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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Yes. Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier. Former cop. Alleged to have perpetrated massacres against the public killing dozens of people and burning down hundreds of homes. As a leader of G9 he publicly threatened genocide unless the prime minister of Haiti stepped down.

    This is all information I got from Wikipedia. I don’t know the veracity of any of it. I don’t live in Haiti and don’t really follow the situation there. Whoever Jimmy is, he doesn’t have very good PR. That’s all I can say for sure about him!


  • There’s a big issue with using weight classes in team sports: player weights vary dramatically. Take the NFL for example. Setting aside the enormous differences in weight between linemen (offensive and defensive) and all other position players, there are also huge weight differences within a given position. For example, quarterback Jared Lorenzen was 6’4” and weighed 275 lbs whereas Russell Wilson is 5’11” and weighs 211 lbs. That’s a huge weight difference!

    You can find similar weight differences across players in other leagues (NHL, NBA, and MLB). Weights don’t really correlate with overall skill level though they do somewhat correlate with position and skill set (and height of course).

    How would you classify by weight in team sports? You might think to do it by position but none of the leagues require a player to remain at a single position for their career. Players can and do switch positions, and many even do so multiple times during a game. Sports like NBA basketball don’t even have any particular rules about what a player at any given position is allowed/not allowed to do, so the positions on team rosters are more like a suggestion than a requirement.




  • We need to make a distinction between child care and early childhood education (ECE). Korea does have ECE programs at their universities and so presumably there are spaces available at ECE programs. However these are expensive because they’re staffed by highly educated professionals, so only well-off parents can afford them.

    This is of course true in any country with a highly educated populace. The issue has been called “cost disease.” When you have a highly efficient, highly productive economy, you end up having to pay less productive workers more. For example, compare a typical office worker with a hairdresser. An office worker today is far more productive than they would’ve been a hundred years ago. On the other hand, the hairdresser today is exactly as productive as they were a hundred years ago.

    Hairdressing productivity has not increased at all whereas office work has. So if you want hairdressers to still exist you need to pay them a lot more than you would have a hundred years ago (commensurate with the increase in productivity of office workers), otherwise the hairdresser might as well get an office job!

    You can see this story repeating itself throughout both Korean and Western economies (and anywhere else where productivity has increased dramatically). And in all of these countries you can see a lot of reliance on foreign workers to fill in these sorts of low skill jobs (such as basic childcare).

    The other aspect of professional child care facilities that I see no one talking about is real estate. These facilities need a ton of space in some really expensive areas to handle a relatively small number of children. Paying for an in-home childcare worker can be a lot cheaper than a professional facility for the simple reason that you don’t have to pay for the overhead of the facility’s rent and maintenance costs.







  • Because lots of people don’t want to go into a job and work with other people. They would rather work by themselves or with their family members.

    When you work in an office or at a factory you recognize that some people do way more work than others. If everyone’s getting paid the same then that is extremely demoralizing.

    On top of that, you have all the politics and drama of the work place. Just because you succeed in a Marxist revolution doesn’t mean you have eliminated interpersonal conflict forever. Gene Roddenberry tried to portray that in Star Trek and it was laughably unrealistic.

    Human beings are innately competitive for social and sexual reasons. That doesn’t go away when you eliminate private ownership of capital. People just find other ways to screw each other over and gain an advantage. Formal power structures get replaced by informal ones.

    The deepest reason to want to have your own woodworking business is an overwhelming desire for self-sufficiency. When people have screwed you over and made your life miserable it’s an incredible escape to be able to switch to working for yourself. If you take that outlet away from people you will face violent resistance.


  • You make it a business to support yourself and your family. Otherwise you won’t have much time to devote to it and you won’t be as good as it.

    Anyway, how are you going to get anyone in a democracy to vote away their own property rights? The Soviets certainly did not achieve that. They used violent revolution to achieve their ends. We all saw how that ended up. The most stalwart opponents of Marxism today are those who knew what it was like to live in the Soviet Union. A system where hard work is devalued and freeloading predominates.


  • Because woodworking is a fun hobby that you can turn into a business. Because I value craftsmanship and attention to detail over mass-produced furniture. Because I believe in independent artisans, apprenticeships, and the sharing of knowledge.

    If you are in favour of a world where this is not possible then I want no part of that. That sounds like a horrific dystopia!

    I also believe you put far too much faith in democracy. Look at the democracies we have around the world today. Sure, they are not as bad as the totalitarian states but they are far from perfect. Democracies are also struggling from a crisis of faith in institutions. How are you going to build a collective society when everyone has lost faith in institutions?