07mk
15d ago
I have two 800$ ish Seiko’s I enjoy.
This is a brand I've heard almost nothing but good things about, but I didn't really check them out much. As of tomorrow, I'm going to have two Seikos that I hope to enjoy, one of each of the Seiko 5 Pepsi collaboration watches. Most watch collectors are familiar with nicknames for various Rolex GMT/Submariner models, such as "Hulk" for an all-green one or "Batman" for a half-black, half-blue one, and one of the most popular is the "Pepsi," which is half-blue, half-red - and I have to respect that Seiko decided to take that and actually make it a real thing, at less than 7% of the price of a Rolex. I also happen to be one of the superior minority that prefers Pepsi over Coke, so I felt like I just had to have these in my collection. There's 7k of each produced in the limited run, and I'm hoping that maybe something crazy will happen with Pepsi in a few decades that would drive a complete collection of both of these watches up in value.
07mk
15d ago
I have an Original Grain wooden watch made from old whiskey barrels
I had never heard of such a thing, and they're gorgeous. I have some friends who got me into enjoying whiskey as my hard liquor of choice in my 20s, and these would probably make some solid gifts for them.
07mk
15d ago
Why the f should we assume that these robots have a subjective human-like experience of being alive? This is supposed to be taken for granted in the game, but the qualia is never even attempted to be established. They look almost human - so they must be human inside their digital cpus? Really?
My half-baked hypothesis is that some writers just don't have empathy for other humans or consider them as conscious beings that have inner experience similar to themselves; they only behave like they do because that's the "rules of society." As such, they think that, if they set up a new fictional world where androids appear as humans, then the same "rules of society" must apply to them also.
07mk
15d ago
Probably not the worst analogy to the Stranger Things denouement. It's a good enough simulation of the actual thing to give a lot of the same feelings, but there's a core missing that just prevents it from achieving the same things as what it's simulating. And it's a lousy way to finish a 10-year-long relationship.
As a 90s kid, I think Nintendo/Sega/Doom would probably be somewhat analogous to the D&D from the 80s. Playground arguments about some obscure (false) cheat code that requires some elaborate set of steps or one's "uncle at Nintendo" leaking them some upcoming release would be fitting and certainly accurate. Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park were 2 of the more iconic films for boys in that era. Perhaps a lot of low-fat foods packed with sugar? OJ Simpson would be big enough in the news for kids to know something about, too. Getting a new AOL CD with a free 15 hours of dial-up internet every month/week/day would make sense. Speaking of which, the dial-up modem connecting sound (I recently watched a zoomer streamer comment utter disbelief at her chatters saying that it was a real thing, when she had thought that it was just some meme up to that point).
That said, I loved the 40 minute "18 months later" epilogue that provided closure, more or less, for all our characters. Was this accomplished with transparent emotional manipulation backed up by an iconic soundtrack? Yes it was, what's your point?
To me, this felt like trying to tickle yourself or have sex with your hand. When I am made consciously aware that the events are happening because the writers wanted to manipulate me, rather than because of reasonable action-and-consequence within the world in which it was built, the suspension of disbelief is lost, and I'm left emotionlessly thinking about the writers instead of emotionally empathizing with the characters. I'll also say that, with both Stranger Things and Game of Thrones, I was shocked by how many people thought that the final season was a sharp dropoff from the penultimate one; for both, I had thought that the penultimate season was garbage, and the final season just felt like a continuation of the trajectory.
07mk
15d ago
The difference between a (good) lawyer with 2 years and 18 years of experience is a hell of a lot more than 10x, though.
I'm somewhat surprised (but not really - the answer is that people just don't really think much about these things) by how common it is that people just argue from incredulity that someone surely couldn't be worth that much more than someone else in terms of the job they do. Commonly with billionaires, or people who make $multimillion salaries compared to, say, entry-level employees who make less than 1/200 of that.
Because, looking at one of the most fair and transparent jobs in terms of measuring performance - professional athlete - it's pretty clear that the top players really can be that much better. Even just making it to the pro level likely places you at least in the 95th percentile, if not 99.9th, and when you zoom in in that tiny sliver of humanity, you realize that the gap between the top players and the median players is HUGE. In 2000, Pedro Martinez wasn't just the best pitcher in MLB, he was better than the 2nd best pitcher in MLB by a gap larger than the one between the 2nd best and the median MLB pitcher, according to most stats. If you look at other top-level talents like Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan, similar phenomena seem to occur.
Given that the gaps are this big in just that tiny top sliver, it tells me that the productivity gap between the very top and the median worker (who's probably what, in the top 30% of everyone of similar age?) is likely to be absolutely enormous. I could absolutely believe that one individual is actually a million times more valuable to a company than a junior employee in terms of value created and thus, in some cosmic sense, "earned" that salary that's a million times higher. There's no real good way of quantifying this in a rigorous and fair way, but, I'll say, I have no incredulity when it comes to this notion.
07mk
15d ago
My actual implementation idea is just to cut my taxes down to near 0 and increase old people taxes while slashing OAPs.
This doesn't seem like the worst idea, or even a bad idea. I'd be curious to see the precise details and what economic models predict in terms of how this affects incentives. Perhaps you could solve your baby affordability woes by becoming a politician, then using that power to steal from the government direct money towards friends and family or make money through insider trading, because your ideas seem likely to be popular enough to have at least a decent shot at winning elections.
How is that bloodier than the present redistribution system? Nobody in the West is doing early 20th century bolshevism.
The bloodiness in these things often come down to friction in implementation. I.e. the existing democratic system often prevents changes like this, because there are a lot of old people who vote, relative to not-old people. As such, it's usually just a matter of time before someone like you gets replaced by someone more extreme than you who calls for just eating the rich murdering the olds, who can't really fight back all that well anyway. After all, who's easier to kill than the weak and frail?
07mk
15d ago
I'm about 8 hours into Detroit: Become Human, a sort of choose-your-own-adventure game from 2018 about near-future Detroit where AI-based androids have become normalized in society, leading to mass unemployment and such. I have been shocked (though I shouldn't have been*) by just how bad the writing and world-building are, given the generally positive reception it got.
There was basically no attempt at thinking through the implications of how a world where near-human-indistinguishable androids are common would work. E.g. one of the 3 player characters is a detective android, who creates resentment among the human detectives for taking their jobs, instead of using them as force multipliers to solve/prevent more crimes. There's also no signs of android police being deployed en masse as street-level police thanks to their greater speed, strength, accuracy, and expendability. Other issues include things like each android model being built with the same face and specialty for that model, when, with computers, it should be easy to mix-and-match (assuming each specialty requires so much data that the android only has enough data storage space for a single specialty). They also lack any sort of "black box" and must be interrogated as witnesses, and their memory is gone when they "die."
Plot points strike me as nonsensical as well, including the use of a local TV station to announce a revolution well before anyone has even conquered a single block, much less the entirety of Detroit, and even less the entire United States and the world, or a human androids-owner just standing there and yelling at them while they rebel and tear him limb from limb. There's also a clear attempt throughout the game to depict the androids as a sort of "second class citizen human," but no effort was made to depict the androids as capable of having qualia, and so the whole thing just feels like playing make-believe with dolls. This came out 2 years after the TV show Westworld at least made a valiant effort at depicting androids as having qualities deserving of empathy, and this game didn't even go that far.
I'd give it a solid 2/10 so far. Solid, because the graphics, level design, and voice acting are quite good, the former especially for a game that's old enough to be in 3rd grade. I'd be curious how a modern remake, using modern AI tech as the guide for how future androids will make decisions, would look. It may be one of the last major AI-focused fictional media before the recent beginning of the age of AI in 2022.
* I shouldn't have been surprised, because the only other Quantic Dream game I played was also awful in terms of writing. This was Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit, a sort of urban fantasy mystery game that had an absolute banger opening scene (your player character, in a trance, murders a man in a diner bathroom, and then awakens to give you control to figure out how to get out of there without alerting the cop eating at the diner) followed by a good first 1/3, a mediocre middle 1/3, and god-awful final 1/3.
07mk
15d ago
Usually, people who are older tend to make more money because they can provide more value by nature of having more experience and understanding of how to provide value. There's also greater replacement costs when it comes to employees that have been working at a company for a long time; someone who isn't all that productive but knows a specific company's systems well could be hard to replace and thus command higher pay than a productive junior member whose responsibilities are low enough such that they could be exchanged for another junior member, and older people are more likely to have worked at a company for a long time.
It's not as if older employees automatically earn more than younger ones for the same entry-level job, except for cases of some other factor that's often correlated. E.g. some possibilities: older employees are more likely to have experience negotiating for higher base pay, or they're more likely to have kids and get a sort of parent-sympathy bump.
There's a strong argument to be made that the current allocation of compensation doesn't properly reflect the actual productivity or value that these individuals provide. There's an even stronger argument to be made, written in blood, that no one can be trusted to make a reasonable judgment call on the justice of such allocation in an economy-wide scale that is better than what we have now.
AI might obviate all of these, but, well, modern AI is less than half a decade old, barely long enough to have gone to and finished college. These things take generations to turn around, not mere single-digit years.
Back to the actual point at hand, I'm still curious what your spending is such that you don't believe that $150K+ plus whatever your wife makes isn't enough to afford a baby. Your fixed costs for things like rent/mortgage and loans must be truly astronomical to make that be the case, and at least the former of those could be changed.
07mk
15d ago
Seiko SBPG001
In terms of digital watches, I only have a bunch of cheap $5-$30 ones (as a recovering weeb, I enjoy the occasional $5 anime-branded Casio knockoff), along with a Casio G-Shock I got as a gift, I gotta say, that's one sexy-looking watch. I've been interested in getting a solar-powered digital watch, because I hate paying to replace batteries (though, it's not like automatics are any cheaper, in terms of regular maintenance - it's just that I can fool myself into ignoring the necessary maintenance with them), and I might look into that one.
07mk
15d ago
I make about 95th percentile income for my age group and I am old for marriage by historical standards. We don't feel like we can afford to have a baby right now. So that would be a take based in reality, yes?
Without knowing more details, I don't know how much of this is based in reality. It certainly beggars belief that someone in the top 5% of income couldn't afford to have multiple kids, much less a single baby. My basic Googling says that this would be over $150K for someone in their 20s and over $290K for someone in their 30s. I understand that cost-of-living varies a lot, but as someone living in a medium-high COL area who has friends and family who are decidedly NOT in the top 5% (they certainly make less than me, and I'm certainly not in the top 5% in income) who have multiple kids, I don't understand how the math could work out to make it unaffordable.
07mk
15d ago
Tissot was actually the first "nice" watch I bought, on a whim at an airport jewelry shop while waiting for a flight. After taking my jaw off the floor at the watch prices, I zeroed in on the cheapest one and got a $200 quartz Dream Classic with Roman numerals (for which I'm a sucker) with a large 42mm dial, for the easy readability. I knew practically nothing about watches and mechanical vs automatic and whatnot back then, but I learned later that Tissot had a really good reputation as a Swiss brand for the sub-$1k market (that this is considered a "cheap niche" rather than "premium" is just... perhaps SNAFU is the right term). I bought another Tissot, a Le Locle (also with Roman numerals), at about $500 some time later, and I do like both of them. Very light and slim, and discreet.
As someone who rides a bus and subway most workdays of the week, I've certainly realized that I'm never going to regularly wear a real luxury watch or even "premium" watch, which is one reason among many that I've gravitated towards cheap Chinese knockoffs. Crime in my commute is pretty much not an issue, but the thought of having multiple $thousands taken off of me in a near-untraceable way triggers my paranoia quite a bit.
07mk
15d ago
naturalized Americans don't count as Americans?
I happen to believe that we're the MOST American!
07mk
15d ago
Listening to some guys talk has turned me off Rolex before I could get any serious interest in it. If I was going for a high-price watch as a daily driver(assuming I had the money to spend), I'd probably be aiming for an Omega or Bulova(ie, the other moonwatch).
Going to a Rolex boutique has certainly turned me off them. But it's probably just sour grapes for me not being high-enough status that Rolex doesn't just bring out the secret stash from the back for me. My money is just as good as fake Johnny Depp's, damnit! After that experience at Rolex, I've certainly started considering an Omega Speedmaster, but I haven't done enough research into them yet, as they seem to have a bunch of different models, and I don't know which ones have the proper lunar landing connections to be good for value speculation.
I'm pretty sure I saw Trump do his own Trump-brand watches, which look, you know, how you would expect.
Hm, you're right. Its FAQ explains that they're actually sold by a company called TheBestWatchesOnEarth LLC, which I'm absolutely shocked is not an actual Trump company, and which licenses the Trump name and brand and everything. The first 3 types of watches listed for Men's are: Fighter, Warrior, and Mugshot Suit. As always, Trump proves un-parody-able.
The more reputable Chinese watch brand names in the single-digit-hundreds range generally have quite high quality like you've discovered.
I haven't had any of them long enough to say, but that's certainly been my experience so far, from a few I've bought in the $70-$300 range from Chinese brands Tandorio, Berny, Addiesdive, and San Martin. San Martin is the most expensive of those, and I just had to get one of their watches which featured Chinese characters for the numbers, which I haven't been able to find in any other brand, not even other Chinese brands. I bought a few from Tandorio with customized engravings (and one with customized dial) since even with the customization they came out to the $120-$250 range, and I just hope they're made well enough to last long enough that I'm capable of feeling nostalgia for the reasons for the customizations. I'll probably turn to Tandorio for gifts every once in a while for my male relatives/friends.
07mk
15d ago
What kind of candidate should the Democrats run if they want to appeal more to middle class voters?
I think the number one thing Democrats need to prioritize for that is making sure whatever selection process they follow doesn't hinge on aesthetics, but rather on specific policies. If there's any focus on aesthetics, it should specifically be about that candidate's open and perhaps even disrespectful disavowal of existing policies and the people who supported such policies and the ideologies from which those policies came.
(Perhaps we could go even one more meta layer up and say that the candidate should be selected for based on her willingness to disavow the process by which the Democratic party selected those people and ideologies as well, but that's probably too indirect and low impact).
07mk
15d ago
If I'm fortunate enough to survive as a POW or at least have a close friend of mine survive as a POW instead of being turned into a goop of chemical bonds for fuelling AI killbots in the coming robot wars, I certainly don't plan on sticking anything up my ass just to keep it. Then again, if I demand my wife bite the bullet (or rather not bite anything, unless the AD's into that) to help secure such an artifact for our child, perhaps I should be willing to at least carry a hunk of metal in my ass for a few years. I don't expect to have any friends nearly as cool as Christopher Walken, though.
07mk
15d ago
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.
07mk
15d 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
16d 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
16d 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
16d 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
17d 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.
I honestly think, for most people, IF they want to wear a watch and are willing to pay more than like $50, a Casio G-Shock is probably the best choice. I happen to just prefer the analog aesthetic, but digital is generally easier to read and use and set, has much more functionality like timers and alarms, and, of course, G-Shocks are just really, really durable. Ever since I started wearing a watch again as an adult, I've taken notice of how careful I tend to be when swinging my left arm while walking and such, which is extra mental work (though perhaps it's also prevented injuries to my left hand, so it's worth it in the long run?). If I'm wearing a watch at all during any physical activity (which I usually don't, but there are many occasions when such timing is useful), it's usually the G-Shock I got as a present.
I think, with watches, it honestly doesn't matter, because basically no one notices. It's one of those things that I feel like I need to complete the look when I'm dressing formally, but it's not like people pay much attention to that part anyway, and in everyday wear, it's even less. Though, who knows, perhaps as non-smart watches become more and more relics of the past, a G-Shock with its sometimes hulking design or distinctive screen setup will become a conversation starter.
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