functor
11mo ago
Imagine if the white house was full of staffers from Saudi arabia and they were all staunch pro Saudi, had a clear pro Saudi agenda and continuously talked about Saudi Arabia. Many openly called themselves Saudi firsters. That would be considered weird. We are supposed to forget about the extreme overrepresentation of a small minority of jews whose interests and views differ from the rest of the population.
functor
11mo ago
Civilizations innovate in the areas in which one can get ahead in. A militaristic society will innovate militarily, a country with a large mining industry will innovate in the military domain etc. The US innovates in media, law and finance. China is an industrial power and therefore that is where innovation will happen. China currently has 26 nuclear reactors under construction with many more planned. Clearly innovating in nuclear power is a great way to get ahead in China while a nuclear power researcher in the west is more likely to produce power points as the final product.
It is no exaggeration to say that most of STEM innovation in US academia is now being carried out by foreign-born people
The plan to have Americans do marketing strategies, finance, write legal documents and do sales while the foreigners do the boring technical stuff was doomed to fail. The US taught the world its secrets, created a rift between the people and the elite, and lost its ability to innovate. Pakistanis at Stanford have no connection to most of America and will see the country as a vehicle for their own personal success. Top people are the ones who need the most loyalty, instead the WASP-elites are surrounded by foreigners while much of the elite are actual foreigners. This puts the elite and the people in different universes, while dismantling any sense of noblesse oblige.
Importing tens of thousands of Chinese people into the university system, getting China up to speed, and then trying to keep them making plastic toys won't work. They were obviously going to bring a lot of that know how home. Specifically banning Chinese isn't going to work either. People who moved to Boston at age 25 to do a PhD at MIT never having been in the US before are going to have a much easier time accepting a high paid position in China than American would if that is banned. The US isn't going to be able to police former international students and researchers.
functor
11mo 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.
The US Navy isn't about defence, the threat of invasion for the US is next to zero. The US Navy exists to ensure liberal hegemony. Their job is to ensure that the world has Netflix, Amazon and is run by black rock. Their job is to ensure the world's culture is super hero movies and McDonalds. Their enemies are de facto civilizational states such as China, Persian/Iran and Russia. Their job is essentially to replace them with radical individualism. The pride flag is the flag of the American empire. A pride parade is the ultimate sign of victory for the American empire and no two countries with official pride parades have ever fought a war against each other.
A transgender woman of colour makes more sense in the US military than a conservative white man, since her values align with the mission. The most important factor for a military is loyalty to the system and the values that the military fights for. A transgender soldier has fully committed to the American empire.
functor
11mo 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.
being anti-US and anti-NATO still correlates mostly to being far-left,
This tends to more old left rather than the super woke left.
the most fervent nuke-Moscow crowd tends to be politically of centre-to-centre-right variety and not really particularly concerned with things like wokeness and non-wokeness.
The center right tends to support liberal interventionism consistently. The center right was the most pro war in Iraq, Libya and Syria to then start complaining about the millions of migrants these wars yielded. In Israel-Palestine the conflict is between those who want Arabs to live where they have lived for generations and those who want them to move. The center right strongly supports large numbers of Arabs having to move. That the same people who wanted to spend trillions defending feminism in Afghanistan are pro war isn't surprising. That the center right supports the next military venture isn't surprising. The surprising part is that the people who used to be opposed to the foreign wars largely falling in line this time around.
functor
11mo ago
Probably the internet killing their budget. Just rewriting a press release is cheap.
functor
11mo 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
11mo ago
I don't think the lack of new epics is the major issue, it is the amount of material published. There isn't that much novel material to create or genuinely new material to create. Yet Hollywood pumps hundreds of movies a year. I think one of the reasons for crazy cultural shifts is the fact that people are desperately trying to come up with something new. When millions of people go to university, we need armies of PhDs to teach them. There probably aren't that many people genuinely capable of contributing something major to their field and there probably aren't that many good project proposals. The result is autoethnographies and trying to re-read classics according to some theory.
It is hard to write a movie script that is actually unique as well as high quality. Most theaters throughout history just ran with the same scripts year after year. A movie production compay has to re-write the script annually. It isn't surprising that they end up writing more or less the same script.
functor
11mo ago
I believe we will see massive labour shortages. We are in an economic slump and unemployment is low. Industrial civilization has had exponential labour growth for 250 years and it is coming to an end. Industrialism started in cities in Western Europe that by today's standards would be towns. During the next 200 years, people poured into British and Dutch cities to work in industrial civilization. Industrial civilization quickly spread, other parts of the west went through the same process, turning millions of peasants into workers. By the end of WWII women were liberated by being made to work 40 hours more in industrial civilization almost doubling the labour pool. Japan, China, South Korea, Mexico, Turkey and India were also let into the club expanding the labour pool by another billion. When the Iron curtain fell 250 million people with relatively high skills joined the western industrial civilization. Five million Poles have moved west while Eastern European cities have large office plants for German companies.
Now we have the results of 1.5 women per children yeilding few young people. The Peasant stock of China is soon exhausted and their population is decling. Japan and South Korea are facing demographic collapse. Eastern Europe is in steep demographic delcline and there are few highly capable eastern Europeans not participating in western industrial civilization. Instead of exponential labour growth we are going to see decline in the work force. There aren't that many really bright Indians left who are doing manual farm labour. The gifted people in Latin America are working as remote programmers for western firms. The baby boomers are checking out, and the millenial's baby boom seems to have been cancled.
Add to that geopolitical tensions and a will to bring production home. The jobs created by excess labour are the ones automated by AI such as HR, social workers, paper pushing work. What will be in dire supply will be hard hat workers. Skilled tradesmen that can't easily be replaced by a robot. If anything, that should lead to a shift to the right.
As for economies with few workers and a lot of money leaning left I present you the counter example of OPEC-states. Oil producers have few jobs and radically conservative societies.
functor
11mo ago
I own a tailor made suit bought in Thailand that I don't wear more than once a year.
leather shoes, shirt and pants is basically something I wear every time I have a meeting which is 1-5 times a week.
functor
11mo ago
Will AI bring back beauty?
Looking at midjourney's top pieces of art I am struck by the beauty in them. They contain detail, high degrees of realism even when depicting surrealist themes. They tend to be symmetrical and often portray idealized versions of reality. AI art tends to portray archetypal depicitions of its motifs and often excludes blemmishes, dirt and grime.
Compare it with corporate memphis a primarily human generated art form that has gained significant traction in the public space in the past decade. This is the most expensive painting painted by a living woman.
Compare the buildings drawn by the AI with the best exterior of 2022 in Sweden according to architects.
AI gives people what it gets positive feedback from. It gives people what they want. People want visually stunning rather than the output of the art community.
functor
11mo ago
Germany is in a recession, and I paid 80 cents/kWh in December in Sweden. My gym still hasn't opened its sauna, and I got shamed for having 18 degrees in my apartment in the winter. Inflation is the highest it has been in decades, and there was a major shortage of firewood. The system didn't snap, instead there is a cost of living crisis combined with cities turning off their street lights and companies banned from expanding due to lack of power. I agree that people adapt. Covid didn't end the world, yet it created problems that will continue for years.
As for energy, the renewable hype died with cheap gas. The wind-hype only worked with cheap nat gas as a backup. Now we have almost free power some days, followed by extreme prices other days. Building a long term functioning electrical grid is different from just generating power. Cheap, bountiful wind power didn't alleviate the high prices when the wind wasn't blowing in the winter.
functor
10mo 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
10mo ago
The underlining axiom is that humans are free spirits accidentally attached to a body. The goal of the new religion is to liberate the soul from the constraints imposed on it by being attached to a body. Men and women are just spiritual essences that ended up in different bodies. The difference in outcome can never not be explained by oppression, and this problem will never actually be fixed. Most groundbreaking research will be conducted by men for biological reasons, which will ensure that affirmative action will always be required.
Wokeness is the natural conclusion of civil rights, assuming that humans have no innate qualities. During civil rights it was assumed that as long as opportunities are equal outcomes will be equal. When the reality of genetic differences struck they had to debug the problem and find new forms of oppression to explain the differences in outcome.
I am actually surprised at how well right leaning military men have cooperated with the system. The war in Afghanistan ended with large numbers of migrants comming to Europe. Afghans are the second most overrepresented minority in crime stats in Sweden. The war flooded Europe with heroin. What exactly was going to be conserved by that war? What socially conservative agenda was ever going to be promoted by that war? Yet, thousands of right leaning white men volunteered to die or get their legs blown off to defend the military industrial complex and globalization. The war in Iraq caused a million migrants to come to Europe and has been a disaster for the Middle East and Europe. I can't see any socially conservative goal ever have been achieved through that war. Yet, thousands of right leaning white men got killed in Iraq in order for their kids to be in a class full of refugees.
Libya ended with a million migrants a year coming to Europe and a jihadist trained by the UK government killing 22 girls at an Ariana Grande concert.
Taiwan is important because the globalists wanted to dump wages by moving electronics production to a lower wage country. If China tries to take Taiwan, the counterattack that gets mowed down will be manned by conservative white men. Towards the end, a few elite forces will walk over the bodies of dead polish Catholics in order to raise the pride flag over reconquered Taiwan. In the movie, the white men will be replaced by women of colour.
Israel/Palestine is a conflict between those who want Arabs to live where their grandparents live and those who want millions of arabs to move. The same conservatives who say they are opposed to arab migrations will be more fanatically zionist than what is allowed on Israeli TV.
I am nor surprised that the western militaries are skeptical of conservative white men. The shocking part is how loyal they have been.
functor
10mo ago
There has been a consistent majority against immigration to Sweden for decades yet politicians have pressed on. Even among non SD-voters, the views on immigration tend to be right of the party.
What you are forgetting is the main issue, social cohesion, the sense of beloning and the deep trust that has existed in Swedish society. Swedes in Dubai don't socialize with rich arabs. Most people have friends in their own age group, with similar levels of education etc. People don't want to feel like an alien in their own community. Swedes start moving out of an area as early as 4% of the inhabitants being migrants. Even if the migrants weren't more likely to engage in migrants and even if they paid more in taxes most people don't want to live in a Bangalore even if the people there are smart and productive.
The idea that society is nothing more than a platform for economic exchange completely misses most of human experience and what builds a strong well functioning society. Take the top 10% of ten countries and put them together and you want have a super-country. You will have a corrupt, dysfunctional society.
functor
10mo ago
Culture shouldn't be corporate. A corporation shouldn't run something that ultimately isn't about money and that can shape the values and culture of the participants. Woodworking is safe since nobody owns woodworking. There may very well be communist, jihadist, trans, national socialists etc who do wood working, but ultimately they can't set policy in the wood working world. Copy right law ensures that a few people who often don't even belong to a fandom can control it without the fandoms or society at large's best interest at heart.
Getting deep into a corporate product is slightly cringe, opt for forms of entertainment that aren't copyrighted or have some natural monopoly.
functor
10mo ago
Millions of people go to college every year, they all need to be taught by PhDs. Few of the PhDs have pure teaching positions, so we need armies of professors who's job it is to teach future office workers to write.These professors need to publish research, so we end up with an endless torrent of "well actually papers" and iterative hair splitting.
functor
10mo ago
The main goal at a major company is to not rock the boat. Companies barely have owners, they have managers with poor job security. The "owner" is a collection of pensionfunds who are run by managers who run a double digit risk of getting fired every year. The higher up management of the company also have below average job security compared to most white collar workers. Compentence isn't the most important factor when it comes to getting promoted at big companies, avoiding scandals is.
The people who succceed in politics and in the corporate world are the people who have an excellent talent for feeling which way the wind blows. A car salesmen will act very differently when a sterotypical biker walks through the door compared to when a vegan feminist walks through the door. These people are tremendously skilled at reading the room. The ability to read the room and adjust accordingly is probably the most indispensable skill if one wants to be highly successful.
This leads to people high in anxiety struggling with what to say when simply agreeing with everyone else in the room is no longer an option.
functor
10mo ago
The overarching goal for many jews is to shape society in a way that benefits jews. Low social cohesion, diversity, and multiculturalism makes jews one group among many that don't stick out. Nihilistic consumerism and the idea that nothing really matters or is important beyond ourselves makes it easier for a jewish subgroup to increase their power and reduces their risk of being considered outsiders. All forms of group oriented thinking are labled as bad. Jews don't want to live in a homogenous culture with strong norms, traditions and a strong sense of identity.
This plan has backfired somewhat as the jewish community seems to be getting high on their own supply with plummeting birth rates among liberal jews and much of the deconstructivist philosophy being swallowed by jews themselves. Jews are engaging in extreme dysgenics with their least intelligent and probably overall least genetically healthy elements breeding at a high rate while lawyers on Manhattan have below South Korean birth rates.
functor
10mo ago
Society goes in waves. We are at Rome in 410 right now, and the archetype of our age is Andrew Tate or the vandals. Great men don't come yet, they will come once the Tates of the world are done partying. Charlemagne, Buddha, Mohamed came out of mobs of essentially bandits and installed order. For them to come about we need desert raiders, Gothic warlords, and Indian city states warring with each other. What we need is conquistador and viking spirit in order to create the vigor and virility that can later turn society to the right.
It wouldn't surprise me if the most virile force in Russia comming forward will come from the Wagner group despite it mainly consisting of the dredges of society.
functor
10mo ago
Order isn't going to be brought about by politicians or people reading books and getting inspired. The actual vigor and virility required to bring about actual change will take extreme circumstance. The more extreme circumstances listed above can drive people toward the maximum of the potential while instilling a strong sense of duty, honour, and group oriented values.
functor
10mo ago
How is this extremism? His politics essentially are that he wants to avoid massive demographic change that will not only greatly replace his own ethnic group but also causes a low trust and dysfunctional society. Not wanting wage dumping by cheap illegal migrants isn't extremism.
Wanting to fire 750 000 rounds containing depleted uranium over Iraq causing thousands of children to get birth defects is more extreme than not wanting mass migration. Wanting to burn thousands of Libyans alive in firestorms in order to turn Africa's most developed country into a mess run by jihadist groups is extremism. Killing a thousand people without trial by targeted drone strikes is extremism. Labelling every 16+ year old man in Afghanistan a legitimate military target while backing drug cartel government is extremism. Bailing out the banks while people foreclose on their homes is extremism. Going 30 000 000 000 000 dollars in debt largely due to spending more on the military than the next 9 biggest militaries combined when your neighbors are Canada and Mexico is extremism. The patriot act and the incredible power of the NSA is extreme. Pretty much the entirety of mainstream Republican Party positions are extremist positions that ordinary people would have a difficult time supporting if it was explained to them.
Wanting the politics that Republicans would call far left anti Israel politics if it was applied to Israel isn't right wing extremism just because it is in the US. Why is a wall In Israel not an extremist policy, but a wall separating the Mexican drug war from the US is when tens of thousands of Americans die of fentanyl overdoses every year?
Middle management is drowning in guidelines and policies. The amount of training that has to be done, things have to be certified etc. If middle management followed all rules and regulations, the world would grind to a halt.
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