You know how China has a strong centralized government and cooperates with their big companies? Government says jump, Huawei says how high?

We have a similar system. A strong centralized government that cooperates with the big companies. The primarily difference is that on the spectrum of

Government power <-----------> corporate power

The US leans more to the right.

Really what’s interesting is both the US and China are slowly converging onto a point in the middle. Zizek said something like this some years back… authoritarian capitalism is unfortunately the most effective form of capitalism.

I try to view it in a zoomed out perspective. Will either president meaningfully make life better?

And for that calculation I take into account a couple things.

A) quality of life for average people. You know- being able to afford your necessities. Being able to comfortably feed your family, pay your rent. Not having to stress about rent money or go into debt when your car breaks down

B) war. War brings chaos. Political and financial instability and average people (who are already not priorities) get put further back on the list. For example right now the US extending the length of Ukraine war is more important than controlling inflation or interest rates. Not to mention public money given to defense contractors that could be building homes for poor, feeding people, building infrastructure, etc

For reference, we have given Ukraine more $$$ (not counting lots of ways military deflates the real number) than Biden’s infrastructure bill allocated for public transportation, roads and bridges, and airports combined.

C) and this is my personal bias here. We have 13 million illegal immigrants. People contributing to this country, filling a gap in the labor market, paying taxes, and yet they have to live in fear. Imagine walking around your whole life scared to see a police officer come out from around the corner.

These people have been here decades and every successive Dem promises to do something. All we get is lip service.

If I thought Biden was meaningfully better on any of those 3, I would vote for him.

But I think he’s marginally better on A (maybe not because at least Trump was willing to flirt with a psuedo basic-income)

I think he’s marginally worse on B (Trump is not likely to start WW3 over Ukraine, although probably just as if not more over Taiwan/Israel)

On c) they are both the same. Biden separates families like Trump. He was using same covid loopholes Trump was using to detain lawful asylum seekers at border.

Sure Trump has more harmful rhetoric but a border wall really does not do anything. Majority of illegals come on valid tourist visas and overstay. It’s political theater.

Similar to my home state of Florida. DeSantis & Rubio (may God smite them down) pushed for a law to make it illegal to drive around an illegal immigrant.

Nevermind the fact that Florida has some of the highest rates in the country and that entire industries use them as the foundation (construction, agriculture, landscaping,etc). What happened when illegals started refusing to come to Florida?

They explained the law was symbolic, wasn’t actually meant to detain anyone. They don’t want real economic consequences. They just want to bang the xenophobic drum. It’s absurd.

You can take a million little things and make it seem meaningful but the average position for the American has not meaningfully improved in the last 3 years just like it did not improve under Trump.

One thing I think Trump is better on is his refusal to get involved in a war against Russia in Ukraine. On Israel they are both lunatics.

Sure, Biden is better than Trump. He’s passed some environmental laws. Not nearly enough, but 5% of the way there is better than -5% that Trump may bring. Sure.

His infrastructure bill, even watered down, was good for the country and we will see benefits well into the future. OK.

But inflation shot up to nearly 10% under him and the only reason it went down is because of the Federal Reserve’s persistent dampening on the economy through interest rate hikes. So now Americans have to contend with higher prices AND higher interest rates making it even harder to buy a home or even just finance a car.

Meanwhile our government is pumping out hundreds of billions of dollars funding wars across the world- maintaining that inflationary pressure while killing countless young men in pursuit of “geostrategic goals”. We keep Ukraine barely alive on an IV drip meant not to save them, but just keep them fighting Russia.

Meanwhile Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics shareholders are popping champagne cheering on the end of the world

Biden has went 180 on immigration. Mr “empathetic policy” on campaign is now Mr “expand the wall and have a photoshoot on the border with CBP officers”

Mr “make the Saudis a pariah state for chopping up journalists” on campaign becomes Mr “billion dollar arms deals”

I’m not saying Trump is better than Biden. I like Trump even less than I like Biden. But in terms of life for the average American, the difference is not significant enough to warrant this type of attitude.

“End of democracy” and all that nonsense. Democracy is already dead because we have to choose between two bombs that will wreck us in different ways.

Either way we’re inevitably going to war in the Middle East. Either way we’re inevitably going to war with China. Either way we are going to let the large oligopolies do what they want with our people. Either way the climate is fucked. Don’t tell me 5 or 10% fundamentally matters when in 100 years we have millions of climate refugees.

I say voye RFK just because he’s absurd. And absurd is better than the other two choices. Maybe it’ll wake up the Dems and force them to come back to reality. The GOP has become a death cult and there is no saving them.

We’re headed to war and fascism either way. We’re just choosing the manner in which we arrive there. My gut tells me it’s the MAGA variety

Trump and Biden are two sides of same coin. They are not so vastly different as you portend

So many Trump policies Biden continued it almost feels like we live in a satire

I would prefer Mr brain worn wins at this point

I don’t see where he equated his relevance with hers.

I understand and ultimately it’s impossible to quantify and compare these things. I’m not trying to defend his AIDs policies. I just grew up as an illegal and I understand what it’s like living in fear.

You see a police officer and you immediately get a flight or fight response. You need to find roundabout ways to get jobs, finance a car, or rent apartments. You never know if ICE will just show up to your house one day. Or if you pick up a family member from the airport and they ask for your papers (my old boss got deported that way. His girlfriend’s niece came to stay a week. He went to pick her up. CBP was waiting with her to get documents from whoever came to pick her up)

You have to pay taxes but you don’t get to apply for things everyone else does. You wanna go to community College? Tough shit, you don’t qualify for instate tuition so you’re paying 3x the normal price. Even if you’ve lived there for 15 years and did your entire elementary / high school in the state. You’re American in all ways except one- documents

Etc etc

There are over 10 million, I think around 13 million people living just like that.

And Trump is awful. But Biden pretended like he would do something, he promised immigration reform. Promised to halt construction of the wall. Instead he expands construction and the next day does a photoshoot at the border with CBP. Month or two ago he actually used the term “illegals”

Which in my opinion isn’t a big deal but for a lot of people showed how far right he has shifted

That’s why I brought up Reagan. He gave millions of illegals amnesty and essentially removed a constant anxiety and lifted up a people that were all hiding in the shadows.

No president has done anything like that. Obama is probably second place because of DACA. I would vote for him again in a heartbeat.

So yeah I understand Reagan did the AIDs thing not trying to diminish it although we are essentially picking between people who have all done awful things. Biden went and publicly bent the knee to Israel at the start of their invasion. Trump I don’t think I even need to elaborate on

Not a good thing but thousands of gays vs millions of illegals

Republicans today are not the same as Republicans back then. Reagan did more for illegal immigrants than any president since. I’d vote for him in a heartbeat if it was him versus the two bad jokes currently campaigning.

Telecommunications. Administration for a company that constructs fiber networks.

Ideally I’d have a 10 inch cock but unfortunately I gotta settle

I would want more research before mandating it as if it were lifesaving operations. But yeah, I agree in a general sense.

I think a lot of people that disagree would change their minds if they had a child with gender dysphoria. A lot of conservatives believe the parents are manipulating the child or seeing things that aren’t there.

But I’ve seen it before. I met a little boy maybe 8 or 9 years old in a very religious conservative household some years back. It was the neighbor of a family friend. Nobody manipulated him into saying stuff like “I’m a girl in a boy’s body”. Or trying to sneak makeup or dresses. They tried to pray it out of him. But it was persistent, year after year he would day these things.

I think the same thing with a lot of anti-gay people having a gay son or whatever. Once you meet someone like that it sort of becomes real and makes you realize “oh wow maybe I’m wrong”

I changed my mind after meeting that family and seeing the boy. I used to think differently on this.

Suicide rates for trans is almost 50%

I’m assuming a couple of things here in my logic

A) transitioning is an effective treatment for gender dysphoria and significantly lowers the suicide rate for these people

B) there is a medically accurate way to diagnosis gender dysphoria

So you say “one is death if not treated but the other is a life choice”

The trans thing is life or death too. If you have a child and they are displaying these types of behaviors (wanting to play with dolls as a boy, saying they are a girl, trying to wear dresses, etc) then you have a kid that is very very likely to kill themselves and have other mental health problems

Getting medical treatment ASAP is the logical thing to do

I know it’s still relatively new and can potentially be harmful to the child if not diagnosed properly. I also understand there are some crazy parents out there who project their BS onto their kids.

But I think as a parent I would want the best for my kid so I would do whatever it takes to make sure they have the best quality of life and just chance at life in general.

If they are going to transition, they will pass much better if they do it pre-puberty. By the time they’re in high school they would probably look imperceptibly like the opposite sex.

I would only want it done after rigorous tests by medical professional that absolutely rules out weirdo parents

If a kid has a heart condition and they have to have a risky surgery, the doctors ask the parents. Because the child is not old enough to understand the implications of these things.

I see gender dysphoria as a similar thing. The suicide rate is very high for these individuals so some form of treatment is essential if you care about your child. It’s the same as if they had a heart issue with like a 40% risk of dying. It’s life or death.

The transitioning process works best if it happens before puberty. When a child goes through puberty, the sexual hormones start pumping and that permanently changes many parts of the body. Literally the shape and size of bones will change.

If you catch gender dysphoria before puberty, the end result of the transition will be much more effective than doing it at 18 or 20. By that point there’s no going back from puberty.

So essentially - the child isn’t making a decision. The parents are making an informed medical decision based on a diagnosis by a medical professional.

I really don’t see this as any different than any other medical issue. The difference is this is unusual and many people think emotionally.

We’re not talking hobbyists. We’re talking top level athletes. Men aren’t just stronger. There are dozens if not hundreds of items they outperform women on.

The sports where women can actually compete with men are rare. For example marksmanship or long-distance marathon. Virtually every sport men have distinct and significant advantages.

Men have larger hearts, more lung volume per body mass, more red blood cells, more clotting factors which means they recover quicker and have a higher pain tolerance.

Testosterone allows for more rapid muscle gain as well as better recovery. So two people training the same exercises an identical amount of time, the man would have gained significantly more muscle mass and strength.

Men have higher blood pressure, which means they feel fatigue less than women. Men don’t lose iron to menstruation, which means there’s more iron for oxygen circulation in the blood.

These items basically make it so men are much better at almost all sports.

For example soccer. The US Women’s national team lost to a team of high school age boys.

Men can kick harder, sprint faster, run longer, train longer & they gain more from training & they recover faster from training so they can do it more, they feel less pain so they can stay at max exertion longer, they can convert oxygen into energy faster so they can sustain all of this more than women,

Etc

There’s a reason we have women’s leagues. If we didn’t have it, women wouldn’t get to compete at a high level.

At a lower level, like hobbyist or local leagues the story may be different. There’s more variance among the general population than amongst top athletes.

Serena Williams, #1 woman tennis player, can’t hold a candle to the 203rd best man. Look up her interview about it. She’s under no illusions about this

Women make up roughly 15% of USCF members yet they only make up roughly 1.5% of grandmasters.

That means they are underrepresented by about an order of magnitude. Women on average are about 200 ELO lower than men.  It’s a very large difference and there has been research done to figure out why.

There are no real conclusive findings (as with much of this type of sociological research) but we have evidence for various different reasons. One, women are not encouraged to play chess at the same level that men are. Similar reason that more men go into Computer Science or Physics. It’s not a built in biological difference, but a cultural one.

Another one is that women are younger by 11 years on average, so their ratings haven’t peaked yet. So we should see this gap close in the coming decades. There are also various other inequities between men and women (like for example stereotype threat).

So that explains at least some of the gap. What I’m trying to say is that beyond these factors, there is also a biological difference that results in men being overrepresented in the top chess players. Notice I’m not saying average chess players, but specifically the best in the world (the grandmasters).

Why?

Well, there’s evidence for something called the "greater male variability hypothesis”. Think of every person sitting somewhere on a normal distribution. Pick a trait like aggressiveness or competitiveness.

There are the extremes on both sides of the bell curve. On the left, super passive and on the right super aggressive. Most people clump at the mean, in the center of the bell curve.

There’s evidence that more women cluster around the mean relative to men. Men are overrepresented at the extremes of the bell curve, even though the average is the same as women. Only by a little bit, but it’s statistically significant. That means that if you took a sample of all the super-aggressive and super-passive people, the majority would be men.

When you look at top chess players, they are more likely to have extreme attributes (being ultra-competitive for example helps you get better at chess).

This same effect is also theorized to be why we see that vast majority of prisoners are male. Vast majority of homeless, etc. Because extreme attributes tend to either be really good or really bad.

So that’s one biological difference. The other is the visospatial intelligence. Men tend to score better on visospatial tests when compared to women. This effect is already visible by 2 or 3 months of age, so it’s unlikely to be some sort of cultural effect.

Visiospatial cognitive ability is positively correlated with chess ability. Another biological difference between men and women that likely has some non-zero effect on chess ability.

So why are women underrepresented in grandmasters when compared to males? There is evidence for both

a) external social factors

and

b) innate biological factors

Nobody knows what % of the difference is due to a) or b). We just know there is some non-zero effect for both.

I encourage you to fact check every claim I’ve made. Don’t just look for one  research paper that confirms your argument. Each claim I’ve made I’ve seen multiple studies on. There are studies that will say the opposite, but look at it in aggregate. Look at metaanalysis studies.

It’s a question of

How much effort (man hours which ultimately translates to $$$) versus how much revenue lost (people not buying because of Firefox bugs)

In my experience this depends on your specific application. Sometimes there are weird bugs or behavior where you have to really hunt down what’s going on. Other times it’s as simple as changing a few css lines or something.

I view India as a rising power that has the potential to rival China and the USA. I think the culture is backwards in many ways and advanced in others. I don’t like your current administration, but I do think India overall has interesting politics. I mean, you guys have an active Maoist insurgency. Pretty wild for the 21st century.

I tend to get along well with Indians I meet in the states. I appreciate India long history and cultural impact (Buddha came from India for example). There were democracies in India before Athens was a thing.

All in all India’s a rising power with a lot of potential. Unfortunately I don’t think they will reach China-status anytime soon because they don’t exercise as much central control as China does.

In some ways this is good, Cultural Revolution wasn’t exactly a great experience for a lot of people. But in other ways it means the Indian government doesn’t have the power to reshape India in a way where it can successfully rival the European powers.

Every claim I’ve made can be double checked by going on Google scholar or libgen. You’ll find multiple studies and recent studies.

Changed it. I always assume people online are male for some reason. I didn’t read your username

Men and women are the same intelligence on average. There are more men at the extremes of the distribution curve for certain attributes, though. And when you are talking about chess players, you are taking a sample of the ends of the distribution curve.

There’s also evidence that chess ability and visiospatial cognitive ability are positively correlated with chess ability. Men tend to perform better than woman on average. (Stuff like rotating imaginary 3d shapes for example)

This may be partially why we only see 42 out of 2500 worldwide grandmasters being women. Men may only perform 2.5~4% better, but when you’re talking about the extremes (best chess players in world) that small % means a lot.

Tldr: It’s not because they aren’t on equal intelligence. Women for example score better on verbal cognition tests.

And on average men and women have the same IQ