DimitriRascalov
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User ID: 450
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
Comparative advantage relies either on high demand or limited means of production. In the classic Portugal & England example by Ricardo both countries have a fixed amount of labor, so although Portugal is better at producing both cloth and wine it makes sense that it focuses on wine and England on cloth, because England has a comparative advantage in cloth. But if either the demanded quantities are small enough that Portugal can cover them on its own or the amount of Portuguese labor grows to that point, there's less or even no need for trade with England anymore and the Portuguese economy can take full advantage of being more efficient at producing both goods.
Accordingly, in order for human comparative advantage to hold against automation it would have to be the case that demand growth outpaces the speed at which automated productive capacity can be expanded. Given that ChatGPT can already talk to thousands of people at the same time while robots outside of heavily constrained environments still struggle to perform basic tasks that are very simple for most humans, I'd say that competitive advantage for humans will break down first in the areas where LLMs are best at.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
Sadly no, as far as I can tell. Here are the latest ones with German subtitles, if that helps (though they might not be available in some countries). I found this guy on YouTube who translated the subtitles of an entire episode from 12 years ago, but that seems to be the only such effort on the internet.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
Are German television shows always based in Berlin, or in Munich?
Partially as a result of the defeat in WWII and the Allies' desire to decentralize the German media, Germany maintains a large amount of regional public broadcasters. There are no less than 9 regional TV channels (each covering 1-3 federal states) in addition to two flagship channels (one from Berlin, the other from Mainz) dealing with national and world events (e.g. news or large sports events) plus an additional 10 channels for specific audiences (children) or covering more niche things (high culture, theater, documentaries, that sort of stuff). All of these are broadcasting 24/7. As you can imagine, that's a huge amount of screen time to deal with and especially the regional channels make sure to fill a lot of that with locally relevant stuff.
As an example: the long running and very popular German police crime drama series "Tatort" consists of several different police precincts all across the country, always produced by the respective regional broadcaster. There's even one from Vienna and Zürich. Across the weekly screenings of new episodes throughout the year, a viewer will be taken to big cities such as Berlin or Frankfurt but also smaller towns like Saarbrücken or Weimar.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
And in fact, those people abandoned the old identity, founded on faith and honor, in favor of novel ideologies based on race or class, which led to swift ruin.
Maybe this is meant as a broader point including communists and Nazis, but in what sense was the French Revolution built on race? Didn't it explicitly found the tradition that the French state still insists on of not enquiring anything about ethnic heritage? And with regards to class, I don't think that pre-Revolutionary France can be described as a society not based in significant amount of class. A core grievance fueling the revolution was the perceived decadence of the nobility, a social class that justified its position at least partly using class based ideology like the divine right to rule.
Broadly looking at the pre-modern West class ideology permeates everything. Greece had all the politicking about who gets to be a citizen, Rome had the patricians and the plebs, the Migration Period sees a bit of a flattening of class hierarchies due to the general anarchy and Germanic influences but emerges into the Middle Ages as highly rigid and stratified societies. Maybe I'm misreading what you mean by "class based", but I don't see any kind of ideological novelty when French radicals and later socialists start thinking in these terms in the 19th century, just that it's now coming (at least partly) from below rather than exclusively from above.
Reading the title of the post I was sad initially at the more limited scope going forward, but given that Aretha Franklin and another less well-known rap album are on the list, I guess it's a small mistake?
Speaking of IS Ellipsis: can you shed some light on your discovery process? I've never heard of it, a YouTube upload has 12k views and on Spotify the group's highest tracks barely crack 100k. Given that this is an underground rap album from 2005, before the age of easy discoverability via Google, YouTube/Spotify algorithm or things like bandcamp I'm left wondering how stuff with limited reach like that shows up on someone's radar.
Thanks again for doing this, I somehow never knew about the Talking Heads live album and it majorly sweetened a long drive.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
This sounds plausible, but I can't imagine these sorts of arguments are doing much to dull the pain of a linguistic group that is forced to send its children into an alien education system aimed at least in part at eradicating its uniqueness. I agree that better cooperation can be to the benefit of a group and language certainly is good vehicle for that, but that presupposes that the people in question see themselves as part of the group that stands to benefit. My impression of Canada is that at least the Quebecois don't seem all that eager in that regard.
Well, one can advance a claim that had Paris not created a French nation, they'd all be speaking German now, or maybe speaking their regional dialects while being lorded over by Germans.
I think that a France that centralized to a much smaller degree than the real one is a timeline with so many possible changes from our own that I don't think one can get much insight from such a hypothetical. The only attempt by Germany that could plausibly be construed as taking over France in its entirety was WWII (and maybe WWI), but there's no telling if that would have even happened in a world where Normandy, Aquitaine and Occitania existed instead of France. Late Medieval/Renaissance Germany eventually let go of the Netherlands after they had drifted apart too much culturally and politically, so it's not like that sort of scenario is inevitable in our world.
I'd also add that the French kings maintained a somewhat centralized state and lorded over peasants with local languages/dialects just fine for centuries before the arrival of the great homogenizing that lead to the current situation. I'd say that your argument applies much better to the Germans, given that absolutist France was very successful in picking off small German speaking principalities along its eastern border. That Alsace speaks French instead of Alemannic is the result of France being able to keep its conquests into the age of modernity when it got to destroy the local language via mass culture and schooling (of course in the case of Alsace thanks due to a large helping of German idiocy and brutality).
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
While that certainly can be true for individuals, I'm not sure that this is the average case as for how it plays out in practice on a large scale. German language schools for the stateless Western Slavs that exited the Middle Ages under the rule of the German lords of Brandenburg and Saxony and generally kept their language as a distinct people all the way into the 20th century didn't result in a vibrant bi-lingual community, but in their slow motion death as a people. Foreign language schooling has been similarly destructive for regional dialects or distinct languages all over Europe, most notably in France. Picard and Occitan are basically gone, Breton is currently still in the process of being killed.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
That really seems like a specifically American experience to me. I've lived in various cities all over Germany and Europe and never been in a situation where the next grocery store offering about 95% of what I'd buy in a month is farther away than 10 minutes on foot. From where I'm currently sitting in Berlin there are no less than 6 medium-sized supermarkets of varying price- and quality-ranges within that radius. In the north-eastern countryside where I spent parts of my youth every third village had a store run by one of the large German chains, so even for rural residents it was either 5 minutes by foot or 10 by car.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
Can you expand on what you think is weirdness for weirdness' sake in MHtRtC? Although I love all BoC albums nearly equally, the reason I tend to put Campfire Headphase below both the first album and Geogaddi is basically yours but mirrored: it's exactly their greater amount of weirdness, not just for its own sake, but genuinely quirky, interesting weirdness, that makes those two albums the ones with the more lasting and deeper impression on me in comparison.
Second the request for more, love reading about music and being introduced to new material. The only two records I didn't know from this list (Big Star and Organized Konfusion) I liked a lot. If it's not too much work, I'd suggest adding a favorite & least favorite track mention for every album, opinions on that are always very interesting to see.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
It certainly isn't his main topic, but he has posts like this or this that basically say the same thing in slightly different terms. In the first one he is quite clear that he thinks that the inability of education to close achievement gaps is due in large part due to genetics, but he also wishes for that aspect to be worked around and deemphasized.
The only point I'm making is that receiving a jillion dollars' worth of NATO aid didn't help the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan much, so there's hardly a guarantee it'll help Ukraine.
What does helping Ukraine mean to you? The last big movement of the war, the Kherson retreat, was enabled by Western long range artillery making the supply situation of the Russians on the western side of the Dnepr untenable. There are hours of video material showing how Western weapons are being used effectively by the Ukrainian forces.
The Afghan army, aside from never receiving gear as advanced as Ukraine, had a fundamental issue with morale. This is not the case in the current war AFAICT. The comparison with Afghanistan seems like a stretch to me.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
Are you familiar with a good explainer on this particular part of Kierkegaard's thought? I admit I'm always confused when this comes up. If you can't accept this concept via rational explanations, how do you even know it's the most important decision in your life? In the story from OP, the fire does eventually kill the townspeople, so in the end there actually is empirical feedback for them laughing instead of believing. Does Kierkegaard suppose similar consequences for those don't make this leap of faith?
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
How would whatever governing entity that's doing this force the refugees to stay there? Even within rich countries like here in Germany the government bureaucrats tasked with dealing with asylum seekers often find it very hard to keep them in the unknown 10k rural town they were assigned to. There are tons of stories how migrants are sitting in Calais, a completely fine and rich First World city, waiting for an opportunity to make it over to the UK.
That's before considering that the refugees would have to settle next to a potentially aggressive and still dangerous neighbor.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
But that's still not answering the question of why, in the past, more people did Christianity than today and why Christianity could not prevent this.
To draw the obvious parallel: we know that CICO sufficiently explains the weight gain in the general population since the 50s on a mechanistic level: the amount of extra calories that people have started to consume since then lines up perfectly with the extra amount of weight the standard model predicts they would and that they actually have put on. If you don't want to be fat, eat less calories. But none of this answers the much more interesting question of why, as a society, we consume so much more and why large swaths of it are unable to self-regulate, despite obvious consequences in terms of aesthetics and health.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
There is some data suggesting that in the general population Islam is losing ground to beliefs and attitudes more aligned with current Western culture, e.g. irreligiosity is increasing and fertility rates are declining.
This might reverse in the long term with the rise of subgroups who are immune to Western memes and might outcompete mainstream society by way of better birthrates, but as far as a timeline of e.g. 50 years into the future is concerned I'd be pretty confident in predicting that we will see a Middle East where the societal importance of Islam greatly declines. This is entirely anecdotal and subject to selection bias, but from my dealings with Gulf Arabs I've got the impression that they're more concerned about Ronaldo and Messi than Sharia Law.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
More evidence in favour of this is that the problem is perceived to go much deeper than immigration, it's just one issue among many where the elites have acted with arrogant dismissal towards the concerns of the everyday man.
I'd say from my experience with people concerned with migration and also in my own opinion that immigration still stands out as a central issue. Elites acting with arrogant dismissal is a very old and common problem, a nation's ethnic fabric disintegrating under the pressure of low birthrates and immigration is not.
A nation can survive its elites having ideas that are disconnected from the reality on the ground about taxation, energy policy or transport infrastructure. It's probably not going to survive the population that founded it and which, even as it's in steep demographic decline, still staffs a supermajority of all culturally and economically relevant positions being reduced to a minority. The formalism of the state might carry on as an undead skinsuit for a while, but the spirit which sustained is dead.
(also @Syo)
Maybe these maps help: SPD, USPD, KPD; for comparison NSDAP, DNVP (monarchists, revanchists and hard conservatives), Zentrum (Catholic centrists and conservatives).
Looking at these, I agree that there is a trend, but it's not that strong and centered less on East Germany as a whole and more on Saxony* in particular, especially for the KPD votes. Both Nazis and DNVP were pretty strong in Brandenburg, Mecklenburg and Pomerania, all three of which would become part of the DDR.
*Funnily enough, my parents always called the Saxons the 5th occupying power (besides Russia, the US, France and the UK), because chances were high when talking to a representative of state power like a policeman in East Berlin you'd be spoken to in Saxon dialect. EDIT: I just found this article from the early 60s that investigates this cliché via a statistical deep dive quite like the debates about Jewish overrepresentation elsewhere in this thread. The result: while strongly overrepresented among the chief leaders of the DDR, Saxons are actually underrepresented in various important committees and positions.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
Don't know about Korea, but at least for Germany there were some notable differences even before the split after WWII. To name a few:
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the east was much more agrarian than the west, although there were of course many industrial centers like Halle, Berlin or Breslau/Wrocław but these were much more spread-out than in the west
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politically, the east was dominated by the protestant Junker class, the descendants of the feudal nobility that conquered/colonized the east, while in the west industrialist families like the Krupps had the most influence, with a much more mixed religious background overall, as most German Catholics lived in the areas that were to become part of West Germany
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in terms of cultural history, the west was largely congruent with the core German territory since the first time there was something like Germany, while the east was a colonial conquest taken from the territory of the relatively unorganized Western Slavic tribes like the Sorbs or the Pomeranians that were stuck between Medieval Germany and Poland. Go back in history far enough and I guarantee that anyone whose ancestors have lived in Eastern Germany for a while will have a lot of Slavic ancestry, this is completely unusual for Western Germany outside of regions that have received heavy Polish immigration in the Industrial Age
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
The question is whether the Salvadoran or Hmong Republicans will be similar in their beliefs, both explicit (e.g. policy proposals) and implicit (values or behavioral traits), to today's Republicans or whether the term Republican will come to mean something different. Someone recently posted this analysis by a user from the old forum (don't know if he's on here), and if this is accurate it suggest that even the additional European immigration from outside a vague Northern European cultural sphere already greatly shifted political leanings in the general population, and the Hmong and Salvadorans did and will shift it even further.
In light of this, I don't think the assumption of your argument, i.e. that we shouldn't care about demographic change because incoming populations will politically assimilate, is broadly false: the trappings and names of the past might be kept, there will be probably continue to be Republicans and Democrats well into the future, but the actual content underneath these labels has shifted in patterns largely dependent on the underlying demographics.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
An interesting related aspect: I was watching this interview with the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman on his Vision 2030 project, basically aimed at propelling Saudi Arabia forward and lessening its dependence on oil (you might have heard of parts of it like NEOM or, most recently, the Line). Right in the opening few minutes, he goes into detail how such a transformation is necessary because (paraphrasing) the Saudi population has grown at such a rapid pace that the living standard secured by fossil fuel wealth is in danger.
He doesn't directly draw a connection to his social reforms, but I was wondering if there might be at least a partial intent there: increase women's liberation, reduce the birth rate, stop his barren desert country from becoming overpopulated.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
Not sure how much help it'll be to you, but here's a page containing all the articles the author of the tweet I quoted published for the Rosa Luxemburg institute, which is institutionally and ideologically very close to the "Die Linke" ("The Left") party. Most of this material is German only, but if you switch to English a few have been translated, like this latest one from May 2020.
From what I can tell from reading a few articles, what he's saying here largely conforms with what I've seen elsewhere: dismissal of market based solutions (interestingly, in an article from 2015 carbon taxes are mentioned as a valid tool in tandem with more direct interventions like mandating the phase-out of coal, in the 2020 article however he advocates full on socialization of the means of production as a precondition for success), the need for faster and way more radical action right now (society waking up to the reality of climate change 10 years too alte is a common theme of the newer stuff) and a focus on climate justice aspects, especially with regards to Global North vs. Global South.
So in other words, he's not hoping for an initiative of current governments or private enterprise as anything more than a temporary thing, he wants a total transformation of society along broadly Marxist lines which would then be able to tackle climate change effectively and ethically (I guess, the things he mentions and the party association obviously imply that, but he doesn't mention Marx or communism by name). I'm sure this doesn't reflect on the entire movement, I'd say the median member is much more concerned about climate change than about climate justice, but among the leadership this line of thinking seems very common to me.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
I could swear I read in one of the news articles that witnesses described the assailant as a man with unkempt hair and tattered clothing, but as of now all articles I could find only confirm his gender, but nothing else. I'll edit it.
Three days ago, my hometown Berlin witnessed an event (German news article) that combines several culture war flashpoints into an almost absurdist melange: a cyclist was driven over by a concrete mixer truck (who was at fault is unclear at the moment, initial statements by the police indicate that the cyclist fell over by her own and that the driver could not react in time, though he might still be at fault for driving too close to her), the driver, as he was leaving his vehicle to call for help, was attacked and wounded with a knife by an unknown and currently fugitive homeless* person, resulting in him needing hospital care, and finally, to top it all off, the special emergency service vehicle purpose built for rescuing people stuck under heavy vehicles was hindered in its approach to the scene of the accident by a traffic jam caused by climate activists who had glued themselves to one of the main highways of the city, losing valuable time and forcing personnel that had made it to the scene to "improvise", in their own words. The woman has died of her injuries today, the driver will survive, as far as is known.
It goes without saying that this story has something for everyone: car drivers vs bikers & new urbanists; crime, homelessness and decay of public spaces; climate activists vs people wanting to go about their day without disruption; and of course the extra comedic cherry on top that this happened in Berlin, notorious for incompetence and embarrassing gaffes.
In the days that followed, several notable people weighed in on social media. One particular take by one of the luminaries of German climate activism quickly made waves on social and legacy media for its display of a pretty cold-bloded pragmatism:
#cyclist mortally injured: "special vehicle for lifting the truck came late due to blockades and the traffic jam they caused"
shit, but don't be intimidated: it's climate fight, not climate cuddling & shit happens.
(image of the now deleted original)
Now, this guy in particular was always pretty radical, but until now this exact scenario was always waved away as something improbable that no activist of good conscience would allow to happen. As already mentioned, after the backlash he quickly deleted it and apologized, but his output since then has been to basically affirm the content of the tweet in a more polite tone, and the scene around him seems to agree AFAICT.
The last few months have seen an increase in highly visible stunts by climate activists, most notably a constant flow of people gluing themselves to the glass casings around famous paintings throughout Europe's museums. Highway blockades such as the one from this event are becoming a regular occurrence here in Berlin and other large German cities. It seems as though climate activism is becoming more and more serious. Up until now, reactions have been more annoyed than angry, with most people I talked to or saw posting on social media dismissing these activities as childish stunts. This and the rather unapologetic stance of the people involved might change things a bit. It remains to be seen if the reaction will be a decrease in happenings as activists are slapped down by prohibitive fines or a further radicalization. Demographically, the protestor seem to be a mixture of almost entirely urban and college-educated young people and a few younger Boomers and older Gen-Xers. I don't know if that's the stuff which refinery bombers or electricity-cable cutters are made of, but perhaps an event approaching significant eco-terrorism might be on the horizon.
* I remember reading something to this effect initially, but that seems to have been retracted or deleted. For now, nothing but the assailant's gender is confirmed.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
... reads exactly like "race is a social construct" except you're constructing it in a way convenient to your particular (somewhat idiosyncratic) white nationalist sentiments.
That just gets back to the common Motte-and-Bailey of "race is a social construct", doesn't it? On a narrow reading, it clearly is, as OP's personal account of racial categorization provides evidence for. On the reading with the further implication of "... and therefore whatever racial groupings are often used are entirely arbitrary [and have no grounding in biology whatsoever]", which is the one that's often meant when the phrase is used in arguments, I'd say it's clearly not, and OP provides a few reasons to think that, e.g. phenotype or various degrees of admixture.
In other words, I don't see the own-goal here, OP seems clearly aware that racial categorization draws both from cultural attitudes and genetic facts. You could basically read his posts as: "this is my social construction of whiteness, here's why I think it captures something about objective reality and why it's socially useful".
Yes, in the context of the overall economy you're completely right and maybe this was a dumb way to put it. However, I meant for this to be more of an example regarding the point of the speed of expansion. In a toy economy like Ricardo's with only various forms of text work as goods in demand and an advanced LLM and office workers as the only productive forces, the comparative advantage that office workers might have is rendered irrelevant by the fact that the AI model is practically infinitely scalable, that's what this was supposed to illustrate.
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