functor
1mo ago
A big part of it is ignoring structural incentives created by political changes. "I can get divorced if I want to get divorced" souds great. But it also creates the incentive structures that causes men to pump and dump women on tinder. "I can sue my ex for tonnes of child support"- sounds great, but my boyfriend of seven years doesn't want to get engaged, doesn't. The thinking is only in one step, government gives me stuff, I want stuff. Not what are the actual consequences of this.
Women can dress however they like sounds lovely. Women are dressing in hyper sexualized ways and compete by having translucent leggings as pants and thong bikinis doesn't sound great. You can't have women competing, no rules regarding dress and not expect women to outbid the competition by showing skin.
functor
1mo ago
Reagan was a neocon globalist. A strong focus on military interventionism, free trade and shipping jobs abroad. He didn't really focus on America but a globalized American empire.
functor
1mo ago
Vietnam has low taxes, social conservatism and super business friendly policies while having hammer and sickle flags along the streets and a political system that celebrates Lenin. The republicans are going to talk about how great Reagan was while under no circumstances wanting to talk about his policies since Reagan's agenda are pretty much the opposite of MAGA. Republicans will like the aesthetic while refusing to even acknowledge the ideas.
functor
1mo ago
I find it strange, we live in a self centered era in which people care a lot about image and status. In a social media fueled age in which cosmetic surgery is doing better than ever I would have expected people to spend more effort than ever on looks.
functor
1mo ago
My guess is that a lot of streamers are cheating. The pro players have to train for hours a day, manage competition and then stream for hours. While IQ is a primary requirement for becoming a chess pro, mental stamina is essential for success. Streaming requires working on regular hours even if one is tired or not in the mood. While streaming, the viewers want fast decisions and the streamer is supposed to quickly find brilliant moves and analyzes on the fly.
Cheating on streams is probably less about improving play and probably more about mentally offloading the streamer.
functor
1mo ago
The same could have been said for the Algerians who then took their land back.
Being given a deal where you are evicted from your ancestral homeland and forced out into the desert with no right to even return to the place you where born because some Eastern Europeans claim it is theirs is absurd.
functor
1mo ago
It is easier than that. Journalists are basically rehashing press releases and are doing little actual reporting. Start a think tank and start producing press releases and your "reporting" will seep into the media as factual news. Buying entire institutions is obviously the most powerful tool but there are many less powerful tools that are cheap. Get social media influencers to promote your cause.
functor
1mo ago
What else does the mainstream left have then the nazi-scare? Free medical care, cheap housing and no more forever wars are popular policies with the base but the elite veto these policies. Trans ideology is losing steam and winning 50+% of votes on trans issues and BLM isn't going to work. What are they going to run on? Free trade fundamentalism, open borders migration and increased deficit spending? The only other issue that they really could run on is a repeat of the inflation reduction act. However, this would require massive deficit spending.
The democrats have Trump = Putin and Trump = Hitler. Other than that they have few policies of their own that they could actually win on.
functor
1mo ago
Dotcom bubble was a bubble because there were no users. The reasoning was along the lines of 20% of all shoe sales in 2010 will be online. Company x has started to sell shoes online so in 10 years they will make billions. They had no sales and no where close to amazon's supply chain.
Chatgpt has millions of daily users. This is more akin to the boom of companies created when the world got smart phones. Those companies made money.
functor
1mo ago
We are going to win a trade war with China! We are going to bring the factories home!
A few companies add a few GW of base load demand and people start freaking out. The failure to build electricity has got to be one of the largest self owns ever.
functor
1mo ago
Unemployment is low and humans have been replaced by machines for 250 years. If anything we would stagnate if we were unable to boost productivity.
There are other productivity improvements from AI, such customer service outside of office hours speeding up bureaucratic processes, rapid prototyping and making it easier to start companies and more. This should improve the overall economy.
functor
1mo ago
People underestimate the size of the labour market. Replacing 1% of global labour is tens of millions of workers. The cost isn't just the salary, employees are expensive. The AI companies set the bar too high by promising AGI and replacing the majority of all coders and other promises that won't materialize. Luckily, they don't even have to come close to those lofty goals for AI to have a massive impact.
functor
1mo ago
functor
1mo ago
The Palestine situation is not over. Israel is continuing to oppress Christians, is continuing to occupy parts of the west bank, is continuing its war in Syria and is continuing its meddling in other country's policies. AIPAC's absurd meddling hasn't gone away. The US is still wasting billions and billions on Israeli interests in the middle east and Israel is still making it hard for refugees to return from Europe.
functor
1mo ago
California has a climate similar to Mediterranean countries.
Instead of being inspired by Italy:
Clearly there is a lot of California building regulation that needs to be tossed out. Especially LA is such a wasted opportunity and it could have been one of the nicest cities in the world.
functor
1mo ago
What did people expect? The US places sanctions on China with a clear goal to keep the Chinese economy down and people expect them just to accept it?
The US occupied a neighboring country for 20 years killing hundreds of thousands of people and had massive airforce bases right next to China. Last week Trump talked about retaking the airforce bases so it would be easier to bomb China. The Chinese are just going to accept it? The US just stole tiktok and China is just supposed to accept it?
functor
1mo ago
The issue is that most jobs don't require excellence or speed, they require not screwing up. A driver can be the fastest, cheapest most reliable driver for years but if the driver causes one major accident the driver is an awful driver. There are plenty of bumbling lawyers who keep their job. If a lawyer is 10x productive, writes beautiful contracts and solves seemingly insolvable disputes for years, it counts for nothing if they do something once that will get them disbarred.
What matters isn't the median speed or accuracy of performed tasks, it is the severity of the three standard deviation worst screw ups that count. I really don't see the one in five thousand worst decisions by an AI not being worse than the one in five thousand decisions made by a human professional. Until then AI will be limited in a professional environment.
It will remain super useful for search, making funny videos, helping people fix things etc.
functor
1mo ago
Do the people opposing ICE really believe that large scale unregulated immigration from Latin America will actually benefit the US? Mexico is in a state of permanent civil war. The countries that the migrants are coming from are low trust, violent societies with major dysfunction. I am not really seeing the endgame here. Importing labour in an unregulated way from third world countries is going to dump wages.
It seems like they are taking a position which they themselves know is losing in the long term for some other benefit that I can't see.
functor
2mo ago
Being hamstrung by dumb rules of engagement is a common complaint of GWOT veterans.
Imagine going half way around the world to someone else's home and complaining that you can't commit more war crimes against locals who never at any point asked you to be there.
The GWOT failed because they failed at building alliances with locals and getting support. Not a single Afghan wanted to defend Kabul. The Afghan national army had zero motivation and nobody in Afghanistan believed in the occupation regime. Killing more Afghans would not have strengthened their enthusiasm for a corrupt regime.
Rather than killing more villagers they would have needed troops that spent years in villages building relations with locals and working on creating alliances with local figures. More gung ho recent arrivals from Texas who are trigger happy and want to go out and slaughter locals would have turned into a Vietnam scale fiasco.
functor
2mo ago
The US was founded by people who used violence against the government and made it a constitutional right to bear arms. If you had asked the founding fathers about the NSA, the crazy levels of nepotism and corruption and how self-centred the American elite is, they wouldn't have called shooting them terrorism. What level of incompetence and acting like the elite in Versailles is required for the constitutional right to fight back to take effect?
functor
2mo ago
I have hired 10+ devs in the past few months and interviewed hundreds.
The job market is turning into tinder. We post one small add and get bombarded with a thousand applicants who haven't bothered to read the job description. The applicants are like guys on tinder swiping on thousands of profiles while treating it like a numbers game. The hot women employers are using algorithms to cleanse out most of the applications and rejecting profiles after viewing them for seconds.
My advice is to network as much as possible IRL. This can meet tech meetups but try other venues as well. Try to find people not working in tech and hang out with them. Do not spend time at home. Meet as many people IRL as possible.
As for resumes, I have to go through hundreds of them. I am not going to read through them all in detail. It has to be easy to take a quick glance and for something to catch the reader's eye. As for the competition it is easy to be better than 95%. Assuming you aren't Pakistani with broken english with a tad of frontend experience you are above average.
functor
2mo ago
30% of Palestine was Christian before Israel started to destroy the Christian population of Palestine. Non of the war mongering has helped the countries in the middle east.
Also if they are so civilizationally incompetent, the last thing we would want would be a Palestinian refugee crisis. Therefore they need to stay put.
The Tories are dying, the CDU is dying, mainstream republicanism is dying. The "right wing" elite has little to offer its voters and consistently fail. People aren't voting republicans for more wars in the middle east, cheap Indian labour and a deregulated wall street.
They try to brand Fuentes as extreme when his policies are having an immigration policy that would make America far safer, more cohesive and that would benefit labour. Meanwhile, we are supposed to pretend that invading Iraq was sensible Milquetoast policy.
The left has a similar problem in that establishment Democrat policies don't deliver to their base either. Parading the first DEI person at some post while delivering neoliberal economics isn't what the base desires. Most likely we are going to see a revolt within both parties that turns both sides into internal shit shows. The establishment controls the campaigns and the seats, the base refuses to vote and to do activism.
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