Origami Around
trying on a metaphor
Sade Olutola
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Cosmic Funnies
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❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
sheepfilms
Cosimo Galluzzi
Show & Tell
DEAR READER
Claire Keane
Love Begins
pixel skylines
★
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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todays bird
seen from United States
seen from Canada
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seen from Poland
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@immanentizingeschatons
Haven't posted anything in a while.
So I've been with my partners for a month and it's really great.
A lot has happened but rn I want to say I have used certain substances and now know what people are and also am on a universal love kick
injygo said: oh god i don’t think i could stand it if you changed your icon
I should have made it a smug anime girl for 1 April, but I fear that laziness would compel me to leave it like that.
argumate as an owl-harpy anime girl
Precommiting to not listen to blackmail can be good for decision theory reasons, but what if agents precommit to carry out the blackmail and punishments anyways? This is may be silly of me and may look obvious in retrospect, but at the moment I am confused as to how this works out?
Speaking of the SSC link post...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KwB9jA9FrsNczWr5F/global-insect-declines-why-aren-t-we-all-dead-yet
huh
“So what do you do?”
“I bounced around a bit after college, but now I’m the COO of a small non-profit focused on health, education and welfare for gifted youth.”
“That sounds really demanding!”
“Well, every job has its ups and downs, but on the whole I find it very rewarding. And of course I love our target demographic.”
“Do you have a lot of accountability to the board?”
“No I’ve pretty much got free rein as long as I make budget. And my partner focuses on fundraising, which frees me up to pursue my vision. I call him “the passive income stream”. It’s a little joke we have, you see. Ha ha.“
“Sounds like a pretty sweet gig, then. Are you ever worried about job security?”
“Oh, my partner and I have a special legal arrangement about that. When we founded the partnership we both agreed that I’d have tenure for life.”
“Wait, what?”
I tried to write a quick response to this twice last night but got tripped up on the “tenure” terminology so what I will say is this:
The narrator didn’t mention the part where the corollary to the “tenure” thing is that they aren’t allowed to quit, and have limited recourse in response to abuse. And historically their partner was heavily institutionally favored in disputes.
In point of fact, the modern consensus is that you are indeed allowed to quit. In fact, you aren’t even allowed to privately sign away your right to quit, or even to try to promise fidelity through the mechanism of (mere) financial penalties should you quit. You would think that America means anything, it is the right to promise to dock yourself five figures if you get caught running around. But the courts can and have thrown that out.
There is currently no legally enforceable right to marry in the US, and the pushback against this modest claim has always struck me as odd because that was precisely what was to be done. Quod est faciendum.
Keep reading
I am aware of the modern consensus, which is my point (and I agree with you that marriage is illegal - I actively support this!). I had assumed that the reference to tenure here was specifically referring to marriage with restricted ability to leave, and so had responded as such.
As for abuse: well, my claim was that it was harder to leave an abusive situation.
(We can consider higher abuse in remarriages to be some evidence against divorce reducing abuse, sure, though we should also consider counterfactuals here - it seems unlikely to me that an abuser would not engage in abuse if their spouse was less able to leave. And it doesn’t tell us much about the overall abuse rate AFAICT)
OK I was being really silly when reblogging this before in not looking harder for data on abuse rates, especially as I had seen it before on tumblr and forgotten. But now that glancing at the SSC link thread has reminded me, we have this paper saying there have been large declines in female suicide, and in spousal domestic violence (though it does not measure the overall rate of domestic violence) as a result of liberalizing divorce laws.
Edit: also silly in how I addressed the counterfactual thing, should have been more explicit about the selection effects!
Ugh I hate how ambiguous language is
Related to my previous ranting about people deserving the right to transition for any reason, I think the idea of “transtrenders” is terrible should be expelled from the discourse. There is no meaningful difference between people who want to transition because they experience “real” dysphoria, however you define it, and people who don’t have “good enough” reasons.
The reason it’s OK to medically transition is not because you happened to fit into a particularly “deserving” category of people, but because it’s your own fucking body. The reason it’s OK to socially transition is because no accident of birth should keep you out of your preferred social role, any more than being Jewish should disqualify you from a profession. If you wouldn’t ask someone if I had a good reason for being a doctor while Jewish, why would you ask them if they had a good reason for living as a woman?
In my pretty strident opinion:
If you want to transition because you hate your body, go ahead
If you want to transition because you hate your social expectations, go ahead
If you want to transition because you think you’d have it easier, go ahead
If you want to transition as a cool art project, go ahead (though probably consider the seriousness of your commitment)
If you want to transition because it would be hot, go ahead
If you want to transition to attract sexual interest, go ahead
If you want to transition to avoid sexual interest, go ahead
If you want to transition because it would be cool, and all your friends are doing it, you should maybe think at least a little about whether this will be the best decision for you. However, if it turns out that, all things considered, you’d be better off transitioned than not, go ahead
Like, in any case where you might be considering transition, you should definitely look at all the alternatives. Transitioning is hard. You shouldn’t decide to do it without thinking very carefully first. But, if after that thought, you think you’ll still be better off, then you should do it. No, I don’t need to know why. It literally does not matter.
do you have a girlfriend? if not, why?
Yes, I have a girlfriend and a boyfriend.
(edit: if this is about the “marriage should be illegal” thing it may be a misunderstanding? The jargony thing here is that no fault divorce renders traditional marriage effectively illegal the same way indentured servitude is illegal - I am not opposed to ceremonial marriage)
“So what do you do?”
“I bounced around a bit after college, but now I’m the COO of a small non-profit focused on health, education and welfare for gifted youth.”
“That sounds really demanding!”
“Well, every job has its ups and downs, but on the whole I find it very rewarding. And of course I love our target demographic.”
“Do you have a lot of accountability to the board?”
“No I’ve pretty much got free rein as long as I make budget. And my partner focuses on fundraising, which frees me up to pursue my vision. I call him “the passive income stream”. It’s a little joke we have, you see. Ha ha.“
“Sounds like a pretty sweet gig, then. Are you ever worried about job security?”
“Oh, my partner and I have a special legal arrangement about that. When we founded the partnership we both agreed that I’d have tenure for life.”
“Wait, what?”
I tried to write a quick response to this twice last night but got tripped up on the “tenure” terminology so what I will say is this:
The narrator didn’t mention the part where the corollary to the “tenure” thing is that they aren’t allowed to quit, and have limited recourse in response to abuse. And historically their partner was heavily institutionally favored in disputes.
In point of fact, the modern consensus is that you are indeed allowed to quit. In fact, you aren’t even allowed to privately sign away your right to quit, or even to try to promise fidelity through the mechanism of (mere) financial penalties should you quit. You would think that America means anything, it is the right to promise to dock yourself five figures if you get caught running around. But the courts can and have thrown that out.
There is currently no legally enforceable right to marry in the US, and the pushback against this modest claim has always struck me as odd because that was precisely what was to be done. Quod est faciendum.
Keep reading
I am aware of the modern consensus, which is my point (and I agree with you that marriage is illegal - I actively support this!). I had assumed that the reference to tenure here was specifically referring to marriage with restricted ability to leave, and so had responded as such.
As for abuse: well, my claim was that it was harder to leave an abusive situation.
(We can consider higher abuse in remarriages to be some evidence against divorce reducing abuse, sure, though we should also consider counterfactuals here - it seems unlikely to me that an abuser would not engage in abuse if their spouse was less able to leave. And it doesn’t tell us much about the overall abuse rate AFAICT)
“So what do you do?”
“I bounced around a bit after college, but now I’m the COO of a small non-profit focused on health, education and welfare for gifted youth.”
“That sounds really demanding!”
“Well, every job has its ups and downs, but on the whole I find it very rewarding. And of course I love our target demographic.”
“Do you have a lot of accountability to the board?”
“No I’ve pretty much got free rein as long as I make budget. And my partner focuses on fundraising, which frees me up to pursue my vision. I call him “the passive income stream”. It’s a little joke we have, you see. Ha ha.“
“Sounds like a pretty sweet gig, then. Are you ever worried about job security?”
“Oh, my partner and I have a special legal arrangement about that. When we founded the partnership we both agreed that I’d have tenure for life.”
“Wait, what?”
I tried to write a quick response to this twice last night but got tripped up on the “tenure” terminology so what I will say is this:
The narrator didn’t mention the part where the corollary to the “tenure” thing is that they aren’t allowed to quit, and have limited recourse in response to abuse. And historically their partner was heavily institutionally favored in disputes.
How do you think parents should balance between puberty-blockers vs. transition hormones when kids express preferences for transition?
It depends a lot on the kid. I do think some kids at that age are capable of really making informed decisions themselves, and you can sit down with them and talk through the costs and benefits and risks of both approaches and have them talk with older trans kids who’ve done each of them and have them eventually make an informed decision which as parents you can just support/enable. But this probably isn’t true of all kids, both because making this decision at 8 is pretty different than making it at 13 and because kids vary in their skills with exactly that kind of decisionmaking (and because our current environment doesn’t really provide a lot of avenues to give either kids or parents the information they need to make an informed call).
For kids who aren’t in a position to make decisions about this yet, I am really not sure what the answer is and I would do a lot of research before deciding but my priority with that research would be figuring out which option makes it most likely that, in two years, the kid will be in a position to make an informed decision themself. Some people seem to think puberty blockers are one of those meds that make it hard to notice if they’re affecting you negatively, and I’d consider that a pretty strong argument for transition hormones if it’s true.I also think we should take a lot of pressure off kids to make this decision young by building a society where they can be their preferred gender even if they don’t look exactly like a cis person of that gender, but I realize that it’s easier to figure out what the best options are for your kid given society than to change all of society.
So, this idea seems too batshit to endorse it without very solid evidence and arguments, which I don’t have, but…
If we get rid of the status quo and naturalistic biases, it makes no sense to assume that kids can make decisions about undergoing puberty in accordance with their ASAB but the other way around. And why is that so? Puberty is known to completely hijack people’s utility function, often in ways they find actively repulsive and undesirable - such as making people into kissing, which they previously find gross. It changes people’s appearance drastically, unpredictably, and often in ways that they find highly undesirable and causing them distress even at the moment of experiencing these changes - such as having acne. Even HRT in adulthood doesn’t result in changes so unpredictable and drastic. Feminization laryngoplasty is one of the few transition-related procedures that changes one’s voice about as unpredictably as puberty does, and it’s gatekept behind a lot of layers of “are you sure you want it, do you understand what you’re getting into, we have no idea what you will sound like, you may not like it, and there would be no coming back?” and even the transgender community being largely like “eh, do you really want to risk it?”
This is a pretty big deal, and yet we just assume that all 8 year olds want it, should proceed with it unless there are extreme contraindications (such as maybe being transgender and having massively supporting family and doctors), and that 8 year olds can make an informed decision “I wanna grow up”. Do you, kid? Are you really informed and responsible enough to make decisions about so drastically altering your body and mind?
Maybe the correct course of action is actually defaulting to delaying puberty until receiving very comprehensive information about possible changes that it can entail and showing the ability to properly assess the risks!
Or, if we do assume that kids are capable of making such decisions, then we should also assume that they can make decisions to grow up in a different direction too.
Will be in Bay for late April until the end of May ( :
also, in Chicago for a week in April
@pricklypearsmane: I really don’t think the leftist focus on nationalizing companies like amazon (not necessarily what I aim for personally btw) is ‘lets nationalize them THEN find a way to make them and their workers even MORE cost effective and faster services by any means necessary’, you’re creating a weird argument in a context completely within the confines of capitalist ethos. 'Maximizing productivity/efficiency’ really has never really been concern of anti-capitalists.
Right, but the issue is that the companies’ valuation is tied to their productivity. And let’s say socialists don’t want to maximize productivity at all costs (cough cough), they at least obviously want productivity–there’s no point in nationalization otherwise.
So what needs to be acknowledged is that 1. you don’t get to spend the value of a company and still own it (which is why you can’t expect to spend a billionaire’s fortune if you expropriate it, a concept which a lot of people still haven’t got their heads around) and 2. once you nationalize, you either continue to operate it essentially as a capitalist, or you take a hit to the productivity that buttressed that company’s valuation–and of course which provided services to all its customers.
On that last point, let’s imagine a simplified example: a factory (say, Foxconn) with a 5% profit margin gets expropriated. As you decide what to do with that factory, you have 3 broad categories that trade off against each other; let’s call them profits, production and product. Profits are self-explanatory (but taken broadly, in the sense that they may be private or socialized), product is what goes to the consumer, and production is everything to do with the making of the product.
Profits: Foxconn famously pays lousy wages, so the Worker’s Committee decides to distribute profits according to a progressive scheme, which might double or more the pay of entry-level workers (this would be roughly realistic for Foxconn). But that means you have to still run it essentially as a capitalist, maximizing profits, still making iPhone screens, still treating workers like dirt.
Production: So the Worker’s Committee decides to improve working conditions–shorter hours, more breaks, better food etc. Good, but that’s going to eat into the profits, so you can no longer afford to pay the workers as much more as you did. Also, a study found that the factory creates pollution, so they change their manufacturing process to one that is costlier but does not create as much pollution.
Product: But the Central Planning Committee decides that iPhones are a bourgeois excess, and turns the plant into a solar cell plant instead, which they decide is of greater social value. Good, but the retrofit and new product are going to eat into that profit margin, so you either maintain the lousy pay and conditions and pollution, or you don’t get as many solar panels out of that factory.
(I picture here, as a matter of convenience, a society that still uses money, but the point still stands in a completely moneyless, 100% centrally planned society.)
And all this is assuming that whatever system of management replaces the old one is as efficient as the old one, producing no additional waste (of labor, of resources).
And I’m open to arguments that this can produce better outcomes in a broad sense–by reducing externalities, by changing production to something that creates greater value overall, by treating workers better, through economic multipliers etc.
But I won’t take anyone seriously who doesn’t understand that these three aspects of production fundamentally trade off against each other and thus ends up double- or triple-counting the benefits of expropriation.
This doesn’t contradict what you say in any way, AFAICT, and its probably a given, but utility changes are not necessarily symmetric: we can do some pay increase, some working condition improvement, some productivity changes, and some certain distribution of these will be the best answer. And pay changes will give us some chunk of improvement that can be split between these three purposes but which can be utilized without eating into existing benefits much.
Unpopular opinion: A lot of the nasty things about TERFism are just the nastiest parts of relatively mainstream SJ, cranked up to 11 and turned against the “wrong” targets.
I can’t speak for rationalists, but the obvious difference between eating weird shit or smoking weird shit or fucking multiple people and religion is that one can try the former without affirming falsehoods, and the cult-of-Eliezer is all about truth in the literal sense, not the Jordan Peterson sense.
Bihacking to find both sexes attractive is an entirely neutral act from an ontological perspective, whereas believing in literal resurrection is not, and if you say ah well I don’t literally believe it I just carefully avoid refuting it then I have an entire folder of owls making sceptical expressions for you.
It went well! ( :
Handed it in
Thanks everyone who gave help and encouragement ( :
