2rafa
6hr ago
Sports franchise revenue (4 of the top 10 games sold every year are EA sports games, pretty much every year) is probably predictable enough to make them comfortable. This will look stupid eventually for the Saudis and Silver Lake, but for now I don’t think it’s a comically bad loan.
2rafa
6hr ago
For years, Andrew Wilson has been the most personally ambitious chief executive in the S&P 500. A self-made man, he went from small scale producer to CEO of EA, and then set about reverse-merging it into (or otherwise being acquired by) one of the major Hollywood conglomerates. From there, I imagine he would have gone for CEO of one of the FAANGs, or maybe the Magnificent 7 a few years later. Indeed he almost succeeded in becoming CEO of Disney, although Iger ultimately preferred a company man (and then latterly, of course, himself). He tried with several others.
That unachieved, he can at least facilitate (and make no mistake, this is all him) the largest LBO in history. I hope it makes him happy, though for men like him there is always another hill to climb.
2rafa
6hr ago
Massive Catholic immigration irreparably changed the character, society, and government of the United States. America is lower trust because of it. The new predominantly Catholic voters in the Northeastern cities altered the political balance of the United States. One can go overboard with this (easy to say that Hart-Cellar wouldn’t have happened without major Catholic and Jewish immigration, but similar things happened in various other Northern European Protestant countries that had very little of either), but there is a limit to calling the impact overstated, too. The world of Anglo-America that existed before the 1880s is dead and buried. Old WASP Boston, old WASP New York, old WASP San Francisco, these places are as vanished as Christian Anatolia or Parsi Mumbai; whether through conflict or simple attrition they have ceased to exist. America is lower trust, more violent, more divided and more selfish than it would have been if the mass immigration of 1865-1920 hadn’t happened. For all the talk at how horrified many Founding Fathers would be at the America of 2025, they would have been horrified too at the America of 1925 and its ethnic character.
Nevertheless, Lovecraft’s shrieking aside, it is also fair to say that America is still extremely wealthy, that its greatest global outperformance followed that period, and that in the end those disparate populations still managed to come together and build a relatively well-functioning civilization, at least for a while.
2rafa
6hr ago
I don’t think Matt Yglesias has a particularly coherent worldview. He certainly has read Sailer, Murray, Yarvin and others. So has Scott, of course, who is also still a liberal if a less confident one than Yglesias.
My guess is that Yglesias accepts that some form of HBD is true but thinks it can be mediated by rapid economic growth, the flynn effect, affirmative action and deciding not to speak about it ever. This isn’t even an uncommon opinion, it was the default view of a large proportion of the American progressive elite between the 1950s and early 1990s.
The decision to integrate coincided with the general decline of religiosity across the western world that followed the 1950s. Only one major Christian movement - American Protestantism - held on long after the others (European Protestantism, Lutheran and other, and Catholicism in general) fell, and that was in large part because of the unique success of the evangelical televangelists and the Christian revival movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, led by extraordinarily capable preachers like Billy Graham and supported by an embrace of modern media and to some extent music. Catholics tried to copy some of this with happy clappy post Vatican II masses and so on, but it never had the same vitality.
The evangelical revival preserved a religious Christian (not social customs; divorce and single parenthood still rose of course) identity among otherwise deracinated American Protestants and the many, many Catholics who converted to it for almost two generations after most Europeans largely abandoned regular churchgoing Christianity. It didn’t really die, not wholly anyway, until the mid-2010s, and even today hangs on due to comparatively higher birth rates and the large scale conversion of Latin American Catholics and their descendants, both in their homelands and in the US.
Catholics didn’t have that, and so a combination of suburbanization due to white flight clearing out the old ethnic neighborhoods and throwing various white ethnics and founding whites together in suburbia and the decline in Catholic mass attendance led to intermarriage and the merging into a shared American identity. Sometimes this is laid at the feet of WW2, but I disagree. The New York or Philadelphia of, for example, 1949 was still very much a place with distinctly separate white ethnic identities. It happened 10-30 years later.
2rafa
7hr ago
Maybe the TikTok algorithm is advanced enough to know I’m Jewish (I’m not even kidding), but Instagram and YouTube both recommend me by far more overtly anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic content than TikTok does. If anything, I think the Chinese - to avoid entangling themselves not only in foreign conflicts with America but with various other countries besides - have overtly toned down political content on TikTok, whereas Meta and Alphabet (both still controlled by their Jewish founders in terms of voting rights and in Meta’s case day to day leadership) don’t care and no doubt just prioritize by engagement, which necessarily favors political content.
2rafa
15hr ago
It depends. Annual immigration as a proportion of the total population is low relative to other Anglo countries and most of Western Europe.
2rafa
1d ago
It seems to me to be a massive screw up if you do not become a citizen through marriage if you are not already a citizen.
If you’re an illegal immigrant can you easily naturalize by marriage? Presumably you’d have to leave the US (and they would have recorded no exit stamp from his student visa 20 years ago, which means he’d have to pretend he left the country without passing through any controlled emigration point), pretend you’d lived abroad for 20 years, and then apply from abroad for a marriage visa (concocting another fake narrative about how you met).
2rafa
2d ago
It’s flawed for sure, but there is substantial anecdotal evidence that the percentage of men willing to engage in homosexual activity, especially in substantially or entirely male communities (men at war, men in prison, all-male boarding schools, male-only religious institutions) is probably higher than the 3-5% estimates of gay men.
2rafa
2d ago
Many male porn addicts seem to be in sexually active relationships though. Besides, I don’t think it’s clear that men with trans ‘girlfriends’ couldn’t find female partners, that seems spurious.
2rafa
2d ago
My understanding of the data we have on sex and partner count is that you had the sexual revolution in the 60s, which took until the ~late 1970s/early 1980s to filter down into mainstream society. From that point (ie the youth of Gen X) everyone has been having pretty similar amounts of sex. Millennials weren’t much more promiscuous than GenXers, and Zoomers are as or less promiscuous than millennials.
The emergence of apps, online dating, social media, none of these seem to have substantially affected population-level promiscuity, only shifted it. The (heterosexual) people hooking up with dozens of people on the apps are the kind of people who would hang around dive bars and clubs until closing time to pick up the best option left had they been born twenty years earlier.
I think it may be different for gay men, although large parts of that are surely increased social acceptability and the fact that HIV is no longer a death sentence, but even then, my guess is many people racking up 4-digit grindr body counts would have been anonymous bathhouse regulars back in 1977 too.
2rafa
5d ago
I think she has cringe but harmless wine aunt energy, a soft-ish voice, she’s not shrill, she seems somewhat befuddled, she doesn’t seem smart enough to screw you over. I felt sorry for her in some of the bad interviews, whereas I never felt sorry for Hillary.
2rafa
5d ago
I think a gay candidate could win a presidential election and I think a woman, including a black woman, could too.
I feel strongly, though, that it’s a question of type. A woman president could be maiden, mother or crone (there are examples of all three winning elections in recent history), but she must across as kind, at least to her allies, and wise. Kamala seemed kind enough, but not wise, and Hillary did not seem kind.
Oprah would win a presidential election for the Democrats. A gay man in the Scott Bessent / Tim Cook mould (soft-spoken but assertive, not necessarily ultra-masculine but not really camp) could win, probably for both the Democrats and the Republicans at this time. I think a gay black man would struggle, although it isn’t impossible. I don’t think a lesbian could win.
2rafa
7d ago
Thank you, interesting. The decline hasn’t been as significant as I’d imagined.
2rafa
8d ago
India is illustrative: they wanted to latch onto Pax Americana and get something out of it; what have they got so far for India proper?
45% of Indians are agricultural workers. In England, that threshold was last fallen beneath around 1675. In America, it happened around 1880. In India, it obviously has yet to happen.
Everything is downstream of this. In the aftermath of independence, the Congress regime (and that is what it was) decided that adopting state-driven industrial policy in the socialist mould was necessary to overcome this. The result was chaos and food insecurity, because the huge mass of rural Indians still had extremely high birth rates. The response, because in a democracy every peasant farmer had a vote, was to invest a huge proportion of the state's resources into incentivizing those peasant farmers with agricultural price floors while also implementing a highly protectionist policy regime that prevented farm consolidation and agricultural efficiency, which in turn prevented urbanization at the degree necessary for the industrial transition.
The % of agricultural workers is the most important metric for understanding India. You can understand nothing without it and understand everything with it. India has a space program and tech outsourcers, but these are the equivalent of the royal astronomer or the imperial library circa 1237; they have not undergone the industrial revolution, let alone anything after that. Imagine a Western country in which peasants obtained universal suffrage around 1400, but which was too large and well-armed to be invaded. This is India. The masses vote themselves the most generous affirmative action policy in the world, with 60% of all government jobs and college places reserved for lower castes and tribes. They vote a huge percentage of the state budget to be devoted to minimum agricultural prices, which make staple crops more expensive in India than they are in the West, and halt mechanization, which further disincentivizes urbanization (because urban workers rely on cheap food). Interstate commerce is guarded by labyrinthine protectionism, all of which leads to the inevitable corruption.
Modi attempted some tiny, granular reforms. Tens of thousand of haggard peasant smallholders marched on Delhi. The Supreme Court, the only true authority in India, stayed and then forced the repeal of the laws (which the government happily accepted) for reasons of social order and societal stability. But India's problems aren't a result of any allegiance with America, which is limited enough as it is (it is if anything closer to Russia).
No. I don't understand. Why? What happens to the US that did not "win"? Unlike the USSR, China doesn't even have a messianic revolutionary project.
We are, of course, in agreement here.
2rafa
8d ago
I doubt it was more than about 200,000. 3 million was obviously laughable. Aerial footage suggests fewer than at some of the largest Gaza protests, which police estimated had ~300k protesters. The largest ever protest in the UK was against the Iraq War, police estimated 750,000 people attended, there was little aerial footage but from some pictures of the route it does appear substantially larger.
2rafa
8d ago
The congressmen who take actual bribes tend to be the dumbest, so it’s still useful to weed them out.
For the smarter ones it’s better to build connections ‘for free’ with lobbyists and then be guided into board and advisory roles when you retire from politics that pay far more than any naked bribe.
2rafa
8d ago
This was previously vetoed by Trump as a favor to tech people (Musk, Bezos, Pichai, Altman, Ellison and Nadella), who he now likes because they flatter him and support him publicly. It was advocated by Miller and Lutnick and obviously commentators outside the admin like Bannon.
Now Trump is annoyed with Modi for buying Russian oil, which he sees as the reason for Putin being nonchalant about a deal on Ukraine, so he asks what will annoy India, and they pitch this again and he says “OK, fine” but without much more detail.
2rafa
8d ago
This is a good idea but will take decades to yield results at the top of government. It’s also true that even in Singapore most of the top politicians and government officials being paid this much are essentially the children of leading PAP members, they just happen to be a highly competent group and so have smart, capable kids.
2rafa
8d ago
Constantly angering the Arab and Islamic world is not a smart idea. Israelis may be better at fighting but they're vastly outnumbered. This is not America vs native Americans. It is provocative and obnoxious behaviour to derive national legitimacy from harsh treatment in the ghettoes and expulsions in Eastern Europe and then ghettoize the locals of a graciously granted strip of land, while continuously striving to expand it for lebensraum. This kind of behaviour has and will reduce favourability in the West.
Yes, Israel was founded in the wrong place.
Most accept this and would take it a step further, viewing defensive violence as legitimate and offensive violence as wrong.
I reject the characterization of colonialism as wrong. The end of empire led to a sustained and considerable decline in quality of life in many parts of the world.
What is their plan for EU sanctions or the US walking away? Or even just a prolonged insurgency and skirmishing with Iran that wrecks their economy? Vae victis works both ways.
While I agree that Israel’s future is very uncertain Israeli unreasonableness has yet to be tested. In the event of European sanctions and American disengagement, an end to all aid, a prolonged military crisis and food supply issues, I think there’s every chance that in the resulting domestic political upheaval they negotiate with the Europeans and Gulf Arabs and agree to some kind of two-state solution; they know if they’re overrun its lights out forever, or at least another 2000 years.
There are a literal handful of good sushi places in Budapest, the reality of having to fly in the good stuff does limit you relatively far inland. That said, it might have the cheapest Nobu in the world, which I’ve always found interesting.
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