100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5hr ago
LEE A life I gotta feed and defend until it grows up and feeds me.
The other problem is that this is also just horrendous bullshit.
Cowboys are not the world-wise stewards of the land that a lot of romance novels and tropes make them out to be. Most share a lot more in common with oil rig workers (often their literal cousins).
The cowboy absolutely sees the calf as walking cash. Cowboys today are not dependent on their stock for their own personal food because that was never the case. The original large scale stock moves from Texas/Kansas northward were because of rising beef prices in the east and England which enabled the economics of cattle drives to work out. Most cowboys, in the latter half of the 19th century - made only one cattle drive in their entire life and then found blue collar style work around the various cattle towns of Wyoming / Montana etc.
The only part of Yellowstone that I found to be very realistic is the revelation that the Ranch is basically underwater in debt and always has been, but that it's so much debt that the bank keeps letting Dutton roll it forward to avoid having to deal with the write-down / write-off.
That's cowboyin'
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8hr ago
The resistance to Voter ID on the left is one of the best, maybe the best, example of how signaling became weaponized and how to build a Motte-And-Bailey into the very DNA of a party / movement.
No reasonable person (sorry mods, but let me finish) could really have a strong stance against valid and secure forms of identification as a requirement for voting. Maybe there's some sort of argument along the lines of "secure IDs are too expensive and too difficult to get for people who, while citizens and non-felons, don't have their shit together." But it's a stretch.
Instead, the left does nice little sleight of hand card trick. It's not about the object of voter ID, it's about the real goal of those pesky rightists; disenfranchising qualified voters. This is why references to poll taxes and other Jim Crow era voting shenanigans are ubiquitous in the discourse. It's a way to hijack the object of discussion itself and redirect it into "THE RACISMS" pile.
A fun thing to do - something I've been doing more of of late - is to find your local leftist cat lady (who you've befriended, right?) and pretend to be retarded. Bring up the issue the way a retard would - "Hey, so what's like the deal with voter ids and whatever? I was just hearing about that on reddit." The immediate response is some version of "THE RACISMS" because that neurological pathway has been so well developed - anything to do with identification / documentation (oh, that's a fun word, isn't it) / registration is all "THE RACISMS" (unless we're talking about gun ownership).
To extract myself from any "boo outgroup" reporting, I'll finish by saying that this is a universal comms strategy used by all sorts of organizations, not just the political. People aren't good at holding multiple things in our heads at once and certainly not if there is complexity to them. We respond better to clean and clear associations. This is the whole psychology behind literal slogans. McDonald's' "I'm loving it" is literally the equivalent of zapping "MCDONALDS GOOD - ME LIKE MCDONALDS" to your brain. Politicians know that emotionally resonant issues are the power issues, so they want to re-route even minor ones to them whenever possible.
But the cost, aside from the real cost downstream (voting fraud), is that political communications are some of the most low signal, high noise forms of discourse. Sorting happens mostly at the tribal level (which is a close to Gospel as we have here on The Motte), and any sort of second and third order effect of a specific policy is never, ever really given consideration (again, with the exception of us internet mole people).
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9hr ago
because voters want things that congress isn’t providing.
This is true. The larger point I was driving at is that voters shouldn't have to be in the position of relying on congress to provide things. Mostly, it should be done through semi-formal social networks (i.e. I hate the idea of government funded somali daycare fraud child care facilities. I'd rather see stable extended families and high trust local communities help shoulder the burden of child rearing). But this is illegal in many cases (beyond just childcare).
A lot of socially oriented programs can be described as "In order to help you, we've made you dependent upon the government. You're no longer allowed to help yourself and if you don't vote us, you and your family will suffer the consequences."
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9hr ago
The government does have to govern
My entire point is that I would like this to be less and less the case.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9hr ago
...I hope you're not claiming to get that view from actual Straussians.
Yeah, I wasn't. I was just being a little cheeky. I actually detest people who use terms like "Straussian" and "first principles" as attempts to signal their Big Brained-ness.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
20hr ago
Great!
I'm asking because I am somewhat of a business nerd. I've asked a few other commenters about their line of employ when they've shown they have some real insight into it. Lawyers, for one, endlessly fascinate me (not in the legaleese or arguments, but in the day in the life of the job. There's a AAQC somewhere in the archives about the reality of being a DUI lawyer that was phenomenal).
I look at people who understand their businesses well as very applied, high value systems thinkers. An "academic" style systems thinker might be able to talk a good game, but an actual practitioner has insights that are completely missed by those academic approaches. The classic Back To School business seminar scene is this, canonically.
Mostly, I'd say I am interested in how e-commerce actually works outside of scammy YouTube influencer takes on it. Your comment about the pareto law of your products hints at this. I'd love to understand how you go about designing a new product, testing for demand etc. Perhaps also what the elements of success in ecomm are and what "pros" do versus what "chumps" do. I think this is enough of a framework to get started?
Trade topics:
I can tell you a lot about:
- Ivy League (and other selective school) admissions
- Real deal data science in both FAANG settings and research lab settings
- Strippers, bars, hookers, nightlife industry in general
- "HickHop" or the blended sludge of traditional Redneck culture smashing into Hip Hop / urban / black culture.
And again, if there's simply a topic you've had on your mind that isn't in my list, I'll put in some real effort to research and write it up - zero AI, all human.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
21hr ago
For this specific discussion
That's fair. Regarding immigration specifically, I generally agree with you and the other posters above.
I was trying to develop the full picture, however. I am generally hyper suspicious of "if we just did this one thing" style solutions. And so, here, I was pointing out that nuking the filibuster won't actually "fix" congress.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
21hr ago
Haha! hahahaha even! Us canny europeans, despite committing demographic and economic suicide for thirty years, finally have these upstart Yanks right where we want them! Huzzah! Now, with just the right finesse of the diplomatic corps, we'll be able to get mild and tightly scoped tariff relief. Just. like. we planned it. And, don't you know, it's all because these colonials lack CULTURE!
The European mind simply cannot comprehend winning in a real sense. I get that World War 2 shattered your brain but it's time to get back in the big leagues of the world.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
21hr ago
I work in e-commerce (I sell stuff online.)
In my ongoing attempt to turn the Motte into the Wall Street Journal for TurboAutists, I implore you to write an effort post on;
a) what you do and your perspective on your industry b) AI's effect on it, if any.
Standard bartering package; if you do an effortpost, I'll match it with either something I know about personally or b) a 3 hour research block plus post on something you choose
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
21hr ago
Even moreso.
It's been this way since literally September 11, 2001. Flight 93 - that crash landed in Pennsylvania - did some because the passengers had heard from loved ones calling them on their cell phones about the NYC strikes.
It's amazing how the entire lifespan of the hijacking tactics and strategy of Al-Qaeda began and ended on 9/11
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
21hr ago
From the link:
On Friday, Judge Dipti Pidikiti-Smith
Dipti Pidikiti?!
Are we in a simulation? That's like a Latino judge being named Speedy Gonzalez or some shi---
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
22hr ago
congress does nothing.
*taps constitutional conservative sign*
This is a feature of congress, not a bug. The point of the structure of the Senate (equal state representation instead of proportional, longer terms, advise and consent duties to executive branch appointments, most special of which are SCOTUS judges, etc.) is that it is supposed to be the "collegial institution" that slows down the structurally populist, high variance legislative whipsawing of the House. The filibuster necessitating close to a super majority to override is a continuation of that.
Americans' problem isn't with Congress per se, it's mostly with the creeping Federal bureaucracy, regulatory apparatus (which has a positive feedback loop with general PMC culture), and the imperial presidency. The growth of Leviathan since WW2 is the problem. I don't want to see Congress becoming fundamentally more active. I'd like to see them pare back the powers of the executive branch (which they can do but most members are a bit too tied at the hip to any given sitting President.)
Then, I'd like to see a hard RETVRN to Federalism that places states as the primary "actors." California can experiment with its polyamory socialist redistributionism while West Virginia fucks around with legalizing machine guns.
Right now, this is extremely murky in actual application because of 1) The 14th amendment and 2) The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the several amendments passed on it in the intervening decades. We'd probably be looking at a SCOTUS decision so far reaching that this SCOTUS - which is conservative any way you slice it, the argument is only to what degree - wouldn't take such a case.
That's the deeper "Straussian" view of the gridlock.
It ain't the filibuster.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
They chose the 90 division army rather than the 200 division army.
Sort of.
Through [Lend-Lease], the US sent the 2026 equivalent of almost $700bn to allies, mostly USSR and Great Britain. To the USSR alone;
Those shipments included 400,000 vehicles, 14,000 aircraft, 13,000 tanks, 8,000 tractors, 4.5 million tons of food, and 2.7 million tons of petroleum products, as well as millions of blankets, uniforms, and boots, and 107,000 tons of cotton.
And, from a logistical standpoint;
Addressing this need, Americans provided almost 2,000 locomotives along with 11,000 railcars to help ship goods and equipment from factories to the front.
The heuristic I've seen is that the U.S. provided the equipment for something like 50 to as much as 100 "divisions" of the Soviet Army. The quibbles here are on doctrinal definitions vs reality of divisional sizes and readiness. I think that's all besides the point. Lend-Lease was a colossal operation and did represent the shifting of national resources away from our own armed forces. The 90 divisions weren't a result of a short fall of men or material, but a deliberate policy move.
Here's the official U.S. Army history on "The 90 Division Gamble" -- link
Arguing over division size and our ability to equipment them isn't a nerdy armchair general exercise. The American way of war since WW2 has been to simply overwhelm the opposing force with MORE of everything. Through the 50s and 60s, there was real fear that we might not be able to do this toe-to-toe with the Russians in Europe. We never got to that point. The largest conflict we did engage in at that time, Vietnam, resulted in American forces losing precisely zero engagements over about a company sized magnitude. Even the Tet Offensive was, militarily, a pretty handy defeat. The problem, of course, is policy and politics.
The United States loves to fight with one hand behind it's back for a whole host of shitty political reasons. A lot of it can be grouped under the umbrella term "optics" -- screaming babies, women and children running away from a burning village / town / city, our own soldiers coming back maimed or shellshocked. War is ugly and bad and Washington has developed the idea that it can be "managed" with policy to make it less and ugly and bad and, somehow, also just as "effective" (whatever that means).
Another culprit is the relationship between Civilian and Military leadership. "No" isn't a word you use with a superior in the military and that culture translates over to how they (Military leadership) "work" with Congress. There's a lot of pants-on-head retarded requests from Congress and even the President - "Can we do this with half as many troops? Or, wait, what about special operations ONLY? No planes. No artillery. Just secret ninjas!" And very few senior military leaders have the elan to dissuade the policy maker or executive on the other side of the table from his or her harebrained plan. Having worked with a few retired generals / admirals in my GovCon days, many of them say that being a general in today's military is a colossal let down. You aren't actually training, equipping, and commanding a division (or ship, or air wing), you're lobbying about budgets and base renaming bullshit in D.C. much of the time.
There is some interesting historical foreshadowing of this. Famous, General Marshall was in D.C. for most of World War 2 despite being, perhaps, more qualified that many (most?) of the field commanders in Europe / Africa. The problem was he was too valuable in terms of political ability to have him away for any large length of time.
All of this ties to the discussion of "warrior spirit" here. Outside of infantry and special operations units, I would content it doesn't exist in the U.S. military and hasn't in quite some time. We run a managerial military and it's the best in the world because we just have so. much. more of everything. Remember the old joke; after the U.S. Air Force, who has the second largest air force in the world? The. U.S. Army. The third? The U.S. Navy. The fourth? The Marines (I don't know if this last one is true anymore). But, like many "managerial" things, much of military decision making has been captured in a consensus-driven, consultant-corporateese style thinking.
late-stage capitalism
I've been aware of this phrase for years, mostly from Reddit. Is there a canonical definition, however? I say this with genuine curiosity / bewilderment. Capitalism, to my mind, is an economic condition reality bounded by certain conditions. I didn't know (and I am dubious) about there being a temporal aspect to it.
Woodstock '99 is one of my first memories from transitioning from childhood to adolescent. One of my siblings wanted to go to it but there was no way my parents would allow it. When all of the MTC reporting came out, the focus then (that is, 1999/2000) was on how bad it was for all of the fans. Mostly, the focus was on heat, water, food, and shelter inadequacies. There were definitely reports of the sexual assaults, however, they did not take center stage. My thinking is that even MTV back in those innocent (lulz) days of 1999 didn't want to dwell on such heavy issues. I could be wrong.
There was zero "woke" angle and zero "this was particularly bad for the female attendees in general." I think there's something revealing about that. As "progressive" as MTV has always been, they, up until the Great Awokening, still believed in gender roles within the context of popular music. Rock Star dudes, of course, banged groupies. Pop Idols (Spears, Aguliera, Etc.) would make dancey-dance songs and then mix in some power ballads about being dumped. Boy Bands would do dancey-dancey almost without exception and the tween girls would swoon but Boy Bands definitely would not bang them. The details don't really matter. The point is that there were assumed "roles" (even within this progressive media outlet) and different actions were permissible - or not - based on which role a person occupied.
I don't think that's the case anymore. Part of the great awokening was a homogenization in all directions. Rock Stars can't be drunk messes who bang groupies anymore. That's toxic masculinity. At the same time, Teen Pop Idols can be weirdo hypersexual entities (thinking of Sabrina Carpenter here). And everyone can (should?) have some sort of "my mental health struggles" part of the biography ready to go at anytime. It's all so authoritarian.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
What's wrong with living, working, and existing for the benefit of someone else's vision?
You mean like Jesus' vision?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14d ago
I think the pure economics side of you argument makes a large category error; you model what is a complex, dynamic system as a linear one.
Let's focus on just this part of it:
Keeping an astronaut on the ISS costs about $1M/astronaut per day. And this is a space station that is relatively close to earth. Of course low earth orbit (LEO) where the ISS is, is halfway to most places in the inner solar system in terms of Delta V, so we're probably not talking about more than $10M/day per person for a Mars mission. For a colony on Mars with 100 people, that's close to a billion dollars a day. There is no national government, or corporation on earth that could support that.
Even if technology development by industry leaders such as SpaceX lowers launch costs by 1,000x, which I find to be an absurd proposition, that's still $1 million/day with no return on investment.
The argument simply multiplies the ISS daily cost by a Delta-V multiplier and then by a headcount of 100. This is mathematically illiterate in industrial contexts.
I won't walk through it step by step because ain't nobody got time for that it's probably more effective to just bulletize the concepts you overlooked:
- Experience Curve Effect aka Wright's Law. As we do things more and more, we get compounding returns to efficiency. 1,000x declines aren't at all "absurd."
- Learning by Doing related to Experience Curve Effects. Supports and expands it.
- Endogenous growth theory. A little broad, but the key is in spillover effects and knowledge transfers that can create a generative cycle. We learn by going to space and some of that knowledge creates new advantages in non-space industries (i'd bet on fuels and materials specifically). That causes efficiency gains and cost reductions in other industries which frees up capital for more CapEx and OpEx intensive things ... like space exploration. The cycle turns again and again. Positive sum games.
- Induced innovation. Again, kind of a supporter thread of Endogenous Growth Theory. I like to think of this one as "unlocking the tech tree." One technological innovation can create a whole new cost and supply reality for another technology which allows development in the other technology that was previously cost prohibitive. A good example here might be the power efficiency gains in touch screen displays that made SmartPhones actually viable circa 2007. Before then, anything that was battery operated and mobile couldn't have colorful, high brightness displays because the effective battery life would be like an hour. Anyone who had an oldschool ThinkPad remembers this.
- A little more "out there" but In-Situ Resource Utilization. This is using non-Earth based resources to help support a long term space ecology / economy / industry. Yes, yes it's very Sci-Fi, but the interaction of the concepts I outlined above paints a picture for how ISRU would emerge.
The book-of-books, imho, on Technological Progress is Mokyr's Lever of Riches. One of the primary points he repeats again is that Technological Progress cannot at all be modeled linearly - it's far too complex for that. Second, that so many major technological breakthroughs were products of recombinatorial innovation - i.e. the borrowing of knowledge between domains to develop a novel approach to a problem.
These are the reason to support Space Exploration even if you don't really care about Moon / Mars colonization. These under explored domains will probably have returns to more conventional domains. "Why can't we just focus on those conventional domains in the first place?" Re-read the above paragraph. It doesn't work that way. Technological Progress is a lot of semi-random happy accidents that collide back together to do wonderful things. In many cases, there can be huge amounts of CapEx and investment with nothing to show for it ... until this everything to show for it. Moreover, sometimes solving one problem requires some counter intuition.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
Shia LaBeouf interview in New Orleans.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
Are we to bully nerds so they can become this worm of a man?
So, no matter how many times I explicitly say "I don't support extreme bullying" people are going to write versions of "BUT WHAT ABOUT EXTREME BULLYING."
Can't win 'em all.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16d ago
I agree with your take on this.
Remember, I like to have a little fun with most of my comments. Sometimes this means I toss out something like "autistic weirdo" that actually has a lot more nuance to it. In this case, my having fun with the Damore hubbub was too clumsy and unrefined. Damore wasn't at all expressing a strange opinion. If had been bullied more in childhood I don't think a "better" outcome would've occurred. That's my specific take on Damore.
But, more broadly, I think it's pretty easy to imagine a situation where an awkward male or female in a workplace does say or do something pretty odd that, had they been subject to a little more social pressure (bullying) earlier in life, they'd be spared from very real career consequences. This isn't a far out opinion; there are entire major network TV programs about how weirdos at work are so weird people don't like interacting with them.
This isn't about HR-style "everyone has different strengths, and we can all get along!" I am saying very much the opposite of that. Bullying is the harsh correct force of social interaction. It shouldn't be extreme, of course (hazing, real abuse), but it should be CLEAR and OBVIOUS so that the subject of the bullying can become aware of where median social boundaries are. But wait, it gets better! Like I said in my original comment, you can continue to be a weirdo even after you get bullied if you are truly committed to your weirdo-oing. In fact, this is often how the truly creative double down on what makes them unique. We, as a society, derive a lot of benefit from those who hang tough through bullying to do amazing things.
We do not benefit from zero bullying. In fact, those least capable and least prepared for life suffer the most from not getting that social feedback. The tender young man who doesn't get pushed into a locker once or twice in ninth grade grows up to be the guy who wear's the hentai shirt during an interview and has a mental breakdown over it. He didn't Do Anything Wrong (TM) - which is true. But he never learned how to avoid and/or deal with this nonsense because of the "loving acceptance" that pops up in a "zero bullying" regime.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19d ago
Apparently a lot of this is because of the gay-hockey-smut novel turned TV show, which brought exactly the kind of audience you'd expect.
Serious question - When are we going to start re-diagnosing Nymphomania and Satryomania? It seems to me that there is a small percentage of the population (male / female straight and gay and ... other) that have extreme difficulty in regulating their sexual behavior both with other people and on their own.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19d ago
Aletheia
How the hell did they decide to name it something so hard to pronounce.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19d ago
I’ve never had an interviewer ask about my open source work Other members of hiring committees have never known what I’m talking about when I bring up a candidates open source work.
These sound like companies that will fail
but the degree to which it is ignored in standard tech companies is a huge blackpill.
The dude who wrote OpenClawd literally got hired by OpenAI less than a month later.
Like I probably could get more ROI by writing a blog post every five patches, but I barely have the energy to write patches, so I definitely don’t have the energy to blog and tweet about it.
Sounds like you should change careers.
I'm being pretty harsh on purpose.
"The job market isn't what I want it to be." Correct. You can either adapt to it or try something else. Complaining alone gets a person nowhere. It's an old redpill quote, so take it for what it's worth, but the saying goes "Life never gets easier, but you can get better."
Technical hiring has been fucked in one form or another since the easy money days of 08 - 16 (roughly). The people who succeed are the people who don't follow the herd and make an effort. If all you want is to resume spam that's fine - expect resume spam level results.
If you, instead, build a network, build a brand (also - who said anything about Instagram? Some of the biggest voices in tech still run their own personal text heavy blogs. Gwern comes to mind). If you don't want to do either of those things, I'm not sure what to tell you.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
20d ago
I agree and like the civic ritual framing.
An additional angle is that a lot of people on the left have this deeply seeded sense that Men's Hockey takes the spotlight awayfrom the Virtuous Valkyries of Women's Hockey. This is why they're aren't constant viral articles about the NHL during the regular NHL season.
And interesting comparison to make is with the cringey hyper fawning of both the mainstream media and much of twitter over the Racoon Haired Ice Skating queen (I can't remember he name ... Aileen? Or is that the PLA Skier?). While I respect her gold medal accomplishment, I fail to see any reason for attraction. She's a mix of aweirdo chungus manic pixie dream girl. I've seen ring leaning twitter accounts call her "bubbly." I've seen girlboss millenials call her "everything" (which isn't specific enough to help). My operating theory is that the winter olympics create a Women Are Wonderful hyper-booster. I'm not sure why (in the Summer olympics I feel like only gymnastics is similar).
Returning to Hockey, I think the Men's Team hate is a clunky means, in part, to try and shoehorn the Women's Team into this Women Are Wonderful gravity distortion field.
You're right, my recommended alternative wasn't totally airtight and perfect. I am so sorry for having voiced my tiny brain solution.
Do you have a solution? Or are you saying that the current state of affairs of relying on state employees / state subsidies to look after your children (or, you know, just do nothing and collect the checks) is better? How about when that state mandates slamming a vaccine into yourself and your child as a hard requirement?
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