MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
No bio...
User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
12hr ago
Yes - SaaS raises prices for consumers because the total amount you can extract from a consumer over a multi-year subscription is significantly more than the highest price you can stick on a shrinkwrapped product with a straight face. But at constant EV of price paid, SaaS is better because you pay more for the successful purchases and cancel the stuff that doesn't work out for you, so trying a new product is a lower risk proposition.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
12hr ago
If Trump called for the slaughter of the first-born, self-reported MAGAs would poll 92% in favour of it. I'm not sure if this is because 92% of Trump's supporters are sufficiently keen to give the loyal answer to pollsters that they would claim to support the slaughter of the first-born, or whether it is because former Trump supporters who can't bring themselves to claim to support the slaughter of the first-born stop self-reporting as MAGA.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
12hr ago
Average or above average does a lot of work here. The problem for women who train hard is not average guys, who some they could probably beat and some they probably cant based just on genetics. Its just that once a guy gets off his ass and gets into any kind of shape, the woman is toast.
Depending on the sport, I would say it is more likely to be high-school level athletes - and given the culture of American school sport the best high-school level athletes are training to a semi-professional standard. The boys' team that the US women's national soccer team trains against is a State all-star team of elite high school athletes, for example.
But a guy who has the necessary skills for the sport and a basically active lifestyle (American car culture means that most Americans who don't intentionally work out are couch potatoes, but this is not true elsewhere) but doesn't train is going to beat club-level women, and a decent club-level male athlete is going to beat elite women.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
13hr ago
The deciding factor against negotiations was, apparently, really stupid. Why on earth would the Iranians want to be taking handouts from the US like this?
That same week, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff called from Geneva after the latest talks with Iranian officials. Over three rounds of negotiations in Oman and Switzerland, the two had tested Iran’s willingness to make a deal. At one point, they offered the Iranians free nuclear fuel for the life of their program — a test of whether Tehran’s insistence on enrichment was truly about civilian energy or about preserving the ability to build a bomb. The Iranians rejected the offer, calling it an assault on their dignity.
To be fair to the admin, this was the deal we ended up reaching with North Korea in the late 1990's. One of the engineers working on the nuclear reactor we built for the Norks was my bridge partner. With hindsight, I don't think it was a very good deal.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Cutting the cost of well-drafted objections by an order of magnitude means that smaller, less objectionable projects will have well-drafted objections made against them.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
On the YIMBY side, it should in theory make it way easier to get permitting and to anticipate all likely objections
The problem is that objections can be generated based entirely on the papers in a way which becomes arbitrarily cheap given good enough LLMs, but even if they are anticipated responding to them may involve expensive activity in the real world, like bat surveys in the most notorious example. It seems to me that giving both sides LLMs will increase the number of "cheap to raise, expensive to rebut" objections.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I think a strong case that a lot of the online censorship (e.g. not allowing people to have frank discussions about Trans rights—and, yes it’s Reddit’s trans rights discussion censorship which drove The Motte to have their own website instead of remaining on Reddit) we saw in the late 2010s and early 2020s was partly a result of EU overreach.
That the worst online censorship was around trans rights is strong evidence that it was not driven by pressure from the EU authorities - the offline push for censorship of sane views on trans issues was much stronger in the US than the EU. Given the weakness of free speech laws in Europe, the EU (and member states) could have openly censored unapproved views on trans issues the way they openly censored complaints about Muslim immigration, but they chose not to. The pattern of what got censored how hard on Reddit is most consistent with a bottom-up push for censorship by the powermods, and more consistent with top-down censorship directed by American lefties than European lefties.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
The largest problem with CSAM is people paying for it, because it creates an incentive to produce more, which involves the sexual abuse of kids. The good news (at least when this product is concerned) here is that most people are not skilled enough to hide financial transactions. "So you just create a bunch of wallets and then use mixers to move funds from a wallet linked to you to a wallet not linked to you" is not something most people will understand.
As of 1999, most people who downloaded paid kiddieporn online knew perfectly how to hide financial transactions - they used stolen credit cards. Operation Avalanche in the US found 35,000 credit card numbers and only made 100 arrests and various foreign offshoots including Operation Ore in the UK became fiascos because they arrested the legitimate owners of the stolen credit cards.
People who knowingly download paid kiddieporn know that they are committing a crime that society (rightly or wrongly) takes more seriously than small-time financial crime and that the material they are looking for is on a darker part of the dark web than advice on how to obfuscate financial transactions.
As a side notice, I find it especially ironic that the so-called Christian parties (e.g. CDU in Germany) are always championing these anti-tech measures. Half of them are in a church which a mere generation ago was systematically enabling priests to sexually abuse kids.
A quibble, but the Christian element of the German CDU is predominantly Protestant, and I am not aware of a large child abuse scandal in the German Lutheran Church. Catholic Bavaria has a different Christian Democratic party (the CSU) which is in near-permanent coalition with the CSU at the federal level, and obviously is guilty-by-association in the way you suggest.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I never talk about Israel/Palestine with them because that makes brains switch off and people get angry.
The same approach works with pro-Israel American normies and pro-Palestine British lefties.
If there was a law against talking about the Israel-Palestine conflict unless you had lived in Israel or Palestine for at least ten years, the world would be a better place.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Europe doesn't have a "native red tribe". (Some groups that fit the description exist, like Northern Irish Protestants in the UK, who are the ancestors of the American red tribe, but they aren't numerous enough to be an important political force in any European country I am familiar with). The red tribe as discussed by e.g. Scott Siskind isn't just "people with right-populist political views" - it is a distinctive culture within America with its own folkways (including religion) that became uniquely welcoming to right-populist politics because of how the civil rights era went down.
The result of this is that you can predict a white American's politics much more effectively based on tribal markers like hobbies or TV-watching habits than based on conventional demographic data like age or income. This is not the case in Europe where right-populism is the politics of the old (in the UK) or the poor and uneducated (almost everywhere else).
No - I am making a specific claim about an unusual aspect of American evangelical theology, which is that some US evangelicals think there is useful advice about present-day geopolitics to be found in Biblical end-times prophecies. ISIS apparently thought the same, but most religious fundamentalists don't, including Al-Qaeda and the Iranian mullahs.
The more normal religious fundamentalist approach to geopolitics is to think that if you get the country right with God you will be rewarded with worldly power. This is fundamental to both Saudi Salafism and Pakistani Deobandism, and appears to be how the Iranian mullahs think as well - I have never researched Shia theology so I can't comment in detail. It is also the more common stream of American evangelical thinking - the "let's immanentise the escheaton with an aggressive war in the Middle East" crowd are a minority.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Johannesburg is the largest city in the world not on a navigable river. It was built around a gold mine.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
The militant Islamic groups in Europe are Sunni. The Iranian mullahs hate them more than they hate us.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Iran has behaved consistently rationally throughout the whole affair. Non-US-aligned regimes seeking to acquire a nuclear deterrent if possible is survival 101 since Libya, and arguably since Iraq.
The only players in this conflict who, as a matter of sincere religious conviction, base their foreign policy on a desire to accelerate the fulfilment of their religion's end-time prophecies, are the Christian Zionists in the US.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
The European response was to deploy a tripwire force to Greenland in case the apparently insane man did the insane thing he said he was thinking of doing. Taking cheap, reversible steps to manage low-probability high-impact risks is risk management 101.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
But Iran's wrecking your stuff. The US isn't mining the strait, Iran is. It turns out Iran thinks you're their enemy too!
As someone in Europe who wants to keep the heat on, I don't have the luxury of thinking about morality or blame - I have to focus on cause and effect. The cause of the looming energy crisis in Europe is an insane decision made in Washington in response to a borderline-insane decision made in Jerusalem - everything else since then is the natural working out of cause and effect, assuming that the Iranian regime has a normal level of self-preservation instinct.
Part of the reason why European countries are not co-operating with the US attacks on Iran is that the most likely good outcome for western Europe is that the EU or individual EU countries cut deals with Iran to get our oil through. Trump doesn't have a plan to reopen Hormuz quickly enough to defuse the energy crisis, and more enthusiastic support by European allies wouldn't change that.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
No, because Al-Qaeda didn't need to do it - 9/11 was insane and there is no scenario where it was a sane response to US provocation.
Iran closing the Straits of Hormuz is some combination of:
- The obviously sane self-interested act of a regime in trouble trying to play a bad hand as well as possible.
- A cornered rat biting everything in sight on the way down
- A defeated regime pressing their MAD button - the credible threat to close the Straits was a key part of Iran's security strategy and to make the threat credible you have to self-modify into the kind of regime that will press the button even if it is too late to save your arse.
Iran trying to close Hormuz is the predictable and widely predicted consequence of their being subject to a regime change war by a conventionally stronger adversary. And that isn't driven by the character of the regime - any Iranian regime that cared about its own survival, including a liberal democracy, would respond in roughly the same way to the same provocation. (Iran succeeding is arguably a result of poor planning by the Trump administration)
9-11 came as a surprise to everyone. To the extent that it was a response to US provocation, the primary provocation (according to OBL, the presence of non-Muslim US troops on holy ground in Saudi Arabia) was not something that would be provocative to a sane actor.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
It isn't R/D, it is Red/Blue. Reagan and Bush Sr were hated by the hard left, but not by normie Europeans. The main thing my (utterly conventional European establishment-left) mother remembers about Reagan is how great his speech was after Challenger blew up.
The Red Tribe and Europeans have limited direct contact (Reds don't travel internationally as much as Blues, the only Red media that gets exported is sports, Europeans visiting the US on business are visiting blue cities unless they work in the energy industry, and Europeans visiting the US as tourists are visiting blue cities, natural wonders and Disney). So most of what we learn about the Red Tribe is filtered through (hostile) Blue media, and most of what the Red Tribe know about Europeans is based on social media outrage porn and/or negatively polarising against positive depictions of Europe in Blue media.
The one place where non-Americans have direct visibility of how Reds think is the public behaviour of the man they have chosen to represent them on the world stage since 2016. And from the outside a culture that can enthusiastically elect Donald Trump looks like a culture that considers sadism a virtue and honesty a vice.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Pezeshkian (who comes from the reformist faction in the mullahocracy and won the genuine-but-not-free Presidential election on that basis) actually taking power and cutting a deal with the US was always the most plausible Venezuela-like regime modification scenario.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
For the Iran situation - all of the 3 big players - US, EU and the gulf know that Iran has to be beaten into compliance once it started. Right now they are just playing a dance because everyone wants the others to pay for the solution.
Or hoping one of the others comes up with a solution - as @RandomRanger and @Goodguy pointed out, if Trump had a plausible way of pulling off a YUGE WIN he would take it, and we all know that the EU and the Gulf Arabs are too weak militarily to open the Straits (other than by cutting a deal with Iran) if the US can't. The only country that might be able to do pull out a win the Americans can't is Ukraine, because they actually understand modern drone-first warfare. I think it is possible but unlikely that the Ukraine-Saudi alliance turns out to be a Big Deal, but I have no idea what happens after that.
If the US bugs out, there are a lot of people with a shared interest in cutting a deal. A return to normalcy in the Gulf is good for almost everyone, apart from Russia, the US domestic oil and gas industry, and Trump's ego, and good for Iran most of all.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
Russian nationalism is tied to politicised Orthodoxy, and therefore anti-Catholic.
Turning American politicised evangelicalism from a force which was primarily anti-Catholic to a force which is primarily anti-Left was a multi-decade project.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
This. The only potential enemy European tanks are useful for defending ourselves against is Russia, and if we are going to defend ourselves against Russia we should be doing it in Ukraine and not in Poland.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
Are athletes generally known for their intellectual rigor? Even politicians are supposed to be only slightly above average intellectually, nowhere near the heights of g-loaded academic fields in most cases.
Given the fraction of American politicians with JDs, I think they have to be more than slightly above average. (It takes an IQ of at least 110 to complete a JD and pass the bar, and the average lawyer is closer to 120). There was a study showing that Swedish politicians have dramatically above average IQs (based on the AQFT-type tests they did when drafted as 20-year-olds) - I can't find the paper any more but the press release gives a good idea of the results.
In general, I would assume that politicians are somewhat below average for the PMC, but well above average for the population as a whole.
That is what I was trying to say with my second option. Thanks for putting it more clearly.
More options
Context Copy link