2rafa
maybe it will all turn out fine
User ID: 841
2rafa
13d ago
I thought traffic models were actually pretty clear that if you could control the speed and, if necessary, the route, of every vehicle in an environment, traffic could be pretty easily eliminated. An accident or closure? Vehicles miles away are quietly redirected to the point a bottleneck never becomes over-congested; since everyone’s route / destination is known those going to different places can be relocated as clusters to avoid slowdowns driven by merging / demerging / excessive lane changes. If vehicles on the road get to a volume where traffic is more likely, you can very slightly lower the speed of cars further from the traffic. And, if everyone’s in self driving cars you can probably also increase speeds significantly, especially on roads with no pedestrians / cyclists like highways.
2rafa
13d ago
Isn’t the general consensus that once self driving cars are finally ubiquitous they can just ban humans driving and connect every sdc in a network that will dynamically redirect traffic, adjust speeds and change lights and crossing times to basically eliminate traffic?
2rafa
14d ago
The problem is that it’s just a far less impressive name than On The Origin of Species or something.
2rafa
14d ago
Trump reversed the vast majority of his tariffs (either voluntarily or because he was forced to) and the US’ balance of trade hasn’t changed in a favorable way.
TACO is true. Trump didn’t invade Iran, and he didn’t implement long term tariffs of the kind necessary to reverse the trade imbalance that was his original problem.
We bought our apartment. Two months ago, the building manager half-jokingly mentioned the owners (who I’ve only met twice, in passing, as they own one other unit which they stay in for maybe three or four days a year) we’re thinking of selling and might be willing to accept a ‘good price’ for a quick sale.
Here’s my justification to myself for buying in cash now:
In dollar terms, property in ‘prime central London’, especially apartments above £1.5m, is down about 50% since 2015. Even in nominal sterling terms they’re down about 20% in the last two years in Westminster, on average, once you actually negotiate. Meanwhile, my rent was double what it was just a few years ago, because an acceptable 2% rental yield in 2017 now has to be 5% or 6% I guess. Most of the people who live around here either have extremely high incomes or are idle rich, which means rent increases can be extremely high and arbitrary, often just to see what a landlord can get away with.
Possible cope:
I had posted a few months ago about liquidating a substantial proportion of what I had in US equities; no crash yet although I still feel pretty good about it. After everything was set aside, I had a number, divided it by a number, and took one of the segments and made that my offer. It was seemingly begrudgingly accepted after some weeks of trying to negotiate upward, but I held firm. Rich people didn’t have a problem with parking their money in London property as long as it held value (not necessarily increased in it, but held), but I think recent declines, inflation, and high treasury and gilt yields mean it’s now a terrible investment unless you actually need somewhere to live. A similar apartment sold for ~30% more than I paid three years ago.
Cope:
Old building so not affected by quality / cladding / whatever issues from recent decades, renovated and retrofitted in the last fifteen years, good management, and I already live there and have had no issues in the last few years. Everything works. I don’t have to move. I feel pretty good about it. While I am very pessimistic on the future of the UK, there’s nowhere I would rather live for now. In addition, I still have maybe 40% nw in the US, and while I’m paid in pounds, my business generates essentially no money from any kind of domestic market, all my clients and almost all of their / our mutual clients are substantially abroad and our fees are in dollars, so I think in the event of any catastrophic sterling devaluation or crisis (increasingly likely) I could negotiate a relatively proportional increase provided the business itself was still doing okay.
Paging @Corvos, @BurdensomeCount and any other Londoners here.
These things always get to a point (absent unknowable AI effects etc etc). Greece is the archetypal example. State pensions were cut by 45-50% in absolute terms over 5 years. There were riots and governments changed a few times, but in the end everybody knew it had to happen.
The UK or US could do the same by printing money which proles seem to accept slightly more than nominal cuts, but much as in Greece’s case, even the most stupid French politicians know crashing out of the Euro entirely in a moment of fiscal crisis would be even more catastrophic.
2rafa
16d ago
We did bomb a bunch of Iranian bridges but bombing power plants wasn’t done because it was understood that that would cause the Iranians to bomb Gulf power plants which they didn’t have enough interceptors to stop, and which would starve or kill via heat huge numbers of people.
2rafa
16d ago
But that’s what I’m saying, you imply that Reddit still bans people for calling for genocide, and indeed it does, but so do we (and that’s a good thing for civility), so my point is that this isn’t a different standard.
2rafa
17d ago
Latin American conservatives mostly do what they can within the system they’re in but the problem is that either (as in Brazil) they’re prevented from doing anything by all powerful courts and a constitution that they can’t overturn or substantially modify (eg almost all Brazilian government spending is constitutionally protected ie a coup complete problem), the central government itself has relatively little power in the face of rampant lawlessness, powerful regional governments, organized crime and anyone who tries to realistically challenge that will either get killed or enough of their lieutenants on the ground will to make reform impossible (Mexico), or, in situations where reactionary coups are possible and do occur, any right wing movement finds itself so impossibly indebted to and a mere patsy for either a corrupt non-ideological military hierarchy that just wants to extract maximum loot out to Miami, organized crime groups (who mostly want the same) or a combination of both to the extent that unsustainable levels of graft eventually bring down any political project by stifling economic growth and competition anyway.
2rafa
17d ago
We don’t let people post the former here so I don’t see how that’s relevant (even I won’t strawman any regulars by implying they say that), and yeah there are plenty of semi mainstream subs where people post the latter, like BaR, RedScarePod, 4Chan, Greentext etc.
2rafa
17d ago
There are going to be a lot of very awful terror attacks in the coming months and years enabled by AI here. You think amusement park ride control systems are all 100% airgapped? Of course not.
2rafa
17d ago
Yeah, and while that subreddit is more centrist and less intelligent than this place, the general tone and the heterodox positions at the right wing tail are not dissimilar from us in terms of no no content.
2rafa
17d ago
Again though, there are a LOT of like dissident right euro and US politics subreddits going far harder on those topics than anyone here (even securesignals) and they’re not banned.
2rafa
17d ago
I thought they only ended it for NSFW content (and old.reddit, where I think for engineering reasons restricting only NSFW content was somehow more difficult since they never did it there). We were never tagged as this on Reddit and neither are most ‘edgy’ discussion subreddits provided they don’t directly post eg extreme gore. In addition, as a discussion club, presumably all of us would be logged into Reddit anyway, just like I can’t remember using The Motte while logged out.
I have no real opinion on the Reddit NSFW login wall but it’s clear to me that it’s very different from what’s happening on X (which is essentially trying to replicate the Instagram or Facebook dynamic where every casual user is forced to have their own profile). Reddit is just trying to force porn watchers (who are, outside of really hardcore addicts, mostly using the site in incognito mode and/or otherwise not logged in) off the site by killing traffic to those subreddits via the old.reddit workaround without suffering a Tumblr style backlash that would result from actually banning that content. This is good for advertisers and the business especially as many governments pass ID check laws for this content anyway.
X harbors ambitions of being an actual social networking and payments etc app platform which requires most users to have accounts under their real names, like the much more lucrative IG / FB. Reddit knows that’s never viable for it and never will be.
2rafa
18d ago
They’ve clearly taken their foot off the cancellation gas pedal since 2022, and even then we were just one of many many communities (some with far more egregiously ‘unwoke’ content) that were warned but not banned, most of which are still on the site. Stuff is broadly tolerated even on semi-mainstream subs now that never was back then, a lot of professional moderators/admins were laid off and a lot of volunteers quit for various reasons, and the AI that’s replacing them cares far more about things like direct use of slurs and harassment (which were never really tolerated and still aren’t here) than it did about simply discussing heterodox views.
I really think the chance we would draw any admin attention whatsoever in 2026 on Reddit is extremely minimal. But we could always do eg a ‘trial week’ and see.
2rafa
18d ago
We’ve done much better and survived with decent activity much longer than I expected, I will say that. But I think now is the time to think seriously about going back to Reddit before the community really dies, which is probably on the horizon if 25% a year declines persist for a second full year from the current baseline. Still, I know almost nobody else agrees.
2rafa
20d ago
Interestingly, When Harry Met Sally was primarily written by a woman, albeit with a lot of male input from Rob Reiner. When I think of fully male centered romcoms I guess I think of stuff like Crazy Stupid Love , which is really more of a buddy comedy than a romcom, and which was obviously written by a man.
2rafa
20d ago
Part of the problem with this administration, widely noted, is its tendency to maximally ragebait while being ineffective, which draws all the ire and force of the left while also failing to accomplish most of the right’s priorities (see deportations).
I have no problem with the government publishing or even streaming an important record of this historical event. The ‘martyrs’ argument is dubious; Islamist propagandists have plenty of footage they can use from Gaza, Iran, Assad’s Syria and so on that is more visceral and powerful.
But just announce it on the day, two hours before it happens, and then do it.
2rafa
20d ago
There seem to be only what, ten thousand wizards in all of Britain, and they all go to school together, so asking for someone’s last name probably returns a value you have heard before.
2rafa
20d ago
A lot of men do like ‘straight’ (or pure) romance. There are male fans of the Linklater ‘Before’ movies, there are plenty of men who watch heavily romance based anime or play games where romance is a central feature, for example.
2rafa
20d ago
My understanding is that the big drug makers have extremely strict contracts with distributors that prohibit any down-the-line use in capital punishment in any circumstances and have extremely damaging financial penalties for anyone in the distribution chain who, knowingly or unknowingly, is involved in facilitating their use for this purpose.
In addition most of the major manufacturers are European or based in other countries that ban the export of any drugs used in capital punishment. Lastly, while India and China might be import options, the courts banned them as unapproved after a few states tried to use Indian drugs in lethal injections in the early 2010s.
Lastly, if a - say - ‘based’ right wing manufacturer were to set up shop in the US and was FDA approved, they would be liable for legal action by any Christa Pike types which, in America’s litigation culture and given that many lawyers and well funded interests are strongly opposed to the death penalty, means that a single botched execution would probably bankrupt such a venture, and in lethal injections failures are not uncommon.
2rafa
20d ago
I have to say that it was a disappointment when I found out that movie silencers are all fake and that guns are actually still really loud with them attached.
2rafa
21d ago
In most of these cases I think the bitterness is usually from people whose parents have chosen not to be ungenerous but not to indefinitely fund their kids’ delusions, so there is a big difference between a child getting an average $70k a year white collar job (certainly not enough to buy a decent house in much of the US today) and a child in their mid-30s still begging for $4000 a month to rent in Williamsburg and doing essentially nothing / DJing / failsonning. Intelligent upper middle class parents, especially those who have worked hard, are usually much more sympathetic to the former than the ‘failed to launch’ from what I’ve seen. The kid who works but who doesn’t have access to maybe the same kind of housing as the parents did at that age is often supported.
[BBC News] Violent clashes, looting and buildings ablaze in France as more than 1,200 arrested after protests
Again the ressentiment of the banlieues has spilled out into the rest of France (again), normally so distant, so deliberately and proudly ignorant, in that distinctly French way.
Some observations:
The Anglo press seems to have no qualms calling this largely violent and destructive rioting. There’s the BBC headline above, but even CNN leads with the subtitle ‘riots spread across major cities’ and the imagery of the burning Limoges town hall, a beautiful example of classical architecture that has now fallen victim to the decisions of 1960s, only via a longer and more expensive form of demolition. Other websites are similarly descriptive, a far cry from mostly peaceful protests. The New York Times says “France reels from largest riots in years”. Perhaps this is the clarity of distance speaking, perhaps the end of Woke I, perhaps liberals get more upset about Paris burning than Minneapolis. I suspect a combination of all three.
In general, Anglo elites, certainly liberal ones, have more exposure to the urban underclass than French elites do. The French sent them all to the suburbs to be forgotten so that the XVI could be preserved in perpetuity for themselves. Yes, there are a few homeless, some African touts, a couple of bad neighborhoods around big railroad stations, but by and large much of inner Paris is - riots aside - actually nicer, safer and better maintained than it was ten or twenty years ago. By contrast, in Britain or America elite housing and business districts in the urban core routinely abut absolute shitholes full of the worst scum these societies have to offer. Yes there are suburbs far away from the chaos, but those exist in every country and true bourgeois professionals consider them crass anyway. You can live in the West Village, possibly the most expensive neighborhood per square foot in America, and still be regularly accosted by scary homeless schizophrenic drug addicted people, who were also seemingly still in control of about half of Washington Square Park earlier this year the last time I went home. In San Francisco the Tenderloin is in the middle of the one of city’s central commercial districts, tech executives (some of whom live in Palo Alto but plenty of whom do actually have houses in San Francisco proper) have homeless people break into cars outside their $4m homes to defecate on the seat and rummage through their storage. In London, section 8 equivalent housing sits next to $20m mansions, too. Lib elites, for all their faults, actually confront more of their poor decisions in Anglo countries than in France, where the standard approach seems to be to just pretend the problem doesn’t exist.
That is not to say, at all, that they make any better decisions. But SF liberal elites actually have to “and that’s a good thing”, which while delusional, involves a modicum more reflection than the head-in-the-sand policies of those who have and do run the fifth republic. There is a form of exposed ridiculousness in America because someone actually has to explain, with a straight face, why enforcing the law on broken tail lights is racist. In France, the equivalent policy would be that the police in the banlieues would just quietly decide they didn’t have the resources to enforce it.
I actually think a lot of these demographics we see in this rioting accurately reflect the composition of under-25 year olds in major French cities. France bans all statistics on this kind of thing (see above), but demographic researchers have often suggested that the population of non-European first, second, third etc generation migrants in France is broadly quite similar to the equivalents in countries where governments do collect actual data, like the UK and Germany. Slightly higher, yes, but not substantially so. So if perhaps 21% of the UK is non-European, maybe the assumption was that it was 25% in France. I think it’s more like 35% in France, and I think among under 25s it’s probably more like 50%.
One can’t deny that at least a noticeable minority of these rioters appear to be ethnic French. One thing one increasingly notices in a lot of European cities with native minorities, and London is a good example, is that the indigenous working class who remain largely assimilate with the migrant, typically Muslim, community, not the other way around. This makes intuitive sense, the white is deracinated and atomized, the Ummah is a after all a multicultural enterprise, and various South Asian and Arab Muslim parents are usually relatively racist against the other major ethnic group in these neighborhoods and so would far rather a daughter or son marry a white convert than, say, a British Somali. Anecdotally, I see small but growing numbers of white British Muslim, including many in South Asian dress, around parts of east London like Stratford now (yes, there are ginger Arabs, but I know an Anglo-Celtic phenotype when I see one). One of our office security guards is one of them, from Dagenham (one of the remaining enclaves of the former cockney London working class). He has converted to Islam, grown a beard, showed me pictures on his Instagram of his wedding and wife, who I think is Syrian. In the coming years and decades - and this is in part what Submission is about - many more of the remaining native populations will choose to assimilate themselves to this stronger, more forceful, more self-assured and ultimately more vital culture.
There has been a lot of Raspail-posting on Twitter about these events, “they will burn your beautiful oak door” etc. I think what Raspail was correct about versus the ‘clash of civilizations’ types (they were right about some things, it must be said, but the particularly Islamic character of what is coming in Western Europe is not yet fully clear) is that a lot of this destruction is just a combination of entropy and lack of care or desire to care, rather than a particularly ideological hatred. Yes, there are educated 27 year old liberal hijabis at the Sorbonne well-versed in critical theory who can justify the burning of a 19th century city hall on the basis of anti-colonial resistance and the Franco-imperialist pacification of Algeria, but the rioting on the ground is primarily driven by rage, greed, and a fundamental lack of care or concern for the civilization, or the remnants of the civilization, in which these people live. This is something those indigenous French rioters, who have assimilated into another civilization (whether they have converted formally or merely abandoned their own identity for the void), also reject.
We often forget that in the great historic conversions to Islam, it was overwhelmingly the converted natives who burned their temples and shrines and idols, who slaughtered their recalcitrant priests. We must expect more of that.
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