Deepish Thinker 🇳🇿🇮🇪🇺🇸

Deepish Thinker is the chosen pseudonym of an occasional blogger who probably doesn't need one. It just sounds cooler, smarter and edgier than his real name.

[Deepish Thinker 🇳🇿🇮🇪🇺🇸 @DeepishThinker]

Last night it finally happened.

I broke bad........

In blatant defiance of the Federal Government, I purchased a shower head with a removable flow restrictor, removed the flow restrictor, then installed the restrictor-less shower head.

Then, in equally blatant defiance of the conventions of polite society, I cracked open an ice cold beer while luxuriating in a torrential post-workout shower.

I regret nothing.

[Deepish Thinker 🇳🇿🇮🇪🇺🇸 @DeepishThinker]

@asymmetricinfo Challenge accepted!

[Megan McArdle @asymmetricinfo]

Every time I am tempted to lose faith in the power of optimism, I remember that every week, some hardy soul thinks "She has been writing for 25 years, and I am going to be the first person to email her this devastatingly scatalogical insult", and I am refreshed.

[Deepish Thinker 🇳🇿🇮🇪🇺🇸 @DeepishThinker]

@loganb Given the startlingly inept leadership and increasingly hostile policy environment in WA, we should probably just be grateful the number isn't zero.
https://t.co/8IBcYM3E44

[Deepish Thinker 🇳🇿🇮🇪🇺🇸 @DeepishThinker]

@politicalmath In my dreams Washington's highly competent political leadership is taking advantage of the opportunity created by California's political dysfunction to make a play for the tech talent and capital that currently flows to Silicon Valley.

Unfortunately, when I wake up..........

[Deepish Thinker 🇳🇿🇮🇪🇺🇸 @DeepishThinker]

@emzanotti You can even argue that the Democratic Party would’ve been better off losing in 2012. Obama’s second term really didn’t do anybody any favors.

[Deepish Thinker 🇳🇿🇮🇪🇺🇸 @DeepishThinker]

An interesting thread.

It says pretty much all you need to know about Biden's presidency that, just 8 months into the new administration, the suggestion that the Democratic Party (and the country) probably would've been better off if he'd lost in 2020 is difficult to dismiss.

A rather more radical thought is that the Democratic Party (and probably the country) would likely have been better off if Obama had lost in 2012.

Consider the Presidential elections since:
- 2016 Clinton vs Trump
- 2020 Trump vs Biden
- 2024 Biden vs Trump

If Romney wins in 2012 do we skip the whole s***show?

[Deepish Thinker 🇳🇿🇮🇪🇺🇸 @DeepishThinker]

@emzanotti Hugely impactful election.

[Deepish Thinker 🇳🇿🇮🇪🇺🇸 @DeepishThinker]

@sferik There is a parallel universe out there where 1/6/21 marked the entirely uneventful end of a modestly successful Romney administration.

Our doubles in that universe have no clue what they missed out on.

[Kimberly Ross @SouthernKeeks]

I don’t want to brag, but we *own* our Toyota minivan. 😎

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Six weeks before a TWA 727 flew into a Virginia mountain and killed all 92 people on board, a United crew made the exact same mistake on the exact same approach and missed the ridge by a few hundred feet. United wrote it up internally. Nobody outside United ever saw the memo.

The crash was December 1, 1974. The controller said "cleared for the approach." The TWA crew took that as permission to descend to 1,800 feet. The controller assumed they knew to stay high until the published approach began. Pilots and controllers across the country were using the same words to mean different things, and the plane hit Mount Weather at 1,670 feet.

When the NTSB found the United near miss sitting in a company file, the question wrote itself. Why did the second crew have to die to learn what the first crew already knew?

Incentives. A pilot who admitted a mistake to the FAA was handing the regulator evidence against his own license. So nobody admitted anything. Every airline kept its own quiet incident folder, and none of them talked to each other.

The fix, launched in April 1976, is the strangest institution in American transportation. The FAA handed the confession box to NASA, a completely different agency, because pilots would never trust the cop. File a report within 10 days of screwing up and the FAA cannot use it against you. No fine, no suspension. NASA strips your name before anyone at the FAA reads a word.

Fifty years in, the system has taken more than 2 million reports and never leaked a single identity. Close to 100,000 arrive every year. Wrong altitudes, missed clearances, two planes nearly sharing a runway, fatigue nobody wants on their record. NASA reads all of it, spots the patterns, and pushes alerts back out to every carrier before the pattern kills anyone.

That is the machine behind the chart. 6,581 deaths per billion passengers in 1970. 42 in 2023. At the 1970 rate, 2023's passengers would have produced around 29,000 funerals. The actual number was under 200.

Every industry says it wants people to report their mistakes. Aviation is the one that made confessing cheaper than hiding.

[Yuri Bezmenov's Ghost @Ne_pas_couvrir]

When you watch old videos of high-trust societies, you notice how little coercive infrastructure they needed. Here, one elderly policeman was enough because shared norms, reputation, shame, and neighbors willing to intervene maintained order.

As trust declines, informal social control collapses and ordinary cooperation must be monitored and enforced. That invisible social infrastructure is replaced by an authoritarian state apparatus and private controls, such as more police, cameras, locks, barriers, contracts, rules, paperwork, verification, and surveillance.

[Wesley Yang @wesyang]

The International Olympic Committee, World Athletics, and the Women's Tennis Association have set a global standard for how these issues are to be resolved consistent with basic fairness and integrity. Meeting this standard is the sole and sufficient basis for resolving these issue across the board. Any deviation from this standard will be a source of justified controversy. All such controversy can be shut down tomorrow and for all time by the adoption of this global standard.

[Kurt Schlichter @KurtSchlichter]

Last week we had a regime media meltdown because a government newspaper had its editor replaced by the elected head of the government’s administration. But nothing about this, which basically outlaws investigative journalism. Gee, I wonder why there is no residual respect for the media.

[Laura W. @BumpstockBarbie]

XO = Turner Syndrome = female
XXX = Trisomy X = female
XXY = Klinefelter Syndrome = male
XYY = Jacobs Syndrome = male

Intersex is not a third sex, and they’re not some weird “in between.”

True hermaphroditism doesn’t exist in human beings. No one is truly both, because no one can produce both large and small gametes. DSD/intersex conditions are male or female specific.

Intersex is an outdated umbrella term for a bunch of congenital conditions that affect the reproductive system. These conditions are male and female specific.

[John LeFevre @JohnLeFevre]

When I was in junior high school (90s), I was legit scared of:
- AIDS
- the hole in the Ozone layer
- bald eagles going extinct
- the next ice age
- overpopulation
- killer bees

[Deepish Thinker 🇳🇿🇮🇪🇺🇸 @DeepishThinker]

“why do you say ‘sex,’ you’re supposed to say ‘gender.’”

We are supposed to choose the words that most clearly convey our intended meaning.

I very intentionally chose the word ‘sex’ to convey that I’m talking about roles traditionally assigned to biological men and women.

If I had wished to make a point about roles traditionally assigned to modern incoherently defined, stereotype derived, self ID categories I might have chosen the word ‘gender’.

Of course, that would’ve been absurd because the modern conception of gender hasn’t existed for long enough to have any traditions associated with it.

[Wesley Yang @wesyang]

More than any other single factor, “trans visibility” is responsible for cratering public support for the imperious demands of the transgender movement

[Deepish Thinker 🇳🇿🇮🇪🇺🇸 @DeepishThinker]

The freezing point of water is an excellent ‘human scale” zero point. Below zero tells you something important about the conditions beyond that it’s not very warm.

The real issue with Celsius is that it’s a rather coarse scale.

A degree should’ve been defined as 1/200th of the difference between the freezing and boil points of water.

[Deepish Thinker 🇳🇿🇮🇪🇺🇸 @DeepishThinker]

Fahrenheit:
- Freezing = 32
- Boiling = 212
- Freezing to boiling range = 180

If one Celsius degree had been 1/200th the difference it would a level of discrimination very similar to the system traditional measurements partisans say they prefer while remaining anchored to important physical phenomena.

[Eli Steele @Hebro_Steele]

“If my benefits come to me primarily as a black and not as an American, then the effect over time is to undermine common society—the common culture and democracy of America. I as a black don't identify with America—America is my enemy. This kind of thinking causes me not to move into the American mainstream. Which correspondingly causes me to fall farther and farther behind. That is the tragedy of that kind of power. That is the tragedy of victimization.” - Shelby Steele

[Charles C. W. Cooke @charlescwcooke]

@JohnWake Because most of what the federal government does is send out checks—in the case of Social Security to people, in the case of Medicare and Medicaid to providers or states, in the case of interest payments to bondholders, etc.

[Wesley Yang @wesyang]

It’s never dehumanizing to call a man a man because a man is a type of human.

It’s always dehumanizing to call women cockroaches because cockroaches are not human.

Moreover, referring to humans as vermin that we exterminate invokes a will to extermination.

[Wilfred Reilly @wil_da_beast630]

An under-rated point is that you can just change your policies.

[Deepish Thinker 🇳🇿🇮🇪🇺🇸 @DeepishThinker]

@JanetheActuary @lymanstoneky The problem is so large and so fundamental that any attempt at an actual fix is more or less doomed, so politics will revolve around the precise method by which the can is kicked till after the next election.