07mk
3mo ago
Does anyone like or collect watches? I never had much interest in them as an adult, especially after the cell phone explosion around my teens/20s made them mostly obsolete, but as I got older, I realized that it's an important piece of jewelry for the typical formal male outfit, and so I started wearing them again a couple years ago. First super-cheap quartz watches from Amazon, which can usually be found for $10-$20, then I found better automatic ones from AliExpress for $30-$300*.
Then, likely through motivated reasoning, it occurred to me that if AI takes off and everyday goods become crazy cheap, positional luxury goods that are expensive primarily because of the brand name could appreciate in value, so I actually bought a handful of automatics from well known brands for $500-$3,000, in the hopes that they'll appreciate in the next few years (also I liked the designs). If you know anything about watch prices, you know that that's not enough to get to the actual luxury luxury tier, so last weekend, I decided to step into a local Rolex boutique on a whim, and it was quite a bit of a culture shock.
I had to wait in line for 20 minutes just to get in, and then once I was in, a single salesman was assigned to me, ready to show me anything I wanted. He had me sit in a lounging area and offered me coffee while he collected the watches I wanted to check out. No price labels on any of them (I'm guessing it's a "if you have to ask how much it costs, then you can't afford it" situation - I had a rough idea that the cheapest would cost around $10K and was prepared to spend on that order of magnitude, but, if you know more about Rolex than I did at the time, you already know that I didn't spend that on that day). I was most interested in a black Submariner with date (basically the prototypical dive watch that every other manufacturer apes with their own dive watches), and the salesman told me that there was a 1-2-year wait list. By which time, given the progress of AI, I have no idea if I'll be alive, have a job, have enough money to afford one, or if Rolex will even be around. But I decided to give him my information and received an email. He recommended that I email him a reminder every month or two, which struck me as odd, given that queue technology is millennia old.
Doing some more research, it seemed that Rolex liked to make customers play games and jump through hoops to get them, which I suppose makes sense when you're the top name in the luxury [anything] space, since the exclusivity is part of the appeal of the brand, and there's no alternative that people can go to. But as a fairly non-/anti-social autist (not literally, but, you know), I kinda resented the notion that I had to socially butter up the salesman to be deserving of one of their products. So I'm not sure how much, if any, I'll follow up. In terms of investment potential, there doesn't seem to be any brand as low-risk as Rolex, but maybe I should just invest that money intelligently in the market instead. In the secondary market, like most fairly free markets, the appreciation is already priced in, so it's not really a great opportunity for making money. It'd also be nice to have a Rolex I could give to my future kid(s) to sell when they're middle-aged or senior citizens, since properly-taken-care-of vintage Rolexes seem to be valued highly, so giving them a pretty insurance policy that both I and they could get use out of in the meanwhile seems nice.
Anyway, now I'm in the hold phase of buy-and-hold and don't plan on buying any more expensive ones in the foreseeable future. We'll see if I end up with a bunch of worthless pretty bracelets or a nice profit soon enough, I suppose.
* Two brands popular on AliExpress (and present on Amazon) that tickled me were BiDen and Berny, for what should be obvious reasons. BiDen is cheap ($30-$100) and fairly mediocre in my experience, with a handful of automatic models that generally look pretty ugly, but I bought some just for the brand name. Berny (they claim to be named after Bern, Switzerland, where a Chinese watchmaker went to study watchmaking) is pricier ($90-$300) and has a large variety, including, like most Chinese manufacturers, lots of knockoffs of more expensive/famous brands. The quality of the ones I've bought seem good. I don't know if there's a Trump brand watch company, but I see a business opportunity here for some Chinese manufacturer.
07mk
3mo ago
Most of the actual solutions are pretty well heresy for the left.
The solution to this seems simple to me. As a leftist who grew up in a leftist enclave, me and my leftist-liberal millennial peers were taught that heresy was awesome and something worth celebrating all the time. So if something heretical is needed to accomplish our goals, it seems obvious to me that we should embrace it and celebrate it and push our movement/party/etc. towards that heresy.
Unfortunately, the past almost 1.5 decades has shown me that that doesn't work, so I'm out of ideas.
07mk
3mo ago
There needs to be an autopsy on the autopsy report. I am 100% serious. Figuring out all the things that went wrong to allow this to happen would solve half of the party's problems. Reinterview witnesses. Reconstruct lines of thought and inquiry. Find the points of failure and conduct root-cause analysis.
The fact that the DNC's attempt at making sense of and learn from their dumpster fire of a failure became a dumpster fire of a failure in itself is just all too fitting. I have to laugh, because otherwise I'd cry. It's just nearly perfect as a costly signal that the party really does believe what it says about blaming everyone else for things going poorly.
07mk
3mo ago
I don't know about a test, per se, but this is where I value the concept of a costly signal. Someone who is (1) will be able to (and, in practice, will do so) send a signal that they belong in (1) by engaging in an activity that benefits whatever principle they're pushing forward while it costs him something, i.e. causes him to suffer. This, too, can be faked, and so it's not a true test, but it's perhaps one piece of evidence among many that one can look at when trying to ascertain someone's categorization. E.g. a man who decides to castrate himself because he believes that the types of behaviors that testosterone tends to cause in men really are evil and toxic could likely be trusted as someone who truly believes in what feminists are saying, because castration is a very costly action that benefits this cause.
Whatever it’s called won’t stop Chuds from referring to it as “Hoes Mad (x12),” though.
That's the porn parody, at least if this film turns out to be well-received enough to deserve one.
Another aside: there's a clip of Ken Jennings on Jeopardy that goes viral every once in a while, where he gets a "question" wrong, for the "answer" of something like "this word for a gardening tool can also refer to a sexually promiscuous person," and he gets it wrong for saying "what is a hoe?" Of course, the correct "question" was "what is a rake?" This confuses a lot of people right now, especially young people, who believe that both should be correct (and/or don't even know that "rake" would be correct). Back when that episode of Jeopardy was being recorded, the proper spelling of the slang term for "whore" was actually "ho," but it was almost immediately after that that "hoe" also became a correct spelling due to social media blowing up and people typing such words out much more often than before and naturally going for "hoe" as a familiar word (and possibly spellcheck). I'm just reminded of this anytime I see the term "hoe" these days, not referring to the gardening tool.
07mk
3mo ago
MathWizard's comment is correct. I first encountered the film in a logic class I took in middle school, as a way to contrast the emotional thinking of most of the jury against the logical, evidence-based thinking of the protagonist who wins more and more jurors over by forcing skeptical analysis of the evidence and witnesses and their statements.
As a complete aside, I've had thoughts at various points over the past decade+ that a modern remake of 12 Angry Men, featuring 12 women on a rape case with a fratty white male defendant would be appropriate. There's a lot of kinks, like how an all-woman jury doesn't make sense like an all-man jury does in the 1950s, and obviously evidence and witnesses to a rape would be quite different from the ones for murder. Maybe in a few years, I'll be able to have Claude generate a script, and in a few more years, have Grok generate a feature-length film of it.
07mk
3mo ago
The final guy wasn't shamed for racism. That was a different, old man. And the shaming and ostracism was in support of logic and evidence, because his rationale for finding the defendant guilty was just racism, in the face of the logic and evidence that they had gone over the movie up to that point. I also don't recall anyone shaming him for his guilty vote, in order to change it; it was his terrible logic they were shaming him for, since the defendant's race couldn't possibly have anything to do with his guilt.
The actual last guy had some personal trauma from his son disavowing him, and the defendant was on trial for the murder of his father. His sticking with the guilty vote due to this, too, was irrational, because his personal history couldn't possibly have anything to do with the unrelated defendant's guilt.
07mk
3mo ago
The only solution is to keep demanding each side do better without regard to what the other side is doing, even though each side would really prefer to use their outgroup's sins as a blank check to be as terrible as they want.
This has been my personal hobby horse since November 2016 when Trump's victory caught me square in the jaw. As someone who firmly believed that diversity was our strength, it seemed to me that obviously the right thing to do was to seek to understand those who thought so differently like me and my ilk that they were willing to vote for someone like him, but it's been depressing to see that most of my side are firmly in the camp of "their sins justify ours; in fact, when you think about it, our sins are actually virtues, because they're directed at the Bad Guys." I enjoy beating the meat as much as any other guy, but I think I'm fatigued of beating a dead horse at this point.
07mk
3mo ago
If/when self-driving cars take off into the mainstream, I wonder if it will become a common prank by teenagers to paint murals of tunnels to cause accidents, a la removing Stop signs. I really don't want to go down in history as the first Roadrunner casualty. But by that point, teenagers doing anything outside and/or away from supervision might be considered as quaint as kick the can or hoop rolling.
07mk
3mo ago
Sure you might be right it’s laudable but if you can point out they aren’t being fair, then they either need to be fair or drop the kayfabe.
Either that, or they develop extra epicycles - and, in the long run, entire industries that generate more and more epicycles - for why all the people pointing out that they aren't being fair are actually wrong.
07mk
3mo ago
Why do they need to lie themselves in their own minds unless they actually have a real conscience somewhere in there that recognizes fairness is better than pure selfishness
This is an excellent point, and, as with all things involving subconscious motivations, I don't think there's a real rigorous way to confirm any of this. My current hypothesis is that it feels better to believe oneself to care about being fair than to believe oneself to be purely selfish which is distinct from believing that fairness is better than pure selfishness. Of course, one could argue that "feeling better when one believes oneself to be X rather than Y means that they believe that X is better than Y," but I'd posit that believing that caring about something isn't a feeling, it's an action. When one acts in naked self interest while feeling really really bad about it and internally beating themselves up in their minds about how bad they're being for not caring about fairness or performing Olympics-level mental gymnastics to believe that they're actually being fair despite the naked self interest, one is clearly caring about naked self interest and basically not at all caring about fairness.
07mk
3mo ago
Ok, so are you saying that the people who make these arguments don't actually care about fairness, they are only pretending in order to enhance their credibility?
Something like that. Furthermore, the voters who find these arguments convincing and decide to vote for them (or vote for the demagogues' preferred politicians or policies, etc.) are also pretending to care about fairness, possibly even to their own conscious mind, so that they can honestly, genuinely believe that they care about some sort of higher order principles beyond naked self interest.
07mk
3mo ago
In fact, it seems pretty common for fairness (explicitly or implicitly) to feature prominently in arguments about public policy.
I think this may reflect that it's very common to convincingly appear as if one cares about fairness (even, possibly, to one's own conscious mind) in order to get advantages for oneself. It's a kayfabe that, by its very nature, must never be acknowledged or talked about, as doing so impacts how convincingly one appears to care about fairness. It's only weird autists like us on this website who either believe it or try to penetrate through the layers of deception to get at what people actually care about.
07mk
3mo ago
If too many of your students pass the material, teach harder material.
Well, yes, and capping the number of As seems to be the means by which one incentivizes the professors to do so. I went to a semi-elite college in the mid-00s, and grade inflation in elite colleges (we considered our college elite, even though it really was only semi-, because of course we wanted to think we were peers to the Ivies) was an actively talked-about problem back then, as something like 40%+ of all grades were As. As best as I can tell, school administrations have tried to address the problem by telling professors really really hard over the last 20 years, and it has resulted in things only getting worse. So telling professors to make their material harder such that grade inflation doesn't happen doesn't seem to have any real impact; it appears that they need actual incentives.
Now, who's to say if a professor, especially a tenured one, will face any consequences if they make their material so easy as to give out more As than the cap allows? Talk is cheap, after all. But if properly enforced, it seems significantly more likely to cause professors to teach harder material than just telling them really really hard to make their material harder.
Perhaps a cap-and-trade system like with pollutants might be better still? Not sure exactly how it would work, but a humanities professor might want to "buy" the right to give out more As from a STEM professor. Not sure what the currency would be, though, to create the right incentives.
07mk
3mo ago
I think there is a good case to be made that a fig leaf is still nudity. If I see the bare ass of someone, I will not say hm, they might be nude, but they might also be not nude because they have covered their genitals. Phrases like full frontal nudity exist to describe the notable absence of any fig leafs.
Fair enough, but then the analogy largely breaks down, because the reason that fig leafed genitals are less outrage-inducing or more okay is that they are, in some meaningful sense, less nude than non-fig leafed genitals. In terms of corruption, corruption that is covered up/hidden/unknown isn't somehow less corrupt by nature of it being covered up in the same way that genitals that are fig leafed are less nude.
It may be true that Trump is meaningfully more corrupt than other POTUSs (if I had to bet, and this were possible to adjudicate in any fair way, I would bet yes - but I'd prefer not to bet, because I know that my judgment on him and his actions is too biased to make a judgment that I have any confidence in being accurate), but that has nothing to do with the fig leaf analogy.
07mk
4mo ago
I don't think "preferring one candidate over another" is generalizable to "murdering someone."
07mk
4mo ago
The meaning of nudity is that there's no fig leaf covering anything and, as such, someone being okay with fig leaf covering the genitals isn't being okay with nudity, they're being okay with something close to nudity but isn't nudity. Corruption, on the other hand, is something that exists mostly orthogonal to what is or isn't covering it (there's certainly an appearance component of corruption, where the mere appearance of corruption is corruption in itself, even if, in actuality, behind closed doors, everything is on the up and up, but I don't think that's relevant in this case).
07mk
4mo ago
Naturally theres risk of losing principle, but thats true of all investing. The exact investment profile is TBD, i was just using S&P for some back of envelope calcs.
Well, even FDIC-insured accounts have some risk of the principal being lost, but if I were executing the plan you were, I'd put most/all of the principal into a savings account for very low risk 3.2-4% return instead of a low risk 8-10% in an index fund. In a 1-72 month time horizon, I think the difference in risk is sufficiently high as to be worth the lower returns, personally.
07mk
4mo ago
I'm not sure what your criterion for "good character writing" is, even with those examples, but I've long found Ico to be one of the best-written stories ever, in terms of everything, including dialogue. But it's essentially a fairy tale with the writing complexity of "See Spot Run," where you can probably count the number of lines that come out of each character's mouth in both hands (and if not, then both hands and feet).
As a side note: do not ever read the "Castle in the Mist" novelization. It is truly awful. It's about 400 pages long, and I got like 100 pages in before giving up - by that point, Ico hadn't even gotten into the castle (this happens in the first cutscene of the game, which lasts like 5 minutes or less), with extensive backstory written about Ico's village and its leaders and the larger society in which they existed. All irrelevant details for the actual story of Ico. Ico's "novelization" really should have been a picture book with, again, the complexity of "See Spot Run."
07mk
4mo ago
Gay marriage seems to be the least zero-sum of the progressive causes
I think this may be precisely why it was a turning point. The tactics used to win this battle - "born this way," "how does two loving men/women getting married and getting [marriage rights] affect you?" - were so successful in large part because it was so close to zero-sum. But once that battle was won, the same activists applied the same tactics to other things which were not nearly so close to zero-sum (insisting that MTF transwomen be treated exactly the same as women in every context is the most obvious example, but smaller scale examples in things like representation in fiction also count), which resulted in significant push back, which resulted in the activists take the "beatings will continue until morale improves" approach.
07mk
4mo ago
The fact that Trump has happened to preside over some major high leverage situations in world history (ie AI, and also having more SCOTUS picks than average) makes me have a horrifying/fantastic thought, depending on one's point of view. What if Trump ends up being right on the "living" side of the longevity escape velocity, such that immortality is achieved such that whatever therapies are required for it are implemented on him just seconds before he would have died? We certainly live in interesting times, and that would make it interestinger still.
07mk
4mo ago
underlying assumption that being horny is something enviable that women are disadvantaged by not being the equal of men.
I don't think that's the underlying assumption, except maybe in a subconscious way that's close to unfalsifiable. The underlying assumption is that men and women's minds are precisely identical in every way that matters. Therefore, any observation that women are less/more X than men is necessarily the consequence of patriarchy, whether due to bias of observers or unfalsifiable "internalized misogyny" of women or anything else. And but for that patriarchy, if freed from their shackles, women and men would have precisely the same level of X.
07mk
4mo ago
Does that mean they get personal blame for everything a random employee does? No. But it's still nonsense logic to try to sue your administration for what your admin did.
That'd depend heavily on the precise set of details. As you said, the POTUS doesn't get personal blame for everything a random employee does.
07mk
4mo ago
Now maybe he was too incompetent as a boss to ensure that the workers under him don't leak things,
I don't think competence is the limiting factor in something like this. Without resorting to scifi or fantasy, it's hard to fathom how the POTUS could be sufficiently "competent" as to guarantee that no leaks in the entire federal government happens ever. Of course, the buck stops with the POTUS, but also, e.g. we don't execute the POTUS every time someone in the federal government is convicted of treason, and I think the reason we don't is that we don't assign blame to the POTUS for every individual crime that anyone working under him commits (maybe we should! The world might be a lot better in a lot of ways). And I think it's reasonable to believe that not assigning such blame is the correct thing to do.
Grindr is just gay Tinder (or rather, the other way around), and Tinder is just online dating, and online dating is respectable now, and gay things are equally as respectable as straight things (or perhaps more equal, but never less), so Grindr is now respectable and has been for a while, QED.
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