NewCharlesInCharge
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User ID: 89
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
In practice no one would perceive the disappearance of the black professional class. You'd just have more of them graduating from lower ranked schools, perhaps even with better graduation rates as ability and challenge get better aligned. Doctors and lawyers from lesser schools still get to call themselves doctors and lawyers.
Very few people will get enough contact with employers that feed from Ivies to ever notice. My employer leans fairly heavily towards prestigious schools and even I don't have enough anecdotal contact with the top law firms, finance industry, consulting, etc. to form an impression of the racial demographics of such places.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
In practice most delegations to the DNC practice block voting anyway, where they swing all their votes one way so as to be more attractive to those trying to whip votes. Sometimes it’s a vote within the delegation that determines what the vote will be reported as to the DNC, sometimes the delegation chair just decides.
Following this primary there will be a process to elect delegates. The ones that win uncommitted slots are either going to be rookies who have no idea what happens at convention, or fake uncommitteds that are actually experienced party members. At convention both will have about the same impact on Biden’s nomination. In the super slim chance of a brokered convention it’s the party leaders that matter.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
That would actually be a decent Google interview question. You'd need to identify units, make ballpark estimates, do a little bit of math.
For example, they say a picture is worth one thousand words. I estimate a typical newspaper contains 10,000 words and weighs one pound. So we have a rate of 10 pictures per pound. Let's ignore that newspapers also contain pictures.
A video contains roughly 30 frames per second, each frame a picture. YouTube has an absurd amount of video. They get about a million hours of uploads per day. Let's say that over their history they have 10 billion hours of video. That works out to 10 billion hours * 30 frames per second = 1,080,000,000,000,000 frames. Or, 108 trillion pounds.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
The pattern being "killings that do not advance his interest." Killing dissidents with implausible deniability serves two purposes: it shuts them up, and sends a message to others who might otherwise speak out.
But Navalny was already silenced in prison and reportedly about to be traded for one of Putin's contract killers. Why would he opt to kill Navalny in this scenario? Is it just orthogonal to the purported trade? Putin had already decided to kill him, forgot about it, then remembered when a subordinate approached him about the trade?
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
He's been in jail for three years. How long does it take to turn a prison guard when you have the CIA's budget?
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
The articles I’m seeing now is that he was killed, under Putin’s orders, to prevent a prisoner swap. For example: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/26/vladimir-putin-had-alexei-navalny-killed-to-thwart-prisoner-swap-allies-claim
This is Nordstream logic. If Putin wanted to stop the prisoner exchange he could have just ordered it stopped. Any subordinate that went ahead and did the exchange anyway would do so at great risk to themselves, since Putin does in fact have people killed.
Navalny’s widow says Putin had Navalny killed because Putin is a “mad mafioso” but I’m not aware of a pattern of such killings by Putin.
If this was a murder intended to stop the prisoner exchange then the most likely murderer is a state other than Russia and Germany. Very similar to Nordstream! The most likely scenario if halting a prisoner exchange was the goal would be that the Americans wanted to prevent the Germans from making a deal with Russia. Perhaps part of the deal even involved gas shipments.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
I have to wonder if focusing effort on keeping people from getting what they asked for has any effect on preventing people from getting what they didn’t ask for.
If I ask for images of a black guy eating watermelon, clearly that’s what I want.
If I ask for pictures of a black president and it depicts him eating watermelon, it’s probably not what I wanted.
I understand that in the latter case it’s going to end up as negative press. Though I wish the response from AI creators was just to tell people to roll the dice again.
In the former where it’s what people asked for, why don’t we treat the tool as if it were Photoshop or Microsoft Word? Adobe and Microsoft don’t get bad press when people use their tools for nefarious purposes.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
Catholics also had large enough families that the occasional kid choosing the priesthood didn’t cause TFR to drop below replacement.
As a catechumen I have some trepidation about this with my own kids. I’m old enough that we’re simply not going to have a big family, we have one kid, hope for two, if we’re very lucky might have three.
If our one kid chooses the priesthood I’ll be proud of his piety but sad about my family line.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
From the outside I get the feeling that writers are being taught some kind of paint-by-numbers system, the construct a basic plot, and then dress it up to match the setting.
An example from the show: Chief of Police Danvers, portrayed by Jodie Foster, takes orders from some guy from Anchorage, and has to quote regulations to get him to defer to her. If you know anything about how police are structure in America, this makes no sense. Within municipalities the chief is the highest police officer. They do answer to others within the municipality, like mayors or police commissioners, but they're not part of some state-wide system.
My guess is that the paint-by-numbers called for the female chief to have a male chauvinist superior. The writers don't bother to make that align with any bit of reality except that it's "in Alaska."
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
I wonder if there's a labor quality issue here.
At Google and Facebook of old engineers had near absolute freedom to choose what they wanted to work on. Google famously had 20% time, Facebook had a fairly permissive evaluation system that let you go do things like make desktop Linux for engineers better if you could argue that it was impactful. They were trusted to do this because hiring filtered for very talented and self-motivated people. The filter was so effective that you could let the performance evaluation process weed out the slackers. As a result, you got the best match between what people were working on and what they were personally motivated to work on. People put in long hours because they really wanted to see their idea working and out in the wild.
From what I've absorbed from fiction, it seems academia used to kind of be that way? Tenure was used to prove out that you were the real deal, and then you just worked on whatever tickled your fancy. My guess is that as academia grew and grew, you got more slackers, and no real weed-out mechanism, so you end up with lots of gatekeeping on what kind of research gets done.
Or maybe professors have had to specialize in grant-writing for a very long time, I don't know the field.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
This same industry will hire sensitivity readers to ensure that they're not making the slightest offense to the most terminally online members of favored groups.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
Among rationalists I think the simulation hypothesis is given greater probability of being true than transubstantiation being true.
Yet in a simulation it would be trivial for all objects to have a property that represents whether it is or is not the literal body of Christ.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
The selective breeding was originally not for dog fighting, but for dogs that want to bite bull faces and never let go.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
As a former Facebooker I share this sentiment. Personalized ads are better than non-personalized. Sometimes I actually find something nice through personalized ads.
They don't butter my bread anymore and I still believe this.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
Imagining myself as an adversary of the United States, I could covertly send unarmed soldiers across the open border, have them obtain weapons on the other side, and then attack.
They wouldn't be armed, and the covert nature would prevent the courts from finding that there's foreign hostility.
Now that I think about it, I'd question the competence of foreign adversaries who haven't taken advantage of the open border. They needn't even be setting up sleeper cells, just getting intelligence agents in and out without being documented.
At the scale of two million per year I think the side making the claim that there's no foreign adversaries mixed in should bear the burden of proof. There's not even one guy among the two million who have ties to the militaries of Iran, China, Russia, North Korea?
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
Proxy wars have never been fought with such a serious risk to the homeland of one of the big powers. Also never so close to nations that could trigger NATO's mutual defense provisions.
If Russia gamed out that there was a 97% chance that Ukraine will seize control of Moscow, then what? Russia would have refused to use its most powerful weapons out of respect for international norms?
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
I would say the real risk of American isolationism is American economic decline, which in turn could lead to a loss of military power that could leave America vulnerable even in its own lands. Free trade really is mutually beneficial, and nations that wall themselves off will inevitably find themselves less prosperous and powerful than others.
Multiple East Asian nations serve as examples of this. The Ming and Qing dynasties in China had broad import-export bans, eventually leading to such a massive power imbalance that European nations, from thousands of miles away, were able to force them to open up for trade at gunpoint. Japan has a similar story, as does Korea.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
This is confusing to me: all the media reports say that the wire is "in the river." Pictures appear to show an orange floating structure.
CBP has boats. So why do they need access to the park?
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
Not only that, Biden has derided them over manufactured outrage. There was a still shot of a mounted CBP agent in the river with people crossing the border, with the agent spinning his reins to control his horse. The media promulgated this as "border patrol agent whips migrants." Biden personally said that the agents involved "will pay" for their actions: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/24/us/politics/biden-border-patrol-haitian-migrants.html
So they're really not enthused about not doing the job they signed up for, to help a President that wants them to pay for things they never did.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
Every mall in my tier three city has a hip hop dance studio.
But yeah TV is much more heavily policed than books. It has far greater influence on the hoi polloi and that’s what the party is concerned about.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
You can buy the book in China though, just not in Chinese: http://product.m.dangdang.com/product.php?pid=11353905286&host=product.dangdang.com
I think most Westerners have an inaccurate view of Chinese censorship.
I’m currently visiting family in China. I can walk to the mall and visit Sisyphe Books, part of a big chain, and buy a copy of 1984, as well as a whole bunch of other books that one might naively expect would not be freely available here.
Of course there’s nothing available from the Dalai Lama, and nothing that makes direct anti-government arguments. That appears to be sufficient to get a book banned: it’s an anti-government work, or one written by someone that has expressed anti-government sentiments.
On the disqualifications, maybe this fell to an overzealous party functionary. You can buy some of these on China.
Here’s Babel: http://search.dangdang.com/?key=Babel&sort_type=sort_default
You can search Baidu for “sandman neil gaiman” and find both the comics and show.
Power is actually quite diffuse in China, at least until the central government decides to assert itself.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
There was also "the latest territory petitioning for statehood should be a free state... to keep the negroes out."
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
Who are the cool kids after say, 30 years old? Writers at the NYT, Hollywood folks, tech titans. Almost universally liberals, almost universally wouldn't desire to be surrounded by deplorables.
The analogy is about group dynamics, not specifically mapping political group A to high school clique Y.
In Washington we have a rich guy funding initiatives to roll back unpopular laws that there was no popular demand for. For example, a capital gains tax, or the state withholding the location of runaway children if they say they’re transgender.
Our legislature has a problem in that we’ve been colonized by Californians fleeing the results of their voting and it’s become incredibly unlikely for Democrats to ever lose control. But we do have this one check on their most outlandish ideas.
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