DradisPing
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User ID: 1102
DradisPing
24d ago
I think the way the press reported him was never really accurate. His hero was always Octavian and has been sporting a roman haircut for like 15 years now. He was known to take new hires on long hikes and was always somewhat outdoorsy.
He's the sort of guy who would decide that learning some hand to hand combat training is important.
But if you're a white guy doing a VC funded bay area tech company there are certain cultural expectations you need to conform to.
After 2016 he was personally blamed for Trumps election by many. In 2020 he spent 400 million of his own money in a scheme to oppose Trump that put him in some significant personal legal jeopardy.
It didn't get him back in good graces so I think his attitude now is "I don't need those people anyways".
It's common for famous people in California to play down personality traits that don't conform to the ruling consensus. A good example is someone like Stephen Spielberg who's definitely a loyal democrat, but he's a former eagle scout who loves guns. People tend to assume he was a pot smoking theatre kid when he was young.
DradisPing
28d ago
A more workable slogan would be "We don't expect you to be white, but we do expect you to act white." They want to be in a society where white American behavioural norms are expected and not being white isn't an excuse.
DradisPing
8mo ago
I don't think there's anything new here. I'm quite certain that there's a long history of courts ordering employers to inform their employees about their rights regarding things like unionization, racial discrimination, sexual harassment, etc.
DradisPing
9mo ago
I think the moral dilemma is "Should you put yourself at risk to help people who endanger themselves foolishly?"
If you assume 20% of people will pick blue because they misunderstand the question then the moral calculus is very different.
DradisPing
10mo ago
has had such a good track record of making good on its promise of embodying
That's a poem by Emma Lazarus, and it's written on one of several plaques on the statue of liberty because she helped raise money for it's construction.
It was never adopted as any sort of national promise.
DradisPing
10mo ago
are people who are just not smart enough / knowledgeable enough to understand that actual 10D chess moves are rare in politics.
Twenty years ago the top ivies had an incredible reputation in the general public. Ivy League professors were magical wizards who you could only listen to if you got accepted to special schools for the brilliant.
A lot of it the reputation still remains.
Picture a red state factory worker. He knows Harvard grads are super brilliant. DC is full of them. Yet he sees them making obviously stupid decisions.
Some grand 10D chess move is an obvious answer.
People who have more contact with Harvard grads, even just reading their writing regularly, are much more aware of their human limits.
Watching the academic elite discuss politics on Twitter has also opened a lot of eyes.
DradisPing
1mo ago
Blacks lived in segregated neighborhoods, and this was a problem. After The War, people started moving to the suburbs, a process which was hasted by not wanting to live alongside black people, who were gradually getting better access to housing.
There's a bit of history missing from your model. During [The Great Migration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_(African_American)) from approximately 1930-1970 large numbers of Blacks moved up from the south to take advantage of factory jobs and social programs in the rust belt.
So the urban whites were fleeing a crime wave from new arrivals to the city, not longtime neighbours.
DradisPing
1mo ago
My view is that there's a small chance that a super intelligent AI will enslave mankind in eternal totalitarianism.
A super intelligent AI controlled by the intelligence community? 100% chance of enslavement.
DradisPing
4mo ago
The press loves to imply offensive right coded groups are much larger than they are. The Westboro Baptist Church peaked at 40 members.
Very few far right groups can get 50 people to a rally. Even in Charlottesville most of the people there were for the rally to stop removal of monuments, not for any broader objective.
The online alt-right movement was real but it was based on the idea that the right had to accept that racial identitarianism was the future and there was no choice but to organize a white identity movement.
Trumps victory changed things. Particularly the intense pushback from the GOPe.
It turns out that Paul Ryan wasn't a weak coward. He just loved big donors and hated Republican voters.
So the people who were reluctantly toying with white racial identitarianism switched gears. Replacing the GOPe feels better and is a much more achievable goal, even if it is difficult.
DradisPing
5mo ago
I think it's a mix of trolling and a low effort scam. Post the auction with some code words associated with CSAM, hope someone bids. Deliver them the image of a cheese pizza as agreed. They won't be in an position to complain.
I doubt there are actually many purchasers.
DradisPing
5mo ago
I have a simple solution to get things started quickly. Make donations to college sports non-tax deductible.
Rich left wingers fund left wing organizations. Rich right wingers fund college football.
Republicans need to start football shaming the wealthy.
DradisPing
6mo ago
When Israel was in control of Gaza they built the hospital to be a bomb resistant fortress so that patients would be safe during fighting. They handed control of Gaza to the PLA / Fatah. Then Hamas won elections in 2007 and took over.
Hamas set up their headquarters in the hospital. For two reasons, it would look bad if Israel attacked it and it was already fortified.
Western reporters are in an odd spot. They sympathize with the Palestinians as an underdog and see it through an anti-colonial lens. Also they need access to Hamas to do reporting in Gaza. Also there's the safety of their reporters.
As a result it's uncouth to mention the Hamas fighters. They sort of beat around the bush.
The only news sources who will talk about them openly are the kind of sources that say blunt un-PC things.
DradisPing
11mo ago
Covid hit NYC. All non-essential surgeries in the country were then cancelled.
Many hospitals in other parts of the country found themselves no major covid outbreak and no elective surgeries.
The nurses had fuck all to do. So they made TikTok dances.
DradisPing
27d ago
I do not want to be a gym rat or get humongous.
Don't worry about this, you don't accidentally get humongous.
The low risk move is to say you're worried that neither of you is getting enough exercise and push to go to some Pilates classes together to live a healthier lifestyle.
DradisPing
3mo ago
Previous suits to hold manufacturers responsible for gun violence have all fallen flat, so it’s a pretty major milestone that this is being heard at all
It looks like they did some pretty blatant forum shopping. The first circuit has 11 judges and only 3 republican appointees, with the most recent being by George HW Bush.
The gun manufactures should be protected by both the foreign government issue, as well as a federal law immunizing gun manufacturers. The tactic lefty judges have been using lately is to just ignore those issues and let the lawsuit proceed. The SCOTUS doesn't take many cases and they get a bit lazy and think they can just review the whole case in the end.
The manufacturers will see a doomed trial with biased judges and settle. So the SCOTUS will never have a case to review.
That's what happened in the Remington lawsuit, Mexico is seeking to repeat.
though it does seem unfair to Mexico if their own laws are being completely circumvented
Perhaps they should invest in some sort of wall to reduce smuggling.
DradisPing
4mo ago
A more realistic alternative would have been halting Lend-Lease after Stalin didn't provide any support for the Warsaw Uprising. That would have limited the USSR's expansion.
Marching to Moscow wouldn't make sense. The war against Japan was still ongoing.
DradisPing
5mo ago
OpenAI's structure is a little convoluted, https://openai.com/our-structure
It's a 501c3 that owns a for-profit company. They are trying to walk a tightrope to avoid falling into thorny legal issues.
It would be very easy for Altman to do something that created legal issues he didn't expect. Moving resources between the orgs could be a problem. Doing something as simple as telling a few of the non-profit employees to help out the engineers at the for profit company is a legal minefield.
There's also another issue. 501c3s are supposed to be run in the ideal Moldbug fashion. The CEO is a local monarch and the board measures his performance and can fire him if they aren't satisfied.
However the board sometimes let power go to their heads and decide they should be running things. They fire the CEO because he's getting the glory and not doing what they say.
DradisPing
6mo ago
Posting here for better visibility, was posted in last weeks thread.
Today we're going to discus the most exciting topic ever, Canadian real estate!
I'm largely just talking about Ontario, but Vancouver has also had crazy real estate for decades.
Toronto area real estate is famous for being a bit odd. California prices without California salaries. Or California weather.
There's a post on Reddit (circa 2022) showing similarly sized homes in Niagara Falls, ON and Niagara Falls, NY. 11 minutes apart. The US home was listed at $69k. The Canadian home was listed at $1.18M. That was about 900k USD at the time. That house was a bit of an outlier, but average sale price in Niagara Falls, ON was $617,100 (445k USD) vs $215.3K in Buffalo, NY.
And Niagara Falls is outside of comfortable Toronto commuting range, where the high paying jobs are. To get to downtown Toronto for 9AM Google maps recommends leaving at 6:10AM. Median household income in the city is $74,500 (54K USD).
When you get closer to Toronto, things get worse.
So how did we get here?
First cities learned that taxes on new construction were an easy way to get money without upsetting current residents. A new detached home typically has $186,300 (135k USD) in development fees*. I've heard people argue that it's higher if you calculate interest accrued due to government delays, often caused by no hiring someone with connections to work the system.
Combine that with high immigration and there's a significant structural housing shortage. Toronto has 360 housing units per 1000 residents. The US has 427, France has 540* all 2020 numbers.
Next there's the foreign investment issue. Some of the details here aren't proven since they aren't knowable for obvious reasons.
25 years ago China was less stable but getting richer. It was difficult to move money out of the country but wealthy Chinese could buy a home in Vancouver if they were frequently there for business or a condo for their kids studying without upsetting the CCP. This turned into smuggling money into Canadian real estate as a safe nest egg, and the Canadian government told regulators to turn a blind eye.
Things escalated into serious money laundering.
Again, I'll admit this is unproven before anyone jumps on me...
But Mexican narco gangs produce fentanyl in Mexico with precursor chemicals from Chinese companies. The fentanyl is sold in the US. The US government watches for big unexplained transfers of money going back to Mexico or to the Chinese chemical companies.
So they are using Canadian real estate to close the loop. The chemical companies sell the debt to a broker. The broker finds families in China who want to pool their money and get it out of the country. Then he connects with the narco gangs to transfer the money to be used in a home purchase by one of the family's kids studying in Canada.
But back to better grounded discussion.
The constant rise in home prices made house flipping and rental properties common. Airbnb became a driving force behind tiny expensive condo construction.
Then covid hit.
Canada had some pretty extreme covid lockdowns. This drove up home prices even more. And home flippers started buying home far from Toronto. Prices in small towns exploded.
However, the rental market in cities was hurting as living in a small apartment when everything is shut down for months is not fun. However a lot of federal politicians have invested in rental properties. The previous minister in charge of affordable housing owned two rental properties with hefty mortgages.
So the feds came up with a way to turn the city rental market around fast. In 2019 they had issued 404,000 new student visas. In 2022 they loosed up restrictions on employment as a student and brought in 551,405 new students.
No thought was given to where these 150k additional new students would live. See the housing deficit since 2020 as above.
Or work, as they all (and a big chunk of the other 400k) came in with the promise of being able to work 20 hours a week and assumed they could all land a part time IT job at least.
There are mass line ups for fast food jobs and stories of rented homes with 10 students living there.
But back to real estate.
A few things happened in 2023.
Business have been phasing out work from home, and commuting from that small town where they bought a house at the peak of the market in 2022 isn't manageable long term.
Interest rates have spiked. This is worse in Canada because mortgages typically renew at the current interest rate every 5 years. With the rate spike your mortgage payment can double or more.
Airbnb income has collapsed due to economic fears. This is happening across the US as well.
The Chinese economy is in trouble. So many people want to dump their investment properties in Canada because they need the money at home.
What's the result? A total shit show.
First there's the pre-construction market. A buyer puts a 20% down (35% for non Canadian resident) and is obligated to buy the house / condo when it's complete.
People were buying these to flip before closing. It was seen as a safe and easy way to make money. They couldn't actually afford the mortgage on the new place, but figured they couldn't lose money.
The risks were significant. If they don't close the builder does an assignment sale and the original buyer owes the builder for any shortfall from the agreed purchase price.
A quick Twitter search for an example turns up an assignment sale where a 2.2 million dollar home (1.6M USD) is being sold at a 332k (240k USD) loss after agent fees.
It's not an isolated example.
The new ultra luxury condo building at 1 Bloor West, marketed as "The One", has entered receivership with $1.2 billion in loans already in default (870M USD).
The normal sale market isn't doing well either. Ontario is in a weird situation where there's a glut of luxury homes but still a severe shortage of homes people can actually afford. Everything has been renovated and flipped. I don't think they've built a two bedroom starter home in the past 30 years.
There are some good Twitter accounts tracking real estate price crashes:
https://twitter.com/jasongofficial
https://twitter.com/ShaziGoalie
Again keep in mind it's just beginning. Investors are still trying to diamond hands it, but the mortgage resets are coming and there just aren't enough people with piles of cash who actually want to live in Ontario. They can't HODL forever.
Go to https://www.realtor.ca/ and search for Toronto homes over 1.5 million. Zoom out. There just aren't that many people in the province looking to buy homes at that price. Especially look at all of the listings in the middle of no where.
People have been joking, with less exaggeration than you'd expect, that during covid speculators purchased the entire town of Bancroft, ON and are now desperately trying to flip it.
DradisPing
6mo ago
when they do something stupid, and sooner or later the escalation's going to get bad.
There's a long history of shenanigans to delay or stop procedures. Early in his career Abraham Lincoln dove out a window and ran with some of the other representatives on his side so that the chamber wouldn't have quorom and the vote wouldn't count.
My favourite is from 2006 or 2007 in an Asia - Pacific country. The opposition wanted to stop a motion from being read in the house, so one of the members ran up and ate it. Which at the time, the rules didn't account for.
I don't mind these events, they give amusing anecdotes and aren't a huge deal.
The issue here is the hypocracy around the "obstructing an official proceding" law. It's supposed to be about destroying documents congress has requested.
DradisPing
6mo ago
First off the common "Evangelical end of days" excuse is nonsense.
John Derbyshire explains it with his usual bluntness that gets him in trouble: https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/Britain/flotilla.html
It remains the case that any fair-minded person must be an Israel sympathizer. A hundred years ago there were Jews and Arabs living in that part of the Ottoman Empire. After the Ottoman collapse both peoples had a right to set up their own ethnostates. It has been the furiously intransigent Arab denial of this fact, not anything Israelis have done, that has been the root cause of all subsequent troubles. It is also indisputably the case, as has often been said, that if Hamas, Hezbollah, and the rest were to lay down their arms, there would be peace in Palestine, while if Israel were to lay down her arms, the Israelis would be slaughtered.
At some level, I'll agree, this is not our business. North of five million people have been slaughtered in the Congo this past twelve years, and nobody much (no, not me — how about you?) has lost a wink of sleep over it.
That just takes us back to Steve-1 and Steve-2, though. The Congo is nothing to me. Israel is something to me. It's an outpost of my civilization, organized on principles I agree with, inhabited by people I could live at ease with. They defend themselves, their borders, their interests, with the kind of vigor and thick-skinned determination I'd like to see my nation display. (If only!) I admire them and wish them well.
There's an affinity. In some tenuous sense, they are me, and I am them. The Gazans? I'll care about them right after I start caring about the Congo.
So there are a few reasons:
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There's a cultural link between Israel and America. Gaza is culturally more alien than it's western supporters like to admit.
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The USSR switched it's support to Muslims in the ME. After that Israel became a firm ally during the cold war and after.
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Groups like Hezbollah are fundamentally enemies of the west. The end of Israel would free them up for other tasks and put the west in more danger, not less.
Yes, they just got a lawyer a few days ago. Robert Barnes found out about it because he was in town working the Amos Miller case and he wanted to verify some details before he filed anything.
So things are moving but I posted it here now to see if anyone had any interesting takes and also to set up an update post later if there's political fallout.
The situation seems to be that the Secretary of Agriculture has financial links to the major milk producers and is trying to shut down the small Amish farms. The Amish don't like to sue for religious reasons so he's getting away with a lot.
DradisPing
1mo ago
Rings of Power was doomed to be bad. They wanted to do a prequel, but didn't have the rights to The Silmarillion. So they could use aspects that were implied by other works but had to change details to avoid infringement.
Naturally most showrunners wanted to avoid that whole mess.
DradisPing
3mo ago
Nitrogen narcosis is what they are condemning as inhumane.
DradisPing
5mo ago
There's also an aesthetic reason. The linear wave looks better in ads than a pea sized ball in the middle of the brush.
Disney's PR team is very very good at manipulating entertainment reporters and online forums. They no how to kick up a mob to attack a competing movie.
Reviewing films is actually quite hard. You get to watch them once and you need to come out with some kind of take based on your notes. You need to do this with multiple movies. Often they are watched without much of a break.
So there's plenty of room for a friendly PR person to offer some notes about other studios movies that are easy to string into an article.
My take is that Disney is upset about TSOF embarrassing the new Indiana Jones movie and in response they are kicking up a culture war storm. A lot of reporters are joining in the gang pile because it's fun and easy.
Beyond that, a lot of people in DC at places like the State Department see the cartels as useful. The CIA has most likely been co-ordinating & manipulating them quite a bit over the years.
Movies that paint the cartels as scary badasses who are just trying to make money getting cocaine to consenting adults are OK.
Movies that point to child exploitation or fentanyl deaths in the US make the CIA look bad by association, so they are attacked.
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