Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Hobbes talks about this, and it's one of the basic foundations of Enlightenment republican thought, that no man knows the business of another so well that he can reliably claim the right of rule over him just by superior knowledge. It was only in the 20th Century that intellectuals became so detached and naïve that they thought, for instance, that they knew farming better than farmers, and, to be fair, only a few million had to die before experts settled on "let's give them better technology, educate them on techniques, and let them make the decisions on how to implement it." But the generations rotate, the lessons of common sense are forgotten, and now the experts are sure that they know best again.
I accept the point against democracy in general, but, if we are to have a democracy, better the ordinary people than the official class that democracy creates.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Submission is a good book, but just as horny as Platform (as is almost all of Houellebecq's work).
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
My descendants in 1000 years will presumably have as little to do with my values, culture, genes, and life as I do to my many ancestors from the year 1025. Yeah, I care somewhat about these hypothetical people, but not so much that I would sacrifice real gains for my children and grandchildren because someday, in a scenario of civilizational collapse where they're all fucked anyway, one of them might go out into the Nevada desert and drink from a stream that has nuclear waste runoff in it. The reality is, either we keep going along the trajectory of technological progress, or life for our descendants will be so much worse that nuclear waste will be the least of their troubles, and I'm happy to judge them for failing the project of human civilization.
What snark?
I mean sure I'll be dead by the time that problem shows up, but I do actually care about the world that we will bequeath to our descendants.
You are implying that the person you're responding to doesn't care about the world he bequeaths to his descendants. Come on, man, you knew exactly what you were saying when you wrote that sentence.
"Bracketing the cost question" lmao. If you don't care about the cost of the power produced then there's no point even talking about the viability of different energy sources at all.
I am happy to have you here for the debate on cost, because that's the debate that actually matters - even if I disagree with your position, seeing you argue that will be productive and we can learn new things. I'm saying that the long-term waste storage argument is an irrelevant distraction from the cost argument.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
(If you don't mind her weighing 250lbs)
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Indian immigrants to the anglosphere, up until recently, were highly selected and assimilated well. In the UK it was completely taken for granted that Indians integrated well and became good citizens, and... well, you weren't allowed to talk about what Pakistanis did. Then, roughly simultaneously, the immigration gates got opened to the chandala (more in some countries than others - but Canadians post online even more than Americans per capita), extremely-online tech workers started having to deal with cheap offshore Indian teams in their companies (where you get what you pay for), the expansion of internet access in India brought a flood of obnoxious hindutva seethers onto social media, and the /int/pol/etc. style banter of the internet made hay with the worst stuff they could find from India. As far as I can tell, Indians are still viewed very positively on the ground in America, because the average American encounters highly-selected and assimilated immigrants, but the online view is seeing some serious whiplash as the most-online corners of the internet encounter the most unpleasant aspects of India all at once.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
I have plenty of friends who do a pretty good job of it. Just got to overcome the instinctive negativity bias the internet gives people.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
I mean sure I'll be dead by the time that problem shows up, but I do actually care about the world that we will bequeath to our descendants.
If my descendants in a thousand years' time haven't figured out some futuristic technological solution to disposing of nuclear waste, then fuck 'em. Presumably they're going through some horrible Max Max/Dark Ages thing to have regressed so far, and a bunch of radiation deep underground in the desert is the least of their problems. This is just papier-mache moral grandstanding, hence your need to resort to snark - it's much more reasonable to care about giving clean, reliable power (bracketing the cost question) to your actual immediate descendants than to prioritize some hypothetical 3035 descendant who finds themselves building a hut in whatever godforsaken place we put a waste dump in.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
People would probably respond better to this sort of pro-suburban stuff if it was ever written as a paean to the sublime joys of seeing your children and caring for them and making that sacrifice, instead of longhouse hectoring because "you just have to, ok?! And if you don't, I'll tell the HOA!" Urbanists and suburbanists appear to be in some kind of competition to see who can me more off-putting to onlookers.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
And driving 30 minutes for real life culture is highly optimistic. I don't just want to stare at some paintings, i want to be part of a community that looks at paintings, do you feel me?
What's interesting is that most highly-cultured tier-1-city people live around 30 minutes by public transit from their local art museum, symphony orchestra, etc., but that doesn't stop them. I suspect it's partly a question of driving having a higher activation energy and commitment than public transit, and partly that, realistically, your suburb's city is unlikely to actually have good enough culture to sustain a feeling of culturedness.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
The part you are missing here is that interchange fees is not the only money maker. At least equally important, maybe more important, money are in people that over-consume credit, and pay absolutely humongous credit rates. You need to lure in those people, and abuse them to the max.
That's actually the part that's harder to exploit as a startup. In my experience, to launch a credit card, you need to partner with a bank, and the bank will want to be the ones collecting the interest revenue, otherwise you need to pay them a lot more money for their services. More generally, while it looms large in the public understanding, from a card issuer's perspective, you don't want to be making money off your problem customers. The ideal customer is a reliable high-spend lifetime customer who will go on to use your other services, not somebody who's going to rack up a bunch of debt, pay high interest for a bit, and then eventually either consolidate or default out of your portfolio.
That part I am not sure I understand. I mean, marketing expenses, sure. But otherwise, it's just bits in some config files somewhere in the existing systems. Why is it expensive? It's a mass industry by now, everybody has their own CC brand.
Do you want to get a banking license? Because, if you don't want to partner with an existing bank, you need a banking license, and to get that you essentially need to buy a bank. And then you need to capitalize that bank, or provide the bank you're partnering with a reason to underwrite you, because if you're lending to your customers (and you're lending, on a short-term basis, even to the reliable customers, until they pay their bill at the end of the month) you need a way to back those loans. That's a ton of money.
Sure, a traditional bank probably won't want to be associated with a gambling business. But somebody runs all those gambling businesses, and they have money too. A lot of money, probably, so convincing them to invest into yet another way to exploit gamblers wouldn't be impossible.
Those guys are providing services to the gamblers, not underwriting their loans, generally. For obvious reasons, you want to be on the side taking money from the gamblers, not the side lending money to them, unless you have the ability to break their kneecaps.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Point 3. is a new one for me but makes a lot of sense.
My 9/11 conspiracy theories are: a) there was a systemic coverup of evidence that the government had heard and (understandably) brushed off warnings ahead of time, and evidence that the emergency response procedures did not function adequately and could have mitigated the impact of 9/11 after the first impact. b) immediately after the event, there was a fairly rushed and slipshod propaganda response to both tie al-Qaeda unquestionably to the attacks with public evidence (i.e. without revealing any sensitive intelligence) and to make them look bad that involved faking some stuff (e.g. the famous strip club Koran).
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Oh yeah I just meant in terms of the use of words. "Peak Oil" back when the greens were using it (I had actually forgotten about the brief ZeroHedge phenomenon) meant "the peak from which oil production will be in permanent decline", and hopefully the same may be true of Millennial Gray.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Yeah, it's the classic "blue tribe sees red tribe as redneck jock bullies because they can't banter" thing, and then blue tribers try to do it to foreigners on reddit ironically, etc. I was at a red tribe thanksgiving this year, and there was a Champions League match the day before that which I wanted to watch. Mentioned it to my host and he said "Well, first, we don't have cable. Second, I don't know or care which team is which, or even where they're from, but I will mildly support whichever team you want to win." Pretty representative in my experience of red American attitudes to foo- soccer.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Well, think of it like this: You're a credit card. Your business model is to take 1.9% of every transaction on your cards as an interchange fee, and hopefully get them into your wider services ecosystem. So, you've got to acquire customers, and the main way you do that these days is with rewards/perks. Just as an example, Capital One is trying to go after a higher-value market segment lately, so they're greatly expanding their travel rewards program (complete with new airport lounges), offering some of the best cash-back business cards going, opening cafes with discounts for cardholders, yada yada. That makes sense.
What doesn't make sense is Coverd.
First off, by definition, cashback rewards are the lowest-value. Banks love airmile rewards because filling an empty seat is ~zero marginal cost for an airline, so airlines can happily sell airmiles at a steep discount to banks to give out as rewards, and the aspirational nature of travel makes it particularly good for customer acquisition. Same but less for other credit card perks, like a Sam's Club membership or whatever, they'll negotiate with Sam's Club and drive the price down etc etc. Cash back, though, the simple rule is that you cannot return more than the interchange fee to the customer (with some exceptions that don't matter here). Customer gets 2%, max, and that's if you really like him and think he'll spend a lot.
So, following on from that, if you're Coverd, you have two options: Give your customers some gatcha, addictionmaxxing, whatever game they can play on each purchase which will never pay out more than an average of 1.9% rewards, or do the same and burn VC money to offer jackpots to get people to sign up. After all, it doesn't work if not that many many people sign up - beyond the startup growth issue, you're going to need a lot of people spending if you're going to offer meaningful jackpots paid out from interchange fees. And it particularly doesn't work if not many people sign up because launching a credit card is an extraordinarily expensive endeavor. It's a Series A raise goal to begin with just to get it off the ground. Then, after that, you're pretty much taking on the credit risk of your customers and floating it every month, and then you have to go to a bank for a warehouse loan or whatever variety of line of credit you're using to back that up and saying "yeah we have a credit card which is exclusively designed for gambling addicts, would you please underwrite us?"
I'm calling my shot here. Coverd will never launch as a credit card company. But as some kind of addiction sales funnel to the depths of hell, I'm sure they'll do fine, just gotta pivot further to moloch.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
If Pantone's doing it as its Color of the Year, then, yeah, that could mean it's on the way out. Same way Peak Oil actually meant the end of oil.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Yeah the business model as it actually exists is too dumb for words, but when you consider it as potentially a play to get a bunch of really gullible problem gamblers all on one platform, then it becomes impressively evil instead of just stupid.
Thinking about it I wonder if there's a tax play here. Gambling winnings are fully taxable, but credit card rewards aren't...
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
I've always wanted to properly see Pittsburgh. I think once this series is complete I'll re-read it and take a week or two to hang out there.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
I suspect that, as with his mentions of technology, he may see Barron's interests as a clue into what the young fellas are getting into these days.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
He's also got a European wife, and seems very close towards Barron, who's a huge fan, has played for the U-12s of an MLS team, and by all accounts is pretty good (obviously being his height is a big physical advantage at that age).
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
So, you've seen Borat, right? Turkmenistan is what Borat tells you Kazakhstan is. They're kind of maybe slowly liberalizing from their previous North Korea status - the first Dear Leader has a gigantic golden statue that rotates to face the sun, the second Dear Leader only built a modest, 20-meter-tall golden statue of himself on horseback atop a marble cliff, and his son hasn't even built a golden statue yet. I don't know what exactly makes the US establishment have beef with Turkmenistan, but I do know they are very tight with Russia/Iran and haven't exactly made themselves look good to the State Department in other respects.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Yes, one time a country signed a peace treaty with somebody they were capable of beating militarily
Many historians now argue, credibly to me, that Germany was well ahead in rearmament and appeasement was necessary to catch up. The Allies were simply not ready to capitalize on Germany having to overrun Czechoslovakia at the same time as Poland, and the British Imperial garrisons in particular were in a state of tremendous disarray that was only fixed very slowly.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
I recently read, in a slightly weird context, two long-forgotten WWII memoirs published during the war (so generally as positive as is possible to be while remaining truthful - e.g. one of them devotes a paragraph to mentioning that there were some HQ officers he deeply disliked and thought did a terrible job, gives the unflattering nickname for one, then drops the topic as far as he can), and the sense I got from them was that when you're really at the frontline, you develop intense camaraderie or you die, but the moment you go behind the lines all the petty antagonisms come out. The real grunts stuck together in small groups even when behind the lines, but for the most part the military had a lot of every-man-for-himself balanced by small favours and horse-tradings. And of course every group dislikes and envies the guys behind them without much thought for the guys in front of them. Mailer, as suited to him, makes it much more alienated and emotional than these contemporary books (the other book, written from a frontliner's perspective, was mostly "you don't have room for emotions, except when talking about women, you either make ironclad friends with your squad or you go crazy/get killed, and humour is a critical survival mechanism"), but these accounts resonate together to me. Mailer was apparently mostly doing the miserable wait-around-build-stuff-steal-what-you-can work, whereas Junger was literally in the trenches for most of his war, and under artillery fire when not, so it makes sense the human relationships involved would be very different.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Emirates has changed greatly as Dubai became more popular as a hub. My experience of flying it semi-regularly in economy ~10 years ago was that the flights were always deserted, so I could get a great seat and sleep lying across a row, and that the Irish flight attendants would give you vast quantities of whiskey with comments like "well, they won't be drinking it."
For those interested in trying rich class, Emirates has both personal and business credit cards in the US with $99 annual fees. Sign up for both of them, spend to the bonus, and you'll have enough miles for a business class ticket or a cheap first class ticket. If you'd like to avoid Dubai, for some reason (the first class lounge is as wildly luxurious as you would expect), they also fly NYC to Athens and Milan, or CDMX-Barcelona.
I just went to the 97th Grand National Exhibition of the American Artists Professional League, which is an association for artists working in traditional, realistic styles. I would say about 75-80% of the paintings exhibited, particularly landscapes, were in the league that I could expect an internet artist to potentially reach. They're fine, but they're not special. The top stratum of paintings (mostly still lifes and portraits, some more dynamic scenes) were on a truly qualitatively different level. I have seen a lot of internet artists, filtered through imageboards and feeds that select for quality, and nobody is even close. These top-tier paintings were generally in the $2-5k range, so much lower than works painted in traditional styles I've seen for sale in e.g. London, that I can't imagine that all of these artists are in fact rare, innate, generational talents hidden by the zeitgeist (in fact, some of the most technically accomplished ones had pieces of clumsiness in the composition or subject choice that would be harshly criticized in an Old Master); I think they're just high-percentile artistic talent people who studied really hard and figured out some beautiful but realistic ways to paint stuff. And it's this level, the type of true old skill, that's falling away.
Partly, I think that's a function of the internet and economics. People are more willing to pay $5 a month for a stream of anime girls than they are to pay $5k for a physical painting, and these skills have fallen far less in, say, South Africa, where art is cheap but the cost of living for a middle-aged artist is even cheaper. And these skills are inherently meatspace-locked, not just in creating the art but in appreciating it. As I've said before, a physical painting is a totally different experience from an image on a screen. For instance, this was probably my favourite painting in the exhibition, and I would have purchased it instantly if it was for sale. But it looks like shit, honestly, on the website, because the screen loses the illusion of depth that makes the painting so compelling. I looked at that painting for quite some time and my brain couldn't but see it as a 3D object, even if I moved around it (this is the same with impressionism and abstract expressionism, you simply cannot begin to get them without having experienced their depth illusions in person). This is downstream from many things over the last two-three decades but such is life, we live in a society joker.jpg.
Oh no, the United States has earned the contempt of David Aaronovitch, Anatole Kaletsky, Caitlin Moran, your friends, maybe even Zanny or Xanny or whatever her name is. The Brit chattering classes are talking tough because their pride, what's left of it, has been deeply wounded, but more in the manner of a scrawny kid who just got wedgied/swirlied/etc. by the jock twice his size. Oh he's gonna kick his ass someday, he's gonna go all out, he did karate lessons! The reality is, there is no pares going on. There's a financial sector that could always evaporate overnight, hooked up to an economy about as dynamic as East Germany, with an ever-shrinking military who, by the way, are starting to despise the London types. The French have a claim to freedom of action, Germany had one until recently, but the only way the UK can stay relevant is clinging to America. Hence the equivocation between "Brits are malding" and "the EU should do something".
If you are in the UK, and want to do something that matters to thumb your nose at the US, volunteer for Democrats Abroad or donate to some outlet like the Guardian that Democratic voters read. Seething from the cuck chair of history isn't going to get you anywhere.
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