DirtyWaterHotDog
No bio...
User ID: 625
DirtyWaterHotDog
4mo ago
Fair, I'll state my claim more clearly.
Jobs force people to agglomerate around cities. Sprawl forces low density, which then forces low supply (high prices) or longer commutes.
Space, time & disposable income affect fertility. Leaving cities comes with a high cost on time and disposable income. Building larger apartments is the answer. IE. large towers, densely packed within the city, but not within the building itself. We don't want to have a canned tuna situation.)
Here are some attainable upper-middle class apartment complexes that I have personally visited. Hongkong, NYC, Zurich, India, Paris, Geneva and Boston. (generally, ignore the ugliness of some of them. They were built during a tasteless modernist era. But they're quite pleasant once you're there)
Examples above. It allows people to be near their work, school and amenities Taller apartments allows for larger apartments on the same footprint/number of families. Staying in the city means disposable income isn't at risk.
We can do both. Sprawl horizontally and vertically. But both groups always find each other on opposite sides of arguments. I've conceded that this phenomena is inevitable. Therefore, I find myself opposing your proposal of horizontal sprawl in favor of my desire for vertical sprawl.
Yeah. Around the world people buy apartments and own them. I personally know friends in Mumbai, Delhi, Geneva, Singapore*, Zurich & Paris who own apartments. The apartments are as liquid as any other type of housing. Because the apartment complexes have large shared facilities, it promotes a natural sense of belonging and community. Makes it great for families.
Here are some attainable upper-middle class apartment complexes that I have personally visited. Hongkong, NYC, Zurich, India, Paris, Geneva and Boston. (generally, ignore the ugliness of some of them. They were built during a tasteless modernist era. But they're quite pleasant once you're there)
These are all fairly dense family oriented complexes. Here, people do not own cars or have a single hatchback for out-of-town trips. You'll notice how the density doesn't mean compromising on green space. Instead, consolidating people into vertical spaces means that the remaining flat land can be used for green space, community gardens and playgrounds. Also, the condos are distant from arterial roads, so quiet and safety, that's associated with suburbs, aren't compromised. The gated nature of many pseudo-public spaces facilities as communal sense of child supervision. You can leave your kids alone, but they're never alone or vulnerable.
Admittedly, I didn't grow up in the US. I grew up in a less fancy version of my above examples, back in India. I don't have the same visceral dislike for apartments like some Americans. I know that American apartments are usually sad motel-esque setups, premium millionaire homes or yuppie share homes. Not a lot of normal 30-40 something families in cities.
That being said, suburbs don't seem all that great either. From my experience living in American suburbs, every house I around me was cookie cutter. Yards were empty. Kids were always supervised. No one walked. I frequently visit French and Swiss cities. Here, people live in apartments, but I see a lot more kids outdoors. Parks are well used. From my anecdotal experiences, European city life is superior to American suburban life in every way.
stability was not within their control
How is that different from an HOA or interest payments on a loan ? Maintenance costs are constant. Once enough has been collected, condo associations spend from their budget. Random one-off bills are unheard of.
Remember that something like 1-in-4 American households live paycheque-to-paycheck. If you're in that position, unexpectedly having to move can financially ruin you.
Wouldn't missing your loan payments put you at the same risk ?
DirtyWaterHotDog
4mo ago
injustice
Why does justice suddenly begin factoring in? Is it just that Utah and Idaho residents have 10x of a NYers political power in the Senate ? Don't even get me started on DC.
But assholes in Pennsylvania and New York and Virginia, whose states are entirely private, should not be choking out Nevada and Utah and Idaho
I hear the similarly-framed arguments in NY, NJ & Massachusetts about the North East subsidizing the lives of Middle America. Either ways, I don't federal control of land has anything to do with low demand for moving to Vegas or Reno
DirtyWaterHotDog
4mo ago
Development is pro-natal
Is it ? I believe the causation is reversed. People who want kids move to suburbs because American inner-cities are the shame of the 1st world. Mormons moved because they wanted more kids, but more land won't magically create more mormons. Fertility rate is a super-national phenomenon. Intra-national fertility shows low variance (eg: Europe) and at times clashes with the more space = more fertility assumption (eg: France)
83% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas. So, at most, people would move to suburbs or exurbs. Suburbs and exurbs are already quite sparse and privately owned. People are tied to their job and profession. They move to cities for work. As long as jobs exist in cities, people aren't leaving urban areas.
Density increases prices
Blatantly false. High demand and low supply increases prices.. Density increases supply, and therefore decreases prices. It's just that the densest places have such a high demand, that no amount of density can limit housing price increase. Places like Austin and Auckland have seen slower housing price growth because of permissive zoning (densification). On the other hand, Bay Area suburb prices keep shooting up because it's already full with single family homes, and rezoning isn't permitted.
If we want people having 3, 4, 5 kids
Name one 1st world nation with a fertility rate above 2.5. The decline in fertility is relentless & global. I appreciate every genuine attempt towards increasing fertility. But, there is no evidence that more space leads to people having more kids.
Israel may count, but zoom in on any Israeli exurb/suburb and it's vastly denser than most American cities. Clearly density was not the issue. I want to offer a counter-solution for the same problem. Densify aggressively instead.
Jobs are in cities. People won't move and they can't move. But, you can make it easier for them to own property near where they work. If space is the issue, then going from 2 -> 4 bed apartments should solve those issues.
Development is good for the economy
Is it ? First the multi-year infrastructure spending sink & then the annual drain on low-density infrastructure. All for a bunch of people who were unemployable enough to move to the middle of nowhere ? How is it any different than social science fake-jobs in the govt. It creates temporary jobs, with negative long term value.
The US needs to aggressively build out family-sized apartments within its existing cities. SJ, SF & LA should be the first targets. Boston, DC & Miami should be next. Austin & Phoenix (Tempe) area already in the middle of a build out, so non-coastal America is covered. In the north, I think Canada (Vancouver & Toronto) will cannibalize growth potential from Seattle & Chicago....so imma leave the north out of this.
DirtyWaterHotDog
4mo ago
Partially agree. Judith is making a horseshoe point without realizing it.
2025 Trump is a far-right anti-institutionalist identarian. Sanders and the Squad would be popular analogues on the left. On both sides, these people express glee at the suffering of others (fuck karens, fuck billionaires, fuck immigrants, fuck trans people etc). They're contrasted by painfully indecisive centralists. 'Decision by Committee' is a slur in business, but also the explicit goal of centrist govts.
The reason her point hits home for the ring-wing, is because right wing centrists lost all power. Post-Jan 6, there was a rout, and the likes of Mitt Romney have been purged. On the democratic side, Bernie was successfully sidelined by Biden and 'The Squad' has been dismantled. The left's centrists are strong, so the sadism of their identarian wing is suppressed.
To be clear, I am a follower of Trump, and part of my evidence for the thesis advanced here comes from introspection on my own psychology. It feels good to define yourself and your own as Inside, and others as Outside, and to apportion to each what is rightly due.
We all have a sadistic side to us. Like epigenetics, we choose to indulge in sadism when our zeitgeist promotes it. Have you only started indulging your sadism post-Trump ? Or has it always been indulged internally, with an external facade to fit into a zeitgeist that promoted restraint ? Even as adults, I know many smart people, who turn into total jackasses when they're around that one dude (we all know one such dude). Those same people have confessed to feeling terrible afterwards, when I talked to them 1:1. Not pretend confessed, I mean 'bawling their eyes out' confessed. You can't always blame unintentional cult members for the sins of a hypnotic leader.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the extreme left's failure has to do with ex-communist nations still being shit-holes. Communism has caused suffering more recently than Nazism. There are people alive who remember how horrible it was. The WW2 veterans are all dead, and the Axis powers are all successful nations now. Italy, Germany, Japan....all great places to live. History is cyclical because only visceral experiences can shape a man. Once those with scar tissue drop dead, no amount of WW2 movies can communicate those horrors to new youth. They must make the same mistakes again.
DirtyWaterHotDog
4mo ago
Surely you mean "asymmetrically"?
Yep, corrected.
the number of eligible groups you could apply this to changes.
Agreed.
DirtyWaterHotDog
4mo ago
(I'm taking liberalism to mean to mean pragmatic pro-institution free market globalists. Macron would be the closest example of ones still in power)
quitting of center left moderates like TracingWoodgrains and Yassine Meskhout
More like their substacks took off, and it doesn't make sense for them to do it for free anymore. If anything, it is a clear sign that they're ascendent. Once politically homeless, they now have an audience of anti-woke centrists listening to them.
failure of liberalism
For decades, Liberals were dominant on both the left and the right. With the fall of the Soviet union, the extreme left was left nursing it wounds. On the right, 9/11 response & economic recovery required large institutional efforts, so anti-institutional groups had no uptake.
AOC and Trump use symbiotic antagonism to shore up support within their ranks. Both would rather see the other win than an centrist. They have embraced horseshoe theory. Liberals are yet to get there. Left liberals still treat right liberals with greater disdain than extreme progressives, and vice versa. Liberals need to work across the aisle to get centrists bill through, while collectively keeping extremists at bay. At the national level, it seems impossible. They have terrible optics too. The centrist left has geriatric Biden/Clinton or DEI hires like Kamala. The centrist right is geriatrics and nepo babies. That's a losing proposition if I've ever seen one.
But there are signs of change among the youth and local govts. Major blue cities have swung to the center. The clearest example is Ann Davidson switching from Dem -> Rep and winning Seattle's district attorney seat. Eric Adams ran on a centrist platform for NYC mayor, and has managed to stay in power despite many legitimate scandals. At the national level, Pete Buttigieg seems to have more friends at Fox News that within the Democratic big tent.
Political trends are cyclic. I think populism is peaking in North America. But I expect Western Europe to get worse before it gets better (for liberals).
Germany, France, South Korea and Canada
It's immigration. Liberalism assumes a certain non-zero-sum-ness to the world. Once low-skill immigrants worsen the QOL of your liberal utopia, liberalism's loses its core appeal. Problematic immigrants come illegally or as opportunistic refugees. If liberalism shows a capacity for strong border enforcement & minimal refugees, then it has a chance. South Korea is it's own mess and has been for a while. Won't equate its turmoil with western ideological trends.
Japan, China
Guess how many illegal immigrants and refugees come to these countries.
On immigration
I don't think employment based immigration is an issue. (Note, I am on H1b, so take my opinion with that caveat). Australia for instance, maintains steady immigration, but has a higher ratio of skilled immigrants vs the others. It hasn't swung populist just yet. For decades before, Canada & the UK sustained a high rate of skills based immigration and it did not doom liberal-centrists. Even after the total shitshow at Canada/UK, their retaliatory leaders of choice still feel like Liberals (Starmer, Pierre).
Is liberalism dying?
Yes
Will liberalism die ?
No.
Guerilla warfare is a defensive strategy against symmetrically asymmetrically matched opponents. Once the tide starts turning the guerillas have no reason to play by this defensive strategy. At that point they move above ground, take over institutions, and the final phase of the battle will resemble one of a traditional war or a coup.
Is the entire blog written by deep seek ? I'm surprised at how often it uses rat-sphere phrases.
Schelling fences , meta-derisking , empirical weight
'Schelling fences' phrase was coined by Scott right ? Did you coax it to sound like a less-wronger ?
When 90% of Europe’s population died during the Black Death
bit exaggerated no ?
Reshaping labor markets: Top graduates now see AGI research as higher-status than finance or civil service.
Chatgpt doesn't like making controversial statements. It's refreshing to see a less lobotomized model delve into murky areas like reconfiguring society.
Liang’s meta-derisking – making exploration legible, replicable, and prestigious
I like this framing. It's incisive. Would be an impressive way to frame the conclusion for any person, let alone an AI. The prestige part is most important.
It demands ecosystems that reward speculative genius as reliably as rice farmers once rewarded meticulousness. The question isn’t whether Chinese minds can innovate, but whether China’s institutional lattice will let a thousand DeepSeeks bloom
yeah......it's right. Derivative, but correct.
or if this lone swallow merely heralds a cultural spring that never comes.
Hah. LLMs can't resist a good metaphor.
DirtyWaterHotDog
4mo ago
Everyone was a writer, a musician, an artist
Its damning, because any serious creative will move to LA / NYC. The ones left in SF are the untalented and fickle kind.
DirtyWaterHotDog
4mo ago
Iron Dome for America
America already has an Iron Dome, it's called the Atlantic & Pacific oceans. Any nation that has the resources to drop a missile on the American mainland is already budgeting for nuclear war. At that point, we're looking at a bad actor who wants the apocalyptic scenario. No Iron Dome is going to stop a player that powerful, motivated and off-their-rocker.
The paranoia is reminiscent of cold war era nuclear arms race. There is reason we stopped proliferating.
kinetic fires and possibly lasers in space
It aligns Elon's and Lock-heed Martin's joint interests. With a double whammy that powerful, I bet it goes through.
DirtyWaterHotDog
4mo ago
Egg frying is about temperature. A stainless steel pan would work just fine. I use carbon steel (woks), and it works great. You only need a non-stick for french omelettes.
DirtyWaterHotDog
4mo ago
Ah you're right. The rest of it is heat sinks and fans. You could fit a whole super-computing cluster on a shipping container.
DirtyWaterHotDog
4mo ago
with a tiny fraction of the compute budget, with no ability to get SOTA GPUs
Shouldn't US intelligence already know about these GPUs ? You can fit 5000 GPUs on a standard shipping container with no special handling required. It should be trivial to smuggle 10 shipping containers for acquiring these GPUs. Scale.AI CEO is the child of Los Alamos researchers and deeply embedded within the US military industrial complex. If he knows it, then US intelligence knows too.
The panic is mostly among twitter speculators.
small AI lab
The R1 paper has 200 authors on it. By their own acknowledgement, they aren't small. Over 2023 Post-GPT4 OpenAI had around 400 employees, and most of these were product people. If R1 had 200 researchers, they'd be around the same size as an OpenAI with $10B in funding.
lot of OpenAI's current position is derivative of a period of time where they published their research
I was working closely with OpenAI as far back as 2021. Technically, tthey weren't that far ahead . They just executed so much better.
They discovered some incredible insights on the continued scaling of model capabilities with size and data. But, once you get that insight, you can't hide it (it's self evident from the model) and is easy to adopt for others in the field. Between Google's Palm 540B & Lambda 2021, the research community clearly knew all the secrets. Openai's other big innovation was the quality of post-training & rlhf, which made talking to it feel far more natural. The Palm models weren't bad, they were just too ADHD to stay on topic. That too wasn't a technical secret as much as an organizational secret. Back then, AI applied-research-2-product pipelines were quite immature at big tech. So, the institutional will power for something like this was lacking.
It's not a surprise that competitors can catch up quickly if they know what's possible and what the target is.
Alibaba was a major player during the pre-GPT LLM battle (yes, LLMs existed for a good half decade before). I'm more surprised that it took this long for China to catch up. On embeddings & cross-encoders, Beijing academy of artificial intelligence (BAAI) had consistently been state of the art. In Vision, they've been mogging everyone since Kaiming He published Resnet at MSR Asia (China) in 2016.
Anyway, do you believe DeepSeek?
Yeah, I believe in China. Motherfuckers are cracked.
DirtyWaterHotDog
4mo ago
Thailand has been ahead on gender-fluidity (lady boys) and sex-in-public-life (mature prostitution industry) for a while now.
Non-christian nations are less bothered by change which has frictions with christian conservatism. India is comfortable with MTF transitioners. Pahadi muslims are comfortable with gay-sex (as long as you dont call it gay sex). Japanese have widespread tolerance for cheating.
Loyal monogamous heterosexual marriage matters matters most to Anglo Christians.
DirtyWaterHotDog
5mo ago
Nothing to discuss here, but found a 5 part deep dive podcast on the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war by Conflicted-History. Probably 7-8 hours long.
Dan Carlin-esque in the best way possible. I was well-versed with the war, and it passed my sniff test. I recommend.
Link - https://www.conflictedhistory.com/the-1971-bangladesh-war-part-1-land-of-broken-maps/
DirtyWaterHotDog
5mo ago
That's why I am hedging by buying Intel too.
There are only 2 companies with any kind of foundry expertise. If TSMC goes under, Intel will at least double overnight.
DirtyWaterHotDog
5mo ago
Because I am a dum dum.
I understand that they have a monopoly on the market. But, What the fuck is photolithography ? More realistically, how big is their moat ? How lasting is their tech ? How are types of etching different? Why is it hard ?
I am not going to jump in blind.
DirtyWaterHotDog
5mo ago
I'd rather buy TSMC. Fabs & Foundries are the main bottleneck. Nvidia & TSMC's volumes will scale together. TSMC has invasion risk, but you can offset that by investing in Intel. TSMC's PE ratio is 30, and isn't pumped up by recent deliveries. Intel is technically in dire straits, but IMO that's priced in. Their valuation is 0.1x of TSMC.
On Monday, I'll be buying some TSMC & Intel together. At $3.2T, I don't think Nvidia stock is going to more than 2x above SNP growth.
DirtyWaterHotDog
5mo ago
I'm not American, and know a limited amount about Tubman. I'm more interested in the art of mythmaking itself.
The public's reception of every currency-note-resident is colored by myth more so than historical facts. The choice to put a person on the note is an ideological statement. Does it matter if Tubman's story is fiction, if it was mean to be apocryphal anyways ? It's about what Tubman stands for, not her actual exploits. As a counter, the same argument applies for George Floyd, whose public portrayal and personal reality couldn't have been more distant. However, Tubman at her worst, was a perfectly normal person. George Floyd was a criminal and a drug addict. I endorse one, not the other. There is a difference.
I am sympathetic to oral history narratives. The culture of transmission through writing is more prominent among European (Christian) & Chinese peoples. It is no doubt a superior technology to oral history, but there are good reasons for why some groups didn't favor it. Slaves were illiterate. Indic peoples had already developed a strict culture of oral history, and had notorious tropical degradation problems. Nomadic peoples such as native Americans didn't maintain keepsakes at all, books or otherwise. Yes, their historic accounts are by definition less trustworthy. But, they aren't fictitious. The mean truthfulness of oral vs written accounts is probably pretty close, but the oral stories definitely have higher variance. The strong coupling of religion (Bible, Protestantism) with the written text, obviously accelerated the adoption of writing among the west's population like no other place. Even among the inventors of paper (Chinese), historic accounts of non-royals aren't preserved that well.
From that POV, I don't think it's fair to hold Tubman's muddled history against her. She wasn't illiterate by choice. The absence of first person written accounts shouldn't be a reason to keep her out of the currency-note.
There are other good reasons to not replace presidents with civilians, but I digress.
P.S: Every passing day, I sound more and more like a woke cultural relativist. I bet it's the contrarian in me. Now that the right is ascendant, I rush to the left's defense.
DirtyWaterHotDog
5mo ago
Vanilla isn't an insult, Vanilla is a sign of absolute victory. Made from the 2nd most expensive spice, vanilla is exquisite. So much so, that we normiefied it. We now have ways to make imitation vanilla and once the inner bean is used, we can still extract by preserving it in alcohol.
English is the most 'vanilla' language, because the Britain/America won. Fries are vanilla sides because nothing is better. Chatgpt's writing style is vanilla, because that exact sentence pattern dominated western speech for a century.
Vanilla becomes an insult, yes. But, that's because it's already won. High quality vanilla bean is genuinely top-tier.
DirtyWaterHotDog
5mo ago
fair fair.
I did only use it to get a list of points that add up to a first world QOL.
The actual value add (the strike throughs) and the core point (Luigi's assassination as major anecdote for America's low-trust-society-ness, America feeling like a developing country) are all mine.
But point taken. Not a lot of 'human' places left on the internet. No point in turning this one into a vanilla slop-fest.
PS: and before I get accused for using Chatgpt, this is the first time I've done that. My point-wise markdown writing style is my own. That chat gpt uses the same style is coincidence.
DirtyWaterHotDog
6mo ago
I just got 'upgraded' on my vitamin D supplements. Got a big syringe to my butt, and 50k IU pills once a week.
I've been in sunny California all of last year, and still ended up deficient. I'm no homebody either. So not sure what the reason is. Maybe it's just that I'm brown and wear jackets semi-permanently.
The previous multi-vitamin pills I took had a pathetic 500-1000 IU. That's less than 10k a week. Gotta up the numbers chief.
You're correct. The kind of place you describe is a hellish sardine can. Building vertical with no considerations is a recipe for disaster. Unfortunately, post 1970s white flight, many American cities have become hostile to things families care about.
I mentioned in another post that I frequent French and Swiss cities. Even in Paris proper there is an abundance of parks, rentable gardens, playgrounds and just generally - open space. Go away from the touristy parts, and Paris gets fairly quiet, car free and residential. The Swiss cities have all of this but 1 level better.
Car death numbers are so high in sprawling America, that at some point suburbs are creating the problems they claim to solve. Parisians dont have to worry about cars, because it's impossible for maniacs to drive 50 mph in residential zones. Similarly, violence and child safety is organically taken care of when there are a dozen observers around at any given moment.
I would let my kid qander by themselves in an American inner city with 4 lane arterials in every direction. But, thats the outcome of the destruction of American cities....not a property of city by itself.
To me, America has less than 10 cities. Everywhere else is a downtown mall and business area surrounded with endless suburbs.
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