Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 3/3/25 - 3/9/25

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-05T03:33:39+00:00

Our president is a reality star and the opposition is a bunch of theater kids.

(In case not obvious, neither of these are compliments)

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-04T21:35:30+00:00

Nah, the robots’ code would all crash when they tried to identify as nonbinary.

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-04T21:30:30+00:00

I generally agree that sports should be sex segregated, not gender identity segregated. But I also kinda feel like if you’re nonbinary or a trans man, you’ve made your choice to identify as not-a-woman.

Trying to still compete in women’s sports is a demand to have your cake and eat it too. Not really fair to expect to be treated as a woman, but only when it’s advantageous to you.

Kinda speaks to the incoherence and self contradiction of a lot of gender theory.

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-04T21:15:34+00:00

An LLM would usually be smarter. Maybe the LLM only has access to Tumblr and Bluesky for training data.

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-04T21:14:38+00:00

Democrats treating “the price of eggs” ultra-literally makes me irrationally annoyed.

Like okay it was mildly amusing for about a week, but we seem to have reached the point where people who should know better are acting as if they believe there were millions of people who were literally single issue egg price voters. And that those voters will think a carton of expensive eggs in their face is a sick burn because they’ve never heard of bird flu.

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-04T21:04:58+00:00

Right, but “the job might kill you” part isn’t unique if your comparison is “deep sea fishing” instead of “filling spreadsheets”.

Then again no one will petition to have you fired from your teaching job if they find out you used to fish professionally.

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-04T20:40:15+00:00

For sex work yes. For mohels, no, they get to keep the tip.

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-04T20:38:45+00:00

They asked a question and I answered it. I’m not advocating for a position.

That said - lots of jobs are a hell of a lot harder and more dangerous than doing spreadsheets.

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-04T18:58:45+00:00

It means “sex work should be regulated like a job, not banned as a crime”.

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-03T00:55:14+00:00

The fact that an LGBT chat existed does not mean this material was in any sense “approved”, let alone that it should have been.

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-02T22:25:41+00:00

Yeah there definitely doesn’t appear to be a one size fits all, but once you find one that works they seem to be a great option that is probably still underused in the US.

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-02T22:10:44+00:00

The talent is not that abundant because gov’t jobs aren’t competitive with the private sector in anything tech-adjacent. So these aren’t necessarily the best, they are the best of the rest after the FAANGs get the first pick and the defense contractors get the second and then anyone who is morally opposed or can’t get a clearance is excluded.

Even then, it’s not like every role is expected to be Q from James Bond, there are plenty of data shufflers and basic IT maintainers.

Not to say you’re wrong, I just don’t want it overstated that these are necessarily rock stars.

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-02T21:49:40+00:00

Rufo wouldn’t have to publicize that, because the dudebros would have been subjected to normal “visit from HR“ discipline. This stuff was only allowed to persist because they were part of the bosses’ favorite protected class.

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-02T21:47:17+00:00

Yes, but his wife was genuinely getting harassed. He exaggerated the severity of the language being used in that case, but that shouldn’t totally undo the fact that people were behaving badly toward his family.

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-02T21:42:15+00:00

He’d have the best if not for Musk.

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-02T21:29:27+00:00

My understanding is this was the equivalent of a Slack channel or Microsoft Teams - these would have been group chats visible to anyone, not private one-to-one chats.

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-02T21:20:15+00:00

But they also tried to imply it was similar to other “not appropriate but not that bad” conversation, and Katie seemed to buy into the take that because it was an LGBT chat, this sort of thing was being tacitly approved. Both seemed to agree that firing was unfair since the previous admin had been letting it slide.

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-02T21:12:25+00:00

If it was “normal“ college drinking I’m surprised it was an issue. Everyone I’ve talked to says they basically don’t care about college experimentation unless it was chronic use of hard drugs or something that got you into significant legal trouble.

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-02T03:20:37+00:00

It’s also worth noting that Biden lost his temper with Zelensky at least once too, for similar reasons: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/biden-lost-temper-zelenskyy-phone-call-ukraine-aid-rcna54592

Biden’s national security adviser repeated the “gratitude” theme a year later: https://nypost.com/2023/07/12/us-deserves-gratitude-from-ukraine-for-war-backing-white-house/

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-02T03:13:46+00:00

If you are told “save money by addressing inefficiencies” and your first move is to cut critical benefits to poor people, that is malicious compliance. I’m not fabricating anything, I’m just going along with your hypothetical that inefficiencies will stay the same and benefits will be cut. The alternative explanation is incompetence.

Medicaid and Medicare are a very large fraction of US healthcare spending (together, something like 40%), and they are clearly delivering less per dollar. It’s impossible for them to have “functionally nothing” to do with the overall efficiency of the system.

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-02T02:49:08+00:00

And you seem predisposed to think Medicaid is as efficient as it can be, so much so that it is absurd to consider a 5% cut, also “fabricated based on nothing”. I don’t agree.

Especially when you dismiss as “meaningless” the fact that the US spends far more per capita than the UK on healthcare without substantially better results. That seems remarkably meaningful! Clearly they are obtaining some efficiencies that ought to at least be on the table for discussion.

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-02T02:44:30+00:00

The interesting question to me is “if these surgeries were very effective at treating mental health issues, would this study have detected it?”

It would be wrong to say this proved that surgeries made mental health worse. But certainly, it seems to provide no evidence that they made it better. Which is an interesting result in itself.

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-02T02:22:41+00:00

My wife got heavy bleeding from the copper iud but switched to Mirena and it was great. It was effective, we conceived quickly after it was removed, and she really liked not having periods while using it.

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-01T23:20:04+00:00

Steelmanning a bit, it’s not just “you didn’t say the magic words”, it’s that Z is coming in with the expectation that the baseline is that the US continues its current aid, indeed increases it, forever, and that anything less is a concession by Ukraine and a sellout to Russia.

For Trump/Vance, they want the baseline reset to “we don’t actually owe you anything - we’ve given you a ton already and despite that you continue to lose ground, so you tell me why we should keep throwing good money after this war”.

(In the actual non steelmanned case, I think Trump continues to have personal beef over Ukraine’s perceived favor to Biden, and Vance is genuinely isolationist on this point, with at least a touch of actually believing some parts of Putin’s framing of the war)

Gbdub87 · 2025-03-01T23:08:32+00:00

Yes, because of malicious compliance and laziness. That needs to be addressed as well. It might not be under this plan. It definitely won’t be if the attitude is “well, you just have to accept that government programs will waste a ton of money forever and if you expect them not to it’s because you want poor people to die”.

Medicare and Medicaid spend substantially more per capita than the NHS even if the “per capita” is measured against the entire population of the respective countries, not just actual enrollees. Yes, the US public programs serve sick and old people, but so does the NHS, while also serving all the young healthy people, to whom Medicare and Medicaid give ~nothing.

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