curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
22hr ago
If that video was the median Amelia meme I would've said something different!
curious_straight_ca
1d ago
I at least find your content more interesting than your style!
Nobody needs the opinion of a journalist; his job is to affirm the opinion of the consumer
Journalists are over-hated. They provide a valuable service of collecting, verifying, and disseminating raw facts like "white house staffer told me this EO is coming" or "this company is merging with that company". It's not as noble a profession as they think it is, and they are of course not perfect at it, but merely being passable at it while making frequent mistakes with significant bias is still very valuable.
Columbia represented both the philosophical principles of the American founding (I may disagree with many, but they are serious and substantial) as well as a concrete people civilizing the frontier and building what would become the most powerful and prosperous nation on the planet. Amelia is a cute hot girl that represents no immigrants. Which is fine, but just not as substantial. Amelia is funny, and and accurately represents that the culture it comes from cares more about 'edgy memes' and 'looking at picture of attractive girls' than it does philosophical principles or material accomplishments. It's not that the former two are bad, they have their place, just... You can see this in the art, compare to this. I think Amelia's just a random internet meme of no unusual significance either positive or negative, but to the extent it really is "an abstract personification of your nation/culture/value system" what it says isn't good.
curious_straight_ca
1d ago
One could say that since humans evolved to conceal ovulation, so that males would have sex with females outside the females' fertile period, unprotected sex naturally serves both to make children and as as a way to signal that two people are mates. And then it seems plausible that sex with condoms, fellatio, etc could serve the same purpose.
curious_straight_ca
1d ago
Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean is a song i'm fond of.
Amelia is ... less ... than all of those, though. It does accurately signify many aspects of the culture/value system it emerges from, just not in a good way. It's just an internet meme about a hot girl. And even that's fine, I guess, the problem is there's nothing else.
I simply think it doesn't matter much, most of the goodwill America gets from other countries is based not on media exports or high-quality propaganda but on actual strategic interests and demonstrable benefits of cooperation
It's not exactly media or propaganda, but much of the goodwill depends on both elite and popular moral/ideological alignment - freedom, progress, democracy, rule of law, capitalism, not being evil totalitarians, racism sexism bad, etc. People genuinely believe in the stuff, in a softer but still significant version of the way people used to be religious. And also care about them as symbols for less pure but no less powerful social animal reasons. And I think that effect explains as much of the turnaround we're seeing now as material interests do.
that I had stopped posting here because it's a purely American Affairs Discussion community
That's not really how I see it, I see it as a place to discuss anything with interesting people, most of the posts I like the most have nothing to do with American politics directly. But I also don't find the 100th post about police shootings interesting.
ends the North American fraternal relationship and likely the entire post -WWII order
How long will that end last, though? Trump only has three more years in office. If a dem wins in 2028 and Europe elects a few more populist right leaders itself, European unity against the US might stop being appealing. And the fundamental fact of US military and economic power relative to Europe isn't going to disappear, unless Trump does something even worse than what he's done so far and doesn't TACO for once. I don't think "free trade pacts" and "strategic partnerships" are going to be what mark the real end of the post-WWII international order.
The costs of winning the Culture War
It's interesting, and irritating if one has right-wing sympathies, how contingent this all is on Trump's particular combination of talent as an entertainer and lack of desire to be at all serious about government. The thing Trump's projecting to the world is comedic incompetence, and other countries are responding to that as they should. The story isn't really about ideology or the cost of winning, it's just that Trump wasn't really a win at all.
Not that Dase's comment was perfect, but given it was prompted by crushed accusing him of being an "agent of the People's Republic of China" in a post that didn't otherwise have much interesting content, I hope it doesn't lead to a ban
curious_straight_ca
2d ago
I don't think any of this makes sense. Any 'rational' approach to sex in this sense wouldn't involve sex with women you won't have kids with. A non-secure marriage is still the best route to kids, other than sperm donation. Modern women and men have lifetime single digits of sexual partners and most end up in one or a series of long-term relationships if not an actual marriage. Players and pumping and dumping just aren't the experience most people are having. And if players generally burn out, but many people who get in insecure marriages don't, what does that really say?
Not that this is a knockdown argument against patriarchy or legally enforced marriage commitments, there's more complexity there, it's just that Jim is very wrong.
curious_straight_ca
2d ago
I don't think this is true. You can embed pragmatic judgements into laws or have them happen in regulatory agencies. We already have laws about undisclosed advertisements in various contexts, which requires defining advertisements. There would absolutely be attempts to work around the laws, but said workarounds would probably be less annoying and less frequent than ads currently are, so that'd still be an improvement. Especially if you don't try to ban all advertising, which is really pretty absurd, but just ban excessive advertising for some sort of specific sense of excessive.
curious_straight_ca
2d ago
As someone who works in a marketing-adjacent field, it's worth noting that we still don't have good ways to tell if traditional advertising is actually effective at driving sales, and there's compelling evidence that its effect for many brands is near zero
I would bet like all of my net worth against this. Being told a product exists makes you realize you might buy it. Being told something exists 500 times makes the average person more likely to realize you might buy it. Big companies have tried reducing ad spend and measuring if it reduces profits, and it has, and then they restarted ad spend.
curious_straight_ca
2d ago
And it does cost $395/year, for the cheapest tier, 'X Premium+', that actually removes all instead of some twitter ads, which is a nontrivial fraction (something like 1/100th) of the median personal income in the US.
curious_straight_ca
2d ago
Because people are more than willing to accept the cost of advertising to get free-to-them, or even just reduced price, content
I think the stronger argument against ads is more that the median ad that makes someone purchase something is causing them to make a purchase that they probably shouldn't in a more ideal world, and people both do that and accept their time being wasted with extremely repetitive advertising because they're bad at making tradeoffs. So that people 'accept the cost' isn't a strong counterargument. And idk if the internet or sports would be doomed or particularly harmed without this much advertising, the economy is an equilibrium, people really like sports and the internet and would find other ways to pay for it. I'm not sure your last paragraph is an argument for advertising specifically more than it is an argument for a class of intellectuals with independent funding and has strong influence over the information diet of the average American. But as I said in my other comment I don't think the problem here is really the ads, it's the things being advertised.
I like some things about this idea of making advertising illegal. It's good to notice that there's something wrong here. That the amount of effort we put into saturating the mind of the median consumer with the names of brands just seems excessive. Amazon, Walmart, State Farm, Verizon, L’Oréal, DraftKings, etc - if it's been more than 10 minutes since you've seen one of those words, that's an inefficiency and the invisible hand's working to correct it. Why should so many competent people spend their 9/5 in marketing ensuring normal people purchase more makeup or clothing or food or parlays that doesn't particularly improve their lives? I get the concept of advertising as presenting consumers with information they might not have so they can make better purchase, but we've clearly gone beyond that.
On the other hand, the problem here isn't really advertising. It's not like DraftKings or running up credit card debt by shopping would disappear if we banned ads. It'd happen less, but only somewhat less. The problems people identify with advertising, I would argue, are really problems with the things being advertised, and in general with modern culture or whatever. Advertising by itself serves a useful purpose, connecting people selling things to people buying them. If something's broken in there, advertising will be broken too, but banning advertising doesn't really get to the heart of the problem.
Also, I mostly agree with FiveHour's post.
I think I uncomplicatedly support a law of the form "you must allow ad-blockers, not circumvent them, and provide the option to disable ads in native apps where ad-blockers don't work" though, because though uBlock gets everything in a browser they still do waste my time sometimes.
curious_straight_ca
11d ago
They could kill 12k people if they wanted to, you're right it isn't hard. But I don't think they want to, and 12k deaths seems to me to be inconsistent with videos/images and reports coming out of Iran. There'd just be more evidence if true.
curious_straight_ca
13d ago
Actual cars are your exploding car though. Cars kill 40k people every year. An expected lifespan of 80 years times 40k people is 3.2 million, and the US population of around 350M people gives us a number not too far from 1%. And many of the people who die aren't even the person at fault in the car accident. So I think that part of the argument isn't quite right.
curious_straight_ca
13d ago
I mean I'm sure there's a moderately strong correlation among the general population, and a weaker but still significant one if you control for socioeconomic status (not intended as a euphemism, although lol), but I think this is worded too strongly to be true. Plenty of people are relatively honest in business dealings but have a strong sex drive and not a strong desire to be loyal.
curious_straight_ca
13d ago
Just because the author of that article set his simulations using figures of 30%, 50%, and 80% doesn't mean those figures are equally supported by the evidence
Sure, it doesn't imply anything, but your one twin study from 2002 doesn't either. There's a lot of debate on the issue, and the person who I respect the most (Alex Strudwick Young)'s best guess iirc is around 50%.
curious_straight_ca
14d ago
As I use codex/claude code to implement high-level features and do complicated changes with just a few lines of natural language, not really! I mostly just think the AI 2027 people are wrong to update that much upwards.
curious_straight_ca
14d ago
This is a clever way for a politician to dodge a question, not 'epistemic virtue', imo. Politicians of all sides say things that sound reasonable sometimes, that itself doesn't make you virtuous. Like almost all politicians, he regularly lies about basic facts if they advantage his team, eg saying he could put mayors of cities in jail for sanctuary city policies. I wouldn't say he has less epistemic virtue than other politicians either - they all do this because if you don't you lose elections - but this is a stretch.
You really don't need to overthink it. Annexing territory is based. It's the kind of thing a STRONG MAN character would do on TV. It's swinging your dick around. It makes the right people excited and the right people angry. And it's not so implausible that, like annexing Canada, it just reads as a joke whenever you say it. Donald Trump is the chief executive of the executive branch and the commander in chief of the military, he's the one making the decision to pursue this, and this just is how he thinks (alternate hypotheses fail to explain his behavior, eg the events around Liberation Day). He's the first Simulacra Level 4 President.
And it's not like there's not strategic logic to the US acquiring Greenland. It should've already happened (gwern link). All else equal, more land = more power. The US's past land purchases seem like good ideas in retrospect. You would prefer to directly control land rather than just lease military bases. I would prefer the US to control greenland (and canada) than not. Even if only to make travel simpler. This is part of why the idea's plausible enough for Trump to push this hard for it, it's not by itself stupid (though the way he's been pursuing it is) but it's not, I think, really why he wants it.
Even from a perspective that doesn't care about progressive moral values or democracy, the current government of Iran leaves much to be desired. Take the water crisis, caused by decades of mismanagement. How can a country with nuclear weapons struggle with water? How does a major oil producer have rolling blackouts? Or 40% annual inflation? That's really quite bad! These are bigger drivers of the protests than democracy! Protests of this sort are a natural check on government mismanagement, even when they don't overthrow the regime (which they usually don't), because they put pressure on the regime to keep the cost of goods low in a way somewhat similar to fair elections.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
I've heard several anecdotal reports of people who took it and say it didn't really work. I don't think there's much risk of permanent damage though.
curious_straight_ca
7mo ago
Sure but you can see how we should have higher standards for supreme court justices than "a bit above average for judges"?
This is also just false as factual matter. Most normal journalists, including at the NYT, are writing articles like "Major US Public Transit Systems Brace For Storm With Detours And Warnings", and even the politics ones are mostly writing articles that are accurate.
More options
Context Copy link