BANNED USER: /comment/193024
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
Failed repeatedly in his attempts to die a hero and has now lived long enough to become the villain.
User ID: 659
Banned by: @cjet79
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
11mo ago
What is it you think the military "claims to care about"
lonely detached loser young men generally make terrible soldiers as Russia is currently learning the hard way. The US military has historically always made pretty extensive efforts to correct such deficiencies where found. Why do you think we pay 19 year-olds to get married and tie promotion prospects to physical fitness?
Would you not say this is a major overreaction to what was, objectively, a minor screw-up...
A screw-up that costs you multiple percentage points of total market share in a business as high volume and distribution heavy as beer is not "minor". That is a 100+ million-dollar mistake that will see senior executives getting called in to meetings with the board/stock-holders to explain what they were thinking, and what they plan to do to ensure that such a mistake is not made again.
He's probably referring to the milquetoast statement about respecting all Americans that accompanied the drop of their new TV Spot.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
11mo ago
Sure, but in Western society, both Western Christianity and even before in pagan Greece and Rome monogamy was strictly enforced and this makes men not so disposable.
No it doesn't, because a widow can remarry. The reason we used men for hard, physical, and often dangerous labor is that we can afford to lose them.
Likewise, the historical reason that male children have been preferred is that until very recently only male children could inherit, and this bias was very much tied to their disposable nature. What does a man do? A man provides.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
11mo ago
I have suggested on numerous occasions that to the degree that AI poses a serious existential threat to humanity it is largely because of Yudkowsky and other MIRI-types rather than in spite of, but I don't think I ever expected him to go this far off the deep end.
I must confess that I am baffled by the sentiment I see being expressed by yourself @Tarnstellung @Folamh3 and others that the response is somehow "disproportionate".
The Bud Light's VP of Marketing Alissa Heinerscheid had previously described Budweiser as "a brand in decline" and had stated that she wanted to distance the brand from its perceived "frat-boy" and "older working class white male" customer base to pursue a younger, hipper, "more inclusive" audience. From the looks of things her efforts were massively successful so why is she being placed on administrative leave instead of receiving a well-deserved round of high-fives, and a 6-figure bonus?
To my eyes answer seems simple, as much as upper-class urban professional types like to talk about elite theory, shareholder capitalism, and how culture is downstream of politics, the bottom-line is one of those things you can ignore right up to the moment you can't, and you can't piss off your core customer base without effecting your bottom line. The beer business is not like the banking business or the venture capital business the cost of switching from the perspective of individual customers is low and the industry itself is heavily dependent on local bottlers/distributors, if even a small fraction of them decide to cut ties or raise rates in responses this can have a significant downstream effect on a brand's profitability.
This is not Anheuser Busch making "a mistake", or conservatives pouncing on some naive interns' minor screw-up/faux pas, this is a senior executive executing a stupid self-destructive plan with competence, elan, and complete success, only to be surprised to discover that shooting yourself in the foot results in a bloody mess. Even if you're broadly sympathetic to the LBGTQ+ cause this is absolutely 100% the sort of fuck up that an executive should get fired for.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
11mo ago
Not exactly a lurker but stuff that's been sitting in my "i really ought the finish one of these and post it" folder
-
Inferential distance: permissive vs contested enviroments (it's not paranoia if people are actually out to get you)
-
Inferential distance: choosing life, love, and civilization over rationality
-
Inferential distance: internal vs external loci of control (even with a gun to your head there is always a choice)
-
Understanding the Appeal: why certain adaptations of a work are successful
-
On legacy sequels and nostalgia bait: Original Top Gun vs Top Gun Maverick, ST TNG vs ST Picard, Karate Kid vs Cobra Kai etc...
-
a commentary on/review of Barry Lyndon
-
a commentary on/review of Paths of Glory
-
a commentary on/review of Hoosiers
-
discipline vs technology, and internet culture war vs meat-space shoot-you-in-the-face war
-
a compilation of/expansion upon my old east Africa posts from /r/Themotte and SSC
-
a compilation of/expansion upon my old Iraq posts from /r/Themotte and SSC
On the face of it, I don’t see any strategic reason for NATO or the Allie’s to really invest in a free Ukraine.
I was going to make snide a comment to the effect of tell me that you don't know anything about the history of NATO with out actually using those words, but then I had a sobering realization that our education systems is so fucked that you might genuinely have never learned anything about WWII and it's immediate aftermath.
Simply put there are multiple very obvious reasons both historical and strategically practical for NATO to invest in a free Ukraine.
The obvious historical reason is to uphold the post WWI norm that "you don't get to arbitrarily invade you neighbors and claim their territory as your own if you want a seat at the adults' table". Enforcing this norm is arguably NATOs entire raison d'etre as it was founded in response to fears in the immediate aftermath of WWII that the Molotov half of the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact might try to pick up where their erstwhile allies had started. Stalin's rhetoric and behavior certainly painted him as keen to do so.
The other obvious reason is one of strategic practicality. Every Russian soldier killed, every aircraft shot down, every armored vehicle destroyed, every round of ordnance expended, is one that can no longer be used to threaten the Balkans. What's happening here is that NATO is spending what is effectively pocket change to see a major strategic threat seriously diminished if not eliminated entirely. I don't care who you are, that is the proverbial 100 dollar bill lying on the sidewalk and the NATO leadership would be fools not to take it. Meanwhile there's the economic factor, for all people complain about the Military Industrial Complex, the cold truth is that money talks, and that there is a lot of money to be made in war. My employer recently opened a new ordnance production facility (rather than closing an old one) for what may be the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall, that's a couple thousand new jobs for some politician's constituents, do you really think that's not been factored into the calculus somewhere?
Edited to Elaborate
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
11mo ago
The easiest solution to this seems to be the oldest one. back in the IRC/Usenet days we'd tell kids "don't say anything on the internet you wouldn't say in a room full of strangers".
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
11mo ago
is that a Ronin/Three Days of the Condor reference? If so nice ;-)
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
11mo ago
Define "Winningness". Ants outnumber humans by something like two million to one, so maybe you need to consider the possibility that it's ants that are the superior replicators and most intelligent thing in the environment.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
11mo ago
My fundamental problem with Bostrom's thinking is that people who do not and who never have existed can't be said to have "wants" in any meaningful sense. His whole oeuvre is based on affirming the consequent. If these people existed, you would be obliged to consider thier preferences. To which I reply if they existed, but they don't.
This kind of idiotic one-dimensional thinking is why I maintain that utilitarianism is fundementally stupid, evil, and incompatible with human flourishing. The simple fact is that there are only two paths available paths to a logically consistent utilitarian. The first is wire-heading, in which case question must be asked "why are you wasting your time on the internet when you could be wasting it on heroin?". The second is omnicide which seems to be the path that Bostrom, Benatar, Yud Et Al seem to be hell-bent on pursuing given all their rhetoric about how we need to build a mountain of skulls in the present to secure the future.
I say fuck that,
My 1e999999999999999 hypothetical future descendants who see utilitarian AIs as abominations to be purged with holy fire in the name of the God-Emperor are just as real as your "10^46 hypothetical people per century after galactic colonization" and thier preferences are just as valid.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
11mo ago
Long story short the so-called AI Alignment problem isn't about intelligence (artificial or otherwise) as much as it is about the inherent flaws of utilitarianism.
I maintain that utilitarianism is fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing because there are really only two paths a logically consistant utilitarian can follow, one towards pure hedonism/wire-heading and the other towards being an omnicidal monster as described in @DaseindustriesLtd's reply downthread. The more logical and consistant you make a utilitarian, the less able to avoid these traps they become.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
11mo ago
The various alternative flavors of utilitarianism proposed to work around the whole wire-heads vs paperclip-maximizer conundrum have always struck me as even less coherent and actionable than so-called non-utilitarianism forms of ethics. In fact preference Utilitarianism is kind of the perfect example. Sorry but stacking layers upon layers of math and jargon atop of a foundation of "x is good because i want it" is not going to make "I do what I want" a sound moral framework.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
11mo ago
My first thought after "Anonymous" was a lawyer (perhaps aided by a few paralegals and interns) for whom filing these complaints is just a job. I hadn't made the connection to ADA testers but now that you mention them the idea checks out.
First off, getting apples to apples comparison of violent crime between the UK and US is difficult due to differences in standards and reporting practices. For example, it my understanding that the UK only records a death as "intentional homicide" if there is a suspect and then has separate categories for manslaughter and suspected foul-play. Whereas the US records all three under the single header homicide before breaking it down by degree. When one digs into the numbers one finds that most of soundbites and examples cited in the media about US violence relative to the UK are playing fast and loose with this distinction. IE comparing all gun deaths in the US (including accidents, suicides and those shootings ruled lawful) to the specific subset of "intentional homicides" committed with firearms in the UK.
Second off, and kind of related to the point above, the more "red adjacent" an American is the more likely they are to question the validity of "gun homicides" as a metric. Sure if you could somehow Thanos snap all the guns in civillian hands out of existence gun crime would likely be dramatically reduced, at least temporarily. but what of it? There seems to be this underlying a assumption behind a lot of these posts that a person killed with a knife, or lynched by a mob, is somehow less of victim. For my part I don't see how that can be, KIA is KIA.
The cynical bastard in me can't help but suspect that a lot of this is downstream the progressive affinity for external loci of control and the broder millue of secular post-modernist nonsense. When some strapping schitzo with a dozen prior arrests kills Granny by bashing her head in with a brick, or pushing her into the path of an oncoming train nobody panics because it's all part of the plan. The posts about focusing on mental health and how "we all live in a society" were already written before the corpse was cold.
Meanwhile if Granny pulls a revolver from her purse and plugs her would be killer center-of-mass, or some bystander intervenes and drops him. Everyone loses their minds.
The simplest and most straight forward argument in favor of "liberal" gun laws is in the old saw, God made men, but Sam Colt made them equal.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
11mo ago
...are you under the impression that Cersei Lannister and her children lived happily ever after? Because I get the feeling that you might be under that impression.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
11mo ago
Correct and that's why there is a built-in amendment process.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
11mo ago
Did we read to the same books or watch the same show? If anything ASOIAF's core thesis seems to be "might makes right is no basis for a system of government"
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
11mo ago
In the books (and for most of the show) Cersie's rise to power and reign is a continuous series of pressing the proverbial defect button for a short-term win only to find her long-term position substantially worse off.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
11mo ago
A comment of mine from a little over two years ago...
When I heard first heard about Roko's Basilisk (back when it was still reasonably fresh) I suggested, half seriously, that the reason Yudkowsky wanted to suppress this "dangerous idea" was that he was actually one of the Basilisk's agents.
Think about it, the first step to beating a basilisk, be it mythological or theoretical, is to recognize that it's a basilisk and thus that you have to handicap yourself to fight it. Concealing it's nature is the exact opposite of what you do if you're genuinely worried about a basilisk...
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
11mo ago
As my Polish AF buddies keep pointing out, Poland is on track to be wealthier than the UK within a decade or so
I don't recall anything conclusive ever having been shown but steroid use was pretty rampant in the 90-era military and a combination of this and the theory that "certain folks were always kind of fucked/compensating for something" theory is pretty widespread on veterans' forums.
More options
Context Copy link