functor
1yr ago
I still see no plausible scenario for these AI-extinction events. How is chat-GPT 4/5/6 etc. supposed to end humanity? I really don't see the mechanism? Is it supposed to invent an algorithm that destroys all encryption? Is it supposed to spam the internet with nonesense? Is it supposed to brainwash someone into launching nukes? I fail to see the mechanism for how this end of the world scenario happens.
functor
1yr ago
Transgenderism is religious dogma taken to its logical extreme. The fundamental thesis of the religion is complete mind body dualism. They see humans as a blank slate sould that randomly attached to a body and thereby has had many constraints and suffering imposed on it. Their goal is to liberate the free soul from the constraints of the physical world. The view can't be understood outside their theology. HBD, genetic explanations for class our sex differences, are the ultimate heresy against their religion. They invalidate the core principle and understanding of their theology. The woke ideology is built on a worldview that free souls were created, they were bound to physical constraints through evil and the march of history is toward liberating the soul.
The more tech Silicon Valley take is that this will be done through genetic engineering/AI/fusion powered utopia. The more social science approach is through "justice".
Academia has fallen into a pit because academia consists of writing commentary to other peoples work. In the social sciences the commentary is to a large extent based on philosophers and thinkers that had ideas that are invalid. Rousseau doesn't live up to scientific scrutiny. Yet the ideas that stem from his thinking aren't tossed out. There needs to be a search algorithm that can search citations iteratively and redact those papers whose fundamental principles are false. Papers built on ideas such as "Existence precedes essence" are wrong since your DNA is at least as old as your existence, since you became you at the point of conception or later.
Wokeism in Academia is theologists arguing about the number of angels on a needle. They are taking religious ideas with weak scientific basis and arguing them to their logical conclusion. Transgender issues are so explosive even though they are marginal issues since they fundamentally are a clash of theology. Theologians could spend centuries arguing about the word "Filoque", we are seeing similar debates today centering around the new religion.
functor
1yr ago
Should we really punish people for everything that goes wrong? Can we make a movie if the producer is charged with murder if someone dies? If the principal of a school is responsible for all injuries on the playground, the result is going to be obese kids who aren't allowed to play fun games. Developing new a new medication costs well over a billion, and much of this cost is due to an extreme fear of someone having an adverse side effect. Meanwhile, lots of good ideas for medications get scrapped due to the cost of developing them into products. Humanity has invested far more in coal power than nuclear power in the past 30 years because of the extreme fear of another Chernobyl and the impossibility of insuring nuclear power. Because of that, thousands of people die every day due to coal pollution, which is causing far worse damage than Chernobyl ever did. If anything we are being too cautious and not accepting enough of risk.
functor
1mo ago
The right's support of Israel never made sense. Israel has created a perpetual refugee crisis on Europe's border, it costs a fortune in foreign aid, and it is a PR nightmare. Meanwhile, ADL, AIPAC and every mainstream jewish groups work against the interests of social conservatism in western countries. Simping for the Israel lobby while the ADL wants to ban conservatives off Twitter is a one way relationship. Israel is oppressing Christians and has sponsored terrorist groups in Syria. Israel works to destabilize the region when the rest of us benefit from it being stable.
There is absolutely no reason to burn political capital defending some of the bloodiest and most brutal wars in recent history in the middle east. Israel can't really provide any tangible benefit to social conservatives in the west. Especially not when Ben Gvir who is Minister of National Security of Israel wants to relocate large numbers of Palestinians in the west.
Had Israel supported similar politics in the west as they promote in their own country, it could have worked. But "nationalism for me, open borders for thee", will upset the left in the west that doesn't like nationalism as well as the right in the west that doesn't like the "open borders for thee"-part.
functor
6mo ago
Wages aren't enough to get people to do working class jobs. People will rather make less working as a journalist than work as a plumber. Being a social media strategist or HR will be more attractive than changing diapers and driving trucks. Unless they want to pay wages that are well out of the realm of possibility for content writers it isn't going to work.
The most effective method to get more nurses would be to fire communications majors from government jobs. A sizeable portion of the upper working class and the fallouts of the actual middle class no longer do working class jobs. Instead they get degrees in less demanding subjects from lower tier colleges. The meme of them becoming baristas isn't accurate. Most of them do get office work. However, they would be far more productive welding, building and caring.
functor
6mo ago
The opposition probably has little to do with cold war era politics today and more to do with failed neocon policy. In Europe we have seen the consequences of warmonger in the middle east with large waves of refugees. The enthusiasm for more bombing, fighting and occupying in the middle east is not high when it has been a failure for 22 years with the only tangible result being massive blowback. People don't want 2 million arabs to flee Gaza, people don't want to waste military resources on forever wars and people question the morality of these wars.
Israel has had large immigration from Eastern Europe. Forcefully moving arabs from their home so Belorussian's can build a new house in Palestine is hard to justify. The naval blockade against Gaza, the continuous mistreatment of Palestinians and the creeping expansion of Israel isn't popular.
Furthermore, Israel hasn't really provided any benefit to Europe while continuously causing tremendous headache.
functor
11mo ago
The cynical view is that Conservative legal elites are completely fine with having their embarrassing white nationalist fringe suppressed and don't expect the statute in question to be applied broadly.
Wanting certain ideas in Israel: The only acceptable idea, and opposing them is extremism.
Wanting the same ideas in the US: Embarrassing extremist.
functor
8mo ago
Fake meat products are a bad idea since they will at best fall in the uncanny valley. They are never going to produce real dairy or meat from plants in a factory.
The vegan alternatives producers should stop emulating meat and instead focus on making something that fills the same role. Tasty on the BBQ would be better than almost meat. The goal shouldn't be to approach dairy or meat but instead create a product that fills the same niche. Instead of trying to recreate milk from a cow create an excellent liquid to have in coffee. It doesn't have to be white or resemble milk, it just needs to improve coffee.
functor
10mo ago
The obvious response should be to point out that the mainstream parties have done far worse. Invading Afghanistan killed 200 000 people are tenfolded their heroin production. Two decades of bombing a country can't remotely compare to edgy forum posting. Nationalists in western countries are too quick to accept being the boogeyman when the mainstream parties have flooded Syria with support for jihadists, destroyed Libya for decades to come, invaded Iraq twice, starved the population of Iraq and blocked medicines to Iran during a pandemic. The mainstream parties tears for the migrants seem hollow when the migrants are fleeing their bomb wars.
Compare pointing finger guns on a train and sending soldiers to their home country with the rules of engagement that every boy above the age of 16 will be counted as a combatant.
Why don't politicians who caused a week of rioting in France have to appologize? When will the politicians that caused dozens of terrorist attacks with hundreds of dead have to appologize? When will the politicians whose policies led to a massive increase in rapes appologize? When will they appologize to all the people who have effectively been ethnically cleansed by being forced to participate in white flight due to immigration policies that make life intolerable in their neighborhood.
The true Finns should never appologize, never cede the moral high ground and make it clear which side they percieve as the evil ones.
While it is true that the US isn't using Kurds and Ukrainians to guard the imperial core, the dynamics are similar. The French and British empires had militaries full of colonials towards the end yet few of them were stationed in the UK itself.
War has historically been an elite endeavour. Knights were elite, samurai were elite, patricians fought in the first line in early Rome. WWII was the last war with a meaningful upper class representation in the US. Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq were low class wars. This represents a shift from the elites viewing themselves as stewards of an empire that are on a mission to build a divine empire to seeing the empire as a vehicle for their own personal benefit. This is a major symptom of the decline of the American elite and will show in other aspects of society.
By now, the working class is in poor health and too many think the elites are lizards or hate their leaders to fight. If Iraq happened today, it would be exceedingly difficult to find 150 000 men per deployment cycle. The US has 340 million people yet can't find enough soldiers, which is a massive failure. Military personnel per capita in the US is not high. The deep underlying issue is that few Americans want to serve. After 9/11 there were line-ups outside recruiting offices. If there was a repeat today, there probably wouldn't be.
The US military is recruiting foreign mercenaries. This brings a set of issues:
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Mercenaries are there to get paid. They don't want to die, they aren't fundamentally motivated by the mission, and they want to do the minimum. Expect small level corruption, feet dragging, women getting pregnant in order to skip deployments, cowardess in battle etc.
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The quality of large mercenary armies drop. Small groups of mercenaries motivated by a yearning for adventure can be high quality. In large numbers, mercenaries will mainly be people looking to get paid. They will get people who can't get a better gig. This means high wages combined with mediocre recruits.
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A rift between the elite and what happens on the ground. A mercenary military is lower in skin in the game. People living on Manhattan and the troops fighting will have almost nothing in common. Expect a lower trust society with less cohesion.
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Mercs have low loyalty. Expect more instances of enlisted leaking secrets on discord servers for personal clout, discipline problems, people selling secrets to foreign governments etc.
functor
1yr ago
I used to dislike the liberal media and the left wing journalists in Europe. Now I really miss them. The news in Scandinavia is increasingly becoming press-releases from American NGOs and google translated Washington post articles. The media used to reasonably critical of power, now they are basically reporting their press releases. Scandinavian journalists have barely any knowledge of foreign affairs, they report what the US military industrial complex reports. The perspective is becoming the perspective of Robert Kagan, often with perspectives that don't even make sense for a non-American. Even our public service media is increasingly ending its articles with "according to the Institute for the Study of War".
There seems to be a link between having values on foreign policy similar to John Bolton and being woke in Europe. I strongly believe the consumption of translated materials from Washington elites are behind both trends.
The people who threw rocks at cops during negotiations over free trade agreements 20 years ago and demonstrated against the war in Iraq are turning into major war hawks wanting to defend American liberal hegemony.
functor
1yr ago
The Rosa Parks story misses many essential components. Had it not been for white people they would be back in Ghana without a bus. The biggest beneficiaries of slavery are black people. African Americans have a 12+ year longer life expectancy than the people who stayed in Africa. They have the best infrastructure, education, health care and infrastructure of any black people. Rosa Parks was not oppressed, she got to coast off the achievements of white people. Black people should be grateful for being allowed to live in the south.
Second, when public transit was integrated, it collapsed due to high crime and anti-social behaviour. Integration has lead to decades of crime against every other group, making urban life infeasible in much of the US. The Rosa Parks story needs to include the realities of people who either have to pay a fortune to commute via car and the consequences of that or the consequences of using public transit in the US. There was a reason why segregation was popular and riding public transit through south side Chicago on a Friday night offers an explanation of why segregation existed.
The IRA wanted an Irish Ireland for the Irish. Catalan nationalists want an independent Catalan. Kurdish nationalists want a Kurdistan. If the IRA had been like African Americans, they would have moved to Canterbury and complained incessantly about everything English. African American nationalists are the only ethnic lobbying group that seems to want to be as close to other groups as possible while continuously complaining about them. Teaching their narratives as the only historic narrative is a misrepresentation of history.
functor
1mo ago
The US is an extremely individualist country and is good at individualist projects which makes the US high in innovation. Meanwhile the US is terrible at large scale collective projects. California high speed rail, Vogtle nuclear power plants and a third of the country doing full lockdown during covid while another third are militantly refusing are examples of Americans being incapable of going with one strategy and ramming it through. Going Belarus and having no lockdowns for anyone, or going China and having lockdowns makes more sense than having half the population locked down while others are having raves.
Manufacturing chips is less about individual genius and more of a grand collective vision. The true innovation and genius is a decade ahead of what can be mass-produced. The timeline from physics genius inventing having a stroke of genius on a black board to manufacturing is long. These genius strokes of ingenuity are difficult to keep secret when they are going to be mass-produced. Taking an idea and building a 20 billion dollar plant requires a Herculean effort of tens of thousands of high skill workers pulling together for a common cause. Building high speed rail is less dependent on the next cool startup and more dependent on society as a whole coming together for a prime directive. China didn't invent the electric car, the mosfet chip, nuclear power or high speed rail, but they excel at scaling production.
Nuclear power is similar. The ideas for fourth gen nuclear power are not new, they are 60 years old. To be leading in nuclear power a country needs legislators, engineers, and technicians who can pull together to make fourth gen nuclear real. They don't need people who can invent novel exotic designs for power plants that won't be built.
As for black people they are useful for the system. A black lesbian woman with a rainbow flag is ideologically loyal. There is no risk that she will turn against the system or be disloyal, she truly believes in the liberal project. White men are a risk group. Chinese and Russian men are the most suspect. When France colonized Vietnam they promoted hmong people to positions of power. The Hmong people have been a minority in a weak position throughout history and had a grudge against the rest of society. They truly benefited from being a part of the French empire. Their loyalty made them good employees. A trustable mediocre employee is better than a disloyal genius.
functor
2mo ago
Egypt has no reason whatsoever in aiding Israels ethnic cleansing of Palestine by helping Israel move millions of Palestinians into Egypt.
functor
6mo ago
They get more foreign aid than any other country. All politicians more or less have to bow to Israel. Lots of American politicians openly say they are Israel firsters. There is an absurd overrepresntation of jews in the american elite and people have gotten fired for not supporting Israel. American aggression toward Syria, destabilizing Iraq and decades of involvement in the middle east has been a tremendous gift to Israel. Even when Israel is mass bombing cvilian areas the US is flying in weapons and stationing air craft carriers off their coast.
The relationship is unidirectional. The US politicians go the wailing wall and bow to their rulers. Blinken is openly running policy for his ethnic interest.
functor
10mo ago
The idea that we can just replace the population with other people is ludicrous. A nation is like a family, just because someone does the dishes and is pleasant doesn't make them a part of my family or mean that they can live there. France is a nation and a people, not an economic zone. There are countries that are nothing but administration of an area of land and these countries tend to be unsuccessful. Countries created after colonialism as nothing more than lines drawn on a map by foreigners concerned by 19th century geopolitics are terrible. Not to mention that we are giving up our history, culture and our way of being to save a government program.
Furthermore, every country is now in serious resource overshoot. Our consumption is wildly unsustainable. The population of humans is several times higher than what it was when we lived sustainably and each human consumes far more. Population reduction has benefits, cheap housing and nature. If you ride through rural Europe on a train you will barely see any real nature. You will mainly see urban sprawl and agriculture upheld by mountains of petrochemicals. Exponential growth in the number of humans isn't sustainable at all. We have witnessed a collapse in insect and bird populations over the past decades. Forests in Europe are largely gone and high intensity agriculture wrecks the land it uses.
functor
10mo ago
In a society with no collective identity this is inevitable. There isn't a sense of the country being one big family with people fighting for the common good, instead countries are viewed as a legal platform and a market administrated by a government. In many ways it isn't too different from Iraq, a plot of land which arbitrarily became a country. Within this arbitrary zone the obvious winning strategy is to form a group and promote your group's special interest. That may be feminism, it may be more money to the military industrial complex, lower taxes for wall street, more money for Israel, extra spending on infrastructure in the place you live etc depending on what group you belong to. The society is a nothing more than a shopping mall and people want to benefit themselves.
The US is largely government by a legal system and the legal system is has as one of its primary duties to defend victims. For lawyers and judges, having grievances is hold the aces. In previous societies claiming noble birth and belonging to the main ethnic/religious group would have provided one with benefits. In a society that has equality before the law combined with a society largely run by lawyers whose job it is to compensate victims people are going to perpetually try to gain maximal victim status.
functor
10mo ago
The issue is that there isn't enough content to fill facebook with quality content. People are spending several hours a day scrolling on their phone. There aren't enough childhood friends getting married and second cousins graduating to fill such a massive feed. People are opening their phone 50 times a day. The world isn't eventful enough to provide content.
functor
10mo ago
The US is stuck in a cold war mindset and can't stop thinking in a two-polar world. The world isn't split in pro America/anti Soviet and pro Soviet/anti America. The world now consists of multiple poles with their own interests and that can cooperate and have their own conflicts. India is the largest country in terms of population, has nuclear weapons, is a major economy and their borders mainly consists of ocean and impenetrable mountains. They aren't Norway in 1955 trying to avoid being conquered by the Soviets in some ideological struggle. The US elites seem to swing between India doing business with the US and thinking they have almost joined NATO and India buying Russian military hardware and thinking they have almost joined a neo-Warsaw pact. India isn't going to be a junior member of someone else's pole, they are going to be their own pole. India is going to do tech deals with the west, buy manufactured products from China, buy natural resources with Russia and buy oil from Arabs.
Until the US realizes that the rest of the world in many ways has caught up, they are going to be frustrating much of the world by treating them like children.
functor
1yr ago
As a programmer I think of ChatGPT as a higher level language. In 1950s programmers wrote ones and zeros. By 1970 much of that was done by computer and the programmer just had to write save something to memory and it was done. By the 2000s a programmer just needs to write fetch this thing from this database on a server and the computer does it.
Natural language is the low level language of law. It is the language in which details are written in. AI will allow lawyers to write a high level language. A 10 sentence description will be able to yield a 10-page contract. A modern programmer is in many ways akin to a tech lead 30-40 years ago managing digital tools doing the actual work. A future lawyer will be closer to a senior lawyer managing a group of digital juniors who fight with the wording of projects.
As this transition comes about, it in many ways becomes harder for juniors as a bigger part of the job gets shifted toward management, understanding requirements and leading a project. A person with business experience and mediocre programming skills may very well be a better web dev consultant than a code challenge pro.
On the flip side the price has gone down and that increases demand. Most likely, people will use lawyers in cases that are currently too expensive. People will want custom contracts for smaller deals, poor people will want wills etc.. I don't think the legal profession will die, if anything it will explode as the output rises. If a job that today takes 10 hours can be done in one the price will be 10%. That could very well 20 fold demand.
Working with consistency, automated testing, finding the edge cases that the AI has trouble with and gathering requirements from customers will be a bigger part of the job.
functor
1mo ago
It is a win in a multitude of ways:
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Israel spent far more on this attack than Iran.
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It caused widespread disruption in Israel. Few people slept well last night, flights were cancelled, large numbers of people hid in bunkers and thousands of soldiers participated in the air defence operation.
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Air defence is limited by industrial capacity, not money. The interceptors are complex machines and production is limited. SAM were low priority during the 20 years of Iraq and Afghanistan so few SAMs were bought and production capacity was reduced. Now Ukraine is consuming SAMs at a rate several times higher than production and their interception rate is dropping due to shortages of SAMs. Ukraine will also need thousands of SAMs after the war ends to rebuild. Israel is firing SAMs wildly as they are exceptionally casualty averse. Meanwhile China builds missiles are drones at a higher rate than any other country and they are stockpiling their weapons. Depleting SAM inventories is a success in itself.
functor
1mo ago
Catholicism can lower birth rates.
Getting married is a big barrier to having children. Men aren't marriageable until they have finished their education, have a job and a place to live. In a country where 29 year old men can't afford their own place and are working as interns few men are going to be married at a fertile age. Unless young women start marrying substantially older men having a high fertility rate becomes unfeasible if marriage is a requirement.
There are really only three solutions:
Lower the social requirements to having kids. Aka single motherhood.
Make becoming a husband more achievable. Aka make it possible for young men to get a stable job and buy a four bedroom home.
Adapt to a middle income country lifestyle. This is common among high fertility immigrants. They can live with six kids in a small apartment, never eat in a restaurant, live off rice and beans and pull teeth out by themselves instead of going to a dentist. Their lifestyle is still materially superior to the vast majority of humans who ever lived. With free school lunches, the children can stuff themselves and get enough calories to cover most of their needs. Humans can survive on a tiny fraction of what middle class people assume to be the limit of survival.
The combination of high requirements and a Catholic view of family means that a sizeable portion of men will never be fathers and those who do will only meet the requirements after age 35.
Is Israel responsible young vs old
Is Israel going to far Young vs old
The big rift is young vs old, with boomer republicans being much more pro Israel than young conservatives. The conservative zionist partnership is strained by AIPAC/ADL being highly anti right on social media. Israel has in no way delivered for the right. Israel with the lobby has pushed migrants into Europe, promoted censorship and cost hundreds of billions. With Israel ethnically cleansing christian Palestinians and mistreating Christians in Jerusalem, it is hard to see what the right gets out of the support. Putting MAGA and ADL in the same tent is as hard as getting the leftist coalition together. Right-wingers are supposed to like Israel, while Israel's lobby wants right-wingers banned off twitter.
The big split is most likely between those who get their information from oligarch owned media and those who get their information from more distributed sources.
A big problem for Israel is the diaspora demographics. Europe's jewish population is in a state of collapse, with especially Eastern European jews moving to Israel. Russia only has 10% as many jews as they had 50 years ago.
American jews are older than the average American and non orthodox american jews have low birth rates.
In the 2020 survey, Jewish adults ages 40 to 59 report having had an average of 1.9 children, the same as in the 2013 survey and slightly below the comparable figure for the general U.S. public, which is 2.3 children per adult in the same age cohort
Source The jewish number is propped up by orthodox jews. Non Israeli jews are trending toward either Haredi jews or secularized liberals with few children and lower levels of ethnocentrism.
In other words the US has a population that is rapidly rising while the number of jews is in decline. There are enough jews to staff high positions but this means that there simply aren't enough jews to keep a presence in broad sectors of society.
functor
2mo ago
Lots of people aren't on the stack. People with fetal alcohol symptom, the ugly, the short, people in wheel chairs etc..
I highly recommend the essay Biological Leninism. Basically, the left is a coalition of people who naturally resent society and are in the bottom of it. The left finds people who will never be able to seize power and promote them to middle managers. The left's coalition is obese black women in a boardroom with Iqs of 100 when everyone else in the room has an Iq above 120. They would never be there in any other society and will therefore be loyal to the current system since they are entirely dependent on it. At the same time they won't actually take over the power structure.
Autists are either too autistic and therefore too incompetent or they are highly skilled autists and will not conform to social pressures and may even take over the power structure.
How many people in the year 2000 would have supported any of the woke stuff today? Even mass immigration is unpopular and has continuously been so. The left has done an incredible job at pushing the overtone window. They take positions that are unpopular and they fight and fight and fight until they are the status quo. Once things are the status quo people accept them and don't debate them much.
The right is stuck worried about polls and continuously compromises while never launching its own campaigns. The right needs to find new battle grounds, take positions that are impopular and fight to make them status quo. Gay marriage was not popular. Gay marriage lost and lost and lost. The left pushed and pushed and pushed.
The right needs to do the same and find newer more radical positions outside the mainstream and make them the mainstream.
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