MayCaesar

I have never understood all these claims on the Internet that women are looking for some specific qualities in men. Observing a large variety of couples, I can very confidently say that there is no such thing as "women want X". All that needs to happen for two people to get together is them being physically attracted to each other and having many similar values and interests. Heck, I knew a couple in which both did full time van-living: no money, no interest in intellectual pursuits, nothing. They met at some random campsite and decided to travel together for a bit, and the rest is history.

People who make "finding a girlfriend" into some kind of science are way overthinking it. People have been meeting each other and falling in love for millennia without any strategies or tricks. The problem today is that a lot of people have extremely poor social skills by nature of being surrounded by technology and living in virtual worlds, so for them finding a "real girlfriend" or a "real boyfriend" sounds like some kind of a fantasy story... But just going outside and starting to socialize will teach anyone quickly that members of the opposite sex are the same walking mammals as them and there is nothing special about forming romantic relationships with them.

Look around. People of all kinds are married and have kids: extremely obese people, extremely short people, extremely poor people, extremely sick people, even people in prisons... You do not need to have a 6-pack, or cite Plato frequently, or have a billion in the bank to find your special one. What you do need is to clear the rubble that the virtual space fills people's minds with and go out there in the world and meet new people, one of which will be the one.

Two wrongs do not make right. Tariffs, when their effects are properly tracked, are nothing more than a tax on domestic traders: it is an illusion that a tariff imposed on another country forces that country's taxpayers to pay it, and not a single serious economist takes this vision seriously. Suppose the EU does impose a 10% tariff on American car imports - and this tariff harms both European traders (who would love to pay less to import American cars) and American automakers (who suffer from a reduced European demand on their cars). What does the US imposing a "retaliatory" tariff do? It exacerbates the issue on both sides. These tariffs do not cancel out each other - they sum up and make the problem worse.

Again, all serious economists - even the ones supporting Trump - agree with that. The latter just, for some bizarre reason, tend to assume that Trump plays some kind of 3-dimensional Go game the ultimate purpose of which is to get other countries to lift off their tariffs. Well, how has it worked so far? How did it work in his first term? There is no 3-dimensional Go thing going on here; there is just a crazy old man who does not understand basic economics. Biden did not understand it either, to be fair - but, at least, Biden was not as petty as to shake fists and threaten old allies.

I think Trump's first term was mediocre - better than both Obama's terms and the Biden's term, but not much better... His second term, on the other hand, is some kind of a perpetual tantrum: the guy has gone completely off the rails. I will go as far as to say that this is the worst presidential performance I have seen anywhere in the developed world over the past 20 years.

It seems to me that ultimately morality of someone's economical behavior is determined not by how wealthy they get, but by the relationship between them and their partners. When I buy a Tesla, I voluntarily choose to part with a large amount of money, because the value of the Tesla for me is higher than the value of keeping that money in the bank or spending it on something else - and Elon Musk delivers my Tesla as promised and gets richer, for he values the profit he gets from his stocks growing higher than he values one of his thousands of Tesla's. If Elon Musk gets rich by doing this, then he is not doing anything wrong in my book. It is another matter when Elon Musk gets into the government and uses his friendship with Trump to push through proposals that harm competitors of Tesla and advantage Tesla and Musk personally.

But a better question is this: what is the source of the latter? Is it that billionaires are somehow intrinsically corrupt and inevitably use their money to buy up political power? I do not see how this can be the case: even if all billionaires were intrinsically corrupt, in a good political system any attempt by them to bribe someone would result in their incarceration.

A more plausible explanation was provided by Friedrich Hayek in his "Road to Serfdom". The source is the fact that the government is the only organization in the country that has a legal power to coerce individuals. This is where corruption originates. There is no corruption on a free market where all transactions are voluntary and anyone can walk away from an interaction they dislike. But when the system is more akin to a "king of the hill" game where whoever gets into this exclusive club of political players gets to force others into interactions they do not want to partake in - and have the law on their side - then everyone who has enough resources will do their best to befriend the king, or, even better, take his place.

Which is why the economy should be separated from the government. It should be impossible to buy any political favors legally, and for that, in turn, it is essential that the government is extremely limited. When the government is nothing more than a guardsman against coercion and violence, then there is absolutely nothing to gain for me or anyone else from buying "political credit". Being in the government actually would be more of a burden than an advantage, and only people who genuinely wanted to do good in the society - at the expense of their time and money - would be interested in pursuing a political career or proactively interacting with the government.

A lot of things are conflated in this discussion... Multiple statements may be true at the same time, and stating them does not imply having any particular bias. It is likely true that there have been a lot of "minority scientists" whose contributions to science were overstated for political and social reasons - and it is also demonstrably true that there have been countless "minority scientists" of objectively high level. There are women in science who get gender-exclusive grants and conference invitations, giving them advantage compared to men - and many of them would have done nearly as well as they did even without these grants and invitations.

On the West currently there is clearly a massive effort to put as many "minority groups" into the university system and academia as possible, the result of which is noticeable drop in academic and scientific performance of the average student: whether someone likes it or not, looking for a kid that can succeed at Harvard in a ghetto of suburban Detroit is a fool's errand. I am strongly against that: I think that all individuals should be treated equally by default, and group identity should not be a serious factor in admissions, grant distributions, etc.

At the same time, some of the minority-related problems are quite real. Women are not discriminated in academic physics or mathematics nearly as much as many feminists claim they are - but some discrimination does take place and is visible. To pretend that this problem does not exist at all or has been fully solved is to play a silly political game. Furthermore, in many areas of the world the discrimination is much worse: you will find far fewer women in academia in Russia or Iran than you will in the US or the UK, and not because women in those countries are magically less interested in science. There is certainly a space for some discussion to be had, and even if you - as I do - advocate for equal treatment of everyone, talking about the problem does not hurt anyone.

I am quite disappointed by lack of nuance in modern mainstream discussions of this kind. It is always one extreme against the other. Either women in science are almost slaves, or they are treated 100% equal to men and any attempt to even mention the topic makes one a "woke leftist". The reality is almost always somewhere in the middle, and without a rational discussion it is impossible to determine where exactly.

From the purely short-term-consequentialist perspective, and assuming the unrealistic scenario in which I knew at that time that this baby would become Hitler unless I killed him right there, and assuming I could get away with it - it would make sense to kill him. But these are some strong assumptions to make.

Even worse, the purely short-term-consequentialist perspective is extremely limited. First, what would it do to my psychology, to kill an (at the moment) innocent baby with my own hands? I might have ended up messed up for the rest of my life, and the fact that I have prevented some terrible atrocities would not have made up for that. Second, what kind of person would I become if I decided that killing someone harmless at the moment in the name of the "greater good" is justifiable?

Other minor problems have not been mentioned by anyone I know, but they are still there. How do I know that, by killing Hitler, I am not condemning Germany to someone else using the chaos of 1929-1933 to further his agenda - perhaps, someone far worse than Hitler? How do I know that the Soviets will not overtake Germany and the entire continent subsequently, causing even worse atrocities than what the Germans under Hitler did? And so on, and so on, and so on.

I think that people who instinctively jump to the positive answer - "Of course I would kill a baby Hitler" - have not thought the matter through well enough. Most choices in life are not just about one specific outcome: they propagate through one's entire life, even the entire world sometimes. Something as minor as indulging in a pizza at a party when being strongly committed to a healthy diet may become the difference between sticking to the diet, and remaining a sad chubby boy for the rest of one's life. Something as major as killing a baby? Well...