BahRamYou
2hr 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."
BahRamYou
18hr ago
As I understand it, that was mostly for political reasons. They felt outnumbered and wanted more congressional votes to survive.
BahRamYou
20hr ago
Well, it's just funny to me. Growing up, it was pounded into me that it's incredibly hard to beat the market, it's all hyper-effecient to the point where almost every active investor underperforms, etc. Then it turns out that I can, in fact, outperform, but no one in the industry cares because I'm just too small. Maybe someone should offer an outperforming fund for small investors, to take advnatage of all these "speedboat" factors that apparently Wall Street doesn't care about.
This really depends on which era and episode you're talking about. They did say that the Romulans were distantly related to the Vulcans but less friendly, so some people made a vague analogy to that with Vulcans=Japanese and Romulans=Chinese... but then the crew meets the Romulans and they're just space Romans, with all sorts of references to the ancient Romans. After that they only showed up a few times in later TOS episodes, mostly sidelined behind the Klingons. Meanwhile there's Sulu and Chekov on the bridge, as an actual, literal Japanese/Russian man, showing how the humans in the future had overcome these sort of petty national conflicts.
Later, the movie Star Trek 6 made the Klingons a heavy-handed metaphor for the USSR and the end of the cold war, revolving around a complicated spy plot. But after that, TNG made them more like space Vikings who looked down on any sort of treachery, while the Romulans became the sneaky spy enemy. So I think the analogy is pretty garbled and there's room for the writers to do whatever they want.
BahRamYou
20hr ago
Well you don't kill them all. Don't commit mass genocide, that's barbaric and wasteful.
(@JeSuisCharlie this is also my reply to you)
Three models I can think of in (relatively) modern times are the late Victorian British empire, the Antebellum American South, and the post-Stalin USSR.
(I feel compelled to mention at this point that I'm just offering this as a thought experiment, using all three of those plus the Klingons from Star Trek as a very loose example. All three of those have some obvious horrifying parts, and I particularly despise slavery)
The thing that all three had in common was that, although they were a heavily militarized society with many of their upper class men serving in the military, they weren't particularly interested in expanding their territory. They already had all the territory they could possibly use—arguably too much. Of course, to some extent they did go to war with other nations, but most of their normal military action was either:
(a) preparing ever greater amounts of force to make sure they never had to go to war (the best weapon is one that never has to be used) or (b) internal force against the tribute states of their empire (Czech or Afghanistan for the Soviets, India for the British, Blacks and American Indians for the Antebellum South)
Of course, the most obvious benefit of such an empire is the resourcees it provides. Natural resources like oil and minerals, but also humans to do all the work that no one else wants to do: work the farmland in harsh rural areas for example, or low-wage service work in the cities. In our capitalistic meritocracy, this leads to an endless dog-eat-dog struggle as everyone is in competition for the "good jobs," leading everyone in fear that they'll be stuck with one of those lesser jobs, and no one will offer them any sympathy—it's their fault for not doing better in school, or hustling harder, or something like that. With the empire model, things are much more clear—you're born into the lower caste, and you stay there, so there's a little more stability to build a culture there and offer some stability.
In our society, military service is usually offered as a path out of poverty for the lower class, while those in the upper class either making a token gesture of it (like the royal family in England) or skip it entirely (like Trump). In the "empire" model, it instead acts as a test of merit and one of the most respected careers, with many of the upper class choosing to make their career there. After leaving the military, they then get a huge advantage for later careers in things like law and politics, which seems a lot more fair and just than offering them to kids who got a high LSAT score and went to top law schools with no prior career experience. Or they can simply retire and live the rest of their life as a gentleman of leisure, with their military pension and discipline keeping them on a respectable path, which is much better than the aimless NEETS of today who have ample leisure time but nothing to show for it.
I would certainly not expect it to be "fun," and I'm aware there would be a heavy price paid in blood for all of this. But it might lead us back to an actually "great" society, where people have a sense that they are part of something truly grand and have an important role to play. The current vision of "you are all residents of an economic zone, go forth and maximize GDP" is somewhat... lacking in its appeal to our nobler spirits.
BahRamYou
1d ago
Well... that's an interesting post! As a fellow Star Trek nerd I'm conflicted on how to respond. You've made so many different, interesting points that I'm disoriented.
On the Enterprise series, personally I still hate it. I hate the opening theme song (trading the classy dramatic music of previous series for a cheesy pop song), I hate the way it retconned an earlier ship named Enterprise, I hate Scott Bakula as an actor, I hate how the showrunners were obviously running out of ideas, and I especially hate how they were trying to shoehorn in then-current year politicals about 9/11 into Star Trek. But I suppose it does have its place as the last of its era, and as something of a time capsule for early 2000s network TV.
I agree with you that Original Series Klingons deserve more respect. They get a lot of shit because of their appearance (which admittedly does look like a weird racial caricature of Turkish or Mongolian people, plus hilariously low-budget). But they're written as intelligent and respect-worthy adversaries. In many ways, not that different from Kirk. When they're first introduced Kirk is trying to blend in among a planet of pacifists, but the Klingons instantly sus him out as being different and more like themselves. They both share contempt for the pacifists, even when it's revealed that they're secretly a more advanced race. And the Klingons are very much a match for the Federation and a huge threat. Later series make them look cool, but act kinda goofy, just blundering around with swords and being stupid. "Samurai/vikings in space" turn out to be no match at all for hyper advanced humans.
Culture War angle: basically, I agree. But this is admittedly a spicy hot take. Most people take it for granted that the ideal utopian future is one of perpetual peace. But why should that be the case? We could openly embrace our identity as an Empire in the mold of the Roman Empire. End birthright citizenship, and make citizenship by blood only. Embrace war as a standard way of life. We will fight perpetual wars, to make ourselves stronger. Some die off, but the rest become even stronger. The reward of winning war is a continuous flow of resources and services, to make ourselves rich, instead of forcing us to have an underclass stuck doing dirty jobs that no one else wants, or an excess of unemployed unwanted men with no purpose in life. Trump's recent rhetoric on Venezuela seems to be a step in that direction- he says that he did it partially for security, but also partially just to take the oil and make us all richer. We'll see if that's actually the case, but I can appreciate the vision.
BahRamYou
1d ago
Depends on whether earning roughly double the S&P for most of the past 10 years counts as "spectacular" enough to compensate for me not having a social media following lol. Didn't realize I needed to be live streaming trades on twitch for to a horde of teenagers.
BahRamYou
1d ago
It was a one-off event about random people that no one had ever heard of before, which hinged on personal details that we have no evidence of at all. That's why it seems odd that so many millions of male gamers got so mad at it- unless of course they were just using it as an excuse to hate women. (at least, that's the feminist interpretation)
BahRamYou
2d ago
This reminds me of a passage from one of the later Song of Ice and Fire books, where Tyrion is learning about some of the deep secrets of his family that started even before his father was born:
“It all goes back and back," Tyrion thought, "to our mothers and fathers and theirs before them. We are puppets dancing on the strings of those who came before us, and one day our own children will take up our strings and dance in our steads.”
This stuff goes back, and back, and back. There's never a single clear point where it all began. When people try to say it all started over a single forum post, of course that makes it look trivial, but it was never really about that at all. The vast majority of people who got mad about it online had no idea who any of the people mentioned in that post were. This was just yet another battle in long, long-standing arguments like:
- Are games considered respectable high-art, or just cheap mind-numbing entertainment for idiots? who gets to decide?
- Is it morally wrong to want to look at sexy women in fiction?
- Who gets to decide if a game (or anything else) is good? Can companies pay off reviewers to get attention?
- Are gamers a coherent class that can exert political power, or just a bunch of individuals that happen to share a hobby?
- If a woman blatantly cheats on her boyfriend, what is he supposed to do about that in a non-patriarchal society? Can he publically shame her, or is he supposed to just quietly get over it?
Many controversial issues here with no clear answer! It's pointless to try to trace any of them back to just one specific incident. If you decide that it all traces back to that one forum post, then it makes the chud gamer side looks really bad, which is why the feminist side usually frames it that way. If you trace it back like "game reviewers have been wildly crooked ever since the start, and it's time we finally had some honest professional reviewers who aren't being paid off by the game companies" then it sounds a lot more reasonable, but also kinda dodges the more contraversial questions.
BahRamYou
2d ago
Piggybacking: i actually do have a personal account where I have been significantly beating the overall market for about 10 years now. Is there any way I can leverage that to get a good job in finance?
BahRamYou
2d ago
And, at the end of the day, being Amish is voluntary. Those who don’t enjoy the life leave
That's omitting a lot of details that make it difficult to leave. They have to leave behind all of their friends and family. Go out into a totally different society. Probably with very little savings, and no relevant skills or education. And there isn't, as far as I know, any support network to help them transition. If they wait too long, they'll probably end up married and with children, since the Amish encourage that in all young people. It's damn difficult to escape from that sort of upbringing.
This woman did it by making a dramatic escape, getting help from a prior outside friend, working a crappy job at Burger King, and then finding her way into working as a stripper. That's not an easy path to follow!
BahRamYou
3d ago
And how we supposed to feel about that, as Americans? So we're too fat and lazy and stupid to actually get good at sports, but at least we're rich enough to buy up talent from other, more sporting countries? Are we going to win the world cup by taking advantage of anyone worldwide with a vague connection to America and bribing them to play for America? Is there even a point to having a nation-based sports competition when there's increasingly large numbers of global elites that can pick and choose which nation they play for, and their family background + big money training since youth gives them an immense advantage?
BahRamYou
3d ago
What do you figure was the point in the 2024 case? I think I gave a reasonable enough list of benefits. High-ranking military being scared to leave their house without a bodyguard degrades military performance: people make worse decisions under stress, and more competent candidates may not want such a job.
Well, the true answer is I don't know. I don't speak Russian, and I'm not very well-informed about that case or the results of it.
But it seems to me that the reporting focuses on that general's role in charge of chemical weapons. Those are a huge trigger-word for western civilians. By killing him, the Ukrainians are making a big public statement that "the Russians are using chemical weapons on us." If that's true, it would significantly increase Western public support for Ukraine. Of course, I have no idea if that's true or not (I hadn't heard of chemical weapons being used anywhere else), and frankly I don't care, I think a few thousand dead from chemical weapons is much less important than hundreds of thousands of dead from artillery. But politically, they are a big deal.
Also, you know, they killed the guy. They didn't just lightly injure him by sending an assassin who had no prior experience with firearms. That seems like an important step in carrying out an assassination.
BahRamYou
3d ago
I just thought it's odd that the man was shot 3 times at point blank range at survived, and i'm trying to think of an explanation. But I admitted that I'm biased because I've been reading spy thrillers recently. I'm really not making a strong claim here about anything, I just thought it was an odd story. Whats the point of Ukrainian secret services shooting some random general in Moscow?
BahRamYou
3d ago
You can always use further motivation to continue the war. They're relying on volunteers, not conscripts, and this will surely spark a wave of new volunteers. They'll probably play up the "IRL action movie hero" part even more in Russian media, too.
Oh, and this general was apparently from Western Ukraine, so he's practically the perfect model for their "Ukraine is Little Rus" propaganda. He can be a useful spokesman after the fighting ends.
Most high-level assassination attempt of the current East European unpleasantness. The target was lieutenant general Vladimir Stepanovich Alekseyev
He seems to be IRL action movie hero, who successfully fought the assassin after being shot in the back twice (while the assassin seems to be boomer who was using gun for the first time in his life)
Is it possible that this is all some elaborate Russian plot? War hero gets shot 3 times in the back, but lives and fights off his assassin bare-handed. They blame it on the Ukrainians. Makes for great propaganda value. (I'm probably biased because I've been reading Tom Clancy spy novels recently so Maskirovka is on my brain. The Russians are always doing this sort of thing in his books.)
BahRamYou
3d ago
USA seems to be doing quite well at figure skating this year. It helps when you can poach the best figure skaters from USSR and Japan. However, that also diminishes the nationalistic hype of the Olympics... it feels like these are just globalistic sports dynasty families, spending their whole lives travelling around the world, not attached to any country in particular.
But also the death of network television, and NBC does a shitty job streaming it on the internet.
BahRamYou
4d ago
Sure. Easy enough to say this sort of stuff when it's just hypothetical, much harder when it's a real decision that you have to make and it's permanent.
BahRamYou
4d ago
I think it's one of those questions that really depends on how exactly you phrase it. Obviously in the real world there are no magic buttons, so we have to use our imaginations.
Like, is this a button that's constantly available, every single day, but once you press it there's no going back? In that case i could see a lot of men pressing it in a moment of recklessness (possibly while drunk) just like how people get bad tattoos or other questionable body modifications.
Also, does it just work superficially, or does it affect their brain, too? Will they suddenly wind up with a drastically different personality? I don't think a lot of people would want that.
Also, is there an equivalent magic button for women turning into men? Otherwise, the world might end up with a huge surplus of women, which changes the gender dynamics quite a bit.
BahRamYou
4d ago
There used to be a lot of jobs for people liks: local music hall player, freelance graphic designer, craftsman stoneworker, small town paper writer, etc. Admittedly most of those dried up long ago, though.
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.
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.
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