ObjectivityIncarnate

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

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  • were those numbers perhaps cherry-picked to make the situation look more dramatic than it actually is?

    If anyone can go from 554th to 5th in any sport/event just by competing among the other sex, nothing else changing, then that obviously indicates something. You can’t handwave that away.

    Her personal 100m freestyle time dropping less than a quarter of a second post-transition is honestly a bigger indicator that transition is not making a substantial difference, because that angle completely removes the ‘chance’ element in your opponents being different people.





  • The fact that the University of Pennsylvania swimmer [Lia Thomas] soared from a mid-500s ranking (554th in the 200 freestyle; all divisions) in men’s competition to one of the top-ranked swimmers in women’s competition tells the story

    In the 100 freestyle, Thomas’ best time prior to her transition was 47.15. At the NCAA Championships, she posted a prelims time in the event of 47.37. That time reflects minimal mitigation of her male-puberty advantage.

    During the last season Thomas competed as a member of the Penn men’s team, which was 2018-19, she ranked 554th in the 200 freestyle, 65th in the 500 freestyle and 32nd in the 1650 freestyle. As her career at Penn wrapped, she moved to fifth, first and eighth in those respective events on the women’s deck.

    It may not be an issue to you, but it’s an issue to every woman whose ranking is lower as a result. I imagine it especially hurts if you’re pushed out of first place in that way.




  • Speaking of “paycheck to paycheck”:

    I certainly have compassion for people who live paycheck to paycheck because they’re struggling to make ends meet, but not those living “paycheck to paycheck” who have the ability to save, but choose not to. And, despite popular belief, the majority of people in the “living paycheck to paycheck” category are actually the latter. But it’s easy to assume the former meaning (it’s more intuitive, after all), so those two ‘subsets’ are almost always (basically everywhere other than within the depths of the methodology of the research that yields the figures) conflated, and so “living paycheck to paycheck” is often used to great effect in rhetoric as a result.

    The fact is, on average, Americans have more of an overspending problem, than an underearning one. Did you know that 48% of consumers earning over $100,000 a year, and over a third earning over $200,000 are “living paycheck to paycheck”? Meanwhile, 25% of those earning less than $50k aren’t living paycheck to paycheck (a demo I was part of until I eclipsed $50k a few years ago)—maybe it’s time to more closely examine what those people are doing, and follow their example.

    It’s absurd that anyone making less than $50k a year is saving more money than someone making $200k.



  • I guess the cycle continues if you will the stock to your children.

    In the US at least, there is what’s called a “step-up in basis”, where when you do this, they receive the stock as if they had just bought it, instead of ‘inheriting’ the parent’s accumulated capital gains. In other words, if I bought a stock for $10 and it becomes worth $100, then I sell it, I’d pay capital gains tax on the $90 I made. But if the stock goes to my kid while it’s worth $100, it’s treated as if they bought it when it was worth $100 (which, in a way, is true, it is worth $100 at the time they gained possession of it), so if they sell it right after inheriting, they would pay no capital gains.

    This is probably a large part of the reason that 70% of generational wealth is gone in two generations, and 90% in three, on average.

    And if the stock tanks, then I guess you declare bankruptcy.

    Yeah, ultimately, it is kind of a ‘house of cards’. The only way this strategy works at all is if the market value of the assets being used as collateral continuously increases, and not just increases, but increases at a greater rate than inflation and the interest rate on the debt, combined.




  • To be fair, “woke” as it’s widely known today originated as basically the left-wing counterpart to “redpilled”, with both just being two different words used by different groups of people to favorably describe themselves as ‘enlightened/privy to the real truth that most others aren’t’. It’s “woke” as in alert and aware of the truth, and “redpilled” similarly to how it is in the Matrix—becoming aware of the actual reality of things, taking the blinders off. Fundamentally, describing the exact same state of being.

    So, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that if you read someone having written:

    The opposite of being redpilled is being oblivious to what’s going on. It’s crazy people say they aren’t redpilled and think that’s like a good thing lol. It’s like saying “I’m a fucking idiot” and being smug about it

    You wouldn’t agree with them, even though the above is the exact same sentiment—the only difference is in what the content of said ‘higher truth’ that one who’s woke/redpilled has become ‘enlightened’ to, is.

    It’s the exact same reason the demographic of people who are against abortion in the US don’t call themselves “anti-abortion”, but “pro-life”. Like the above, it’s a PR move. Would you accept a ‘pro-lifer’ telling you you’re “anti-life” if you oppose their view? That’s the kind of rhetorical maneuver you’re employing in your comment.

    My point is, the self-labeled descriptor is not important, and all sides will obviously use a descriptor that sounds good and makes them sound favorable to describe themselves, so focusing on it is pointless, and just comes off as arrogance. Focus instead on the actual things that “woke” represents—it hits much harder imo to read something like, for example, “it’s crazy people say they’re against healthcare being a human right and think that’s like a good thing lol”, than what I quoted above.