Corvos
16d ago
What about, say, that famous meeting with North Korea? Where Trump got a lot of flack b/c Kim Jong Un looked entirely too smiling and chummy with him. Same with Putin.
Corvos
16d ago
Consider the scenario where he didn't get caught - would this individual be able live as a fugitive, abandoning being an upper-middle-class 20-something college-educated techie?
Why would you do that? Either they have enough evidence on you to catch you or they don't. I would just go back home and act like nothing had happened. After about two weeks, I figure either they have the evidence to catch you and you're in jail, or they don't and you put it out of your mind and never tell anyone.
Trump doesn't like win-win arrangements (and nor do his dumber supporters in the country), and wants to replace the status quo with a setup where the US wins and the EU and first-world Asia lose. [...] including Red China in the system has turned out to probably be a mistake, because the CCP was talking about win-win outcomes while seeking win-lose ones quietly. But Trump isn't trying to kick the Chinese out - China gets a better deal than traditional US allies do.
I think you are modelling Trump wrong. I think he's fine with win-win between equals. To me his actions make most sense if you model him as viscerally attracted to strength and repelled by weakness.
From this perspective China is strong, it builds stuff, it's worthy of respect; maybe you've got to tariff them a bit to stop them leeching off you and to remind them that, hey, you're no slouch yourself, but generally they're cool people. Likewise, Russia is pretty impressive. Not nice, and failing to take Ukraine was a bit lame, but they stuck two fingers up at everyone and they've mostly backed it up.
Britain and the EU on the other hand are very lame. Lots of puffing themselves up, lots of trying to look down their noses at the real players like a little man wearing platform soles, but then they break and beg for help. They have some influence (EU regulation for example) but it's a pathetic, crawling, sneaking sort of power. It's not just that the NATO countries are expensive to defend, they're sad and they make America sad by association. Likewise Palestine, the Middle East, Africa.
Ukraine and Israel are in this weird halfway place where they're quite strong and defended themselves pretty impressively, but (Ukraine especially) can only do it if they're on America's apron strings. They're not bad guys but they do have to sit down and listen when Daddy talks and they don't come to the White House and posture like America's doing them a favour.
In the UK it is common for residential buildings to be >200 years old. Nobody was aware, even the surveyor didn't notice. Just one day part of the building fell down and the insurer said (paraphrased) 'okay, you had an insurance policy but it doesn't cover anything that happens because of gradual decline, or gradual damage, or structural issues, or...'. In theory they should be aware that old buildings sometimes have these issues but in practice they refuse to pay out.
It's not that I don't get where insurers are coming from on these kinds of cases, it's just that in reality they rule out basically any of the actual causes of big expensive problems which makes the policy kind of worthless. They sell the illusion of safety on their advertising materials without any actual intent to provide it. You're always taking a gamble on whether they come through for you or dig in their heels.
Corvos
17d ago
At the risk of being flippant, I can't remember any deal that fell through when one of the parties admitted to being the cause of its failure.
If you are uninterested in actually discussing the phenomenon, you may of course use any term for it that you please.
It’s more complicated than that. Partly because of the intellectual mixing on both sides, partly because successive UK governments have been importing European legal concepts and theory since the ‘90s.
See e.g. the Human Rights Act 1998, which incorporates the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into UK law.
Corvos
18d ago
I’ve heard different stories from different people. The French broadly say that the Australians kept changing their mind on the specs they wanted, the Aussies say the French were costing too much and taking too long. I haven’t done a deep dive myself.
My understanding is that AUKUS happened because the Americans and the UK decided to offer nuclear technology which is usually verboten, basically to split off Australia from France.
Ultimately, the US is a big elephant in a small room. A single change in policy by the US can and has torpedoed entire sectors in foreign countries.
To take an extreme example, if you receive a letter from your landlord telling you that you are going to be evicted then in a sense your choosing to leave peacefully rather than squat or lay makeshift pit traps under the welcome mat is a moral choice. But only in a sense.
?????? Hasn't usa always asked europe to pay more money into nato and they always don't?
Look at AUKUS (where the Americans and the UK undermined French submarine sales), or the recent Palantir contract in the UK (where the US undermined UK AI development). America wants cheaper, more easily defended vassals, not peers. Paying for a standing army (controlled by the Americans, natch) is expensive and doesn't really have any use except when the Russians are actually literally invading, which isn't really a concern for most of Europe at the moment since the rich nations who fund the thing are on the opposite side of the continent. Development is where the money, influence and power projection is, and the Americans guard it jealously.
None of which is to say that the Europeans don't also shoot them/ourselves in the foot by working hard to destroy their own industries and repel investment at all costs.
Corvos
18d ago
pathologically always doing their own thing leaves them in a much better spot than the rest of the Euros.
Can you clarify? I'm not sure I see what you're gesturing at.
No need to list examples of these Indian or Arab mayors in UK. It's just hypocritical to hear it from US and even current administration.
This is not just mayors. These are the leaders/president-equivalents of the UK, Scotland and Ireland: the most powerful people in the land.
What I am trying to say is that, if we were talking about alcoholism, then maybe Japan is teetotal and the US sometimes comes home drunk from parties, but the UK is an alcoholic drinking fortified beer at 9am. Is it hypocritical for the US to tell the UK they drink too much? Sort of. But it's still true.
I don't know, it feels like something changed with respect to speech between 2010 and 2020. Like, people would look down on you for saying non-PC things loudly in public, but you didn't get arrested for it. And as for the VP's wife being Indian, for a while we had in the UK:
- The Prime Minister of the UK
- The Taoiseach of Ireland
- The First Minister of Scotland
- The mayors of almost all major English cities
All either Indian or Arab, at the same time.
From the Telegraph this morning:
A TEACHER was banned from working with children after telling a Muslim child that “Britain is still a Christian state”, The Telegraph can disclose.
The primary school teacher was referred to his local child protection board over comments made to the pupil at an inner-city primary school in London. A senior detective from the Met’s child abuse investigation team also became involved.
In this case, the teacher was suspended and subsequently sacked for an incident in which he allegedly admonished students for washing their feet in the sinks in the boys’ toilets. Police were also called in to investigate an alleged hate crime.
According to the child who made the complaint, the teacher told them the school was not a religious one but that there was an Islamic school a mile away if they wished to go there instead. He also told them: “Britain is still a Christian state” and pointed out that the King was head of the Church of England.
The teacher tried to explain to the year six class the importance of British values of tolerance. It was claimed he reminded the children that Islam remained a minority religion in the UK.
In his legal claim against the local authority, lawyers for the teacher pointed out the school was a non-faith school and that prayers had been informally banned from the playground – and by extension that included washing feet in the toilets – and confined to a prayer room set aside for the purpose.
But the school suspended the teacher in March last year and subsequently sacked him. A month later in April 2024, he was informed he was being referred to the local safeguarding board as well as to the Met. The police inquiry was subsequently dropped.
Is it an indictement that there was a policy inquiry, or reassuring that it was dropped? Pick your poison.
Take nuclear waste for example - if you can just throw your highly radioactive waste into the river, fucking the nearby ecosystem and causing a massive spike in cancer for every living thing that is connected to that river (which is more than you'd think if you haven't studied ecology) you've actually created a problem that will be substantially more expensive to fix than simply following the regulation. Building nuclear reactors on earthquake fault lines is in fact a bad idea, as is building them in floodplains or directly next to the sea. Your nuclear reactor should also be built to rigorous construction standards rather than relying on cheap contractors who half-arse everything and replace a bunch of structural cement with styrofoam to reduce construction costs.
But I don't think many people can accurately determine which regulations fall into the former category and which fall into the latter.
At the risk of embarrassing myself, I feel like I could pretty easily sort them into 'yes' (most of the stuff you mentioned), 'no', and 'demands further enquiry' if I didn't have political considerations to worry about.
Corvos
19d ago
Presumably the trick would be to release the news to the parents (possibly via Facebook/WhatsApp) and the children (if possible) before the school. Then the children won’t take the teacher seriously and when parents ask why their children are being taught by a porn star, the school’s response would be “WTF why did we hire a porn star?” rather than “we’re aware and it’s really none of your business”.
The other traditional method for disguising an attack is the old ‘expression of support’. “It’s disgusting that people are accusing Teacher X of being the famous porn star Y” or “there’s no way this is X, right?”.
As a wise man once said, “It is necessary to put yourself firmly behind somebody before you can stab them in the back.”
Corvos
19d ago
I think he is saying that the economists are telling the data to go away and stop bothering them, not telling you to shut up.
Corvos
19d ago
I was thinking of the big change-your-life medical claims, plus some problems my friend once had with house insurance after part of the house collapsed and needed to be rebuilt. The insurance company shrugged and said 'you bought a house with a hidden structural defect decades ago, that's not our problem' and indeed that is broadly what the contract says, but the endless list of opt-outs in the contract doesn't fit with what 'insurance' is meant to be.
Corvos
20d ago
For better and worse, university admissions often play pretty fast and loose. The admissions questions are jumping-off points for you to persuade the university that you're interesting and a good long-term investment. They're not a points-based assessment, especially not somewhere like Stanford, and this guy would surely have known that.
In the UK, Oxford has a reputation for having much more interview-based admissions based (in theory) on future potential and interestingness, whereas Cambridge admissions have the reputation of being much more reliant on strict grade ranking and standardised testing. Neither of them is considered a clear winner and both strategies appear to have their pros and cons.
Corvos
20d ago
I have met and disliked these people before, so I mostly agree with your position. However my understanding is that American top-level universities have always seen their job as being 'identify, gather and acculturate future influential people' and whether you or I like it or not, I'm pretty sure that this guy is legitimately the kind of guy they want and that their admissions system is designed to identify.
Admissions questions aren't essays, and often aren't marked by a rubric. They're prompts designed to ferret out, 'are you the kind of guy we want?' and I'm pretty sure he would have got in with or without daddy's deep pockets and BLM.
Corvos
20d ago
Technically, in normal gambling you are stastically certain to lose over time, whereas if you don't change your purchasing habits here you can only win.
(Give the Devil his due.)
But yes, obviously that's not going to be how it goes and this thing should be nuked from orbit.
From a foreign perspective, it looks like the problem is less general economic disenfranchisement and more than American medical care structuring really is uniquely awful and there isn’t the state capacity to rip it out and replace it with a new kind of system (most likely the kind they have in France, Japan etc.).
I might go further and say that insurance in general is just totally broken in the West.
Firstly, the stuff that people want to insure against (big, unpredictable disasters that result in ongoing costs) aren’t what insurance companies want to cover.
Secondly, the likelihood that an insurance company will pay you depends less on the terms of your contract and more on its own PR and financials. And those financials depend on how new the company is and how its investments are going than anything to do with you and your problems. All the incentives are massively perverted - it’s a way to milk money off people to use for stock market gambling whilst paying out the minimum possible until you inevitably go bust.
Corvos
22d ago
To (reluctantly) be fair, the teen in question had supposedly extremely high grades, had been to the White House dinner and was recognised by Barack Obama, and is clearly a social media star of some sort. Writing BlackLivesMatter over and over again on his application was cheap rhetoric but it was in response to a specific question on his application rather than an essay:
In response to a question asking “What matters to you, and why?" the teen wrote "#BlackLivesMatter" exactly 100 times.
it's not literally all he had going for him.
Stanford didn't just accept some total rando because he wrote Black Live Matter.
Fair. I thought someone said he'd been mooching around all over the place contemplating whether he should kill someone else.
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