ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
2mo ago
It all comes down to Sergey and Larry, IMO. They wanted to try lots of off the wall things with their newfound power and wealth without being subject to market discipline, which isn't necessarily a bad thing (except to investors). One option would be to just start new companies, but that's a bit more complicated than just starting random projects within your existing company. So people were hired to enable those things, and the ads revenue not only continued but increased exponentially, so hiring continued.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Suppose military service were entirely voluntary. Do you expect there would be a substantial drop in the number of military recruits? If conscription doesn't conscript many people who don't want to fight on the front, why is Ukraine strengthening penalties for evasion and expanding conscription operations?
ThenElection
22d ago
Thanks for the link. And, yes, it did shift my views toward more Ukraine support (never anti-Ukraine, but more concerned with male wellbeing and disposability). As much as I'd love a poll that got into the nitty gritty of what exactly Ukrainian men think of current conscription/mobilization policy, that seems unlikely, and this poll does suggest they're broadly supportive of it, at least in principle, and I can't think of any quibbles that'd reverse the results.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I mean, I kind of get it: if I were in Ukraine, I'd rather be in the Western sphere than the Russian sphere, Putin is an asshole who launched this whole war, and the US is getting to screw with a rival for comparative pennies. But at some point you've got to consider the humanitarian cost: I might prefer being in one sphere or another, but I'd always prefer being in either sphere peacefully than being blown apart by a shell in a war zone.
It seems to me that the resolution of the conflict remains wide open.
The resolution, yes; the outcome, no. Appalling amounts of lives and infrastructure have been destroyed, and whatever lines end up being drawn up on the map, the people of those countries deciding the lines will be dead or impoverished. It's only a question at this point of how many dead and how impoverished.
It may be up to the Ukrainian people to decide whether it's worth fighting on, but I'd point out that in that poll, 42% favor negotiations to end the war. I'd be curious to see crosstabs: are the young men being forced at gunpoint asked to sacrifice most well-represented in the small majority who favor continuing the war without negotiations?
ThenElection
29d ago
Hapa, though white passing.
ThenElection
23d ago
It seems like there are three possible states to your knowledge variable: unknown, believed, and disbelieved.
Maybe I'd coin the word "delief" for that.
ThenElection
2mo ago
I agree. But by the same token, too many men are falling into the same trap: "I'm mediocre because the world is biased against me, giving unfair preferences to everyone else."
Sociologically, one or neither (or both!) may be true. But if you embrace victimhood as part of your identity, you're dooming yourself.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Ukrainian women are doing nothing wrong. If I were one, my immediate response would be to GTFO of Ukraine as quickly as possible. As it became clear that the war will last a long time and even once resolved will leave Ukraine a ruined place, I'd then look to settle down in whatever safe country I could find, ideally a relatively well-off one, which would likely involve finding a partner from that country. Maybe I'd use Tinder, if I were foolish. Regardless, in general it's not something I'd begrudge them, and given the option, I'd expect most would rather have stayed in a peaceful Ukraine and married a Ukrainian man. Unfortunately that option's not on the table, so they make do with the options that they're actually presented with.
The central issue is that men are being prevented from doing the exact same thing.
ThenElection
2mo ago
In San Francisco, we got a homeless pedophile advertising free fentanyl to kids from pre-k to 8th grade outside their school:
(In fairness, he did end up arrested and convicted, but only after public outcry.)
ThenElection
28d ago
Scalia would have been 70 in 2006. Scalia was very important between 2006 and his death. His impact in general has been almost immeasurably huge on American jurisprudence, even the court's liberals owe a lot to Scalia in their opinions. He achieved this mostly by sheer force of will and intellect,
If Sotomayor is as strong a justice as Scalia, then yes, your argument holds and Democrats should keep her on the court. Scalia had a high VORP.
ThenElection
5mo ago
In general, people don't actually care about gender or race swapping: put in the best actor/actress for the job, and you can do wonders. The issue is when people try to do a "modern" remake that lacks any artistic intention or execution except "we got rid of the white men!" That's what makes people grumpy.
Starbuck, in BSG, will always be Kara Thrace to me. She's flawed, compelling, and there is no Mary Sueing or girl bossing in her character. Makes me want to rewatch over the holiday break.
Google doesn't exist.
It's just a bunch of people, sending messages to other people, with its components arranged in a particular way that has created self-sustaining income streams (largely based upon luck and having stumbled on ads and executing on them effectively before anyone else). Even if Google did have some deep ideological principles, it would be unable to translate them into some kind of transformative cultural force.
From that, principal agent problems dominate. There's no way for individuals' actions to cohere enough for any collective Google agent to arise. Google doesn't want a woke fascist state, or to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, or even to make a profit. It's just a bunch of bureaucratic fiefdoms posturing to other fiefdoms to get a bigger cut of ad revenue. So an individual can get an edge in getting a bigger cut of ads revenue by leveraging woke arguments: who's going to say "well, it's stupid to ban Gemini from generating white people"? Because it certainly won't actually help them in getting their own bigger cut.
This kind of falls under your 2), though calling it stupid assumes a bit too much an entity that uses its agency in an obviously counterproductive way. How to distinguish each possibility? In isolation, the Gemini debacle doesn't give too much evidence (although it weakly indicates against 3; if demoralization was the goal, Google wouldn't have walked back the image generation). But if you place it in the broader constellation of issues that plague Google, 2 is the simplest and most consistent explanation.
ThenElection
4mo ago
Trump is an unprincipled egotist who is unable to work with the Establishment: he'll do whatever he wants, and he has no incentive to work with the Powers That Be because they despise him and would never cooperate with him (and the feeling is absolutely mutual). No other candidate comes close to offering that.
It's not particularly likely to lead to anything good, I think, but if you're broadly anti-establishment, he's the closest thing to a sure bet to do things differently than how the Establishment wants things to be done.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Plenty of bad behavior happens among the Silicon Valley elite. And although journalists attempt to make hay of it occasionally (ew gross why is that nerd having orgies with recent high school graduates), most people shrug and look the other way.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I'd be curious to know how much of the new funding would go to neutral research, and how much would go to particularly female-centric research. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me for funding to go to making sure studies on hypertension also include women, but if it just goes to yet more breast cancer or birth control research (when men don't even have access to a birth control pill yet!), that would be biased.
Looking at how the order defines things...
The term “women’s health research” means research aimed at expanding knowledge of women’s health across their lifespans, which includes the study and analysis of conditions specific to women, conditions that disproportionately impact women, and conditions that affect women differently.
That doesn't make me optimistic, but we'll see.
ThenElection
2mo ago
Was JP ever really a TRP influencer? My sense was that, when he had his brief moment of being a Person, he was just a vaguely conservativish ersatz dad figure not really associated with the broader manosphere, let alone TRP. The media got a hate boner for him (was it the trans stuff?), and then manospherians rallied around him briefly, in a the-enemy-of-my-enemy kind of way. Then people forgot about him, because his main thing was "make your bed," and he got bored with being a Thought Leader when he realized benzos were more fun.
ThenElection
2mo ago
An internal locus of control gives you better outcomes, regardless of how valid a particular complaint is. Even if it is insanity, it's a useful insanity.
I have no idea if the particular woman in the example above actually faced unfairness or not (she probably has; at some point we all have). But I do know she'd be in a better position, financially and psychologically, if she spent less time introspecting about how mean and terrible and unjust the world is to her and more time embracing her agency.
I present my sketch of Cat Woman, an entirely fictional story:
Kirsten Rubenyan is a lonely, struggling MFA student. At some point she has a fling with a perfectly ordinary and fine enough guy she thinks is a lesser-than (after all, she's working on her MFA and he doesn't even have a car) and eventually that goes sour. She is testy about how the relationship went, so she stalks the social media of an ex he mentioned and spins a tale intermingling lots of concrete identifying facts with projections of how she felt about him.
It turns out surprisingly decent with interesting subtleties and ambiguities, but she realizes that her stand-in protagonist is a bit too unsympathetic, so she tacks on a bit at the end where the guy calls her a whore so readers know who the bad guy is. It bursts onto the scene as an internet sensation, and everyone is able to identify the guy and thinks he's an abusive asshole. The guy falls into a neurotic depressive spiral wondering whether he was as bad as she depicts him, constantly rereading his texts with her to figure out what he did to deserve this fate as his life falls apart, until ultimately killing himself.
Kirsten walks away with a movie deal but vacillates between feeling she's the victim of a mean misogynistic society and having nagging doubts that maybe she did something wrong.
Any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
ThenElection
2mo ago
Basically. EU leaders see AI as a marginal improvement instead of something transformational.
Robots will still take EU jobs. This law just makes sure they'll be Chinese (or, god willing, American) robots instead of European robots.
ThenElection
2mo ago
There were probably a thousand men or so who took his advice to heart and improved their lives for it. So, he's almost certainly a net positive. I hope he gets his life together and can be happy with that small positive influence he's had.
ThenElection
30d ago
You could also tax different products at different rates, depending on the income range that purchases them. Used clothes, lower rate; Teslas, higher rate; organic produce, higher rate; frozen veggies, lower rate. In theory you could kind of approximate the same effect. The biggest issue would be all the jockeying different industries would go for to be classified into the lower rate (why, of course this Hermes bag is purchased mostly by lower income people!)
ThenElection
30d ago
All taxes are distortionary.
Hate to be that guy, but land value taxation (or really taxes on anything that's inelastic in supply) doesn't have that problem. Probably the most compelling argument for it (plenty of arguments against it, as well).
The issue with full time pundits is that they become more beholden to their audience, both in terms of having to constantly produce and in terms of playing to their audience's biases. The best things about Tracing are that he only writes about things he finds interesting and that he isn't motivated to suck up to any particular viewpoint.
I do like the independent investigative journalist for hire angle. Give him $10k for 80 hours of work (does that sound right for pricing?), let him nerd out on some obscure corner of the world for a few weeks, and at the end you get something interesting.
Nuclear may be an overstatement; effective is probably a better word. Although Ukrainian soldiers likely know what's going on, the propaganda's goal is not to inform but to increase the salience of that fact.
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