Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
No bio...
User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3d ago
I find this topic very irksome, for reasons that can be gleaned from some jingoistic comments below.
There is a lot of a cope. But there's also a lot of reflexive anti-jingoism where America default bad. I confess, I don't know whether to trust the economists or not.
"Breakneck" is also an annoying gimmick. They're not engineers.
I'll read it and get back to you.
Maybe the thickest layer of obscurity is official translation. For example: «中华人民共和国». «People's Republic of China». Character by character: something like "The Middle Splendid Land's People's Common-Harmony State". That's what they intend to be.
Out of curiosity, do you speak/read Mandarin?
I'm not really interested in arguing with you on the subject and I'm not even sure I disagree, but on this point that you might find amusing - the dim sum place near my house is also called 'peaceful mountain dumpling shop' (obscured for opsec reasons) and I can tell you it's anything but. I'm reminded of the Chinese copypastas from World of Warcraft:
patchwerk fat american 胖胖美国人angered hits on armored men对装甲兵的怒吼intentional pain river keeps others safe故意痛苦的河流使他人安全medics focus those who eat fists医务人员将重点放在那些吃拳头的人身上
邪恶的骑士 Evil horseriders 一起站 Stand together for falling sky 带走武器 Steal weapon 避免黑洞 Avoid pancake of darkness 圣光波 Change position often
They're funnier if you've actually played the game...
To get a feel for it, I recommend reading this interview (1, 2) on a book about his father Xi Zhongxun
Thanks - I'll try a book about Xi and/or his father.
Does anyone seriously think they will have trouble building sheds with lots of cooling and grid connection. They have the world's best HVDC system, they ate several major markets in the last 5 years, their heavy machinery is penetrating German/Japanese markets already. They'll be fine.
The point of that argument is not that China is incapable of building datacenters, but that America hasn't lost it's ability to build - it's just very focused on profit.
Cope? Maybe. Like I said, I don't know if I should trust the economists the way I trust psychologists and social science majors, the way I trust engineers or somewhere in between.
What merits explanation is not China but the dysfunction of Western societies, the decline of civilization really.
Again, I think Tyler's point is that a lot of what looks like dysfunction is actually function downstream of people's revealed preferences.
I'm honestly 100% uncertain on whether China wins, America wins, or both muddle along on roughly equal terms for the rest of my lifetime. I'm still skeptical of your apparent certainty, but I guess we'll see.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4d ago
Which mods have acknowledged this?
Hmm, this one I misremembered...
Yes, the community here has suffered evaporative cooling and a hardening of consensus viewpoints.
...although this is somewhat tacit acknowledgement.
This is just wrong and tells me you're either being disingenuous or you just don't pay attention.
Who have you banned for saying naughty things about blacks, immigrants, women or progressives on par with hanikrummihundursvin? I don't think faceh or sloot have been banned for ranting about women being the mental equivalent of children (afaict this ban was for being a generic asshole). You'll say whiningcoil is on the edge, but as far as I'm aware he hasn't eaten a 90 day ban and has plenty to say about immigrants wrecking his town.
No we don't. This is, again, flatly wrong. If we were free speech absolutists, we wouldn't ban people for calling brown people locusts and Jews parasites
Yes, this is my point...
How many places on reddit or elsewhere can I very calmly and civilly argue for why I don't think trans women are women, or HBD may be real?
...and how many places can hanikrummihundursvin calmly and civilly argue that he hates the subhuman subcontinental filth and Jewish parasites that are holding down the proud Aryan race? You're proud that the speech you like is allowed here while being verboten on reddit, even as you ban the speech you dislike and put boundaries on what the deplorables are allowed to say.
But someone coming in saying Black Lives Matter and Trans Rights Are Human Rights would be allowed to argue for those positions.
I have not, and would not deny it.
BUT - it must be said, one reason they break so readily is that they are just not used to people being allowed to dogpile them, instead of the other way around.
There is some truth to this. But there's more to the story than libruls are thin-skinned snowflakes who can't handle disagreement. Not everyone wants to share a space with people calmly and civilly advocating for political violence or genocide any more than you want to share a space with 4channers.
But your criticisms are off base and mostly just wrong when not outright disingenuous.
We've done this a couple times, and usually your argument is just repeating that you're wrong, Chrispratt. Do you think you're going to change my mind just by repeating that you think I'm wrong, or do you feel the need to defend your record to the audience? Are you worried I'm going to evaporate as well? If it's the latter, I'll probably hang around until this place dies from a lack of activity and things get boring - no need to try and convince me one way or another.
But anyways. You're wrong, Amadan. I think you're ingenuously wrong. I think you're all doing a good job as moderators, but I'm less and less impressed with the free speech argument the longer I stick around.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4d ago
He said "progressive/liberal." "Progressive" is kind of a dirty word hereabouts, basically interchangeable with "woke," but do you not consider yourself a liberal?
In that case, why say progressive at all? And even then, the word 'liberal' contains multitudes. A Texas democrat, a Freddie De Boer flavor liberal who rarely culture wars, some kind of lawyer from Pittsburgh and some kind of software-adjacent lawyer are the vanguard now that everyone to their left is gone. Who's who, and whether that's an accurate cross-section of the label 'liberal' is left to you. 3-4 people is still not that many.
Once, I would have gotten pushback and been told I'm too sensitive and used to my progressive safe spaces and there's an even balance of left/right viewpoints. Now, there's tacit acknowledgement even from the mods that this is true and the party line has shifted to liberals are just too thin-skinned to deal with how wrong they are.
Sure, I'm probably a liberal, although I rarely participate in discussions and Mr. delVasto probably wasn't around when I did.
Really? So you think he could have said something similar about another group and not been modded? Why do you think that? Or are you agreeing with Hanik that the mods are ZOG collaborators? That would be a twist.
No, you aren't on the AIPAC payroll (or if you are, make me a mod daddy - I'll ban all the jew-haters tomorrow). But he was relatively polite, speaking clearly and it certainly wasn't low effort. His participation adhered to the rules better than Jiro saying 'Yeah, no' because he was butthurt about Jews being called parasites.
But yes, I'm pretty sure he could get away with hating on American blacks or illegal immigrants or Islamists or progressives or plenty of other groups for a lot longer than he could get away with hating on Jews. Coincidentally, there are a hell of a lot more Jews here than blacks or any of those other groups. Why do I think it would be modded differently? Because people hate on blacks and illegals all the time without consequence, maybe a bit less monomaniacally than SS, but just as virulently and often less articulately.
I mean, do I need to point out that in your link, @naraburns was not speaking as a mod?
What does it matter? His views on his objectivity are the same whether he's posting with mod flair or not.
"You're doing a good job and you also suck" is such a special snipe.
I don't have time to fully flesh this out because life, so concisely:
- You (the mod team and userbase more broadly, not you specifically) pride yourselves on being free speech absolutists and sneer at [insert lesser forum here.]
- Actual free speech absolutism leads to autistic 20 page screeds about holocaust denial and eventually devolves into 4chan.
- You know this. You tell those people to shut the fuck up and ban them when they get too obnoxious, or, as people here like to say: 'start scaring the hoes.' Iterate for definition of hoes moving rightward over time.
- 'Free speech' now works great because most substantial disagreement is gone from the platform and people pulling you too hard towards chanhood get banned.
I think you're right to do #3, and that you do a good job of it. I just think it's hypocritical to claim to be advocates of free speech when the only difference between you and reddit is where you've drawn the line in the sand, and that line is largely a product of the views of your userbase.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4d ago
Can you name a single progressive here? I guess magicalkitty and whatever the other person's name is (aka darwin and impassionata), although I'm not sure they count given that they've been permabanned in the past and mostly troll now. There aren't any left to mod.
On the flip side, there's nothing in the post being modded that would deserve a ban on any other topic. There's no objective rule here (however much the mods may protest to the contrary), just an arbitrary line in the sand that the local userbase happens to draw further to the right than reddit does.
To be clear, I think they're doing a good job. But the hypocrisy and chest-thumping around free speech is profoundly irritating.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5d ago
The only thing that the above reveals is that US suburbs are largely preferred to US cities (and, more specifically, by the kind of upper middle class striver who uproots from Europe/China to the US), but this does not generalize to suburbs and cities as a whole. Maintain a Singapore quality city in the US and I don't doubt many suburbanites would trade the yard and those extra beds/baths for a condo.
It's a fair argument, but I'm not sure I buy it. Millennials revitalized city cores and gentrified the shit out of many historically run down neighborhoods. They couldn't conjure up a world class mass transit system, but most of the ones I knew lived without cars anyways. Then they all hit 30, tried to buy a house in the burbs at the same time and the housing market chaos of the early 2020s ensued.
Also, ironically, I ended up taking a ton of cabs when I was in Singapore. It was nice, but I'm not sure I'd say it was in a different class from the American cities I like.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5d ago
I think this is too fuzzy an analogy to be much help.
Fair. It's not a particularly sophisticated model, but then, I'm neither a historian nor an economist. It seems to be the playbook the CCP believes in, though.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5d ago
Tyler Cowen had Dan Wang (author of Breakneck, originator of the 'China is run by engineers, US is run by lawyers' meme) on his podcast last week. IMO, Tyler's podcast is at it's best when he's debating rather than interviewing, part of why his year-end reviews are some of his best episodes. It's particularly interesting watching someone intelligent actually defend America and moreover champion causes that inevitably would code as lower-status to the intellectual class.
tl;dr, Tyler's views —
- Suburbs good, cars and highways good
- HSR/mass transit overrated (but we should still do better)
- America can build (gives the example of AI data centers)
- American Healthcare + rate of healthcare spending good
- China pandemic response bad, America pandemic response good
Massive quotes incoming. Skip ahead if you don't want to read Tyler's arguments:
COWEN: A very simple question. Doesn’t America just have better infrastructure than China? Let’s say I live in Columbus, Ohio. What exactly am I lacking in terms of infrastructure? I have this great semi-suburban life. It’s quite comfortable. What’s the problem?
WANG: America has excellent infrastructure if you own a car. If you are driving every day on the highways into the parking garages to work, that is quite fine. I’ve never been to Columbus, Ohio. I’m sure its airport is perfectly adequate. I live mostly in between Ann Arbor as well as Palo Alto. These are cities that enjoy access to two excellent airports: DTW as well as SFO. All of that is fine...
I think there should also be much better transit options within cities as well, because we are working through these subway systems built mostly 100 years ago now in New York City, which are screechingly loud. The noise levels on BART as well as New York City are sometimes exceeding these danger levels experienced by most people. I think that there should be just more options, rather than cars, as well as airports.
COWEN: Aren’t those relatively minor problems? I agree that we should build more rail, but mostly we’re not going to. We’ll improve airports, add more flights. The New York subway is clearly too loud, but part of the American genius is you don’t have to live in New York City. Say we did everything you just mentioned. Would GDP be more than 1% higher...Just get everyone a car, or almost everyone... I don’t see how we could make American cities into European cities. What we have are the very best suburbs. Chinese suburbs strike me as really quite mediocre. They can have excellent food as pretty much all of China does, but after that, I don’t see anything to recommend them at all.
And honestly, this seems to me to be the revealed preferences of most people. Europeans and Chinese who move to the US largely move to the burbs and buy the big car even while (at least the former) tut-tutting about how barbaric it all is. People, at least once they hit a certain age, want the SFH and the big yard with the fence and the space to raise their children.
WANG: I think that my hypothesis is that China will continue to build much, much more because it doesn’t have a lot of these American notions of being super obsessed with financial measures, like profitability, as well as these other ratios. I think there is something much more common in China, as well as the rest of East Asia, where the business leaders are much more concerned about simply market share than they are about having really high profits.
COWEN: This critique that the United States is too financialized or too concerned with the bottom line, hasn’t recent experience with AI infrastructure and data centers shown we can rise to the occasion? It’s not obvious all of that will make money, but we’re going to put up trillions of dollars to do it. We’re going to do it pretty rapidly. We’re way ahead of China, certainly ahead of the rest of the world. The Gulf may end up in the running there.
On the pandemic and vaccines:
COWEN: That seems wrong to me. US underperformed by different bureaucratic measures, but what really mattered for saving lives and reopening was vaccines.
WANG: I agree.
COWEN: On that, US overperformed. China is miserable at the bottom of the barrel. They even had the Pfizer contract and wouldn’t even use those vaccines. They used their own inferior vaccines because they didn’t have a society of lawyers who would go crazy suing everyone. US, I think, in pandemic, everyone did terribly, but US got the vaccines, got them quickly, way ahead of schedule, and did certainly much better than China.
And yet. And yet! At one point we have this brief exchange:
WANG: ...What I am always asking is, what if they succeed on being the global center for automotives?
COWEN: Which is likely, right?
WANG: Which is likely. They’re on track to do that. Right now, they have about a third of global manufacturing capacity. They may continue gaining share, in part because they’re deindustrializing everyone else, deindustrializing Germany in particular, as well as Japan and South Korea. The US has mostly already deindustrialized itself, so it’s not in the firing line. At some point, there will be a second China shock coming for America’s manufacturing industries. They’re going to make all the drones. They’re going to make much of the electronics.
I can buy some of Tyler's takes, and as I mentioned it's refreshing to see an actual contrarian take about the competence of America. But at some point, it just transcends a contrarian take into cope territory. Why are we complacently accepting that China is going to be the global center for auto manufacturing on top of drones and everything else? Life might be good now, but if China is just 1950s America, and 1950s America was just 19th century Britain, aren't we headed for the same stagnation and broad irrelevance of the UK today?
Maybe some of the catastrophizing about China is overwrought and some of America's apparent weaknesses are just the invisible hand of the market moving in mysterious ways, while the gleaming bridges and HSR to nowhere are albatross projects and a drag on growth. Maybe our apparent decadence and vice are really just the product of a system optimized for giving it's people a good life, while Chinese grind 996 work weeks for shit wages to stroke Xi Jinping's ego. But man, I don't want to get hit with the rare earth metals stick whenever the POTUS doesn't kowtow to the emperor. I'm still torn between whether the economists should be running the show or whether we should keep them as far away from the levers of power as possible.
Make some actual tariffs that bite and laws that promote onshoring; and if consumers don't even notice an increase in prices it ain't working. If your argument is that we can't match the Chinese in whatever way, deregulate or bring Chinese companies here so we can learn from them or do whatever it takes to compete. Instead, we just decided to sell them H200s and erode one of our few remaining advantages (maybe someone more plugged in can comment on how significant this is?).
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
23d ago
The current era is best understood as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.
Still? You can keep saying it, but that doesn't make it true. The current era is best understood as social media-induced brainrot afflicting each generation in it's own way, with zoomers doing whatever it is they do on tiktok, boomers/gen Xers schizo posting incoherently in news comments sections and millennials straddling the line. Then some idiots on the margin actually Do Something, and the rest of us are dragged through the ensuing shitstorm.
If you still believe your model has so much explanatory power, make some predictions:
This time, I'll ask: do you genuinely think my prediction was wrong, and that we are in fact moving away from large-scale violence? Do you genuinely believe the Culture War is winding down? And since no FCfromSSC post would be complete without a link to some other excessively-long comment, nor with a listing of recent violence datapoints, here's both in one from last week.
I do not think I am obsessed with small-minded, zero sum games. I am interested in what is going to happen next, and what is happening next is, it seems to me, largely determined by such games. Most people are obsessed with winning and losing, and because their values are now mutually-incoherent, cooperative victory is no longer a viable option. I think that internalizing this insight gives me a clearer picture of where we are heading, which is of course the main question we've debated for some years now.
As for myself, I am already saved. I think my side will win, but whether it does or not does not is a matter of no true consequence; nothing that truly matters to me is protected by victory or lost by defeat. I do not believe in progress, moral or otherwise. There is nothing new under the sun, all things are wearisome more than one can say. This is the bedrock truth as I understand it, and while I freely admit that it does not come naturally to me, I try to maintain a clear sight of it, even at some personal cost, even here.
Riots and political violence failed to manifest after a brainrotted zoomer killed Kirk two months ago, elections ran smoothly and the political momentum seems to be swinging away from 'Your Side.' I'll give you and @ThomasdelVasto ten to one odds that there's no civil war before the completion of the next presidential election, and I'd give you much better odds if I sat down to think about it more and actually had the money to bet on it. I'd wager that if we had some indices of political violence and economic prosperity, the former would be below 1960s/1970s level, the latter would be close to some ATH and the only way the current era is remarkable is how efficiently the internet has divided us.
But please, make your own predictions.
Do people actively play/did people use to play MUDs back in the day?
20-30 years ago, I was deep into a very niche MUD - small enough that naming it might even be an opsec liability. Maybe 50-100 max players online. I'm shocked to see that they now have a discord, and about 1-2 dozen people who still play. No idea how they manage to RP/PVP. I'm also surprised to find a fairly active subreddit for MUDs, possibly enough to make me consider trying it again.
More options
Context Copy link