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joined 2022 November 14 02:02:20 UTC
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User ID: 1850

clo


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 November 14 02:02:20 UTC

					

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User ID: 1850

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for the sake of argument, your first point could be applied to just about anyone who is a net drain on the economy, like old people, unhealthy people, or disabled people.

4R Single Barrel is the best readily available bourbon imo, I try and never run out of that stuff. The Wild Turkey offerings are also good value as a daily sipper and rarely run afoul of the collector/flipper mania.

I can also give high, high marks to Redbreast's cask strength offering and the Lustau edition, Lustau in particular is excellent for getting people who don't like whiskey into whiskey as there's no need to fight the drink as is common for most hard liquors.

Decent to good scotch kind of starts at the $100 mark, but scotch is my preferred tipple. It's just so much more interesting than bourbon; I can pick apart a small amount of scotch for hours. Bourbon I end up drinking too fast because I look for more in the glass than is generally there.

Scotch I enjoy neat with a small splash of water depending on the proof. Bourbon, I occasionally like a small rock or two, as the hazmat proofs are generally cheaper than scotch even if they're harder to come by.

That utopia can be achieved, on earth, by human hands.

If this is the end state, immanentizing the eschaton, etc. Nothing is off the table. Most disagreements seem to be on the method.

G-Shock metal square with negative display and the rubber strap: got some adapters and I've currently got this on a distressed leather strap. Love this thing even if the adapters make the lug-to-lug massive. Probably the best G-shock overall short of the MR-G square monstrosities that sort of lose the idea of what it means to be a G-shock, although the G-shock octagon is probably an easier rec these days.

Straum Opphav Damascus: was charmed by this microbrand, the dial is something else.

Casio fanboy pick: Casio Oceanus OCW-3000, probably one of my favorite watches ever. Pretty much every watch should offer a version in titanium, polished and finished to this standard. Bought this when the yen cratered this year. I also had the Cachalot for a bit before reselling it (heavy discount), it's essentially a nicer bigboy MR-G with sexier finishing.

Seiko Sharp Edged Presage Aisumi Blue openheart: I go back and forth on this, I feel like I should own at least one Seiko but I feel like I'm just not making a connection to this watch as pretty as it is. In an attempt to like it I bought the official Seiko bracelet and stuck it on to replace the awful leather strap, but it got even heavier and as a result I like it less and less.

Lorier Neptune IV (date): found out about this literally the day before the drop. Pictures do not do it justice, for something this price it's an absolute steal. The acrylic crystal was a tough sell at first but it really does look nicer and warmer, with thicker distortion and a warmer look, even though it means I have to buff out scratches every month.

Currently looking at adding a Speedmaster to the collection but can't decide on which one. Also, despise Rolex enough to consider buying a superclone. I've been treated worse as a customer in a Rolex AD than when buying just about anything in existence.

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.

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.

You may want to read TLP's dissertation on the subject, whether you agree with it or not. Beware, following this guy down the rabbit hole may be infohazardous.

When they say, "it's a woman's choice" what they mean is "it's not a man's choice, it is thoroughly stupid to wear make up just for men, the only acceptable reason is if you do it for yourself, if it makes you feel better about yourself."

Let me offer a contrary position, unpalatable but worth considering: the only appropriate time to wear make up is to look attractive to men. Or women, depending on which genitals you want to lick, hopefully it's both. "Ugh, women are not objects." Then why are you painting them? I'm not saying you have to look good for men, I'm saying that if wearing makeup not for men makes you feel better about yourself, you don't have a strong self, and no, yelling won't change this. Everyone knows you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, now you're saying the cover of the book influences how the book feels about itself?

I am not doubting that in fact you do feel better about yourself, I am saying that that fact is both pathological and totally on purpose. Since this cognitive trick does help you feel better about yourself, by all means go ahead, but at what point will you stop pressuring other women to go along with it? When will you stop "requiring" it, like when you say, "oh, she's so pretty even without makeup" as if the default was makeup?

He, uh, cited the study you're talking about? Through HuffPo, but - if you're not going to read the link, then sure:

The evolution from "enhances sexual attractiveness" to "doing it for yourself" is definitely a regressive step, and by regressive I here mean "regressing to age two", but it's the next step which reveals the presence of a neurosis: recruiting science as a justification for behavior: "Study finds makeup makes you appear more competent." Can't wait to read about that study in a Jonah Lehrer book. Ugh. So here's the evolution of feminist theory, take notes: "I want to look better" to "I want to feel better about myself" to "I want people to think I am better." Madness.

The further clue that the problem is not gender but... you... is that you find this pseudoscience while you are browsing the internet, i.e. it is your entertainment, your free time; your leisure time is spent justifying a behavior you can't not do. "But I wasn't looking for those articles, I just stumbled on them." Exactly.

Alone is not a pleasant person to read most of the time. His brain works in mysterious ways, and his material is intentionally acerbic because it's meant to make you question yourself. The point about makeup is completely orthagonal to the point about how power works in society, narcissism, and pornography (the general theme of pretty much all his writing).

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.

Then say that?

My mistake. I assumed you were making a request in good faith. I won't make that mistake again.

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.

the Chinese may be the only people in the world who are completely unable to comprehend the basic human impulses of sympathy or gratitude toward other people.

My two cents probably means nothing to you, but Townsend should have traveled more. There are things in a large plurality of non-western cultures that would have horrified him. Although I am willing to bet that China does it at greater scale simply on a pure numbers perspective.

There are a wide variety of brutalist solutions you can apply without resorting to guns.

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.

Because the idea that a low status male thinks he has a chance with her implies she is low status.

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.

I think you finally managed to get at the core disagreement.

The tradcon doesn't need - or want to - convince the people in modern urban life. To them, it is self-evident that modern urban life does not work.

If you are convinced that modern urban life works, then complaining of its difficulty and the rigors of how hard it is to make it in modern urban life is not going to change any minds. It will in fact convince tradcons of their position.

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.

While I am no fan of alarmism and I think Yud is a clown, I am struggling to understand this mental block you - and others - have whenever it comes to the dangers of AI.

You seem to feel the need to understand something before it can kill you. There are plenty of things in this world that can kill you without you understanding the exact mechanisms of how, from bizarre animal biology to integrated weapons systems.

There are plenty of things in this world with proven - not unproven - capability, that regular human beings can use to kill you. An AI that demonstrates no more capability than regular human beings can kill you, as well as potentially a large number of other humans - and this is only with the methods my stupid animal brain can come up with! It doesn't even need to be particularly smart, sentient, conscious, or even close to AGI to do so. It could be something as simple as messing with the algorithms that have an outsized disparate impact on large amounts of everyday life.

And that's without even considering the things that bare-ass naked-ape plain old humans could get up to with a force multiplier as big as AI!

There are massive amounts of x-risk from regular people, doing regular things, fucking up, or intentionally doing things that will cause an untold amounts of suffering. Some people consider regulated research on viruses or prions extremely dangerous! Is it a failure of imagination? Do you need to know every chess move Magnus Carlssen makes before believing that he can beat you at chess?

Then why do you have difficulty believing that someone - or something - of similar intelligence to him could figure out that you are going to attack him with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire, pay private security, and pre-emptively deal with you beforehand?

We're not even talking about superhuman capabilities, here.

Had they not promised the moon, I think the game would have been received much better. Also, it was broken on consoles at launch, so there's that. Most of the discussion not being about the game's writing frustrated me, because it's really quite something.

Honestly, as fine as the main story is, a few of the smaller side quests in the game have writing that haunted me for long after the game was over. Dream On in particular actually stopped me in my tracks near its resolution and had me thinking about the right course of action in a way I haven't been challenged by any piece of media in years.

I think the truth is somewhere in between.

There are unique advantages and drawbacks to both, but if you are a credible and accredited scientist working in a high-value field such as medicine or AI, I would say the US still offers more money and opportunities. Quality of life is, in both countries, exceptionally dependent on where you go. There are places in both the US and China that I would not want to ever visit, or even pass by, without a heavily armed personal escort that would suffer no repercussions for shooting bystanders.

People is a tossup. I think in America the variance is higher, it's a culture and society that says one thing and does another and lionizes exceptionalism of all sorts. China tends to squash everyone down into the same paste by design.

Food is again, exceptionally dependent on where you go.

I definitely do think the attitude towards foreigners has gotten significantly worse in China over the last decade and a half. 2013 China and 2023 China are, for foreigners, quite different.

Well, then - since we espouse equity, let's see if any government will fund initiatives to lower women's job satisfaction, a goal I consider eminently more achievable by a government than improving men's job satisfaction.

I'd actually go so far as to say that in 2023, there are no non-fossil fuel power systems that can be run sustainably without government subsidies. And even then, governments are playing a global game where the flow of fossil fuels are tied to geopolitics.

I was working in China during the Great Solar Adoption. Endless fields of them, blanketing dozens upon dozens of factories. What they don't tell you is that photovoltaics are incredibly toxic to handle, dispose of, and manufacture, they require regular cleaning before the efficiency generation drops precipitously, they don't last anywhere near what they're supposed to and produce incredible amounts of dangerous e-waste. They were only adopted because of incredibly generous government tax benefits and subsidies, as well as awards for reaching a significant % of total power generation from solar, and kickbacks to companies manufacturing solar panels.

Current state of renewables simply don't scale, not if we want to maintain the same quality of life. Maintain, not improve. There is no solution. You can shit up people's quality of life, but you'll get pushback, especially as the shit won't be evenly applied.

Honestly the only energy sources I have hope for are geothermal and nuclear. And nuclear has a long list of caveats in that even in the face of overwhelming security precautions, black swan events can have outsized disparate impact. I hope we crack fusion regardless.

There is definitely a way to make our world much more ecologically sustainable - bomb all non-agrarian Third World countries to glass. If "degrowth mindset" is in vogue, might as well go all the way and yank the ladder out from countries seeking to take advantage of readily accessible cheap fuel to industrialize.