SomethingMusic
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User ID: 181
SomethingMusic
5d ago
I highly suggest double checking reading the books with the movies. I know a lot of people dislike the books for being too slow, but one of the important works that make Tolkien Tolkien is his language, not just what happens. Remember that LOTR is not a book series of logistics and accounts but rather an epic poem in the style of Illiad, Homer, and Gilgamesh. GRRM's question is applicable but also somewhat irrelevant, as Tolkien was writing romantically rather than practically.
It's a failure and modern language and how the corporate world has transformed common communication that we now want perfect details and descriptions of logistics, supply chains, and contracts instead of a much more (literally) accounted retailing of a story. While it would be interesting to write a fantasy story in the perspective of a CPA auditing the misty mountain or an insurer assessing a citizens claim that a trebuchet destroyed their home and requires a payout, I'd argue that wasn't the point of LOTR and shouldn't be faulted against it.
My biggest gripe of the movies (beyond that some of the lines and comic insertions of Franz Walsh didn't fit the setting or Tolkien's setting) is that the music really isn't correct. It isn't bad, but the strong Celtic borrowing that Howard Shore used in his composition isn't particularly accurate to the world.
SomethingMusic
5d ago
I'm not sure what would be most useful to him in 2024, though.
A 10 foot tall space marine who only sports Warhammer 40k quotes
SomethingMusic
11d ago
True I looked over that part, but do the drones need individual 'intelligence' or could they be controlled by an AI farm?
SomethingMusic
11d ago
This is already beginning to be dealt with. Sam Altman has created a spinoff company 'OKLO' to create small scale fission reactors to power AI server farms. If CES reporting is correct, NVDA's AI server blades are INSANELY power hungry to the point that having their own nuclear reactor might be a cheaper answer than using the power grid.
For transparency - I own some shares of OKLO, so far it's been a pretty lackluster stock pick but I expect decent growth in the medium to long term as long as regulators don't start poopooing it.
SomethingMusic
16d ago
I've wanted to talk about AI music for a while. It's decent for the certain types of music, specifically pop songs with simple voice leading and harmony. When asking for specific instrumentation or a specific musical style it seems to fail pretty bad. For example, if I wanted specific instrumentation for a chamber piece, it's currently impossible for it to create a string quartet in the style of Brahms. Al 'classical' generations are psudo-orchestral works similar to the most generic Marval movie anthems, not like the incredibly nuanced creations of Stravinsky, Messiaen, or Bach where each musical line matters. It adheres strictly to conventional tonality no matter how much you try to prompt your way into serialism, asymmetrical rhythm, jazz, etc. Much like previous AI music it really avoids key changes and any more complex musical ideas.
Does AI Djent? A decent bit, to be honest. But does it Stravinsky? We're a long ways off.
SomethingMusic
26d ago
Sorry, I never meant to insinuate that you'd considering you flex your familial connections to force someone into a decision (I'll admit I'm not too familiar with arranged marriages). I'm glad it sounds everyone would have a level head about the whole situation.
I understand your fear of marriage, especially one with so little time to figure out if you really have a connection and are worried about the feasibility of a relationship working over long distance. Are you worried that you'll find greener grass? Or is it your internal monologue when you see women?
I guess the question I would have is, what the hell are you waiting for, and what are you afraid of missing?
The hardest part is, given your situation, that chances are one of you will have to give up or compromise your career for the other to some extent. That will be one of those things that can be very difficult for couples to navigate, but it's doable if both people are willing to work for each other instead of their onw goals and is an inevitable part of almost every relationship.
SomethingMusic
26d ago
On one hand, the leverage your close family and personal connections you have with this young woman is a little disconcerting. On the other hand, you're hitting it off and you seem to both like each other.
I understand your worry and considerations, but long distance is doable if you are both looking for a long term relationship. My fiancée and I did long distance for a long time (over 5 years!) before I got myself in order and moved to be closer to her. I regret nothing, and we remained committed to each other for the entire time even if we couldn't see each other more than once every few months.
Now, this forum would probably press the statistical improbability of this being successful, but I laugh at the face of statistics. Be the outliar!
Life is short, go for it!
SomethingMusic
26d ago
I believe this happens with almost all belief ideologies - Most modern socialists are hilariously bad at defending socialist/communist idealism beyond the most elementary criticism, with the only notable person I know who can hold their own being Zizek. Likewise, modern atheism has become low hanging fruit and poorly upheld compared to it's intellectual roots of Dawkins and others. There needs to be intellectual and social challenge to peel away the grifters and the stupid to reveal the people capable of actually defending an ideology.
SomethingMusic
28d ago
Wow, there's certainly a lot of conversation going on that I guess I've inspired! I apologize I haven't been active as I've been busy with my personal life, so I don't always participate off of surface level comments.
Is correct, I posted the OP, not him. The focus on the male side of the lack of participation in the labor force is simply because that's the current headline and more noticeable trend. Population - wide employment participation seems to rarely fully recover after any financial or social crises. Even 7-8 years after the 2008 financial crisis labor participation never recovered. The male participation is more newsworthy, since the past 25 years has seen a 10% decrease of male labor participation compared to the ~3% decrease in female according to FRED. My goal wasn't to focus solely on males, but rather point out the most noteworthy trends and the underlying reasons behind them.
Whether males or females should increase their participation in employment is another discussion entirely.
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
How snail-brained gullible are you exactly?
Is this necessary? Cynicism isn't always a necessary characteristic when reading an earnings report. Jordan Peterson said something that I that I try to take to heart, which is "believe people when they say something is the motivation for their actions." This doesn't mean that their explanation is the real reason for the action, but it is what they believe is the reason behind their actions. Corporate entities have a good reason to not lie on earnings reports and losses (getting sued and/or fired for lack of transparent reporting on earnings), I am willing to take their statements as generally factual, even if corporate stupidity is closer to the real reason.
They couldn't see that one coming at their giant company, that's been running all you can eat deals since my grandmother was taking me there as a kid? This is classic "loser execs blame others for their failures." Every restaurant to ever run an all-you-can-eat deal knows that the first thing you do is say, No Sharing on the menu, on the salad bar, and sometimes a couple other places in the restaurant. "Any Sharing of Salad Bar food will result in an additional salad bar order being charged." My local diner run by a greek dude from Lesbos knows that. How the fuck would Red Lobster not know that? Every all-you-can-eat buffet I've ever been to also reserves the right, on their menu, to cut you off. My concrete contractor and his sons had been thrown out of every smorgasbord in three counties.
And Red Lobster didn't have any kind of metrics tracking the Shrimp deal, to notice that it was causing losses and end it early? This whole debacle beggars belief.
You're correct it could be pure mismanagement of their corporate entity, but this is why selfishness vs trust is an important distinction. Adam Smith understood this concept that self-interest could result in creating public good. A corporation would do something 'good' (offer food for a lower than profitable price) at the goal of customer acquisition. The result was increased popularity and attendance of the restaurant, but at the cost of underestimating the popularity and/or any potential abuse of the deal.
Which can be directly and obviously traced to the trend towards low-staffing in stores. CVS and Walgreens used to have three to five employees in a normal sized store, and the closest you ever got to "Self Checkout" was my local convenience store where I would wave my Arizona Green Tea at the owner and tell him "I'll just leave the dollar on the counter" so he wouldn't have to get up. Now I go into CVS, and if I need someone I spend five minutes searching the store for the one person working there. And that single employee is almost never at the front desk, where they might at least see me leaving and yell at me, they are nearly always somewhere else in the store, stocking shelves or something. If I wanted to steal some stuff, who the fuck is going to stop me?
To say nothing of self-checkout, which invites casual small-scale theft, even by otherwise honest people. On at least three occasions, I've stolen things in self-checkout by accident. A small item in the bottom of my reusable bag (because they charge me for regular bags), didn't make it out of the bag. At no point have I ever felt like there was any chance that if I chose to steal a few small items I would get caught by the bored employee pretending to watch. To say nothing of, say, buying one 15lb bag of cat food and four 20lb bags, and scanning the 15lb bag five times. Even if I were caught, would the bored teenager at Target really call the cops, or would he just accept I made a mistake and make me ring it up again? It's zero risk.
Why do these companies accept these downsides? Because they'd rather lose goods to shoplifting than pay employees, their losses to self-checkout theft are less than the cost of paying a cashier. They could hire greeters and cart checkers, like Costco does, but they don't, because they lose less to shoplifting than they would have to pay greeters and cart checkers.
Companies are not accepting these downsides. Many places I see are now employing full-time security guards to prevent theft, are closing self checkout locations (my local Walmart has closed all self-checkout locations and has people checking customer receipts on exit), and has gates to prevent people leaving without going through a checkout. Any store which is unable to adequately prevent losses are closing. Brooklyn has losing 50 different chain stores in the past year. Companies are reacting to increased theft and are shutting down unprofitable stores. The losses of accidental check out are negligible to people deliberately stealing significant dollar amounts of items from retailers.
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
You're right this is not clear, I'll admit to this thought being a little half baked but I want to get it out before I forgot or moved on to other things.
I would assume, based on this, that the increase in selfishness then, would be found in the, non-marginalized, non-favored, demographics, but my vague understanding of the spike in shoplifting is that this is not the case.
My argument is when governance stop enforcing laws unilaterally and starts responding to perverse incentives, that all parties start switching to self interest over mutual growth. In a game theory matrix, the best but 'unstable' outcome is both the government and constituents do wats best for each other, when one party defects for one reason or another, they both slide to following self interest, creating a more stable or predictable, but significantly less beneficial, environment.
I think government action, or often inaction, is probably contributing to the rise in the overtness of these behaviors, but I am not sure the mechanism is any more complicated than, some people will act up if you remove the consequences from their actions.
Why do you think governments are selectively enforcing laws? And what are the consequences of the government making these deliberate choices?
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
Selfishness doesn't always come at significant cost to someone else, but I'd argue the choice to pick former over the ladder does imply some amount of selfishness in the term of short term gain over long term benefit.
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
The breaking of social covenant and the rise of selfish societies
Recently in the news, Red Lobster is reporting an 11 million dollar loss, which is forcing the company to close many restaurants and possible file for chapter 11. The problem? Their '$20 all you can eat shrimp' deal was too good. Some anecdotal evidence indicates that large tables would order one or two orders of the never-ending deal, causing huge losses as large parties would share a single plate for $20, causing significant restaurant losses.
In the past few years, NYC has seen significant increases in retail theft, with stores facing many millions of dollar losses, with the estimate of retail theft being up to 4.4 billion dollars for the state alone. The cost of thefts cause a cyclical cycle, it forces stores to raise prices to cover the loss of the theft, which in turn prices people out of purchasing goods, which again raises theft. So far, the plans the governor has been trying to put into place seems to have done little to curtail any theft.
A 2024 jobs report shows a massive shortage of manufacturing labor, with 770,000 manufacturing jobs open. Labor participation has not recovered from the COVID crisis, with participation at 63.3% just before corvid and around 62.5% from the most recent report. Labor participation was highest before the 2008 housing crisis during the Bush admin around 67%. 7.5 million men have dropped out of America's workforce, meaning that they are not job seeking and therefore wouldn't be tracked as part of unemployment in FRED data.
There's a lot of words spilled on the internet on 'high trust societies'. Places like Japan where a lost item will be much more likely returned to its owner than, say, Detroit. Or rural America, where people will pay money at an unattended farm stand for fresh fruits and/or vegetables. However, trust doesn't fully cover what's going on in the west. /u/johnfabian's post is not about trust, but rather the breaking down of the covenant between constituents and their governments that keep a society basically functions. These social functions are much more simple than trust. It's about not running a red light, not driving the wrong way down a highway, or waiting in line for a train rather than trying to crowd on regardless of capacity.
Western society flourishing was largely predicated on this tacit understood social covenant: on an individual level, each person does their best to contribute through labor - be it stocking shelves to software development to entrepreneurship. In turn, the government upholds the status quo and optimizes legislation for stability and prosperity for the working class.
However in recent times this has changed. I'm not sure if the western governments decided they can have it's cake and eat it, too, or that the only way to perpetuate power is finding a new voter base, but the recent focus on marginalized groups has significantly eroded the trust away from indigenous constituents. It doesn't take a genius to tell that demographic groups are being treated, litigated, and policed based off of completely different rule books, and this type of treatment always creates division and resentment. The covenant between government and the constituencies broke, which changed the payoff matrix. As governments pick and choose which demographics to control, people become more selfish, as the ability to create value from freer markets diminish.
This is why 'selfish societies' is a better term than 'low trust' societies. As much as people love to yell at corporations for perusing short term gains, individuals pursue selfish gains at the cost of others even more as shown from my examples alone. Trust does not fully explain how people behave in the aforementioned examples, but selfishness does. Low male employment, antiwork, and the rise of NEET-dom has nothing to do with trust, but selfishness adequately describes the motivations for the ideological positions they hold. Obesity isn't a trust issue, it's a selfish issue, where people would rather eat themselves into oblivion instead of finding a healthy balance and self restraint. Even the declining birthrate is a result of selfishness; people would prefer to have the increased income and enjoyment of consequence-free fornication instead of laying an effective and positive groundwork for future generations.
The question, then, is it possible for a government to regain the respect of its constituents, and can the people understand that there needs to be some amount of selflessness to create an environment to nurture the next generation?
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
Maybe people are feeling well?
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
Basil, Mint, Rosemary (not all at once)
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
I don't even want to imagine what it's like trying to drive in urban India. Of course, my poor American perception of India is bifurcated between 'enlightened' gurus whose philosophy saves humanity, people living in extreme poverty bathing in cow dung, and the people trying to scam me from call centers.
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
I'd donate for that. Give me some time and proper motivation and I could probably write it.
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
Was this in India or in England?
I live in a city where the road rules are decaying every day. Red light? Suggestion? Stop sign? Suggestion. Left turn from the right turn lane on a red light with oncoming traffic? Fuck you get out of my way. Speed limits? Square the number and you get the speed of the average driver.
I hate driving, but the alternative is a bus fill with drug addled obnoxious lowlifes who are one bad look away from starting a fight on a bus. Also they never run on time and are simply inefficient ways to travel.
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
I somewhat agree and disagree. I think 'dead' time can be repurposed over time, if not to enhance productivity but instead to do something marginally more constructive, such as reading a book or picking up a room a little bit. Assuming you don't replace it with TV/vidya/low hanging fruit.
I think 6 days is too short of a time to have any significant effects or adjustment. A month or more might be a better sample.
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
That is a good point. It's easy to skip the introductory literature of an author for their more comprehensive works once you know the depth of their writing.
On the other hand, It's not like Smith or Dostoevsky wrote children's stories, so either way can work?
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
It is a good point, I don't know the breakdown of the money spent on immigration in a place like NY if it's simply housing/food or if it includes translators, lawyers, social workers, etc. I'm sure someone knows, but articles are largely rage bait or too sympathetic to really dig into how these dollars are being spent.
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
You're missing the forest for the trees. You're focusing on Amazon as a company rather than the issue of finding undereducated, isolated, an unemployed young men/women an attempt to integrate into society proper as a successful alternative to violence, drugs, and petty crime. It doesn't have to be Amazon, just any job that doesn't require a high level of previous training and education.
The other aforementioned people you created to dismiss my idea don't necessarily need the program I'm proposing, it's not like those people are about to resort to criminal behavior or aren't going to be assisted by other government programs or are incapable of finding work themselves.
Having that experience on my resume would make me less likely to get a real job (to say nothing of the opportunity costs, where I could be using that time to upskill or expand my resume) and more likely to stay dependent upon the system for life.
Could you expand on this? I feel like this is just rageposting instead of an actual example. Also, you don't necessarily need to put work on your resume if it's something temporary while looking for a permanent position.
Of course you're under no obligation to provide an alternative, but poopooing something just because you don't like my general idea doesn't really disprove what I'm getting at, either.
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
I always find it a pity that CS Lewis' most successful work is Narnia series, considering so much of what he wrote exploring the human condition is so eloquent and excellent.
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
It was a spitball idea, not one that I think should be implemented verbatim into government policy. There needs to be a way for at risk and poor people to have constructive outlets and understand the importance and value of gainful employment. If you think its so juvenile, can you think of something better?
I believe plenty of well endowed women have read LOTR, though probably less now than in the time it was published :) If you want to go a bit further into early Tolkien I'd suggest Farmer Giles of Ham though is essentially a children's rendition of the Hobbit and almost could be considered and early sketch of his later, more substantial, works.
I loved the soundtrack initially, and I agree the Shire and Rohan leitmotif are excellent. My nitpick is after watching the movies after decades of contemplation, not one out of immediate reaction. Gandalf's deus ex machina-esque characterization is further illustrated in the books, in that Gandalf is essentially an angel and not purely human, something which is hard to illustrate and represent in the movie.
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