FruitfulLemonyLemons
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User ID: 370
FruitfulLemonyLemons
26d ago
Riots during Trump admins have been politically genius. If the admin Does What It Takes to restore order, he confirms the image the left has painted of him of being a dictator. If he just lets them run their course (which he has done every time thus far) his presidency looks chaotic and people yearn for normalcy.
Puts him in a double bind.
(If you ask me, if you're in a double bind anyway you should do the right thing.)
FruitfulLemonyLemons
29d ago
Devon Eriksen effortpost on Twitter
He argues that Trump and Elon are sort of polar opposite personality types in terms of "guile". Elon being an autistic engineer has and expects a "guileless" communication style devoted to simply conveying the truth as you see it. Trump being a Machiavellian type sees communication as a tool of power (see also Scott Adams' talks on "persuasion" and Trump) and wants loyalty with no expectation that he'll give it to you straight.
Notably, despite calling Trump "Machiavellian" he sees both people as earnestly trying to avert disaster for America, with Elon seeing the debt as the most important existential threat and Trump seeing immigration and entrenched bureaucracy as the most important existential threats.
Fascinating take overall and worth the read, here's the full text:
These guys don't understand each other.
Elon Musk is too guileless. He says exactly what he thinks is true with little regard for how others will react. He alienates allies by airing disputes in public instead of settling them behind closed doors.
Because he is a sperg engineer who leads companies of sperg engineers, and to do this, you must be 100% truthful and transparent.
Donald Trump is too guileful. He says exactly what will advance his plans with little regard for telling people what he actually thinks. He alienates allies by expecting their unconditional support without sharing any aspect of his strategic plans with them.
Because he is a New York real estate developer, who thrives on winning negotiations and gaining advantage from unshared knowledge, and to do this, you must be 100% calculating and opaque.
Here's what happened.
Musk worked super hard, and took great personal risks, to get a head start on balancing the federal budget. He correctly believes that federal spending is an existential risk to the nation.
Trump regards those savings as a political asset.
And, since he lacks leverage in congress, he took them and traded them for other things he wanted, apparently dealing with border control, the courts, etc... problems which he correctly believes are an existential threat to the nation.
He may have concrete plans for balancing the federal budget in the future, but, frustratingly, he won't tell his own team what they are.
Trump could have squared this in advance with Musk, in private, but he appears to either have assumed his loyalty (treating an ally like a subordinate), or been unable to persuade him.
Likewise, Musk could have raised his complaints in private, but either he was too upset to try, or was not able to reach an agreement when he did.
Trump doesn't understand how to deal with spergs. You have to tell them the truth, not expect them to read subtext. They refuse to read subtext. They want to be spoken to honestly.
Musk doesn't understand how to deal with Machiavellians. They think of language as a power tool, and think of those who insist on truth as naive.
Both men are used to being in charge, and are used to dealing with subordinates, who must cater to their preferred style of communicating.
They are both therefore uniquely unsuited to having both the patience and the capability to speak the other's language.
The truth is that both the federal budget and the federal bureaucracy are existential threats to America. Maximum priority.
Trump's concerns about the "art of the possible" are probably valid, but Musk's sense of urgency should not be dismissed lightly.
It is churlish to leverage the superior strengths and talents of people on the autism spectrum while making zero allowances for their unique needs.
That said, spergs can be frustratingly dogmatic, even when they aren't the richest and most successful man in the world.
A few other things to notice:
The democrats have said nothing. That's because there are no democrats. They have no independent intellectuals, only paid schills.
A response will not be forthcoming until the wholly organic grassroots PR committees have met, and the wholly grassroots talking heads have been cut a wholly organic grassroots check.
There's also a strong case to be made for Team Nothing Ever Happens. Remember that Musk will sometimes shut up when he calms down, and Trump has no problem calling someone the Antichrist one day and working with him the next.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
1mo ago
Demographic shift of Boomers moving into retirement, lower birth rates
FruitfulLemonyLemons
1mo ago
Do you think in the coming years the higher ratio of older people cashing out 401k's etc vs younger people contributing will put constant, unrelenting downward pressure on stock prices? Or is that a drop in the bucket compared to other factors in the market?
FruitfulLemonyLemons
3mo ago
Ringworld maybe? The team has some strife but they're mostly functional.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
4mo ago
Yeah this is the sort of stuff the anons were talking about but I was trying to verify
FruitfulLemonyLemons
4mo ago
Is it worth it to buy health insurance in the USA if you make a decent middle class income and have decent savings but don't have insurance through your employer?
It's so expensive and I've seen contrarian takes to the effect that you can get a better deal on basically everything by not being insured and in the event of something truly catastrophic you're probably going to be declaring bankruptcy either way.
But that's just Internet anons so I wanna hear from some other Internet anons to get a more balanced opinion.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
5mo ago
What's a piece of media made recently that you genuinely, uncontrollably laughed at?
Feel like I've been in a comedy desert for years and wondering if I'm just not looking in the right places.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
5mo ago
Like 10 years ago I used to frequently spend hours in a Starbucks, reading books or writing and getting wildly overcaffeinated.
I stopped in part because they seemed to be deliberately enshittifying the experience by replacing comfortable furniture with bare wood, and kinda making the overall vibe less inviting. Just felt like they were discouraging spending time there.
Reading this, I'm beginning to suspect why. My theory is instead of making a ballsy policy like they're doing here, they decided to just sort of passive-aggressively make the place less inviting in hopes the riffraff would stay out, of their own accord. Of course, that did not happen, but the good people stopped coming, so now it's all riffraff and no good people and the whole vibe of Starbucks is way off from what it used to be.
Somebody tell Brian Niccol to bring back the comfy chairs, maybe we can turn things back around.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
6mo ago
I just wanna know the chances of another Covid Era
FruitfulLemonyLemons
6mo ago
Should I be worried about bird flu?
FruitfulLemonyLemons
6mo ago
If Indian workers are so bad, why do tech companies keep hiring them?
I've heard it alleged that they are paid substantially less than American born workers, even guys on the same team in adjacent cubicles. Does anyone know if this is true?
FruitfulLemonyLemons
6mo ago
Yeah, to a baby learning language, "mama" refers to the whole suite of feelings and sensations and needs and wants and other qualia associated to its mother. To an LLM, "mama" is a string with a bunch of statistical relationships to other strings.
Absolute apples and oranges IMO.
We don't learn language from the dictionary, not until we are already old enough to be proficient with it and need to look up a new word. Even then there's usually an imaginative process involved when you read the definition.
LLMs are teaching us a lot about how our memory and learning work, but they are not us.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
6mo ago
Is NVIDIA really the only game in town here? No Chinese competitor giving them a run for their money, etc?
FruitfulLemonyLemons
6mo ago
Theft of Fire by Devon Eriksen. Kind of neat so far, feels like Niven but updated for a 2020 view of the future instead of a 1970 view.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
6mo ago
In terms of raw, personal, I'm-not-going-to-get-this-because-it's-just-my-own-idiosyncrasy preference, I want standard time with an 8-4 work schedule. Like let's let noon be noon, but let the workday be from 8 to 4, let the schoolday be similarly DST equivalent, etc.
Never liked that we pretend to have the power to mess with Time Itself rather than admit what's actually happening is we're changing our schedules.
Second best option, let's switch to perma-DST but call 1:00 noon and midnight, and rotate any newly made analog clocks.
Third best option, ugh I guess we can just do perma DST and explain to our grandkids the history of why the twelves have a special name while the sun is at its highest/lowest point at 1.
(I like the DST schedule but I don't like the time nonsense.)
FruitfulLemonyLemons
6mo ago
I've never seen this when actually talking about God, it's usually for figures of speech that nonseriously invoke God, so as to avoid using the name of God "in vain", which violates one of the Ten Commandments
FruitfulLemonyLemons
6mo ago
I don't have enough insight into their inner workings to be able to answer this. But my guess is they are targeting some positive profit margin (since they would have to) and creating actuarial rules to target this number. Then claims etc are mostly following an algorithm. But then again given as I have alleged the "non-insurable" nature of health, they are probably having to constantly tweak this.
I doubt they're frequently making individual case-by-case decisions to deny somebody for the sake of let's-get-rich-and-do-coke, but maybe I inappropriately assume people aren't monsters.
In any case I'd want to see evidence of such backroom decisions because it's quite an allegation. But that would be hard because I'd also want to see that it's not just "this guy is trying to spend infinite money to eke out another month and unfortunately we don't have that" sort of thing. Like my point is it's actually really hard to prove actual malice here.
Being in charge of a health insurance company is like being a world leader: you are going to be making decisions that result in some people living and other people dying. There's no way around it. Your whole job is allocating scarce healthcare resources.
The scarcity is the real problem. But we'd rather murder a scapegoat, in cold blood, than face reality.
And scarcity is not going away. Not when it's possible to pour a near-infinite amount of money into eking out another year or two at end of life. Stop and think about what that means. I honestly question whether health is "insurable" even in principle.
Healthcare in America has problems but we cannot even begin as a society to discuss those problems with anything resembling sanity until we as a society learn to memento mori.
So if you're gonna murder a guy you might wanna have a better reason than some people get their claims denied.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
7mo ago
On further thought I take that back, a good college try at devising a "system" that prevents (reads: delays as long as possible) the inevitable corruption is a noble endeavor and I'm sorry for discouraging it.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
7mo ago
As much as the whole doge thing warms my millennial heart, DOGE just seems like a clone of Inspector General offices, no? And the main reason those have no balls is they're staffed by people who go to the same house parties as everybody else, right? (I am just assuming, here, this seems like a likely Schelling point over time)
So the most effective DOGE will be the Musk one since he's a true outsider, then they will be less effective over time until DOGE exists just to get paid to rubber stamp things.
More and more I think this stuff is really about the people and not the positions. You can create a "Department of Screw the ATF" whose whole job is to obstruct the ATF but if you populate it with people who are drinking buddies with the ATF people they'll coordinate on one or two "hard hitting" investigations (maybe to get rid of somebody the ATF wanted to fire anyway) to make the public happy and otherwise will be in lockstep.
Checks and balances are a cool idea but it's rare to get people who are true enemies. When that happened in the beginning it was such a crisis that we got the 12th Amendment. Not to mention a literal gunfight. Later we got Brooks/Sumner. It's ugly.
Speaking personally (and as somebody who has had libertarian leanings since the age of 16) I wish Musk the best and I think there is a unique window of opportunity here but I kinda hope DOGE just dissolves itself after he's done, there is no real need for a redundant Inspector General, in fact it would be the sort of redundant bloat that DOGE exists to remove.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
7mo ago
Murder is not a federal crime (with some special-case exceptions)
FruitfulLemonyLemons
7mo ago
I think this change would make its availability feel less precarious than it does now.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
7mo ago
The incoming administration has promised to punt the issue of abortion to the States and I hope they go one step further and enshrine this punt with a Constitutional amendment that would keep the federal government out of the business altogether, including encouraging or discouraging States or individuals via funding, services, etc. And probably also prohibiting States from punishing abortion tourists in any way.
There are so many important issues of geopolitics and energy and trade and I'm so fucking tired of this issue being at the top of mind every single national election (for literally my entire life and I'm over 40!!!), and half the electorate being one-issue voters about it so you can't even have a real conversation with them about anything else.
It might also help heal relations between the sexes but I won't bet on that, let's not get too greedy now.
Has he been on the radar a long time? I literally heard of him for the first time like a week ago.
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