Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
#209, #StandUpLocust, #MurphysFerry, Surah Yunus 10:71
User ID: 2418
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
14hr ago
The rich have always been very class conscious.
I imagine what it would all look like if the Black Death struck again, in 2026. The workable solutions to any of this would be tyrannical in nature. “Free and open” is a recipe under trying circumstances to give natural selection free reign to determine the course and outcome. Maybe some people want to live under that paradigm. Normal human beings do not.
I remember reading a history book on the effects it had on Britain in the 13th century. One natural consequence that fell out of the havoc it wrought across the country was that the whole society became younger. It was a horrific time to live through, but the social transformations that co-evolved in the wake of the pandemic were amazing to read about. It made me reflect on history in a way I’d never considered before.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
3d ago
If you set the threshold for success as low as a placebo then your answer is built directly into the assumptions of the argument. The standards for medical efficacy are generally much higher than that, which is why a lot of it is bunk. At the very least none of it has proved worthy of repeated scientific scrutiny and came out with flying colors on the other side.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
2d ago
Always keep the expendable chaff on the front line to soften up the enemy before the real battle starts.
Opening repertoire’s were always my weakness originally and it was where my deficiencies showed, but in end games I was always rock solid and had near machine optimal moves. I always preferred the Ruy-Lopez. I also liked to emulate Dubov playing the Tarrasch but my calculation was never as complete or precise as his. Watching him play is beautiful, despite my style being wholly antithetical to his own.
I was curious to see if Yagiz Kaan could steal one from Magnus or at least draw him, since he’s now the youngest 2700 ever to play the game; but Magnus never loses endgames. It took balls to see such a young kid so eager to swim out to the deep end of the pool. You could tell he realized the single blunder he made where it was lost for him. My boy’s been taking our people to the Promised Land for nearly 20 years, #VikingPower. Chess belongs to the North, 💪 👊 ⛪️.
But I’m proud of Yagiz. Kid’s got a bright future and I look forward to watching his games.
Sounds like you’re just talking about Fermi’s paradox.
First of all if they were out there, how would we see them? The problem isn’t that we don’t see them but we shouldn’t even expect to. Our television and radio broadcasts don’t even reach beyond the heliosphere. It’s the sphere of charged particles at the edge of the solar system. A lot of those radio waves are just going to get annihilated, or scattered or absorbed.
Even if they did though, the inverse square law entails that the signals going to degrade substantially and so quickly that eventually it’s going to be below the standard background radiation (and therein invisible, it’ll be static; like looking at a TV). I’ve seen calculations done before that about one hundred light years is roughly the maximum distance (and this is even if you don’t take into account the cosmic dust that absorbs radio signals) it could travel theoretically. And even if you multiplied the strength of the broadcast by say two, that doesn’t increase the distance by two.
But let’s say life occurs once every thousand light years. Even in our galaxy alone, they’d be too far away for us to ever see them. Even if they’re millions of years older than us, because those signals are simply gone. Even if you had nuclear powered spaceships roving around the galaxy, they still aren’t generating anywhere near the amount of energy that starlight does. So Fermi’s paradox isn’t really a paradox for me. The best takeaway from this is to assume that intelligent life is roughly less than one per hundred light year radius. SETI researchers fully acknowledge all of this.
A highly intelligent and old civilization wouldn’t be very expansive necessarily, even with Dyson spheres in the mix. It doesn’t follow that we would expand to every spiral arm throughout the Milky Way and then move to other galaxies either. This becomes evident when you calculate the expansion rate. Is it one light year every billion years? One every thousand years?
Old civilization or not, they’d still run into the same problems as us. You have relativistic speed limits. But even apart from that, you can’t really send a massive spaceship at the speed of light, because the first particle it hits will just disintegrate. Just the random protons floating around alone will be like nuclear bombs, practicality dictates you would go slower. The propagation rate wouldn’t be near the speed of light. Even if you went 10% of that, every particle that hits that ship is going to do massive damage to it, plus you’re talking about light years of distance, and that’s not even factoring in gamma radiation… there’s way to many problems with this whole project; it just wouldn’t work.
I’ve never done the full calculations, only the quick and dirty mental math. Even if there was an advanced alien civilization say every thousand light years, the probability of seeing nothing would be close to 100%. The silence and non-observation that we see should be fully expected even if they are out there; that’s why the argument from silence fails, because it’s fully expected by the evidence.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
2d ago
… If you want the player to feel awesome upon obtaining a colorful cloak or a new spell, then you don’t want everything in the world vivid and dazzling, because the novelty and pleasure of these things reduces the power of those reinforcers. If the mobs are colorful and the characters around you are all wearing awesome things, then picking up some basic “red cloak” is no longer as pleasant, and thus no longer reinforced. Pleasure from stimuli are competitive to each other. (In a boring classroom, even a black and white VHS is a good reinforcer; not so in a mall)...
I’ve had thoughts about this in real life and have come to the opposite conclusion. One thing I love looking at the buildings of North Korea for (Yeah. I know.) is their obsession with pastel colors, looking like a city full of abandoned colored marshmallows. When I walk around the parking lot of my employer and I see the same silver, white, gray, black colored cars everywhere, it really leaves things looking incredibly sterile, with the life having been sucked out of everything.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
2d ago
I literally just told you why. It’s the physical limitations that prevent us from being able to detect them. But even suppose none of that was true, is the best thing to do if you’re an intergalactic civilization announce your existence to the rest of the galaxy? Why think that at all? It doesn’t seem to me to be the case that that would be the best approach in the first place.
You always have to consider the contingent historical circumstances that these nations develop under because revolutions never begin as a clean slate. It happens within a context.
If you take China as a popular example, almost nobody takes into account the fact that China has always had an authoritarian / autocratic streak since its inception. When you combine its unique history with the conditions under Mao Zedong, it doesn’t require a unique ideological causal factor to explain. This is why phrases like “Socialism with Chinese characteristics,” is so well know in area studies of the region. It’s a syncretism between the two and you can’t divorce one from the other. Just like Zen Buddhism with Capitalism in Japan or Confucianism with Korea.
In the west we suppress dissenting voices as well. The spectrum of acceptable opinion within the MSM for instance is extraordinarily narrow. It isn’t narrow because someone throws you in a concentration camp. It’s narrow for other reasons. We don’t call it censorship, we call it “content moderation.” In the same way the term “propaganda” fell out of favor after the Second World War and has since been referred to as the “public relations industry.”
Bruce Schneier has also done an interesting analysis that turns politics into an analysis of information systems and in particular the structure of information flows, which are what’s important to these systems. One thing he notes is that democracies take the form of what he calls “common political knowledge,” and it details the power that transparency of information has. Authoritarian societies take common political knowledge and turn it into “contested political knowledge,” such that institutional divisions become less well understood and rules are often very fuzzy. This has several security benefits that you often see applied in IR studies, that explains why regimes will almost always favor security over prosperity whenever there is a conflict between the two.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
3d ago
It’s actually kind of funny how religions practice eugenics in a way. Any system that organizes relationships that imply family formation do this.
All worldviews like this apply a selection template that involves… more or less “breeding” (if you want to call it that) for certain features. Eliezer once made a pretty funny remark in dialogue with Adam Frank that it shouldn’t be a surprise why you might find concentrations of individuals in societies today with full blown religious adaptations because until very recently, non-believers were regularly burnt at the stake.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
3d ago
Here in the US, I know people who have gotten chiropractic coverage under their own insurance.
I’ve sometimes wondered why a lot of domestic insurance programs in the US refuse to cover medical tourism operations abroad, when the expense is often much cheaper. It’s not all cosmetic that’s done elsewhere (although a lot of it is). Probably regulatory related if I had to guess. Not to speak of the logistics.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
3d ago
LibGen has been down for awhile now, and Anna’s Archive got taken down by the powers to be.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
3d ago
It’s the secular guardian angel.
AI will never replace this level of art.
Train it on 4Chan datasets. Lol.
I’m an ethnic Scandinavian by race; blue eyes, dark eyelashes; rosy cheeks; a lot of my father’s facial features; the standard Nordic template; and I really bemoan what leftism is doing over there. A lot of far-right publishers like Arktos come from there and produce a lot of literature that’s popular in the west and is continuing to gain traction year after year. It’s concerning to imagine where all this is headed because these people don’t integrate. They live in parallel societies.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
17d ago
I'll never get people who are always permanently adamant and obstinate when it comes to accepting blame for anything and yet can turn around and declare like a harp that you "hold the other party accountable" for days on end without a trace of irony. You can't have accountability without blame. Those things are two sides of the same coin. Physical abuse is never justifiable but that doesn't mean you aren't an idiot if you choose not to leave. How many of these people have you met that live by the same code they decry having their own feet held to the fire over?:
- If a man cheats in a relationship he's an asshole.
- If a woman cheats in a relationship, he's an asshole.
The cheater will almost always consider themselves justified if they can't spin themselves as a victim. In both cases, it's because the person was lacking in character and should be held accountable for their own choices and actions. But this is about how socially it is perceived more often than not. A lot of people rightfully can blame a man for cheating on a woman, no matter how good or bad things are in their relationship. But when women cheat, it's far more common to feel sense of questioning and empathy regarding the actions of their partner; it's often seen as understandable because he was lacking in some ways. "He was driven to cheat because he can't control himself." "She was driven to cheat... By him."
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
16d ago
Well the left gets funny in the head when you move their own logic onto other areas of concern. How many times have you heard someone in that camp say the right has a problem with gun “culture,” yet if you point to a group and say these people have a problem with “gang” culture, they stare at you blankly or quickly pull on the arrow in their quiver to smear you with whatever label they think will stick in the moment.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
20d ago
George Halvorson is the best person I know to consult on the state of the healthcare industry today. One of the major cost drivers for things is simply ordinary price inflation, believe it or not.
Whenever I think of the associated costs in healthcare, the complexities surrounding it are so daunting that it always brings me back to 2016 when Hillary and Bernie were running for the democratic ticket and why there’s so much bad data on this.
Back when Bernie Sanders was running for president, I don’t know how many people remember this but there was an infamous “Yale” study that come out during that period, which was a paper that supposedly showed how his plan could effectively nationalize large portions of healthcare as a whole, making things cheaper and more efficient for everybody.
Then I did a little bit of digging, and it became very clear to me that nobody read beyond the headline. Go into any hospital and walk into the insurance department and ask the person there, “What would happen to your hospital if you were reimbursed only at the Medicare rates?” The answer is always “Oh that’s simple. We would have to shutdown the hospital.
The author of that study simply took the Medicare reimbursement rates and applied them across the entire healthcare industry as a whole, which is grossly inaccurate because private insurance cross subsidizes Medicare to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars each year. This goes away under Medicare for all and the Yale study simply ignored that fact.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
7d ago
I was always a turtling / defensive player by default, especially in the FMP maps that made it easy to macro. In all my private matches we’d orchestrate, my peers hated playing my ass because they said I played “boring.” Well yeah… When you play competitive, you play to win. If you’re looking for something casual, stick to playing in public channels with randos.
Back when we played the private ladders like Vile Gaming Tour (VGT) and StarCraftDream (SCD), things were serious and we all wanted to see the “best” players in bo3’s, bo5’s or bo7’s who could put on a fascinating show, along with all the shittalking that ensured from everyone complaining that “so-and-so plays like a faggot!,” and calling each other noobs’s and retards. I swear it was the teenage immaturity that kept the game alive longer than it otherwise would have, but it was great.
Oh you’re into credit markets! I’ve studied this stuff pretty extensively and know a couple of people in high finance (one in particular who works the sell side in DCM and has gotten rich via distressed debt investing); and have a few very distant relatives in IB. The industry has changed quite a bit since the early days of the Internet. Derivatives trading in the classical sense is going the way of the dinosaur. People tell me if you’re looking to really “get into it,” beyond the horizon of an ordinary retail investor, what you really want is a job in “structuring.”
Fixed income (i.e. bonds, credits) are several orders of magnitude larger than equities markets. I’m not exactly going to pitch myself as a person chalk full of solid advice on complex investment strategies (disclaimer: I’m not a financial advisor or professional analyst), but I invest myself, and follow that side of the industry pretty closely. I’ve also been studying the equities of energy markets both international and domestic for the last few years, due to climate change trends and have discovered some pretty interesting things.
I can recommend plenty of resources your way, if you’re into that (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9).
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
14d ago
I understand the logic that sits behind their way of thinking. The day you stop believing people can live together in harmony, peace and security is the day you lose it. If the attempts to keep that vision alive were always going to be doomed to fail and if America is the next USSR or the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then I’m not really optimistic about the future.
True, but you can’t effectively convict someone on circumstantial evidence alone. Most criminals get caught because they’re desperate or stupid. The police don’t catch smart criminals. They catch the low hanging fruit, they’re getting the ones who can be caught.
Approximately half of all murders each year in the US end up going unsolved. That’s not the conviction rate you want with all the “… surveillance footage; cell phone records; purchase records at stores; internet search histories; etc. If you have a motive to kill the person, e.g. you and your neighbor were having some kind of dispute…” that you have at your disposal.
Having grown up in proximity to violent gangs I can tell you plenty of gang members exit the drug trade and go into legitimate businesses all the time and never get caught. The whole trope of “I’m going to only make a couple million and then quietly exit,” isn’t a myth. It happens all the time. You’ll find only 1-2 pictures of these people floating online. They have zero Internet presence. They aren’t extravagant or flashy. They’re normal by every appearance; there’s nothing for law enforcement to work with.
A long time ago I watched one of Michael Franzese’s videos and someone was interviewing him about people in that life who were known killers. He said a lot of it is grossly inflated by law enforcement and he can’t imagine some of the figures that were attached to certain suspects, because there are people in active war zones who don’t even kill that many people in the line of combat. There are active hoods in the United States of America that have murder rates higher than the we had at the height of the war in Iraq.
I have no problems believing the numbers suspected by these guys. I once observed a discussion someone had with a historian who just didn’t believe the Mongol’s genocide of the Islamic world was as large as it was because the logistics of it didn’t make any sense. And the historian replied back “You don’t need industrial facilities to commit a genocide. You just drag someone out to the back with a machete and kill them…” I think statements like the one you offered and of people like Franzese really just come from a failure of imagination and living closely on the ground to that kind of activity.
It’s really not the surprise people think it is.
You nailed it. That's exactly the problem. For someone to step in and begin regulating social behaviors or rolling back norms to generations prior, that would amount to "telling them how to live their lives." They're not ready to have this conversation. The kind of solution they want to this problem is the kind of solution that would prevent them from having a voice at all in the first place. The only time you'll ever be able to blame me for the way I am as a man is when I'm making choices on your behalf. Otherwise, this is on you. You're the one making the choice. I've never been for unbridled freedom in the case of either gender, but what's an occasional problem for every other man has become an epidemic for woman writ large and there's only one group of people responsible steering the ship.
So long as people don’t have to live with the ideological byproducts and waste generated by the downside of the policies they advocate, they’ll continue to be at liberty thinking up all kinds of fanciful garbage encircled with every halo of bullshit you can think of. You saw this with the hysteria of Martha’s Vineyard and the controversy surrounding that debacle.
It wasn’t just the economy though. People vote just as much along identitarian lines and projected onto Trump the values they sought to find in his statements.
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