I would suggest that there IS still a basic life script... but there are now way more failure modes that can suck someone in and divert them from the script, often inescapably so, so life is harsher to those who aren't able, for various reasons, to detect and avoid these pitfalls before moloch snags them in his maw.
The number of ways to drastically and unknowingly screw your life trajectory up has grown. There are superstimuli everywhere, controlled by faceless entities/egregores that are exceedingly efficient at parting you from your money and depleting your wellbeing.
Go to college on loans and get a degree that has poor employment/salary prospects, spend a few years spinning wheels trying to make the career in that field before throwing in the towel and accepting some blase corporate job, leaving yourself in your mid-late twenties with a pile of debt and no meaningful experience, which you have to climb out of before your life really 'begins.'
Get addicted to one of the nastier drugs and even if you don't end up overdosing on Fent or becoming a zombified husk, you're still torpedoing your ability to acquire and hold down a decent job, stay out of jail, and achieve financial stability.
Acquire some modest life savings which you burn up in the crypto markets, or betting on stocks, or a more standard gambling addiction, given how gambling is increasingly ubiquitous, leaving you with nothing to show for it. Also the brazen and sophisticated scams that are constantly seeking out marks these days.
And, honestly, if you marry and knock up/are knocked up by the wrong partner, this can leave you pretty irretrievably damaged if they choose to go full nuclear when the relationship falls apart.
Also way easier to become a grossly obese blob. And/or a NEET.
U.S. society is rich enough that you can continue to putter along after suffering one of the above setbacks (except the overdose death), but you'll pretty much be relegated to financial destitution unless you stumble into one of the much rarer positive black swan events that gets you set for life.
And many people chasing those positive black swans get pwned by the above because accepting risk has all kinds of foreseeable AND unforeseeable effects.
No, I don't think past societies had better guardrails, and certainly, obviously had their share of risks, too. But I reckon that outside of traumatic physical injury/disfigurement (and even then!) it was much easier for the average young adult to recover from mistakes, move on, and get a 'fresh start' even if they dicked around most of their twenties. There were fewer 'instant fail' conditions that would render you unable to continue as a functional member of society..
4chan was massively toxic but the anonymity and completely ephemeral nature of the threads meant you could just... walk away and nothing would follow you.
No long-term social consequences. No need to worry that someone would e-mail your boss (well, minimal, if they captured your personal info it could be merciless). You could get trolled into an incandescent rage and then the thread would fall off the board and that was that.
The current version of social media is putting your personal identity next to every opinion you ever uttered and storing it for years on end, often making it trivial to search it up later.
Which lends itself to people policing themselves and each other more heavily, and empowers targeted, relentless bullying.
faceh
1mo ago
You know, for clarity's sake, I'll specify that those endowed with legislative authority in Gov't don't really understand it.
Plenty of agencies snap up tech-savvy employees, especially in the intelligence branches, and they presumably get regular briefings on new tech developments.
Finance is a funny bird because of the revolving-door between the regulatory agencies and the financial institutions. Gov't "understands" finance because the industries are heavily tied together, which is not (currently) the case with the tech industry.
Does anyone still 'collect' music (i.e. keep locally stored copies in some kind of organized database, regardless of format) in the current age of ubiquitous streaming?
I assume that Spotify (and the rest) has all but killed the idea of 'keeping' music on your local computer or phone amongst the youth.
As someone who has a music collection going back to when I first started obsessively ripping CDs to my PC in my teens, I find that I mostly keep doing it through force of habit, and the slight fear that things I like might disappear. Some of the older files in my collection are hard or impossible to find online these days. But with so many different streaming options and, now, an AI that can produce radio-quality music in seconds it seems like there's really no point to keeping a large local music collection unless its related to your career in some way.
So if you DO still store music locally, what are your reasons and methods?
faceh
2mo ago
you can go to whichever one you want
Hahaha right except there's also admissions processes that very much filter for the exact types of people they want to attend. Let us ignore affirmative action putting its thumb on the scale.
And many colleges have removed the one requirement that at least tried to be objective.
And you can get your admission rescinded if they find your behavior as a youth undesirable
So yes, its always possible to take your student loans elsewhere, but let us not pretend that there is equal bargaining power on any level, where the market is relatively frictionless.
And that leaves aside that whatever remaining value there is in the universities mostly comes from the prestige attached to the credential or, perhaps, the social connections it allows you to make, so WHICH university you go to absolutely matters.
So really, you're hiding behind the fact that the decision to attend university is 'voluntary,' while ignoring that getting into a university is influenced by factors beyond individual students' control, that their funding is usually coming out of public coffers, and they don't need your consent to revoke your admissions, scholarships, or suspend you for behavior that is neither violent nor illegal.
So perhaps the issue isn't quite what you're suggesting it is.
faceh
1mo ago
There's a solid point that the U.S. being able to offer a higher standard of living than virtually anywhere else is its single greatest power to tempt defection and dissuade its own defectors. As you say, if you defect somewhere you don't have immediate cultural ties, you'll almost certainly end up living a far crappier lifestyle once the initial rewards for your valorous actions are spent.
Like how in the Hunt for Red October the defectors manage to persuade themselves that American life will be idyllic if they can pull it off.
You can have a case that just seems obviously, incontrovertibly correct, but if you've got a justice that already decided what they'd like to do, it's not very hard for them to use brilliant legal reasoning to do what they want to do.
Probably the most frustrating aspect of legal practice when you're autistically determined to reach the 'right' conclusion as a matter of law.
You can come armed to the teeth with precedent, facts, and legal argumentation and if you run into a Judge who is dead set on ruling a certain way you can 'lose' when they either rely on some particularly ambiguous precedent or some esoteric dissent or some novel legal concept they pulled straight from thin air (or read in a creative law review journal).
The Spirit of Aloha, for example.
Hence why I prefer when the Supreme Court sets out rules that at least sort of tie the law to something tangible and mostly immovable, rather than trying to weave increasingly intricate webs of reasoning to maintain an increasingly farcical standard which keeps collapsing when it comes into contact with the real world.
I'm gonna tap the sign.
My position is that I like meritocracy, and I also understand that 'merit' has a bit of a floating definition that means different things to different people. There is probably no true 'objective' measure of merit that we can calculate, and certainly not one everyone will automatically accept.
Be that as it may.
Subjectively all I am asking for is assurances that your attempts to tweak the numbers toward your preferred distribution are tied to responsibility for outcomes that results in that you are on the hook for, and ideally that YOU are eating the cost of those tweaks both up front and on the back end.
If you're going to MANDATE racial quotas of one form or another, and also extend special protections to those who engage in such quotas, and also actively try to deflect any blame for the possible harms/negative outcomes people point out, then I'm going to have a problem. I of course will apply this logic to those who insist that we should have white people in charge of everything too.
Fundamentally, my objection is actually not that Harvard Et al. have racial preferences in admissions, I object to Harvard Et al. getting paid by a government that redistributes the gains of society so Harvard incurs no risk when selecting students (i.e. shields Harvard from consequences, to some extent) AND that Harvard Et al. are acting as gatekeepers into the very halls of the elite and upper echelons of government that are deciding how these racial preferences are defined and how the money is distributed. Nobody at any point in this chain has any 'skin in the game' that will filter them out if they turn out to be making bad/wrong decisions (defined here as those decisions that actually harm people they are charged with representing/assisting).
For example, HBCUs tend not to bother me in the least, I don't really begrudge blacks having a college 'set aside' for them, provided they're not teaching/endorsing hardcore racial animus. They have a 'plausible' argument that a school designed by and staffed by blacks may be better suited to providing for and supporting the education of other (culturally similar) blacks. I don't buy the need to protect the students from racism, but I see a tight feedback loop where the decisionmakers are directly accountable to most stakeholders.
Are HBCUs "anti-meritocratic?" From the 10,000 foot up view, probably! But they are presumably 'allowed' to impose their own internal version of 'meritocracy' that selects for features that aren't colorblind and advances a goal that isn't defined merely by "the best person for the job as defined by test scores and performance."
Just, don't force my participation.
So the question is, if Harvard is having an outsized influence on who gets to be President, who gets on the Supreme Court, who becomes CEO of huge corporations, and various other privileges enjoyed by elites, where exactly can I, a mere state-school peon, register any particular grievances I may have if the people they're putting out are not actually good at their jobs and are causing problems which directly impact my life?
There is definitely a worrisome idea I've played around with where at some point technology allows nigh-complete surveillance of the populace (not necessarily full control,) of every public movement, every financial transaction, and every piece of media consumed, and once the basic techs needed for this are available, whichever ideological group happens to be in power will then be impossible to remove.
So whichever ideological group happens to be in power when the proverbial 'music' stops wins that particular game of musical chairs.
I think that might at least partially explain why lefties absolutely LOSE THEIR SHIT at the idea of Trump (or any righty) ascending to the Presidency, as if somehow Trump happens to be at the helm when we hit the point of no return, they realize that they might not be able to remove him... ever... just because he happened to be the guy 'in charge' when the switch was flipped.
This assumes AI doesn't kill us all, however.
We lucked out that it wasn't the fascists who were in control, but I'd rather not have the current elites locked into power either.
faceh
26d ago
I don't know of any app or tech that lets you play your own local music collection but intersperses songs from a given streaming service for better variety and to emulate a more radio-esque experience. That'd be a pretty neat use case.
Last.FM scrobbling can track your music preferences across different players, that much I know.
I like using streaming services for discovering new music, and I would like to implement one-click way to download a good song and rip it to my library. I probably use youtube music more than youtube itself these days.
But I'm increasingly questioning the goal of having such a library. Pass it on to my kids? A backup in case the internet goes down? Am I the equivalent of a boomer hoarding 8 tracks or something?
Not even joking, the main goal of having such a library might be for the Friendly AGI overlord to find my hard drive and divine my music tastes so it can produce ideal songs for me to enjoy for eternity.
TO BE FAIR, I don't want it to be 'true' either, in the sense that I wish the truth was something different, even if the underlying idea of humans having diverse phenotypes which have impacts on behavior were true.
Any joy I'd get for being a member of a 'superior' group dissipates when considering how my own capability to effect change is practically nonexistent.
I'd prefer the world where HBD was 'true' but IQ and cognition were a bit more malleable (in the positive direction, hit someone in the head with a hammer and it's malleable downward). Then we could probably cooperate towards a better place on the payoff matrix where the tradeoffs aren't so severe.
There are a ton of failure modes for that world too, don't get me wrong. But the world we're currently working with has molochian incentives that we currently can't budge without committing certain atrocities (which wouldn't guarantee success!) is endlessly frustrating.
Imagine by comparison that we figured out that the laws of physics somehow dictated that it was impossible to get a human-sized payload past the orbit of the moon without investing literal continent's worth of resources to it. To the point where we would have to simply accept that we were stuck on this planet and whatever resources lay beyond are simply not going to be available.
I'd hate that truth, and would rage against it, but ultimately the universe would care just as much about out fate whether it is true or not.
Instead, thankfully, getting past lunar orbit is merely very difficult but affordable.
Kinda like how the potential brainpower we as a species can marshall is limited by our number of geniuses and most humans are just not able to contribute meaningfully to the advancement of the species. If we could reach an intelligence 'takeoff' where we could boost low IQ humans to some reasonable degree then we could be improving our lifestyles a lot faster than we are.
And we're getting to the point where a broad 'uplift' of human intelligence might fall into that 'very difficult but affordable' category. Or it could be a long way off, but at least its visible.
How are you supposed to deal with that without becoming utterly nihilistic?
Reframe your locus of concern to yourself, your immediate family, and your local community, and see what if anything you can do there.
It is entirely possible for a particularly committed (and wealthy, in this case) individual to push back against entropy/moloch in their local environment. Care less about the fate of 'humanity' in the abstract (aside from existential risks) and more about the humans within your personal dunbars number.
Effect change where you can effect change. That's how you avoid nihilism.
faceh
1mo ago
You're on point with this. This is also why many states offer the ability to "seal" and/or "expunge" your criminal records... conditional on not committing particularly severe offenses.
With an expunged record you can truthfully state that you "have no criminal record" and have no convictions or even arrests that might turn up on a background check. And indeed, a standard background check would not turn up any such incident.
This matters a lot if you're a young person who got pinned for a misdemeanor and doesn't want to have this interfere with your attempts to kick off your career. Also why Judges sometimes employ leniency with young persons even when the offense is rather heinous, because someone is unlikely to return to the straight-and-narrow ever again if an early conviction cuts off most legitimate employment.
The next best thing is to have a plea of 'not guilty' on your record and as you say a consistent pattern of denials even if ultimately you get found guilty. You can at least claim that there was some crooked prosecutor or corrupt cops who fabricated evidence (it happens) and railroaded you for [reasons] and that you genuinely to this day protest your innocence.
This stops working very quickly the longer your rap sheet gets.
The other practical reason to stay in denial mode is because if you get caught on tape or within earshot of a reliable witness admitting guilt, that confession mostly torpedoes your ability to negotiate with the prosecutor because that confession, if admissible, simplifies their job immensely and means they are more willing to take the case to a jury and use your own words against you.
So if you risk possibly incriminating yourself by uttering a confession in any context, its safer to lie to every single person you interact with so none of them turn up on the witness stand later, and ONLY be willing to admit guilt after a favorable plea bargain has been obtained.
Incidentally, there's your logic for why the fifth amendment enshrines a right against self-incrimination.
The Steelman is that it's the only vote that 'matters' if you're someone outside of the elite power structure.
Putting Trump at the controls as the result of an election win (as opposed to something like an insurrection) is the strongest possible message that "We do not like how the political class has managed the government, we want them out of power, and to remind them who is 'actually' in charge of the government."
He is the approximate equivalent of a "none of the above" option when it comes to selecting from the various candidates that the Mainstream parties are trying to shove down our throats. Well, not equivalent because he is not a void, he's an actual candidate with a platform, but there's just nobody else who is outside the standard power structure who can provide that option.
This partially explains why he maintains or grows in popularity the harder they bring the hammer down on him. The more the elites/political class express their spite for the man, the stronger the signal that electing him will send. Of course, sending a signal doesn't mean anything actually changes.
Pulling the lever for Haley is a tacit 'approval' of the status quo. You're not registering your voice in the system so much as clicking "Accept" on the Terms and Conditions of the current edifice and its activities. It doesn't 'count' in any real way, as she's fully ingrained in the current power structure and will not modify it's trajectory one bit.
Trump has remained the major Schelling point for everyone who is very much against the status quo and wants to voice that displeasure rather than merely withdraw.
Edit: I would also mention that Bernie Sanders represents a similar sentiment from the left, but in my opinion he folds to the main party too quickly for this purpose.
Taps.
The.
Alright, admittedly the internal systems at these entities sure seem better at catching and punishing their own, but I can see almost zero way they're held accountable to those outside the institution.
Part of this reads mostly like the natural outcome of people realizing they can (in theory) get wealthy by helping others exploit the U.S.'s overall ineptitude. Although a lot of them seem to be the cause of the apparent ineptitude. Right now the ability to influence the U.S. to take or withhold from taking a particular action on the international stage may be the single highest value service on the planet. There's no real hope of any other country militarily 'defeating' us but if you can get the U.S. to bomb another country or refuse to support one side of a civil war, then you can be relatively sure that other countries will go along without much complaint.
So intelligence and counter-intelligence are able to achieve outsize effects if they are successful.
I don't know precisely how you could balance out the interest of "we are a clandestine organization that needs to operate with minimal exposure to the public and maximal discretion to act without immediate accountability" and "there needs to be someone NOT beholden to the organization keeping an eye on us to jerk the reins when we misbehave."
I suppose the position of Royal Spymaster will always end up occupied by a figure who will use access to high level intelligence and intrigue to obfuscate his actions so as to avoid accountability. Seems like the question is mostly How do you filter candidates heavily enough that a guy like Beria to run things.
So...what gives? Are modern women just that impulsive when feeling unhappy in a marriage? Or misled? Do they have illusions about singlehood?
Probably similar to the reason a gambler would keep playing even when they're way up and the odds are not in their favor going forward. They could walk away from the table, stick the money in an index fund and enjoy the benefits of it for years to come, or they could go another round and maybe double or quintuple their money!!!
More directly, people in general are bad at considering the long term costs of an action when they perceive a short term benefit that would remove what they perceive as a source of discomfort.
I also think that women, in particular, when they've grown up being showered with male attention, and the had their pick of suitors, they expect that they'll still be a hot commodity once they're out of their marriage. They have been out of the game so long that they don't realize that a 30+ woman, possibly with kids, is simply not going to command the same sort of attention, especially with newer models on the showroom floor.
I don't know how to get across to a woman whose recollection of the dating world is "I went on fun dates with hot guys who paid for everything" that if she tries that now she'll find herself rejected more often and her pickings will be much slimmer.
(This doesn't explain why college educated women are more likely to initiate divorce, I suspect that has more to do with sheer social status)
IMPORTANT EDIT: college educated women are not 'more likely' to initiate divorce than other groups, only that college educated women who get a divorce are the ones initiating it 90% of the time, and husbands 10%. College educated women are less likely to be involved in a divorce either way.
This is not to say that no women end up happy after initiating divorce. My own mother seems to have ended up being quite happy after divorcing and remarrying (my dad is doing alright too). Just that you would have to take claims that they're happy with a grain of salt because they will be VERY vested in projecting the appearance of happiness and retroactively justifying their decision even if from the financial side of it they are OBJECTIVELY worse off.
Like seriously, how many people would you expect to pull the divorce rip cord, find themselves alone and relatively poor (compared to their previous status) and just as unhappy as before, and would then openly proclaim "I made a big mistake, it was all my own doing, and I have irretrievably worsened my quality of life!"
Does the ego even permit that sort of open admission?
faceh
25d ago
I've been willing to pay a couple bucks to rent a film for a movie night, but I do feel utterly betrayed when something I've bookmarked for later consumption is pulled when I actually go to watch it.
My habit now is if there's a series or something I'm watching with friends, I'll download local copies just in case.
faceh
3mo ago
I can say that at the state level, there is a tactic law enforcement uses with regards to confidential informants/insiders/undercover officers to avoid blowing their cover is to put them through a prosecution that inevitably results in probation, on paper, which means as long as they don't get arrested again they'll never be in a jail but at least it looks like they got punished along with the rest.
To be a proper Bayesian I'd need to hear the base rate for how many J6 Defendants got probation sentences, but this does nudge up my belief that Ray Epps was, in some sense or another, involved with the Feds.
I've given a lot of thought to the issue of how you can set up a foundation with your name on it and expect it to stay aligned with your intentions over the course of decades. It's hard, way too many failure modes and attack surfaces you'd have to anticipate and design countermeasures for.
Even in the best case scenario, all it really takes is the last person who knew you when you were alive to die or retire and get replaced by someone who has no connection to you and no respect for your ideals, and then there's no mechanism for forcing adherence to your goals. They turn the ship in a different direction and sail on unabated.
No matter how rigorously you define your terms and how stringent you make your instructions, over time your org will be Ship-of-Theseused into something with the same name and generally the same stated purpose but controlled by actors who may be actively hostile to your desired legacy.
You can hand-pick your successors, but once you're gone there's little guarantee those successors can manage to handpick good successors without serious entropy setting in.
The example that strikes me the most is the Ford Foundation which controls a $16,000,000,000 endowment, and has the stated purpose:
To reduce poverty and injustice, strengthen democratic values, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement.
But when you look at where they actually spend the money, it is pretty indistinguishable from any other standard lefty activist organization.
Underscored by this excerpt from the Wiki:
This divestiture allowed Ford Motor to become a public company. Finally, Henry Ford II resigned from his trustee's role in a surprise move in December 1976. In his resignation letter, he cited his dissatisfaction with the foundation holding on to their old programs, large staff and what he saw as anti-capitalist undertones in the foundation's work.
So yeah, the direct descendant of the guys who set up and funded the Foundation quit because it was falling afar from it's original mission and was becoming anti-capitalist using funds provided by some of the most famous Capitalists of all time.
Took less than 50 years. I can barely imagine how one could ensure your legacy lasts 200 years without losing focus... short of founding a religion with fanatical adherents. I suppose you could pay to train an LLM that will spout your values and is given an endowment of its own to ensure it has server time secured for itself in perpetuity.
The whole problem is that if your foundation controls significant wealth, that will attract all kinds of parasites and scavengers to the 'free calories' and nature will then take its course once there are none remaining to defend the bounty.
faceh
6mo ago
It has been darkly amusing to watch the "NAZIS ARE EVERYWHERE, WE MUST FIGHT BACK" crowd going to bat for the honest-to-goodness "Round up the Jews and exterminate them" authoritarian brigade.
faceh
2mo ago
Please check your arguments to verify that they are solid before presenting a weakman argument for your point.
Okay, I feel a little bad about this, but I was actually presenting a weakman to see if anybody would actually try to argue the counterpoint.
If you want to hear Pelosi's thoughts on the Coronavirus at the time, listen to her exact words, spoken from her own mouth:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=2SKy8XAn5MQ?si=ycMLrkzra7wkEEJD
"PELOSI EASING OUTBREAK FEARS" is the Chyron. This was the official Democrat/lefty position, that racism was the bigger danger, and the virus was of moderate concern because they 'took precautions.' This was aired on January 24, BEFORE she issued her boilerplate press release.
Once again, I saw this with my own eyes. Heard it with my ears. People trying to convince me I was misinterpreting can politely sod off.
Not the most sporting of me, but I also don't appreciate people gaslighting me, and I suspect you're not interpreting my objections in good faith.
faceh
3mo ago
Yep.
I was laughing at how this union is just an arrested development version of the most stereotypical teenager romance for the last 70 years.
The hyper-popular prom queen marrying the football star. Granted Kelce isn't the quarterback, but if his team wins the Superbowl and he proposes to her on the 50 Yard Line it'd be almost the most cliched Americana-style union one could conceive of.
Literal rivers of happy tears will be shed by the women looking on and living vicariously through them.
High School never ends, it seems.
faceh
25d ago
Yeah and probably best practices to not do that.
I dunno man. Why don't we reductio ad absurdum and add furries into the mix?
Say "what if genetic engineering gets SO GOOD that people can incorporate animal biology and become human-animal hybrids or 'manimals' that have many of the psychological traits of other creatures?"
At some point the psychological changes might end up becoming 'irreversible' because they take with them the desire to alter yourself.
Because the implications of this tech would suggest we can ALSO psychologically tweak people to be completely content with their current identity.
What if we could engineer people to feel 100% straight, have no doubt about their biological gender, and no curiosity about experiencing what the other genders were like, and they were about as non-dysphoric as you could get?
Wouldn't that be a little bit preferable to a scenario where people spend resources jumping between body's identities on a mere whim? I mean, in a post-scarcity situation it hardly matters, but as a practical concern it seems MUCH SIMPLER to just have everyone take the "accept your gender identity" pill.
The booze-and-meth of the masses. Get 'em all riled up and take away inhibitions so they get distracted brawling each other.
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