Just Me

“People should pass a test before being allowed to have kids.” “Isn’t it scary how white people have this inborn capacity for evil?” “I’ll never pass because males and females have different skull shapes.” “Autistic people have a stronger sense of justice than anyone else.” “I don’t want AMABs in my space because they’re dangerous.” “You shouldn’t have access to hormones if you dress like THAT.” “Anyone who does something that awful isn’t human.” “Some people really shouldn’t be allowed to vote.”

Y'all know phrenology and craniometry aren't the same thing, right? Studying the shape of the skull as a geometric object is craniometry. It only becomes phrenology when you try to infer things about someone's mind from the shape of their skull.

#this is nice but i have questions#for instance what if they see shit that’s not for kids because the computer can’t tell they’re underage#i feel like a better solution is to like…keep kids off the internet

I wasn’t trying to say that companies should keep lists of underage users, nor that all kids should be off the internet forever, period (although I do think if you’re under 13 you have no business being on social media for any reason). I agree with everything you’re saying, though. I’m anti-authoritarian parenting through and through. I’m kind of surprised my take was interpreted as me not thinking kids are people, and I hope you reblog my clarification so people don’t see me as something I’m not!

The problem, as I see it, is that we're not doing pure age verification in the least intrusive possible way and almost nobody wants to. We're doing mass surveillance with age as part of the personal data being grabbed. Realistically the liquor store isn't saving your driver's license to a giant database to keep forever and sell to Peter Thiel and cooperate with the feds. They're just looking at the birthday and making sure you kinda resemble the picture. Whereas if you cooperate with the age verification on Discord or Pornhub, there's a fair chance they're selling your personally identifiable information to Palantir.

This….

This explains a lot.  And it’s a good example of what I was talking about in my post on scarcity being used to prop up ableism – always question the idea that a resource is genuinely scarce.  Even if it seems obvious that it is, quite often that’s the result of careful manipulation and misconceptions that you’re not even aware of.  

I currently live in a country without free medical care and still, it’s enormously cheap compared to the USA. An American expat wrote a piece for our English language paper about how she paid more for parking at the hospital than giving birth to her baby that’s pretty interesting:

Yesterday I had to go to the hospital cause I injured my eye, I’m frankly dreading what the bill is going to be, but what made me balk was being told in the pharmacy that my insurance was denied for the antibiotic eye drops and it’d be over $100 out of pocket. So I didn’t get my eyedrops.

US healthcare is certainly far more expensive than its actual cost, but people in this thread seem to be making the opposite mistake. Just because you paid an amount, doesn’t mean you paid the full cost, any more than it means you paid nothing but the cost.

i’m doing all this research on when “like” is used as a filler vs. “um” or “uh” or whatever & i’m really loving this

And it needs to be said that “to be like” is importantly different from reported speech! It can be used just to relate what someone said, sure, but it’s much more versatile. For instance, it can relate internal speech or thought. Consider “He just stared at me like ‘what is this guy doing here?’”. That is super clumsy without 'like’. What have you got? “He just stared at me as if he was wondering what I was doing there”? And that doesn’t capture the shades of meaning you can put into the phrasing and delivery of the reported speech/thought. Because “he was like” does not mean “he said”, it means “here follows a short impression of him at that moment”, and that impression can be reported speech, reported thought, a non-verbal noise, a gesture, a facial expression… it’s extremely versatile and honestly I’m not sure how we ever managed to communicate clearly without it.

COVID shots were given away for free because they saved lives other than the life of the customer and the life of the seller. It was a textbook Pigouvian subsidy for behavior with positive externalities. The same sort of argument would support government funded sick leave (if you stay home when sick you won't infect other people) but not government funded insulin (nobody will catch your untreated diabetes from spending time near you).

an author was just found guilty of child abuse for writing a fictional book about age play and will be sentenced in april.

This is why it's so important to clearly distinguish actual recordings of the sexual abuse of physically existing children from the broader category of erotic material about kids.

I can see a decent argument for criminalizing very convincing imitations of recorded child abuse, based on similar reasoning to why California tried to criminalize selling Alligator mississippiensis leather (until the law got struck down in Federal court) under a state Endangered Species Act even though A. mississippiensis isn't endangered. California thought there shouldn't be a market for the products of killing endangered crocodiles and A. sinensis. But it also recognized that a police officer usually can't tell at a glance which species of crocodilian a piece of leather came from. So to eliminate any market for killing endangered crocodilian species, California thought the best method was banning all crocodilian leather, whether or not it's from an endangered species.

I just discovered that there was a person who was afab and ended up joining the russian army by the name of Alexander Durov in 1806.

here's another good article about him

Latchkey discovery

As noted in other reblogs, it really doesn't fucking matter, bc Whisper (the most common note-taking AI in medical spaces) is prone to the exact same massive hallucinations as ChatGPT, and we genuinely don't know where the data goes, bc it's all black-box shit.

The sad thing is that I've met doctors who reason at a level comparable to AI. They'll imagine that I said something I didn't say but that shares some words with what I said and would make sense for me to say in context. It'll be difficult to get them to reason about certain topics without using the right keywords to bring up the subject. And there's a simple endocrinology question several doctors have gotten wrong at me that ChatGPT gets right.

Does anyone else notice how the word "unaltered" is doing a lot of heavy lifting? Anabolic steroids lower testosterone and improve athletic performance. If you meet a cis man with no LH or FSH to speak of, less testosterone than a typical healthy woman, no HDL-C, no symptoms of hypogonadism, and large amounts of muscle, you can safely infer that he is now or was recently on testosterone-mimicking PEDs that don't show up on your testosterone test. And that's the case whether or not he admits to the killjoys at WADA and the local police department that he altered his testosterone level.

That sounds kinda like an experience I've had a number of times. I'll be thinking about two things, and then something disrupts my thought process (e.g., nearly fall asleep, stand up too fast, experience a drug effect, ...), and I'll find myself concentrating on a thought composed of random pieces of both precursor thoughts mashed up into one mass. And it seems normal for a second or two, until I try to reason based on it and the pieces fall apart at the seams.