ThenElection
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User ID: 622
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
7mo ago
More bread and circuses. Americans, it is very clear, prefer to identify themselves as being in perpetual conflict with near symbolic enemies than far actual enemies. It's an indictment of democracy that people prefer to project their emotional hangups onto political figures (either as avatars of good or evil, depending on partisan valence) than to view them as flawed mortals to be pressured to achieve national objectives.
Although we might benefit from having angels as our political leaders, that's unrealistic. And I don't think anyone can plausibly say we deserve angels.
ThenElection
1yr ago
why the hell do we subsidize incompetent mothers one penny
Subsidize is doing a bit of work, here; as far as child support goes, it's a choice of how we split what's currently the man's contribution. Regardless of anyone's level of sympathy for irresponsible mothers, there's no reason that they should get less sympathy than irresponsible fathers. And even if we did want to subsidize irresponsible fathers compared to the status quo, allowing financial abortions would unleash a dynamic that results in substantially greater financial subsidization of children by taxpayers.
And hypothetically, at least, all this money is going to the upkeep of the child. If the money not actually ending up benefitting the child is the concern, you'd get a lot more buy in (from me, at least) with ideas on how to make sure a greater proportion of child support goes to benefit the intended beneficiary.
ThenElection
10mo ago
Under a Democratic SCOTUS, the team looks out for the team. Under a Republican SCOTUS, it's just the opposite.
ThenElection
1yr ago
The shooter was identified as Audrey Hale, 28, of Nashville, according to the chief, who said she identifies as transgender.
Glad that we're finally closing the mass shooter gap.
ETA: I'm pretty sure, given the phrasing, that we're talking MtF.
Movies can be great even if they go heavy on the DEI side of things: see Everything, Everywhere All At Once, which, although polarizing, definitely stands out in good ways.
I think there's pretty much no DEI -> bad quality relationship. It's more that, if a movie or show flops, there's a bunch of buck passing; gesticulating wildly at racist chuds is a useful strategy because it allows everyone involved to point to someone without implicating each other. So RoP gets to have lots of good press about how it's failing because of racism, while HotD is quietly stuck with people who want to watch it.
ThenElection
9mo ago
"Who has it worse" is not a productive or answerable question. There are different lived realities to men and women, and whether someone is affected worse by those different lived realities is highly individual.
The OP's entire frame of argument is a mirror version of the frame propounded by most feminists, who have as a uniting theme the idea that women have it universally worse than men. And it inherits all the faults of the feminist frame.
ThenElection
1yr ago
A breaking change in the kernel is different from a breaking change in an application; perpetual backwards compatibility would slow things to a halt. Should e.g. k8s have kept support for docker shim indefinitely? It was a constant source of maintenance issues (and if Reddit were using it, it would have caused a similar outage).
ThenElection
1yr ago
I initially questioned myself about whether it was worthy of a top level drive-by post and agree in retrospect. I'll avoid it in the future.
ThenElection
1yr ago
The reduced effectiveness against Omicron appears to be due to the virus being better at evading the immune system not due to a mismatch between the vaccine and the virus. Although that's difficult to tell because it's hard to find an entirely immune naive individual to expose to Omicron (either the actual virus or a vaccine).
One approach: why not engineer a new virus that the vaccine doesn't protect against and that mimics Omicron's ability to evade the immune system? It could give us deep insights into future pandemics.
ThenElection
2mo ago
I agree with everything you said, and no one should have to worry about making sure there isn't a homeless encampment a block away from a Four Seasons.
That said... 2cim isn't some yokel from Kansas City visiting San Francisco for the first time with her corn-fed husband and kids unexpectedly finding herself surrounded by syringes and shit. She is absolutely aware of the issues with San Francisco, and she's quite capable of finding and staying in parts of the city that are liveable.
ThenElection
1yr ago
I agree that the US is uniquely well positioned, though I think that high quality immigrants are going to be harder to come by, particularly in the quantity needed to reverse the costs of an aging population. My hope is that we try to reverse the culture of anti-fertility starting now and that technology will catch up in the next decade or so to help with the dysgenic effects.
ThenElection
1yr ago
On a social level, there's not much people can do individually. Someone can reasonably point at the single childless 30 year old professional concerned about TFR as somewhat hypocritical, but I agree: individually, we all must make do as best we can, and there's not much point in railing on individual choices.
When thinking of it as a social problem, though, if someone correctly recognizes it as a serious issue, I think it's reasonable to ask them what they're willing to give up to solve it. It's similar to environmentalists worried about climate change who refuse to even consider nuclear power: when faced with hard choices for them, they are just saying "I want all of what I want and refuse to make any trade offs." It reveals a great interest in signaling and a lack of any deep commitment to solving the Serious Problem.
The higher TFRs in the Philippines and Niger likely is driven by the lower classes and has a dysgenic effect, but despite that they're still likely to have higher growth rates than comparable countries with low TFRs.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Removing the gender aspect, if you're in a fight with a substantially stronger person, your first order of business is going to be putting distance between you and him and hopefully buying a few seconds to scream for help or find something to defend yourself with. That's possible in a regular room or hallway; it's not possible in an elevator, where you may well be knocked out as soon as anything starts. Not too different from the risk of being in a narrow alley as opposed to a wide street.
That doesn't detract from the fact that it's social norms and laws that are doing most of the work here. But it's defense in depth; adding a layer of being in a physical space where you're not as disadvantaged is a reasonable approach to risk mitigation.
ThenElection
1yr ago
That includes people who are on Social Security. If you scope it to Millenials and younger, I think the average is around 10.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Publicly stated opposition, at least. In private, they tend to go for other people with above average abilities. That tendency is even stronger when they're e.g. choosing anonymous donors from a sperm bank.
ThenElection
15d 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).
ThenElection
4mo ago
Is your main point of contention that vegans bundle together a lot of beliefs that should be independent, likely motivated by a core moral dislike of killing animals? Sure. But the vast majority of people do that; beliefs are tribal, and that's far from unique to vegans.
I'd be curious to see a link to the vegan post you mentioned; did he jump from point to point as you describe here, or did he focus on the (likely wrong) "veganism is good for high performance in sports" argument only to have a bunch of posters bring up unrelated points?
ThenElection
9mo ago
Has a political movement focused on encouraging ethnogenesis ever had a good outcome? I don't mean a politics that organically develops around a preexisting ethnic identity; I mean a politics that recognizes the weakness of an identity and believes that the use of government action to solidify that identity can solve real problems.
I also mean more than the politics of historical fascism (though those have always had disastrous outcomes). Maybe European nations in the 19th century, in a kind of turning peasants into Frenchmen kind of way? Perhaps, but that was a gradual process taking centuries and itself caused plenty of disasters. Many Eastern European nations would have had a better 20th century if the pursuit of minor identities hadn't torn apart the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And the most common outcome is for ethnogenic movements to just fizzle out: see pan-Slavism.
ThenElection
1yr ago
China's reliance on imports of food and oil are vulnerable to a tit-for-tat retaliation from the West.
True, but Taiwan is even more dependent on those things and vulnerable to economic coercion. And much of the world is dependent on Chinese trade: South Korea's and Japan's supply chains are deeply rooted in China, and a blockade of China would send them into spiraling into depression. (Making the blockade leakier helps them, but also defeats the purpose.) If it came to some kind of long-lived stalemate, there would be a lot of pressure to wrap things up, even on terms favorable to China.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Among my abandoned Substack drafts
Can you share your Substack? Wasn't aware you had one.
ThenElection
1yr ago
The group in question here is lesbians, though, not heterosexual WUCW. It's not a coincidence that political progressivism has started policing who lesbians have sex with and not the broader group of WUCW.
ThenElection
1yr ago
No one's vote materially influences outcomes. A Democrat in Idaho has every bit as much influence as a Democrat in California.
If a Republican likes living in California or a Democrat likes living in Idaho, why should they uproot their life to be governed by people who happen to share their party affiliation?
ThenElection
3mo ago
China has a material advantage in the local theater, but the best it can hope for is getting its neighbors to commit to neutrality (and at least Japan will not, and it still has meaningful shipyards). The US also can shut down Malacca.
Everyone's economy will be f'ed, but if China can't win in the span of ~9 months, it has lost. That said, I don't reject the possibility of it winning in that duration: there are just too many uncertainties to call an outcome.
Speaking purely from the political grandstanding perspective, it mostly makes DeSantis look silly and buffoonish: at the margin, it lost him votes, possibly even in future Republican primaries. You can talk about hypothetical second-order effects on marginal illegal voters all you want, but the public doesn't care, and it'll be hard to convince anyone that this escapade was DeSantis courageously trying to institute good policy despite any negative effects it might have on his grander political ambitions.
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