MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
No bio...
User ID: 896
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
11hr ago
David Mellor is the classic recent British example.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
11hr ago
The public and the media don't get to make decisions as to whether he keeps his job, the board and shareholders of Nvidia do.
In effect, so does the government. There is enough evidence of willful violation of export controls that the government could legitimately destroy Nvidia with investigations (not to mention the lack of practical recourse if the government do so as illegitimate process-is-the-punishment fuckery), hence they can threaten to do so unless Huang is fired.
I don't know if Trump can save Huang (or even if he could have done if he hadn't lost his soft power by presiding over a landslide mid-term defeat) but he can definitely sink him.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
11hr ago
Apple has seemingly become less dynamic. They put out the same tired products with modest improvements. It’s a good business model but they seem to have lost the vision aspect Jobs brought. Maybe Jobs was lucky re timing however.
Page and Brin were bored with Google's core business by 2015 (when they created Alphabet and made Pichai CEO of the Google subsidiary). I suspect Musk got bored with Tesla's core automotive business around the Cybertruck release. Bezos retired when he started getting bored, and Jobs never got bored. We can argue about whether Google search and the advertising products that funded it stopped being insanely great before or after 2015.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
11hr ago
The other issue is what the win condition looks like. What is the scenario where Anthropic is successful enough to be worth 10+ trillion as a mature company (which is how bulls justify paying 1.5 trillion now) but there are still worthwhile things money can buy?
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
12hr ago
I don't think he was unusually pragmatic about treating scientists well - given the situation the USSR was in, agronomy was just as mission-critical as nuclear physics and he still did Lysenkoism. I just think he made one particular correct call on nukes.
There was kind of a three-tier system for nuclear scientists and engineers:
- People who stayed in the visible bits of the USSR (like the researchers at the Kurchatov Institute) didn't officially get any extra leeway, but no doubt would get the file read twice if some Komsomol gunner noticed them being the first to stop clapping.
- The "closed cities" where the more practical and engineering-focussed work happened had noticeably more intellectual freedom, but you had very limited ability to interact with uncleared people outside the city. If you were valuable but too political unreliable for the Kurchatov, you could be transferred to a similar role in a closed city (and the aforementioned Komsomol gunner would see you and your family disappear and think he had won).
- As @sun_the_second pointed out, there were bougie gulags for valuable scientists and engineers who were too disloyal even for the closed cities, which (unlike the proper gulags) had central heating and sufficient calories to prevent cognitive impairment due to hunger.
Biologists who rejected Lysenkoism got the classic gulag.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
12hr ago
so they paid for each acre-foot as much as any farmer did
You sweet summer child. Water law in the arid parts of the US is the kind of thing that soured Gorbachev on the USSR. People are using gimped showerheads/toilets/dishwashers to save water so that farmers can irrigate subsidised alfalfa (which is not human-edible) for export.
In this case, it should add up to "good for the data centres" - they are paying far more for water than the farmers are. In practice, I suspect it adds up to "no data centres here - they compete with humans for the miniscule smidgeon of water that isn't wasted by farmers".
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
13hr ago
Because this is nothingburger. The chips given to her company are drop in the bucket of China's grey imports. And because the pussification of Washington will not begin in earnest until February this anecdote still holds true
Whether or not GPU sales to Red China is a nothingburger is precisely the issue. The Trump administration has tended to treat it as one, and a large part of the reason for this is "what's good for Nvidia is good for the United States" mercantilist logic. It is obvious that Nvidia lobbying is an input into the administration's decision, which is entirely proper if you can assume that Nvidia is not compromised. Unfortunately, a honeypotted CEO means that assumption is no longer safe.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
16hr ago
naval-gazing
was that a spelling mistake or a joke? Sir, this is a land war.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
16hr ago
How many troublesome insurgencies were primarily about "poor people with guns" as opposed to "poor people with bombs"? IEDs were what US soldiers were afraid of in both Vietnam and Iraq, and my read is that they have been insurgents' first choice since about WW2.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
16hr ago
The Profumo affair also involved a spy - which then, as now, was considered a major aggravating factor. Christine Keeler was a lady of negotiable affections (though probably not on an uncomplicated night-by-night basis) and one of her other clients/lovers/sugar daddies was the Soviet Naval attache, who was (unknown to Profumo, I think) a spy in active talks with MI5 about defecting. I believe the affair is responsible for the meme about all military attaches being spies.
A direct comparison is hard because the idea of a woman young enough to be a honeypot being a senior executive at a Soviet front company was not thinkable in 1963.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
1d ago
Realistically, I think phase 3 has already happened, and more of the new Says Law jobs created by AI will be pink-collar than blue-collar.
Think about what you would add to your life if you were several times richer, but couldn't occupy any more land than you do now. It won't be more stuff (you don't have space), to the extent that it will be better stuff that will mostly be automated work (although there is obviously some scope to consume craftmanship), so most of what you add to your life will be services, and most of those services will be pink-collar.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
1d ago
Criminal penalties are much harsher in the US than Europe (including the UK, which is more punitive than the European average), for almost all offences. The difference is somewhat smaller than it looks, because you can negotiate much larger discounts for a guilty plea in the US system. (Plea bargaining is illegal in the UK, with the discount for a guilty plea fixed based on how early you plead, capped at 1/3 if you informally admit guilt in the police station and then plead guilty at the arraignment).
In both countries, I would say the consequences of lifetime sex offender registration are worse than the official sentence.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
1d ago
Even if Anthropic takes over the light cone, it will never pay a dividend.
This is a big deal. The corporate cultures of Musk Inc, Alphabet and Anthropic, and probably most of the other founder-controlled tech megacorps, are all such that your equity is de facto a perpetual non-voting zero-coupon preference share. Mark Cuban famously said that these should be valued in the same way as baseball cards.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
2d ago
and waste resources as prison cells get filled with "dangerous" (/s) screen-watchers
If this law is enforced in the same way as the laws against downloading real kiddieporn from the internet, then the likely penalty is a slap on the wrist plus sex offender registration. The guideline starting point for possession of category A kiddieporn (penetrative sex, but sadism and bestiality are considered aggravating factors that get you a longer sentence) is 12 months in jail, for category B kiddieporn (i.e. non-penetrative sex acts) 6 months , and for category C kiddieporn (i.e. nudes) it is community service. In all cases you can get a reduction for pleading guilty, and sentences of less than a year for first-time offenders are suspended by default, so to see the inside of a jail cell you either need to be going for sadism and bestiality, distributing the stuff, or managing to annoy a judge.
Criminalising downloading kiddieporn, aggressively enforcing the laws, and imposing sex offender registration on people who get caught is extremely popular. I don't think voter backlash is going to be a problem here, even though it should be.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
2d ago
As someone who has moved in with the woman I was sleeping with, it's a great idea for many obvious reasons.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
2d ago
There was a police investigation into online death threats sent to supermarket heiress and feminist activist Caroline Criado-Perez which led to no prosecutions because the people sending the death threats were minors or doing it from outside the jurisdiction. The only cases which are both newsworthy and serious enough to prosecute involve a sane, adult, British man threatening a female celebrity.
PC David Copperfield devotes a chapter in Wasting Police Time to how he was expected to police non-credible death threats, writing from the perspective that they almost always involve teenagers, who will be let off with a caution if the case is prepared for prosecution, and that is in practice dealt with with informal warnings.
Sending credible death threats is something the police take seriously, but given that it tends to be criminal low-lifes threatening each other over drug deals, chavs threatening each other over chavettes, or chavs threatening their chavettes over general disobedience, it isn't newsworthy.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
2d ago
If you are over 50, I do not think getting a leather jacket will make you more attractive to hot Chinese spies.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
2d ago
Why American?
The question of who Jared Kushner is working for is an interesting one, but the way to bet is that he is working for the people paying him. Based on the publicly available information, that would be the Saudis. If the book claiming that the Dutch managed to flip the Russian spy who had pwned Kushner's phone is correct (which I doubt) then the Emiratis are paying even more.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
2d ago
As I understand it, an important part of any protection racket is that you do in fact protect people from outside groups as well as your own.
With the Ankh-Morpok Thieves Guild being the paradigmatic example.
An interesting question about the next 5 years or so in El Salvador is whether there is going to be a big increase in disorganised crime now that the gangs are unable to suppress it and Bukele's police almost certainly lack the necessary skills.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
2d ago
Sleeping with a professional prostitute while married is a lot less socially harmful than keeping a mistress, which in turn is less harmful than leaving your wife to marry your mistress.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
2d ago
"Switch sides and you don't have to keep fucking the kind of man who thinks he's still cool wearing a leather jacket at 63"
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
2d ago
Ethnic machine politics sucks, but my experience growing up in London in the Loony Left era was that public employee union machine politics sucks worse (my understanding is that SF and NYC are the main victims in the US). Ethnic machine politicians have a mandate to provide good public services to their ingroup, and the nature of urban local government is that often (but by no means always) means providing good public services that benefit everyone in the borough.
To avoid both you appear to need competitive partisan local politics, which is difficult in a world where politics is nationalised and urbanites and right-wingers consider each other permanent enemies on culture war grounds.
"I never thought the leopards would eat my face" says ethnic machine politician who delivered the bloc vote to the Face-Eating Leopard Party.
I have very little sympathy for Trump voters who are suffering because of Trump policies, but there are two groups which provoke negative sympathy. One is people who voted for Trump because Biden was insufficiently pro-Palestinian - I mean WTF, but they did. And the other is small business owners who employ illegal immigrants. What did you think "Mass Deportations Now" meant - vibes, papers?
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
2d ago
"Would Song China have industrialised if they hadn't been curbstomped by first the Jin and later Genghis Khan" is one of the great what-ifs of history. I am not a China expert, but based on schoolboy history they had high-trust commerce-supporting institutions (1), widespread use of water power (2), better metallurgy than the pre-industrial west (3), and underground coal mining (4).
Surely naval-gazing is what the Rear Admiral does at the Vice Admiral's rear?
More options
Context Copy link