It’s not an unpopular opinion but it might be a tankie shitpost. I just really fucking wish people would explain their reasoning rather than just blatting out a stupid idea. This one isn’t stupid, per se, but if you want actual feedback you should say why you hold this opinion so people can tell you where they agree and disagree and it’s not just a downvote fest.

Having said that, this is the least stupid of a series of incredibly vapid posts, so I’m writing a response.

Yes, there is a supply/demand relationship. Let’s say you make 50 widgets a year and sell them for a dollar. Then a new use comes out for them, and people are willing to pay two dollars (this is actually the story behind the kong dog toy coming from a VW part). So now you can increase production, but eventually you’ll run out of customers, so you can reduce the price to $1.50, and so on. You can see this happening in real time in commodities markets, where oil producers will cut output to drive up prices, or increase it to drive them down (eg if they want to reduce oil production in other countries).

Where you’re not wrong is that it’s a highly idealized model, like a lot of basic economics. It works best with commodities, but we’ve seen it with video cards, hard drives, cars, and so on. However, the more complex the market, the more factors beyond supply and demand are involved. There are things like sticky prices, information disparity (look up a paper called “A Market for Lemons”), and biases like those that won experimental psychologist Daniel Kahneman the Nobel prize in economics.

I’m going to assume that OP and most people posting here know the difference between trans and drag. Some drag queens are trans, most are LGBT, some are straight. But trans women are women.

Trans persons - at least many of them - mostly want to pass and have their identity accepted. This goes for trans men and trans women. And most people would like to be seen as attractive.

The truth is though that you might just be into trans women. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but the community is generally aware of and quite wary of “chasers.” Those are people that fetishize trans persons.

The difference between being attracted to trans women and being a chaser is whether you see the person as an individual or as a class. Think about white guys who are really into Asian women or black men. On the one hand, it’s fine to have different tastes and perceptions of beauty. The fetishization occurs when the individuality of the person becomes less important than the fetishized quality.

Yeah, this was an easy one to call. It’s repeated in other countries as well.

One other factor that they don’t mention is that the surge in street opioids corresponded to a crackdown on doctors writing opioid prescriptions. I saw this coming when I was doing policy analysis and looking at unintended consequences in complex systems. I don’t remember much about what degree of a surge we saw in prescriptions, but I do remember all of those “pill mill” headlines. That always struck me as a pretty manufactured crisis - but even if not, the crackdown certainly didn’t improve the situation.

It wasn’t, really. We need to stop attributing some kind of infinite foresight and wisdom to the authors of the constitution. The Supreme Court was a bad idea poorly implemented, the senate as the superior house was a fucking terrible idea, and the independent executive is not defensible at this point.

The authors (who, let’s remember, were working with a 17th century philosophy on the nature of humankind that has since been discredited) were operating on entirely different premises, for an entirely different country, and balancing things like slavery and freedom and democracy versus rule by the elite (the elite were justified to rule by their identity as being elites) by trying to come to a middle ground compromise on those and related issues. It’s really kind of crap by modern democratic, political, and philosophical standards. The only reason it hasn’t been addressed is that we’ve become self-aware enough that we’re terrified that US democracy has fallen to the point that we could only do worse than 18th century slaveholders, landlords, and wealthy lawyers.

To make it explicit, the authors thought that a) the rich would put the country’s interests ahead of their own, b) that selfishness would mean people wanted to protect their branch of government rather than their party, and c) that part b would be a sufficient bulwark against demagoguery. They believed in a world where men (and I mean men, specifically, and rich men in particular) were rational actors who would act in their own self-interest.

Don’t get me wrong - they were reading the scholars of their time - but if political and social science hasn’t made advances in the past three centuries we should probably just give it up.

It’s going to be a glorious disaster. Didn’t they slash the initial IPO estimate about six months after announcing it and shortly before the whole API thing? I haven’t cared enough to follow it closely, especially since abandoning the platform, but it really seems like the stakeholders wanting to cash in on a sinking ship before it finally goes down.

Please make your argument citing specific international laws.

I’m going to go with the former because if it were the latter the Russians would know about it and wouldn’t be using it for anything other than browsing onlyfans.

This the order in which you should try to access papers:

1. Normal Internet search including quotes to force the title and components like “pdf”
2. Organizational/lab pages of the authors. Very many people will put either full papers or preprints on their personal professional pages.
3. Preprint services like arXiv. The ones you look at will be determined by subject area. Preprints will usually only differ from the published work in formatting.
4. Just email the authors. Most of us are so happy that virtually anyone wants to read the paper we spent months on that we will happily send a copy. Because people are busy you might need to hit them up a couple of times, but most will be more than happy to send you a copy, and most publications specifically carve out to allow authors to do that.

“Speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good goat trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.”

-John Lewis

Yup, and they successfully argued for years that their non-physical presence in a state meant they should not pay sales taxes in that state, effectively forcing states to subsidize Amazon at the expense of local businesses.

So what you seem to be arguing is that logic dictates that anyone with the economic power to ensure or prevent the passage of laws is necessarily correct, and that the only definition for a term like “theft” is the legal interpretation that you, as a non-lawyer, decide to apply. You’re saying that, despite centuries and millennia of colloquial usages of the term, both predating and concurrently used with the very restricted legal definition, any dictionary or other usage-derived definition is invalid.

That doesn’t sound like logic to me, Mr. Spork.

I think I’m going to have to disagree on the basis of such usages as “women singers/songwriters.”

The differentiation is socio-linguistic, because “female” is often used in a dehumanizing context in English. Sociology-linguistically, it’s similar to referring to “blacks” as opposed to “black Americans” or “deafs” as opposed to “deaf people.” The problem is specifically substituting a noun that historically been used to dehumanize the people to which it refers, because it is exclusionary of the “default” status (male, white, hearing).

I am on the side of the linguists who take a descriptive rather than a prescriptive approach to the analysis of language, but part of being a descriptivist is recognizing the subtext potentially if subconsciously involved.

For future reference:

Male/female is chiefly used to refer to biological contexts. “Female spiders in some species tend to devour their male mates” is a perfectly acceptable description.

Men/women is chiefly used to refer to human-centric sociological contexts. “Women in technology roles face hurdles that men in similar roles do not.” is also a perfectly reasonable description.

Just a note to say that PJ Harvey can send you down a dark, dark path. I can’t listen to her unless I’m able to clock out for a couple of days to recover. She’s a really powerful singer.

Also, I want to call out both Sinead (and I’m not even going to get into the character arc she was subjected to, but highly recommend her later work as well as her early stuff) and Kate Bush, if you’re into the more experimental stuff. Going further I that direction would be of course Björk and the incomparable Diamanda Galas. On the other end of the spectrum you’ve got bands like the Cranberries, with Zombies being easily if not superior to anything done by U2 on the Troubles.

In that use case, it makes perfect sense for a binary switch to say I am (not) on the ground. It doesn’t necessarily address the situations in which flight attendants will make manual adjustments to passenger seating assignments in smaller planes while at the gate (which I assume would still involve actual numerical values to some actionable degree of accuracy), but I’ve worked with enough engineered systems to know the design limitations that went into them versus what we wish they would do. That still happens in shipping smartphones. I remember working on a study design from 10 years ago where we could tell the survey team pulled over to the shoulder of the road based on their gps signal but only because they were in the middle of nowhere with a clear line of sight to multiple satellites.

Try this:

Eivør - Trøllabundin

Also, “females” makes you sound like a Ferengi. It’s okay to say women, even when you’re using it as a sexist overgeneralization.

That makes a lot of sense. I worked with space systems for a while, and so I’m very conscious of technological conservatism and its critical role in aviation and space systems. Absolutely no pushback there.

I did not anticipate a binary/on-off system for weight detection. Even in legacy systems, that seems less than ideal, but I’ve been around enough that it shouldn’t surprise me. For that, though, I can see the need for more accurate readings and will concede that it might be cheaper to weigh every passenger than to upgrade a fleet given the certifications etc.

I do harbor a suspicion that things like wind loading, given enough readings and the additional meteorological data, could be corrected for more cheaply than deploying a passenger weighing system just based on what I know about data corrections, but I do have to admit that I was not taking that effect into account in my initial thinking. This was exactly the kind of pragmatic insight I was hoping to get, so thank you! Basically, the approach I would start with would be the same flight number/aircraft model with the airport wind speed or other weather data and see how it affects variability against a null model where you assume no effect. But when you combine that with janky or binary sensors (and I’ve only been to Finland when the weather was actually quite nice so I can’t speak to the variability in their data), and then I can see why this approach might be quite pragmatic.

Thank you! I learned something today.

I absolutely do understand that, but thank you for the detailed explanation.

What I’m saying is this. I’m assuming (based on having flights make adjustments to seating at the gates and just thinking about how I’d design it if I were engineering an airplane) that each wheel/strut measures the weight placed on it while on the ground. This, to some level of accuracy (think back to sig figs from physics 101) gives you the average loading for a flight. You already have the loading for checked baggage (which are already weighed independently as the bags are checked), and I assume something similar is done with any additional cargo. So the total passenger weight (people plus carryons) would be total loading - checked bags - cargo. The passenger/carryon component is automatically an average over that particular flight, since it’s the total weight that you could then divide by the number of passengers. You get that metric for free, since the sensors and data collection is already in place to ensure flight safety and (I assume) required by federal regulations or something.

So you can say that Flight XY3094 that flies from Dallas to NYC at 9AM averages (I’m just making up a number here) 30k lbs of passenger weight. Because you already have the data, you can break that down to seasonal metrics (more weight in Dec and Jan, less in Jun and July eg), compare between flights on the same route but different days of the week or times of day, and so on. You can look at the variability for the data as a whole or within each collection (eg +/- 3000 lbs for winter flights). These are just the most simple examples I can come up with, but hopefully you get the idea. I could have a data scientist write this in such a way that it is constantly updating the stats daily, and be able to perform time series analysis to see whether they’re increasing as a trend over time, or whether the deviations are increasing. I could tie in the data with ad campaigns, to see if those act as a driver that give us a predictive model we could use to offset ad expenses and increased fuel costs versus ticket sales, and so on.

The only additional resolution you’d get from weighing individual passengers/carryon is per passenger variability data, which would not be useful unless they’re looking to build a model where they adjust ticket price by weight of the individual passengers. Remember, they already have the aggregate data. To get the aggregate data from the individual passenger data, they’d have to add them all together then divide by the number of passengers and so on. You could look at stats like the skew in the data (“What percentage of our passenger weight comes from really heavy passengers?”) but again, I don’t see that being useful unless they’re intending to redo their ticket pricing model.

Again, it’s not free. There are costs for collection (purchase and distribution and maintenance of equipment), personnel (“Sir, please stand on this platform. No, like this.” Etc), data collection (physical network and software to collect and transfer the data), analysis (including defining the metrics and writing the software to execute on it and make reports), and actioning the data (business types figuring out what to do with it). That’s easily several million dollars, now that I’m thinking about it step by step.

They have to have justified this - they’re expecting it to pay for itself. I just can’t think of anything unless, despite their denials, this is going to be used to create a legal argument to charge heavy passengers more money.

Yes, it is my educated opinion that this person, for the reasons I outlined at a pretty high level, has mental illness.

No, I do not think that the other person’s statement was totally cool. I agree with you that it was insensitive and dismissive. I want to make it very clear that I’m not trying to invalidate the reaction that kind of comment inspires.

What I am saying is that we do not do the fields of medicine, mental health, or criminal justice reform any favors if we try to take the stance that mental illness has no role to play in these kinds of incidents.

Look, I’m a researcher. One of my primary areas of research is studying how susceptibility to contagious ideas like these cluster in social networks and how they’re exploited by the viral contagion between individuals as pushed by their peers and mass/social media. I can get all into sigmoid transfer functions from opinions to behavior and how they’re left-shifted by predispositions.

But my main, ethical point is that this is a medical problem, and we need to treat it like one. None of that casts aspersions or makes any assumptions whatsoever about the vast spectrum that constitutes what we broadly and often erroneously term “mental health.” It just means that people need psychological and medical interventions rather than life in prison or the electric chair.

No, it is a legitimate mental illness.

I will lay a bet that if we were to perform a neuroimaging exam of this man’s brain, we would find a hypertrophic amygdala (which is the physical part of the brain that detects and classifies fear and threat responses) heavily primed to kick off a reaction in the limbic system. It’s a hair trigger over which you don’t have conscious control at that point. I will also guarantee he has a hypotrophied prefrontal cortex, which is the slower to react but more evolutionarily advanced part of the brain that’s supposed to keep all that stuff in check by asking “Is that what’s really happening?” and “What will happen to me if I do this?” There’s also a very solid chance we’d find evidence traumatic brain injury, with is present in 50%+ of persons in jail for violent crime and about 10% in the general population. We could do a blood work up, a DNA test, a psychological history, and so on.

We’re talking about structural, chemical, genetic, and psychological determinants. I don’t know how to classify that other than mental illness requiring treatment. I’m going to use a non-preferred term in its colloquial sense, but if a person is psychotic, you’re not going to punish them back to mental health.

Not everyone with mental illness is violent - almost none are. But people with these conditions are indeed mentally ill - it is a medical, not a moral condition - and until we approach it like that, we’re not going to be able to begin to address it.

I do not believe that we have free will, but I think in extreme cases like this you don’t even need to go that far. You’re no more going to fix a person like this morally than you’re going to cure epilepsy with an exorcism.

Kris Kobach of Kansas is also well known for marketing a software package that is used to deregister voters preferentially with minority names and which has been used in multiple red states to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands to millions of people.