BahRamYou
2d ago
I think some countries/cultures are just better at certain things than others, and it's almost random as to what and why.
Like, sure, we could make excuses why Americans don't need to learn other languages, and that's certainly part of it. But early Americans didn't need to know Latin, and yet apparently that was common enough to be a routine entrance requirement to Harvard and other universities. We also don't need to be good at niche winter olympic sports, yet we still consistentlly do well and are currently 2nd in medal count, behind Norway (which has the advantage of basically inventing most of the winter olympic sports). We are consistently bad at professional international football/soccer, despite spending increasingly large amounts of money on it, while tiny poor countries like uruguay and croatia do increasingly well at it.
Looking internationally, the pattern becomes increasingly strange. Germans do great at learning English as a second language. Dutch, even better! French... not so much. Swiss people learn English, but struggle with whichever of French/German is their non-native language. Meanwhile Belgiuns, Luxembourgians, and Alsace–Lorrainians (in my highly subjective experience) learn all 3 languages with no problem. 2nd and 3rd generation Hispanics in the US are all over the place in terms of language skills, but tend towards English-only as they get more removed from their parent country.
In asia, it's even stranger. Japan has been heavily promoting English since the 50s, but is still terrible at it, despite massive amounts of English loanwords. Korea used to be pretty bad at it, but now seems very strong. Taiwan is incredibly strong at teaching ESL. I challenge anyone to find a consistent pattern there.
My only guess is that you need the right balance of resources and motivations. You need enough money to properly teach children a second language, but not so much money that they feel like they don't need to bother. They need to be constantly immersing with the second language, but not so much that they just forget their first language. They need to feel like the target language is "cool" and exotic, but not so distant that it's overwhelming. Basically, they need the right mix of "want" and need" to feel like "I will learn this language within the next 5 years"- not so quick that they give up when faced with drawbacks, but not so distant that they slack off and feel like it will never happen. Willing to spend some money to help them learn, but also willing to just grind and memorize.
BahRamYou
3d ago
It would be interesting to research how this tracks with overall demographics of society, especially in historical times. After WW2 there was a huge shortage of males (because of the war) and also a huge baby boom (...maybe because of the war? But maybe other reasons too? Still not fully understood). As a result, there were a lot of young women, so I think people just didn't notice or didn't care as much about age gaps. If anything, they were more worried about the opposite- what if a woman couldn't find a suitable husband!? Disaster!
Nowadays the population pyramid has been inverted. There's more people above 30 than below, and more men than women below 30, so the competition to date under-30-women is intense. I think it's natural that society in general takes a harder look at such relationships (are we sure there isn't an unhealthy power dynamic there?) and also that under-30 men would feel jealous and protective.
BahRamYou
4d ago
I've watched Pippa a lot. I think the overall culture has changed a bit (partly because of her). Vtubers really took off around 2020, when people were stuck inside due to lockdowns, with nothing to do but consume endless content online. And between covid and the presidential election, some people were desparate to find a happy space where people weren't talking about politics, so vtubers became something of a sanctuary. And the En world especially, everything revolved around Hololive, which was set up like a traditional idol company, with them having a carefully curated image and avoiding contraversial subjects (although they could still be pretty edgy sometimes).
Pippa was originally just some random streamer working for a small unknown agency. She wasn't trying to be "based" or political at all, she was just a weird shut-in who spent too much time chronically online looking up weird edgy content, and then she started talking about it in streams. She intentionally referenced 4chan memes, although usually not political ones, and 4chan at the time was a big hub of vtuber discussion, just not one that anyone in hololive or nijisanji would ever acknowledge.
So OK, she does occasionally mention things like how she owns guns or is interested in the Bismarck. But she's really not doing "based" political content at all. She's just cracking jokes, trying to be high energy, and doing whatever she can to be funny. She'll mention people like Asmongold or Alex Jones, but almost never discuss them in any detail. She certainly doesn't stand up on a soap box for any specific political causes. Still, even that much was pretty shocking the general vtuber culture of 2021-2022.
Nowadays, of course, there's a million indie vtubers, and most of them are a lot farther removed from Hololive or any other "idol" types. So now we have some that are explicitly political. It's not that shocking though, it's just... kinda boring, they repeat the same talking points as anyone else on the internet.
All of this is to say that Pippa just kinda pretends to be edgy, but it's pretty tongue-in-cheek and she's actually a sweet girl, so I wish people would just leave her alone.
BahRamYou
9d ago
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/se_la_v%C3%AC is correct in italian
BahRamYou
9d ago
Sure, but who else is like that, who writes prolifically on the internet for a general audience, in modern times? I think you'd have to either go back to much older sources, or look to some fairly obscure academics who don't even have a twitter or any sort of online presence. Academia in general just... doesn't do a good job of catering towards popular interests.
BahRamYou
9d ago
Yeah, I feel like I agree with you in principle, but in practice that would just lead to awkward cutoffs like what happened to me in this case. I wasn't necessarly looking for a lifelong friend, just one good conversation at a party. Se la vie.
BahRamYou
9d ago
I think I answered @JeSuisCharlie's question of "is he a trustworthy source?" You're now asking a different question- "is he more likely to put forward an argument in good faith?" (presumably you mean, more likely because of his political beliefs?) To that I would say no, but neither is anyone else. Like everyone, you need to read him with an eye towards his potential bias.
BahRamYou
9d ago
I dont believe any source is trustworthy in the sense of "oracle of truth." I just appreciate his perspective. He must be read in context, just like every single other human who ever dared to speak with authority. I so generally trust him about the specific factual details of life in the ancient world, but much less when it comes to editorializing or drawing broad conclusions.
BahRamYou
9d ago
I was having a nice time talking to her until this one mind-killer topic came up. Guess I'll just wait until there's a democrat in the white house until I'm allowed to talk to women.
BahRamYou
9d ago
So you just pretend like you don't know who Trump is or what the US presidential election is? how does that usually work out for you.
BahRamYou
9d ago
They just randomly bring up the Byzantines or 1990s Russia? That's... interesting. (personally I would think those subjects are way more fun to talk about than contemporary US politics, but admittedly I would't want a random person to try to lecture me about them)
BahRamYou
9d ago
I think he's just caught between a rock and a hard place.
If he wants to keep his position as "internet historian," it's essential that he has some genuine academic bona fides. Right now he's an adjunct professor, which is just barely enough to call himself "professor," even though everyone in academia knows he's not a "real" professor.
His specialty is an classics, specifically the military history of the Roman republic. That's a very old-school, white male coded, conservative interest. It's also been out of favor with the academy for, I don't know, at least 100 years. So if he bends too far towards his fan base, he'll get excommunicated by the academy and lose all of his professional bona fides. He'll become just another internet "roman statue guy." On the other hand, if he leans too far towards the academy, he'll spend all his time writing about the queer women of color in the roman republic, or whatever. He wrote a whole series about how women traditionally made clothing and he had to admit that primary sources were sparse because even the primary sources of the time thought that this was an incredibly boring topic which no one cared about. They basically just took a strand of wool or flax then "spun" in a circular motion, over and over and over, for approximately one million hours, until it resembled something like a modern dress. Neat.
In of his recent article, he did admit the contradiction- if he was a woman or Black person, writing about more academia-friendly topics, he'd probably be a full professor by now. Instead he's marginalized as basically a glorified grad student, despite having a huge internet following and way more funding than most full professors. And yet, he has to kind of look down on and despise his followers in order to maintain his standing. Truly a difficult position.
BahRamYou
9d ago
To be fair, she's not wrong. If you had put a gun to my head and forced me to pick between Trump and Harris, I would have picked Trump. She seemed intelligent and fun to talk to just... completely mind-poisoned by politics. I was really hoping we could drop the subject and talk about literally anything else. But no. No compromise, no "agree to disagree," no mercy.
I don't think I could convincingly lie and pretend to be an ultra leftist. I suppose I should have just said "Harris," and then quickly changed the subject to something else. But I suppose it would only be a matter of time until I was found out.
BahRamYou
9d ago
How do you handle it when people ask for your political opinions in real life?
I had a woman ask me suddenly, out of the blue, "who did you vote for in the last election?" We were having a nice conversation before that point (not like, a meet-cute instant love or antyhing, but at least it was a good conversation). I answered truthfully that I had just recently changed my address at that time, so I didn't vote, because I was dealing with a lot and it just wasn't worth the effort for me of updating my voter info on top of everything else. She instantly made an annoyed face and turned away, never to talk to me again. She was obviously a liberal- god help me if I had said I voted for Trump. But like, what are we supposed to do in these situations? Is it just impossible to talk to people with different political opinions now?
BahRamYou
11d ago
Even if/when there's problems, is there any indication that the war hungry empire wannabe nations are fixing any of these? Russia has been killing off hundreds of thousands of their young men trying to take even a small portion of nearby territory.
Well, I haven't done a robust statistical analysis of this, but there does seem to be a trned where the more war-hungry nations have a higher fertility rate. Africa and the Middle East most especially. Israel also, and they might be the best example of what I'm thinking of- they seem to have accepted that they'll just be at war in Gaza forever, never going full genocide but never finding a peaceful solution either. The US isn't very warlike, but we are somewhat more warlike than Europe or East Asia, and correspondingly have a higher fertility rate. Russia is admittedly an outlier, but I think they're just slowly finding their way forward after the absolute devastation of the USSR breakup in the 90s.
China is probably the only working example whatsoever and that's still because Deng Xiaoping the so called "number one capitalist roader" introduced market reform to them and allows them to actually meaningfully grow. And even then they're still fucked. Even just among the other majority chinese Nations, China is the poorest per capita. They just make up for it through sheer numbers.
China really needs to be judged on a curve. Remember they went through the century of humiliation, followed by Mao just absolutely ruining whatever was left with his retarded policies. The fact that they still exist at all is incredible, and they seem to be quickly making up lost ground.
Technology cooks your food, gets you from one place to another, brings you entertainment, saves your life and all sorts of other things.
Sure, there's obviously some good uses for technology. I just dispute that technology on its own can make people happy or give us meaning in life. As you noted, even poor people now have plenty of access to technology, so we don't need to be rich to enjoy it. This is going past what we can prove with statistics, but my impression of most poor people in the US is not that they want more technology, but a deeper meaning in their life. Put another way- they want social capital, not technological capital.
...and there's something to be said for having an actual human cook food for you or provide live entertainment, instead of a robot and a screen. Nothing I've ever watched on a screen is as memorable to me as some of the events I've seen in person from a real human.
BahRamYou
12d ago
Hmm, that's interesting. It seems like they were afraid of runaway population growth in their slaves, to the point where the entire south would just be overpopulated with slaves if they weren't allowed to expand territory. Suffice to say that kind of population growth is no longer a concern these days.
BahRamYou
12d ago
I dunno about that take. I feel pretty confident that Montgomery, Alabama did not have great public transit in the 1940s. I also think history classes should stick to teaching history instead of opining on the quality of public transit in different countries in modern times.
BahRamYou
12d ago
I think they do a decent job of teaching older history. It's just, they start at the back and work forwards, so they run out of time with the postwar 20th century stuff at the very end of the school year. Plus all the obvious culture war angles to it.
BahRamYou
12d ago
My opinion is that US schools do a really bad job of teaching the civil rights protests of the 1960s era. A lot of people unironically believe that Rosa Parks was just some random nice lady who was too tired to change seats on the bus that day, and that MLK Jr assembled a group of purely peaceful protestors who shamed the evil whites into doing the right thing. The reality is... a lot more complicated.
- Southerners had been feeling profoundly divided about segregation for a long time
- Rosa Parks was the chosen representative of the NAACP. She had a long career of activism, and carefully planned her protest to be as sympathetic as possible to the middle class whites of the area. There had been numerous failed attempts before her to do the same thing.
- MLK Jr was arrested and went to jail, something which he fully expected and was prepared for. However, he urged his supporters to act tactically and strategically, not in random mob violence. He drew a clear divide between forceful activism like the Boston Tea Party, which had a clear purpose, and random individual action, which does not. Ironically, MLK Jr is probably just too intelligent for modern political activists to understand.
BahRamYou
12d ago
Somewhere in between. I have a few strategies, but they're a bit loose and I do use some intuition. I didn't just go all in on Nvidia or any other individual stock though. Mostly I try to apply leverage plus hedges with an ear towards the news.
BahRamYou
12d ago
For what it's worth, while it may be small in the grand scheme of things, it's not small to me. I've been investing basically everything I could scrape together, and I currently have no job, just living off my investments. So it's not like I just yolo'd a few bucks on crypto or whatever. I do care a lot about risk and taxes and things like that.
I can appreciate that there are different rules for professionals managing other peoples money, I'm just surprised that the finance industry seems to hostile to career-changers. Maybe I should go back to school for a finance degree or something.
BahRamYou
13d ago
You're making the "end of history" argument ala Fukuyama. 20 years ago I would have agreed with you, but I think we're starting to see the cracks in this sort of market-focused liberal democratic model. Plumeting birth rates, rising social problems, and a general sense that people are not as good as they used to be. Technology is very good at solving market problems like "how can we target people with ads," but not so good at actually enhancing human lives. And genetic engineering has yet to overcome basic human differences, eg men and women are still different despite the best efforts of feminists and trans activists to erase those differences. Ditto the racial differences.
The British empire kept losing territory and power, not just the US but plenty of other colonies. The American South lost to the North. The USSR racked up loss after loss until it fell apart. Over and over again the empire model is filled with losers.
So what? The US has also lost lots of wars. Just a few years ago we had a humiliating retreat from Afghanistan after 20 years of failing to accomplish anything there. It doesn't matter. The nice thing about being a big, powerful military empire is that you can afford to lose wars. Losing some random territory in Africa was hardly an existential threat to the British Empire- even losing their American colonies wasn't. The southern planter caste lost their slaves, but they kept their land and went right back to their traditional way of life after the war ended, just paying the former slaves a small amount. Even now they make up a disproportionate share of US military officers. And while the USSR fell apart (due to economic reasons, not from war—it's kind of amazing that they kept their empire running as long as they did when it was so ramshackle), Russia kept its nukes, its space program, and a lot of its power. Its former KGB leader became president. Its currently at war in Ukraine to regain its lost territory, and it will probably win despite the west sending significant aid to Ukraine. It's not just some minor footnote in history!
Then of course there's China, which seems to be charting its own unique path with both centralized state control and dynamic markets. I don't even know what to say there, except that it's clearly a rebuke to the idea that liberal free-market capitalistic democracy is the only model that will work from now on.
BahRamYou
13d ago
Can I ask if you actually in the finance industry? It's OK if you don't, I just want to calibrate whether you're speaking from experience or your personal opinions.
My background is programming, where it's relatively common for people to come in without formal CS degrees, but having experience in other ways. Someone who built their own app that's "like an existing big name service, but better" would be very impressive! Even if it doesn't scale up, that's OK, we all know that scaling is a difficult problem and that's why we have huge engineering teams. Just the fact that someone could do that on a small scale is still impressive and would at least get them an interview, or possibly some funding to try a startup if they apply somewhere like YC. It's very odd to me that the big finance industry seems to take the opposite view, where first-hand experience and small startups count for nothing, it's much more about "who you know" and "where did you go to school."
Do you get the same problem with it that I usually do? That is, the first attempt is really good, and a few additional prompts make it even better. But the more I work with it, the more it seems to get stuck in weird errors or unnecessarily complicated code. After, like, 10 prompts, if it's not working perfectly I just have to start from scratch. It's like pastry dough- a little kneeding is necessary, but too much can ruin it.
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