Templexious
Stuck in time
User ID: 2308
Templexious
3mo ago
I find the need for "steelmanning" of trump to be silly.
He's running for president. People like him for what he stands for. They can vote for whoever they want, it's a republic with tinges of democracy.
I will be voting Democrat because I don't like Russia/Putin, but that's the extent of my reasoning for my presidential picks. I understand and see why people like Trump, and to say that he's being unduly attacked because he doesn't "fit in" to the establishment is not a lie.
They're very clearly trying to pin him to the wall for things that would be relatively minor scandals with a few fees and a public apology and then it would be over with any other ex-president. It's really satisfying to see how hard the establishment strains at gnats to pin him to the wall, when we know that they've gotten used to letting people like epstein go around as an open secret.
Templexious
6mo ago
Nursing homes are in aggregate a symptom of a social disease- end of life care for the elderly and the infirm is atrocious.
Society has kicked families out of their homes, and left the elderly out to dry, while simultaneously sucking up adult children's time that would be spent caring for the elderly in their last years.
The problem is that historically, we simply didn't have the technology to keep them all alive, usually, when elderly would spiral, they would spiral relatively fast- infection, diabetes, cancers, all things that had no cure in the ancestral home. In the current era, we just wait for them to decline, and while we have cures for the most major diseases, we have nothing to help the elderly live more fulfilling and yes, even economically-productive lives. They are shoved into a heartless building where they play bingo on Tuesday at nine am and wait for god to come knocking, with the very occasional visit from what remains of the local evangelical churches activities.
Yes, there are problems in nursing homes, but no, there's no incentive to solve it, one way or the other. The country seems locked in indecision on this particular issue. The AARP is the largest focus group in the US, and as a bloc, holds a stranglehold on the younger generation's ability to help them solve their problems. Young and middle-aged voters are similarly out-of-sighting and out-of-minding the entire problem- shove the elderly into a nursing home and visit once a month until they die-if you're nearby. Maybe do a task that the nurses haven't gotten to. Then move away when offered a raise or a new job in a new state.
Ol' granny's got 5 years still left in her, nevermind that she can't make her way to the toilet any more, but her son Kyle is 50 years old and still in his career and living in tennessee, five hundred miles away.
Templexious
4mo ago
That mitt romney article reminds me of one from the bush campaign where they claimed that the John Kerry kids were awful and rude and used slurs and a bunch of other bullshit.
His kids at the time were two-four years old. People will write literally anything during campaign years, so long as it makes the other side look bad.
Templexious
2mo ago
I have nothing but applause for your constitution in being able to endure everything between those polar points.
Templexious
4mo ago
Tangentially to this, toward the end of the bush years, there were media reports on msnbc and cnn that basically questioned whether or not bin laden even existed.
No one else remembers that, but good to know people still believe that he existed.
Templexious
5mo ago
50k potential federal employees turning over every time a president changes would be a pretty massive change in how the government runs. It would make for excellent fireworks.
Templexious
4mo ago
This thought occurred after Christmas this year during a few activities where family members wanted to play a game, so they pulled up a YouTube video to demonstrate how a thing is done, and it was incredibly gross.
99% of modern kids will never have the ability to be forgotten- parents post their pictures online when they're not able to give consent, including embarrassing and compromised photos. This includes YouTube videos of moms putting their daughters in compromised positions and posting them on the video site.
Such videos are easy to find- the mom often speaks, and their prepubescent girls do a seemingly-innocuous activity. Those girls will always have those videos on a stranger's hard drive at best, or at worst, end up as data used for ai generation.
I'll note that I don't have a proposed solution to this. The laws on child-porn already exist, but this content skirts the edge of acceptability. The girls are usually 10-13, and doing an innocuous activity- like playing pattycake or ring around the rosie, usually in mostly-acceptable clothing.
When you stumble on one such video, you can tell what I'm talking about. It's the camera angles.
For this reason, I come to TheMotte- have you seen the videos I'm talking about? What do you think about them, and how would you evaluate whether or not such content is okay to post online?
If you have kids, do you worry that there's some random perusing Instagram or willing to train ai on them?
After seeing these things, I can't get it out of my head, nor can I come up with a reasonable solution.
Templexious
1mo ago
It's usually not very strict, otherwise you would hear about things like subway's breads being classified as cake from the US instead of just the EU.
Templexious
5mo ago
It's not a particularly surprising reaction, no.
Nor is the rolling over and acting offended that people reacted to IH the way that was entirely expected and predictable?
"Ah yes, these edgy jokes we used caused the expected reaction. Now, we will be offended on IH's behalf toward the people who took the bait."
It would be bad bait if no one took it, no?
Templexious
4mo ago
The thing is that the romney campaign didn't reciprocate with those punches, and instead held their tongues.
Templexious
2mo ago
I've yet to see the mods knock an actually-good two-to-three paragraph post, so I'm dubious this is a report on the reality of the moderation's behaviors.
Seems self-evident that it's more difficult to moderate six+ paragraphs with five sentences each on each comment.
Templexious
7mo ago
his stupid war.
Just double-checking here, but you do know that Putin did, in fact, invade Ukraine, correct?
Templexious
7mo ago
Keep in mind also that Tim Ballard was married. I'm sure his wife didn't exactly consent to him trying to sexually proposition the women who went with him on these trips.
Unfortunately, as Quantumfreakonomics notes, she has not spoken on the issue, and she is most certainly a victim.
Templexious
7mo ago
This was an exceptional read and summary, and would love to see more posts like this on the site.
I have long since memory-holed how much of a shitshow the ongoing war against the second amendment in the US has become.
Templexious
5mo ago
Most of the argument is about where the line should be
The number of arguments which boil down to some form of sorites paradox is very annoying.
Templexious
8mo ago
Because a border wall increases the marginal cost of trying to cross the border, and allows the country to begin to get a handle on its own internal affairs.
You'll never get illegal immigration to zero, that doesn't mean "do nothing" is the correct approach. Unless you're from the WEF or similar globalist group where no borders is the entire solution.
Templexious
5mo ago
I was wondering if anyone would call me out on the use of whence. Congrats! 🧐
Templexious
5mo ago
this individual
"this individual"-ing Nick Bostrom is a hilarious way of wiping away his work in promoting effective altruism and longtermism.
You can't tell a mass of people who have watched their prices skyrocket and housing prices and rental prices skyrocket and also that many are having a harder time finding jobs for the equivalent pay that "things are fine".
It's been constantly debated whether or not economic indicators are direct abstractions over reality, and to tell people who are feeling down that "things are fine, actually" is akin to mass gaslighting. When talking to a group of people who are used to constantly being lied to and therefore eternally skeptical of establishment that their beliefs and understanding of reality are wrong or incorrect, this is especially egregioius.
Now, you mention that there's no way of bringing about an equivalent to election-loss shock to show the flaws in polls, and then argue about the use of other economic data to make a point. While a useful metric, the establishment groups will use whatever metrics they want to say things are "fine, actually" so long as they have enough donations and electoral support that they don't get voted out each election. I've never, for example, seen major party leaders ever cede a point and change their policies or messaging until after it lost them an election.
As such, economic data debates are only as useful if the establishment is willing to listen and hear out and change their views accordingly.
Templexious
4mo ago
oh it's this guy again
Templexious
9mo ago
Books aren't expensive enough to justify them anymore.
This claim is going to need an in-depth number of citations showcasing that all books that libraries host are still available and purchasable, and their prices, and comparisons with past prices, all adjusted for inflation, as well as the average income of the parents who send their kids to a particular school, also adjusted for inflation.
The justification for tearing down institutions needs to have some measure of scrutiny.
Templexious
5mo ago
To whence shall we roll back the clock?
We joke about the glory years, the years when Things Were Better, which just so happen to coincide with people's younger years. You get me to say what years I would like to roll back the clock to and live, I would probably say somewhere around the 90s-late 00s. I am an outlier, as far as I know. Virtually no one I know would like to roll back the clock to spitting distance from two thousand and fucking-eight.
Back when the most lefty thing on the internet was a girl telling people that she didn't appreciate being propositioned for sex on an elevator. Pre-tiktok, the era of old forums. The iphone still a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye. The era when Google and Microsoft weren't the undisputed emperors of your lives.
Actually, forget that. We all know there's nowhere to roll back to, we can only roll forward, embracing the aesthetics of what we imagined the past to be. I, for one, am glad that I am not eternally inundated with "WOW DAE PARENTS ARE BOOORIIINNG????" ads. You can pull my 70-lb tub of legos accumulated over more than twenty years out of my cold, dead hands, NSA. And it's probably true that in the next 30-40 years that democracy and republicanism-as-we-know it will no longer exist.
No seriously, whence come the true techno-king? Who are the contenders for the first immortal god-king of humanity. I joke in the phrasing, but it is not exactly an incorrect joke now, is it? It is very probable that we will have the first actual trillionaire human in the next thirty years. The first effectively-emperors of mankind.
The only reason companies don't do governance of humans is that they're shit at it, actually, and Democracy is surprisingly efficient over long timescales. But assume for the sake of thought experiment, that the singularity happens, and we have our first crowned god-emperor of humanity thanks to the creation of AGI. Who are our contenders?
Personally, I should expect them to:
- Be in AI or AGI development already or in the next 2-3 years
- Be incredibly wealthy already
- Likely be from a company currently valued at least in the tens of millions of dollars
As such, pick your top 5 most likely individuals to become humanity's first true techno-kings, and why. Do you have any you think are sleepers?
I'll hold back my top-fivers for a couple days or so.
Would there be interest in a book review or summary of kantian philosophy and/or john locke's treatises? The goal would be to relate them to our current political situations under my own personal lens.
I find them to be incredibly prescient, even hundreds of years later, and the online material which covers them is only what can be gleamed by browsing wikipedia, and therefore rather shallow.
Templexious
9mo ago
It's not an incorrect take.
In an unrelated note, since there's no better places to discuss this, instituting a more strict character count per comment would bring a breath of fresh air to the thread.
Reading the motte has become a dull slog, and many of these top-level comments consist of word soup with BIG TITLES pretending to say something meaningful without corresponding substance.
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