2rafa
14d ago
Crimes committed abroad are often prosecuted domestically, murder is illegal in El Salvador so he can be deported and then tried there.
2rafa
15d ago
By whom? Who's the power behind Ukraine staying in the war? What is it hoping to achieve? Been looking for analysis on this for a while and not found any.
By the state / defense bureaucracy which is comprised (at this stage, after numerous purges) of ardent nationalists.
2rafa
15d ago
Or is that the participating in society meme?
In many ways the perfect motte and bailey question. You can own an iPhone and be a communist, but you probably can’t buy the latest iPhone every year and be a communist because - even if you think FALGSC is inevitable - communism is an international movement that sees even the lifestyle of the Western middle class as the product of grotesque exploitation of third world peasants and proletarians that would be swiftly corrected under a communist revolutionary movement.
Peace is often found when lifestyle and your worldview are in some alignment. It is possible to be an actively-gay-sex-having Catholic priest (albeit a bad one who, I imagine, is breaking his vows) who nevertheless advocates that gay sex is bad. I suspect there is some torment involved, though, no matter the undoubtedly complex knot of justification and self-deceit. If you believe in America, I suspect it feels especially good to buy American. Plus, if you have money, the quality is often better.
2rafa
15d ago
It's a pale shadow of true immortality
It’s the only immortality that is realistic. Not because “brain upload” is against the laws of physics but because it’s probably grossly inefficient.
2rafa
15d ago
The other reply is right, you don’t have anywhere near enough data on Grandma (unless she’s a famous celebrity with a 40+ year TV career) to train an AI that ‘feels’ like it’s her. She’ll make an infinity of hand movements, facial tics, use certain words and the illusion will be instantly destroyed.
It’s as much about learning the things she would never say as it is appearing like an authentic old person. For it to be fully authentic those Meta glasses will have to catch on so we can record dozens of hours of mundane interactions with others. I would estimate that a few thousand hours would be enough for a good facsimile.
2rafa
15d ago
Zelensky could send family abroad (they may already be, but at the least they have been many times since the start of the war) and then resign into exile in Florida while on a visit. He has enough money in Panama for a Trump Gold Card and the administration could frame it as a generous gesture for peace personally negotiated by the president. The SBU are competent enough to pull off overseas assassinations but doing so in America would be uniquely dumb even for them.
2rafa
15d ago
AIPAC would be the more relevant group to compare to Soros. The things Musk is doing are all things Trump ran on.
Trump ran on being the most pro-Israel president ever and openly discussed assisting Israel in the war on Hamas many times in the campaign.
2rafa
16d ago
By that logic everyone who voted for Biden should have been OK with Democratic aides and advisors running the show because that’s the way it has been forever, it didn’t even need to be mentioned.
2rafa
16d ago
I think the reason people assume absolute dominance (either of the most powerful ASI or of the humans in charge of it if control can be solved/maintained) is that once you get to super intelligence it’s theorized you also get recursive self-improvement.
Right now it doesn’t matter for mundane human automation of tasks like image or text generation if one model is 3% smarter than another. In the ASI foom scenario, an ASI 0.1% smarter than another immediately builds a infinite advantage because it rapidly, incrementally improves itself ever faster and more efficiently than the ASI that started just a little bit less intelligent than itself. Compute / electricity complicate this, but there are various scenarios around that anyway.
2rafa
16d ago
The BBC article on this change specifically mentions solar cells as part of the exemption.
2rafa
16d ago
No lol, he just picked an anime avatar and now some of his twitter audience unbelievably think he’s a woman. I don’t think he’s even claimed to be, so it’s not even a grift, it’s just weird or very stupid people.
2rafa
16d ago
-
Impose huge tariffs on China to try to drive some kind of autarchic domestic manufacturing revolution.
-
Embarrassing climbdown after the market melts down and your donors / friends get mad. Keep tariffs only on China. This means that cheap manufactured goods, clothing, widgets etc keep flowing in from South and Southeast Asia in huge volumes, so no boost to American manufacturing for any of them.
-
Exempt electronics, computers, solar panels etc from Chinese sanctions, ensuring that even the critically important industries to national security stay 100% reliant on Chinese manufacturing because Tim Apple said that the iPhone would double in price if he didn’t get his exemption.
-
Chinese tariffs remain at 125% on the US. Trade deficit with China widens. American manufacturing doesn’t develop at all (suppliers buy the easy stuff from elsewhere and the complex stuff from China, where the exemptions apply). Americans can’t sell anything in China.
This really is what winning looks like.
2rafa
16d ago
Having, say, a year of gradually escalating fees ending at 1,000,000% percent or whatever we've slapped on China now seems much better from a market's perspective than "1,000,000% in 90 days."
If you’re actually going to do it it’s better to do it all on Day 1 because anything else is extremely inflationary as the tariffs slowly tick up (I assume this is the actual advice Trump was given). Of course, it’s a bad idea to do it at all.
2rafa
16d ago
George Soros himself has a vaguely lib, pro-democracy, pro-markets ideology influenced by his youth. His son Alexander, who spent 8 years at Berkeley doing his masters and PhD (graduating 2019), and who is in charge of his charitable giving, is the arch-progressive who, unsurprisingly, supports just about every progressive cause championed in the Berkeley faculty lounge, from homeless drug addicts in San Francisco to Arabs in Israel/Palestine.
Soros Sr had, I suppose, some kind of shadowy influence in that he funded huge numbers of educational and think tank type institutions that promoted his ideas, especially in Eastern Europe. Soros Jr just realized that local politics was even more important to progressivism than national politics and so funded huge numbers of leftist DAs, city council members and so on very strategically in competitive races. I don’t know if that influence counts as ‘shadowy’ given it was all very public.
2rafa
17d ago
If you observe a novel system and wish to understand it, look at the outputs it produces. Those outputs are what the people feeding and maintaining the system consider sufficiently acceptable to continue feeding and maintaining it.
No, I think you discount inertia here. Plenty of people maintain systems they don’t really believe in, support or care for because it’s just what they do, it’s what they’ve always done, and changing a routine (even if you have the power to do so) requires effort.
Then, of course, you respond by saying that in this case, even if the system’s output is ideologically unattractive to those who feed it, they still consider it acceptable, and therefore TPOSIWID is still true, because the purpose itself is a kind of inertia machine, or to be a sinecure, or to perpetuate itself in some grand sense. But then the whole phrase is kind of meaningless.
Or, to put it another way, TPOSIWID is a common catchphrase on right wing twitter to criticize mainstream or progressive institutions. But it works equally well in reverse, because it explains to us that a lot of rightist grand ideological plans will end up establishing (and arguably already have) institutions that fail, are corrupt, are sinecures, exist to perpetuate themselves and have highly deleterious outcomes for society.
So the phrase just becomes a warning about where ideology leads, and thus just another dull argument for the kind of technocratic mediocrity that TPOSIWID advocates hate.
2rafa
17d ago
Did @2rafa recognize the style, or is top-level post deleter using a consistent block of IPs or set of IPs known to be used by a single VPN provider?
I’m not a mod so don’t have access to that information, but I noticed the style and that he posted two top level responses in a row which is very rare for regulars outside of election-day or other major happening threads.
2rafa
17d ago
Even if new users couldn’t delete posts until they’d been users for 100 days or whatever, this guy would just edit them to say ‘deleted’ and then delete his account, so that isn’t a big deterrent.
The only thing I can think of is mods (who are presumably able to see deleted posts) manually restoring deleted comments created within 50 posts of a user joining the community to protect against bad actors. Idk if that’s viable.
2rafa
18d ago
Interestingly, Next, which is genuinely led by one of the best businessmen in the world (and I mean that without reservation, turning a mediocre British clothing retailer into an extraordinarily profitable and resilient operation) mostly solved the issue by rotating staff between the warehouse and storefront. If Simon Wolfson were dictator of England…well, it would be better managed, for sure.
2rafa
18d ago
There is no need for any of this when the British government can just hire Polish garbage men (inventing a visa category if necessary, and it is barely even necessary) to do the job.
2rafa
18d ago
I disagree regarding Israel’s options in terms of domestic politics (accommodation with the Palestinians became politically impossible after the early 2000s and ‘mowing the grass’ was politically impossible after October 7th), but you are right as far as political science, certainly.
‘Realism’ is just idealism by another name. The realist has his own ideology, how can he not? To put it another way, realism is really just the purest form of small-l classical liberalism in geopolitics. Everyone is a rational game theory actor responding to incentives, everyone is actions in their own rational self interest. This is no less fictive than the ideology of the ‘rules-based international order’ - in fact it is more fictional, because proponents of the latter typically admit they actually have some kind of ideology. The realist just thinks he is a cool, casual observer, the chopper pilot on the last helicopter out of Saigon, shrugging, “it is what it is” even as he believes in so many grand myths of his own. It’s like that political compass meme, right, the radical centrist, the “grill pill” has no less complex and ideological a philosophy than the ancap or the communist of the fascist.
To go back to the subject at hand, Israel anywhere else would have failed, Israel where it is can probably never succeed. As I said before, its survival this long was improbable at the moment of its founding, it was always skating on thin ice. I don’t believe acquiescing to Palestinian demands, not in the 1970s, nor in the 1990s, not today, would save it. Like the realists, the Arabs see themselves as a martial people; they can smell weakness. Whether Israel does it by choice or at gunpoint, any concessions will only hasten its collapse.
2rafa
18d ago
What gets me about you and your infinite cycle of creating new accounts and then deleting them, new posts and then deleting them is that you never really seem to explain why. You can just be a normal poster here. It’s OK. You’ve posted about a lot of interesting things, you’d fit in. It’s a mostly civilized political discussion forum for nerds. There’s no real malice. Just stop with the dumb routine.
2rafa
18d ago
Eg China has shown its take on the situation, in Xinjiang.
Few things would get the Sunni Arabs to give in to their peoples and throw everything at Israel for a third time, but forcibly re-educating Muslims away from their traditions would be one of them. That’s far, far more politically sensitive that what Israel is doing in Gaza.
The Salvadoran government, his government, can release him whenever they want.
More options
Context Copy link