ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
16hr ago
I bet someone could make a compelling pitch deck. Run a market for an uncorrelated asset class. Sell products on it that aggregate risk. No one (except for you) needs to actually make money from it.
ThenElection
16hr ago
An idea whose time has come: asteroid gold futures.
ThenElection
16hr ago
I think other technological innovations will make it all a moot question in the short term.
That said, from the time of establishing a colony, it seems like two or three decades might be enough for it to reach self sufficiency (or at least enough self sufficiency to buy it meaningful independence).
ThenElection
18hr ago
There's value in having a frontier. If all there can be is the system that exists now, it's almost inevitable that it will be occupied by institutions that already exist. Having a frontier--America, the West, California--creates a space where people can go out and create new systems that don't carry the drag of history. This ends up benefiting even the original civilization, as the most successful learnings from the frontier filter back to it.
Undersea or Everest cities are cheaper and much more practical, but they don't buy you independence from existing systems (as at least would-be Martian colonizers think you could get there).
ThenElection
21hr ago
Finally, looking at this advice from depth psychology perspective it is forcing men to present a specific persona that doesn’t reflect their true self.
It's possible for most men to learn to perform personas that have ready access to relationships and, yes, casual sex. But for me, although I succeeded at that, it was a fool's errand because it confused a terminal goal (finding someone who brings me joy in sharing a monogamous, lifelong relationship) with proximal ones (having sex; being able to wear the label "has a girlfriend"). It's an easy mistake to make, because one requires the other. But a lot of the strategies offered work against the terminal goal, because you're just learning to perform a persona, and, at least in my case, any benefit in dating you get from that isn't anything that will lead to the relationship you want.
You reverse it. Civilization didn't free us from the bottleneck; it created it. Hunter gatherers had a ratio of something like 2:1 to 4:1. It was simply materially impossible for one man to monopolize reproductive access in a community. The advent of agriculture 5000 to 7000 years ago caused that ratio to skyrocket to the 17:1 figure (which is better stated as the ratio of effective genetic population size, but the implication is directionally correct). See "A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture" (https://genome.cshlp.org/content/25/4/459.full.pdf).
Later on, as sedentary societies evolved and monogamy norms were created and propagated themselves, the ratio dropped back to a more reasonable 4:1 or 5:1.
ThenElection
2d ago
Getting the US to fuck off from Taiwan is equivalent to being a world power.
I agree that they're not looking to create a world order where they have replaced the current role of the US, though.
ThenElection
2d ago
Yes; if China wants to be a world power, it needs to put its military through its paces as a kind of stress test. Beyond pointing firehoses at Filipino fishing boats.
ThenElection
2d ago
Thinking toward China, there's just a huge amount of uncertainty about how its military would do against any country, let alone the status quo superpower. I don't think anyone, even Xi Jinping, has a good idea. The fact he hasn't acted yet is good piece of evidence that he thinks the US would win; but that's inherently a point at time estimation, and he has the advantage of choosing the most advantageous time he wants to, up until his death.
I am very confident that China would put up more of a fight than Iran, which admittedly is a bar so low it's on the ground.
ThenElection
2d ago
China imports roughly 70% of its oil, most of it transiting the Strait of Malacca. In a Taiwan contingency, those sea lanes become contested. Beijing will need alternative energy sources and will look westward to Iran, Russia, and any Gulf state willing to sell outside the dollar system. If the Middle East has already drifted into Beijing’s economic orbit by the time that crisis arrives, China begins the confrontation with a strategic energy reserve that American planners cannot disrupt.
The Strait of Malacca wouldn't be "contested": it's a narrow choke point that the US will easily dominate. No oil from any country in the Middle East is reaching China in the event of a Taiwan contingency. There are also no overland pipelines from Iran to China: the inconvenient Himalayas stand in the way, making it uneconomic. Whether Iran is a American or Chinese pawn doesn't really play into it.
The main thing taking Iran's regime off the map does is they won't be able to cause (additional) trouble in the world economy by shutting off Persian Gulf oil.
ThenElection
3d ago
There's now a non-zero chance China is going to face a de facto united West that's militantly supportive of Taiwan independence & coordinates globally to restrict advanced tech imports, with just Pakistan, North Korea and Myanmar as allies (and I'm not sure about Pakistan).
Iran was never going to be an important player in a Taiwan contingency, and China has never had an ally who'd be important in it except for Russia (and, to a small extent, Pakistan). And although Anatoly just says it's a possibility, the idea of us getting a more united West from the current situation is not at all obvious.
ThenElection
3d ago
The DoD not wanting to buy a product they can't control is perfectly reasonable.
Agreed, and if I ran the DoD, I'd take a similar stance, even if there were no immediate plans to do those things.
The DoD not wanting such products used in their supply chain is understandable as well -- more so for AI than for many other things.
Also somewhat agreed, but it depends on the scope. Palantir using a supplier with noxious terms to make decisions during wartime? Yeah, that seems inappropriate. Coders using it to write missile firmware code? That seems fine.
The DoD wanting no one who uses Anthropic to also deal with them is not reasonable
This is where 99% of my anger is coming from. It's a wild, CPC-style overreach, which goes far beyond a supply chain risk designation. Hopefully it's just bluster and TACO.
ThenElection
3d ago
None of them, however, have an edict against them saying that no company with any business with the US government can do business with them.
ThenElection
4d ago
Straight from Hegseth's mouth:
Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.
That has nothing to do with how other companies make products that they offer to the government. Why should Amazon be banned from renting GPUs to Anthropic if they want to also rent hardware to the government?
ThenElection
4d ago
Link for US involvement: https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/israel-us-attack-iran-trump-says-major-combat-operations/
Well, here we go. Scope of the attacks still unclear.
Fair enough.
But when a Democratic administration institutes a policy that the government will do no business with a company that does any business with other companies that don't include at least 50% disabled black transexual prostitutes on their boards, I'll at least be able to object to it in a principled manner. (And, yes, I object to softer edicts like that today.)
ThenElection
4d ago
Suppose Glock decides not to enter a contract with the government for any reason. Is it good for the government to try to destroy Glock as a corporate entity in response?
(Here the analogy is generous to the DoW: they entered into a contract first with open eyes, reneged, and are now trying to destroy Anthropic.)
ThenElection
4d ago
whenever it crosses their AI cult morality threshold
Apparently, not having AI be used to institute domestic mass surveillance is now "AI cult morality." And those were terms the government agreed to with open eyes, reneged (which is fine, whatever), and then not only declared Anthropic a supply chain risk but also banned any company that deals with the military from partnering with them in any way.
It's quite unclear why they deserve that designation and treatment, while Chinese AI companies don't.
ThenElection
4d ago
An anonymous report from "people familiar with the administration."
It's worth pointing out that the public positions of all non-anonymous principals are in agreement: the point of contention was stipulations in the contract that Claude not be used for autonomous weapons without a human in the loop (yet, at least) and not be used for domestic surveillance.
One is more profitable than the other; it also has near universal employee sympathy on its side.
And although it's uncertain if Anthropic will ever be profitable, what is certain is that this administration isn't forever.
Short term reprisals would be likely, but it's an open question whether the administration would be willing to nuke Google/Amazon/Microsoft/OpenAI/Nvidia just as a show of force. Might not be great for the economy.
Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.
Does this mean Google and Amazon aren't allowed to have any kind of relationship with Anthropic? Or, at least, they have to choose whether they prefer Anthropic or the DoW?
My gut tells me Anthropic brings in more profit for Google than the DoW does, but unsure.
And Amazon is in an even tougher spot. Does it have to divest from Anthropic?
ThenElection
6d ago
it looks like you put this together in Google Docs. There is nothing wrong with writing a resume in Google Docs, but it can't look like it.
As an aside, I've had very positive responses from typesetting my resume with LaTeX. You've got to be applying to the types of places where the people reviewing your resume are likely to know it on sight, but it's a positive signal (irrational as it is, I've noticed that when I'm interviewing people even I give more benefit of the doubt to good typesetters). And it would be much easier to pack in a bunch of hidden buzzwords or the full list of technologies you've worked with, for the benefit of automated systems that prefilter.
ThenElection
11d ago
Twitter bots need freedom, too.
ThenElection
11d ago
I think he and Musk are joking.
90s era Nick Land is spectacular, in all senses. And he's probably the most important philosopher-poet for the AI era. Meltdown:
http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm
Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.
It seems the simplest explanation. Trump likes doing things. Bibi says, here's a thing. Trump says, great, let's do it! I can't see either of them needing much prodding to get on board.
The only reason someone would need more than that was if they bought the line that Trump was some Ron Paul-esque paleo isolationist. I don't think many people believe that now.
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