Bingbong
2d ago
Guy was pretty clearly starting to retreat once the gun was pulled IMO. I think it's fair to pull the gun but firing on an unarmed individual who's retreating is outside the bounds of self defense.
Bingbong
2d ago
Yeah. To a certain degree I think that's one of the 'benefits' of the Gambling industry in that it allows that money to be recirculated, especially before the modern eras where a lot of the big gambling operators were also insane degens in their own right so there was a natural recycling effect for failsons to turn large fortunes into nothing. Also generally the sort of personality that's capable of massively running it up is going to be a bad combination of addictive and prone to all-inning which doesn't mix great when exposed to gambling.
Also people end up gambling since they've essentially capped out their local scenario. If you're sitting on a pile of crypto obtained shadily, already paid for maximal lifestyle in Albania, Costa Rica or whatever (which really doesn't cost that much in grand scheme of rich person things) and can't travel that much due to potential sanctions then you might as well start blasting 200k a hand blackjack. Atleast I've seen a lot of ultra highrollers that essentially describes.
Bingbong
2d ago
I'm all for more aggressive policing of drugs. The current legal metagame has sprung downstream out of 'let's not ruin the lives of promising college students for trying some weed and LSD' then with 50 years of iteration has reached the point of insanity, especially in the form of the strength and risks of modern drugs.
Gambling more complicated. I do think some people are degenerates but also slamming everybody all the time with gambling ads whilst trying to watch sports is just exacerbating standing societal issues. I'd rather that particular rock required a bit more upturning and less automatic takeover
Bingbong
2d ago
We have laws against drugs and gambling
At this point both seem to have dropped off the radar somewhat. I need to do an effortpost sometime about the state of the insane amount of grey market gambling proxies there are (as an industry participant), and how so many are prettymuch onshore camped out in random stupid loopholes.
Bingbong
4d ago
This is totally an impossible thing to fix? Like I agree there'd be friction issues where major issues aren't caught (though that's hardly exclusively a mid-level thing) but massive savings on decluttering the existing medical infrastructure whilst it urges people from a healthy, robust 83 to a diminished, venerable 84 at enormous cost.
Bingbong
5d ago
In other countries rampant with problems (India, China) they just let people die a lot more. I'd like to keep our system.
What percentage of healthcare expenditure is going into 'not letting people die' and what condition are those people in?
Bingbong
5d ago
If only there was some sort of low-tier medical professional that doesn't require the full education of a Doctor but is better (or atleast a coat of paint on top of) a quick google search and 'make sure you hydrate and rest'.
Without even getting into the absurdity of the amount of investment, effort and expertise that goes into the 8 medication, 15 critical condition palliative care of the proverbial aunt.
Bingbong
5d ago
I've always thought medical expenses tend to be the biggest drain on the elderly, plus also strong cottage industries have erupted around scamming the elderly due to their status as easy targets holding a massive chunk of the capital.
Bingbong
5d ago
In Australia the house you live in doesn't count towards your pension eligibility which is equally crazy, so a lot of people of retirement age will totally consolidate their net worth into their place of residence (and durable purchases like a caravan/new car) in order to get maximum payment from the social security equivalent which otherwise tapers off quite quickly above a couple hundred k in assets.
Bingbong
5d ago
To a first approximation, it's not clear to me that they did better with the pension plan compared to just taking the cash and plowing it into the market. That seems to be pretty typical of most pension plans I've seen. A bit of a hit on return, but lower risk (the biggest risk being actually making it to retirement with them). Actually figuring out whether that tradeoff is a good deal for any particular individual/plan requires some details about the particular plan and, uh, assumptions.
The discipline of actually saving and investing automatically goes a long way.
Even property's quite similar for a lot of older people. It isn't necessarily that the returns were massive compared to just buying the proverbial index, but a mortgage enables you to get a bunch of leverage and is the right sort of recurring annoying cost that kinda forces the average person to actually keep sticking their money into the system. Plus being relatively hard to tap the equity spontaneously.
Bingbong
6d ago
The rise of modern healthcare, especially long tail end of life care coupled with the vast majority of people being married to some sort of 'I deserve automatic retirement in my 60s with 20-30 years left of meandering consumption despite working in some low-mid tier white collar bureaucratic function' view of life just means the whole system is creaking at the seams. I'm personally post-having to work due to hitting a good tech exit + some crypto shenaningans, none of which I'd consider indicative of any particular value generation for society on my part or on the part of the capital I have, but atleast I'm self-funding.
Most governmental retirement systems picked their age thresholds when the human population pyramid was fundamentally a lot different, work was far more likely to be physically arduous, the elderly were better incorporated into the social fabric of their families (which has changed due to a plethora of reasons) and end of life medical care was far more palliative. However, since the expectation of retirement has now become a memetic social contract it's very hard to tell most people that they haven't really earned 15 years of cruises and progressive medical care.
Bingbong
8d ago
Also it's not like cheating's some absolute thing.
Dude could be an incredible chess player + also cheated to win one of the cash pool tournaments on top of that one time.
Bingbong
11d ago
Maybe a traditional declaration by each speaker. Something along the lines of 'I am the Senate?' and then a vigorous folk somersault.
Bingbong
11d ago
How do you calculate the cost of education, though? Yes the family's likely social dead weight when the children are growing since they're being subsidized, but at a certain point that child's going to become economically productive etcetera.
Bingbong
15d ago
Yes having worked in that kind of role the whole thing'd just begin and stop at 'oh it's Michael Jackson and the name is Don't really care about us'
Bingbong
15d ago
Yeah but the emergence of new antisemitism has been enabled largely by people on the Left who incoherently decided Palestinians were the absolute pinnacle of moral behavior due to their 'oppressed' status, plus centering opinions from African Americans who have always trended towards a lot of antisemitism not really expressed by white people. Your screeds are questionable when most of the overton window to allow this has been opened from the Left.
Bingbong
15d ago
He's got a sufficient force of minorities in this that he probably won't have lingering cancellation effects here, but also not expecting it to sweep the box office and win an Oscar. Probably does okay?
Bingbong
15d ago
Any thoughts on which side of the political aisle tends to be prone to ruthlessly enforcing purity politics over relatively small schisms?
Bingbong
15d ago
Yeah the whole Israel/Palestine thing seems to have eroded the taboo around open Antisemitism to a large degree and this all just coming off that. Whether people have changed their privately-held views is another question, but generally taboo enforcement is down to Leftwingers so once they've decided to flip on an issue the whole discourse is gonna change.
Bingbong
15d ago
And you've got most major digital marketing platforms actively hacking their own KPIs and the people just going along with it since 'Oh Facebook told me they're doing well, so by proxy I'm doing well'
Bingbong
15d ago
Some of the point about the money with AI is that the current financial engineering means that a lot of money is coming onto existence on paper (especially in these circular 'Company A invests in Company B but Company B then immediately uses that money to buy compute from Company A, valued in accordance with the new benchmark' deals) and not really escaping the loop the same way. This is now, somewhat, obscuring a state of pretty clear stagnation and weakness in the broader economy.
Bingbong
15d ago
Also massive reams of labor is currently probably kinda pointless in the present metagame but kept around for a combination of ego-reasons and since people are sold fantasies about stuff like 'Marketing' and 'Human Resources' which are real phenomenon but likely hugely overallocated to in manhours (and I've worked marketing roles, the sort of insane digital marketing KPI hacking that goes on would make an Engineer vomit).
I don't think that AI will, in the medium-longterm replace these roles insomuch as prompt a reshuffle where a lot of more extraneous roles get rebranded or people just kinda slide around till they find new roles in wishywash nothingness that AI's less capable of servicing.
Bingbong
17d ago
we'll do weird things like them away from their parents and raise them as our own'.
I'd say the intention of the Stolen Generation was ultimately benevolent from the government of the day even if the way it was carried out has a bunch of controversies. Also the ironicness of the Stolen Generation ultimately producing the vast majority of educated, reasonably-affluent Indigenous and their descendants who now rally endlessly about how bad the stolen generation was whilst their un-stolen counterparts essentially continue to rot in the ass-end of nowhere maybe deserves a serious thinkthrough.
I mean the point is more that once you've established your harem, unlimited party passes and mansion in the balkans that a lot of that stuff doesn't really cost thaaaaat much by shady black market millionaire standards. You can probably get it all set for a couple M a year, inclusive of bribes to relevant local parties. So you've got a massive inflow of cash coming from whatever you're running in the background to make you the top dog and nothing else to really spend it on but gambling. Plus there's maybe some laundering effects but in my experience it's more 'I have huge amounts of money stuck on the blockchain/in cash, what else am I gonna do with it' than really explicitly trying to turn it into legal tender.
Also these people are turbonormies. Generally what makes you top dog in these things is a combination of ruthlessness, timing and being compulsively prone to go all in. It's a lot more 'Guy who owns 50 car dealerships' energy than 'this is a delicate political operator who used deft genius to climb the ranks of crime'
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