dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
No bio...
User ID: 583
I dunno, based on interviews he seems sappy enough that he believes in the institution of marriage.
One view is he felt his sex life dwindling and his mortality creeping in and didn't want to accept that, so he started lifting and doing roids and wanting to party a bit but his then wife wasn't really into picking up that same lifestyle.
If being the richest man in the world was worth anything, surely it would be cheating old age at least a little bit.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2mo ago
Doesn't this "Art of the Deal" lens prove too much?
Can you find any economist who thinks universal tariffs are a good idea? Any published literature on it?
Maybe they're deliberate tactical choices, but to what gain? The markets lost something like $10t in value since he announced them. Losses on this scale were certain while any recovery afterwards is more speculative due to the loss of confidence. Is whatever Trump thinks he's going to gain from this worth that risk?
Almost certainly no. Just because you may be doing this as a tactical choice doesn't shield you from your choice mathing out to erratic and retarded.
When it comes to fuckups - i would say this is run of the mill one. As a person that has dealt with security and opsec - at some point you just accept that C level people will do stupid stuff and move on. That secrets will be sent in plaintext. That passwords will be written on post it stamps or spell to the secretary in the cafeteria where everyone can overhear.
I work in cybersecurity and this is my reaction as well. Overall, I'm honestly very impressed that they used Signal. Nature is healing!
It was dumb of them to add a journalist to "Houthi PC small group" chat but shit happens.
Yes yes ideally they would not be discussing this on their extremely difficult to secure smartphones and instead followed official guidance to use MS Teams with whatever dumb compliance features Microsoft added but we all know C level execs aren't going to listen. I don't even blame them.
Imagine how awful the federal government's approved classified information messaging things are.
This is the same reason I didn't hold it against HRC for having her own email server. Imagine how shitty the State Dept's approved mail service would have been in 2009.
(Though that's obviously a lot less secure than Signal)
Well, in a functional organization you would say we have $4 trillion in revenues and $6 trillion in expenses, year over year. This is obviously unsustainable. We need to cut $2 trillion in expenses or we go bankrupt.
So you ask every department head to produce plans to cut their spending by one third. It's hard but they do it and you implement the cuts and layoffs and move on.
That's not the government we have though.
In our government such a process would take years and the conclusion would be that we can't cut anything. The "experts" would not comply. They probably don't even know how to comply, because they've been shielded from "efficiency or death" forces their whole lives.
Faced with this, you can do it in reverse. Randomly shoot big holes in the agencies. Then drip money back into them. It'll be now be clear what roles were most essential and should be filled back in first.
Is this ideal? No. But what's even more not ideal is the current trajectory.
One thing I miss about taking the subway to work is that I don't read 1-2 books a week anymore.
And some writers have written books that have changed my whole way of thinking.
But one thing that bothers me about reading books is that for something I have spent an incredible amount of time on, I have forgetten most of them and they're still rather cumbersome to refer back to. Despite drowning in information technology, books are kind of crappy. Additionally, a ton of books could have been an interesting blog post series but they've been puffed up and watered down to fill a 300 page book with a dumb title.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
Re: United Health CEO, I feel that I'm among the extreme minority of the population that thinks it's bad to celebrate political assassinations and also that it is a social good for companies to offer insurance in the US. I am astounded by how relatively unprofitable being an insurance company is and also why anyone would go into this industry and put up with the abuse and general scorn.
Imagine being at a party and saying you work at a health insurance company. Total hatred from almost everyone.
It's amazing that people do this at all?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
7mo ago
Surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, this has not dented the stock of United Healthcare Group.
As an American who lived in London for a bit, I met several people who seemed completely identical to the rest of the English at first-blush[1], but they'd eventually confess to me that they're quite ashamed of their obvious(??) working class upbringing. The forward-ness of this surprised me, because I had many English acquaintances who would never open up about their feelings like this on other topics, no matter how much we were drinking. I do wonder if being an outsider helped them confess this to me, or if this is just something you have to voice to everyone.
Anyway, it sounded markedly different from meeting someone from the Midwest in NYC confessing their shame at growing up in corn fields of Indiana or whatever. The person from the Midwest just felt good to be in NYC, like they escaped. Whereas the persons I met in London very much projected that they could never escape their class, and this deeply affected them.
Can this shame lead to rage as this down-trodden feeling class is apparently ignored while the government falls all over itself to support problematic foreigners? I can see that, 100%
- In hindsight their accents were different though it's not like they were speaking blatant My Fair Lady style Cockney
This essay feels out of place in the NYT. Which is to say it's well argued, nuanced, a bit witty, requires more than twenty seconds of short-term memory and it advances claims that readers are not going to like. Also it's about 5x longer than usual. I am curious how many readers actually even get through it. The carrot and stick of the article (Harvard good but also bad but also good and Trump bad but also has a point but also bad) is potent but attention spans are so short and nobody is open to ideas.
Which is to say I think the article is excellent!
What I'm saying is as constructed, they are literally incapable of changing enough to do what they need to win.
The Man Enough ad (YouTube link) really drove home how unbelievably out of touch the Kamala campaign was with working class men. Somehow managed to directly insult and talk down to the demographic they were doing the worst with and actively trying to target.
They polled terribly with white men. They really needed not to do this! They couldn't help it.
I was a full on "lesser evil for Kamala" voter but this, this ad nearly made me just leave the ballot blank.
This is not a Sputnik moment for the US. The US has a secure and increasing lead due to bog standard logistics and capital advantage, as always. What this should be is “are we the baddies?” moment. Also, it's a moment to ask oneself how high are margins on Western model providers, and whether it's a true free market. Because Liang Wenfeng himself does NOT think they're that far ahead in efficiency, if they are ahead at all.
If DeepSeek was a Chinese psyop this would be a good in-kind comment :futurama-suspicious-fry:
But more seriously, why is Facebook's Lllama so lousy by comparison if the labs are hiding their true edge? DeepSeek is presumably what they wish they had released and their AI team do not seem like dummies.
Is the implication that they deliberately released a fat model even though they can go leaner? Or are we writing off Facebook for this discussion?
Also this would imply a level of collusion that doesn't seem sustainable.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
Looks like fireworks. Some commenters wonder if this is the way exploded car batteries burn.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6mo ago
I think it's because we see quick progress from "hey this ride didn't cause an immediate horrific car wreck" to "90% of the time the car arrives at the end of the obstacle course. amazing" and believe getting to 100% is in the bag.. But in truth the reliability rate has to be something absurdly high. Even if a Tesla on FSD only needs a few interventions a week, this is still a very, very long way from full autonomy. We need something that requires no safety interventions per approx 500 years, not just something that requires less than around 1 intervention a day.
As we know in reliability engineering, every 9 you add next to "99% reliability" adds an order of magnitude of complexity or cost. Full self-drive might fall under similar development burdens.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
7mo ago
For completeness he has this quite fantastic followup post where he expounds https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1819867003966148655?t=nxw_B_ejIP_ZsG_GhBVdMw&s=19
I think he's not describing hedonic treadmill stuff. People don't really continue working 60 hour a week jobs alternating between Walmart and driving Uber just because they consider Steam games a burning need.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
9mo ago
I'm 0% bothered by the fact that a town can come up with incentives to get 20,000 people to move there (and grow by 25% or whatever). Even if they're immigrants, necessarily.
What's rather alarming is that it was not by the town's political process and that they somehow are all immigrants from Haiti? What's their legal status? And how did so many of them end up there? This requires a lot more light.
I certainly wouldn't want my town to grow by 30%, populated entirely by (e.g.) Sudanese refugees that are totally 0% ex-Janjaweed we swear, with no say in the process whatsoever.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
9mo ago
As an aside, the federal government possessing the ability to drop tens of thousands of migrants on your town seems like a surprisingly powerful instrument of coercion. Remembering the Washington Bridge Fort Lee lane closure scandal, I do wonder if this is over something as petty as the mayor calling the wrong person a cocksucker on a phone call, or whatever.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1d ago
HBD, by which we probably mean IQ is what like 30-60% genetic and average IQ scores for whole racial groups vary, is only really worth discussing because so much of academia and society goes berserk if you bring it up. It's a truth that upsets the blank slatists so much that they pervert scientific discourse to bury it.
But it's not actually all that useful a model for the world? Society doesn't change that much if it informs your view: AA doesn't structurally fix anything, maybe try not to force kids to do school programs they can't possibly succeed in, maybe "learn to code!" is cruel. Ok cool. Now that that's out of the way we still have crushing social problems to deal with.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8d ago
Supermarkets are on thin margins and yet you have manyfold increase in the price from farm to table.
They have thin margins but they make it up by turning over inventory quickly. This doesn't mean supermarkets aren't profitable, just that taking radical steps to lower prices won't really work because they don't have much room to cut.
People are mad that prices went up 40%
Cutting the supermarket's 4% margin to 3.7% (or whatever) isn't going to matter.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
19d ago
Yes. Some people believe the US is infinitely wealthy and we can afford to take in all of the downtrodden of the world fleeing poverty and oppression and the only reason you could be against this is because you're racist.
It does not compute that this could bankrupt the entitlements systems they are so fond of that are mostly paid out of high earner taxes. Or they believe money is magic and the classists are causing fake scarcity or whatever.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2mo ago
Don't tell anyone but the stock exchanges are all in datacenters in NJ now. The trading floor on Wall Street is just for show.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3mo ago
elicit glee from yours truly because they're so obviously needed.
I have expressed similar amounts of glee. Here on TheMotte even. Repeatedly. Watching people on /r/fednews react with outrage at the collision with reality has been like porn.
But I still think the government does some useful, good things and the carpet bombing approach DOGE is taking is very costly. I would consider it worthwhile if the goal was to substantially reduce the deficit, but not if the goal is to score ideological victory. If the goal is to keep the deficits and cut taxes, you can score ideological victory through more surgical cutting.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
4mo ago
At the very least this is all going to be fascinating - one of the ironclad, universally agreed-upon tenets of a social science being put to the test. Markets have not reacted well so far, but that's as much a feature of groupthink as it is reflective of material reality. It's a good time to be a prospective PhD in Economics. You're about to have more than you could have ever hoped to work with.
This is like firing up the Large Hadron Collider for the first time for macro-economists right?
Yeah, I don't know.
The most absurd one that I've seen that worked is a dude found a homely lesbian woman with bad career prospects at an anime convention while he was visiting. They became friends and he paid her $20k/year and they roomed together (he paid for the 2 bedroom apartment) so they could fake marry and he could get his citizenship.
Their "wedding photos" were so obviously faked and it still succeeded. I think the fact that they were both awkward ultra nerds threw off the immigration officials.
They were friends and both liked anime so it was kind of a cute romance, in a way.
Curious. What gave you the impression that Trump had principled beliefs in the integrity of the US's legal system and upholding political norms? Why did you think he couldn't cross these lines?
I am 0% surprised he could tweet something like that.
Whether he actually has the cajones to lead a revolution is dubious. He's fairly shy when it comes to bloodshed, going by his last presidency. In fact the only durable principle he seems to have is an unwillingness to get US troops killed, which I find commendable even though I'm more of a neocon myself.
I think he loves to troll though, especially for political edge, but also knows when it stops being fun and games.
Why are these Haitians being admitted to the US when there's a neighbor conveniently next door to them called the Dominican Republic that they can move to? They share an island together, in fact, no need to get on a plane or boat.
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