domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2hr ago
Phylloxera is another example. There is still no way of controlling it even with 21st century technology - if it wasn't for the good fortune that vitis vinifera grows well when grafted onto the rootstock of American vine species with natural resistance (but which produce undrinkable wine) we would have lost >95% of our ability to grow wine.
As a (technical) Irishman and an oenophile, I am genuinely conflicted about whether potato blight or phylloxera is the worst thing to come out of America. But both make high-fructose corn syrup and The Phantom Menace look like nothingburgers.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2hr ago
I don’t suppose you can provide more than one example of “their” prosecutions, can you?
As far as conspiracies go, this one is pretty dumb.
roystgnr
2hr ago
Is it possible to be weighing engagement vs breaking up at the same time ?
It's quite sensible; when you know your SO well enough to decide whether you want to spend your life with them, the best answers are "yes" or "no", not "no but I'll waste both our time dragging things out anyway".
Sometimes I appreciate her steady self confidence. Other times, I am frustrated by her lack of brutal drive to self improvement.
Pros: she's confident
"Cons": she's not brutally driven
her intelligence is not up for question, but other times Im dissastisfied with the lack of sharp off the cuff retorts
Pros: she's intelligent
"Cons": she's not sharp-tongued
the brain wants what it wants.
It is definitely possible that you're not the kind of person who can be happy forever with her, and I certainly don't know you or her well enough to say you are ... but it says something that you were trying to lay down criticisms and your top three were one triviality plus two humblebrags.
The relationship feels like coasting. And some part of my brain wants jazz.
Jazz gets a lot of value out of tension and dissonance, but like any music the trick is the balance between tension's creation and its release. If you've got a partner who consistently relieves tension, then finding tension elsewhere (e.g. from your own hopefully-not-quite-brutal drive to self-improvement) is going to be much easier and more productive than the alternative of demanding/creating tension in your closest relationship.
(not to be mistaken for the alternative of creating tension via your closest relationship - I wonder if humans are ill-adapted to handle a "feels like coasting" malaise phase because historically we'd have all the tension we could want from the "when will baby start sleeping through the night and my brain fog go away" phase sooner)
naraburns
nihil supernum
2hr ago
The New York Times reports...
Huh. I admit I did not expect the article I was fisking to turn out to be at the start of a chain of information laundering for Kamala's campaign, but I guess I should have.
It's amazing to me how transparently false the narrative is, that these deaths are directly downstream of Dobbs. There seems to be more evidence that these deaths are directly downstream of the news media's scaremongering; I'd bet that both women honestly believed abortion laws in Georgia to be far more restrictive than is actually the case.
Quantumfreakonomics
2hr ago
What Nybbler said is likely the proximate cause, but the deeper issue is that in an increasingly globalized economy, America’s comparative advantage shifts away from physical manufacturing and resource extraction (which is the domain of no college men) and towards finance, technology, and intellectual property (which is the domain of educated professionals). This leads to a general resentment against “the system”, which Trump offers in bulk.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2hr ago
Is this sulphate aerosol geoengineering, or are you thinking about something else?
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
So we are talking about mitigation of effects, not getting rid of GHG, I guess?
I have not done the math, but I can see that kind of money building a lot of dams to counter rising see levels. I don't really see how it is enough to combat the expected heat waves, though. It will not buy half of Africa air conditioning for their homes.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2hr ago
That’s the kind of reasoning which encourages Great Leaps Forward. Never mind the subcontractors, never mind the supply chains, we in the planning office know better.
It’s also really…aesthetically unappealing? Interesting for a cyberpunk novel, but a miserable place to live. I have to believe there is value outside of what’s measured by stock prices.
Supah_Schmendrick
2hr ago
I actually don't know if we're in that situation. It would not surprise me if the Secret Service took incidents involving a Dem VP significantly more seriously than incidents involving Trump.
practical_romantic
2hr ago
I got hurt before and have acted like a wuss. The Pua stuff helped me avoid those tendencies.
I had to mention the fact that I couldn't sleep with her because for the first time in a while, I felt something for a girl without having even been physical. Rather, first time I felt anything and that too despite not having done anything physical.
I do agree with a lot of what you wrote. I am just lost and I don't know how to move forward. Pickup helped me a lot but I can't see my own internal contradictions which is why I post.
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
I think that any method of warfare comes down to statistics. Just about any attack has a risk of collateral damage.
For some attacks (such as targeting a wedding reception with a hellfire missile, which I am generally against), you know the exact amount of dead civilians beforehand. For some, you only have an estimate of the distribution beforehand.
I would argue that the correct thing to worry about is the expected count of civilians killed (or QALY lost, if you are into that). 'The pager blows up a crowded gas station' is on the far tail, high body count but also unlikely.
It helps that the pagers were extraordinary weak explosives, not enough to kill the person holding them in their hands in most cases. If instead they had the deadliness of a fragmentation grenade, obliterating any unarmored target within a six meter radius, then the calculation would be quite different.
The context of the attack is that the IDF is fighting Hezbollah's sister organisation Hamas in Gaza, and the collateral damage there is abysmal (because IDF killing Palestinian kids are a great outcome for Hamas). In one case the IDF killed a high-ranking Hamas commander and 50 bystanders in a refugee camp (which was a bad call to make, IMO).
I will assume that out of the nine killed by the pagers, only the girl is an obvious civilian -- if there were more dead kids, Hezbollah would be sure to tell the world. Likely they were the intended targets. Let us say that the tail risks of vehicular accidents and causing larger explosions amount to another expected civilian death.
An enemy:civilian ratio of 4:1 is not bad for an enemy who is likely to fight an asymmetrical style of war a la Hamas. It is sad that civilians were killed and injured, but if you need to kill your enemies, you can do a lot worse.
Of course, one can debate if Hezbollah needs killing, or if they were in the middle of deradicalization, building hospitals and slowly forgetting that there was something about destroying Israel in their mission statement. Extrapolating from Hamas, I think it is likely they need killing, though.
DradisPing
2hr ago
The big red flag is that the crimes seem to take place in Miami and LA, but the indictment was filed in SDNY. SDNY is where they like to do their politicized prosecutions. Charges filed there with a dubious connection to NYC implies that this is about him pissing someone off. Twitter is just a guess.
gattsuru
2hr ago
The New York Times reports:
Vice President Kamala Harris will give remarks in Atlanta on Friday focused on the stories of two Georgia mothers whose deaths she has argued show the consequences of the strict abortion bans passed by Republicans after Roe v. Wade was overturned.
The speech is part of an effort by the Harris campaign to push reproductive rights to the center of the presidential election, according to a person with knowledge of the event who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the plans.
The deaths, reported this week by ProPublica, occurred in the months after Georgia passed a law banning abortion at six weeks. Amber Thurman died of sepsis resulting from an incomplete medication abortion after waiting 20 hours in a suburban Atlanta hospital for medical care. A second woman, Candi Miller, died after declining to seek medical care for complications from abortion medication.
Tactically, this is the sorta thing that's obvious logical: Harris is trailing Trump in Georgia in recent polls, it's a major state for many of her success paths to the Presidency, and abortion is one of strongest spaces Harris has. There's basically zero chance of the ProPublica article leaving the "There may be alternative explanations for that delay other than legal concerns. But I trust that the reporter on this asked those questions, and so far no one has offered any" zone before the election is over, if it ever happens, and even if final report drops and embarrasses ProPublica, there's minimal chance anyone going to a Harris rally will ever hear about it.
But I remember when a federal candidate repeating rumors under the aegis that they weren't disproved yet was a bad thing. Scroll up in that twitter thread, and you'll find that a ProPublica writer brought it up as a counterexample in response to a conservative comparing fearmongering over ectopic pregnancies to the "eating cats" thing.
...
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the sorta people who were found it atrocious when Trump squirmed to mock a disabled man but couldn't care about Biden calling an innocent guy a white supremacist are going to find their gumption here. I'll post one if I can find it.
haroldbkny
2hr ago
I guess I propose that they might mean close to nothing, when there's still 10 to 30 million other species that remain that easily fill the gap left.
gorge
3hr ago
Other times, I am frustrated by her lack of brutal drive to self improvement. Shes objectively achieved enough that her intelligence is not up for question, but other times Im dissastisfied with the lack of sharp off the cuff retorts that ive come to expect from my male friends.
Honestly, sounds like you have been mind-killed by modern media. Real, actually living women are like this. From this comment and other comments sounds like you have a great catch.
practical_romantic
3hr ago
I don't see them as people beneath me. There are some people who get to enjoy the company of various women in a short duration of time in their youth and I wish to be one of them. If I meet a girl who I find attractive and wish to engage with, I try to do so in a respectful manner that's playful and not at all leech like or creepy.
I like women. I like meeting them, seeing them smile, make jokes and the entire experience. At a point in my life I was certainly someone who did see them in a wrong way but I'm different now.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3hr ago
No, no, we agree on the basics. It’s just not what I’m used to.
yofuckreddit
3hr ago
I use this same framework for a lot of my policy reasoning. It works for:
- Guns (Children killed/mass shootings)
- Crime
- Abortions (Late-term elective)
- Government Spending (Fraud/Efficiency of Programs)
- War (American Citizens in danger)
@faceh mentions this is useless because of second-order effects. I disagree strongly. The algebra problem gets slightly more complex, that's all. The rate of children killed by guns needs to be balanced against the value I ascribe (.99) to potentially having better weapons to kill criminals (probability X) or the National Guard (probability Y).
You can't make the equation too complex to where the changing variables are difficult to find in your mind. But using the gun control scenario as an example: Probability X and Y increased as race riots ran rampant across the country and the left began to flex their lawfare power. This, in turn, increased the acceptable amount of dead children I'm willing to accept to keep my semi-autos. This is what people mean by the gun control debate being over.
And Trump as a salesman is a lot like a car salesman, Obama is more like a startup founder pitching to angel investors.
I don't recall seeing it formulated close to that before saying that but I absolutely could have, I don't think of it as any kind of personal insight, I see it as trivially derived from other insights I took elsewhere (taking Trump seriously not literally, him talking like New Yorker, being directionally if not literally correct, etc...)
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3hr ago
Who could have imagined 20 years ago that the Teamsters would be a Republican stronghold
The Teamsters have never been a reliable left-wing force - per Wikipedia they endorsed Nixon, Reagan and Bush Sr.
For a shift that large in internal polling within a union that isn't consistent with nationwide trends (which show a very small shift in favour of Dems after the obviously senile candidate is switched out), I would assume that there is a Teamsters-specific issue that the rest of us are not aware of - probably related to how trucking is regulated. Some of it will be youth sex polarisation, but not much given the average age of the Teamsters membership.
there342
3hr ago
Natural beauty is eroded, and the world is less interesting. No, these species did not make number go up, but that doesn't mean they meant nothing. What are the negative implication of humans living in a pod and not knowing what a tree is?
zeke5123a
4hr ago
The democrats also just straight up lie a lot. When Harris kept saying “Trump’s Project 2025” that isn’t “technically true but misleading.” That was straight up lying.
I’m not sure it is really fair to say Trump is unique in lying. Where he is probably unique is that when he doesn’t need to lie he exaggerates.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
4hr ago
The Democrats offer them nothing but scorn.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
4hr ago
Ideally we wouldn't know even if the answer was greater than zero, to avoid inspiring copy-cats.
We're not in that situation, though, so it's irrelevant to the question.
So then, to you, what would not be an ideologically-driven narrative?
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