2D3D
9d ago
The hypocrisy of the "theres no such thing as social contagion" brigade is, once again, amazing. Adolescence showed that problematic white boys are poisoned by Andrew Tate into killing girls with their misogynistic incel culture, which justifies broad castigation of the adolescent white male as the obvious target requiring remedial action. Meanwhile there is no such thing as transtok telling girls that being queer is simply self expression oh and binding makes the icky male gaze go away and if you think girls are prettier then maybe youre actually not a straight girl blablabla.
Social contagion is real, but its only a bad thing if boys can be blamed. There are no such thing as bad philosophies, only bad targets.
2D3D
9d ago
Perhaps the attention paid to the male loneliness crisis is due to the fact that it manifests as societal wide problems, whereas female loneliness just results in shut-ins posting on private tumblrs to a circle of cheerleaders waiting their turn at the podium.
To share my own experience, my own compatriots who fell into this insanity actually fell into such due to the harry potter fandom spaces, where they would go insane about how gay pederasty was morally pure compared to disgusting heterosexuality. Their real life end state manifestations is raging at the CCP for censoring their beloved boy love dramas and spamming chatgpt for increasingly explicit kpop slashfic, but the through line still exists. They have eschewed all heterosexual relationships, consigned themselves to a chaste nunnery dedicated to homosexual pedophilia, and find plenty of validation from adjacent groups cheerleading self-indulgence as liberation from the patriarchy.
The great awokening obviously broke many brains, and till my death I will point to elevatorgate as the crystallization of feminism+racism+mental issues in the social justice caucus, but it particularly affected unmoored young women who lacked real life reinforcement. Whether negative or positive reinforcement, the lack of real life consequences for life choices makes online communities easy to fall into and hard to escape once that becomes a 'community'. Men who crawl out of the porn and vidya pits could be threats, women just become the crazy cousin no one talks to anymore.
2D3D
14d ago
The big fear I personally have is that management buys into the promises of consultants and vendors who claim that AI will be their solution and advise cost cutting before benefits materialize, or worse when the low hanging fruit is all that is plucked.
If you want a preview of this nonsense, just attend literally any conference now. Every single vendor is now forced to add 'AI' into their suite of offerings, but more concerningly they are saying that they will deliver AI capabilities to clients who hire these guys. The incentive structure for companies is to have an internal manager assigned to spearhead this endeavor, and that persons incentive in turn is to outsource all responsibility possible to the vendor. A vendor that is thus inclined to lie because they have little to lose is the most likely outcome, and I've seen it happen so many times. Builder.ai is the clearest high profile example of late, but I've seen this happen like a dozen fucking times already.
2D3D
14d ago
I've also had better luck using AI as a disposable coder I can rush to test and let it run into walls rather than hoping my dev team would be able to figure things out organically. The tension of streamlining vs overloading a dev team is always an issue, and I've certainly found human intervention necessary for a great many edge cases that will show up.
Certainly the administrative loads and documentation tracking for what projects are extant and what is viable is helped. In the weirdest sense AI is useful as a stupid conversation partner to sanity check, and it doesn't mind being bullied or rejecting effusive praise.
2D3D
16d ago
I'm a pretty firm advocate of the techno robocracy. Low TFR among high performers may be extant, but Korea would rather give robot kpop stars citizenship and permanent bodies than let foreigners take root in their soil, and frankly who can blame them. Europes mistake was not leaning into robo-utopianism instead of their chosen path of human unversalism. The 20-40 year timespan for East Asian robotopia vs the Southmuskbotland is more likely than East Asia or USA opening the floodgates to satisfy the VOO IRR.
2D3D
16d ago
Its businesstoday.in. Their slop was worse before AI, at least now theres a semblance of grammatical coherence. I have placed hardstops on google to filter out all Indian news sources (except for theprint and thehindu) from any search results, and my news quality sources have improved dramatically. Thanks to slop like Eurasiantimes and businesstoday and all manner hindustantimes and ndtv and even 'respectable' not-obviously-indian sources like economictimes all being published in english and churning out AI slop nonstop we are going to see source pollution by AI generated articles very soon. Bad enough when AI overweights archived blogposts from the livejournal graveyards, worse when its the entire subcontinent clickjerking over every piece of mediocre slop churned out by hypernationalist basement dwellers.
2D3D
18d ago
Trumps personal corruption is stupid and I honestly think he's just creating a void where bad actors and those confident in his insanity can profit. Timing stock purchases around tariff announcements is risky if you think Trump will back down at the last minute, as he has done before, so it just reflects a bet that Trump is actually pulling the trigger on something every suited economist is screaming will be stupid. The memecoin stuff is honestly just funny at this point and calling it access capitalism is dubious since access to Trump seems to be counterproductive - Musk is on the outs, and Susie Wiles is still by all accounts the main powerbroker.
Right now the bigger problem is that the irritating screeching makes it hard to filter genuine problems of Trump accruing personal gains through the power of the executive versus the normal machinery of government being somewhat incompetent. Everything Trump does is corruption destroying the republic, but yet it still stands, so at a certain point it is legit to ask what the hell this corruption actually is.
The mechanisms to hold Trump accountable are unfortunately degraded, and the question must be posed on whether such mechanisms ever would have worked as intended anyways. In such a degraded and polarized environment, we're going to end up in a vibeoff anyways. Wait, I just time travelled back from 2011, and its been a vibeoff since a decade ago. Elevatorgate raises its head again!
2D3D
18d ago
Virtue is predictability. Those with honor can be trusted to at least follow the terms of a deal and not try to screw you at the last minute. A man who promises wine at one drachma per amphora but who will fill it with cholera water is less worthy a partner than a man who sells at five drachmas per amphora but who fills it honestly.
That is the big problem with corruption: it is an open ended incentive to race to the bottom, and it ruins any faith that any activity with a time lag will be honored. Did the property owners intimidated by Crassus have any faith that Crassus would not come back later and spike up the rates? The main advantage is that Crassus would have stopped other arsonists from burning down their property if only to reserve that right for himself, which from our modern lenses is insane.
What we see in modern USA is a different form of corruption: the corruption of credit. The wheel of loans and equity and finance have made money in hand disconnected from money that is spent, and so it is those who game the system that benefit. Republican corruption may involve private benefit, but Democrat corruption involves robbing the public purse to pay off their friends and pets. I again point to the homeless advocacy industrial complex that exists only to drain coffer for the privilege of inconveniencing everyone including the homeless even further. Its not like the grifter even profits that much; Dominique Davis of Community Passageways per propublika bilked 10m from 'community contribution' which are largely state funds put into 'dollar matched' foundations and the wages only hoovered up 50% of the funds, with the remaining 50% just disappearing.
For all the crimes of Caeser and Crassus and Trump and the republicans, I can at least squint and see they did SOMETHING with their corruption and their grift. For the corruption which includes democrat and socialist and every possible shithole tinpot dictator you'd be lucky to even see the mansions that are built off stolen lucre. Spending money to waste money even more quickly seems to be the order of the day for others, and if you're a US citizen asking what the hell the democrat states do with their current tax bases should make promises of taxing the rich being the panacea suspect.
2D3D
22d ago
Thats a really good point, but if anything the Syrian civil war shows how quickly realizing the fragility of the state is the observation that collapses the schroedingers unreality of state capacity. The SAA collapsed and retreated, and more importantly the citizens in the overtaken cities saw fit to allow, if not actively aid, the various advancing rebels. Counterexamples are how Russians reached the end of their logistical trains and could not advance further in Ukraine (or hell even Chechnya), the USA found willing collaborators in every town in Iraq, the Tigrayans go only as far as their kin exist etc etc etc.
Does the left want chaos? Their behavior is consistent with wanting to seize the levers of power for themselves so that they can create a better world in their preference, with their only active step being stepping out of their high towers to lead the huddled masses that will mill around aimlessly wondering what to do next after the hated patriarchy is cast down. Cheerleaders for violence are never on the field, and the rare times they're there its just to get gangbanged by whatever players still playing for keeps.
2D3D
22d ago
Agree, but this also means that the lesser threats of breaking civil society due to the rampancy of low level crime is ignored, leading to a tautological ouroboros whereby the lack of reporting about crime is itself taken as proof of the lack of crime, rather than the ubiquity of said crime.
If its easy to close ones eyes to the death spiral of tolerating petty crime when it happens far away, it becomes easier to close ones eyes towards the violence committed by your ideological allies even when close by. The gays for palestine will not sway from their support for violent islamists, the hijab appreciation day brigade will not notice the cries of the Iranians being tortured, the Robin diAngelo book parties will not notice the monochromity of supermarket theft in their midst.
By social pressure, westerners see it more important to forgive foreign rapists and murderers of their kin than to enforce laws blindly. Reality might reassert itself in time, but recency bias overweights the cultural milieu of the 2010s even till now.
2D3D
22d ago
There is no actual population mass willing to engage in active actions that exists to delegitimize external authority beyond their local sphere. There are cheerleaders for violence like Black Lives Matter, pro-palestinians, Jan 6 (though the motive was seizing power rather than juvenile chaos) that will celebrate violence that reaches escape velocity but are largely unwilling to travel outside the start point of violence to continue it. There are local resistances like CHAZ, Black Hammer, Koresh, technically the various Mormons, that carve out a local territory for themselves and attempt resistance against state authority, but they seem content to self implode rather than actually wage violence against society. And of course you have all criminal gang wars that exist in the space between state capacity and extractable resources, where violence is waged against each other in lowsec but never attempting to attack the state.
In none of these circumstances do we see, at least in the USA, any appetite for mass movement of violence that would see either armed revolution or enforcer defections. The Days Of Rage of the SDS in the 70s was perhaps the last time the intelligensia thought they had the mass of society on their side that simply was waiting for the chosen ones to lead the way, and they got smacked down by reality when not a single normie joined their revolutionary uprising. Even the Black Panther Party failed to significantly mobilize the Black Middle Class who were still extant (this Black Middle Class now has turned into normie whites, living entirely seperately from their co-ethnics).
The above impression of equivalence between leftist and rightist violence is due to categorization of intent, not scale or capability. Should rightist violence truly emerge, it will utterly dominate and show the hollowness of leftist rhetoric. Leftist agitators are keyboard warriors happy to cheerlead the violence spilled against their enemies, taking credit for the violence being proof of their ideologies salience when convenient and staying silent when not. The vanguard of revolution is happy to proclaim their inevitability and act as such, despite their subreddit members not being able to leave the house to get a sandwich let alone lead a charge.
2D3D
23d ago
no university has a department of data fabrication
Except they do? Soft sciences all suffer massively from replication crisis, but faked data is a huge problem that goes unchallenged and covered up till it could not be hidden anymore. Francesca Ginos work on behavioral science was totally fabricated and earlier attempts to highlight it were quashed till 9 years later. Roland Fryers work on black outcomes was quashed because he went against the orthodoxy of white supremacy being responsible. Hard sciences also suffer from dubious research overenthusiastically seeing shadows in slides.
I think its fair to see the prestige of academic research as a dead end if they don't stand the test of the real world. The endowments and sinecures lavished are rewards for satisfying the emotional wants future billionaires whose nostalgia overweights the contributive effect of their university years to their success. The actual practical knowledge of university is either relevant only to the arcana of the universities internal minutae or only temporarily substantive as the world is so dynamic. Spending eight years locked in your lab to dissect nanoparticle impregnation becomes irrelevant when corning glass comes up with 5 different product iterations in the meantime.
2D3D
26d ago
The secret to deportation is to register every single migrant entrant and have strong relationships with the origin countries of these migrants. Remittances incentivize India to cooperate with UAE in cataloging and receiving deportees so that surplus labor can continue to be exported from India. The imbalanced power dynamic is a feature, not a bug, that the domestic population actively supports.
The only breaking point is if there are illegal migrants, but the secret the UAE has is strong border agreements with neighbors who are equally if not more hostile to migrants than they are. No Ethiopian is crossing into the UAE when the Saudis shoot them on the border first. What few ever make it there have no reason to stay because imported labor keeps demand for illegal low wage labor low.
The imports will immediately overthrow the UAE rulers if they could. The calculus for the UAE is that the imports are disincentivized from doing so because the only value the UAE provides, stability (tax safety income or other), is precisely what the imports lack in the lives they came from.
Oh, the final secret: citizenship is restricted. The great mistake the Europeans and Americans made was giving citizenship and family reunification to what should have been temporary imports. The khaleeji get to be stupid and decadent, and all they have to do is endure the disrespect of seething activists.
2D3D
27d ago
I'm too lazy to dig deep so I'm gonna rely on the bigbrains here to ask: is it legal for such an open lottery system to have race clauses baked into it? Like, most babies born of 2 parents whose combined skin tone is or is below a certain reflectivity or some weird shit like that?
I ask because there have been similar legal challenges here in my neck of the woods to extremely patriarchal wills. A common issue used to be where an alleged deathbed conversion of the patriarch to islam (or a marriage cert found in Indonesia where underage prostitution is conducted under the guise of temporary marriages - 'convert' marry pump dump divorce in about 1 hour) invalidates previous wills which specifically state that no property can be disbursed to muslims. A new tactic gaining (weak) traction is that such wills are invalid because of their discriminatory nature against mixed marriages, but southeast asia doesn't really play that game. Does such stuff happen in the west?
2D3D
1mo ago
Cooperation is useful.
Thet is a function of hyperconnected modern societies with resource extraction capability no longer being the determinant of biological survival. The extent of cooperation historically was limited to how far the reach of your competitors were, and how much work was needed to get something useful out of the ground. We see that in societies with much more reliance on local resource extraction that the incentive for cooperation is much lower, since the pie is shared with more mouths.
I actually agree that open communication and cooperation is the most effective way to function as a society, with defectors being punished heavily to prevent tragedy of the commons. Unfortunately with disparate impact it is. now unbecoming to punish troublemakers, so we live in societies where the effort to create discord is so minimal and the rewards for the disruptor so great. Johnny Somali actively seeks to cause disruption for personal benefit, and he was never punished for his antics until he went to Korea and discovered Asian Racism.
2D3D
1mo ago
Maritime bridge systems technician. Always demand for that and the increasing digitization of equipment means you can't just climb the mast and bang on the radar till things align, since the network connections and system settings need to work in concert. Many bridge systems engineers bitch about how turning on one system gimps another system in another part of the bridge, and specialists refuse to learn the capabilities of other departments.
Navigation and comms are the two broad categories that bridge systems fall under, so depending on your future interest for when climbing up and down masts isnt exciting anymore you can transition to some office role.
Another big issue is navigating the unions for work. Federal level unions are basically extortion rackets, and state level affiliates seem to be politicizes shitpiles. Only one I've heard positive news about is Maine, which is generally top tier for anything marine in the USA.
2D3D
2mo ago
It wasn't even that good as TV went. It was just Omarosa being an absolute meme queen with the racialized undertones glaringly present, and Trump dunking on clowns. It was novel as TV concepts went, so gotta give that to ABC.
Anyways, I would posit that the Trump tariffs can be summed up in 3 different memes:
stickinbike.png michael scott handshake.png chadxi.png
There are many different image macros that can be applied. Be creative in my stead, dear bored board members.
2D3D
2mo ago
The Arabs insist on returning to 67 and not 48 borders because the Palestinian territories were administered by their neighboring co-ethnics, and the Palestinians caused endless trouble for the Egyptians and Jordanians while under their protection. The political masterstroke of the Arab world was to give the Palestinians to the Israelis without any demand of their own, leaving Israel with an eternal pustule to deal with while keeping Jordanian and Egyptian hands clean. Not that it'll matter very much, Kuwait did a nakba of 300k Palestinians and no one bats a single eyelid. Its just much funnier to the Arabs that they get to give this gift of eternal irritation to Israel while pretending to give a single shred of real support to the Palestinians. Hamas is armed by the Shia Persian infidels in Iran, not the Sunni Arab cousins just across the (heavily guarded) border.
2D3D
2mo ago
2D3D
2mo ago
Sometime in the mid 2010s the cultural narrative trend went towards extensive 'these people did bad things because they were forced to and actually its the supposed good guys who are the evil ones that should be blamed for the bad actions of the bad guys.' Its a bit of a stretch, but not a very long one, to see that this was being forced into video games at the same time as all other media, particularly in order to capitalize on the 'current power order bad, bad things supposedly evil people do are just disagentic actions reacting autonomously against larger evil forces'. Put plainly, the analogy is that agency is reserved for the protaganists in-game race, and all enemies are actually victims that you are effectively mercy killing out of their tortured existence. Wait, thats slightly more fucked up the more I think about it.
Blizzard seems to be the only one that escaped most of that retardation, mainly because their writing was always trash to begin with. Look, there is ALWAYS a massively overwhelmingly evil external enemy that is responsible for everything, and its an eternally sliding scale so when this enemy gets some backstory and becomes sympathetic we immediately roll out the bigger BBEG to take the responsibility of all evil!
Outside of this, western game companies tended to have incredibly unimaginative narratives. This friendly white man turns out to be the actual evil bad guy all along! This orc is actually the poor oppressed woobie. Etc etc etc.
2D3D
2mo ago
It speaks to the modern social attention meta that all we have to do is ctrl + f the more egregious AI tells, and add an introductory paragraph to frame the following text blocks as a first person rather than depersonalized voice.
Also, can I just point out that the actual text block is just... inane? It just looks at the percentage differences as a be all and end all effect, with zero consideration for salient factors like composition or even scale. While fine tuning is a frictional exercise, its certainly not so onerous that you need to slap this cursed golem stitched together out of wishful outcomes and deliberate ignorance onto the market.
(lets see AI slop generate THAT)
2D3D
2mo ago
Priors here slanted opinions against the academy regardless of the legal outcome, because the only presentation the academy cares to display is sanctimonious moralizing. The only change would be whether the judiciary is viewed as equally captured.
edited to focus on a different aspect
Do western governments prioritize these other aspects because there is the presumption that the base citizenry is a hemostatically stable organism able to self regulate? Whether this assumption is wrong or not, this is a first order difference vastly different from the Asian societies I am familiar with. Here the governments view the citizenry as needing a level of government management to internal forces spiralling out of control or external forces from disrupting what is posited to be a delicate balance. Social shame is employed and even sanctioned by governments to effect this ethos, and it seems much less expensive than deploying active state resources to gently encourage irredentist antisocials back into the fold.
2D3D
4mo ago
Heart Attack Grill is a medicare psyop to discount the NPV of future payouts. Insurance companies should go full throttle on this: if youre covered and expected to be a significantly negative coverage incident, you should be offered the choice of premiummaxxing or a hyperindulgence event. Die now, get the a discount of the expected value of your future insurance payouts given as a cash dividend so your loved ones enjoy that bet.
My gut feel is that the one reason (akong many) the democrats lost in 2024 was that the main beneficiaries of their better policies were or would have ended up being white men, so it was forbidden to highlight those successes without finding a way to portray them as actually having benefitted BIPOC. Apply the same rule to the converse and you get the absolute paralysis of law enforcement and civic responsibility.
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