him to face any consequences. You'd think his wife fleeing the country would be evidence that she was the one cooking the books but the cops wanted their scalp.
He spent a few years in jail, and obviously he divorced her over it.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1hr ago
Nvm, faceh said what I was going to say below. Still totally understand where you're coming from though.
birb_cromble
1hr ago
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm interested in the fact that the judge has defined a class where, due to the linear nature of time, the majority of the members of the class do not actually exist.
Is there any historic precedent for that kind of class? It seems like there's an issue if standing if you don't exist yet. Is this some sort of legal fiction, like when the government sues a barrel of vinegar?
gog
1hr ago
I worked at a daycare for one glorious year. Kids a little less than a year old were dropped off at 7 and picked up at 5. One kid screamed for the entire duration, every day, for months. The other kids just screamed for a week. The attendants cuddled the babies, but they mostly left them on the floor to crawl around. By the time they graduated to the 2-year-old room, the kids were merely supervised, rather than attended to. This was a budget daycare, but not unusually so. The 12th kid on a farm would get a lot more attention than these babies, certainly until age 2 or so, and it would be maternal or sororal attention, rather than "minimum wage demands that I hold you for 10 minutes every hour). Furthermore, even a baby left alone in the corner of the kitchen while the mother makes johnny cakes (or whatever 12-child farm families eat) is still in its mother's presence. Daycare babies are not.
JTarrou
1hr ago
I always found that focusing on principles more than technique helped me link things together better. The move of the day stuff sometimes lines up with what you need, but not often. It's worth learning that stuff, but my advice is to focus on things that connect to parts of the game you already know decently well.
So, if you're confident defensively in half guard, maybe try learning a couple sweeps and subs for that position, preferably ones that branch off each other. That gives you a simple choice matrix for that position.
My own progress really took off when I started to focus on staying in and advancing the control position. Six months I learned to sit in mount, six months on back mount. Still working on Kesa/Side Control. Once you understand how to progress the position, submissions sort of fall out of the process. About a third of my subs now are unintentional, before I start chasing anything.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2hr ago
While I have a soft spot for Fantastic Mr. Fox, I’m not really going to disagree. I got Anderson by randomly sampling 90s films. Here’s a few more:
- Jumanji (1995). Written by Jonathan Hensleigh, a lawyer who got his start writing TV episodes. Directed by Joe Johnston, who studied special effects in college.
- Men in Black (1997). Written by Ed Solomon, who studied economics but dabbled as a stand-up comedian. The jokes write themselves. Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. I think the worldliness of his brief career in porn is counteracted by the fact it was photography.
- Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). Director James Foley, studied psychology and film. Writer David Mamet despite winning numerous awards, appears to have had a normal if liberal childhood in Chicago.
While I tried to pick a different movies, these were literally the first three I clicked.
I stand by my theory that getting a liberal arts degree, plus a film masters, has been pretty normal for decades. The view of writer or director as Romantic auteur is what the kids call “cope.”
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2hr ago
I just hung out with a dude who at least expressed some degree of belief in the claim that 9/11 was an inside job. About all of.. 2 hours ago.
I'm not so sure of this. Men are significantly more likely to be victims of homicide than women, particularly when accused of victimizing a woman. I think there's a very good argument to be made that use of #killallmen is at the very least intentionally reinforcing that particular inequality to hang a sword of Damocles over men in an effort to control their behavior.
More options
Context Copy link