ccc
7mo ago
More risk than has been currently been taken.
After almost 3 years of frog boiling, there should have been 30+ escalations along the way that each on their own might receive nuclear responses but that altogether culminate in "there's so much US military involved that Russia loses everything".
Instead of properly following this frog boiling strategy, Biden had a bunch of red lines he wouldn't cross and stopped the boil at a simmer, defeating the whole point of the strategy. There should never be any red lines. At most there should be "don't do that yet" lines.
It took a whole two years to merely let Ukraine fire US supplied weapons offensively. This was not just on its own stupidly risk averse but more broadly demonstrates the failure to commit to the strategy, ultimately justifying the use of nuclear threats. The two year mark of frog boiling should at the very least have both the US air force and navy personnel directly involved, and probably even marines. By three years it should've been guaranteed to be over.
But, well, none of that was politically possible, or maybe Biden just didn't have the balls to do it. I will be pleasantly surprised if Trump escalates properly to give Ukraine the aid it needs to win and/or to get concessions out of Putin, but I'm not holding my breath.
ccc
2yr ago
I dislike utilitarians in large part because of this very line of thinking. Those questions are far too hard to answer. You presume to know the answer, that the world would necessarily be worse, and then use that assumption to justify elite control.
ccc
2yr ago
ccc
2yr ago
People with no care for morality are not in question. Of course it doesn't matter to them. They simply do as they will.
The people in question aren't ignoring any moral axioms of utilitarianism. Ends justify the means is fundamental to it. You can thus be a committed utilitarian and do evil simply via bad calculations.
Other moral systems fail in other ways. But a strict deontologist is not going to rob Peter to pay Paul.
ccc
19d ago
You seem to be conflating the Tea Party and MAGA. They're not the same thing. Plenty of people were involved in both movements. That's just politics.
MAGA doesn't care about deficits. They're about to sign a $2.6T omnibus bill. Take a guess how much of that is going towards capacity for deportations.
ccc
24d ago
If she repents and changes her ways, I will forgive her.
Of course, this is meaningless. I am nobody. In the world of online microcelebrity culture, there is no institution that can make her this promise. Before the Internet, there were things like religious leaders that could meaningfully make this promise. Even the irreligious would usually have their censure limited to a well-defined social group with de facto leaders who could grant clemency. That's all gone now.
With the tools we have, there's only really two good options. Ignore her, or make an example out of her.
ccc
1mo ago
Yep, Abundance holds up a mirror to Democrats and many don't like what they see. A lot of their assumptions about governance and economics has be thrown out to accept its thesis. That's why there's so much nitpicking about political strategy and messaging efficacy and never any criticism of its actual prescriptions. Moreover, the existing homeowners (the much maligned NIMBY liberal) are usually moderate Democrats, so they make a good villain for leftists to blame. Meanwhile, The Groups are mostly leftist sinecures and axe grinders, making a good villain for technocrats to blame. Cue internecine conflict.
I think if COVID lockdowns had not tanked the credibility of technocrats everywhere, there would be enough trust that this agenda could get motion. Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in. It's almost absurd we live in this reality where we have such boundless wealth and nothing but frivolities to spend it on, where "We need more houses? OK, let's build more houses" and "We need more energy? OK, let's build more solar/wind farms" faces such extreme and multi-pronged resistance, but so it is. Put another trillion into NVIDIA. Perhaps God can save us from ourselves.
This has been the procedure for his whole 2nd term. Flood the zone with shit. Put feelers out to see what people will tolerate. So what if he telegraphs the punch? Making the opposition flinch (and laughing at them when they do) is half the point. The other half is it gives him options. Nobody panics if things go according to plan, even if the plan is horrifying.
There won't be any Literally Hitler moment (i.e. broad suppression of civil liberties comparable to the Reichstag Fire Decree) because the media landscape is totally different today than it was 100 years ago. Today the playbook is individual opposition buried under a litany of accusations, reports, and kangaroo courts -- too many things to litigate for any Informed Citizen to keep up with, each with a sliver of truth behind them. It will look like a hollowing out of the Democratic party to the point where they run someone like AOC for president. You'll still have your first amendment, you'll still be able to say whatever you want online, and you'll vote for a 2028 Trump ticket of your own free will, never minding that the USA is more like Mexico than ever before.
ccc
4mo ago
A self-citation to a self-citation to a bare assertion, purely intended to smear the author. Could you try making an actual counter argument?
ccc
4mo ago
I feel a bit stupid
You should feel more stupid. Even now with hindsight you can barely muster a proper mea culpa. Your failures of judgement are innumerable, yet you fall back to "I didn't even vote." And you have the audacity to say the accelerationists are full of pretense? You will learn nothing from this.
ccc
5mo ago
Why do you need sync if you're only going to write at the disconnected setup? I would think the simplest way to heed that advice is to get a machine that can't connect to the internet and write on that using some offline word processor (e.g. Scrivener). Maybe back it up on a USB drive occasionally if you feel the need.
In most places you can get refurbished office PC's for cheap that should be up for the task. An old laptop with a broken WiFi card could also work.
ccc
8mo ago
Nate Silver predicted "a total turnout of 155.3 million, with an 80 percent confidence interval between 148.2 million and 162.5 million", which is something like 73% odds for lower turnout than 2020 (158.4m).
ccc
8mo ago
There's still risk discounting to account for. Even if the true odds are, say, 50-50: to counteract 25m of dumb money, the sharp traders need a bankroll in the order of billions of dollars to avoid kelly ruin, i.e. approximately the total volume on that market right now.
ccc
10mo ago
It really is this simple. The age issue exists for Trump almost as much as it did for Biden and poll respondents were serious that they care about it.
ccc
1yr ago
[...] just say that's what you are.
This is disarmament. So you are advocating unilateral disarmament then? Unless your demand is only for your enemies, in which case yes they will of course ignore it.
Maybe, if you can't oust a corrupt president or prosecute a guilty criminal for his actual crimes,
They should just get off without any charges? If your commitment to due process and the impartial hand of justice is that great, you can't turn around later and defend Rubiales' because he's on your team.
I'm not advocating for lawless vigilantism or witch burning. I'm pointing out that one party engaging in power politics doesn't necessarily disqualify their legitimate complaints.
ccc
2yr ago
She sounds like she has issues socializing, but she's also trying to play rec sports. Doesn't make much sense on the surface. I infer from this that she's at least somewhat aware of the former and using the latter as a way to fix that.
Which is to say: she might be more amicable to a frank one-on-one than you're presuming. Given that she seems to have no real power, I don't see any risk in giving it a try.
That's what I'd do. But I also kind of get off on roleplaying therapist.
ccc
2yr ago
The fear of being "cucked" is making some people psychotic. View anything through such a loose lens and you see yourself getting cucked everywhere. And you're not a cuck, right? So all this cucking makes you feel emasculated and boiling with rage and you'll do anything to make it go away, even if it means giving up your humanity.
That one is a relatively insignificant and powerless man doesn't have to be viewed through the lens of a sexual fetish. There's other, healthier ways to cope.
ccc
2yr ago
Specialization is of course good, but all the things you've listed (except changing oil) are much more complicated and take longer to learn than building a PC.
If you're so rich that you can call it a convenience tax rather than an idiot tax, then sure call it that instead. But if your time really is that valuable one wonders why you asked here in the first place.
ccc
2yr ago
You're putting on a pretty high pedestal a girl who's stuck sitting around for hours on her phone.
Humanize her a bit and it's probably less likely she's made a rational calculation with ho logic to ignore the LVM than it is that she's neurotic and antisocial.
ccc
2yr ago
The bluecheck and the bluecheck privileges (priority in replies, bluecheck only feed, etc) should be separated. Have the former require a large, one-time fee to cover the cost of Twitter doing some due diligence, and have the latter be the subscription fee.
Verification being a recurring payment is so absurd on its face that it makes me think Musk is not as interested in making money from bluechecks as he is in destroying the bluecheck class.
A lot the drugs athletes take under PED bans right now are just testosterone but re-synthesized to avoid detection. There's a lot of ways to get T levels up, and the safest ways to do it are also the most studied and easiest to detect. In this way, PED bans actually incentivize athletes to take riskier drugs.
People like the narrative idea of a Faustian bargain so much they assume it's always true that there's one on offer. But it's possible if under a scheme where PED's are allowed that the rational choice for athletes is sticking to basic steroid cycles and blood doping that gets them 95% of the way there and avoid the riskier experimental stuff that might not even help.
ccc
24d ago
This can't be overstated. Have a look at the questions she asks on Manifold. Almost all of them are about herself or about sex. Every time I hear about her it's one of those. It's so tiresome.
ccc
24d ago
We should "cyberbully" celebrities more. They got into the business for attention. Well, you don't get to pick and choose what kind you get.
A celebrity has made themself an avatar, a role model for all their fans and haters. They are an object to be adored and criticized. Society learns and enforces norms by how celebrities are treated. You put your body and soul out to the world to be judged. So you shall be. Ever wonder why women are so much more interested in celebrity culture than men? Because women have always been the primary enforcers of morality.
Can't handle it? Pick another career. Go work a shitty office job like the rest of us.
Even this arrangement is unfair to the audience, because the celebrity gets to set the frame. See Taylor Swift annihilating her business rivals via social media to negotiate a better price on her master recordings. Her legion of haters are but a drop in the ocean for a celebrity with the wisdom to ignore it. They can't affect her.
What they can do, however, is affect the "discourse." They can inform and influence their friends and wider society about what the right and wrong things to do are. These are real stakes. While nerdy men will sit around and debate fruitlessly about the intricacies and nuances of books written by dead perverts, the people rebuking celebrities are out doing real, applied philosophy.
You're right from an individual's utility-maximizing perspective this makes no sense. It's irrational. It's wasted energy. So is voting. So are all manner of good deeds that will never be repaid in kind.
Isn't there a massive oversupply of TA's and PhD students? Get them to do it for pennies. Hell, they already do that. It's not like professors at large like teaching anyway, much less grading.
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