RenOS
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User ID: 2051
RenOS
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3mo ago
Thanks, Trump! Now we only have to figure out how to get all the Bürgergeldempfänger to work at these businesses...
RenOS
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9mo ago
Yeah. Charisma, Intelligence and Status are extremely important for female mate choice. If given the options, the average woman will almost always choose a popular CEO over even the most ripped man imaginable. Provided the CEO is barely taller than her, of course.
RenOS
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3mo ago
I'm about as pro-capitalist as it gets but imo this is the wrong model for zero-sum (for example advertising) and negative sum (for example compliance) industries. Especially large, already successful companies can secure their position by burdening everyone with enough extra costs that only they can shoulder well enough due to scale.
RenOS
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11mo ago
Could you link to such a post about LOTTs fact checking?
RenOS
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10mo ago
You have it fundamentally backwards. Israel not only already substantially opened up shortly before Oct 7, but they also hoped to open up further and Hamas put an end to it since it was against their interest. Palestinians working in Israel and normalising relationships is in Israel's interest, since it makes Hamas' obsolete and removes their biggest thorn in the side. Or at the very least they would like to just leave the Gaza strip alone, but that was unsustainable since it gave Hamas' easier access to weapons. Endless death and war on the other hand is in the Hamas' interest, since it lets them generate western and arab support and keeps them in power.
RenOS
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3mo ago
I'd rather advice a trip to Southeast Asia, in that case. If you want to retire anyway, it's a great place to stay for indefinite time as well.
RenOS
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10mo ago
Depending on the minimum wage laws it absolutely can be the case. Not to mention that the big problem isn't just being low skill - we have some black market work for those, even if it isn't ideal - it's unreliability. If you can't depend on a person to at least show up on time, stay for the agreed-upon time, do the work, and not opportunistically steal from the company, than a person can easily be worth negative money for a company. If you read up Haiti and more generally african countries, it's this unreliability that drives most of the dysfunction, not just merely being low-skill.
RenOS
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1mo ago
Tbh this is just as bad a take imo as the fanatics wanting to get rid of cars in the countryside said bc they "just need better public infrastructure". Yes, cars are superior for rural regions and public infrastucture is just not feasible there, but for well-designed suburbia and especially for smaller cities, bikes are also just better in many circumstances. It has nothing to with hobbies, hippies or fitness fanatics (though regular exercise is one of the benefits of bikes!). They need so much less space, they're cheaper, more flexible, less dangerous for pedestrians, etc.
Reducing cars in the suburbs to pedestrian speed and giving them the blame for any accident is great, it means even smaller kids can run, play, and bike through the suburbs without me needing to worry much, It means I can walk and bike there without having to be attentive all the time, and as long as it is properly designed even if I need to drive through it's just a minute or so of slow driving.
In cities car culture is also awful, the smell got better but everything is just so clogged and noisy. Worse, the danger means that even if you want to bike, it makes you choose the car bc a single idiot can cost your life. When I was living in London, almost everyone biked for a while, and those who stopped always had an incident with a crazy car driver. I myself also had several such situations. The counter here is usually crazy cyclist, but crazy cyclists are merely annoying, even a collision will usually not even seriously hurt you (though I get very pissed when small kids are involved, but even there I can literally just jump in front & stop the bike if needed); Crazy drivers can kill you with frightening ease, and there is absolutely nothing you can do. There's a lot to dislike in the EU, but well-targeted car bans are great.
RenOS
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1mo ago
Having 4 people with 1/4 of your genome is objectively better than just being one person because of the risk dilution (Nevermind that I don't plan to have so few grandkids).
On the second, my experience has been the opposite. A few big actors - often rather general memes than really the particular mouthpieces making the actual statements - are imo the winners on the cultural influence market. By far one of the worst places to invest in unless you're extremely confident.
RenOS
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2mo ago
For me it's rather simple: It should be in a place no pedestrian would walk, independent of whether a pedestrian is currently present. Whether a pedestrian can see you from a distance doesn't matter, I wouldn't care.
RenOS
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3mo ago
I don't think those really are comparable - all of them were reactions to concrete fiscal crises/shocks which absolutely needed a short-term budget correction. Our current problems are ballooning costs, and while I think this has significant long-term negative effects, it doesn't have that immediate necessity. But I'll grant that I myself was being hyperbolic - it would be more correct to say that governments rarely manage to limit spending with long-term foresight in mind, but only purely reactively after a crisis has already happened and desperately requires action. DOGE is attempting the former.
On the second point, I completely agree, but in my view this makes reducing welfare spending for the old a foregone conclusion, it's only a question of how long we can kick the can down the road. And mind you, Americans have a comparably rosy situation - here in Germany the old / young ratios are much more grim.
It's not that STEM is the best. It's that there are sciences with a tight feedback loop with reality, and those without. In the former, which is most of natural sciences, it's hard too go off the deep end, in the latter, which is most humanities, it's extremely easy. There are a few special cases such as math - math has a tight feedback loop with some very basic parts of reality through its assumption - proof - conclusion structure - but you can still go some crazy places with weird, hard-or-impossible-to-prove assumption. This makes clear statements and fair marks in the humanities almost impossible, so the researchers and teachers err on the side of kindness.
In particular, this makes the humanities appeal to a certain kind of person, mostly activists, who don't actually care much about reality but care a lot about forcing their worldview on the rest of society. Also, classes in the humanities are easier on the account of literally everyone I know who has ever taken them, including full humanities majors, some even flat-out told me they're taking humanities specifically bc it's easier. It's also an objective fact of universities that there is a pecking order of difficulty where people who fail one degree always move down, but never up, when trying again even if the NC (numerus clausus, the required marks to get started) of the upper fields is technically lower. As an example, at my medicine-focused university, "applied math in life science" is among the top despite having literally no NC at all, one of the next is "molecular life sciences", one of the next is "nutritional sciences", the next are all the "care sciences" (midwifery etc.). As in this example, humanities are almost always lower than the STEM fields in this order.
There are also many great, smart & careful students & scientists in the humanities, since they still are very valuable and interesting fields to study but tbh at this point I think they're probably in the minority, and definitely not in charge.
RenOS
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9mo ago
A super-jacked dude is rare enough nowadays that he is reasonably high on the totem pole to reliably land one-nighters, yes, as long as he has some charisma to match.
But from my experience, CEOs and other high-status men are still higher even on this count.
RenOS
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9mo ago
Likewise, it's unworkable to ban children from porn sites. Are they going to make everyone give their ID to every damn booru and sketchy Russian site? We have a massive surfeit of bureaucrats with too much time and money on their hands. Nobody ever wants to leave things alone, they have to work hard making a mess out of uncomfortable, sometimes unpleasant realities:
It's also simply a solved problem: For small children, parents should fully monitor their screen time anway; For older children, it's trivial to set up a device with a whitelist; And for teens who are old/smart enough to get past these filters, just watching porn is the least of a parent's worry. In particular it's preposterous that the west claims it's impossible to keep teens from having physical sex, while simultaneously demanding that they can only access porn with 18.
RenOS
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10mo ago
Nate's model is designed to be bearish after convention, though. Basically, it assumes a candidate ought to get a substantial bump based on historical records, and if they don't, it adjusts accordingly. For Harris, it's arguable that circumstances are unusual enough that having a convention bump exactly like a normal candidate was not to be expected.
RenOS
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27d ago
Just to be clear, you mean the umineko project port, right?
RenOS
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1mo ago
He is a pragmatist through-and-through. Old-school worker's left, though nowadays he dislikes unions as much as management. As far as I know he has never read any philosophical text, and he generally abhors big idea conceptualism as a whole. Either you have specific ideas for specific improvements, or he doesn't want to hear about it.
RenOS
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1mo ago
I agree - but to them, the situation in Gaza was sufficiently bad that it doesn't count. It's just a fairly simplistic moralistic view that doesn't really account for agency on the alleged victims side or pragmatic solutions.
RenOS
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2mo ago
Sorry, I should have mentioned: Currently I'm only listening to audiobooks, since it allows me to do household chores, cycle, etc. simultaneously. With small kids + full time work I don't really have time to properly read. The limited spare time I have I unfortunately already waste on substack/theMotte. But it sounds interesting enough that it will go on the list of things to read later.
RenOS
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3mo ago
I don't really mind it too much in itself. It's a question of frequency and presentation; It's annoying and stupid that it has become the default, especially so if it's not justified through fantastic elements. But it seemed relevant to the OP.
RenOS
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3mo ago
I think the only way to get persistent trade surpluses is when one country is saving in the other's currency (earning or buying their currency, and then just sitting on it).
From what I understand, Import/Export is specifically goods and services exchanged for money, so it does not include many financial instruments, such as direct investment into a foreign country or leaving your money at a foreign bank. So a country can run a long-term trade deficit indefinitely as long as it can re-capture the difference this way. Which is especially easy if you just-so happen to be the financial headquarter of the world. But yes, many countries saving in US currency is also an option.
I agree that, if anything, this implies a trade deficit is good for you.
I don't want to be mean, but there are far, far harder games than the DS series. DS is normie-hard; It's the maximum amount of hardness that you can afford while keeping most of the casual audience, and as oats says, it has multiple design decisions that allow you to get past content you consider to difficult (online co-op, single-use items, simple rushing, cheese/OP gear, or in the worst case, plain ol' grinding). Especially in co-op it's arguably quite easy.
People do know that this stuff will often get taken by the employees if it isn't collected, or even donated, right? So even on consequentialist grounds she is quite likely to be stealing from someone poorer than her for small immediate gratification. It's pretty minor as things go, but I agree with others that I wouldn't perceive this as positive. Also, if everyone was like this, lost and founds would literally not exist.
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