functor
5mo ago
The MAGA crowd is like someone who found a genie but can't formulate their wishes well. It is the good old trope of getting your three wishes but each wish comes with a giant caveat.
They wished for ended discrimination against Asians in college admissions and didn't get increased odds of whites being accepted.
They complained about migrant crime and got dorky Indians instead of Guatemalans.
They complained more about migrant crime and got a society in which cops look like soldiers.
They complained about muslim terrorism and got a surveillance state that rivals stasi.
They complained about muslim terrorism but instead of getting an immigration ban after 9/11 they got tens of thousands of largely right wing voters killed/seriously injured fighting wars in the middle east that caused a migrant crisis and effectively ethnically cleansed Christian populations. Their "clash of civilizations" ended with the US supporting Al Qaeda in Syria and opening the flood gates to Europe by bombing Libya.
The migrants are living on welfare they complained. So they got a migrant with a job.
If you can't even state your own self interest how on Earth do you expect to win anything?
functor
5mo ago
They also seem to forget that the women would have been pregnant a large portion of the time.
Also performance enhancing drugs have made many of the female pro athletes barely female.
functor
5mo ago
The whole Indians debate is perfect example of why high skilled immigration is a bad idea.
The side pushing for more Indians is largely Indian with another prominent figure being Elon who is an immigrant himself. The America first crowd is noticeably more rooted in America. US politics is devolving into the farce that is democracy in Iraq. They don't really need elections as they could just use the census data to assign seats to the Kurdish party, Sunni parti, Shia party etc. The system isn't going to have any long term visions, any cohesion or any sense of national interests. It is going to be each little group squabbling to maximize short sighted self interest.
functor
5mo ago
Indian developers are a lot cheaper and most jobs don't require a genius. There are plenty of boring repetitive tasks in tech and often the really talented people aren't good at these tasks because the best developers tend to get bored.
The model that works is two high skill developers in the west managing 8 lower skilled devs in another country. The two high skilled devs will complain endlessly about having to manage "low status" people and review code instead of writing their own but the truth is that Indians are often far more cost effective. The all Indians are awfull trope is exaggerated. There are plenty of awfull Indian devs but there are also high skilled Indian devs.
functor
5mo ago
Rather it was communities from western Europe who wanted to have their own states where they could have their values and their way of life.
functor
5mo ago
The idea of filling up your elite with people who left their home land for a better economic deal that isn't even that much better is absurd. The US is filling the upper class who would ditch their culture, homeland, family and friends for 2-3x salary increase. The US elite is going to drift far from the general population if it largely consists of rich arabs, Vietnamese computer nerds, wealth Chinese business people, eastern European jews and other groups who find Milwaukee as relevant as a white guy in Singapore finds Bhutan. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the US is deeply divided when the elite view the country as a vehicle for their own personal success and have no real ties to it.
functor
5mo ago
While there are large slums and the underclass lives an awful life it is possible to live very well on a decent income. I have been to other developing nations but not to India.
functor
5mo ago
I don't really see the appeal for a lot of these migrants coming to the west. Indians who could be making 2000 dollars a month which goes a very long way in India become underpaid engineers in the UK where their after tax salary ends up being 3000 dollars which barely covers rent. My Indian colleagues love sharing photos of the beautiful houses they grew up in, their gardeners bringing in daily tropical fruit and all the family life they have back home. In their new country they live in a cramped apartment in a semi-ghetto.
My predictions is that we are going to see an exodus to India which won't just consist of Indians. Northern European weather is awful, taxes and regulations are high and the cost of living is through the roof. It is better to move to your Indian employees than to move Indians to Europe.
functor
5mo ago
Catholicism has historically been pro death penalty and catholic societies have had rates of death penalty far higher than any society today. The issue isn't "catholic stuff", the issue is that the pope is barely catholic.
functor
5mo ago
Indonesia is the largest muslim country. They would probably be less disliked as immigrants than christians from Zimbabwe.
functor
5mo ago
The muslim angle is overrated. People wouldn't have been happier if the migrants were christians from Ethiopia. Muslim at this point means non Asian, non white immigrant. Islam is just an easy and relatively politically correct term to use. The basic premise holds regardless if he was muslim, Christian, athiest or Zoroastrian, MENA migration doesn't work in Europe.
The same people would not have been any happier to take South African Zulus but would have gladly taken South Africans of a Boer persuasion. Trying to own AfD by pointing out the specifics of a Saudi's religious beliefs isn't going to work because the AfD voters don't want mass immigration from MENA regardless of religion.
functor
5mo ago
You already can. Chatgpt says:
Increase Model Depth/Width: Add more layers or neurons to increase the capacity of your neural network.
-
Improve the Dataset
-
Computational Resources
Use Better Hardware: Train on GPUs or TPUs for faster and more efficient computations.
There really isn't much secret sauce to AI, it is just more data, more neurons.
functor
5mo ago
Alternative take: the federal government has become too large to manage. The scope of the federal government vastly outstrips the capacity of the human mind making it impossible to manage. The only way to have a federal government is to shrink it to a size in which it is humanly possible to understand what is being voted on.
functor
6mo ago
Another and often ignored factor is how sedentary american culture is. Driving is ubiquitous with more people commuting by bicycle in Copenhagen than in all of the US. American grocery stores are surrounded by a sea of parking while in the rest of the world most people would walk to their local store. One thing that struck me in the US was how common escalators are. Lawn mowers nearly always have an engine in the US and are often ones the user sits on. In other places a person mowing grass is more likely to walk. Even fit Americans don't move that much. Fit Americans tend to be sedentary nearly all the time except for four hours a week of vigorous fitness. Gym culture is bigger in the US than in much of Europe. What is missing is movement in every day life.
functor
6mo ago
Thanks for your comment. It does seem like they are more social and more into strategic networking than middle class people.
functor
6mo ago
One of the main problems outside of science in academia is that they never had to confront the poor axioms. Physics had to throw out Archimedes and then throw out Newton. It was painful but it had to be done. Accepting Darwinism invalidated a large body of work based on prior ideas. It was tough for the people whose papers got invalidated but it had to be done.
In Social science people can still pretend that the garden of Eden existed, that fanciful tales of people on paradise islands living in absolute freedom were true etc.
Economists still talk about how money was created from people who wanted to barter more efficiently even though this has been disproven and even though writing is older than money. The idea of a social contract is still used even though humans lived in groups for tens of millions of years before we became human. The social sciences are stuck in a worldview in which humans spawned on Earth as individuals and invented all social structures even though this goes against all evidence.
The idea that women were historically oppressed is based on the assumtion that the natural state of women is a state of absolute individual freedom. The reality is that no hominid females of any species live in such a state. An animal that lives in a social structure isn't going to be happier if they are deprived of that social structure. If women were historically oppressed they could have packed up and walked into the woods. The reality is unless the family was exceptionally abusive most women clearly prefered belonging to a social structure over complete personal autonomy in the great wild.
functor
6mo ago
Using Micheal O Church's model of social class with three ladders, labour, gentry and elite has anyone experienced the journey from G2 to E4? My family has been G2/G3 for several generations and most people I know are in that category. My mindset, my way of being and my values are very much gentry even though I am into dissident politics.
Do to ballsy moves and living on nothing for years my company is not at a stage where I am an E4. I have also started to interact with people at an E3/E2 level. I find them to be in an uncanny valley where they are in many ways similar to the gentry but still fundamentally different from me.
Do you have any advice for managing this transition?
functor
6mo ago
It matters because it is one of Syria's main revenue sources. Losing it puts Syria in a permanent state of crisis.
functor
6mo ago
Divide and conquer. The US has a long history of supporting jihadists and trying to undermine stable states in the region. The Iraq war wasn't nation building, it was nation wrecking. The goal was to turn the middle east into a buch of small clan structures consistently stuck in internal fighting. Assad provided a stable state which was difficult to dominate. Now we get the destruction of christian culture in the region and a flood of migrant to Europe.
functor
6mo ago
We should be thankfull that Iran has helped Syrians defend themsleves and that we haven't gotten a complete genocide of Christians and others who represent the last vestigates of Greek civilization in the middle east. Iran has been hugely beneficial in Iraq where they helped the Iraqis end the occupation and then fight ISIS. In Syria they helped fight off jihadists attacking Syria for years.
The stability that Syria provided for the past 8 or so years has been highly beneficial and it is a great shame that we are losing it.
functor
6mo ago
Alternatively, the US stops occupying Syria's oil and minds its own buisness.
functor
6mo ago
Last war ended with 12 million refugees and over a million comming to Europe. The wave of jihadism that came with a country in the vicinity of Europe becoming a terrorist haven also created massive blow back. There is some chance that Europe simply won't let the jihadists take over this time. Assad is hugely beneficial for Europe.
functor
6mo ago
I tried to send 400 Euros the the Netherlands from Sweden this week. The transaction failed several times so I called the bank and they told me that international transactions are disabled since I haven't had that service activated. There was no notice, just a timeout notice. I spent half an hour on the phone asking questions about whether I knew the person I was sending he money to, how often I make international payments, my bank accounts with other banks and so forth. Finally the money was sent with a five Euro fee and it took three days for the money to arrive. My startup has employees in Pakistan. We pay exorbitant fees to the banks for currency transactions. We have had payments blocked for two weeks due to "investigations" and in the best case it takes a week for money to arrive. I know a professional poker player who gets paid in cash. He is effectively treated like a terrorist.
Banking is just money tracked in databases with a monopoly based on insane legal frameworks that make banking so profitable that their profits amount to several percent of GDP. Crypto has to get efficient enough to be easy to use and it will take off. It needs to be too decentralized for governments to effectively regulate it. Ethereum has better chances of becoming a viable unit of exchange for larger or international transactions that are too annoying to handle with conventional systems.
The other wild card is BRICS. Their alternative could easily be far superior to the ancient swift system. Maybe the US could push bitcoin as a non BRICS swift alternative.
One thing that is ignored in this debate is the petrodollar. The US prints money like crazy but keeps the dollar high by pretty much forcing the world to buy American dollars. Don't participate in the American racket and end up like Iran. This means that there are too many dollars and the prices in the US have shot through the moon. The US has become an excessively expensive country with an economy based on finance, insurance and real estate.
This kind of worked when the US was technologically vastly superior to the rest of the world and could force people in other countries to trade bananas and oil for Ford cars. As the rest of the world has been catching up in terms of tech, it is harder for the US to compete when housing prices are multiple times higher in Seattle compared to China or Poland.
American engineers with 100k of student debt, living in mediocre million dollar Seattle homes with 2000 dollar a month medical insurance for their family and who need two cars for their house hold simply can't compete on a global market. There aren't that many technologies that the US is that far ahead that the American company can charge an absurd premium.
The US doesn't seem to want to give up on the empire business so the result is to not lower costs but to press living standards down. Silicon valley real estate has to keep being at an inflated price but US companies can't pay 150 dollars an hour for mediocre web developers for their website when companies in other parts of the world pay 20.
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