HaroldWilson
8d ago
Very dependent on individual experience, of course, but it definitely seems like Twitter is much more of a slop factory under Musk. If we just look at things which are not just directly related to the changed political valence of the platform, scams and bots are way more prevalent than they used to be, even paid advertisements are pushing scams and the comments under any big post are utterly worthless because of the boosting of blue-check replies
HaroldWilson
16d ago
People don’t like them, and they are not getting married.
Fine, but this thread literally started about the case of two married couples.
HaroldWilson
16d ago
It's not about punishing people, it's about an implied obligation. If (for instance) a woman interrupts or gives up a career while married, whatever you think about who has is 'hardest', that is very obviously done on the understanding that this loss in current and future earnings is fine because the man will continue to earn. If he then pulls the rug out from under her because he's had a mid-life crisis and wants to run off with the secretary, he should have to make good his obligations. If you don't like those obligations, don't get married. If we could bring up the money for alimony from the ether, that would be great because I don't care about 'punishing' the adulterer, but obviously we can't.
HaroldWilson
16d ago
Edward's decisions were mainly driven by them wanting to simply spite their families
Does this make sense? I was always under the impression that especially for Edward the spite for their families was mostly downstream of their disapproval of their (prospective) marriage.
HaroldWilson
16d ago
do not owe women anything, including consideration or respect
I mean they do owe them consideration and respect qua persons.
HaroldWilson
16d ago
Are you in a position to punish women financially for adultery like you think cheating men deserve?
Yes. Obviously it's much rarer because house husbands are still very uncommon, but tens of thousands of men receive alimony. A relatively small fraction of the total, but again that's because there is less reason to award alimony in the case a husband who continues to work throughout a marriage, especially when, as is true in most cases, they out-earn their wife.
HaroldWilson
16d ago
How many is a 'small' amount is a how long is a piece of string question of course, but the point is that there is more than enough high quality 'mainstream' (as in conventional or establishment rather than mass market) journalism to satisfy even the most voracious reader. Which is to say that the problem I think is mostly with the audience rather than journalists. Most people want slop so that's what they get given, especially on television. Idk about the situation in Finland (and obviously in smaller markets there'll be less choice) but for an American or Briton there is ample very high quality mainstream journalism out there if only anyone would be bothered to pick it up.
HaroldWilson
16d ago
That would take forever so to get an idea of what I mean I'll give some examples from a single subgroup, say foreign policy/international affairs (for no particular reason): Foreign Affairs, the Economist, ISW, World Today (Chatham House's magazine), the World Service, Brookings, the aforementioned FT and WSJ, Foreign Policy, JDW etc. etc.
HaroldWilson
16d ago
It kind of says it all that you're go-to example is a seven-year old story from a third-rate publication. This article was literally famous for the extravagance of the claims within it and the denials from relevant organisations. And you know who published many of those denials? Bloomberg. Perhaps something from the current decade and in an actual prestige publication might be nice - after all if 'virtually every longform article' you read turns out to be a lie it shouldn't be that hard to find reams of examples.
HaroldWilson
17d ago
If you believe this you probably consume too much low-quality media. Turn off the TV and pick up the Financial Times, Economist or other such prestige publications.
HaroldWilson
17d ago
More chaotic perhaps. But we're already almost a decade into the MSM's Fine People hoax and it still gets pushed and believed. I find it hard to make a distinction between major political institutions blatantly lying, and an LLM hallucinating information on the receiving end.
Only someone who largely consumes rolling news slop could say this. MSM produces reams of very high quality reporting every day, it's just that no-one cares about it because round-table shouting gets more clicks. If you actually think LLM generated false articles are no different to say, reading the Financial Times or New York Times you are simply wrong. Does the latter (and to a lesser extent the former) embed left-liberal assumptions in a lot of their reporting? Of course, and one should read anything with a critical eye. But they're still pretty good. If you don't want that just read the WSJ instead. These aren't as popular as the slop of course, but that's mostly the fault of the readers/viewers. If one read any of those publications daily or every few days, you would have a more complete and accurate understanding of politics, the economy etc. than probably 99% of the American public.
HaroldWilson
23d ago
mostly old people died now so low QALY losses compared to say, Spanish flu
He literally talks about this in the post.
HaroldWilson
30d ago
I don't think this line of argument necessarily proves anything about the optimal number of semi-skilled or unskilled workers to have in a country. Clearly that number is above 0 (or you get reverse complementary task specialisation where skilled workers get moved into care work because the wages are get so high that productivity suffers in the long-run) and might depend a lot on how the generous the state is to recent migrant workers. The Qatari economy would probably not be better off if they deported all the South Asian construction workers (even if we were to assume they were entirely free economic agents rather than borderline indentured servants). What the balance is in any given country is just an object-level question you can't reason your way to an answer to.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
I don’t think most of them are valuable to most people
Not vastly in a purely economic sense, but personally I think the way I interact with information, ideas and the world generally is incomparably better off for having studied history at university, in a way I doubt I could have achieved by pure dilettantism. Maybe it isn't the most rational use of national resources, but either way I think it's still one of the developed world's greatest achievements that so many people get the opportunity to have their internal world enriched forever, even if a lot of them don't take it up when they're there.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
writing indigenous studies slop essays
If you are at an elite-ish university like Columbia and you are writing 'slop' essays that is almost certainly entirely your own fault, or at least a failure in your own imagination. Even in the most modish areas the questions they are grappling with are almost always interesting and important, even if one disagrees with the way those questions are presented and the assumptions within them (incidentally, there is nothing examiners love more, no matter their outlook, than answers which 'interrogate' the question set). I doubt there is a single humanities essay/coursework/examination question at Columbia to which an intelligent and engaged student could not engage with in an enriching and interesting way.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
the expected role of women ought to adapt to the circumstances.
I mean, it has? Women's labour force participation is nearly 80% in the 25-54 bracket.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
Elizabeth Warren is not Barack Obama
?
Warren made the initial 2011 speech that Obama was referencing/expanding upon in his 2012 speech, but the whole controversy arose over Obama saying the line.
that ideas matter more than actions.
What does this even mean In context it's just a completely anodyne exposition of the notion that no man is an island. Idk what 'ideas/actions' has to do with it when one of the examples he gave of facilitation of success by govt. is physical infrastructure.
A belief that continues to shape Democratic party policy and campaign strategy.
If this were true one wouldn't have to reach back for a statement from four Presidential campaigns ago. Nobody references 'I'm not concerned about the very poor' do they.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
Degrowth
Get real. Trump has just delivered the most anti-growth policy of the post-war era but Democrats still get this moniker because they, what, don't always acquiesce to tax and spending cuts?
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
This might be more compelling if MAGA ever criticised Trump when he goes the other direction. When the tariffs came out MAGA defended them as sound economic policy. When he backtracked they still defended them as a brilliant negotiating tactic, despite having supported them in substance days before.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
"Fuck you, we did in fact build that"
Some real Obama Derangement Syndrome here. A throwaway line from a campaign speech 13 years ago and people are still mad over it. This is the equivalent of if people were still referencing the Malaise speech all the time in the 90s.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
And everyone fell into lock-step behind him
Initially yes, but not post-debate (Pelosi being the obvious case) and I doubt that happens with Trump.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
Normie Africans name their kids things like ‘John’ or ‘Mary’
Not uniformly. African-origin names are common in many Commonwealth Southern and West African nations.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
TDS
Can this die now? TDS has largely been vindicated over the past four and half years, and especially the past 100 days.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
Oh sure legally but the object-level principle at stake is basically the same - whether or not we should avoid using participation in local legal proceedings as a means of deporting illegal immigrants.
This feels slightly paranoid. There are only twelve months in the year and whichever one you chose you could be accused of co-opting something. The Sacred Heart month is also a strange choice to try to co-opt as an act of totalisation because it has almost no cultural currency in the Anglosphere except maybe within American Catholic communities; in fact it it's relevance is fast becoming exclusively as a counter-signal.
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