Also the rise of drugs and the mentally ill amongst the poorest cohort of society means that the social cohesion required to have a good 'dorm experience' isn't where it is otherwise. AFAIK Asia still has a bunch of dorm concepts around, whether it be essentially company barracks (Shataku in Japan), a lot more hostels than you'd see in equivalent Western countries or other solutions.
I remember seeing a video (Don't think this is the original version but it got some traction on Twitter) a few weeks ago about a Microsoft employee choosing to essentially live in a dormitory in San Francisco Chinatown and a bunch of people calling him a Bugman but like personally I've done a few half-year stints in expensive cities for work and I'd have been happier in a corporate dorm as a singleton (at the time) than paying full market rental rate for a place I didn't really use to its full advantage. I'd much rather pay $200 a week for that than $500 a week for a 2br.
Bingbong
2d ago
Not survival, but it's performance yes. There's been many companies that lost their magic when leadership or star personnel changed.
Yeah but also a certain amount of this can be the leadership/star personnel having a keen nose for when the music is changing and/or the 'good times' in the greater economy responding more to an avant garde, visionary leader
Bingbong
2d ago
Exactly. There's a vast rural hinterland population in China who are already gravitating towards the big metros and accepting middling living conditions to do factory work and gig economy work. Pivoting them towards care-work is a lot easier than trying to either encourage people who are used to laptop sinecures at the minute or taking on foreigners who add a bunch of demographic issues and unexpected longterm issues.
Bingbong
2d ago
The rate of games being released onto the Steam Store has gone vertical afaik since your basic friendslop content now takes like a week instead of a couple months. Do agree there hasn't seemingly been that big an impact on AAA games but they've got such huge release cycles.
Bingbong
2d ago
I mean plenty of places in the world that haven't achieved consistent running water or electricity and still have a ton of cell phones around. If anything the Cell Phone has kinda trumped a lot of pre-existing needs.
Bingbong
3d ago
The way he put it was that hetero basic PIV stuff was post-scarcity and that adding step-references gave it the same taboo boost as like an interracial gangbang or extensive anal in terms of niche audiences. Lot easier to pay talent to say 'stepwhatever' than arrange stuff that's actually physically onerous.
Bingbong
3d ago
I mean being exported as a slave from West Africa probably long-term better for your bloodline than remaining in West Africa.
Bingbong
3d ago
Nonsense. Plenty of places in the world have insanely harsh drug laws if you actually get caught, maintain a small bubble of users who aren't socially encouraged but also keep the worst of the addiction stuff non-public, and therefore run better. There are still drugs consumed in Singapore, but in small and very circumspect quantities. Every attempt to relax drug laws will then get further relaxed by the courts in an all-consuming feedback loop in the West, and straight to junkietown.
Bingbong
3d ago
Can't remark on Timor-Leste but Chinese definitely run most of the large private enterprises in all of the other countries on that list. Even Brunei the royal family might control the oil but there's a very rich Chinese substrate as well.
Bingbong
4d ago
Honestly he was kind of a filmnerd and talked a lot more about cameras and shooting angles and stuff. Think he just kinda fell ass-backwards into it and was less degenerate than most other people around at that point.
He did know a lot about escort rates so I assume he must have slept with some of the talent
Bingbong
4d ago
Islanders? Polynesians are generally in their own category but yeah generally most of the money is concentrated into the Chinese diaspora throughout SEA so high-level business culture is actually fairly consistent.
Bingbong
4d ago
From an acquaintance who was a porn director in the 'good old days' before Onlyfans, the step-sibling stuff just became popular since it was maximal taboo for minimal actual requirements of the acting talent. It let you shoot essentially boring vanilla stuff and got the same niche bump that a lot more onerous stuff would do otherwise.
I mean even North Korea seems a lot better organized than a lot of comparably poor states. I'd rather be the average North Korean than the average Liberian or Haitian assuming I wasn't able to migrate.
I'm not starving, it seems like I'm not going to randomly be killed by bandits, my life expectancy is like 73 which is like mid-tier for the world and there's no particularly active hot war.
Bingbong
4d ago
How are you defining the bottom 20%'s lack of net worth? LIke they probably own less real estate than they did historically, but they're also probably wealthier in random crap than they were 50 years ago. Condition in their commons is maybe hard to calibrate since probably more drug issues, but also genuine poverty and starvation has been largely stamped out in the West.
Bingbong
4d ago
I know plenty of multi-generational Dubai residents who are doing far better than they would have in their country of origin, and yet still have no real pathway to citizenship. Nothing wrong with that model.
Bingbong
4d ago
Yeah and there's always going to be a ton of 'a bunch of 90th percentile quirky UMC-types decided to do X and produced 90th percentile quirky future-UMC types so we need to copy their methods' logic going on when it's more about the genetic baseline. I'm not against Montessori but in my experience it's a very high volatility way of educating children where most of the ones I've met are either geniuses or anxiety-ridden untermensch, but that also might just reflect the current societal and economic moment.
Bingbong
4d ago
Yeah from what I understand of girls liking anal it's more the inherent transgressiveness and the psychological thing than the actual activity being particularly primed for physical stimulation.
Bingbong
4d ago
I feel like that guy would be very hard to crack if only since he's so public with what he's up to.
Bingbong
4d ago
I mean the immediate issue I'd see with America trying to use honeypots for other countries/cultures is that extramarital stuff is way less of an issue in the vast majority of other country/cultures, especially if it's of the 'powerful man with a sidepiece' variety.
Bingbong
4d ago
I mean casual side prostitution was a lot more normalized in essentially every Western society until the last 100 years or so. The current model with Japan having a ton of random prostitution/prostitution-lite options but also a way-lower divorce rate than Western countries since it's just kinda is what it is societally is how most of human history functioned.
Bingbong
4d ago
I feel like spy as applied to this is such an odd continuum, too.
Like if 10 were 'literally trained espionage operative of China on an explicit mission to seduce Jensen' I'd expect this to be more like a 6 where it's more 'High-tier Chinese national likely has strong relationships with CCP and a strong overlap in interests with stuff the CCP also wants to have happen without being an explicit government operative'
Bingbong
4d ago
As somebody who's been involved in business circles in East & Southeast Asia I'd be very shocked if Huang's relationship didn't operate on 'don't ask don't tell' at the bare minimum considering how much of network revolves around escorts in that part of the world. Thus would be surprised by a divorce.
Bingbong
4d ago
China has a lot more leeway with the massive elderly overhang between state capacity, automation and not having to deal with them as a massive voting bloc plus such a gigantic existing population that losing some absolute numbers when large amounts of China's poorer population essentially doesn't exist economically already.
IMO if anybody is going to crack scalable robotic-assisted elderly care it's probably China.
'Yaddayadda population curve' also assumes fungibility of population and that certain demographics of immigrants aren't net drains over any reasonable time horizon.
Bingbong
4d ago
Laws built around reducing turbulence for young stoners have also massively eroded the West's ability to deal with the Junkie tier of user. Criminals aren't all Aladdin and whenever enforcement is reduced on paper then administrated by light-touch judges then the whole thing rapidly snowballs past functionality.
Semi-related but the Ilhan Omar Cidering of 2026 seems to have largely fallen off the docket as well.
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