durdenhobbes
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User ID: 1307
Has anything noteworthy improved in the world in the past 10-15 years?
I've wondered if it's just a natural product of depression or aging, but I was thinking recently about how absolutely everything feels as if it were so much better a few short years ago. Housing/food/necessities more affordable, political discourse less toxic, the internet was both more wild west but also more self-regulating, TV was in its golden age (Breaking Bad, The Wire, Mad Men, etc.), sports felt more like an escape than circus, technology still held promise of a brighter future rather than potential enslavement of humanity, people still talked to one another without being addicted to smartphones, the media was still somewhat believable, medicine was still a respected profession by a wide margin, college was the smart choice for many/most young people... I could go on but you get the idea.
What has actually improved in the time since? Uber? Starlink? That's all I can think of, and I don't use either one.
durdenhobbes
1mo ago
How did illegal immigration become so polarizing? The last two Democratic presidents prior to Biden, Clinton and Obama, both talked about maintaining strong borders and deported millions of illegal aliens. Suddenly in the last few years, Democrats act like it's always been our cultural policy to allow whoever wants in, to live here. Is this really just a crass strategy to build a larger blue voting base, or is it something more?
durdenhobbes
4mo ago
I was thinking back to 5 years ago, when Covid was still mostly (in the U.S., at least) considered a China problem. I remember seeing videos all over Reddit of people dropping dead in the streets, apartment complexes being weld-locked shut, etc.
Obviously this doesn't reflect the U.S.-lived version of the pandemic, but I never heard anything more about these videos. Were they ever officially debunked as Chinese propaganda, or even addressed at all?
durdenhobbes
1yr ago
Why is that a thing? It defies all logic and common sense (which I know shouldn't be unexpected, but it still is).
durdenhobbes
5mo ago
If losing the competent people means also losing the people who are smart enough to maintain the deep state apparatus as the true power center of DC, then this would be a feature, not a bug.
durdenhobbes
5mo ago
It's not "evidence", exactly, but having stayed up all night on Election Night 2024, I was getting text messages from my Biden-supporting friends and family members basically throwing in the towel and saying congratulations. Then at midnight or so, when all the major swing states stopped counting because poll workers "needed to sleep", I thought it really strange that all these states in different time zones decided that at the same time. Then when the 4am ballot dumps came in (what happened to sleep?), and I saw every predictor index go from 95%+ Trump to Biden, I was forever convinced that it was a rigged election.
Too many inexplicable abnormalities. There were some significant statistical anomalies that came out later to confirm my suspicions, but they seem to have mostly been scrubbed from the internet.
durdenhobbes
2yr ago
I find myself in a weird position where I don't like to be alone for very long. I can't sit at home all day, and need to be around people fairly regularly. But once I'm around people and someone starts a conversation with me, I immediately can't wait for that conversation to end, even if it's interesting. I want to want to talk, but it just feels off and I never seem to know what to say.
The only workaround I've ever found to this is alcohol, which makes conversation entirely enjoyable, frictionless, and engaging, but it comes with obvious health downsides.
Are there any healthy remedies to make sociability not feel like awkward work?
durdenhobbes
2yr ago
As an aside, I've often felt it was a blatant smear that Republicans got tagged as the "racist" party (with increasing fervor) in recent years, when the supposed "most racist" states in the South were reliably Democratic during the eras of exponentially-greater blatant racism. I've often heard the defense of "oh well the parties flipped", but I've never been able to square that argument with obvious examples like Robert Byrd being a Democratic senator a mere 13 years ago, or things like Biden's comments in the 70's about a "racial jungle".
I'm like "okay, if the parties flipped, then when did they flip?". Because when it comes to Biden (and countless others, I'm certain), they clearly haven't flipped yet.
durdenhobbes
4mo ago
I think that there are trillions of natural phenomena in the universe, and a very finite set of words to describe them. Oftentimes we're forced to use imprecise language as a result, because human language is limited. Ultimately they're just words, and we should stop giving quite so many fucks.
durdenhobbes
8mo ago
Do you mean you made a crypto bet, or you just expect crypto markets to respond positively to a Trump win?
durdenhobbes
1mo ago
Meanwhile I've already used it to do things for my startup that I can't even imagine how I'd have paid for otherwise.
Would you mind sharing any examples? I've failed to engage with AI in any meaningful way, not for ideological/luddite reasons, but the simple inertia of doing things the way I've always done them. I'd love to try something new, and don't know where to begin.
durdenhobbes
8mo ago
One aspect of Trump that I feel like is under-discussed is his abstinence from alcohol and other drugs throughout his life. Close to 70 percent of American adults drink alcohol (and knowing a fair cohort of baptists and Mormons who drink semi-regularly, but would never self-report, I expect this number is actually higher), making him something of an outlier. Could it have any explanatory effect on his seemingly age-defying stamina and energy? His resilience in the face of social/legal/political headwinds that would sideline most men half his age?
Having made the recent decision to eliminate alcohol from my life, I've noticed immense dividends in terms of my own personal health both physically and mentally. Particularly when it comes to attacking difficult problems head-on, rather than kicking the can down the road. In conjunction with the RFK MAHA agenda, I wonder if a further shift toward tee-totaling (which Gen Z seems to be steering toward already) could be a side effect of Trump's second term.
durdenhobbes
10mo ago
it might make sense to consciously get people to adopt non-zero-sum measures for status.
Is this even theoretically possible, though? Status is a relative position, and a rising tide does not lift all boats. It'd be akin to raising everyone's SAT scores—you're still going to have a 99th percentile and a 5th percentile, along with the correlated benefits (or lack thereof).
durdenhobbes
2yr ago
That's not even a criticism, though. That's just shock-gallows humor. Not to mention, people get cancelled for saying a whole lot less than "I think it's funny when they die" when it comes to actually-favored groups.
durdenhobbes
2yr ago
That's a rather cynical way of viewing things, but you do you. So long as you can be sure not to consider any other perspectives, and most importantly to "steer clear of them in 'in real life' interactions". Something, something, "ATM machine".
durdenhobbes
5mo ago
Not entirely relevant to your post, but the thing that strikes me the most about the hubbub surrounding USAID is the fact that I'd never even heard of it before (or if I had, it was in a passing enough fashion that it never registered). I consider myself reasonably well-educated, and was at least once considered smart and well-read. I spend an inordinate amount of time reading about politics and culture war issues online, and yet here is this entity that evidently has a massive impact on American interests both at home and abroad, and I'd never given it a single thought prior to this week.
It just makes me wonder how many such power centers like this might be out there.
durdenhobbes
5mo ago
I apply the same structure to "conspiracy theory" evaluation as a prosecutor would to a criminal case: means, motive, and opportunity. The NBA is a multi-billion dollar global enterprise, the value of which rests on delivering a compelling product to as wide an audience as possible. It's a cartel of privately-held organizations operating in lockstep under a commissioner whose job is to maximize the value of the league as a whole. It wouldn't be terribly difficult for a small handful of high-level NBA executives (whether they be corporate office or individual team owners) to work together in the interest of profit maximization at the expense of competitive fairness. Things like this trade, the Lakers-Kings '03 match fixing, Donaghy, etc., all point to what appears to be obvious collusion.
durdenhobbes
9mo ago
This is pretty off the reservation, and I'm sure would have major drawbacks, but I was thinking about how much I hate the end of close football games. Specifically, the point at which the game becomes more about gaming the clock than it does playing one's opponent to the best of your ability. (This usually happens somewhere between 10 and 2 minutes remaining in the 4th quarter).
The only way I could think to solve this problem would be to eliminate the game clock entirely, and switch instead to a possession clock. Each team would get a pre-determined number of possessions, and would have, say, 3 minutes to score or punt. Clock stoppage would work basically the same as it does in the last 2 minutes of the current game (out-of-bounds, incomplete pass, penalty. Probably want to add stoppage on first downs like in college) and you'd get an elective stoppage or two per possession (to allow for running plays near the end of the clock). Turnovers don't count as possessions for the recovering team, so they become way more valuable as you'd be able to score and then immediately get the ball back.
No more useless kickoffs. No sitting on a small lead and milking the clock. Just balls out football from start to finish, unless it's a complete blowout, in which case the game wouldn't have been compelling anyways. Tell me why this would suck.
durdenhobbes
9mo ago
What war has ever contained enemy combatants entirely separately from the civilian population? Even when a massive percentage of the military is deployed to a warzone, there are certainly plenty of personnel who still go home to their families each night.
It seems to me that the real argument becomes what qualifies as a warzone, and when.
durdenhobbes
6mo ago
I was a voracious reader as a child (best friends with the school librarian-type of nerd), and remained so through my early twenties. At some point in my mid-twenties, though, I consciously considered that I did not typically retain much beyond a nugget or three of wisdom from any given book. For the time invested, I felt like I could learn more about a broader number of topics by simply reading a well-curated selection of articles. Maybe it was my attention span being eroded by social media and technological overload, and this was my attempt to justify it to myself, but I do still largely believe it to be accurate.
I still read a handful of books each year, but I rarely come away feeling that it was a markedly better use of time than reading articles and journals (or even just reading The Motte). About the only major advantage I can identify is that book reading is decidedly higher-status.
durdenhobbes
8mo ago
I keep seeing this PMC acronym, and I must've missed when it entered common parlance. Could someone please enlighten me? My search engine was no help.
durdenhobbes
8mo ago
But the reason why it matters is not because the country needs to have an alert, mentally healthy person in the chair of the chief executive. It really doesn't.
That's one of the key underpinnings of the Trump/MAGA movement, though: it should matter. While the average voter (or even the above-average) has no real idea of how government functions on the daily, they still would like to believe that they have a vote that matters, and elected officials who represent them. If it's all unelected bureaucrats/deep state running the show, and everyone knows it? The show is over.
durdenhobbes
8mo ago
Has Musk's star been waning? The Starship booster landing the other day was probably the technological achievement of my lifetime.
durdenhobbes
9mo ago
I had the same thought, although from the looks of things there were absolutely explosives planted in these pagers; batteries don't just explode like that.
This is the part that leaves me flabbergasted. I've seen close friends have their lives left in utter shambles after being cheated on and left by a wife who decided that he was nothing more than a piggybank. Men who were allowed only a pittance of time with their children, despite having no criminal record/history of abuse/etc. That the modern, overpowered family court allows women to destroy the lives of decent men for absolutely no reason is a stain on our society, and will undoubtedly have more severe ramifications as future generations grow up saying "yeah there's no way I'm risking my life by getting married and ending up in a financial/emotional/spiritual dumpster like my dad".
It makes me physically angry sometimes that so much societal and conversational capital is spent on the most trivial "microaggressions" that supposedly-marginalized communities experience, yet massive legal aggressions with the demonstrated effect of driving men to suicide are only spoken of in hushed tones in the dark recesses of the internet.
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