DradisPing
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User ID: 1102
DradisPing
5mo ago
On the other hand, I have heard a lot about the alleged "rise of the far right" in Ireland over the course of the last few years, and the fact that it happened so soon after Geert Wilders' election is certainly odd timing.
I think there are a few factors.
A big one is the CIA and State Department. They've traditionally viewed right wing parties in Europe as the enemy, and made efforts to keep them from winning. However they've been incredibly distracted the last few years by the Afghanistan withdrawal, China, and focussing on Ukraine / Russia as well as neighbouring countries in Eastern Europe. Note that the right wing party in Poland just lost.
Pro-Hamas protests have brought longstanding issues with integration of people from poor Muslim countries to the forefront. The excuse from the internationalist types has always been that they just need time, but after 20 years of hearing that people can see the situation has gotten worse, not better.
Another issue is a general economic decline in Europe. Things aren't awful, but they aren't great and there's less faith in the long term outlook. So people aren't feeling as generous as they used to.
DradisPing
1mo ago
I was most surprised by how 29% of the elite thinks that China is an ally, compared to 9% of ordinary voters. I would’ve thought the elites were the hawks! Maybe some of them have commercial interests in China or they want to work with China on climate change or they’re ethnically Chinese, anyway this is really odd to me. The hawk faction may be in control but the doves haven’t been totally eviscerated. Does anyone have any explanations or observations on this matter?
First here's a map of The Emerging US Mega Regions
The Northeast is the home of America's traditional ruling class. During WWII and after the Great Lakes region was getting rich and powerful. Unfortunately the Great Lakes region (GLR) is in road trip distance of DC and NYC. The North-easterners didn't like seeing them drive up in nice cars throwing money around. They saw them as uppity. So various federal policies were put in place to economically devastate the region.
One of them was encouraging companies to offshore the GLR manufacturing to China. China made sure the Northeast elites got rich off of the deal in various ways.
So the elites see China as a nation of obedient factory workers who know their place and pay tribute to the right people. Things like the 2022 visit to Taiwan by Pelosi were about sending a message to Xi Jinping to stay in line.
Of course that doesn't really line up with China's plans for itself. But admitting that destroying the GLR manufacturing base was a colossal fuck up is too much for most of the elite's egos to handle.
Hawks and Doves is probably the wrong way to think about it. The "Hawks" see China as an economic rival, there's no appetite for violence. The "Doves" are the ones more likely to use military force to keep China in line.
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.
DradisPing
4mo ago
Yup, it uses Google Tag Manager for analytics.
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
No they dislike Elon because they see him as a traitor to the left.
Something happened to Elon in the Ukraine war situation. After helping out Ukraine greatly with Starlink he had some sort of bad encounter with the State Department / National Security types.
Despite being a loyal tech lefty for years none of his friends would do anything and he realized he needed friends on the right to balance things and protect himself.
That's what lead to his crusade for free speech and his Twitter purchase. Word went out on Reddit that he was a traitor and should no longer be trusted. People fell in line and started attacking him.
DradisPing
3mo ago
But back to the topic at hand; it's unclear what Abbott's actual game is; he's an accomplished constitutional lawyer(literally; that's how he became governor) and knows he's going to lose at court. He's also never been the reckless type and so it's unlikely he did this without thinking it through. Angling for a Trump cabinet seat, maybe? It also surprises me that he did this now; primaries are coming up in March, and Abbott endorsed a relatively wide array of candidates to try to shift the house in a more partisan republican direction; taking a political risk like this one is unlike him.
His problem was that he had to be seen as doing something. His credibility was low with the right.
He's been off side with the base regarding some recent legal issues. Alex Jones was getting railroaded by a far left judge in Austin and Abbott didn't even make a token comment about due process. A bunch of Bushies were upset about Ken Paxton beating George P Bush and teamed up with the Dems to impeach him in a process that abused the rules. After Paxton won Abbott sent out a press release congratulating him on winning a fair trail instead of admitting the problems with the process.
So Abbott needs to shore up his credibility with the right.
Picking a fight over the border is attractive for a number of reasons.
- Biden's border policies are extremely unpopular, to the point that his administration wants to avoid delineating them. Forcing Garland to take them to court likely means forcing the Biden admin
- Under Trump the legal left took the position that States had a number of rights to defy federal immigration law and enforcement. This puts them in a position where they need to oppose their own legal briefs from five years ago.
- Any legal fight will take years and keep illegal immigration in the news for that time. If Biden tries to do something extreme it more of an opportunity for Abbott.
DradisPing
4mo ago
In the US masking became blue tribe signalling. Anyone who refused to mask was seen as a potential Trump supporter.
It was most likely not so politicized in Europe.
DradisPing
2mo ago
Timing wise it doesn't make sense for Putin to kill him. He was in prison and didn't have any significant political support on the outside.
So the likely options are:
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CIA / GRU / another western intelligence service killed him to get support in the west for more aid money. It did happen right around some votes, and Navalny wasn't likely to be of any other use to them.
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Natural causes. Russian prisons probably aren't great for your health.
There's less egg on the face of western allies then you think. CNN will just ignore this. Reporters will still talk as if it's settled that Putin killed him.
DradisPing
2mo ago
2012 - 2016 is when the SF tech industry switched from "free speech and neutrality are critical for our growth" to "kicking around our political enemies is a whole lot of fun". I think Obama's re-election campaign was the turning point.
Ellen Pao was probably always more comfortable with censoring and control. But in her actions she was just following the prevailing winds in SF.
DradisPing
4mo ago
When I heard this, I did feel an intuitive sense of disgust, but I had a difficult time justifying the feeling. What’s so bad about Disney that isn’t bad about going to Burning Man?
Disney is largely a girl brand but you were exposed to it heavily in your childhood. It's fairly common for adult women to still have a love for Disney. Men remember it as a childhood thing they were never that into.
Basically you're having a reaction to the perceived childishness of it. Kind of like how you'd react to someone asking to go to one of those adult kindergartens.
I'm not sure what the exact parallel would be. Star Wars fandom used to skew heavily male but didn't have event locations. Auto shows seem to have a similar gender split, but they aren't child focussed. Comic cons before girls in sexy costumes started going could work. WWE and Monster Trucks fit apart from the fact that they are seen as low class.
DradisPing
8mo 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
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
4mo ago
A key thing to understand is that the two largest oil producers for most of the 20th century were 1: USA and 2: USSR. Political science types like to play up the battle of ideologies and play down the battle of the petro nations aspect.
Oil exports were the primary source of the USSRs hard currency and allowed it to import things.
In the 80s the Reagan White House got the Saudis and some other gulf nations on board with a scheme to pump like hell and crash global oil prices. This was combined with advanced military research projects like SDI, sometimes called "Star Wars", forcing the USSR to dump even more money into military research.
As a percentage of GDP the USSR had already been spending what the USA would consider WW2 levels for many decades.
The cash crunch created a crisis in the USSR. They were looking at average Russians having to go back to only eating meat once a week like during the Tzar era. Soviet leaders assumed they could loosen the iron fist a bit, allow some market reforms, and keep the USSR going.
Instead the whole thing collapsed.
Of course there were other issues. Chernobyl made Soviet leadership look dangerously incompetent internally.
Now I don't know any good books on the topic. Reagan is a highly contentious figure and has only grown more so over the years. A lot of academics are loath to admit his gambit killed the USSR.
So books tend to be either ra ra Reagan or to play down what happened.
DradisPing
10mo ago
California officially banned racial quotas in universities in the mid-90s. Schools responded by doing detailed evaluations where the results just happened to exactly match the now banned quotas.
DradisPing
5mo ago
The stealth is quite good. Many of the gigs and other side jobs have thieving or installing a virus on the network as a goal. You get a bonus for remaining undetected. You can get cybermods to be more stealthy and can hack cameras / turrets / etc.
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
Being overly introspective isn't helpful to a lot of people. You can get stuck in your head and spiral.
Sunshine, exercise, and community connection is generally better.
Join some kind of sports league and make and effort do nice things for people you care about. Help a friend or relative do yard work.
DradisPing
7mo ago
You keep tossing out "the Hock" with no explanation like it's common cultural knowledge. Yet Google returns nothing.
What is it? Where are you getting it from?
DradisPing
7mo ago
I'll be honest about my feelings towards unions: I don't get it at all, and I think I'm missing something.
There's a lot of history there and a lot of competing interests. It's probably worth reading this: http://www.paulgraham.com/unions.html
I think you'd be insane to not just fire anybody who joins a union on the spot. I don't get how places can "vote to unionize". Why does the employer not simply fire the people doing the organizing?
There are explicit laws against that. Unions in general have a lot of laws to protect them. Read up on Pinkerton strike breaking.
The owner of the "Giant Tiger" chain of stores in Canada likes to joke that "you don't get unions unless you deserve them". I don't think that's entirely true, but early unions were created in response to genuinely horrible treatment.
Are the people running factory machines inside of Ford and GM (or starbucks, or a hollywood writers room) really that highly skilled?
More or less yes. Starbucks isn't terribly high skilled, but a key part of the atmosphere is the preppy gayish vibes they curate in their employees. They needed to do a lot of careful hiring and firing to get that while staying within the bounds of the law.
Hollywood is actually a case of very functional unions. Each production is a new company, so everyone is fired afterwards. The union can't force anyone to employ low performing employees. So standards are enforced by constantly having to be rehired and treatment is enforced by the union. Writers getting royalties makes a lot of sense. Without them writers would save all of their best ideas for a time when they were co-producers and could share in the profits that way.
Skilled autoworkers do deserve decent pay and are difficult to replace. One issue is that the janitorial staff will often get better contract than they deserved, and the union representing them is stuck fighting for raises on top of an already overpriced salary.
Autoworkers and old industry are very interesting. Their golden age has passed, but a lot of unions still expect generous contracts.
Unions are often overly adversarial in the US. I have a controversial explanation for this -- the culture was strongly influenced by soviet spies who wanted to sabotage US industry. The KGB was certainly trying, and had a lot of connections on the left. I admit I can't prove they succeeded.
But countries closer to the iron curtain tended to have more reasonable unions. Germany has national unions based on job type instead of local unions for each company. That makes them more accepting of contracts that are in line with industry standards even if they don't offer big raises.
American unions will bankrupt a company then shrug and say they were just representing their workers, who are now all unemployed.
Unions in the US (and Canada) also like to start taking over management roles, which creates conflicts of interest. Controlling shifts and vacation dates. Sometimes people need a way to protect themselves from an abusive union rep. As far as I know no one has managed to organize a sub-union to curtail union abuses, but I think it could happen.
DradisPing
16d 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
1mo ago
They work their personal networks, chat with friends of friends and let people know they are available. They tend to specialize in certain neighbourhoods so they can join social groups in that area. People are a lot more comfortable if they have some social connection to the agent, or if they get a referral from someone. Some of them actually are also Uber drivers so they can chat with locals and find out who may be interested in selling.
There are also some very underhanded tactics. Back in the day there were real estate agents who paid black women to push strollers around neighbourhoods to convince people it was time to sell. Also things like talking to lonely seniors and convincing them to sell.
DradisPing
1mo ago
My understanding is that Jesus washed the feet of the apostles (his best friends) to create the priesthood. There are no accounts of him washing anyone else's feet. There's no general call for Christians to wash the feet of randos.
DradisPing
3mo ago
The protestors would not have been able to enter the Capitol had they not had the numbers, the motivation, and the willingness to get violent.
See here's a key point of disagreement. On Jan 6 Pelosi and the DC mayor refused national guard support. Then Capital Police security was running at half their usual numbers, "due to covid messures". Then they started getting agressive with the protestors at the front. Then the line broke because Capital Police fired tear gas upwind and gassed their own lines.
If security had been run in a normal fashion then no one would have entered the capital.
In the past I've heard a lot of jokes about "The People's Republic of Pennsylvania". I don't know much about the state, but the Secretary of Agriculture has been making news lately.
The latest evolving story is about Rusty Herr and Ethan Wentworth who ran a bovine reproductive services company called "NoBull Sires, LLC".
The dispute arose back in 2010 because the Ag Department sent them a cease and desist plus a statement of fine on the grounds that using an ultrasound was practicing veterinary medicine without a license. The counter argument was that the Ag Department was out of scope of the law. Routine checks don't meet the requirement of "diagnosis and treatment" for practising veterinary medicine, even if they involve an ultrasound machine.
Notably the Ag Department seems to have never filed the paperwork with a court, which is a prerequisite for enforcement. So they were likely aware of the legal issues. In 2020 the Pennsylvania Veterinary Medicine Association sent a complaint to the Department of State.
On April 10-11, 2024 they were arrested and sent to jail for 30 days for "contempt of court". The problem is that the Ag Department seems to have issued the arrest warrant on their own. The case has never been in court. They have not been before a judge.
So they are both in jail serving a 30 day sentence that didn't involve a judge and they haven't been allowed to see a judge.
There is a culture war angle here. The press seems to be reluctant to get involved for a few reasons. These days they like to defer to the bureaucracy, particularly when the Governor is from the right party. Plus Pennsylvania is in play for 2024 so they are reluctant to kick up a fuss that could help Trump.
I'm only finding coverage in the farming press right now and they don't really dive into the legal issues.
https://www.lancasterfarming.com/farming-news/news/livestock-ultrasound-operators-jailed-accused-of-unlicensed-vet-practice/article_39004570-fcd8-11ee-8396-1f8ec41b214f.html
https://agmoos.com/2024/04/17/pregnancy-is-not-a-disease-two-men-jailed-without-bail-for-repro-ultrasounding-of-dairy-cows/
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