functor
4mo ago
To what extent is the recessed jaw epidemic genetic and to what extent is it environmental?
beautiful buildings can be simple
Most old buildings were not palaces with intricate marble an complex art. Most old buildings were fairly simple boxes with good proportions that fit into their surroundings. In the photo above every building is a box. Yet tourists flock to the street and the property prices have soared through the roof. Arguably they are simpler than a lot of glass and steel designs.
Modernism's problem is that each building is trying to be a monument standing out instead of fitting into an urban landscape. The buildings try to stand out by having unnatural facades and flawed proportions. Fixing these issues isn't that complex. A brick, stone, or wood building can be a beautiful box without complicated construction.
functor
4mo ago
The idea of having lots of kids while living with low status breaks down when you realize that the women who agrees to this will most likely be fat and below average Iq. The dating market is a status game and with birth control people can afford to trade time for more status. Men can spend years going to grad schools, traveling, saving for an impressive condo etc while building their career to move up the stack of profiles on tinder.
Dropping out of the status game at 21 years old to marry a woman who is happy to have 5 kids in a three bedroom house, never travel and live a low status life means your kids would be dead if we had natural selection. The exception is men who have such high status that they have won the statusgame at age 21.
functor
4mo ago
There is also no requirement for them to be in China. The deepseek serverfarm could be anywhere in the world. It could also be distributed with a bunch of smaller clusters. The model can be trained on regular gaming GPUs. It would be more expensive but the sums are absolute peanuts for a state actor.
functor
4mo ago
I am surprised that nobody has filled the niche that facebook is useful for, keeping track of distant acquaintances. Facebook was decent in 2010 when it let users keep track of their second cousin's graduation and high school classmate's new house. There should still be a market for a listing of life events for people on the periphery of your life. Linkedin has weirdly enough partially filled the role but there is no true platform for this.
functor
4mo ago
Nuclear isn't that expensive. France managed to build a majority nuclear grid that has been safe and stable for decades while maintaining sensible electrical prices. The price comes from building one of a kind reactors by companies with little experience while contending with insane levels of regulation.
functor
4mo ago
The electrical grid needs baseload power. In this graph green represents wind production in Sweden each day. A serverhall or steel mill has a fairly constant consumption rate. During During various Dunkelflautes the wind power production has dropped to low single digit percentages of installed capacity.
Some countries like Norway and Iceland are blessed with boundless cheap baseload power from hydro and geothermal. The rest of us need to create it. Nuclear is reliable, not dependent on weather and provides a stable and green electrical grid. There wasn't a single hour in which Germany's electrical grid was greener than France's last year. France bet on nuclear, Germany on fossil fuels with wind when the weather is good.
Too much focus is spent on electricity production and not enough on the grid. A nuclear powerplant 50 km from a city requires a 50 km cable that is operating at an average of 90-95% capacity. Windpower requires multiple power lines that can be a thousand km long to connect the city to various different wind parks, where it might be windy at different times. This is not green, cheap or efficient.
functor
5mo ago
The just push migrants to Europe while helping them cross the Mediterranean while their NGOs are the biggest lobbying groups for mass immigration.
functor
5mo ago
Maybe the ADL can explain to its home country that such conspiracies are racist and that social media companies should ban people who spread such hate.
functor
5mo ago
Israel was engaging in acts of war against Palestine. They bombed Gaza before october 7th, they had killed hundreds of Palestinians earlier in 2023, they were engaging in an illegal blockade and stealing land.
functor
5mo ago
And the fact that Israel is costing a ton of money, genoiciding christians and filling Europe with migrants. We have 250 000 Syrians in Sweden and now the country has been taken over by jihadists with fancy foreign weapons who got air support.
functor
5mo ago
expressed willingness to sell out his base.
No, he is focusing on "Make America great again", not wasting endless sums of money fighting wars in the middle east that end up destroying the local christian population. His base has won absolutely nothing from the last few decades of neo con wars. His base got nothing but debt and mentally ill veterans from the fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq. Providing Israel with endless welfare is the opposite of America first.
Will the Jews who support the Republican party exclusively because they're the most unwavering about Israel turn coat
Trumps loyalty should be to the US, not people whose loyalty is to other countries.
functor
5mo ago
The slogan is "make America great again". Not waste trillions on forever wars in the middle east with no prospect of success. Maga is the opposite of the fiascos of nation building from the mainstream republicans. Genociding the local christian population isn't that popular with young people. Younger voters, including younger republicans skew a lot more pro Palestine. Israel actively supporting jihadists in Syria hurts their supposed "anti-islam" stance.
functor
5mo ago
Latin America isn't all socialists, Milei is a latin american. Latin America is populist, clownish and doesn't have as much long term thinking.
functor
5mo ago
The wars always follow the same patterns and have since the 1800s. A long backstory is ignored, and instead the new boogeyman is launched. There is no reason why this boogeyman exists, he is just evil and wants to wreck the world. A great sense of urgency is instilled and we all have to act now or else Ho Chi Minh, Gadaffi, Castro or whoever else is going to come to your town and murder babies! They are purely evil and have no arguments whatsoever, they are just cartoon villains.
Then the war starts with a big hype, freedom fries, this next war is so high tech, cheap precise and so different from all the others! Don't ask any critical questions, a few special forces operators can take all of Afghanistan in a few weeks and win! There is complete hype, the media asks barely any critical questions, and the psyops are in overdrive.
Then the war drags on, the casualties and costs mount, the refugee crisis grows and "we will be in Berlin next week" attitude is replaced with cynicism. During this phase the debate doesn't get better because now it is a sensitive topic. The war ends and people still don't want to talk about it, hold anyone responsible and even talk about it. It becomes embarrassing for the "Saddam will nuke as all crowd" when they have to face their fiasco.
These things become public frenzies whipped up by the media that fall apart with critical questioning. This isn't too different from defunding the police in Detroit. Every linkedin user is supposed to cheer it on, and a critical question makes everyone in the room deeply uncomfortable.
The west is incredibly good at psy-ops and unfortunately the main target is western leaders. Western leaders genuinely thought Ukraine's summer 2023 offensive would be a success because they had been psy-oped into thinking Russians are orcs with WWII tech who will collapse at the sight of a modern tank. The support for Ukraine has been haphazard because western leaders have been utterly convinced Russia is going to collapse any moment and the battlefield is Legolas and Aragon turning beheading Uruk-Hai into a sport.
The fact that so many in the west were shocked when the war broke out points to the absolute lack of understanding of the situation and what a filter bubble westerners are stuck in. The reaction was to double down and isolate their filter bubble even further.
During the invasion of Iraq Baghdad Bob was on CNN and there were at least some journalists running around on the ground. Today the media is so focused on purity that we would never see a live interview with even a Ukrainian soldier.
The sad thing is people who think every previous war was a farce will join the hype for the next war.
functor
5mo ago
More so than tax incentives they don't benefit from going to war against a large portion of their base. Facebook's users in the US coincide fairly well with boomer conservatives. Alienating millions of users for purity isn't going to be profitable. Driving millions of users away by being woke or even banning them is bad for business. Besides, politics creates user engagement.
At peak banning even Trump supporters were getting banned. That is a huge demographic for facebook adds, partially because of their numbers and partially because trump does well among reasonably well of people that can be target through digital advertising. Democrats have a lot of underclass voters which aren't great for advertising and their more elite voters are less likely to want to use facebook.
functor
5mo ago
Funny how Palestinians are supposed to accept being truly defenceless while Ukrainians are defenceless if they have 50k troops.
The violent people overthrew the government, shelled the Donbass for 10 years straight and have been pushing for wwIII for the last two years.
functor
5mo ago
In a sense the US does. The US/Britain forced Ukraine to consistently talk the most hawkish stance and reject negotiation with the promise that the US/UK would have their backs. The Ukrainians are slowly waking up to that they are effectively taking the role the taliban had in the 80s. Their job is to be thrown under the bus for America's interests.
functor
5mo ago
He is a startup founder with a record high burnrate with a product that isn't good enough to be a commercial product. He has to bring in lots of customers promising it will soon be better. He wants to speedrun to a point in which he can actually generate revenue that can cover his costs.
Chatgpt is not good enough to replace developers, lawyers or any other qualified profession. It is an alternative to google without the ability to insert advertising. Github co-pilot isn't great for overall productivity.
Chatgpt is facing scaling laws. The bigger the model the more power it draws. The size of the model required to be useful is too large for today's hardware and power costs. They can no longer make a model orders of magnitude larger. The datasets are too large to fine tune manually.
Sam Altman is pretty much begging for a nuclear reactor and enough GPUs to swallow all that juice.
After hiring numerous developers during the last month I have concluded that a big portion of the difference between the competent devs and the incompetent ones is that the competent ones are always learning. It isn't necessarily an IQ thing, it is largely an attitude thing. For example some devs with 10+ years experience type extremely slow on a keyboard and don't use any keyboard shortcuts. They can't use git from the terminal and simply fail basic tasks outside their narrow niche. Their attitude is that they just learned how to complete certain tasks and they do those tasks on repeat.
The best ones are trying new things and learning. The better devs often have some strange flavour of linux, like obscure programming languages etc. This isn't because these tools are productive, it is because they learned these tools out of curiosity. To be a solid developer one has to be curious, trying to do things in new ways, trying to understand why things are the way they are and trying to improve.
The Indians have a bad rep because they are the epitome of developers who became developers wthout any passion. Their parents told them to be developers and they grew up in a country in which making money is a priority. They learned a Java version in college and every problem can be solved with the one tool they know. They often work hard but the attitude is solve the task with the simplest possible solution without much engineering skill. When all you have is a hammer the world looks like it is made of nails.
There are of course passionate devs in India but they are fewer as so many people with no interest were pushed in. The irony of Indian devs is that they don't focus on the art side of development but on the hustle side. In practice the people who make a lot of money are those who focus on programming as an art. The lack of Indian open source projects Indians in more niche communities such as functional programming etc says a lot about the attitude.
The best career advice for devs is to not just do what you know but to try new things and learn. Constantly try to do things faster, better, with other tools and from another perspective.
functor
5mo ago
No one originally wanted to invade Afghanistan or reshape it into a modern western ally. We just wanted to capture/kill Bin Laden and other Al Qaida leaders, and stop Afghanistan from being used as a terrorist training center. That was accomplished.
Occupying a country to find one person or even a handfull of Saudis and Egyptians is absurd overkill. Besides, the taliban were willing to cooperate to hand them over.
The issue is neocons and globalists can't really accept that there isn't a part of the world without feminism, hollywood movies and American imperialism. They rather spend 20 years bombing a meaningless plot of land than accept that there is a realm outside of the liberal paradigm.
Turns out it's very difficult to change a culture!
They managed to make the west woke. Admittedly it took a century but they assumed they could speed up the process with more advanced tech and military superiority. What was underestimated was the resolve and bravery of the Afghan people, who put up a 20 year long heroic defence.
functor
5mo ago
These terrorist attacks have nothing to do with middle eastern conflicts
How would fighting multiple wars in the middle east not be connected to blow back? Having large well organized and well equipped jihadist groups can very well cause terrorism in other countries. 9/11 wouldn't have happened without the CIA-asset Bin Ladin, multiple attacks in Europe have been conducted by people trained in the middle east. The ideological inspiration, propaganda and connections between jihadists in the middle east and the west do exist. Terrorism increased markedly in Europe during ISIS hay day in Syria.
The neo-con project, mass immigration and terrorism are intertwined.
functor
5mo ago
Rather amazing that after supporting jihadism since 2003 the US hasn't been hit harder than it has. The US meddling in Syria and the war in Iraq are directly to blame for ISIS, especially combined with operation timber sycamore with the US arming jihadists.
functor
5mo ago
We can conclude that there are a lot of white and Asian men who are not getting the academic degrees they would get in a meritocracy. Then the question becomes where do these men end up and how to invest in these sectors. Typically high status low paying jobs such as author, human rights lawyer, journalist, professor etc are being ethnically cleansed of white men while other elite institutions are having an under representation of white men. These men are probably not all giving up on life just because they didn't get into Yale.
It is a genocide. First off 80% of the population of Gaza are there because they or their ancestors were forced into Gaza and have been locked in Gaza ever since.
Israel has denied them food, bombed them at an astounding rate and murdered tens of thousands of people. Judaism is a religion which holidays are celebrations of Bronze age genocides of neighbouring tribes and that rhetoric has been used liberally during the war. While Israeli soldiers have been committing war crimes on an industrial scale they haven't been shy about referencing their historic genoicides.
Israel has shown that it is incapable of of taking an area the size of a city against an enemy with no logistics. The war started with Israeli soldiers crying in a bathroom of a well fortified position while getting smoked by men in sandals, and ended with Israelis being unable to fight. Israel has ended up deeply divided and is in a permanent state of crisis. Israels situation today is similar to the situation of French Algeria in the 50s or Vietnam in the 60s. They have a population that hates them and the cost of containing it is too great. Israel isn't a sustainable state and the Arabs know that they can outlast them as long as they sustain the pressure.
Europeans have fought battles on battle fields for thousands of years with a strong aversion to harming civilians, punishing prisoners and acting in a non-chivalrous manor. The cowardly and brutal fighting style has once again reminded Europeans why the jewish mindset is fundamentally incompatible with the western mindset and how the Semitic/MENA culture simply is not anything we want to deal with. Israel's popularity has plummeted in the west, especially among younger people who consume their news through social media, which is less controlled by the ADL. The same Jewish institutions who attack westerners for the slightest ethnocentrism have the chutzpah to try to justify bombing the Christians in the middle east so they can build summer homes on the west bank.
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