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domain:thezvi.wordpress.com

Are you a measles virus or something? From a human perspective, RFK is visibly malevolent in a very obvious way.

Before he got on the Trump train, RFK devoted a significant part of his activism to discouraging parents from vaccinating their children against measles based on false claims that vaccines cause autism. His activism caused a measles outbreak in Samoa with 83 deaths.

If we measure malevolence by the degree by which the harm-to-victim exceeds the benefit-to-wrongdoer, killing kids for social media klout is the worst.

Except there is a large group of women who don’t share the values of the strikers. So effectively you have probably at least 40% of the population already going to defect and they will heavily benefit which would encourage the not true true believers to defect.

OK, the US military is not well-endowed with the cerebral sort. Many abstract tasks like strategy or military-political coordination elude them. They have produced some real masterpieces of silliness in past years: https://x.com/DefenseCharts/status/1321799395571097601

But the US military do have powerful radars and cameras pointed at the skies. They have lots of space assets, they are very interested in space. There's no way of getting to the bottom of this without their resources.

Have you seen the guys who are white dudes for Harris? I don’t blame women for not wanting to have sex with them.

Nicely done

Fuck me HL2 is so good. I literally replay it once every 2 years or so.

If it's like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, then it will result in mostly men dying, which affects birth rates much less.

Let's say the TFR stabilizes at 1 so that population halves every 30 years or so. Then it takes 90 years to return the world population to 1 billion, which is about what it was at the beginning of the industrial revolution. But the industrial revolution was very localized; it certainly didn't depend on millions of rice farmers in China existing. It started with 10 million people in Britain and spread to 100 million people in Europe.

So it takes like 300 years to get the world population back down to 10 million. Unlike the 10 million who lived in Britain in 1800, who were mostly illiterate farmers, people in the future will still have computers with the internet and Wikipedia, so they are much more capable of maintaining industrial society.

Of course if the population keeps shrinking the situation does become problematic at some point. But 300 years is a long time. Lots of things will change during that time. I would worry much more about the near future, for which we can make better predictions and over which we have much more control.

The main problem with the GPU market today is that you can't buy a 3080 equivalent new for 400 USD. That's what people have been wanting since the 4000-series came out, but what they actually got for that cash was... the fourth release of a card equivalent to the GTX 1070/1080.

The 3070 was always a dead-end product; it was just supposed to be a 2080Ti but for a significantly less asking price than the 2080Ti was at that time. The 3080 was/is quite literally twice the card.

If it makes you feel any better, know that because the 1070 is still a mid-range GPU today, anything faster than a 1070 will work reasonably well. Sure, you might need to drop to 1080p or not get the fullest out of your high refresh rate monitor, but it's still going to work.

They are fanatically bad apologists for their understanding of the Christian approach to gender roles and even for their understanding of the Gospel.

I think people who are bad at relationships in certain ways are drawn to belief systems that can be used to not only justify, but reinforce, that deficiency. Christianity is just how the traditionalists/men do it, and that's mostly because until around 60 years ago there was no reason for women to have their own version.

Because of this, I think people who don't have that problem look at Christianity, see people doing that, come to the completely reasonable conclusion that they are the same, and shut down. Doesn't help that people who aren't Christians for those reasons look or act much different than your average good-quality human being, either (hence that famous Penn and Teller rant about morals), but maybe that isn't "real" Christianity either?

How did she find out? Did you tell her outright? I'm sorry either way.

From Democracy in America:

The hatred that men bear to privilege increases in proportion as privileges become fewer and less considerable, so that democratic passions would seem to burn most fiercely just when they have least fuel. I have already given the reason for this phenomenon. When all conditions are unequal, no inequality is so great as to offend the eye, whereas the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity; the more complete this uniformity is, the more insupportable the sight of such a difference becomes. Hence it is natural that the love of equality should constantly increase together with equality itself, and that it should grow by what it feeds on.

See also: the psychoanalytical concept of the "narcissism of small differences".

& Tilde;test& Tilde; (without the spaces, case-sensitive) → ∼test∼

Also, & approx; → ≈

HTML named character references are supported by Markdown.

It's somewhat relevant to the discussions about the federal government workforce. The federal government employs a lot of people, and those people aren't being spewed out by a magic high-IQ-only people factory; they're just regular people, from the regular population. Some are really smart and capable; others, less so. Different agencies have different dynamics that draw from different subsets of the population.

There is a legend in the research community of a new director taking charge of one of the national labs and saying in his first appearance in front of the workforce some form of, "We know that 50% of you don't want to do anything. That's fine. We're not going to make you; we won't fire you. Just don't get in the way of the other 50%."

The reason for this legend is not overly linked with any dynamic particular to the federal government, but it has a slightly special form in such places. There is a long, complicated story about the inherent difficulty of evaluating research efforts. In every industry, you'll have people who frankly do not have the skills or ability to contribute to the actual mission/bottom line, but they obviously don't want to have that figured out. They might lose their job! So, they try to make it kind of look like they're doing something, even if it's dumb/not productive. In industries where it's harder to evaluate whether something is actually contributing, there's a lot more room for this to flourish. Also in industries that are so bloody rich that they can sort of afford to scattershot all over the place a little and not worry too much about economy. See also the tech industry in some recent times. The federal government has a bit of both floating around. Depending on the agency, their mission may be more/less well-defined. Some pockets clearly think that their mission is approximately everything. Some defense orgs definitely think this, as it's extremely easy to slide down the slope of thinking that you have to account for literally every possible situation, every possible contingency, every idea that could be used against you or by you to gain an advantage.

Couple these two things (a workforce so large really isn't drawn from just the best and brightest) and such a broad mix of groups being more-or-less mission-focused and more-or-less clear on what contributes to that mission, and you inevitably get allllllllll sorts of pretty random crap. Some is really really good; some is, well.

I'm riffing on all this in part to say that there will definitely be some obvious low-hanging fruit for Elon/Vivek, but there is also just such a massive diversity of agencies that have such different missions, different needs, different levels-of-evaluability, that it will likely be a lot more difficult than Elon just rolling in to Twitter and saying, "Everybody bring the code you've written in the last year directly to Elon." Sure, if they have the time and inclination to scratch and sniff down to small groups like this, they'd find some set of people who say, "I take the Latin from the internet and put it in the goddamn logo!" But a lot of times, they'll get some mountain of hazy documentation about 'work' that is supposedly in line with a mission that may be extremely sprawling, unclear, and questionable in the first place. But it might actually be good-ish! Hard to tell without a deep dive and lots of expertise... multiplied over and over again in thousands of different domains that require all different sorts of expertise. Godspeed, Elon... godspeed.

That's not the same thing.

Yeah, that's why I said "not directly". Point remains if a parent makes a mistake they'll usually by wrecked with guilt, for the doctor it's tuesday.

But often they don't make the same decision their child would have if mature. Many parents attempt to override their child's decisions even after their child is mature.

If you mean something more than disagreeing with them and putting some social pressure, than I agree it crosses a line. Luckily the law is on the adult child's side in such cases.

No, I think that clears the higher bar.

Cool. So it just so happens that this blog post was talking about the exact same drug - down to the brand name - that gender clinics sell as "puberty blockers", the first line of medical intervention that they recommend for the youngest children, and claim is completely reversible. Funnily enough data from UK's Tavistok indicates that as many as 48% of kids referred to a gender clinic are autistic, so this is giving the exact same drug to a largely the same cohort. The only difference is the disorder they aim to cure, but both disorders are wishy-washy and not objectively verifiable (I guess autism might be, in the more extreme cases, but that's a point against gender affirming care).

If there's an argument for the government forbidding the doctor to administer it in one case but not the other, I'm not seeing it.

They said the same thing about kings once....

What can I say? If you want to live in platonic / marxist utopia where all children belong to the state, you're free to want it. I even wish that you get to live in the society you desire, as long as you don't go full Jihadi, and claim that this is the one true way for all of the world to live. This is why asked how are your ideas not based on your non-universal ideology.

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all ... are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights

If you actually believed that this means parents have no authority over their children, you'd be quoting Rousseau, not the American founding fathers.

But they aren't deciding for themselves! They are deciding for another person! In the purest form of libertarianism, the child would decide everything for themselves.

I am not advocating for pure libertarianism, but that is what I mean by 'your children aren't your property.' The base state isn't parents having absolute power over their children, it's them having no authority whatsoever.

Yes, that's my point. If you were advocating pure libertarianism, I could consider your idea of removing all authority from parents, and ensuring the child's autonomy. But since you don't, the idea is completely absurd to me. If parents have no authority over their children, than an adult has even less authority over another unrelated adult.

Funnily enough, both are the Casino-world tax haven of a bigger polity.

They're good memes brent

This is common enough that right wing twitter/substack has already "invented" a term for it. They call them hicklibs.

I've heard this phenomenon called "Tocqueville effect/paradox". @MaiqTheTrue

Same reason why (sane) people don't start expressing rage at someone pointing a gun at them. Anger is used as a tool when you think it'll work in favor of your interests rather than against them.

I don’t think it’s a valley, I think it’s a sort of truism of political life. Complaints and protests tend to happen in places where said problem is least apparent. Environmental protests happen where the environment is well cared for, marital protests happen where women are safe, screams of authoritarian regimes happen where arbitrary arrests don’t.

Bunch of UFO unsolved mysteries science fiction fans grew up and joined the DoD / MIC / Congress, and now they’re powerful enough to commission and staff these “investigations” where they get to sperg over found footage and can demand to be taken on tours of Area 51 outbuildings to forage for aliens in long unopened refrigerators.

There is nothing more to it.

My immediate reaction to this 'movement' is the same as when I see the 'we're not having kids because it's too expensive' or even 'we're not having kids because of global warming'. A rationalisation for what's going on, not a true reason. After all, Korea's birth rate been low for decades, and only now are the women supposedly swearing off men?

There are clearly a lot of things that contribute to Korea's low birth rate; the punishing work culture, the educational arms race, the pathological status obsession, hyper-urbanism, the lack of in-person socialising (and the comparative amount of spending time online), the sleep deprivation. I see the breakdown in gender relations as a symptom of all this, rather than the cause.

I can get behind some wall spaghetti testing

Double tilde: 30% vs. 90%

Triple tilde:30% vs. 90%

High-spatial efficiency double tilde: ≈30% vs. ≈90%

EDIT: this is a known issue, see https://github.com/themotte/rDrama/issues/736