I think the trend in influencer boxing is kind of a good thing insofar as it inspires otherwise directionless young men to gain some martial prowess.
But end of the day I'm bored of the pointless spectacle of this type of exhibition. Nobody's earning any real glory here, and we're definitely not getting to see the pinnacle of the sport, with the best competitors squaring off under a 'fair' ruleset and neutral officiants. Even if they're fighting 'for real' we're not really getting a definitive measure of who the better competitor is.
Oh, and you can just add in that the other Paul brother literally performs in the WWE.
So diversifying out to a different combat sport is probably part of the strategy.
Sometimes feels like we're hitting the purest distillation of sports as a moneymaking enterprise. The Athletic performance and outcome of the contests becoming fully secondary to the amount of money that can be earned from the spectacle. Get enough people to watch and to bet on the outcome (on both sides) and it no longer matters so much if you win or lose.
Which Jake Paul seems to have realized.
Where every single sports league is 100% commodified and there's no remaining connection between the team as an entity and their geographic location. You might as well play all the games in the same place at a certain point, why bother making the teams travel all around to play the games anymore? Make the fans fly to you! And it'll make it easier for players to swap to new teams too.
Hell, they should make it so that teams can trade players with each other during the games, that would add some interesting chaos! Its not like there's much loyalty left in the system, too much money to be made.
When all it means to be a 'fan' of a team is to throw money at them and let your emotional state be dictated by their performance. Its not like you can say you grew up in the same town as them, went to the same school, or share any genetic lineage with them. These are top talents scouted from around the country, often around the world, and you get to pay to watch them play, what does it matter whether they're wearing the same logo that you are?
I'm sure its been this way for a while, but yeah, even when its not blatantly scripted like pro wrestling, feels like the fix is always in, the game is designed to profit the players (and coaches, and owners, and advertisers...) and the fans, spectators and bettors are just there to provide the liquidity.
faceh
6d ago
@blooblyblobl did make a case that we're far off from fully human-capable robots, although specialized ones are obviously becoming more common.
faceh
6d ago
It created ample unemployment among industries where the machines were just flat out better than a human could be.
The whole premise with AGI is that it can in theory be better at everything that a human could do.
If we manage to achieve this path, I might consider it evidence that God (or the simulation masters) exist and loves humans.
Since this is the exact path we'd need to tread to avoid massive fallout from our demographic crisis while also avoiding entirely the existential risk issue.
I think the question that does need addressing even in this case is sincerely what to do about those who are dumber than AI on average, but can still perhaps do meaningful work under AI supervision or instruction. I don't want to relegate any humans to 'sheep' status, even if they are sort of happy under that paradigm.
Me, I kind of want to have a world where there's 'expert systems' almost everywhere, AIs that are specialized in various tasks (self driving cars being one example) and humans thus are still doing plenty of high-level decisionmaking, maybe consulting the big AI oracles when they do so.
But it does seem inevitable that people are going to be all too happy to offload any and all 'hard' decisions to AI and gleefully follow recommendation its makes even if its not superintelligent enough to optimize everyone's lives everywhere for maximum wellbeing.
So there is still a nightmarish scenario where the upkeep of our society is now 100x more complex thanks to all the work required to keep the AIs running, we can't really focus as much as we'd like on just things that make us happy since we're constantly being directed around to do all the tiddly little maintenance tasks, and if we get a disaster that breaks the AIs or similar breakdown, things will regress so fast all at once that we won't be able to prevent a full collapse.
I have thought on the hypothesis that Older males are acting in ways that inhibit up and coming young bucks because they instinctively(?) view them as competition for resources and, yes, mates that could unseat them from positions they very much feel they have earned and are entitled to keep.
Is it purposeful but maybe not 'intentional' behavior, throwing up obstacles for up-and-comers, giving them half-baked or outdated advice, and gleefully implementing social policies that systemically exclude such men under the veneer of 'equality', all in the name of keeping those possible competitors from threatening their current grasp on power.
I can think of multiple events in the Bible, for instance, where an older male in power seeks to inhibit or literally kill a younger upstart 'rival' to keep him from unseating him. You know why Saul wanted David (i.e. the dude who slew Goliath) dead? There was a literal prophesy that David would be king. And Saul wanted his son to be King. Even though his son liked David. Oh, keeping things relevant to the season, Jesus' birth caused King Herod to slay every single male under age two in Jerusalem for fear of being unseated decades later.
I could see this dynamic playing out writ large on the civilizational scale.
But there's little research on this point, and I don't think anyone has admitted to feeling this way or using this to guide their decisions, so I don't feel I can prove this with any strength.
Part of the evidence I've seen in favor of this hypothesis is that nepotism is still clearly a way to get ahead for white males. Note that I do not consider nepotism inherently a bad thing. That is, older men still clearly favor their progeny for advancement, they aren't throwing their own sons to the wolves... but it would then stand to reason that they are being much more suspicious of males they aren't related to and would feel fewer qualms about kicking out the ladder that those kids might use to advance.
Being a little bit petty, notice that Alexander Soros gets to be the heir apparent of his father's massive empire. The same father who has spent B-I-L-L-I-O-N-S of dollars implementing the exact policies and pushing the exact ideas that led to the issue the OP article identified.
It would stand to complete reason that George Soros might elevate a proud woman of color to take over his empire. But he chose his own male child, and said son, despite claiming to share his father's priorities, happily accepts. WHAT GIVES? (This is not an antisemetic dogwhistle, for those who have already instantly thought along those lines.)
So yeah, there's the real possibility this is all just an evolutionary arms race with the genes that favor their own kin implementing a cultural superweapon to generate an advantage in the great game of environmental fitness.
In 1975 you had to deal with the sweaty young men who worked for you because that was who the firm hired. In 2020 you could become ‘executive mentor’ to a bunch of pretty, 28-32 year old Asian, Indian and white women under the guise of “equity and inclusion” and be praised for it.
Just had to watch out for MeToo accusations. I noted that some evidence against my hypothesis is that older men were still getting sniped with being sex pests, and no matter how much power they had this was often enough to get them removed and unable to return to their former glory.
You can ascribe some of that to intra-elite competition.
Plenty of young dudes caught up in it as well, but if this were an 'intentional' play by older males to thin out the competition, it surely backfired on many of them, and hurt their overall ability to use their own power to procure sex from young women, which they certainly would not prefer to happen.
This likely also plays into the whole Epstein debacle, but I will leave that aside.
faceh
9d ago
My personal push would be to form a unified group that pledges simply to withhold tax payments while this particular discrimination regime is allowed to continue.
Needs to be enough buy-in that "they can't prosecute all of us" is a legitimate factor. And ideally pool funds to pay for attorneys for those who do get tried.
Yes, there's like a dozen ways the state can crack down on this, but that would actually force them to cross those lines OR negotiate.
It's harder to disrupt or de-legitimize such a group compared to one that threatens violent martial resistance. Hence why this approach would probably beat forming an informal militia.
faceh
9d ago
Ding ding ding.
And then there's the added problem of "oh, and any other field you might want to try could arbitrarily be closed off to you if it ever becomes lucrative and high-status enough for entryists to target."
Well, its pretty clear that you'd prefer to live in this era in terms of the sheer abundance of any goods you could want, and the technology available.
But the inability to parlay that into a meaningful life is... problematic.
faceh
9d ago
The contradiction is "you cannot save yourself from a literal systemic issue, coordinated action is necessary."
The point that needs to come across is "everyone else is coordinating with others to your disadvantage, you need to coordinate with others to prevail."
Boomer advice that ignores this sets people up for failure.
The institutions being hostile demonstrates that you cannot, in fact, save yourself without defeating those institutions. You cannot defeat those institutions by following the advice of going it alone. Its a contradiction in terms when you acknowledge the underlying fact.
faceh
10d ago
I still feel genuinely uncomfortable being super-sensitive to racial politics even as I realize "huh, I guess a lot of people do despise me just because I'm white."
Like, to the extent almost every other ethnic group has massive bias toward people who share their genetic makeup, the only viable strategy in response is to assume any individual of said group I encounter is biased against me until proven otherwise. It feels like I'm sitting there thinking "Okay, I know what stereotypes I'm expecting you to conform to... please please please don't confirm them."
After a certain point, the heuristics just prove too useful to ignore.
faceh
10d ago
I'd argue that the are available (look up Veterans using and abusing VA disability status, for example) but men are shamed for using them in ways that single moms and minorities of course are not.
No such thing as a welfare program designated specifically for them, however.
faceh
10d ago
Disagree, although I see the point. Most 'great men' commit some acts which would be considered atrocities if they didn't 'win.'
This is genuinely the other side of the coin for all the gender/dating wars discourse. All the pressure is being put on the men to improve and jump through whatever hoops women require in order to get one... and every avenue for improvement is being cut off and the hoops have been set on fire, lifted 500 feet in the air, and suspended over a pit full of poisoned spikes. And men are told "just jump higher, it is still doable!"
The whole "pull yourself up by your bootstraps, nobody is coming to save you, life doesn't owe you anything" mindset/'advice' that gets handed down to young men is blatantly contradicted by the fact that the entire social, legal, and political fabric is arrayed against them achieving the most reliable, rewarding paths to long-term success. On the margins, a lot of these guys will be completely wrecked because they followed the standard advice to a tee and had their path blocked anyway, leading them into a depression spiral.
And so when similar advice comes down with regard to the dating market, "Become worthy of women, nobody will set you up but you, women don't owe you anything" and men notice that they are in fact being selected against based on factors they can't control it starkly informs them that literally nobody is on their side, they have no 'allies.' And so older guys giving such advice will sort themselves into the 'enemy' category for simply failing to see that the situation is now actively intolerable to anyone trying to follow the standard advice.
And this wouldn't be quite so utterly intolerable if it weren't for the fact that these same dudes are going to be paying most of the taxes and will be expected to continue to be productive so as to subsidize their own disenfranchisement and replacement. They can't even really say "screw you, I'm taking my ball and playing somewhere else" because they will be compelled to pay into the system regardless.
On the one hand, you've got women who are increasingly rejecting settling for men and claiming its because they fail to measure up to said women's standards. Standards which have drastically inflated in recent times, whilst the standards women apply to themselves have basically evaporated. She can literally be an active prostitute for the entirety of her twenties and then 'expect' to settle down for a guy who will care for her (whether she gives him kids or not) in her 30's.
Then on the other, men are getting actively nerfed in their ability to advance their careers and they see additional competition is introduced from foreigners and their competitors are getting subsidized meanwhile Old Boomers are squatting in the seats of real wealth and power (and deflecting blame) and adding to the criticism of these young men. Oh, and some old wealthy boomers are also directly snatching up eligible women in their twenties and directly contributing to the aforementioned sky-high standards without a hint of irony. So young men notice that going for absolute degenerate crypto gambling and harebrained startup schemes are the only 'hack' to get yourself out of this rat race that aren't completely stacked against you. Its still gambling, but at least chaos is fair. (Note, I don't actually believe that, but I see the reason it would be preferable.)
And every step of the way, from every angle (except guys like Andrew Tate) they're informed that they are the problem. And if they crash out over this, that is seen as proof positive that they're the problem. In England, apparently, they can get literally jailed for complaining about some of this.
Whatever arguments you want to make about the improvement in material conditions for young men over the past couple decades, their social standing has been eroded to the point they can't actually use that material wealth to satisify their actual desires (marriage, kids, respect, social esteem, and purpose) and are constantly, CONSTANTLY at risk of losing that wealth for making the sort of misstep that today can get you arrested but in the Boomers' day would have been the subject of a classic comedy film.
I'm so glad you made that point so I can post this.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/spacex-launch-site-boca-chica-texas-60-minutes-plus/
Granted these are more a shakedown attempt than a true attempt to stop the process.
faceh
15d ago
And yet you get people screaming about water and electricity usage (being fair, the latter is a concern).
They have successfully shut them down before:
https://www.kold.com/2025/12/02/county-city-leaders-amazon-pulls-out-embattled-project-blue/
I agree with your overall point, datacenters are less objectionable than average... so imagine what building anything more objectionable would take!
Let me just say for the record, I am SO glad that NASA exists simply because by building out their facilities at Cape Canaveral back when Florida was barely populated, we've got a large rocket launch complex that didn't have to be built in barely accessible mountains or something. Can you imagine the fuss residents would put up if someone suggested building 40 launchpads near a populated area?
faceh
15d ago
And more to the point... I don't think the real contention was that America CAN'T build. But between all the bureaucracy, environmentalism regs, NIMBYs, and cost disease, it just costs WAY more than it probably 'should' and thus things only get built if someone is enthusiastically willing to fund the process. Once they do, things happen very fast.
With Datacenters, we have motivated buyers utterly flush with cash so the cost obstacle is surmounted, at which point all the other steps can be done.
As I'm fond of pointing out, Florida built a high-speed rail system before California even broke ground on theirs because there were many many fewer unnecessary obstacles to doing it. Simple as.
faceh
16d ago
Yep.
Maybe if we don't want centralized control over vote counts, we could still have some central FedGov fund for paying the election expenses of given districts so long as they meet certain standards and can pass an audit.
And maybe those that fail, rather than toss out that election's results, the punishment is that their votes won't count in next cycle.
faceh
16d ago
Either way, communities that can't secure their elections shouldn't get their votes counted.
I see the risk factor being malicious actors throw the count off to get certain districts disqualified.
It is such an odd situation, you can't really train many 'professional' poll managers for an event that happens like one day every two years.
So we rely on volunteers with minimal training and small motivation to go above and beyond the call of duty.
It sucks that this once again seems like something trivial to do in a 'high trust' society. But as trust degrades suddenly it becomes almost intractable.
Generally speaking, I will never, ever fault somebody for putting their beliefs up for scrutiny, when they've actually made their arguments clear and aren't ignoring inconvenient data or hiding that they have a pecuniary interest in making you believe what they're saying.
Its admirable specifically because people will ignore that it was a well reasoned, researched, and even-handed prediction about a topic of great uncertainty, and will mock it for getting details wrong while still being mostly right directionally. You take a risk to your status to try and elucidate the topic for everyone. Sure beats people trying to obsfuscate as a status play.
The thing that gets me is that OF COURSE every single AI company is actively trying to create an AGI. Whether that is what they admit or they even expect to achieve it seems irrelevant, they're acting in ways that would bring it about, and bring it at the fastest pace they can achieve.
I'd love to see someone as smart and persuasive write the definitive "AGI Never" paper, predicting when capabilities will plateau and never improve, with falsifiable metrics to compare over time. I just do not think there's an argument that can do so successfully.
faceh
17d ago
If we design a procedure that makes it trivial to give foreign powers leverage over people, then we should expect them to use it.
Well, there was a whole whole thing about Russia allegedly recruiting Trump with a pee tape or something.
The only thing that makes controlling people involved in elections valuable is the aforementioned trillions of dollars tied up in the outcomes, and of course Diplomatic/military consequences.
All the more reason to take the 'extreme' measures to secure them.
I suspect the vast majority of citizens to be honest citizens.
If you'd asked me this 10 years ago I might agree.
Nowadays, I'm not willing to say even a bare majority are.
But I do believe they respond to incentives! Be those incentives from malicious actors, foreign powers, or their own government.
I simply note that a lot of Election Officials don't have strong incentives for good behavior, and its probably insufficient to 'reward' good behavior on their part.
Which leaves...
Reading the link, most of what happened in Broward County in 2018 is standard-issue incompetence causing waste and delay, but not affecting the ballots.
Yes.
And if the incompetence is significant enough, that's precisely where someone would hide the fraud.
The money quote literally says:
"we are unable to provide assurance over the accuracy of the November 2018 election results as reported.”
Add that to the issue:
"Half of Broward County’s election precincts reported more ballots cast than the number of voters."
And that's precisely the place you'd want to look for fraudsters. But oh so luckily the process was so badly done that we can't really determine what the numbers should be.
If you're trying to swing elections, you WANT there to be enough plausible deniability that the numbers can't be directly challenged. Can't do that if things are well-run and accurate.
But its REALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLYY convenient that the places where the 'incompetence' is actually so serious all tend to trend the same way on election night.
For 2018, if you add Palm Beach and Broward together (they are adjacent counties, BTW) there's about 1.3 million votes recorded between the two of them. It would be feasible if not likely to hide 10k-30k false votes in there if spread around enough, which as mentioned would be enough to swing the Senate race and several of the state-level executive races.
It is driven by widespread sloppiness, corner-cutting, incompetence, and insecurity that means losing candidates can spam plausible fraud allegations and election officials can't refute them.
The one thing I don't think that the architects of our Democratic processes realized was that literal Trillions of Dollars would become tied up in the outcomes that can swing with <100,000 votes.
And yet, I've lived in Florida long enough to see it go from being THE SINGULAR EXAMPLE of sloppy election processes (2000 was the year of 'hanging chads') to running effectively flawless elections that report on time and accurately. The state has only gotten more populous since then, too.
Its like so many complaints about social problems are disproven with a straightforward counterexamples.
"Oh man violent crime is complex and multi-factorial, you can't just arrest your way to safety." Why'd it work for El Salvador?
"Bureaucratic waste is inevitable, and achieving real cuts to government spending is futile because all the incentives run the other way." Why'd it work for Argentina?
"Elections are complicated and chaotic, and counting millions of votes quickly AND accurately isn't viable in many places. Incompetence will always seep in." Why'd it work for Florida?
So maybe the solution is to just send Desantis on a tour to every single state with fucked up elections and he can show them precisely what to fix.
This is a general problem with making highly-visible solutions to non-existent problems a key part of your politics.
Its clearly not non-existent. And if merely announcing the penalty is sufficient to scare people from doing it, so much the better.
That was actually the argument I made back when Desantis put together his election fraud task force or what-have-you.
Merely being aware that there's people out looking for it is a disincentive.
What are your 'load-bearing beliefs?' The ones that, if they were disproven (to your epistemic satisfaction) would actually 'collapse' your worldview and force a reckoning with your understanding of reality.
I'm definitively talking about the "is" side of the is/ought distinction. Not your moral beliefs or 'hopes' for how things will turn out.
And not focused on such dry, mostly undisputed facts like "the earth's gravity pulls things towards it center" or "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell."
Ideally beliefs that you consistently use to make predictions about actual events, despite not having sincere certainty about their accuracy.
One that I've been leaning on a lot lately: "Intelligence tends to be positively (if imperfectly) correlated with wisdom."
This is probably the one thing preserving my general optimism for humanity's future.
There are definitely high-IQ sociopaths running about, but I strongly believe that the world would be in a much worse place if the smartest apes amongst us were not also generally aware of their own limitations and were trying to make good decisions that considered more than just short term interests.
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