domain:nfinf.substack.com
WandererintheWilderness
4m ago
The problem isn't personally having illegals hit and run you personally on the road (that was several friends of mine), or murder your family (that was my coworker's brother), or take hostages and burn your house down (that was a row of houses or two behind mine)
I think this still counts as things happening to you "personally". A series of mishaps and disasters affected your friends and family and coworkers and neighbors, and this gave you a subjective sense that civilization was falling apart blah blah blah. @cjet79 can correct me if I'm wrong, but I parsed "Overall my life has been awesome and not filled with much tragedy" as very much including "my friends and relatives and neighbors have rarely if ever suffered life-ruining events of the kind you described as having affected your family, neighbors, etc.".
SnapDragon
6m ago
I'm reminded of the Obamacare debacle, which still fills me with rage. People (correctly) pointed out that women pay more for health insurance, and (incorrectly) said that this was an unfair "woman tax". It was politically brilliant, reframing the fact that women live longer as a societal injustice - against women! And it was 100% successful; Obamacare made gender-based pricing illegal, and now every man in the country is subsidizing the health care of every woman in the country. Forever.
birb_cromble
10m ago
Southerners who didn't care about good food.
WandererintheWilderness
14m ago
Rape is more sensitive, I guess.
Especially with regards to CSA, it definitely leads to a lack of clarity at times. If someone tells me "oh, Alice was abused as a child" it can be pretty tricky to decipher if they're telling me her parents used to beat her, or that she was groomed by a creepy uncle - even when I am actually intended to take the hint by the speaker (as distinct from them deliberately obscuring the facts to protect Alice's privacy).
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
15m ago
IIRC, the basis for the argument that high fructose corn syrup being worse than cane sugar comes down to fructose needing to be converted to glucose in the liver, as opposed to glucose, which does not. Sucrose is essentially a molecule of fructose and a molecule of glucose, so the liver only has to do about half of the work, comparatively speaking. Proponents allege that too much HFCS in the diet leads to more visceral fat and even metabolic syndrome and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. The counterargument is that the difference in metabolic pathways is relatively minor, that if caloric sweeteners are that much a part of any diet, metabolic syndrome and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease can result, and that the bigger issue is a diet heavy in processed foods in general.
WandererintheWilderness
16m ago
No_one
16m ago
Maybe you should give it a try, no? I mean, same tribe, even vaguely similar social circle.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
16m ago
Yeah, I recall it was an explicit point among some pro-choicers to “own” the abortion activism in the aftermath of Dobbs. Maybe the larger ecosystem has rejected that take. But it was a thing at the time, and I respected the candor and straightforwardness of the view. I get that the point is “women should have the right to choose” and that it’s not “abortion is the greatest thing ever!” but the shift has been from “safe, legal, and rare” to “safe, legal, and none of your damn business how rare it is.” It’s more of a change in tone than a change in view point.
WandererintheWilderness
18m ago
I'd argue "passed away" is a more precise term than "died". "Passed away" means died peacefully. If I get a call that tells me my father passed away last night, I instantly parse it as: ah, he died in his sleep, guess age caught up with him at last. If the call instead tells me that my father died last night, I'm as likely to imagine that he had a car accident as anything else.
No_one
19m ago
No, he's not wrong. They were generally older. The youngest girl ever mentioned was 12, and seeing how they were generally older, she probably looked older than she actually was.
Girls start puberty, on average, around 11 in late 20th century America. So, odds are, while this was obviously very wrong that she was not, biologically, a child.
WandererintheWilderness
22m ago
I get the "marriage equality" thing, but honestly I'm fine with that term too -- if you believe gay marriage is meaningfully different from straight marriage, obviously you think it's unequal, and should be so legally,
Well, one sticking point is that it used to be a major conservative talking point on the topic of gay marriage that the word "marriage" means "a man and a woman getting hitched", exclusively, fundamentally; that so-called "gay marriage" is not marriage at all, and granting queers the use of that word even with a qualifier is already surrendering half the battle. Precisely analogous to the anti-trans contingent's reluctance to use a term like "trans woman".
WandererintheWilderness
25m ago
Firstly, unless you're a complete nihilist, "black lives matter" is a true statement. So's "blue lives matter", and so's "all lives matter". The controversial ideological position behind BLM's name is the claim that white cops don't believe black lives matter and are consequently shooting innocent blacks left and right. Conservatives believe that this is baseless slander, that most cops value human lives as much as anyone without racial discrimination, and that the supposed spree of extrajudicial police killings is an illusion at best, a deliberate lie at worst. Nobody except a few mad edgelords disputes the literal meaning of the words "black lives matter". The implicit BLM claim of "black lives matter, and yet white cops are racist and don't believe that", meanwhile, is so contextual that simply saying the name "Black Lives Matter" does not, in any conceivable way, constitute parroting that claim out loud.
More salient, however, is the fact that while "black lives matter" is technically a "message" with a "direct plain meaning", the same can hardly be said of the words "george floyd". You are not endorsing any particular idea by mouthing or writing those syllables, except that there was a human being by that name involved in the event at issue, a truth-claim which I… hope you would not deny as a matter of objective fact.
That second bit is making it especially hard to take you seriously.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
35m ago
A lot of really really unhealthy eating amounts to "not thinking about eating." Just eating whatever.
The moment you start thinking about anything relating to eating, it's a huge upgrade over not thinking.
You can get just as fat off cane sugar as hfcs, but if you refuse to eat hfcs you'll at least reject a few things at the 7-11, and sometimes you won't eat something you would have otherwise eaten.
FlailingAce
43m ago
Congrats! I got interested in the financial independence/retire early (FIRE) movement after I left college (because I really didn't enjoy my job). I'm much less strict about it these days since I'm married and have a new career I love - for instance, we just purchased an unnecessarily large dream house - but I'm still looking to retire in the next ten years or so.
the last several years my investments have appreciated more than my yearly income
tantalizing close
My man you have already arrived. A while ago in fact! Relevant post from my favorite FIRE blogger.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
49m ago
Not exactly a question, but definitely small-scale (or niche) and probably not a good topic for the main thread:
Pope Leo has granted an exemption for a parish in Texas to continue the Traditional Latin Mass
Early this year, the Diocese of Charlotte, NC issued, then delayed, a reduction in the number of locations for the TLM. The open secret is that the Vatican probably told the Bishop "slow your roll, guy!"
Is this enough evidence, now, to develop some cautious optimism about restrictions on the TLM easing?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
54m ago
Interesting. I keep a picture in my head of how everyone looks. Probably wrong but I'll never know.
faceh
57m ago
Define "Substantial."
The majority of retirees fit that criteria, and most of them make it through life just fine without becoming a target.
Like, the very idea you should forgo a wife and kids in order to avoid being targeted for having a modest amount of money sounds absolutely insane to me? That just doesn't happen.
No, I'm agreeing. I'm pointing out how going FULL Hermit mode is really the only way to mitigate certain risks created by having people you care about enough that you'd pay lots of money to avoid them getting hurt.
Realize that in several countries, kidnapping for ransom is a big business.
You should not live in such countries if your goal is to keep your 'fuck you' money. This is not an excuse not to have a family, just a vector by which you might get fucked in spite of having the fuck you money.
phailyoor
57m ago
Yes I agree. Shame on the government forces that allowed open air drug markets in major US city centers, released drug dealers over and over again after arrest, and turned a blind eye to public drug consumption in the middle of the sidewalk and at bus stops.
phailyoor
1hr ago
Yes, I understand the distinction, but the issue is that I may want to mention that activist organization without mentioning the idea that is conveyed by the words in the name of that organization. That idea may be unrelated entirely to the relevant actions of that organization, yet by writing the words in the name of the organization, you have brought that unrelated idea into the discussion, whether you or the other readers want to or not.
Of course, this doesn't directly address the issue of saying the name of a certain individual who was linked to the 2020 riots. That argument is somewhat more complex.
Turniper
1hr ago
I don't really think that's true though. It's not a substantial risk factor. Acting rich is far more likely to make you a target than merely prudently investing a modest amount of wealth. The majority of retirees fit that criteria, and most of them make it through life just fine without becoming a target. Like, the very idea you should forgo a wife and kids in order to avoid being targeted for having a modest amount of money sounds absolutely insane to me? That just doesn't happen.
phailyoor
1hr ago
The names "Human Rights Campaign, "Justice Democrats" or "Freedom Caucus" don't convey any message at all, beyond possibly giving an inaccurate idea of what the organization does. You can't say "human rights campaign is false." It doesn't say anything in particular about human rights or campaigning.
On the other hand, the words in the name of the organization do have a direct plain meaning. A meaning that is direct and can be argued. It's certainly possible to argue that "[words in the name of the organization] is false" or "[words in the name of the organization] is true."
WandererintheWilderness
1hr ago
For what it's worth, speaking as one of the most left-wing people here: I found it very interesting, I believe you wrote it in good faith, and I have a lot of sympathy for you, so I'm glad you did go to the effort of writing it.
(Of course, it doesn't convince me. The impression I get is that the universe has played a cruel trick on you - that you've been tremendously unlucky over an extended period of time, Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers-style, and this has inevitably and understandably skewed your intuitions in a very deep way. If I had a chronic heart condition, and got "treated" by three or four of Scott's anecdotally-psychopathic cardiologists in a row through pure luck of the draw… yeah, I might wind up with a deep-seated intuition that there's got to be something to the inherent rottenness of the profession, no matter how eloquently people tried to talk me out of it. Confirmation bias giving undue salience in my eyes to the ordinary feelings of ordinary cardiologists would do the rest.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1hr ago
You probably know he's hugely popular
Yeah, I definitely wanted this to be my bridge back into the genre, and had heard a lot of great things about it. I agree that the characterizations are dicey at times and that much of the dialogue writing is awful. I find the cosmology interesting, though, and I admit I’m a sucker for the “here’s a list of factions with distinct personality traits and iconography, sort yourself into the one that you’d be a part of” trope.
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
Overall my life has been awesome and not filled with much tragedy.
That's the part of it that is hard to communicate. At no part in my story was I the direct victim in any of this, beyond getting beat up by the illegals many years older than me who were placed in a middle school classroom likely based on education level, the county not yet having an ESL program. A mistake that was relatively quickly corrected. This might have been 1996? According to some census data I found the county was only 7% Hispanic then, compared to it's 25% now. Whites declined from 75% to 35%.
The problem isn't personally having illegals hit and run you personally on the road (that was several friends of mine), or murder your family (that was my coworker's brother), or take hostages and burn your house down (that was a row of houses or two behind mine). It's how it feels to see civilization fraying at the edges all around you, chaos growing stronger every day, and the high trust society you grew up in collapsing into a low trust hell hole of all against all. You came from a world where things like this didn't happen, period. A 40 point swing in demographics later, and suddenly it's normal. It's like that "First they came for the..." poem, only instead of methodical Nazi's eliminating problematic groups, it's just raw 3rd world barbarism and high time preference imposing it's consequences all around you, and occasionally picking off someone around you. And for whatever reason, people just keep their head in the sand. They roll to disbelieve, or they pretend this is fine. To notice at all places you on the fringe.
Claude tells me it's basically 'self-sustaining fusion reactor +++' since you have hundreds of tonnes of high-temperature, enriched mercury and lithium in there too somehow being restrained by a material under intense neutron bombardment. It needs months and years of sustained neutron production to work.
Probably easier to do the 'we made like 6 atoms of gold in a particle accelerator' thing in a lab.
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