burkeboi
4d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
9d 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
9d 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
9d 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
9d 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.
burkeboi
9d ago
The Russian government's actions over the course of the last decade show that it values having friendly relations with Israel and the Arab Gulf States even while having hostile relations with the United States. I don't know to what extent this policy is motivated by geopolitics and to what extent it is motivated by shady financial interests of the Russian elite. In the case of Israel, the friendly relations are also probably motivated in part by the fact that just like America, Russia has many Jewish elites, and that Israel has many Jews from a Russian background.
One darkly humorous part of the whole China/Russia/Iran is how each of them very clearly wish they had different allies and aren't exactly shy about it. China always hedging between Russia/EU and Iran/Sunnis/Israelis, Iran originally preferring European companies over Chinese companies, and the above behavior from Russia. Rumors of Axis 2.0 are overstated.
burkeboi
9d ago
The world is too complex for anyone to properly grasp. The purpose of echo chambers is to selectively filter/spin stories that flatter their ingroup, or make the outgroup look bad. I'm fairly confident that if you perfectly swapped someone's social environment to be full of partisans of the opposite valency, and fed them a curated media diet you could change their politics fairly easily over time.
I agree with this, but only to an extent. I think that there are personality based limits to this. If I'm being perfectly honest, I went from being a progressive raised in a liberal family to no longer being a progressive once the progressive social millieu I was in started saying too many things that hurt my ego/went against my personal interests. I think a lot of transitions of people politically/socially, in modern terms often people who grow up and live in one political/social group to the opposite one, come from the politics they inherit harming their ego or going against their self interest. There are tons of historical examples where people go against their social subgroup due to a harm their social subgroup dealt to them.
burkeboi
11d ago
I suspect his 'radicalized' story is false. I've listened to the Haitian story of the podcast, including the end where he narrates the history of Haiti, and he's not exactly a Haiti apologist. He doesn't sanitize or downplay the crimes either the biracial population or slave population committed, and he never particularly emphasizes foreign depredations in Haiti's history either. If anything, once the French are kicked out he seems more sympathetic to the biracial leaders than the pure black leaders. He didn't present a sob story for Latin American independence either.
burkeboi
11d ago
This is a bit ironic, but Israel does seem to be the first modern state that I know of to actually go through, or be going through, de Maistre's counter revolution. Even with the Holocaust disproportionately targeting Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox, those two groups gradually grew from being essentially charity cases of Secular Jews in Israel to being king makers with huge sway over the government and, assuming Israel is not destroyed in the meantime, on track to demographically dominate the country in the later half of the 21st century.
burkeboi
11d ago
No. Things can always get worse without resistance. Look at Cuba, the situation is much, much worse now than many people - even those hostile to communism - imagine. The country has, since 1991, slowly gone from a moderately poor but functioning socialist country like the former Eastern Bloc or China at the time, to the poorest country in the region after Haiti. The people are starving, there’s no electricity, no medicine, no fuel. The economy has been collapsing for 35 years. There is extensive reporting that even the Chinese have strongly recommended pursuing China or Vietnam style capitalist reforms, but the regime leadership are, moreso than the Chinese or Vietnamese, die hard communists loyal to central planning as an economic theory.
I've been to Cuba, and it really is shocking just how horrific it is. In Latin America, there are tons of mostly indigenous villages where there essentially is no modernity since anyone with the skills to maintain it, people like doctors and engineers for instance, decamp for the cities which are often first world/close to first world. The Mexico City gdp per capita is Spain tier, for instance. Many of these villages don't even have running water. I've used a bucket with a rat larger than my cat on the wall giving me moral support, for instance. Cuba is essentially one of those villages, just on the scale of a country and with a few exceptions in the hotel zones.
I'm not sure how Communist Cuba's government remains, though. At the low level, cops literally treat you better and reduce any requested bribe if you stay in a casa particular (small house owned by an individual cuban) vs. a state affiliated hotel. They view the first as you supporting the people, and the second as you supporting the state. The party/military essentially functions as a kleptocracy; they make deals with foreign companies to run the hotels, the hotels are incredibly capitalist where poor Cubans serve rich foreigners (and a few locals) where you call each other compañero/comrade as a costume. Even when I was there, most propaganda was more of the anti-imperialist/nationalist/third worldist variety than class based variety.
At this point, I think the party/military understands, even if subconsciously, they are just kleptocrats engaged in capitalism who ideologically justify themselves on anti-Americanism. They literally show MTV in the same hotel Castro used when he first became dictator. Additionally, the revealed preference of the government is to not invest in the rest of the country, which absolutely requires infrastructure improvement, and to solely partner with foreign companies to build up tourism. The hotels are set up so that as much as possible, they import all their necessities, such as food or toiletries, rather than buy it from Cuba itself. The government relaxed the emigration laws so more people can leave. Their actions to me suggest rather than viewing themselves as communists building up a country to a bright future, they view themselves as hotel magnates who unfortunately have an entire island of poor people attached to their properties. It also helps fuel their cope that if Cuba ever liberalized, they would be in penniless exile in Venezuela or Russia at best and languishing in a Cuban jail cell/lynched at worst.
This is true historically, too. There were empires that took centuries to collapse. In my opinion, the institutional inertia around immigration for the Anglo countries is too high to solve. The public don’t have the stomach for what is required. Look at Minneapolis; ICE would probably have to kill hundreds of thousands of American citizens to outweigh even a small part of the damage caused by massive third world immigration. The only thing that could save it would be some kind of sudden, deeply unexpected overthrow of democracy in a Western country, but there’s a 90% chance that only makes it worse. You only get one LKY in a century, if that.
Unless something radically changes, I don't think that the Anglosphere has the stomach for mass deportations, defined as millions deported, any time soon. At the same time, you can have meaningful differences in the rate of immigration: Biden vs. Trump, Trudeau vs Carney for instance. While I don't see any plausible path where, for instance, you get a Britain with absolute minimal immigration/restrictive guest worker programs like in Japan, I still think it's up in the air the degree and type of mass immigration Britain gets. A Britain with a diverse immigrant pool and most problematic groups, like poor Kashmiris, limited is a far different place than one where you get true open borders with, for instance, the entire third world. Britain in first scenario likely is still a pretty decent place to live, while in the second scenario I'm not sure Britain the state survives it.
burkeboi
11d ago
I'm less referring to personal pressure which is brownian, and more society in general.Eg, even the most flagrant of the homos are out here fighting for ... the right to participate in the institution of marriage? Who could have predicted?
Anyone paying attention. The culture says that you are not a complete human without the picket fence and the kids, etc etc.
The first question I would have is: which society? This isn't a gotcha: it's fair to say that, essentially by the mid 20th century, the US did have a mainstream mono-culture which almost everyone interacted with consisting of big business, the government, mainstream media (not just news but things like Hollywood as well), and probably a few other things too. At the same time, you also had subcultures that had values opposing and/or orthogonal to that dominant culture. The Amish and gayborhoods being some examples. How much the values of the dominant culture dictate your life and community does very much depend on where you elect to wind up.
I think that's why the rejectionist tendency among all people is getting stronger over time; it's coming from the same place. The flaming LGBTQ types and the Incels and the Transhumanists and the fuentisimos and the revanchist communists are all reacting to social pressure to conform to a certain image or life path that for various reasons only has enough room for x = population % 10001 and everyone else can eat shit and die.
This is true to a large extent. While the modern mainstream has a more ambivalent relationship to those above groups then pure hostility, it's clear that tons of people were given expectations of what is the good life that, for varying reasons depending on the person, is out of reach for them. What makes this more dire on a personal level is really how much power the monoculture has over your life; if you're Amish, the monoculture has a limit affect on your lived experience but if you're an atomized modern, you're going to swimming against the river every time you wake up without a supportive community. When you have a bunch of people with mutually irreconcilable desires to change the monoculture, and the stakes are high for them since there is no subculture they can retreat to to compensate for any failures in the monoculture, conflict becomes nasty quickly.
burkeboi
11d ago
Well, some wish to build a sentiment of worldwide community for the Human Race - the planet Earth as one big commonwealth, with countries and borders as an administrative tool not different from a country itself dividing itself up into Länder or counties or regions with varying degrees of local government.
I agree with the notion that all humans do owe each other some things. Off the top of my head, non-aggression and a degree of respect for one example. I this all national identities, both ethnic and civic, are contingent on history and convenience. I don't think a global identity is any more or any less invalid philosophically than a national identity from first principles. I think that internationalism has actually had a decent amount of success both materially, pax-Americana has been the best time to be alive in human history, and ethically, most people agree in the value of the international community to a greater or lesser extent. At the same time, I think nations are a Chesterton's fence that we should be careful about rapidly changing, now that they exist.
You might think this is utopian, but it's not a contradiction - and I think this was genuinely the dream of many in the late 20th century, explicitly or implicitly, with the infrastructure of the EU and UN as steps towards implementing such a thing. The hope was that national identity would simply become irrelevant to fostering civic spirit as progress and globalization and the Internet built up a sentiment that we're all in this together. People would genuinely become citizens of the world in their hearts, and vote for the good of their countrymen as a special case of voting for the good of Homo sapiens in the same way that you vote for the good of your town as a special case of voting for the good of your country.I think, then, that the current malaise results from resurgent (or simply stubbornly-not-fading-away-on-schedule) nationalist sentiment making itself known loudly enough in various parts of the world that what was once merely optimistic now looks genuinely unreachable in the short term.
I think the problem comes as follows: what happens when the interests of yourself/your family/whatever relevant community you are a part of conflict with those of the nation or, in this case, the human race?
Ever single nation has had to deal with that question: there are always parts of the nation that get elevated and other parts that get shafted. It can be as personal as sacrificing your wellbeing in a war for that of a nation, or as abstract/community based as your language being suppressed like in the case of Occitan vs French or your religion being seen as seditious or semi-seditious such as in the Kulturkampf in Germany or Catholicism to many regimes in France. I think the recent surge of the populist right is less about a pro-active increase in national sentiment and more about subsets of different nations feeling culturally and/or economically shafted by the recent economic and social changes in their countries.
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:
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.
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