campfireSmoresEaten
No bio...
User ID: 2560
campfireSmoresEaten
22d ago
But since then, there have been few obviously pro-social successes of his.
Starlink is cool. I have higher willingness to support Ukraine than Musk, but Musk has done a lot more to support Ukraine than I have.
The continued achievements of SpaceX.
The continued rollout of electric cars.
His record on AI is mixed, but he has spoken out about the dangers. Including directly to some very high ranking politicians. I think it's weird he's not doing more. But if humanity is going to die, I would rather we die with someone having brought this to the attention of various powerful people directly. It's "dignity points", I guess.
He has acted as a sort of grey-tribe wing of the republican party with respect to things like the deficit, which is probably a good thing. And arguably he's sort of a moderate on immigration? I haven't really followed that.
campfireSmoresEaten
23d ago
There is a common human thing where someone gets into a hole and takes a huge risk in hopes of getting out of that hole, which makes the problem much much worse.
If politicians embrace AI for this reason and then superintelligence kills everyone, I would describe this as that
campfireSmoresEaten
20d ago
Are you sure Kulak is a man? I've listened to the Kulak podcast and it's a woman's voice. Voice changer? Just a very convincing fake voice?
I was very surprised, but I guess some of the essays are about subjects which a woman might theoretically be more likely to write about than a man.
campfireSmoresEaten
23d ago
Maybe without leaded gasoline the average IQ (or brain health, if IQ is too gross) of the United States would have been raised just enough to prevent this.
campfireSmoresEaten
23d ago
I am fine with returning art, but I would object to returning Gibraltar or the Falklands. They seem very different to me.
campfireSmoresEaten
27d ago
Well what did you have on your to-do list?
campfireSmoresEaten
19d ago
Well, shows what I know. Must be a voice changer or something. (That is not the kulak voice I was familiar with)
campfireSmoresEaten
22d ago
Yeah. In addition to that, I regret using the word "gross" in an internet vernacular sense
campfireSmoresEaten
5mo ago
Our cheap raw materials and manufactured goods all rely on unsafe, exploitative labor performed in the Third World.
Some of it is exploitative, some of it is just because life in poor countries is generally not so great. Of the part that is exploitative, some of it is because the politicians and other elites in these countries are corrupt, and it is genuinely difficult for even a benevolent rich country to change that.
Based on historical evidence and my understanding of the underlying economic mechanisms, it seems to me that trade is very good for making poor countries not poor anymore. I think that rich countries have screwed up many times in this area, but:
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For the most part, life in poor countries is bad because that's the definition of being in a poor country, not necessarily so much because they're being exploited by rich countries.
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When poor countries don't get rich, there are other factors at play besides the machinations of rich countries.
Those factors would be:
a. Corrupt rulers.
b. Locals who use their power to support economic policies which turn out to be counter-productive, whether the locals are the rulers or the public at large.
Some would say this is what happened in Mexico with their domestic oil company, Ghana under Nkrumah, Brazil's attempt at trade-substitution, the Sri Lankan energy crisis, Argentina under both Peron and the military junta that deposed him, etcetera.
I know this is a tangent, sorry.
Here are two articles about PEPFAR (EDIT: one of the organizations for which funding has been paused) that I think are worth reading.
https://brendonmarotta.com/4454/pepfar-plans-to-end-infant-circumcision-in-africa/
tl;dr: PEPFAR is responsible for an unknown but very large number of botched circumcisions in Africa, perhaps hundreds of thousands.
https://brendonmarotta.com/4475/pepfar-to-experiment-on-african-children-with-the-shangring/
tl;dr: An article about them moving from a circumcision device with an unacceptable rate of botched circumcisions to a new device with an unknown rate of botched circumcisions.
Any circumcision on someone who cannot consent is a human rights violation. I realize some of PEPFARs other tasks are praise-worthy, but I cannot possibly support an organization that engages in this sort of unnecessary cruelty.
campfireSmoresEaten
5mo ago
"Me
Not a war, just a special military operation ;) "
I disapprove of mixing a serious discussion with low-grade snarkiness.
campfireSmoresEaten
4mo ago
I don't think it is/was an inevitable historical process. If the Democratic Party had made fewer mistakes in this election, Trump would have lost. What if Biden had stepped down and the DNC had run a primary for the Democratic presidential candidate? We understand why those things didn't happen, but there's no compelling reason why they couldn't have happened. It was just chance.
I mean, I realize that even if Trump died in his sleep in 2022, some of his outlook would still be present in DeSantis or whoever the Republican candidate would have been, but still.
PEPFAR is among the organizations with paused funding, and when I've seen the executive orders discussed in other places it has been the focus of the discussion.
campfireSmoresEaten
6mo ago
staple statement
campfireSmoresEaten
4mo ago
What is your argument in plain English?
campfireSmoresEaten
4mo ago
The Soviet Union was a fare more compelling adversary to both parties than its descendant, Russia, or the new upstart, China. It was a nuclear superpower with large land borders and a hostile ideology. Russia might retain the nukes, and is a great power if you squint, but it no longer has any meaningful ideological drive or desire to spread it beyond "if you trade with us and speak favorably of us, we'll back you". Even China has strong trade relations with Europe, and also is not culturally hegemonising to the same degree.
Maybe in some respects, but in other respects China seems more dangerous than the USSR.
- More of a manufacturing giant.
- Not committed to the dubious economic theories of Karl Marx, only uses Socialism as a convenient branding tool.
- Probably others I can't think of right now.
campfireSmoresEaten
4mo ago
The benefit is fewer wars and more stability, which helps everybody.
Plus more military bases I guess. Better to have one somewhere than to need one somewhere and not have one.
campfireSmoresEaten
7mo ago
Huge exaggeration, in my opinion.
campfireSmoresEaten
10mo ago
Just cut Social Security. Old people have had their whole lives to get their affairs in order.
I was too busy fighting for my country in Vietnam! (I was a Viet Cong radio operator who immigrated to the US in 1995)
campfireSmoresEaten
5mo ago
https://cha.house.gov/2025/1/chairs-loudermilk-massie-release-january-6-2021-pipe-bomb-report
"The FBI’s Investigation into the Pipe Bomber: The FBI did not receive “corrupted data” from one of the major cell carriers in connection with its investigation into the pipe bomber. A former senior FBI official testified that the major cell carrier companies provided “corrupted” cell data to the FBI and suggested that that “corrupted” data may have contained the identity of the pipe bomber; however, in responses to letters from the Subcommittee, the major cell carriers confirmed that they did not provide corrupted data to the FBI and that the FBI never notified them of any issues with accessing the cellular data."
I'm not sure the corrupted cellphone data thing is as you're describing it.
Based on this report, it seems like either
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There was no corrupted data and the FBI guy just said something completely erroneous out of incompetence.
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The cellphone companies are not aware of the corrupted data, but it's real.
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Some sort of miscommunication based on different definitions of the term "corrupted data" between the FBI and cell phone companies.
campfireSmoresEaten
7mo ago
Fun fact: Tycoon comes from the Japanese word taikun, and was first used in English by Commodore Perry to describe Lincoln. It's probably the first Japanese loan word in the English language.
campfireSmoresEaten
4mo ago
I've heard that fentanyl is strong enough that there if even a single truckload gets through the border, that's already enough doses to saturate the market. This was from a podcast, probably Freakonomics, but I'd have to double-check.
campfireSmoresEaten
11mo ago
What follows is a somewhat harsh statement that I don't fully endorse:
Gass is on Simulacrum Level 3, Jack Black is on Level 2.
I don't know. Realistically I feel like most hardcore progressives are just concerned about optics on this, not that they actually understand the deeper underlying morality in any real way. By the deeper underlying morality I mean stuff like "how you behave in a conflict is just as important as what side of the conflict you're on".
campfireSmoresEaten
1yr ago
Someone blatantly pointing out in the most public way possible that this has always been a fiction, that governments may make figleaf declarations about opposing these types of slander but will never actually enforce them because they actually are inherently conservative entities that are on the side of the privileged and the default, that anyone can make the most vile comments they want and always could without fearing legal reprisals
I don't know if you're an American, but this is just not true. In non-US countries, people have been prosecuted for saying that the bible says that homosexuality is a sin in Canada and I think Finland, for saying that Muhammed was a pedophile, for telling jokes, for saying that Muslims girls are raped by their family members, for saying that Muslim girls are murdered by their family members in honor killings, for saying that Muslims want to kill us, for quoting someone else saying that Islam is a defective and misanthropic religion, for comparing Muslims to Nazis, for saying "Well, when one, like Bwalya Sørensen, and most black people in South Africa, is too unintelligent to see the true state of things, then it is much easier to only see in black and white, and, as said, blame the white."
More: For saying that white people pretend to be indigenous for political or career clout. etc etc etc
There was that guy who bought a bunch of boxes of magic cards using bitcoin gained from some sort of criminal activity. The guy selling the magic cards was not a crypto-savvy guy. (And then the criminal sold the magic cards.)
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