ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
11hr 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
14hr 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
15hr 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
4d 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
9d ago
Twitter bots need freedom, too.
ThenElection
9d 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.
Sidestepping the question of whether tax refunds that refund more than you paid in can be considered morally a tax cut...
EBT at most gives a few thousand dollars a year. It's true that the most of recipients are net negative in revenue, but there are still sundry taxes they do pay: sales tax, taxes on social security benefits, payroll, taxes on unemployment benefits, gas taxes, etc. We have a lot of taxes. You can dig through those and find enough they do pay so that you can refund them for food purchases without dropping into negative for taxes paid.
It would be a somewhat silly accounting game and wouldn't change how decidedly net negative they are in revenue. The trick here is in leaving out the really big redistributionist things (e.g. education, healthcare) and not counting it against their tax contributions.
Going back to actual net revenue, I can see the argument that it's impossible for anyone who's negative net revenue to receive a tax cut. But this has the side effect of meaning it's impossible for the large majority of Americans to receive a tax cut, because most are negative net revenue, both annually and over their lifespan. On an annual basis, the guy I originally mentioned above getting tens of thousands of value in property tax deferral is almost certainly net negative (though over his lifespan he's probably net positive so far).
ThenElection
10d ago
There are clever ways you could make EBT structured as a tax cut instead of spending as well. I don't think that would make it any less objectionable to the people who object to it.
To your more abstract point, the government is an institution like any other, and it will extract value from the economy to sustain its own existence. As part of my negotiating with its power, I want it to do what it does in as fair and transparent a way as possible, in a way that minimally distorts the economy or incentivizes putting effort and planning into schemes to take advantage of it.
ThenElection
10d ago
We could just dump it in the water supply. No need for the authoritarianism; there's the precedent of fluoridation for polluting our precious bodily fluids. Just have to make sure sodas also have it in them.
ThenElection
10d ago
Any kind of subsidy or redistribution will have some kind of waste built in from people exploiting it. I just can't get too worked up about EBT: sure, it isn't 100% efficient, but a substantial portion of it does reach people who need it.
Another California program: property tax deferral for the needy. If you own your house but have an income below ~60k, you can defer property taxes indefinitely, as a loan at a simple (not compound!) rate of 5%. One one-time coworker has engineered his income and assets (multi million dollar Roths FTW) so he no longer has to pay property tax through this program; this ends up amounting to something like 20k in benefits per year (that's after subtracting the accrued debt). That's a lot more scamming of the system than someone buying shitty mushroom snacks on EBT.
My main objection to the people in your example is the obesity and the festering sores. But, that's what poverty looks like in the US today. If you want to avoid it, shop at better grocery stores than the bargain market.
Left-wing politics more generally, including increased wealth redistribution.
Curious about the anti-D response here: in the 60s and 70s, the USA strikes me as clearly more decadent than the USSR, while the USSR was much more left wing. Are those statements accurate? And yet in the USSR case, bad economics trumped any edge in resistance to decadence. How does someone reconcile this tension?
ThenElection
13d ago
Getting the media on your side is part of competence. Given the existing environment, I get the appeal of throwing your hands up and saying it's impossible. But the Trump administration doesn't put in even a minimal attempt to work the mainstream media, seeing no value in it compared to building a parallel system.
ThenElection
14d ago
Robin Hanson's gentle silent rape would be the least of the examples shoved at me about how this wasn't a real crime at all.
It's a disgusting betrayal of trust, and the guy was clearly a creep along all dimensions, but what good is it trying to persuade the unpersuadable that this was wrong?
<high decoupler hat>
Hanson isn't saying that rape of this form shouldn't be a crime or isn't wrong. His argument is better characterized as this is wrong and a crime, but so is cuckolding, in the sense of forcing a man to raise another man's child without his informed consent.
</high decoupler hat>
Hanson almost certainly has no objections to Pelicot and his fellow rapists being punished as he is, or even significantly more.
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.
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