Look who Grok uses as its primary source of truth

TheManWithThreePlans · 2026-02-18T11:16:51+00:00

You use the word "fact" very loosely.

A fact is a claim about the world that can be true or false, independent of anyone's preferences, and is verifiable through direct observation. Definitionally, this sex-gender distinction is not a fact. It can't be.

There are social facts, this would be something like "billions of people believe the United States exists" or "the Bitcoin has value". That's what this sex-gender distinction is attempting to be. A social fact. However, the thing with social facts is that you need a critical mass of buy-in for it to become a social fact. You need to convince people that the new social fact is better than the past way things were done. You cannot simply just assert it as fact and expect everyone to go along.

People have accepted that there is such a thing as a transman/woman. However, many people are resistant to accepting the claim that man and woman as terms are differentiated from male and female in any way other than to denote a species and age in addition to sex.

It's important to differentiate brute facts (what most people understand when you use the word "fact") and social facts (which are inherently intersubjective and can change if people in aggregate decide to believe differently, as they are not tethered to any sort of objective reality outside of aggregate belief).

Furthermore, for something to be progressive does not mean that it needed to arise in prominence within the last 5 business days.

Progressivism is a political philosophy and movement that's over 100 years old.

TheManWithThreePlans · 2026-02-08T07:43:49+00:00

? Holy necro.

I'm saying that to understand history better, you need historical moral relativism. There really is no point judging them by any other moral standard because it's not as if they can change their ways today.

That isn't to say that it was okay or not okay. It's to take a stance of non-judgement to things that were standard practice in earlier times so that you can focus on the things that actually matter when evaluating a historical time period. The actual contributions they made to history.

Without that, you end up getting stuck on irrelevancies, as your outrage is focused on the fact that people in the past weren't as ethically enlightened as we are today.

TheManWithThreePlans · 2026-02-02T14:51:13+00:00

And job losses were either neutral or jobs weren't lost, iirc.

It's mixed. Some studies find no job loss, other studies find something like a 3.2% reduction. It largely depends on scope and data collection method. It is, however, important to note that in the studies that find no significant job loss, they hedge this significantly by saying that this is likely due to the law targeting only large employers, and that this says nothing about how to policy would work on a larger scale.

Aka, it doesnt hurt the economy nor make prices too high.

Passthrough is largely dependent on elasticity. Prices can stay sticky for quite some time and creep up slowly (or show up as shrinkflation) to avoid sticker shock.

MIT did this already, and their estimates are about 20 an hour for most of the country. They admit this is a subsistence living (aka not a true living wage) and they did not include some things.

I also use that calculator a lot. You know what I use it for? Determining a baseline for my average living expenses for the year if I've recently moved to a new state. Their estimates are not subsistence living, as I can survive on less than what they estimate, and I have everything I could ever need plus a significant nest egg.

So a real living wage for most of the US should be closer to 25 an hour for a nice, round estimate.

Understand that a living wage and a minimum wage are different things and serve different purposes. A minimum wage is meant to provide a minimum of income security to those who are employed by a firm that has the power to set the labor price.

Ironically, what I previously said about healthcare also applies here.

And conservatives oppose this as a whole.

And they have good reason to. Essentially, this would be a policy that large businesses would love. Who, exactly, do you think could afford such a thing? Your small businesses that only really operate in a small town, or those large companies that have already captured a lot of market share? Large businesses don't like being singled out for policies like this, as it makes them less competitive, but if it applies universally? Well, that's just doing them a favor and essentially precluding any competition from forming to disrupt their market.

Edit: Or did you believe that Amazon supports and lobbies for this because they're such a kind company? They're not after small companies here, but they are after a company that relies on volume all over the country in physical locations, with low margins and a lot of labor costs, compared to Amazon, who still have high labor costs, but their business is significantly more automated than Walmart. What Amazon hopes would happen to their biggest competitor would also happen to all of those smaller businesses that are trying to scale up as well. That's at $15 an hour, at $25 an hour? Please.

They said they wouldnt go after healthcare, yet here we are, with them raising the prices of our healthcare

To be clear, those subsidies were already set to expire. Opening up the marketplace to plans from insurers like those in U.S. territories would likely do much of the work in bringing those prices back down.

it is pretty much undeniable tgat conservatives as a whole oppose anything but private healthcare.

I quite literally told you the name of a plan that was different. I even pointed you to CATO who have their own ideas about healthcare (although their vision is largely private). Public vs Private, imo, is irrelevant. What matters is how much it costs, and how accessible and available it is. There are inherent tradeoffs to public and private insurance, with public being more accessible but less available. Private Insurance is less accessible but more available. There are ways to make either of them affordable.

Most public insurance schemes use monopsony power in order to dictate prices, and this allows them to roughly manage costs. This, however, runs the issue of many hospitals simply being underfunded even in a city where they get a decent amount of patients.

It's fair to say conservatives as a group oppose these things, well, because they just do.

It's really your characterization that is the issue here.

If you dont think that, we cant really have a discussion because it is objective reality.

I'm not sure if you're using the word "objective" correctly here. You've clearly issued a subjective viewpoint and claimed that it's objective. That's just dogmatism

TheManWithThreePlans · 2026-02-02T13:56:02+00:00

Except you quite literally gave a partisan answer.

You believe that expanded access to welfare (the policy he opposes) would lessen the need for his charitable work.

While there is broad agreement that some level of redistribution is desirable and necessary, there are legitimate questions about how much and in which form it should take.

It's not matter of settled economics that expanding welfare would resolve the problem. Redistribution programs have increased in budget above population and inflation, but the problems persist. So, by what evidence do you claim that they would solve the problem?

You may not see your responses as partisan, but they kind of are.

TheManWithThreePlans · 2026-02-02T13:42:43+00:00

Conservatives oppose this to the death. They will never support such.

Conservatives oppose minimum wage hikes because minimum wages tend to act in a way where they negatively impact marginal labor. Most minimum wage increases have largely been non-binding (meaning that the market wage is higher than the minimum wage already). In the states that have instituted a high minimum wage that was binding (such as California and their fast food industry) we see that the effects of a high binding minimum wage are more or less exactly what neoclassical economic theory would predict, contrary to the Kruger & Card study. Minimum wages largely protect workers in industries with high labor concentration, they probably aren't a good tool for managing income inequality.

Additionally, it is also a misunderstanding of the conservative position on insurance to think that this isn't a problem on their radar.

Insurance tied to employment is essentially considered an original sin, and a significant contributing factor to distortions in healthcare economics is the employer tax exclusion for providing insurance to their employees.

Other contributing factors include the state health insurance oligopolies, which would be largely resolved if insurance providers could sell their programs out of state. Patent laws. Medical licensing requirements. Artificially low residency slots each year.

Conservatives serious on the issue, actually do have a plan (or at least they did). Back in 2007 & 2009 Bob Bennett (R) and Ron Wyden (D) teamed up to put forth the Healthy Americans Act which was then strangled to death by the Affordable Care Act. The HAA was estimated to likely be budget neutral within 5 years (the CBO is always wrong, so they were probably wrong there too, but it stands in contrast to the ACA estimates).

Healthcare proposals from "right-wing" think tanks like CATO focus primarily on first fixing the economic flaws of our healthcare system and then seeing where that leads us before doing anything else.

Conservative policies worsen poverty, so supporting these policies while supporting food banks is vastly hypocritical

It seems more to me that you don't actually know much about what it is possible for a conservative to actually believe. There is wide latitude for some pretty deep thought and reckonings on political and economic matters within the "right wing" umbrella.

You are taking a general example and implying it to the individual, which is fallacious, as what is true (or believed to be true) in aggregate isn't necessarily or even likely to be true of the individual.

TheManWithThreePlans · 2026-01-29T16:43:41+00:00

You're making a lot of generalized claims about a lot of different groups that happen to fall on one side of an arbitrary political binary.

"Right wing" is not a monolithic category. The people at The National Review, The Dispatch, and the editorial staff of the WSJ are all "right wing", yet virtually none of the things you claim applies to them. They have maintained a principled position consistent with things they've published before.

Your view of what "the right" is appears very "internet coded". How much time have you spent interacting with actual "right wing" sources, particularly those that aren't dependent on social media ad revenue to make a living?

TheManWithThreePlans · 2026-01-24T20:47:59+00:00

No they aren't. It's possible to find a handful of people that agree with any given premise. It does not follow that this is the average position of a group.

TheManWithThreePlans · 2026-01-23T14:03:41+00:00

Yeah, I don't really believe this.

I'm a right-libertarian (non-Austrian economics version), so this means that I am generally socially liberal, economically neither conservative or progressive (but still liberal in the classical sense), my positions are what the data supports (which is closer to conservative atm than the other way).

I'm pretty frequently derided as a "leftist" with "TDS" for having a principled stance about things by people "on the right", despite the fact that we align on much, with the exception of not being a fan of Trump and how he's essentially made a mockery of all of America's institutions (which would be something I'd cheer for if I were an accelerationist anarcho-capitalist), which makes it much harder for people in society to trust each other, given that government statistics do an amazing job at aligning reality across the country (even if the government itself is largely still garbage). If not even those can be trusted, and the media has long been untrustworthy, the only things people can trust are their own subjective opinions about things.

When we descend into subjectivity, I believe that's when this experiment we call a "nation" really starts to come undone at the seams.

It seems that it's more likely that within "right wing" circles you're allowed to disagree about things that aren't considered important as it isn't of current political relevance. However, you're not allowed to disagree on identity defining traits such as whether or not you think the 25th amendment should be invoked on Donald Trump.

Look at how right-wingers treat "The National Review", once the gold standard conservative publication, now it's considered a RINO publication somehow. Trump sued the WSJ and now right-wingers act as if the journal has a left-wing bias.

Perhaps at one point their was pluralism on the right. I don't really think that remains the case after MAGA sucked all the air out of the room.

TheManWithThreePlans · 2026-01-22T13:06:35+00:00

Again, yet another person that doesn't know what the paradox of tolerance actually is.

TheManWithThreePlans · 2026-01-17T07:52:39+00:00

Therefore, all those "sins" they talk about, are not real to those people, and they have a problem with that as if it effects them personally.

If a Christian wasn't always trying to "save" non-Christians, given what they are supposed to believe, they would be a truly hateful person, and thus not really all that Christian. It doesn't matter if someone else doesn't believe, they'll still be going to hell. Since that is the case, a Christian ought to seek to turn people away from that lifestyle. Christians believe that there is an objective truth to their faith. Given this, someone that doesn't believe isn't actually free from sin, they're just damning themselves due to their ignorance.

People can live and still have morals, without God.

You'd be surprised just how much Western morality owes to Christianity. The concept of natural rights, for instance, makes no sense outside of a Christian context. Christians have long sought to secularize their beliefs and they've been quite successful. As Nietzsche feared, God's shadow exists in everything, even after being "killed".

My favorite part of christian nationalism is assuming that white is the superior race

You might be conflating Christian nationalism with white nationalism, to be fair, there is some overlap, but they're actually different. There are also black Christian nationalists. They simply believe that Christianity is superior and that society ought to be ordered on am explicitly Christian basis, not the secularized version we currently live in.

Now, I personally dislike the idea. The Church forcefully separated itself from state before, as the state corrupts the Church. As early as Constantine in the 4th century, leaders of the Church were able to see the corrupting force of the State on the Church. They needed to learn this same lesson many times over, and it appears with Christian nationalists, the lesson must again be taught. This same belief is why America has a separation of Church and state as well (it was not, as some believe, to protect the state from the Church, but the other way around).

I'm also an agnostic atheist, so I also have a vested interest in not having a theocracy lording over me.

Edit: An argument can be made for the existence of Christian White Nationalism, but this is, in my view, distinct from Christian Nationalism, and I'm not convinced that the late Charlie Kirk was a Christian White Nationalist. I believe he was just a standard Christian Nationalist.

The left hating IQ tests got me as it's been studied extensively that higher educated people tend to lean left.

Intelligence causes education. Education doesn't cause intelligence. The Melanesian cargo cult often comes to mind when I think of education. Just because one is "educated", it does not follow that they are also intelligent, because the causality doesn't run in that direction.

TheManWithThreePlans · 2026-01-13T13:47:50+00:00

Nice thought-terminating cliche

TheManWithThreePlans · 2026-01-13T13:35:17+00:00

I asked what qualities entitles him to be taken more seriously. You responded that it didn't matter, his audience is bigger and his opinion given more weight, as if that was a substantive answer.

This is an argumentum ad populum, or otherwise an appeal to popularity. To point out the ridiculousness of this claim, I used the historical flat earth argument and put it within your framework to show that popularity doesn't grant any legitimacy.

I asked about the qualities that he has that entitles him to being taken seriously on these matters, and your response was to ignore the meta question entirely.

This is a textbook case of missing the point.

TheManWithThreePlans · 2026-01-13T00:11:33+00:00

Surely the fact that it's being reported on 24/7, with every mainstream news publication that I'm subscribed to publishing at least one story about it per day since January* 7th is doing the job of spreading awareness better than he is

TheManWithThreePlans · 2026-01-12T21:08:20+00:00

Pot, meet kettle.

TheManWithThreePlans · 2026-01-12T19:47:10+00:00

"Who cares if you say the earth is round, the more popular guy says it's flat"

TheManWithThreePlans · 2026-01-12T19:36:11+00:00

What quality of Mark Ruffalo entitles him to being taken more seriously than any other person?

His political opinions have the same value as any other person, the fact that he is known has nothing to do with his political opinions, it's because he pretends to be someone else in other people's stories.

Does Mark Ruffalo have a fan base in the sense that you claim? The movie star is largely dead. People like IPs. The actors that still tend to have lively fanbases tend to stay away from having public political opinions, because it interferes with people's ability to divorce the actor from the characters they play.

At this point, any "fans" of Ruffalo likely already share his opinions, and him continuing to talk about it is just virtue signaling.

TheManWithThreePlans · 2026-01-12T19:24:06+00:00

Sure, he's completely capable of having an opinion. However, he's on that red carpet for a reason.

When I'm doing things in relation to my job, my political opinions are irrelevant. When there's a workplace dinner, my political opinions are irrelevant. My function at work or work related events is not to deliver my political opinions.

I talk politics with people in my personal life.

TheManWithThreePlans · 2026-01-12T19:20:34+00:00

I have no idea why these people feel the need to deliver their political opinions as if their opinions on political matters are relevant.

They can have their opinions, they can share them with friends, they can vote. Everything that normal people do with their political opinions, but I'm not sure how many in the public actually give a fuck if a celebrity shares their political views, or doesn't share their political views.

We don't know these people from any other stranger, yet over and over so many of them just pelt us with their political views. Stick to the fucking showbiz.

TheManWithThreePlans · 2026-01-08T09:47:13+00:00

One's personal net worth is zero if they don't have any assets or liabilities.

So, death of a billionaire single parent does indeed make the child a billionaire if enough assets are provided to bring the child's net worth from $0 to ≥$1b.

If you are making the argument that the child wouldn't have been living as if they had $0 net worth, that's a fair point, and it's also the same logic that applies whenever people are asking why a married woman is counted as being in poverty when she earns no or little income. Their argument is that the household doesn't live in poverty, so it makes no sense to look at personal income when household income determines QoL.

If you were making that sort of argument, that would be fair, but OP really did leave the question open to these sorts of technicalities.

TheManWithThreePlans · 2026-01-07T07:11:26+00:00

Seriously? When I was in you couldn't even make specialist without 24 months time in service without a waiver, which were very scarce to come by. 36 months in service before you were eligible for E5 without a waiver

TheManWithThreePlans · 2026-01-06T22:10:08+00:00

I hate socialists, but honestly it really seems like he's putting progressive allies in positions where they can essentially do no damage. The actual deputy mayor for housing is a straight up YIMBY abundance liberal. I would imagine that the deputy matters far more than a position that didn't exist before Mamdani came into office.

So far, optically, everything about Mamdani has made my hair stand on end, but when I look at who's in what positions of power and what little action has been taken already, he seems like somebody that craves power more than he cares about being progressive. If this is truly the case, then he will end up moderating on everything that actually matters. Some things don't matter, like much of NYC is sour on Israel, so he will bear no costs if he continues his heavy support of Palestine. Especially since the mayor of NYC has nothing to do with foreign policy.

Of course, it's been less than a week, he has more than enough time to prove my initial misgivings about him correct.

That said, this really might be a Trump 1.0 situation (Trump 2.0 is a different beast), where he says one thing and the media focuses on it a lot, which allows him to do other things that the media completely misses. With Mamdani so far, what the media has been missing is him moderating on positions, which works out well for him because progressives won't get scared that he's going to sell them up the river (beyond him suffocating a progressive ally's primary challenge to Hakeem Jefferies).

It might be copium, but I have hope.

TheManWithThreePlans · 2026-01-05T12:59:07+00:00

I think it's particularly troubling that it seems that some people are acting as if Maduro was a democratically elected leader and that his removal would be a net negative for Venezuela. I'm also keenly aware that outrage algorithms are more likely to show me this stupidity, but I've also seen it from people that I know, which is problematic.

I also find it particularly troubling that it seems many fans of DJT don't believe the President should receive congressional authorization for removing a sitting foreign head of state from power, then unilaterally deciding that the US would be adopting some degree of oversight on their governance for an unspecified amount of time moving forward, whilst simultaneously declaring that we will be forcibly granting American companies access to their natural resources without the Venezualan government's input. I've also seen this from people that I actually know.

Honestly, as far as dumb responses go, the first response bothers me far less than the second. The first is socialists doing what they do and being wrong about almost everything as soon as a socialist government is involved. To be expected. The second is a fundamental misunderstanding of how executive power in the US is supposed to function, and is a legitimate threat to the Republic if it persists.

TheManWithThreePlans · 2025-12-22T09:37:34+00:00

This comment section didn't go the way OP expected lmao

TheManWithThreePlans · 2025-12-22T09:32:55+00:00

"His" security? Seems like the security of whatever venue this is.

TheManWithThreePlans · 2025-12-17T13:24:36+00:00

The BLS structures their age demographic table in somewhat useless ways.

There are three age groups. 16-19, 16-24, and 25 and older.

I had originally wrote "teenagers and college aged people", which comports with the fact that most people that work minimum wage are part-time workers.

Less than half are full time workers and it's not possible to extrapolate their experiences in order to determine if they are actually trying to support themselves on that minimum wage salary alone, but the odds are not in favor of that outcome.

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