Hold up. I'm lost. While I'm sure that there are still mass graves, the bodies were generally burnt in the crematoriums. Am I mistaken on that front.
That isn't to say that there aren't mass graves or anything. However, is it not well known that the bodies were put into crematoriums?
Shouldn't you be challenging the claim that there were in fact crematoriums?
And I'm not undercutting you here. I want to get on the same page. Are you claiming that there was no explicit documentation related to death camps (save "coded" documents)?
Do you meant that Hitler himself never signed such explicit documents himself?
BayesWatch
1yr ago
Barron's either has an inside scoop or is irresponsibly wrong.
As per my recollection, and as Matt Levine said today on Twitter, Musk at one point considered borrowing against Tesla shares, but instead borrowed against Twitter and funded the rest from stock sales (+investors +large shareholders who rolled over their shares).
Barron's is flat out wrong and should feel bad.
BayesWatch
1yr ago
Ya, but, hypothetically, wouldn't that selection have only existed among the pool of already available slaves.
So if there was selection it would only be among the pre-selected group (of tribes that got enslaved by other tribes, I guess)?
I don't see how your point disagrees with what the parent comment says. Sure there was selection, but that selection would be among a pre selected group, and said means of selection would have dysgenic effect.
Was this on the old subreddit? I can remember a few. Were people saying that markets couldn't possibly be so inefficient?
BayesWatch
1yr ago
It is a heuristic and nothing you said suggests that it isn't a good heuristic. For one set of users he says "they might be real, but they might be a bot/spammer", and for a second set he will say "I have reason to beleive that these are real people".
So long as he can filter out bots and such from the second set, it's a great heuristic. It's fine if lots of real people get thrown out, as long as the bots get thrown out with them, and you are left with people you have reason to believe are real.
BayesWatch
1yr ago
a decapitation strike on Russia's launch capabilities has already happened
???
BayesWatch
1yr ago
He's not talking about Ren Tech, he's talking specifically about Ren Tech's medallion fund. It's only open to employees.
BayesWatch
1yr ago
Not to mention taxing consumption instead of income incentivizes people not to buy a ton of random shit which a lot of our economy is based on.
Why do you think buying random things is a bad thing for an economy?
BayesWatch
1yr ago
that there is a case to be made that they are comparable to libel.
Have a disclaimer saying "everything you are about to see is fake". Libel problem solved.
BayesWatch
1yr ago
That makes sense, but then you can't use existing notions of libel to justify your intuitions.
BayesWatch
1yr ago
Did I miss something? When and why did we start calling Jews "(((Triple Parentheses)))"?
BayesWatch
1yr ago
People don't really convert to Judaism. Judaism heavily discourages conversion, and people usually give up after waiting a couple of years. Simply put, they don't want people to join, and the law is that you should discourage anyone who tries to join. The optimal Goy doesn't convert to Judaism, they simply observe 7 commandments given to the son's of Noah.
Secular Judaism might include some highly inclusive conversion but it doesn't change anything in a meaningful sense. Assuming that the mother did some kind of inclusive conversion they are considered a danger because a couple of generations later someone might actually think they are Jewish, marry an actual jew who thinks that she's an actual jew, thus introducing non-jews who will give birth to non-jews who think their Jewish, and then their non-jewish daughters will marry jews and have more kids that they think are jews but actually aren't. Introducing this kind of faulty record keeping into the system is a big deal because it allows people to honestly make mistakes that result in the offspring of every daughter not being jewish. This is a genuine problem.
It is not the case that there are conversions into the Jewish genetic cluster in any meaningful sense.
BayesWatch
1yr ago
"the Goblins are an anti-Semitic trope"
There really might be something off about the Goblins. Watching the movies now it's impossible not to see in the movies. My inclination is to say that it was chance. Something totally unintentional that looks obvious once it's been framed as an antisemitic trope. But by God it looks like an Antisemitic trope. It's literally a race of hook nosed bankers that hoard piles of gold and treasure, they even look and dress like antisemitic caricatures. Their uniform is literally black suits and white shirts. I mean, my first inclination is to say that its a coincidence but at the same time, that is a pretty freaking big coincidence.
Not everyone who sees a problem with the Goblins is acting on bad faith. It's not an ipso facto excuse to justify the actual reasons that you don't like her. The depiction of the goblins in the series really is strange.
BayesWatch
1yr ago
That means nothing. Look at Cyberpunk 2077. You have no reason to believe that it's a good game until it's actually released.
BayesWatch
1yr ago
severely hampered by a bad but IP mandated ruleset and meaningful lack of content compared to the book/movie story games
How so?
The Slytherins are an unmanly ethnogroup that uses their wealth and ownership of the media to secretly control the government.
Do you mean Slytherins or pure bloods? Slytherins obviously aren't an ethnogroup, and to the extent that purebloods are an ethnogroup the analogy doesn't hold up.
The sacred 28 is a list of the 28 truely pure blooded British families. Those 28 families include
-
The Weasleys.
-
The Prwetts of which all the boys died fighting Voldemort, and Molly Weasley is the only daughter.
-
The Longbottom's
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The Shacklebolts
The list includes other non-heroic but not Voldemort adjacent families, like Olivander, other plotting backroom dealers like Slughorn and maybe Greengrass.
So even this take doesn't break things down into a unified ethno group. A large amout of the fighting is among the sacred 28.
A Crouch, a Lestrange, and a Lestrange/Black torture the Longbottoms into insanity.
A Longbottom destroys a Horcrux.
Voldemort's side (1/2 Gaunt) killes the Prewetts boys.
Molly Weasley/Prwettt kills Belatrixx Lestrange/Black.
Voldemort Kidnaps an Olivander.
Belatrixx Lestrange/Black kills another Black.
A black betrays Voldemort and steals his Horcrux.
A Shackbolt is one of the cheif enemies of Voldemort.
A Crouch is Voldemort's main government opposition during the war, but his son worked for Voldemort, and his son later kills him.
All of these surnames are in the sacred 28.
So it's no so much an unmanly ethnogroup that uses their wealth and ownership of the media to secretly control the government. So much as it is a part of of ethnogroup hat uses their wealth and ownership of the media to secretly control the government, often against other members of that exact ethnogroup.... actually, on reflection the the intrasect fighting might make it a more accurate representation of modern Jewry, but not in a way that lines with classic sterotypes (that and how secular liberal Jews and Orthedox Jews are diametrically opposed on every political issue is not well known in common discourse).
BayesWatch
1yr ago
You are absurdlyunderestimating how OP Harry Potter style Wizard's are. Wizard's powers are not equivalent to that of a modern human with a gun.
In an actual war between all of the muggle world and a group 10 talented wizards, the wizards would win in a single day. Apply an invisibility charm, aparate to Washington, imperio the President, do the same to all ranking cabinet members. Repeat for each country. Be back home for lunch. You already won, but you can spend the next week Aparating around under invisibility charm and casting imperio on everyone that matters.
That is a single trivial application of what you could do. It doesn't matter if a gun is better than an Avada Kadavra, a wizard should win every fight against a muggle without using any lethal force.
BayesWatch
1yr ago
More than that, you just cast an invisibility charm, apparate next to world leaders, Imperio them, repeat for people at every locus of control, and wizards control the muggle world.
BayesWatch
1yr ago
Then he never really was a billionaire. Theoretical future money you may or may not get from a business deal doesn't actually count.
Well, then most billionaires aren't actual billionaires. The value of of Kanye's stake in Yeezy plummeted absent without his partnership with Adidas (and the fact that no one else would want to fill Adidas's role in the partnership given the stigma around him) . If equity in a company (Kanye's clothing company) doesn't count as wealth then what does? I'm not sure how you would measure wealth, but I that certainly isn't how wealth is normally measured. By your reasoning, there was probably a brief point where Elon Musk was both the richest person in the world and not a billionaire as you define it, given that he didn't, for a decent period of time, have a billion dollars in money outside his stakes in his personal companies.
It seems counterintuitive that a guy who was then richest person ever should yet, according to your unique definition, not be a billionaire. I mean more power to you, but you are using the word in a very strange way.
That is absurd. He was making more money than he ever had before, in the months preceding his cancelation he made up the majority of online sales on Adidas' website. The world was his oyster, he had reached the greatest financial success of his life, surpassed all his peers, and the value of his company was still sky rocketing.
Old rappers are not going on tour, unlike old rockers.
Tour? You do realize that he was now a billionaire designer, yes? Who cares about going on tour? Kanye had one of the most devoted fan bases, and he can and did go on tour, but he now a fashion brand, who happened to rap as a side job. Rhianna, another artist turned billionaire fashion label, hasn't performed in 10 years. It doesn't matter. They don't have to do that kind of stuff any more.
Then he lost billions of dollars in a single week, and if you think that it was part of some 3D chess move and not just bad impulse control then I don't know what to tell you.
BayesWatch
1yr ago
Putin can lose the war regardless of his domestic interests, because Putin's domestic political needs aren't what determines military success. No one 'chooses' to win a conflict in order to win election.
That is unless ones survival is contingent upon winning AND there is no question that you do in actuality have the ability to win the war. What determines the military success is Russia's risk aversion towards escalation, and if put in a situation, where Putin thinks that it is worth it for HIMSELF that Russia should risk escalation by making the choice to win (which they obviously can), the the entire world is at risk.
BayesWatch
1yr ago
pattern seems to be that they have an ego problem and lash out in frustration burning all their social credibility
What does this mean?
BayesWatch
11mo ago
walking back and forth yelling at nobody in particular that he was hungry and thirsty and that he didn't care if he went to prison and he was ready to die. He then aggressively threw his jacket onto the floor.
What, do you think, would have happened next. This seems to be leading up to a certain kind of action, no?
BayesWatch
8mo ago
Did the FBI itself actually lie, or was it people associated with the FBI?
This rush to adjustment is absurd.
(1)
"But it looks like Musk is doing a bad job at Twitter." This is usually a reasonable predictor of failure. However, everything Musk succeeds at looks like an absolutely terrible idea until all of the sudden, it's not. So hold your horses.
In the case of Musk, the claim "it looks like he's running company x like a total clown" isn't good evidence that he doesn't actually know how to run company x. It is likely that he would look like in idiot even in the case that Twitter eventually becomes a trillion dollar company. Everything we are seeing is weak evidence of what the future outcome will be. The nature of market inefficiencies is that they are not obvious, else someone would have already exploited it. Finding major market inefficiencies almost requires you to see things in a way that would seem absurd to everyone else.
This is just the beginning. There are so many things that Twitter can become. I don't understand how people are writing him off so easily. How would you expect a world where Twitter is a huge success to look different than it does right now.
Did you think that Musk was going to do things that everyone thinks are totally reasonable, just as everyone expected based on his clear operational excellence a couple of weeks after buying it, it does really well? That was never going to happen.
I would expect a success to look something like "Musk is a total idiot" to "see I told you he was a total idiot" to "OK, it looks good now but it's just a blip on the radar" and eventually "Ya Musk was successful but it's because of his workers not him. Any rich guy could do this" and "did you hear about his fathers emerald mines?".
I don't understand how you are distinguishing a world where Twitter goes bankrupt from a world that it's absurdly successful. The expectation is that everyone would say that he was an idiot. Everyone would say that he has no idea what he's doing, and eventually people would say how it was obvious in retrospect (and had nothing to do with Musk). I don't understand why you would expect Musk to run his business in a way that doesn't seem stupid. Everything he's done for the last 20 years has seemed stupid. Until it wasn't. And people still think that every new thing he does, at those same businesses, is stupid.
Surprise, when people exploit market inefficiencies it looks stupid. If it was obvious sthen omeone would have done it already. Musk has a long history of doing stupid things that are totally reasonable in retrospect.
I don't know if Twitter will succeed or fail. I do think that if Musk does spend a lot of time at Twitter (at the expense of Tesla and SpaceX) he will make a tremendous return. I do think that there is a very large chance that Twitter will eventually make an absurd amount of money and that when it does so it will look nothing like it does today; I think that Twitter the micro blog platform will serve as a launching point for other more profitable businesses.
Things currently look exactly like we would expect a Musk success to look; they also look exactly like we would expect a Musk failure to look. As of yet we don't have sufficient information to determine whether this is a winner or a total flop.
(2)
Twitter is a far more plausible business than either SpaceX and Tesla. Tesla and SpaceX were terrible businesses, the idea of them succeeding is absurd, but we are so used to their success it seems like Twitter is uniquely terrible; the reality is that Twitter operates on far more fertile soil than Tesla/SpaceX. Tesla/SpaceX were pie in the sky companies that were going to fail with near certainty. Conversely, Twitter is a company that should be worth more, it was expected to be worth more, but has failed to live up to its potential. In a vacuum, Twitter is a far more plausible than SpaceX/Tesla.
(3)
There are a lot of claims that Musk is just some luck business guy. This is absurd. The odds that someone would hit gold so often, on companies that seemed certain to fail is incredibly unlikely. His first 2 businesses Zip2 and X.com (X.com acquired paypal and later rebranded as Paypal) might have been luck. He was a smart guy, but there were lots of smart guys making lots of money like that before the dotcom bubble. So it's impressive, sure, but that's it.
However, Musk then picks two companies that were near certain to fail, just terrible ideas, even if they had adequate funding, which they didn't, and turns them into no only functioning businesses, but implausibly large successes. I don't think you appreciate how absurd this is, and how this, in combination with his two software startups, suggests that there is property of Elon Musk that makes a company likely to succeed. It would be improbable that he was so consistently lucky in not only business, but in what were the WORST businesses; these businesses were terrible ideas. You would have to be looking to loose money to touch them. The nearest competitors to both businesses have some of the largest revenues in the world and don't touch either of those markets. The improbability of succeeding at all these things is implausibly improbable.
He had 180 million before tax, and wanted to start a rocket ship company and a car company, despite not having nearly enough capital to make a weak attempt at either.
There hadn't been a mass manufacturing automotive company since the early 1900's. Starting one should have required a ton of capital and time. You might not know this but Tesla has the highest automotive gross margins of any car company not named Ferrari, despite Musk's silly automation and manufacturing ideas being mocked as the whimsical overconfidence of a fool. He was a complete idiot until maybe 2 or 3 years ago, and turns out all those stupid ideas created the highest automotive gross margins and companies are tripping over themselves to incorporate them into their assembly lines. Tesla has higher gross margins than Toyota (the king of not only auto manufacturing* but of all manufacturing*), Mercedes, and BMW, despite the current standard cost of manufacturing electrics cars currently being $10,000 higher than that of ICE vehicles. This is absurdity upon absurdity.
SpaceX is just an exercise in implausibility and improbability. The odds of its failure were a near certainty. It's rivals were rich governments, and defense contractors that make bids on Trillion dollar government projects. It would have been a near certain failure with adequate capital, which it didn't have, not anything close to it. The majority of satellites in space were launched by SpaceX. The overwhelming majority
If he would have gone out and looked for business that were most likely to fail a rocket ship manufacturer and mass production automotive company would have been pretty good attempts. You need to go back in time 20 years and consider how absurd these companies were. They were terrible ideas. Certain failures. They both succeeded beyond any imaginable best case scenario.
I don't care that Musk makes cool rocket ships and cars. I don't care that he's "disruptive". That means nothing. What matters is that he picks businesses with the most infinitesimal improbability of succeeding. It wouldn't matter if he had founded a company that makes industrial solvents conditional on its success being so incredibly improbable. T
he salient feature of Musk isn't the cool stuff he makes, it's this strange property that lets him take businesses that are certain failures, and to not only make them profitable, which would be absurd, but absolute giants, that dominate the spaceflight industry (civilian and private) and produce significantly higher gross automotive margins than those of not only BMW and Mercedes, but Toyota as well; all this despite the industry standard that it is $10,000 more expensive to make an electric car. FYI up until the recent supply chain woes, Tesla was increasing gross automotive margins each quarter by a couple of percentage points, despite cutting the prices of the cars by an even larger percentage (that's wild).
Musk is simultaneously the most overrated and underrated person alive. He's overrated because people think he's amazing because he makes cool cars and rockets ships, and because he's super "disruptive". Meh. He's underrated because people don't appreciate the degree to which he puts himself into situations with the most overwhelmingly certain probability of total failure and turns them into implausibly massive successes.
There is some special quality that allows Musk to totally defy probabilities, to an insane degree. At a certain point it's not luck. There is no reason to expect that this weird ability would not extend to Twitter. Everything he does is outside his domain of expertise. Twitter is the closest thing to his first businesses were he wrote all the code, so prima facie, if he has any "area of expertise" Twitter would be his only business that is plausibly related to that area of expertise.
I think that he is very very smart. I think that people dismiss this because fanboys on Reddit praise him for silly superficial things like disruption and making cool stuff. What you should care about, what matters for this conversation, and what is actually impressive about Musk is his ability to give the middle finger to the Gods of plausible outcomes. You hear so much fanboys praising him for silly reasons that one would dismiss the whole thing. He deserves that praise and more, but not for the reason that he gets it.
The whole idea that he's a genius because "cars, rocket ships, and disruption" is silly; it is Musk's absurd ability to shift probability's that stands out. By analogy it's like saying that Tom Brady is the best football player of all time because he's good looking. It totally misses the boat.
Everyone needs to take a step back and wait.
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