burkeboi
10d ago
<De Maistre Hat>The authority of marriage collapsed before the no-fault was the law. Before no-fault was the law, people would get around the fault rules by perjuring themselves. Only through the organic growth of successful subcultures will no-fault divorce once again be the social norm. </De Maistre Hat>
burkeboi
12d ago
That's not necessarily true. To say "I'm principally concerned with the wellbeing of a subset of the population of state" isn't the same as saying "I only wish to have a state with this subset of the population." The historical US was a perfect example of this; huge numbers of Americans cared principally about the wellbeing of their subculture and acted to secure their interests, but most were not interested in making their subculture the consensus culture of the US.
burkeboi
15d ago
To expand upon the sanctions point: they are useful in dissuading countries from attempting to obtain nukes since they do cause economic damage. If a country, for whatever reason, is dead set on getting a nuke then the sanctions would not stop them or meaningfully slow them down.
All that being said, this war seems to make it clear that the JCPOA was probably the best deal the US could've gotten without being willing to use more force than any US government could politically muster. It seems to get a better deal involves the US being willing to use more force than it's actually willing to.
burkeboi
15d ago
For almost all societies, there was always some form of welfare for the poor. The amount varied, but the only time I can think of when a society either showed complete indifference or actual facilitation of harming the poor was when the poor was an outgroup. St. Domingue being an example.
burkeboi
15d ago
I'd add to this that there really weren't that many completely infirm/economically useless people back then either. Without modern medicine, even assuming you got past childhood mortality, there were very few people who would've made it to their 60s since a lot of things we handle nowadays, such as early heart disease or infectious disease, would've just been fatal back then. In addition to that, while there was always some degree of welfare in states, the destitute likely would die within a decade due to their weakened constitutions.
It's a good problem to have that tons of people who would've been dead in the past are alive thanks to modern economics and medicine. That being said, their continued living does necessitate a societal negotiation on how resources are distributed.
burkeboi
21d ago
Southern Blacks don't decide elections anymore. NC and GA have lost importance. Dems don't need either state to reach 270. PA, MI and WI are the most important swing states now.
It's not just southern blacks; it's blacks in general. While their percent is smaller in northern states, without their solid black support, the Democrats cease to be competitive. Look at Wisconsin, for instance: the 2020 margin for Biden was 0.5% . From wikipedia, the black population of Wisconsin is 6-7%. If they vote 85-95% Dem, and their voting population is roughly their state population, then their presence turns an R+5 victory into a D+0.5 victory. It's the same story in many other Northern states.
I was curious about how crucial the black electorate is democrats in the north. I asked ChatGPT to crunch the numbers on the non-black electorate in 2020, and it calculated that, in regards to the northern states:
Biden still wins the non-Black electorate in New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Maine. He loses the non-Black electorate in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
That's 2020. In 2024, even states like Illinois start to be competitive without the black vote. While I don't think Pete is going to make blacks a republican or neutral constituency, blacks are a necessary part of any Democratic coalition if they hope to win.
burkeboi
22d ago
By that definition, I agree with your predictions. That being said, I'm not sure they will get rid of the filibuster; it's just too useful for politicians since it lets them avoid so much accountability.
burkeboi
22d ago
I'm a bogglehead, so I agree with the approach that in the end, the market will increase. My argument is there likely will be a debt crisis that will cause pain in the future. The pain it causes will be less than the benefits of market growth, however.
I think one thing to keep in mind is that it is entirely possible that behind the scenes information alters the calculus such that most, if not all presidents would have jumped in on this one.
I agree with that. If Iran was within a year of getting nukes, proactively attacking would be within the Overton window. It probably would have been the consensus or near consensus.
It's not popular to consider, but if Iran actually went ahead with nuclearization or was reaching a break point with missile/drone production...both of those essentially "require" intervention if we are to keep with our foreign policy goals.These things are part of the "official" stated reason for the war and are quite possibly actually accurate, even if many Americans aren't happy for them. The underlying motivation might be something like "we have to go now or Iran will be able to destroy Israel and we can't do anything about it. You might be okay with destroying Israel but the U.S. government isn't (at least for now).
While Israeli interests do push the US in a more hawkish direction, I actually think Israel is not the biggest consideration here. If Iran gets nukes, that sets off a chain reaction of nuclear proliferation and really changes how not just people in the Middle East, but quite likely outside the Middle East interact with both nukes and Iranian power. The Saudis will get nukes 0.5 seconds after the Iranians get them. Iran actually having nukes likely just flips the table in very hard to predict ways. That scenario is complicated enough, and calculating the force need to stop it and/or how much force is worth it quickly gets into complex territory.
Once the territory gets that complex, I'd say reasonable and informed minds can disagree and one can really only tell if a war is ultimately a good idea or bad idea in retrospect. While the current war so far, in both motive and conduct, seems like a bad idea to me I wouldn't be surprised if in a year in hindsight it turns out "yeah, it was a necessary if imperfect action."
Additionally Trump and likely any replacement Republican president would be tempted to pull the trigger if it was a near thing and not yet profoundly dire due to a fear of ending up like Biden (in the sense of permitting Russia to attack Ukraine).
I don't think you can say the US meaningfully "permitted" Russia to attack Ukraine. There is a lot of intermediate actions between doing nothing and starting WW3 over Putin's invasion, and the US has consistently aided Ukraine and injured Russia through that aid. If the goal is to discourage violating other nation's territory, the US has definitely shown that it will seriously hurt non-allied nations that do that. I'm not sure any other US president would've acted too differently to what Biden's Administration did since doing nothing encourages territorial revisionism, which destroys the nice pax-Americana we want to keep, and WW3 is too costly for a non-NATO ally.
EDIT: To be honest, I'm also not 100% confident how much AIPAC and pro-Israel sentiment really changes US policy. The Cold War US friendship with Israel, which as Suez showed was not 100% agreement, was mostly utilitarian against the pro-Soviet Arab Socialists. The US was allied to the Arab monarchies for the same reason. Especially given that the Arab monarchies are de facto Allies of Israel, I'm not sure how much US policy would change if every Evangelical and Israel lobbyist suddenly got Thanos snapped away. There are good non-sentimental reasons the US allies with who it allies with.
burkeboi
22d ago
The US has seemingly defied every prediction of its debt being unsustainable. GDP keeps going up,so the debt is inflated away. Those who keep predicting collapse or other crisis keep being wrong.
Looking historically, sovereign debt crises generally are less "things get gradually worse" and more "the fundamentals get worse without affecting day to day operations too much, then a crisis hits and immediate consequences are felt." Generally its multiple different factors gradually building up until you get a polycrisis that makes the debt unresolvable. Will this be the time the bears are right? Looking at their previous predictions, probably not. Without course correction, or a spanner in the works like AGI, will the US in the medium term face a debt crisis? I think quite likely.
burkeboi
22d ago
Ultimately, that's the rub. The greater the return, the greater the risk, and there isn't a reliable way to make high return investments without the risk. Only 10% of the best who best know the market on the planet reliable do better than them over a 20 year window, and most of those folks do worse the 20 years after that statistically. There is no non-luck way to hit a jackpot.
burkeboi
22d ago
It's 6 months before the mid-terms and polls imply a blue wave. In 2018, He had higher approval ratings, a thriving economy and no war....yet he got knocked down by a blue wave.
I semi-dispute this. From what I recall, 2018 was a clear democratic victory but not a blue wave. I suspect that at this point the country is too polarized to have Wave elections at this point. Democrats and Republican were both excited over recent victories that, by Cold War standards, would be considered quite close.
2028 will be very hard to predict. The next (likely Democrat) President will either need to be a great uniter or a technocrat policy wonk.
It seems the trajectory, at least for my lifetime and most of the past 40 years, has been steadily declining quality on both sides matched by increasing venom and promises of injury to the outgroup. I see no mechanism for the Democrats, or the Republicans, to buck that trend any time soon.
burkeboi
22d ago
One of the big reasons I joined recently was to try and recalibrate my understanding of Trump, and really US foreign policy in general. I really did not predict Iran, I used to be a proponent of "Donald the semi-dove", so I clearly needed to update my models.
One political change that I think is overlooked is that the Blob of 2010s and 2020s is a lot different than the blob of the early 2000s. The blob learned from the Iraq war, and pivoted towards either minor interventions, such as Syria and Libya, or just a supporting role, such as Ukraine. Afghanistan certainly was a black mark, but they didn't start anything major after Iraq. They even resisted going into Iran during the later part of Bush II and backed the JCPOA. Once you take into account the Blob's moderation on this issue, they go from "out of touch warmonger" to "interventionist, but within the public Overton Window".
It does reality is the inverse of how many people thought of it from 2015-now: Trump is more aggressive, for better or for worse, than the Blob.
burkeboi
23d ago
They were back together in a month. They would break up and get back together a dozen or so times over the next five years. They had a kid, a lawsuit over custody and child support. Then they got back together, had another kid, got married. Then they separated, got back together, lasted a few more years before getting divorced and what does my genius friend do?
I haven't been able to find data on this, but I wouldn't be surprised if at least some types of cluster B disorders increased fertility. Obviously the selection effect in the past couldn't have been too harsh, given those disorders exist today. Also the phenomenon of BPD women being attractive if a poor choice. I have a distant family member with a similar story, except she aborted her 4 pregnancies.
burkeboi
23d ago
The experience of tons of nations going from capitalism -> communism and communism -> capitalism is that the old boss, more often than not, is the new boss as well. Bad bosses aren't really a solved problem, assuming it even is a solvable problem.
burkeboi
23d ago
Anyway, the problem here is that different thirsts for a person might be mutually-exclusively satisfied by different strategies. She wants several mutually-exclusive things, because the pareto-optimal reproduction strategy has to sort of multithread and jump to whichever option is advantageous at the moment.
I think this is the key point. Women (men as well) want multiple, often conflicting things in relationships. An easy example is a dominant guy who takes what he wants but who also puts her interests first. While maybe not theoretically impossible, in practice dominance and agreeability and conflicting traits, so you have to compromise on both if you only get to pick one man.
I also happen to know that women are substantially more likely to orgasm with partners who beat them than with those who don't, though I hesitate to mention it because the data is not publicly-available and I have no real way to substantiate the claim. But once you start paying attention, the pattern is pretty clear.
Whether the same man who is violent or not violent is more viscerally arousing to most women may be an open academic question. I'm unsure if it's a practical question however; as mentioned above, we pick our partners based on balancing tons of mutually contradictory desires. At least in my PMC/middle class bubble, charismatic but decent guys or 'assholes' who are within the normal realm of behavior, so generally normal guys who are less agreeable, rule the roost. It seems this may just a bubble effect though; everything I read about the underclass suggests thugmaxxing is the most effective strategy.
Overall, IME being a socially dominant man, which entails being moderately disagreeable, seems to be the dominant strategy. Being that type of guy will often get you called an jerk, since 'jerk' often just means 'you didn't give me what I want'. I think the notion that 'women desire a cruel man' does have some truth, but it's balanced by other concerns as well.
burkeboi
24d ago
While I think it is clear that women largely prefer a harsh and powerful man over a decent but weak man, with some limits on the harshness, I imagine most women would prefer a decent but powerful man over a harsh but powerful man. That being said, for a decent number of women the harshness is the point and the cruel man is their favorite. Not the funnest preference to have, I imagine.
My company also uses Claude Code, in my case including Opus. It is quite useful: if I give it a feature, then, step by step, have it create the tests to verify the feature is complete and write code based off of the tests then its pretty helpful. At the same time, I need to review all the code and say "ok, you need to simplify here. You made an assumption there that is not quite accurate, and we need an adjustment there." It has gotten more useful, and my company has a lot of solid documentation that helps Claude, but there is a fundamental dynamic of me doing the actual engineering, Claude implementing the architecture, me reviewing and suggesting changes, and just iterating through that loop. It's quite useful, and Claude has improved over the past few years, but I don't think the fundamental relationship between software engineer and LLM has changed in the past few years even with its improvements. For additional context, I work in FinTech so error tolerance is very low.
While Claude can IME make software engineers more efficient, and thus either decrease employment and/or cause Jevon's Paradox, I think actually replacing software engineering as a whole is probably AGI-Complete. I imagine with medical doctors it's a similar situation where it can let them help more patients, but the buck ultimately has to stop with the Doctor until AGI.
The core question, to me, on if/when we get AGI seems to be this: can we reach AGI through iteratively improving LLMs and adding in supporting models to fill in gaps, or do we need an entirely new type of model to reach there. If the first, AGI may be coming pretty soon. If the second, the timeline gets a lot harder to predict. I'm not confident which of the above two paths, or a different path, is what will happen.
burkeboi
26d ago
Caveat: we won't know how this war turns out until a year or more in, so this is just a very low-confidence statement.
Militarily and politically, what is the US lacking? Willpower. If the US population decided tomorrow they wished to do anything up to and including conquer Iran, the US could do it. The issue is that the US government, as a result of the population not being sold on the war, is unwilling to escalate beyond a certain point or sustain casualties or discomfort for the US civilian population. If what Rubio said was right, and the US joined in since Israel was going to attack anyway, that may have been a huge blunder; the US joining in without an immediate Causus Belli really weakened the will of Americans, as well as allies, to actually prosecute the war. If Israel attacked then Iran retaliated and attacked US bases, the US would have an immediate Causus Belli and, while likely not an unlimited will for war, a strong will for war you have to respond if your troops/bases are attacked. The limiting factor of the US right now is willpower, and events don't seem to have strengthened it.
burkeboi
26d ago
Battle Cry of Freedom. I'm always fascinated by revolutions and civil wars since almost no one actually wants to fall into them, but one step after another makes people escalate to that point.
burkeboi
27d ago
It is actually kind of interesting how different peoples' categorization of different ideologies depends on their ideology itself. Often they lump in different ideologies based upon the fact that their objection to those ideologies are the same. The modern left objects to both conservatives and revolutionary rightists/fascists since both oppose the left's egalitarianism/universalist values. Conservatives oppose both leftists and revolutionary rightists for trying to rebuild society based on abstract theories.
Liberal fascism is a snarl, but it also encapsulates a real aspect of how traditional conservatives view the world and what they find wrong about both ideologies.
burkeboi
27d ago
I come from a long line of racists. Many of my ancestors were even bigoted towards their spouses. I married a fellow non-Hajani (Mexican). Just as my grandfather held prejudice, my father held prejudice, I shalt hold prejudice and create the genetic baseline for my children, and my children's children to hold prejudice. We differ in the object of our distaste, but we shall be united by our holding of distaste.
Don't be a virgin who IQ-maxxxes or Nordic-maxxxes; be a chad who ethnocentrism maxxxes. That is the only way.
This does not surprise me. Outside of having a sunny and generally happy physical climate, Mexicans (in general) culturally accept a huge amount of flaws in the world and have consequently low expectations that they generally can meet. Additionally, you have the factor of parts of Mexico being pre-industrial poor and those people moving to modern cities which lets them run ahead of the hedonic treadmill for a while. Low expectations plus a modern, industrial economy seems to be a recipe for optimism. Post WW2 Europe and USA were similar cases of low expectations from war and depression meeting a growing industrial economy.
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