fren
1yr ago
Is this really how you search? Not "how to improve stage presence for guitarist" or "guitarists with best stage presence"? Because I just typed those into google and all the results are perfectly relevant.
Google search has gotten worse, no doubt. SEO has turned into algorithms building entire networks of blogs with GPT-like content on every topic. Sometimes I get two paragraphs into a blog before I realize the content was algo-generated. Much like the latest GPTs, often it has the info I was looking for. I think censorship and subtle ways of steering people away from undesirable opinions also plays a role depending on what you're looking for.
Google used to have a 'discussions' search option that would only give you results from reddit, forums, and the like. It was great for getting different views and back-and-forth problem solving. Its been years and I'm still upset they removed it.
DDG has been my default search for a while and most of the time I end up having to go back to google to find what I want. Google's getting worse but is still the best out there.
fren
1yr ago
SBF and his friends stole billions of dollars. Either they go to jail at some point, or they manage to sneak away like most crypto fraudsters. Neither outcome would be remarkable.
This kind of gotcha journalism is lame. SBF gives the same so slow stupid answers to every question and never really says anything concrete. Hopefully his new lawyer can convince him to stop embarrassing himself.
fren
1yr ago
Love Elon. He makes 'move fast and break things' work at scale. He has reasonable and level-headed takes on most issues.
The twitter focus is simple. Solving the problem of online discourse and cultural degeneracy is as important (if not more) as sustainability and space colonization.
After the chaos of the mass firings, twitter still works fine and is getting more users than ever. Elon understands the importance of engagement metrics and seems to be monitoring them closely.
There are many possible avenues of monetization once you have the attention of billions of users. Selecting and implementing them as revenue sources in an effective manner as the corporation drowns in debt and bleeds money is just the kind of challenge Elon is made for.
If he integrates crypto effectively, I may even have to make an account myself.
fren
1yr ago
Find a market near you that sells large aloe vera leaves. Cut a section near the base and slice the flesh through the middle. The soft texture of the flesh and natural skin-nourishing gel lubricant are what I would consider a serious value-add. I would never use a plastic "toy" or oil-based or synthetic lube, it would probably cause a reaction as my skin is kind of sensitive.
fren
1yr ago
Musk twitter poll on reinstating Trump. 60% Yes at 1.8M votes.
Bold considering some significant fraction of online Trump people have moved to other platforms, Gab, Gettr, .win, Truth, others.
fren
1yr ago
So this "Effective Altruist" was funneling money to the Democratic Party and has a multi-million dollar bet against Trump 2024.
His promo video talks about "climate change" and "pandemic preparedness", literally the two most over-promoted fashionable causes where almost all funding has been a waste or worse exacerbated problems for people who need the most help around the world.
Sorry, SBF is a joke using the EA label as a shield from scrutiny and to bolster his brand.
But we have to admit SBF and Caroline seem to fit the rationlist communities stereotypes. Honestly I see a bit of myself in them: eschewing materialism and living an apparently humble lifestyle, the chill math-nerd vibes, passion for technology and making the world better, the girl looking ten years younger than she is - she could be getting fisetin from the source as me for all I know.
To me this is one of the best things about this little ideological pocket of the internet. We can approach the world with the same sort of curiosity and skepticism, read a lot of the same material from SSC and elsewhere, and yet end up in wildly different places in terms of our beliefs and values. And then come together to try to understand each other.
That's one of the key things that made the motte (and other rat-adjacent communities) valuable and interesting. We are not all the same. Although the motte participants seem to be more right-skewed, there are lot of obedient conformist woke types that follow a lot of the same content.
So now we have a situation where one of the most successful people to be associated with this sphere turns out to have ruined a bunch of people's lives and defrauded major investors of billions. If Rationalism was some kind of united community, this would be a chernobyl. But we're not. Some of us believe that the elements of rationalism that think "we know so much better than everyone else" needed to be taken down a notch and this event only helps.
It's high time we moved to post-rat anyways. The idea of rationalizing your way through the worlds most complex problems was a dead end. EA might have made sense in a stable world with clear optimization pathways. What we are confronting now is a profound social and cultural shift where anything with positive connotations seems to get usurped for evil purposes under the guise of doing good. The collective actions of the world's elite are displaying an almost schizophrenic form of control: e.g. malaria nets to save lives while warning about overpopulation.
I could care less about how this affects the rationalist community. What we're really trying to do here is avoid the bullshit on the rest of the internet where you submit a post with relevant information trying to add nuance to a debate and it turns into just trying to figure out which "side" you're supporting. We can continue that regardless of what happens, and perhaps over time more people will see value in it.
fren
1yr ago
The point is that more real economic activity needs done with crypto for it to truly make a difference. It's incredible it's gotten as far as it has without interacting with the real world much, but that is changing. the future will depend on people's willingness to use it and if they keep getting scared away or dismissing it, it will be a slow process. But it's looking inevitable barring some major catastrophe.
Lightning network may be a dead end (although it is still growing), as it is crippled by the ignorance and stubbornness of the bitcoin maxi's, but there are hundreds of other payment solutions being built on other crypto platforms. It's a race at this point and either the bitcoiners will compete or they won't.
Not to mention there are actual use cases of crypto today in countries with unstable financial systems.
Most of the companies and technologies you mention are exploring applications for crypto in their organizations. You may not see what problems it can solve, but millions of other people do.
FYI: DEXes exist on many networks, not just ETH, and cross-chain DEXes are becoming a thing.
fren
1yr ago
Sorry, I have to say it. This is good for crypto.
People are far too trusting with these centralized exchanges that are basically unregulated and provide very little transparency as to how they manage user funds. The more events like this happen, the more people will learn that the whole point of crypto is to not blindly trust an organization because they have their name on a stadium or advertise everywhere on social media.
Hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger has reported "massive outflows" from exchanges to the self-custody wallets they make. It appears people are learning.
The crypto space is still a wild west rife with scams, opaque systems, and deceptive marketing. This is just yet another expensive lesson for the newbies that joined in the 2021 bull market cycle.
The collapse of FTX came not a moment too soon. SBF, noted for playing League of Legends while on a fundraising call with investing giant Sequoia capital (and apparently squeezing in a round last night while dealing with the collapse of his empire) had been lobbying Washington for legislation that targets decentralized protocols and would grant favorable status to his exchange platforms. He was just behind George Soros as the #2 donor to the Democrats.
This event targets centralized exchanges as the source of systemic risk and highlights how decentralized open-source infrastructure is the safer, anti-fragile path forward. The progress being made here is remarkable and could soon make exchanges like FTX largely obsolete. Just over 2 years ago, the first decentralized exchange (DEX), Uniswap, launched and was slow and extremely expensive to use. Now we have an ecosystem of DEXes running on many blockchain networks, offering low-fee, fast, leveraged trading, limit orders, and supposedly soon, decentralized order books. The billions of dollars of capital poured into this ecosystem have not all been siphoned away by fraudsters, the world of decentralized finance is expanding and innovating rapidly. Web3/blockchain is now one of the most common career paths for CS grads. The opportunity and dream of a new financial system still lies ahead, and its future is brighter than ever.
To make a difference in the wider world where our freedoms and independence are being aggressively stripped from us day by day, more real economic activity needs to take place on decentralized, open networks. I'm still waiting for substack to open BTC lightning payments. Macro-economic content network Real Vision has pivoted heavily toward crypto and yet they won't let you pay for a subscription with cryptocurrency. It's very rare to see any online business accept crypto apart from donations to the odd independent creator, never mind seeing crypto acceptance at your local market or corner store. So we have a ways to go yet. But to be fair, we are just now getting to the point where transaction speed and convenience are at a point where they could be easily used in point-of-sale applications in the real world.
If you care about censorship and individual liberty, you'd be wise to get up to speed on crypto self-custody and see what you can do to use it more as "money" in your daily life.
fren
1yr ago
The value of a dollar comes from, er, somewhere? You need dollars to pay taxes? Everyone else wants dollars so you want them to trade them with those suckers who want them? Something about oil? [...]
That all makes sense so far.
Does it though?
The value of the dollar comes from our belief that it has value, primarily. Also because people have debts denominated in dollars and need them to pay those debts down, including foreign entities in the offshore dollar market or 'eurodollar system'. The US dollar is the global reserve currency and so USD is always in demand for international trade. Part of the issue we have today is the opacity of offshore dollar markets and the distortion of price signals due to all the international demand for dollars, as observed in the recent volatility in currency markets.
When people say 'print' money, what they really mean is borrow. The confusion -- and apparent ignorance about the effects of government borrowing -- comes from the trends in interest rates over the past 2 decades, namely being so low that interest on debt has been basically negligible. That is just starting to change as more debt gets refinanced at current rates which have risen rapidly this year. If rates stay elevated for some time, the government interest expense is going to be a problem.
Central banks are exploring CBDCs for the reason you describe, more direct control over the money supply. Multiplying balances by a constant is unfair if the value is greater than one, enriching the wealthy exacerbating inequality. If the value is less than one, you are basically implementing a flat wealth tax.
The objection is, can you trust the government with that level of surveillance and control?
fren
1yr ago
Because that would be too obvious. The most successful Israelis accumulate wealth internationally and acquire power in non-monetary ways, and likely recognize the vulnerability of Israel's position and the benefits of keeping it weak in appearance.
In closer correlates of IQ that others noted, like research and technology, Israel is about as far ahead of its peers as you would expect. I'll add that Israel is the smallest country with an operating space program (that goes back to the 60's) and is the only program that launches facing west, against the rotation of the earth, to avoid flying over their friends in the middle east. This loses them about 30% fuel efficiency compared to everyone else.
fren
1yr ago
Well I hope they come to an agreement quickly and this spectacle can end. As a resident of Ontario, I'm honestly shocked by how many people survive here on such meager wages with the cost of living so high. Yet there seems to be no end to the service workers and delivery drivers willing to do these jobs. I guess there are always ways to make ends meet, and for many migrants from around the world it's still paradise by comparison. Sure feels like we're sliding towards a neo-feudal dystopia though.
It's a really bad look for Ford to try to force the contract down their throats, even if some of their demands were a bit much. If going full authoritarian, he should have just dissolved the union altogether...and then moved on to broader education system reform.
fren
1yr ago
Beyond the conflating of money supply inflation, asset price inflation, and consumer price inflation, everyone experiences the erosion of their purchasing power differently and seems to have a weak understanding of how leads and lags affect apparent inflation levels and the tools policy makers can use to combat it.
You can run through all the factors on the supply side, demand side, supply chain issues, protectionism, changing consumer behaviors, shortages & gluts, and so on, and then try to wrap your head around the way money and debt is created/moved/destroyed in the global financial system and how that impacts the money available to consumers with different spending habits, and you'll only realize this is too complex to comprehend.
The simple solution is energy. Energy is directly included in the CPI basket as electricity and fuel, has a significant role other items like transit and air travel, and indirectly affects almost all goods and services as goods need to be manufactured, distributed, stored, and sold, plus people need to move to perform most services.
Fighting inflation generally, but especially for Europe now specifically, can not be done without cheap abundant energy. Draining the SPR was/is the best tool available to the US government to have an immediate effect on inflation however poor a decision that may be in the longer-term strategic context of sustained low oil and gas capex, deteriorating relations with OPEC and Russia, and the strength of the anti-fossil fuel political/social movement in the west.
With debt levels where they are, continued elevated inflation (4%-6%, which doesn't seem like a lot, but it adds up fast) is really the only path forward for major sovereign governments to remain solvent over the coming decade. As long as we are able to produce enough energy, we should avoid major fiscal crises and severe inflation, but that is looking more challenging as time goes by.
fren
1yr ago
One could argue jewishness is at the top of the culture war, which helps explain why it's a weapon for both sides.
The history of the holocaust is perhaps the most powerful victim narrative there is - a people brutally killed by the millions in a way that is modern, industrial, and driven by pure hatred. The powerful victim framing is used by the woke left to attack any opponent who publicly identifies the elites as jews.
Of course, when elements of the legacy left and the woke speak out for the rights of palestinians, the right is not going to forgo the opportunity to use the anti-semitism label against them. Rarely does the left criticize the jewish elites these days, apart from some elements of it that have been driven to the very fringe.
And it is the subject of jewish elites that is the most relevant to the culture war. The insanity of many of the trending cultural movements, the racial conflict, anti-energy "ESG" movements, pedophile story hour, #metoo, ubiquity and desensitization of pornography, pro-war/anti-war, and so on, represent such a regression of humanity that you really have to question the extent to which any of it is organic. Insofar as modern American cultural trends are manufactured, it is with the blessing of the elites.
It does not need repeating that jews are over-represented in the sort of elite circles relevant to shaping cultural narratives, media, banking, politics, media, technology, media.
Not all elites are jews, and not all jews are elites, but ingroup preferences and biases are going to play a role both consciously and unconsciously in the decisions of who is and isn't let in. Not really good or evil, just human (and potentially evil).
But certainly some forces at play in the culture war could be fairly called "evil". Beyond the promotion of degeneracy and "pitchfork people versus torch people" distractions, the most obvious example is the insanity and crushing of the human spirit following the amplification of the fear and hysteria around covid that lasted two years and in some circles persists to today. A rational society led by benevolent elites would be discouraging fear and encouraging calm in response to a novel cold virus.
So we know these elites can use the jewish victim narrative as a shield against criticism and use the vast and well-funded network of "anti-hate" groups to ostracize and ruin their opponents as soon as they start to notice and vocalize the apparent overrepresentation of jews among the people who appear to be perpetuating these evils. One of the most famous people in the world saying "Jews control the banks" and losing access to his bank immediately thereafter brings this into the forefront of the collective consciousness.
With this in mind it's useful to clarify the relevant issue here, which is not jewishness generally, but a group of people that obtains and maintains wealth and power through careful cunning, manipulation, and deception, caricatured in the meme of the "grabbler" and broadly repeated in anti-sesmitic stereotypes dating back centuries.
So what exactly is the connection between all of these elements:
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Over-representation of jews in elite circles of media, banking, politics.
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"Anti-semitisism" as the most stigmatized form of hate.
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Superiority complexes, "goyim", and narrative control / censorship.
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Glamorization of cultural degeneracy and wokeism.
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Demonization of family and traditional values.
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Promotion of racial conflict, and anti-whiteness.
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Covid lockdown hysteria, vaccine apartheid, the pharmaceutical industrial complex.
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Ye sacrificing his career and professional reputation because he's "off this meds".
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Epstein didn't kill himself; human trafficking and blackmail of influential people.
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Financialization of the economy over the past 50 years.
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Debt, compound interest, ESG, growing income/wealth inequality, inflation, and poverty.
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"You will own nothing and be happy"
That is the realm of the jew-illuminati conspiracy. There may even be no connection at all, and the trends we see are just a natural result of free markets, globalization, and technology intersecting with human nature.
The extent to which jewish thought may be influencing the elites control of culture nonetheless warrants some consideration from anyone seeking to understand the culture war, though you won't find any real answers amidst the sea of anti-semitic nonsense out there, and must bear in mind that merely speculating on the connection between nefarious behavior of elites and jewish thought is itself met with hostility and used to further the victim narrative.
Ultimately it is likely a fruitless endeavor, though if the connection is real then continuing to sweep it under the rug is perhaps a recipe for holocaust 2.0. And now, even if you conclusively prove some "evil jews" conspiracy to be true, sharing it widely will only cause problems, you are better off sharing the more nuanced anti-semitic take of "don't kill the jews; kill the jew inside you"; meaning, don't perpetuate any of these toxic cultural elements and resist the temptations of greed, status, and materialism, in favor of a life of service and respect towards others. Because the power to do these evils comes only from exploiting human weakness and temptation, and the more we recognize that and refuse to comply, the weaker that power becomes. In the end, whether the jewish influence is 0% or 100%, isn't that the outcome we should all want?
People on all sides unironically fall for all kinds of stupid crap. Doesn't mean they're wrong, even if they're right for the wrong reasons.
Key distinction: Schwab is not "behind" the cabal, he's in front of it. Any real truther will tell you that the elites with real power don't want their names known and don't want to publicly identified at all. By being a social node for these elites, Schwab's WEF is saying some of the quiet parts loud, and the real elites are generally OK with it because the power they wield is becoming so intense it doesn't really matter. Besides, he knows he'll have people like you help dismiss it all as nonsense and cast those paying attention as crazy conspiracy theorists.
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