LateMechanic
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User ID: 1841
LateMechanic
1mo ago
There's something to be said that the current backwards-compatible syntax for modern C++ will get unwieldy, but there has already been public discussion of attempts to make breaking revisions to it: see Sutter's proposal for cppfront.
And I think the other main one currently would be google's Carbon, which is an experiment from the google LLVM/clang crowd, from their frustration with the c++ committee's hesitance to do breaking changes. They're trying to use good ideas from Rust and others, in a way that's interoperable with c++ files & libraries. Although I haven't heard much about it lately.
LateMechanic
7mo ago
This isn't the Motte anymore. Look- I wasn't expecting my post to be accepted with applause and universal agreement, but my thought out, nuanced, cited post gets 4 upvotes, while apologia for sexually harassing women (that dismisses out of hand what I wrote) gets 30+?
Although subjectively explaining vote counts almost never works out, this one seems to make sense to me (as a lurker throwing around upvotes).
Your first post framed this as exasperated leaders at their wits end just honestly trying to get men to treat women as fellow humans, which apparently doesn't ring true or sound too compelling to people here. "What's wrong with the men these days that people think this is the only way they will behave?" as a question is totally dependent on the legitimacy & good faith of the premise "people think this is the only way", which is the main contention in most of the other top-level replies.
The_Nybbler seemed to cut through right to the key point, that attractive/desirable men are going to keep winning in online dating regardless of how many rules they follow or break. So making more punishments and penalties available to women to use against men they aren't interested in is continuing the same one-sided trend we've been in, which can feel unfair and avoidant of root issues.
Then you spun that into a long and somewhat interesting comment (though with about 3 too many links) about how we're screwed if we just let 'cheaters' win, which also characterized persistence in the most nasty way 'lying/manipulation/harassing to get laid'. But the point wasn't that we let cheaters win, it was that desirable men win online dating whether they cheat or not.
So to an average observer, it looked like you had perfect form and a great-looking swing, but you just whiffed the ball on both swings. Meanwhile The Nybbler had a bit of a lazier swing but nailed the ball square-on. Hence you not being downvoted to oblivion or anything, but just receiving merely mild internet reward points.
LateMechanic
3mo ago
MMT just gives the descriptive reality & logic of how things work now and throughout history, including how the base interest rate is simply a policy tool to subsidize savings (which can be set at 0% any time we desire to not pay that subsidy). Argentina is currently serving as a good example of why giving savers free money, in proportion to how much money they already have (increasing the interest rate), is probably not the tool you're looking for if you want to combat inflation (shocked pikachu there). As for the USD inflation, it appears that most currencies around the world experienced about the same cost-push inflation coming out of covid, while having fairly disparate levels of counter-cyclical fiscal injections and unemployment levels, so it's not as obvious as it may seem.
The Greece point is that the conversation was simply incoherent just 10-15 years ago, but has moved significantly toward productive correct debates about the preferred size of government and inflation constraints, rather than a fear of large numbers and negative-sounding words debt & deficit. So that's my prediction that the world is moving farther away from arbitrary limit rules on those, rather than looking to embrace the wisdom of Germany in 2009 or 1992.
LateMechanic
3mo ago
I think too many people in power have learned from MMT how money, banking, and government finance actually works, so it would probably take a few generations for people to forget those again for debt-hysteria to strongly return. In addition to the plain logic, all the evidence is that strong fiscal policy is the answer to extreme economic crises, rather than a target for blame.
Even the eurozone seems to have learned that their anti-fiscal-policy stances were a mistake and caused the first big crisis to flatline growth for the last 15 years. So the Maastricht 3% deficit limit is finally being scrutinized and softened to allow for better counter-cyclical fiscal policy. And in the US we've gone from Obama being confused and thinking he needed to fly to China to make sure they'll still 'lend' us money, to now the massive covid stimulus packages without a peep about becoming Greece or bankrupting our grandchildren.
Now the conversation is more correctly about inflation instead of solvency. And while regular people do hate inflation, even way more than is warranted, I'd guess that's too nuanced and subjective for much support of a constitutional amendment around debt/deficit.
LateMechanic
3mo ago
Agreed on all counts I think. But despite the rage and desire to punish, they did have to accept the economic reality and Draghi finally set it right in 2012 with the "whatever it takes" admission, which was correcting the first main issue. Then I think since covid and looking at the 15 years of poor growth, they've been coming around on the problems with deficit limits, which is the second big economic problem. These things reflect what necessary compromises had to be made 30 years ago to get buy-in, and what were the dominant narratives at the time (where central bankers and monetary policy were seen as sufficient wizardry to manage an economy).
Well this was the next in the line of huge-budget remakes of their mega classics on the level of these, which had actually been insanely successful for disney (including Aladdin's 1 billion which I'm surprised you describe as not working):
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(2014) Maleficent - $750M, budget $180M
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(2016) The Jungle Book - $970M, budget $175M
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(2017) Beauty and the Beast - $1.26B, budget $160M
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(2019) Dumbo - $350M, budget $170M
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(2019) Aladdin - $1.05B, budget $183M
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(2019) The Lion King - $1.66B, budget $260M
- (2023) The Little Mermaid - ~$400-550M (expected end result), budget $250M
There are also some smaller ones, and a maleficent sequel, but The Little Mermaid was expected to be on the Aladdin/Lion King/BatB level.
So it was definitely expected to be doing far better, and not at all the case that 'nobody wants' these. One argument is that peoples' appetite for these remakes has finally dried up, and that this movie's box office is paying for the lion king's sins of being weird looking. And that this was the first of these without major star power. But the negative/international feedback does seem to heavily center on the race-swap ('she doesn't look like ariel from my childhood') and on the creepy realistic animal friends.
LateMechanic
7mo ago
Problem is, we’re going broke.
Since 2010, the fund that SSA uses to pay benefits to retirees has been paying out more money than it has been receiving in taxes. At the current rate, the fund's trustees estimate that it will exhaust its reserves in 2033 and be unable to pay full scheduled benefits.
As the annual trustees' report shows every single year, of the 4 trust funds, HI/DI/OASI all have exhaustion dates projected in the near future, but SMI always passes with "adequately financed indefinitely" terminology. Which is merely because of how they were set up differently, with SMI being able to be part of the normal government deficit. There's no reason the other three can't be changed in a similar way, which would be a bit awkward for doomsayers if the trustees report every year said a brief 'all funds are adequately financed indefinitely'.
For who points this out, I've only seen MMTers who are trying to show there's no real fundamental economic viability problem here, rather than an accounting & legal issue with how the rules are currently written. And also Cato writers who aren't big fans of the trustees' flowery language and want it to be more explicit about SMI's potential governmental deficit spending.
LateMechanic
3mo ago
To be honest, intuitively I would have expected more correlation. But as far as this chart goes, the x-axis doesn't really look like what I'd expect, with almost all countries clumped closely together between .01 and .05, whatever those refer to (I was under the impression covid stimulus varied a lot more, like these charts show). Tracking down this paper from your twitter screenshot, this is Robert Barro who is apparently still interested in his old bizarre idea of ricardian equivalence, where consumers are supposed to be rational agents and thus should respond to government deficits by saving money instead of spending it because they know they (or their descendants) will pay more taxes in the future at some point...So I imagine that explains the strange x-axis here, working in extra variables that are relevant to him wanting to test his specific ideas about rational consumers looking at debt ratios and duration.
LateMechanic
7mo ago
What a weird take. That would be like "oh the joe rogan podcast, what a BIG deal, that's the guy from Zookeeper!" Carolla had one of the most popular podcasts in the world for like a decade and it still seems to be doing numbers in the last 5 years (though I already mentioned it may be dwindling). Looking at it, just within the prior 3 weeks before Hanania, they had Candace Owens, Tucker, and Vivek as guests, each pushing one thing or another, and getting more views to the extent that they're a draw.
I'm even subscribed to Hanania's channel, yet the only reason I knew he had a book out was due to stumbling across this particular mainstream appearance (hence my assumption that he had been doing normal rounds like this, and thus my surprise to learn that it's not the case - taking your word for it, I haven't been searching for him).
LateMechanic
3mo ago
I mean it'll stop the specific problem they had with corruption, which was taking on debt and spending it all on politically connected patrons rather than investing it into more productive uses.
It just doesn't really sound like reality here to me, talking about huge complex government budgets like this. Is the premise something like, they'll do all the necessary & proper spending first, and then at the end of that, if they are still allowed to issue some more bonds before hitting some limit (with some kind of timing, like the last day of each period?), then they'll max that out and give the money out to the cronies? So the hall-monitors from other countries try to perfectly set a limit on them in order to just allow enough for the proper spending which should be prioritized? If the leadership is simply corrupt and untrustworthy, why wouldn't all that 'favored' spending be mixed in with all the 'proper' spending, and the distinction being possibly subjective anyway?
Good governance is hard and I don't know all the ways that other countries and US states for example try to deal with these. The euro monetary union countries definitely have a tricky setup to deal with, without a 'united states of europe' fiscal authority. I can imagine the psychology of being in other countries and feeling a lack of trust of others' behavior. It just seems like everyone is moving away from thinking that arbitrary limits on the fiscal outcomes are workable solutions.
This might be beyond me. What do you mean?
That chart of sectoral balances is the fastest way to really intuitively understand that financial assets are zero-sum. So when we talk about the government deficit, we're simultaneously talking about the non-government's surplus. You can slice everything into any number of different sectors, but a common useful separation is 'government' vs 'domestic private sector' vs 'external / rest of world' sectors.
What we find is that the private sector really wants to be running a surplus at almost all times, because people like to build up savings for security. So that's why in general the government almost always has to be running a deficit, injecting financial assets (money, bonds) into the economy. When the private sector is in deficit, that means people are collectively spending down savings and/or running up private debt, and we see it tends to end with a significant recession where the private sector forces itself back into surplus by cutting spending.
(The other source of financial assets would be the external sector, where a net exporting country runs a trade surplus. Then you could potentially have the domestic private sector and the government both in surplus potentially. On the flipside, if a country is running a trade deficit, then their government deficits need to be even larger in order for the private sector to be in surplus.)
So this is the dynamic 'savings desire' of the private sector. The behavior could be affected by various psychological, historical, cultural factors, and could be incentivized or disincentivized by stuff like tax-advantaged retirement saving, etc. We might find that the Japanese people lose trust in saving for the future by buying stocks, and instead they largely want to build up huge monetary savings for retirement, which could cause the japanese government to need to issue a massive amount of bonds & currency for people to sit on (without any inflationary effect, just having to solve the paradox of thrift and fight off deflation).
I don't think you can chalk it up to aesthetic preferences - for Greece specifically we have the comparison of the modern day vs the post war era up till the oil crisis, during which they kept the budget controlled and growth was steady and reliable.
Going off some Greek sectoral balance charts here (which I would prefer to be flipped around 0 to look more useful) and from the paper they're quoting from. It looks like Greece had a moderate government deficit but their trade balance turned to deficit in the late 90s, which pushed their domestic private sector into significant deficit, probably running up a lot of private debt. Similar to the US at the time in the late clinton-era. Then Greece adopted the euro and was locked into effectively a currency peg with the likes of Germany, which essentially made the trade deficit structural from then on.
So then, during and after the financial crisis and great recession, the private sector was hammered and was trying to de-leverage and rebuild savings, which by necessity is going to force the government into massive deficit (as tax revenue falls and safety net spending rises, the normal automatic stabilizer reasons for this).
If the main moral failing (causing a larger headline government deficit number) turned out to be that they were running a trade deficit and had been suffering a private deficit for a decade, it doesn't really seem that damning. Hard to make corruption & profligacy actually work as a macro story (though I'm sure it's plentiful at the micro level).
LateMechanic
3mo ago
Yeah there's nothing stopping anyone from doing a bad job running a government, but I'm skeptical that austerity is going to significantly hamper the corrupt actors anyway. That often seemed more like a 'just-world' convenient justification in each of the sovereign debt sagas. Greece would have been fine (at least in this sovereign debt regard) if they hadn't given up the drachma, and they ended up fine once the ECB finally realized it was their job to simply fully back all member states.
Any government will need to have various checks against spending getting out of control, such as having a proper budgeting and auditing process. But once you land on the size of government desired, the taxes and especially the debt & deficit are just dynamically emergent results based on the private sector's savings desire and the level of exporting. Net exporters acting like their lower deficits are evidence of good sense & morality is more of that just-world confusion. Trying to force a country to shoot themselves in the foot economically based on those debt/deficit outcomes being too large for someone's aesthetic preference (or bad faith justification) is a destructive angle that it seems people are not falling for as much anymore.
LateMechanic
10mo ago
Just noting, this line:
hoping to curry favor with the person they expected would be the next American president
was referring to the foreign government looking to donate to the clinton campaign or maybe clinton foundation, not the FBI. Meanwhile in durham's reporting, apparently the FBI were intentionally 'tippy-toeing' based on the chance clinton would be the next president. So it's not quite as strong as you're describing. But an interesting takeaway from the Durham report regardless.
At least as of about 10 years ago, the classic example (by commons/piracy advocates) of rights-holders starting to target propaganda to children was the MPAA working with the LA Boy Scouts to make an anti-piracy merit badge, the "Respect Copyrights Activity Patch" around 2005/2006.
I haven't really followed the arguments in some time, but definitely noticed the same shift in younger normies on reddit over the years. It's hard to imagine that dorky propaganda was so effective, but I'd guess it makes a difference what you're hearing from a young age.
edit: And almost surely the huge victory was successfully getting people to lump copyright/patent/trademark law together under the name "Intellectual Property" since the nineties, which completely does change how you think of these. Thinking of 'property' gives people an intuition about stealing, whereas 'temporary government-granted monopoly publishing rights' doesn't. Seems like when broken down, most people strongly favor trademarks, strongly disfavor patents, and have mixed feelings about copyright.
As an aside, having multiple of my first 10 comments on this site related to Richard Stallman...well that was unexpected.
LateMechanic
1yr ago
The nights were pregnant with pre-millennium tension; we ran riot because we had been promised a new century to become adults in, because we were sold on a vision of rebirth through numerology, and we knew what came next would be better than everything that had come before. It turned out that that was untrue, and we never got over it.
Go look around at the way the world looked in 2002. Everything looked like shit. The fashion was worse. The music was worse. The country was worse.
A lot of people are mentioning 9/11 as the main material event that must have been what changed the overall feel and marks the end of the broad 90s. But I think there's something to what Freddie says here about goofy numerology putting something in the air that a lot of people felt. Even if we know rationally that it's arbitrary, it feels interesting psychologically being the last decade of the millennium, about to tick over to triple-zeroes and something new, Y2K. When that passed without incident (as it was bound to), some magic feeling was lost, and we just continued on with boy bands, survivor / american idol reality tv, frosted-tips, whatever.
I think the last faint echo of something like this mass psychology was in the run up to 2012, with the mayan calendar ending doomsday stuff, on the heels of the financial crisis and great recession, occupy wallstreet, the last of peak-oil doomerism before fracking, etc. People could indulge in some more dark fantasies of living in interesting end-times that are about to transition to something different, until january 2013 when it was time to go back to mundane reality.
LateMechanic
1yr ago
I couldn't avoid searching 'richard stallman dancing' after reading that, and wasn't disappointed.
LateMechanic
1yr ago
So the promiscuous woman is scorned, not primarily by men, but by other women.
This always made sense to me and seemed to match what I encountered and saw in the world. That is, until gen-z men started to become visible to me on the internet about 5 years ago, who seemed to be the ones lashing out at women with shaming language about 'thots' and 'thirst-traps' (any women publicly using their good looks on youtube/twitch/etc). By my priors, I would have expected men to be quite fine with women dominating instagram/streaming/asmr/whatever, while some women would be trying to enforce against the defectors with various levels of slut-shaming. And by my reading, the young men aren't simply playing catch-up with new norms and trying to signal their new virtues -- it's more like: "damn you for tempting me to donate my hard earned money!" Am I misreading this as a phenomenon?
LateMechanic
7mo ago
no mainstream conservative figure like a Ben Shapiro or a Steven Crowder has reviewed it or interviewed him.
I was randomly looking up Adam Carolla's podcast yesterday and watched a recent episode, which happened to feature Hanania and his book, so I just assumed he's been making the rounds. He was good and fit in fine as a guest with only a little bit of airtime, although it looks like the youtube views at least are only around 20k per episode (probably better numbers for other audio-only spots).
LateMechanic
7mo ago
Yeah was going to say this. Probably one reason reddit doesn't let mods see author-deleted comments is because there's such a simple workaround extra step (edit to blank or something useless), which only distinguishes between people who know to use it or not. Then again, there are other tools like RSS which pick up the initial posts/comments, so it still is a bit like email where once you've hit 'send', it's out there.
Meanwhile the nice thing about this codebase's change is that you still have access to your own deleted posts (in gray) and can easily 'undelete', which must be similar to what the mods see.
LateMechanic
10mo ago
Oh yeah I think it's certainly going to end up being considered a massive flop, likely losing them upwards of a hundred million+. I put those production budget figures in for comparison's sake between the various movies, but making $450M on a $250M production budget would be a catastrophic loss, not a profit. Because there's also a huge marketing budget on top of that, and the box office revenue gets cut down by ~50% for the studio's share (the theaters get the other half).
Strange yes, although I realized it was very similar to how the stackexchange sites broke backward compatibility with older browsers 1-2 years ago for comment collapsing/uncollapsing. And I knew that was fixed for waterfox in a later update. So I just tested it and found the release was 2022.06 where they said "Web compatibility improvements to fix breakages across a variety of websites". In waterfox v2022.04 comment collapsing is broken on stackoverflow and in the new motte as of a few days ago, but both working fine in v2022.06. Just unfortunate for me because that's all after the 2021.09 version update which made their whole browser way slower, which kind of defeats half the purpose of using an older nonstandard browser.
LateMechanic
7mo ago
The real magic here is in the fact they sell miles from their loyalty programs to other companies (like AA to Hertz) so they get the incentive benefits. These are sold at a markup
I think that's a smart evolution of the business, although I wouldn't say there's any particular magic in this step either. This still falls under the universal logic of IOU issuance: anyone can issue their own IOUs (printed from nothing) and decide both what it takes to get one and what the redemption value will be.
I guess what moves it to feel more 'bank-like' is that the airlines take tracking accounts in their database very seriously, compared to less serious bearer punch-cards for free Subway sandwiches or whatever. And flights are more universally desirable, compared to more subjective businesses. Maybe I will use Hertz instead of Avis if it's giving me $X towards my next flight on my usual airline, but for some reason if they were partnered with Mcdonalds reward points, it would take a lot more than $X to move the needle.
LateMechanic
1yr ago
Yeah that's exactly it I think. The OP redditor's main mistake was being under the impression that FwB is a normal thing in modern dating, and that it's the casual next-step after flirty friendship (before taking the much bigger step of committing to a real monogamous relationship). There's almost no way this guy internalized that the mythical social media 'FwB' status was a prize final destination that he was just entitled to waltz right into.
So that's why summing it up as the guy 'essentially' asking "hey, wanna fuck?" / "Hey, wanna be my fuck buddy?" like many are doing here is a borderline strawman. With really minimal charity, it looks like confusion about the modern landscape way more than crassness. He likely already knew he was in trouble when she said "what's that?" and found himself trying to explain it.
LateMechanic
10mo ago
Here was the list I was using, pulling the comparable big-budget entries (although missed Alice in Wonderland from 2010 which I guess actually was the success that caused them to lean into this approach).
Mulan is a weird one that just can't be compared box-office-wise, because it was scheduled for March 2020 and went through a number of postponements until the theatrical release was simply scrapped and it was dumped on streaming.
The point is that for many people who haven't been paying as much attention, one might think that TLM is comparable to Cowboy Bebop or Dragonball and maybe people just don't like these. But we're a decade into this being one major pillar of disney's huge blockbuster release strategy (right up there with marvel & star wars) which had led to their box office domination high-point by 2019. The whole 'Walt Disney Pictures' division basically transformed into just making these, and up until the pandemic I don't think it could be described as anything other than an insane success. So now if it's starting to falter like star wars, marvel, pixar, and walt disney animation all are, that's definitely a possible culture-war hot spot.
Disney’s live-action division, which once struggled through an identity crisis and pricey flops like John Carter and The Lone Ranger, has found its sweet spot. The musical casts a light on an unsung part of the Disney moviemaking machine that has learned to lean in heavily on the live-action adaptations of beloved Disney-branded animated films. The label, which had two Pirates Of The Caribbean sequels in the billion-dollar club, notched its third with the Tim Burton-directed Johnny Depp-starrer Alice In Wonderland. It now seems a matter of time before Beauty And The Beast becomes its fourth. While a sequel to Alice failed — it was made even when Burton said no — The Jungle Book nearly cracked the billion-dollar mark with $966 million in global ticket sales.
Beauty And The Beast is just the latest example of a philosophical change within Disney’s most overshadowed silo. The baseball equivalent of Bailey’s mission statement is basically, be disciplined enough not to swing at bad pitches outside the strike zone. That wheelhouse has increasingly become about recapturing the animation library magic with live-action films, ideally supplying one or more of the three tentpole-sized annual films the division generates (supplemented by one or two films whose under $100 million budgets are far lower than the big pictures carry).
...
In a conversation Monday, Bailey credited the division’s escalating success rate to the silo system instituted by Disney chairman Bob Iger and managed by Alan Horn, the former longtime Warner Bros chief who stabilized a static operation and infused his own moral sensibilities on the slate. It is a program where each division stays in its own lane and isn’t pressured to make more movies than its marketing machine can handle, while maintaining quality controls. This differs from some studios that seem to be bent on filling a high number of films on a slate. Disney’s annual collective output usually doesn’t exceed a dozen. But eight of those Disney films are global blockbusters that suck all the oxygen out of the box office when they are released.
The collective results have turned Disney into the most consistently dominant studio Hollywood has seen in the modern era, to the point where it now dictates the release calendar, at least the most desirable summer and holiday corridors. Date a Pixar, Marvel superhero, Star Wars sequel/spinoff, Disney Animation or live-action animated film remake, and it is likely that other studios will then have to work around it.
Personally I think the only one of any of these I've seen is the Jungle Book, just because it was that strange situation where two different studios put out new jungle book adaptations at the same time.
LateMechanic
9mo ago
Awesome, thanks! Interesting to hear what that compatibility issue was (sounds like a handy operator). I probably do need to jump to Basilisk or just finally give up on XUL addons and go back to Firefox, but you may have given me a final stay of execution
The archives of those pages are linked in the first Revolver article, which shows the FBI had been updating the /wanted/capitol-violence page as each person's status changed (leaving each person's 'photograph number' the same). They were putting big red "ARRESTED" labels on everyone and leaving their picture up. The day before that July 1st update of quietly removing Epps, the top 50 people on the page had over 60% marked 'ARRESTED', while only two numbered suspects had been removed (Suspects #36 and #37, and then Epps #16 was removed the next day).
So the removal was clearly not just triggered by a successful identification. Moreover, based on looking at those red Arrest labels, it seems like their priority was roughly similar to the order of 'photograph number', where being Suspect #16 was close to the top (not many marked arrested in the 250-400 range at that time).
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