clo
1yr ago
My mistake. I assumed you were making a request in good faith. I won't make that mistake again.
clo
1yr ago
Hong Kong is a unique case.
Rather than owning the land, the land is leased from the government in 50-year increments. The only exception are old village rights that date back to the really, really early fishing village tier Hong Kong, which are worth millions now even if the land is undeveloped.
This is pretty much the primary source of funding the government gets. Every time a land, apartment, or house sale happens, the government gets a cut (this is referred to as "paying the land price") as they still own the land. There are also esoteric rules about how an apartment is taxed ("usable area").
The government is therefore incentivized to limit the amount of land that can be developed as housing to keep land prices high, even if it wasn't being used as a speculative asset by Mcdonalds, other corporations, and anyone in the mainland looking to liquidate yuan in favor of more secure financial holdings. They are also more interested in leasing to corporations or holdings with significant existing assets rather than individuals, as there is more collateral (this explains Hong Kong's endless malls).
There are significant benefits to this, like extremely low salary taxes and a government that experiences frequent windfalls distributed back to the populace in other ways, but on the whole most people under 30 have given up owning an apartment. It is possible, but you need to keep a highly paid (often highly stressful) job for 25+ years with no speed bumps, and significant money to pay up the first installment of the mortgage.
clo
11d ago
There is a critical flaw with your advice.
The definition of luxury belief is beliefs you can afford to have. "Study your hobby and things will work out" is a luxury belief for exactly this reason, because you can get away with studying your hobby and things will work out for you in the end (if you have additional options to fall back on or money is not a concern at all). Why would you ever broadcast that you can't afford to have these luxury beliefs? What are you, poor?
The problem isn't that these beliefs are wrong, it's that America is the land of temporarily embarrassed millionaires. You see this all the time because it is a culture obsessed with broadcasting their success. Some woman wrote a book in coffee stores and made a billion dollars, why can't you do that? She proved it's possible! What are you, stupid? Kids see streamers their age making six figures a year. Why would you study hard when you can stick your face in front of a camera and make money for acting like a moron and playing video games! What are you, stupid?
What they don't see are all the failures. Failures are invisible. For every JK Rowling there's millions of writers, even published ones, who can't pay a power bill with book royalties. For every Mr Beast there's a thousand people humiliating themselves on Twitch for pennies in the name of Content.
clo
1mo ago
That's because this is what winning looks like.
Someone once said power is demonstrated by the ability to make outcomes that disadvantage people you don't like look like they occur naturally.
Here's my version: power is demonstrated by the ability to entirely avoid, or even remain entirely ignorant of, the negative consequences of your actions.
The losers have to eat shit. They also get to see the winners shovel it at them even if it is completely by accident.
clo
4mo ago
While I am not sure about the main body of your argument, I think that you are incredibly wrong on the China AI prediction and drastically wrong on the oil prediction. I've got skin in the game and am quite long on oil futures, specifically exploration and drilling. Whether you like it or not, fossil fuels are currently the lifeblood of civilization and we do not have any appreciable replacements - even if it could conceivably replace energy needs, which it won't, especially given the modernization, buildout and investment in Mexico, India, and a growing second world, hydrocarbons are used to make goddamn everything from aspirin to solar panels. The current dip in oil prices and subsequent resurgence of unsteadiness in the ME is caused more by US fracking than anything else, making them energy-independent and less interested in ME politics as a result. The smarter players in the ME know this and have tried their best to diversify their economies with mixed results, or alternatively are looking to allow countries to purchase oil in currencies other than USD (it was barely covered in the news but the UAE agreed to let China purchase oil with RMB recently).
China is already suffering because of a massive deficit in professional or service jobs. AI will make that worse. It's not an instability problem - the Party can levy pretty much everything under the sun to make sure they stay in power - but their internal governance, domestic market and stock market is quite weak and will take at least six to eight years to recover, let alone supercede their growth for the last decade. Their foreign policy is the wild card: it depends entirely on BRICS and how that shakes out. BRICS is considered a joke or a threat depending on who you talk to, the truth is probably somewhere in between. None of the BRICS nation really trust or like each other, they just want to form an alternative non-American power bloc in case America decides they don't like them all that much one day after a change in presidency.
I also think that progressive/liberal blue America is an opposition based party. They are anti-Israel because team Red is nominally pro-Israel and support for Israel has been the unstated government line for decades. Given that Team Blue is more about stomping Team Red into the dirt and laughing as they die of opioids and despair than it is about anything else, I think that their care-o-meter about Israel is entirely limited to the extent that Team Red is for it.
clo
1yr ago
I don't quite know how to put my thoughts in order given the vitriol of your response. On the surface, I agree with you.
But there are plenty of societies that aren't authoritarian hellholes that somehow don't have this problem. As well as plenty of societies that are authoritarian hellholes with decaying or depreciated social fabric/lunatic homeless.
I feel like the logic here doesn't quite hold.
I am not quite sure what it is, but I think it's something unique about Americans that makes them believe shared social anything is inherently a scam, or for suckers. A scam because it won't work (despite many examples of it working) or for suckers, because how dare anyone else benefit from something they pay for (because people paying for something they won't partake in is by definition, being a sucker). Then again, the game America as a country plays better than anybody aside from basketball is socializing their failures while privatizing the gains, so maybe it's genuinely cultural.
clo
1mo ago
Oppenheimer was not evenly awful about this, which is the sadder part. A couple of the scientists (and notably Kitty) were fine. Oppenheimer was being portrayed as a weird autist. By far the worst thing about that movie was about how Nolan portrayed his relationship with Tatlock; it was like watching two wooden blocks rubbing together. The infamous Bhagavad Gita line is somehow... a seduction tactic? I vaguely remember some backlash over it.
clo
2mo ago
Truth in and of itself is never a good reason to talk about something. There are many facts nobody wants to discuss.
This sticks in my craw a fair bit because this is who, whom all over again. The truth will set you free, but point deer make horse is an easy way to tell who is on your side and who isn't.
In both his examples, the truth is not the problem - it's the very short men, women's sexual preferences, the severely handicapped, society, and resources that matter instead. You can crow in the streets all day about the emperor having no clothes, but that doesn't make him not the emperor, and if he can execute you and yours at will, you'd be damn certain that pretty much only the suicidal would say the quiet part out loud.
Not to disparage your comprehension skills, but the points he's making are fairly simple:
Even if the research is spot on, what can be done?
This is not new, here's a study from 1994 that has similarly ugly conclusions, but there is no will to do anything about it.
The conclusions of the research were not unanticipated. In fact the motives behind the results have been understood for centuries.
Power is demonstrated by the ability to make outcomes that hurt people you don't like look like they occur naturally.
To solve the problem people need to admit they were wrong. They would rather keep searching for a solution that doesn't exist, rather than admit that the research shows what they think is unfavorable (in this case, black criminals prey on whites, and this has a direct correlation with white flight).
You can come up with all the facts you want, but there is no way around the problem that people understand the will to power.
As someone who was in the machine for a few years, you're correct in that the value is in the IP.
And they've trashed their IP.
The missing thing everyone tends to overlook is merchandising. Consumer Products was an extreme overperformer in Disney's catalog during the Marvel golden years and the first of the Star Wars sequel trilogy. Add to the ocean of Frozen merchandise... Disney makes significant gains on both product and selling the license to produce product for their brands, backed by a minimum guarantee sales agreement. Their IP did so well that they basically bullied toy and product companies into accepting whatever terms they wanted in order for access to their properties.
This is why The Last Jedi was so significant for Disney. It was a movie where the demand for product basically imploded. Hasbro lost their ass on it, and due to the poor performance of that movie's products as well as the chaos of getting anything approved by Disney for that movie (and the increasingly short turnarounds for Marvel ones in time for movie releases), it basically heavily damaged Disney's relationship with a lot of the toy and product guys.
Bear in mind Consumer Products did so well that they merged it with Parks to try and hide the black hole of Parks spending, mostly driven by overspending on development of new attractions, construction and cost overruns in upkeep.
If your company's value is the value of your IP, the price going through the floor is indicative of how the company is doing at IP management. Faith in Disney's ability to effectively monetize the IPs they own is critically low.
This is the most incredible thing I've ever read. I'm kind of amazed by it, honestly. Amazed and impressed.
I'm sorry because this really isn't the place to make assertions without evidence, but I don't believe you. I think you are a liar, and if people were this coldly utilitarian about their community, let alone their country, civilization might be at genuine risk of breaking down and the hardcore red-tribers who believe civilization is constantly inches from the precipice are not full of hyperbole and hot air.
To clarify, it's not the fact that you see the benefit in doing as you claim that impresses me so. It's the fact that you think not doing so is rational and pragmatic. The borders, rules, abstract nations of distinctions between nations and ethnic groups on any sort of ideological level that you claim to not respect are the very same rules that draw lines between you and others.
The house metaphor is overused, tired, but still apt. Do you respect fences, doors, barriers? Do you not understand, as a self-avowed rational actor, that if you show that living in this manner is possible for you, then others will realize the same thing and apply the same lack of respect to your fences, doors, and barriers?
And again, as a self-avowed rational actor, you are willing to say this out loud? Are you insane? In your own words, while you understand the benefits of America's relatively strong rule of law, you feel no obligation whatsoever to America as a legal entity? You realize that what you are claiming is that that you like it when the laws govern others to your benefit but don't intend on following the same laws. Leaving all questions of morality aside, I struggle to believe you genuinely think this is a position with any pragmatic value at all.
So I don't believe you. I do not believe you are a pragmatic or rational actor, I believe you are reveling in taking advantage of a system designed to benefit you while caring nothing for its maintenance, under the belief that this is rational and logical behavior. Do so at your own peril, there's enough people who do the same already, but crowing about it makes other people who maintain the system you benefit from and contribute nothing to feel like maintaining the system less every day.
Again, I am making assertions without evidence, but I am willing to make a guess that you do not have offspring. If I am wrong and you are not a liar, and you genuinely hold this opinion, I wonder if you have any goodwill for those who carry your genes into the world and have to live in the countries - yes, countries! - of the future.
To wit - I never thought I'd see the day where ignoring the phrase "don't shit where you eat" is treated as a rational belief.
clo
1yr ago
Because the idea that a low status male thinks he has a chance with her implies she is low status.
clo
2mo ago
We found out what other people really think and talk about, and the conclusion is intolerable. The internet's leveling effect meant that random nobodies could be signalboosted into the consciousness of the body politic.
Once undesirables were allowed an audience and became clearly visible, those who weren't undesirables wanted them destroyed, silenced, and removed from their public spaces.
Don't worry, there is an easy workaround for this mess. Just never be an undesirable in the eyes of those with power.
Dune
Fertile
I'm sorry, what
By your own account, you think Dune licensing is mismanaged. And you still call this fertile?
Fertile means bountiful. There's much less Dune stuff than there is LOTR stuff. It might have something to do with the way LOTR invented a whole genre of fantasy fiction and then had a very popular and well-received movie trilogy that continues to live in the minds of "normies" long after it succeeded.
I think Marvel is heavily mismanaged, but still fertile. Just none of it is any good. They keep growing garbage. They keep making more and more of it, but it sucks.
They don't make a lot of Dune. Dune media is as parched as the desert it comes from. Had the newer movie not come out - a movie where even the company funding it was unwilling to commit to wholly and was on record not being willing to fund the second half before they saw how people reacted - I think licensing it would have been dirt cheap. I also don't think Dune is all that great, although it definitely fills its world with a ton of ideas and is quite rare in the world of schlock-sci-fi in terms of both its scope and breadth.
You could probably say the same about WH40k; a similarly rich and expansive world in scope, which takes the distinct opposite approach to licensing by shotgunning walls of flak at everyone in exchange for cashing big royalty checks from as many sources as possible, with a net result that maybe 15-20% of their licensed work is worth anything at all.
What makes a piece of media inspiring is a terrible question because what inspires people will vary from person to person. If I had to take a blind stab at it, I'd say it would probably have to do with stories that try to grasp at universal things about the human condition.
I think the enduring power in the LOTR work is that it posits the existence of clear good, clear evil, and that the corrupting presence of evil is not defeated by martial might or using evil against evil but by the willingness of small, humble beings from nowhere to sacrifice. These are things that speak to the human understanding of the world and the nature of evil.
Granted, I think the first Blade movie is Great. I also think Nabokov's Pale Fire is Great, and I think the Lives of Others is Great. I think all of these things are wonderful for entirely different reasons. I don't want things that are based on these intellectual properties, much less think they'll be great at all. Yes, even the Wesley Snipes vampire movie. The more of this we got the worse it gets. They fail (or succeed, rarely!) on their own merits, but I would not call anything based on the intellectual property great simply because it belongs to the same intellectual property.
That way lies Star Wars. And the more you look at Star Wars as an IP, the more you realize that sometimes dead truly is better.
Enh, see, I want to agree with you. I really do. And I hate that I have to qualify this by saying that I am Chinese, because I hate that I feel the need to state my race before applying my argument, especially here. Ideas should be colorblind no matter where they originate from.
I want to tell you that you are simultaneously both spot on, and that you are overthinking it.
I think the best way to put it is that (mainland) Chinese are ruthlessly value-optimizing. They hold fundamentally different values, because of course they do. Whether these values are inherent, or they are taught, is not my concern - nature/nurture debates do not interest me, and modern Chinese history involves enough bloodshed to justify the color of the flag. What they are is what they are, and given that a multipolar world seems very likely barring dawning American AI dominance or continued military dominance, it causes me regular frustration that the vast majority of westerners fail to grasp that they're working off of fundamentally different values, let alone understand that they will naturally optimize for those values. Chalk it up to the American belief in universalism, or the standard American practice of saying (or believing!) one thing while doing another.
You may be absolutely right that your struggle with China is in fact racial. You may even be right in fearing a high-IQ species with alien fundamental moral and aesthetic instincts.
But at the end of the day, China is simply optimizing for its own values. Everyone does this. Your examples are entirely valid. Foot-binding conferred status and sexual market value at the time, so they did it. The weak exist at the mercy of the strong, so they are subservient to the strong. There are millions of Chinese people who are competition, losing the competition means you are one of the weak, so the toddler will eventually grow to be competition, so why care for it? Man's best friend is made of meat, and meat is protein, so why not eat it? Your political enemies can potentially threaten your existence, so why not eat them? You can sell a literature book by describing a scenario where the lower class gets a moment of catharsis by screwing over those more powerful, why wouldn't you?
I am entirely convinced, given the mess that America is in, that they are also subservient to perverse incentives. While they are not remotely comparable, the mechanisms behind it are the same.
It's simply more naked in China. Everywhere, the weak exist to be destroyed, or to be subservient to the strong. Losing in China is existential. The culture has a long history of genocide, either by the hard, physical method, or the soft method of cultural assimilation. Whatever chance that the weak had of affecting any kind of change was run over by tanks in the streets of Beijing as they were reminded what it meant to be weak, and what it meant to be strong.
You can't change anything about China without changing the values - or, well, as Chinese would put it - the dog-eat-dog nature of reality. If you don't wish to change the values, then there's nothing for it - nuke the bugmen, or attempt to practice isolationism. There are millions of Chinese. The preferred method of problem solving through the years by China's rulers was to throw bodies at the problem. Life is, and always has been, cheap. Winners win, and losers lose. If you can't grasp what this means, you haven't lost hard enough. Losers in China know what it is to lose.
(I lie, maybe I will bring up nurture after all - I have noticed that Chinese-Americans, especially the born-in-the-US generation, have poor comprehension of "winners win, and losers lose". Even if they lose, they assume family, community, social security, academia, the federal government, will be there for them and have managed to optimize for America in many ways. They will wear their "Chinese-ness" on their sleeves to get ahead for diversity points and wouldn't be caught dead wanting to move back to Mainland China. They know how the game is played.)
Maybe Chinese TFR being as critically damaged as it is will change some things. I'm not optimistic, because China will simply apply a top-down brutalist attempt to fix this. Or, alternatively, the opposition will become strong and eat the top, and apply their own fix that might be just as bad if not worse.
clo
1mo ago
You're onto something. The goal of fiction isn't to recreate reality, but I think the further the creative class gets from the working class the worse mass-market entertainment gets. You have to really dig around or look at niche works, or be able to swallow pretentiousness that hasn't been eclipsed by the creator's ego.
Ghostbusters (1984) is a story about schlubby guys getting jobs as supernatural firefighters and pest control. The villain of that story isn't Gozer, it's the EPA inspector who has no clue what they actually do. More and more, the creative class seem to be EPA inspectors.
Of all the debates on here but HBD, this is the one that tires me the most, because no matter the conclusions, there is no solution that powerful and culturally-dominant societies are willing to accept.
The sexual marketplace is Moloch's little bitch. Women control access to reproduction. As long as women control access to reproduction, they gain power by withholding it. A man acts, a woman chooses. Q.E.D.: it's in the interest of women to withhold it to their own benefit for as long as possible (what if a better mate comes along?) while the world feeds them a constant parade of men to swipe left on. Sufficiently large network effects mean that this, at scale, will mean that reproductive access is limited to a smaller and smaller % of the populace.
There's no fixing this in ways that the currently dominant social and cultural paradigm will accept. How can you, when women can actively weaponize men against other men with nothing but the mere promise of access to reproduction?
There's nothing left to debate. At the rate things are going, either find a first world society someplace where TFR is above replacement so we can isolate the factors responsible, attempt some solution sufficiently alien the memeplex doesn't recognize it as a threat to women's autonomy, agency, education or power, or get women to actively seek reproduction with males they consider low status.
I consider freely available access to cold fusion, FTL, and entropy an easier nut to crack than the latter.
clo
1yr ago
Very disheartened by this "postmortem".
In my experience, it's not the "icky red tribe discussion" that's lowered the quality of the sub. It's actually the increase in number of people with niche or unpopular opinions, that are often coded right wing.
Worse, the newcomers or people discovering this place for the first time are not properly acquainted with the culture it inherited, a culture where their ideas are discussed and debated (on good faith). When someone genuinely tries to steelman their viewpoint and argue against it, the newcomer finds their genuinely held belief challenged. They will double down rather than change their mind or accept a new argument - as opposed to the standards of the motte, where steelmen grind against each other, and the weak are ground into filings - they consider any challenge to their viewpoint just plain wrong even in the face of evidence.
This results in a norm of more and more people that are willing to assert increasingly outlandish claims without evidence, as they understand on some level that outside this place, evidence is not needed to convince others for or against their viewpoint.
Evidence didn't convince them away from their viewpoint before, so why would it convince anyone else? This makes arguing in good faith extremely difficult.
Hats off to the mods, even if I agree or disagree with their positions. There are a significant number of genuine shit-stirrers who explicitly set out to skirt the rules while actively trying to sabotage discussion, and the place is the worse for it.
Video game writing is one thing. Have you seen Hollywood recently?
I went to the cinema recently and saw two movies. One is Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. It's Kaiju Wrestlemania, the monster fights are pretty fun, Kong at one point beats a monkey with another monkey. Entertainment. And in between it all is some of the most agonizing, painfully bad human-scale plots, characters and exposition I've seen. Granted, it's a movie about a nuclear dinosaur fighting a giant monkey, it's not exactly somewhere people look for good writing. It's going to make a lot of money.
The other was a matinee showing, I woke up early, offset a healthy morning walk with some unhealthy breakfast, went to an AM showing of the only flick that still had the discount pricing. Some anime flick called Haikyuu: The Dumpster Battle. It's an animated movie about high school volleyball featuring two teams playing a single best-of-3 match in the lower bracket of a tournament.
After finishing that movie, I came out of it gobsmacked. Not because it was great or anything, but because this nothing anime movie from a series I don't think is any good managed to clear the what seems like a ridiculous bar, these days, of being a human story about humans doing human things. You know, a story featuring characters who drink water and breathe air. Humans.
It's not that Japan is somehow exceptional at this, it just seems like Hollywood has entirely forgotten what humans are like. How they talk, how they think, how they react around other people. What they care about. It seems like the ability to model human beings, or write from their perspectives, is completely missing.
When Hollywood writes characters these days, they almost inevitably end up as one of the following:
- Cliches
- Cartoon characters
- Obnoxious
Or some combination of the above.
To go back to GxK: the cast of characters in that movie exploring Hollow Earth are as follows. The adoptive mother of a mute child, who is having trouble connecting to her adoptive daughter (probably the closest to an actual person, cliche). Angry security man who is rough, tough, and angry at everyone for no apparent reason (cliche, cartoon character). Weird surfer Australian hippie kaiju vet heavily implied to be adoptive mother's ex boyfriend (cartoon character). Mute girl who can talk to Kong (plot device). Chubby black podcast conspiracy nerd trying to get views on a podcast and complaining about trolls (cartoon character, obnoxious, cliche).
None of these people are people. I don't know if they drink water or breathe air. The podcast guy looked and acted like if you cut him he'd bleed Monster Energy. None of them talk like human beings. Their dialogue is either snappy oneliners, built for movie trailers, or clunky exposition. It's telling that the movie's best sequences featured exclusively kaiju, had no dialogue whatsoever, and props to the special effects team - Kong was capable of emoting and communicating who he was and his thoughts and feelings to the audience far better than any of these cardboard cutouts in the shape of human actors.
Haikyuu: The Dumpster Battle opens with a slow, almost arthouse-movie-esque sequence, with things framed off center or slightly out of frame, where a dispassionate character who doesn't care about the sport of volleyball at all is lost on his way getting to a practice bootcamp and doesn't consider it a big deal. His phone is out of power. And instead of trying to find his way to bootcamp with any urgency, he sits down and we hear the sound of a handheld video game console powering up.
I almost wanted to jump up in my chair and point at the fucking screen, as if Hollywood were watching: It do be like that. In a sequence that's two minutes long at maximum we have established who this kid is, what he's like, his attitude, and what he cares about. Why does it seem impossible for Hollywood to write stories about people? Regular people, working-class salt-of-the-earth human beings? Are they just bad at modeling what those people are like? Do they know any? In lieu of this, I have to conclude that the writers genuinely do believe human beings are either cliches, cartoon characters, or obnoxious.
My working theory is that the ability of western writers to model other human beings seems stunted. The current crop are narcissists, incompetent, or incapable of basic human empathy. Either that, or whatever they put down doesn't survive peer and funding review.
Beyond that, the other takeaway I had is that Hollywood seems to have completely lost the ability to impose any sort of meaning on their stories. I don't mean in a didactic or parable like sense, but I mean in the sort of literal 'here are the story stakes' meaning.
GxK, spoilers, has stakes like the world ending in a new potential ice age. H:TDB is a sports movie about a single lower bracket game in a high school tournament. Somehow, the latter was a story that felt like it had higher stakes. Every hard rally meant something, every small micro-victory and every way characters and their ideologies were tested felt impactful and meaningful.
Why are you shocked? Support for Israel is Team Red-coded in America.
American political theater is so polarized Blue team in America could ritualistically eat babies and people still wouldn't vote for Team Red.
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