ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
29d ago
"Actually Indian" can be your new tag.
ThenElection
29d ago
UBI is definitionally giving income to people without conditions. Requiring them to work an (even fake) job is a very different thing, proponents of which (a "Job Guarantee") have a long history of feuding with UBI advocates. You might as well say any form of redistribution is a UBI.
ThenElection
29d ago
Vietnam is also right next door to a regional hegemon (which has invaded it, in living memory) which also has the ability to immiserate it and militarily dominate it. And although it avoids poking the dragon when it can, it still is able to maintain real and significant independence.
I don't doubt that the US could turn Canada into a frozen hellscape if it were sufficiently motivated. But that threat isn't enough to get infinite pliability from Canadians, just as the Chinese threat of the same isn't enough to get infinite pliability from the Vietnamese. Both middle powers perceive that their respective hegemons are balancing multiple objectives and believe (correctly, in the Viet case) that the costs to other objectives prevent the maximal response.
ThenElection
29d ago
A theory I played with was that it was intended as a distraction from Venezuela. Greenland is far more ridiculous than Venezuela, so you make a bunch of noise about it and then later walk it back, and everyone's forgotten about Venezuela.
The issue with that theory is that... Venezuela seems like a success? Why would you want to distract from it? It can be a feather in your cap, not something to bury with the next noise cycle.
ThenElection
29d ago
What would the US do to stop them? Mass seizure of financial assets? A blockade? Decapitation strike? Invasion?
There is still an order, which is the order of reality. And although the US is very powerful, it's not infinitely powerful. All of those would rapidly result in the whole world looking for a better deal with a new protector.
ThenElection
30d ago
Storm Horncastle. She appears to be Norwegian; not an adopted name.
ThenElection
30d ago
I have lived in China, and I like it a lot. Some of its tier 1 cities are quite livable, and there are smaller towns that are also quite nice as well.
The core issue is that... It's not a democracy. Not in a moralistic sense, but it ends up making bad decisions, and then follows through with them come hell or high water. It was genuinely impressive how they marshalled society to get to (near) zero COVID for years, but it was a stupid goal that hurt its economy. It could similarly do something really stupid re:Taiwan, and it can persist in that decision for years.
It also has severe fertility issues, but that seems a broader issue affecting all the East Asian countries. You might hope that its authoritarianism would give it more capability to address that issue, but so far we're not seeing anything too effective coming out of it.
ThenElection
30d ago
Shapiro, when asked about Harris:
"Kamala Harris? Who's that? Oh yeah, I think we might have met at a fundraiser once, didn't leave much impression. Did she ever end up getting that job she was applying for?"
ThenElection
1mo ago
When I think back to what was the first step for me off the progressive reservation (this was back in 2013 or so), a coworker of mine was arguing that I (a man) was privileged compared to her. This is a woman who went to boarding school at Andover, spent most of her high school and college years snorting coke, and had parents who bought her a condo in SF as a graduation present. While I literally grew up on food stamps.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Going by the digging ditches comparison, it's also pointless and stupid, but for many kids it would be genuinely more fun and engaging. That's because it has the possibility of a positive reward signal: finishing the ditch. But the quadratic formula is something many genuinely are just not capable of: there is no final "get shit done" point for it.
ThenElection
1mo ago
LBJ won a Nobel Prize for inventing the free lunch.
LBJ never won a Nobel Prize. He was nominated in 1964, but even that nomination was for steering American foreign policy toward international cooperation.
ThenElection
1mo ago
It's a shared culture of narcissism. People look for identity and meaning in stupid acts of protest, and they imagine what the government does is provide the stage for it. Totalitarian symbolically, but it will never engage in any kind of violence at all against you personally, which would interfere in your bragging rights about how righteous and badass you are.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I don't think it's incoherent to say that protesting an evil regime is good and protesting a holy regime is evil, which seems to be the reason for the split view. It's even my view and likely the majority view: although it might be unwise to publicly fight against Hitler/Stalin, I'd definitely be rooting for someone who does. Where I'd differ is in not judging either administration as calling for unmanaged or badly managed protest.
The issue is that maintaining public order inherently involves violence, and both Babbitt and Good (and their supporters) thought that they were somehow exempt from facing violence when they were protesting (ironic, since they probably think of the respective administrations as closer to Communist/Nazi than I do).
ThenElection
1mo ago
That explains only the Somali daycare fraud, though. George Floyd wasn't Somali, and Renee Good wasn't trying to save an illegal Somali immigrant. And I don't see Somalis as having some Svengali like ability to warp the entire culture; Good, after all, had only been in Minnesota for a couple months, without giving an opportunity for them to work their hypnotic magic.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Minneapolis has been stagnant economically compared to more "woke" cities. In 2000, Minneapolis had a GDP per capita significantly above the US average; now it's basically average. Maybe it's vibes: when you're relatively treading water, you have worse outcomes on a range of measures?
I had ChatGPT pull data (change in GDP per capital; data sources are BEA and the Fed):
| City (metro area used) | GDP per capita (2001, current $) | Latest year used | GDP per capita (latest year, current $) | % change (2001 → latest) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Minneapolis (Minneapolis–St. Paul–Bloomington, MN-WI MSA) | $46,924 | 2023 | $94,214 | +101% |
| San Francisco (San Francisco–Oakland–Hayward, CA MSA) | $57,487 | 2022 | $159,777 | +178% |
| Portland (Portland–Vancouver–Hillsboro, OR-WA MSA) | $39,601 | 2023 | $86,805 | +119% |
| Seattle (Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue, WA MSA) | $51,397 | 2023 | $138,947 | +170% |
| Los Angeles (Los Angeles–Long Beach–Anaheim, CA MSA) | $41,367 | 2023 | $100,522 | +143% |
| Boston (Boston–Cambridge–Newton, MA-NH MSA) | $52,592 | 2023 | $122,902 | +134% |
| New York City (New York–Newark–Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA MSA) | $50,967 | 2022 | $110,691 | +117% |
| Chicago (Chicago–Naperville–Elgin, IL-IN-WI MSA) | $43,525 | 2022 | $89,514 | +106% |
Supports my hypothesis, but it doesn't really ring true to me.
I think perhaps it's the white people in Minnesota. When I think of the prototypal white person there, I think of some middle manager for Fortune 500 #352. Competent and well-meaning, but not quite a go-getter. And that ends up reflected in the political culture, in that it's not especially responsive to changing circumstances. California, by contrast, has the same issues, but it encountered them earlier and its system has rapidly evolved to be resistant to shocks from them. A billion dollars in corruption and fraud, you say? Race riots? We found ways for the system to manage those decades ago.
Minnesota is naive; its system assumes good intent and isn't able to deflect or absorb the actors with bad intents.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Every measurement has costs. What if we could go from 98% to 99% accurate by having kids grind for 12 hours a day for grades, every day, while doubling public education spending? That would prevent millions more from being misclassified.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Manuel Noriega was, what, two weeks? New record set? Impressive indeed.
ThenElection
1mo ago
How to make CSAM is widely known, and plenty of places don't cooperate usefully with the USA in stopping it. Despite that, the USA does manage to broadly limit how much it proliferates.
I'm not saying that it's a good idea, and I'm not saying that open weight models could be completely eliminated. I am saying that they could be quite effectively suppressed, as there are plenty of tools that the government can use to enforce a ban, imperfectly but substantially.
ThenElection
1mo ago
The goal wouldn't be to make it so literally no one in the USA could run an open weights model; it would be to add friction points to make it more trouble than it's worth, except for the most dedicated people. You wouldn't need any kind of global agreement, just a national focus and working with large tech companies to limit it. DNS blocks, removing them from Google search results, etc. A relatively small amount of effort can prevent the bulk of casual users from having access to them.
That's just if you get the domestic consensus to look at open weights models as something comparable to copyright violation. If instead the public started seeing them the same as CSAM, you could go a lot whole lot further: still theoretically accessible, but very rare.
ThenElection
1mo ago
You could make it pretty broadly inaccessible: ban all open-weight models; require any image generation to have strict safeguards and reporting of attempts to authorities; enforce severe criminal penalties. Your existing model would be pretty much untouchable, but it couldn't easily be shared, and a decade from now most copies of it would have been lost to end users. You could even require manufacturers to include firmware on new hardware that bails on unapproved workloads, but that seems like it'd be overkill.
Not saying that this is what I'd like, but it seems doable.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I would have felt very differently: I would have cared much less, quite honestly. "Oh, someone's a weirdo, anyone whose opinion of me changes because of it isn't worth caring about." And I'm not sure that making the AI-generated nude clearly a fake joke (giving her purple skin or whatever) would change anyone's opinions. I think the crux of the matter is that it's a sexual image, and we cordon off sexuality as requiring unique, almost spiritual protections around it.
ThenElection
1mo ago
So, back in high school, someone made a fake photo of me and posted it in a classroom. It wasn't a nude, but it was political, depicting me as Stalin, as I was an outspoken socialist. I was outraged ("the photoshop is not even accurate! I'm a TROTSKYIST!"), and it definitely hurt my feelings and hurt me socially. Pretty clear case of bullying, but, in retrospect, it was pretty hilarious and a useful learning experience. Should that kid have been punished?
I don't think so, and I suspect you don't either (though I'm curious if my suspicion is right). Which shifts the question to, what is the difference between a nonsexual representation and a sexual one? I think, to many people who don't see harm, harm categorically isn't something that can be done with an image or words--sticks and stones can break my bones etc. If people start physically attacking someone, or destroying their property, in response, there is harm, but the harm originates from the physical act, not the instigating image. The introduction of a sexual element doesn't change this. (I'm speaking here in terms of conceptual framework, not legal definitions.)
That doesn't mean that the school shouldn't do anything about the boys--schools can and should regulate behavior above and beyond the minimal standard of harm. But the idea that actual physical violence should be punished less than images and words is weird to me, especially when school administrators had no actual evidence of the images.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Stranger Things was disappointing.
The first season was great, and it was all about the settings and vibes. After that, they didn't know what to do with it: sequels demanded they simultaneously up the stakes and explain the universe. S2 went with a kind of eldritch Lovecraftian approach, which was exciting to me because it's a genre that's nearly impossible to do well (explanations are self-undermining), and that season gave a reasonable go at it. But the task of following through proved too much for the writers, so we got creature features and supernatural slashers instead.
The weak story thus forced the focus onto interpersonal relationships that turned into soap opera, with an ever-expanding cast (with outrageous plot armor) to pander to more market segments with fan service. By season 5, it was impossibly unwieldy.
Will's coming out was entirely unnecessary, but it's important not to treat it as some departure from an otherwise good season. Every scene involved some long-winded heart-to-heart with unearned development. Somehow there's no tension at all: the world is ending, but you wouldn't know it by how the characters acted. The final journey to Vecna's layer (which is supposedly on a timer, as it's literally actively traversing a wormhole to destroy our own world) becomes a calm stroll (through a brightly lit, demogorgon-less set) where two guys just talk about their shared like of a girl and find out actually we're not too different after all!
So, does it matter that Vecna and the Mindflayer are weaker than the L1 demogorgon in season 1? Nope, because they're entirely secondary to the real goal: shoveling slop and 80s nostalgia to a bunch of Millennial Netflix watchers who want soap opera but want the imprimatur of prestige television.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Injection is for the benefit of the public, not the criminal. At some point we got squeamish about visibly physical punishment, and injection sweeps all of that under the rug, making execution a bloodless, bureaucratic affair.
One thing that makes it a bit worse than regular make work corruption: public transit is useful in a place like DC. WMATA's existence makes it so a more reliable, cleaner, effective replacement can't take its place. Just handing out bags of cash to favored groups would in some ways be better, because at least private companies could run the existing profitable routes.
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