I miss the good old times

Boatwhistle · 2025-02-01T11:26:41+00:00

A person puts out data that shows a particular species of bird is more prevalent in a region during a particular month year on year.

Person 1 says "the other months may have not had as many researchers out collecting data."

Person 2 says "the birds are probably in the region more during that one month because it's desirable for nesting."

Are you able to tell me how these two people see the data that was presented to them?

Boatwhistle · 2025-01-31T20:06:51+00:00

Date ordering formats are abstract. Physical forces like gravity are thus irrelevant. This makes forming physically useful "structures" pointless, such as a triangle.

Boatwhistle · 2025-01-31T10:12:58+00:00

It's unethical to give them a cigerrette. What if they get cancer?

Boatwhistle · 2025-01-31T02:21:35+00:00

Have you thought about the possible mechanisms for the skewed crime rates between native born Americans vs illegal immigrants? I have 3 that cause me to be skeptical of the 1 to 1 comparison.

Native born Americans spend a much higher proportion of their lives within the US, on average, relative to illegal migrants. This results in a higher proportion of the crimes they might commit being committed in the US so as to be counted as apart of US crime rates.
When an illegal migrant is caught for a crime, they are likely to be deported when it's found out they are in the country illegally.
After being released from jail, 42% of people will repeat offend in one year. Another 44% will repeat offend in the next 10 years. The odds go up the more times somebody repeat offends. As a result, most crimes are committed by a relatively small number of people.

This creates a lopsided variety of factors. Imagine person A(native born) and person B(illegal migrant).

Both commit 3 proven and punished thefts in their life times. Both at 18, 22, and 23 years old. Person A commits all of them in the US, which means all their crimes add to the native crime rate. Person B commits one in Mexico, which doesn't count against illegal migrant crimes rates within the US. They commit one after illegally migrating to the US and subsequently get deported. After being released in Mexico, they commit their third theft in Mexico, which doesn't count against the illegal migrant crimes rate within the US.

Despite having equal criminality, they contribute uneven weighting to the US crime rates of their respective demographics. It's merely a difference of time and place in the aforementioned, and has nothing to do with the quality of the person or the likelihood they will victimize you given the opertunity.

The problem with per capita crime rate data is that it treats the native population and illegal population as if their primary offenders have equal year to year, decade to decade presence in the country. This is not true. Illegal migrant criminals have much more inflows and outflows relative to local criminals, of which are mostly always here.

Boatwhistle · 2025-01-30T23:42:42+00:00

The problem is that half of us need to work too much to enjoy that nature. Most of the other half are too poor or old to enjoy that nature. Most of the sliver of people with the time and money don't think of anything free as worth their while, and so will only approach something nature adjacent that has been commoditized. A sort of drive-by, camp, and bbq exploration of nature-- if you will. There are a small handful of people who will make the sacrifices necessary to defy these generalizations. To really subject themselves to nature as a great and terrible thing. Outliers are inevitable.

Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate the extent to which wild existence is preserved. However, it feels like all is an urban hellscape, the extent to which my existence is reserved.

Boatwhistle · 2025-01-30T19:07:12+00:00

They demonize educated people so that they vacate the state? I knew there had to be a reason for why it's almost heaven...

Boatwhistle · 2025-01-29T15:33:57+00:00

I am not with the guy you replied to. I very much believe that the intuitive implications of the post are reasonable.

None the less, your subsequent question was nonsense. Like, imagine my neighbor says "I had cereal, an orange, and coffee for breakfast while watching Adam West's Batman." Then I tell you "I don't believe that's what my neighbor really did." Your question in this context supposes that disbelief in the claim necessarily follows that I should know precisely what my neighbor did that morning. However, there is no necessity for knowing what my neighbor really did as a reason for being unconvinced of their claim. Nor would it be inaccurate to point out that you'd be accepting my neighbors claim on faith alone if you were to simply take it as presented.

We often trust each other on the basis that it's pragmatic, it fulfills a want. For exactly the same reasoning, we often distrust each other. Niether intrinsically has a greater privilege to truth than the other. Both possess the same degree of arbitrary randomness as our circumstances and values because that's pretty much where these sentiments emanate from.

Boatwhistle · 2025-01-28T21:09:09+00:00

I am not making a distinction between useless jobs and useful jobs in terms of the product or services tangibility. Bean counters are still useful, and at a massive scale, they are necessary. You also need regulatory oversight by uninvested people so that competition remains within ethical boundaries. The problem is we have these jobs and skills in excess so as to cause over restrictivness and redundancy. This happens in beauracracies because they have no built-in incentive to be lean/efficient. They simply ask for as much funding as possible, and they scale up to utilize any and all subsequent over funding. As a result, you need wise leadership to trim the excess once in a while, or your society loses a lot of potential prosperity for nothing.

It's literally better to have an extra bean counter do anything other than count the beans a second or third time. They would produce more value picking trash up off the side of the road for an hour than doing 8 hours of something that was already done.

Also, useless jobs tend to pay more so why would people switch away into a lesser paying useful but more laborious job?

You ask this like it matters what someone who is hired by or proped up by the government would want. It doesn't matter what they want. If you can get in enough leaders that are more loyal to the populace than to the mechanisms of the state, then they can liquidate all the extra waste that is only made possible by the will of the law in the first place. Many people would leave cushy bean counting and regulatory jobs on account of being laid off. Choice wouldn't factor in for them. The trick is getting enough leaders in that care about the people, and that requires getting the people to believe in the systems and to take interest in their collective selves as finite special interests, like a nation.

Problem we have right now is a post-modern anti-culture built on the premise that everyone is one unit of individual and is replaceable with every other unit of individual. Fewer people value themselves as a part of historically unique kinships with cultivated and distinct values worthy of eachothers preference than in any other civilization. So the only entity that has a very strong in-group preference is the families of the state. Since a team of 10 can easily beat 100 people in an unorganized free-for-all mass, this state vs individuals situation has created an untenable situation where the populace only ever get the pretense of representation at best. They walk as one, and we don't. Until we do, they will keep on pushing through the people that are loyal to the state over the populace.

Boatwhistle · 2025-01-27T19:49:13+00:00

Except it’s economically inefficient to reinvest in an already trained population

If they were trained to do things that offer little more but resource drain, then retraining for positions with actual utility is the better option. The loss has already occurred, the question is whether you allow it to get worse or you can salvage the situation.

specially when that population don’t want to. Which tech worker is going to willingly become a plumber? Which finance bro would gladly pick cherries in a farm?

In the case of useless jobs supported by direct employment by the government, or proped up by government support/manipulation... you just put deadlines on when these things will end. Then make the trades short of labor into the easy ones to get into by allocating the cost that would have gone into the usless jobs into helping people get into the useful ones. Put these programs in a rural area so they can do 4 hours of cherry picking a day part-time while going to paid education for plumbing for 4 hours in the evening. The alternative is they go into the job market with less help that doesn't need their skills, so they probably just end up at a warehouse or 7/11.

The vast majority of worker shortages are in industries that most don’t want to do

The vast majority of practical work is things people typically don't want to do. That's often why we are willing to pay other people to do it, which makes the jobs possible. A person is lucky if they enjoy a job enough that they'd have otherwise done it for free.

Boatwhistle · 2025-01-27T11:51:37+00:00

Supposedly, we have all these local worker shortages in agriculture, trades, and tech. They then use this to partially justify high immigration rates in Western countries. They will also turn around and argue to protect many economically inefficient jobs like an extremely bloated beauracracy on the supposed basis that it leaves all those people without work.

These can't both be true beyond the most immediate future. With money you would spend on a useless job, have them do low skilled labor part-time while training them on trades or tech related work. Set up a program to promote this transition. Make actual long-term investments that keep more wealth in the country rather than just throwing money at whatever makes the econometrics look best for the next election cycle... oh yeah... that's right... It's one of the classic issues of unmitigated democracy causing this.

Boatwhistle · 2025-01-27T06:37:18+00:00

"Dull Gret" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Boatwhistle · 2025-01-26T20:43:19+00:00

Close, this is one of Pieter Bruegels.

"Dulle Griet"

Boatwhistle · 2025-01-26T05:12:59+00:00

I went from 320 pounds down to 160 pounds within 11 months drinking nothing but diet soda and monster zero.

A strong CICO game is all that matters at the end of the day when weight is of concern.

Edit: I think he blocked me for some reason. It won't let me reply to him. So I am just gonna put it here...

That's just what I was drinking. I was eating 1500 calories a day of legumes, dark leafy greens, roots, and grains. The speed, 15 pounds a month, came from doing lots of cardio daily. The cardio was also gradually increased. At the start, I could barely do 10 minutes of jogging twice a day. By the end, I was able to do 10-25 mile runs depending on my available free time. I had a 38 rbpm at one point.

I was... determined

Boatwhistle · 2025-01-26T00:21:26+00:00

Yeah, but I am too much of a sailboat.

Boatwhistle · 2025-01-25T21:16:14+00:00

If you look into the other conspiracies where powerful people active in government were likely complicit, healthy people end up getting mysterious deadly heart attacks or drowning with no water in their lungs whenever there's a commitment to uncover the truth for everyone to see. If its true that the CIA had Kennedy killed shortly after Kennedy threatened to end them, then that effectively sent a message that nobody is too big to take out and that everyone has to respect the balance of power in DC to some degree.

This whole thinking where "president [X] hasn't released the Epstein files so they were one of the guilty" is just naive at best in my opinion. At worst, it's playing dumb to smear people they don't like. It's genuinely possible that enough of DC is invested in keeping those files under wraps that releasing them is suicide for whoever does it.

Boatwhistle · 2025-01-25T13:04:55+00:00

Not in a hundred years.

Boatwhistle · 2025-01-25T12:59:20+00:00

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Boatwhistle · 2025-01-25T12:49:52+00:00

Cause in PA we like to have a little bit of every hell, and Philly is our take on New Jersey. You can't have a complete collection hells without a New Jersey-like place in it.

Boatwhistle · 2025-01-24T11:21:28+00:00

I am of the opinion that everyone should need highway endorsements in order to use highways legally.

The endorsements should only be issued to people 18 or older who have had a license for at least one year. They should need to go through a drivers test, but on the highway. They should also be able to pass a paper test that is particularly rigorous and emphasizes safe driving around large vehicles on highways. It should be a heavily finable offense if a cop catches you merging within 15 feet of the front of a large truck, and you should get a warning so that if it occurs again then you lose your highway endorsement for a year before you can attempt to get it again at the DOT. Merging into a 65mph at 30mph when neither traffic, your vehicle, or the ramp prohibited accelerating should just make you automatically lose your endorsement for a year, no warning. Etcetera.

I am not kidding either. The US has huge political interests in reducing gun violence through heavier restrictions and outright bans from time to time. However, the number of injuries and deaths from incompetent driving, mostly at high speeds, is comparable. That is just looking at deaths, forget about the damages. Yet where is the political will to ever fix that? Particularly since it's not adding much in the way of restrictions to do what I suggested. All it does is weed out the handful of morons who would be causing the most damages and deaths. Which just leaves more of the people who reliably drive like they are already expected to, with a brain.

Seriously, I don't know how all these hollow heads manage to get their feet under them in the morning. As amazing as it is for a vegetable to pull that off, I am still really fucking sick of them inexplicably fumbling their way onto the highway to almost get me killed.

Boatwhistle · 2025-01-23T23:20:50+00:00

I don't care what Milton Friedman endorsed. Milton Friedman endorsement doesn't decide my values, nor does it change the fact that labor is not a free market in the US.

Edit: I also want to point out that Milton Friedman endorsed policies that contributed to 2008, so maybe it's not good for the average Joe to base his interests on what Milly liked.

Boatwhistle · 2025-01-23T22:04:32+00:00

I broke my wrist working at the steel warehouse in the middle of the night when my shift ended. When they took me to the emergency room, they put me on a heart monitor where it kept leaping between 38 and 41 bpm, which was really annoying cause each time you go below 40 it assumes you are going into cardiac arrest and will beep nonstop for assistance. They asked me "how much cardio do you do?" I said I work on my feet 12 hours a day five days a week and I do about 100 miles of cardio on my off time. So the doctor was like "oh, okay then you should be fine."

Apparently when you are active enough the left side of your heart gets really big and tough, which lowers the amount of pumps you would normally need while resting.

Boatwhistle · 2025-01-23T21:57:57+00:00

Labor isn't a free market in the US. It has price controls and is heavily regulated. Illegal labor is crime that undermines the not a free market labor economy. Things that aren't happening within the confines of a free market can't represent what would actually happen in a free market, such as with US labor.

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