functor
11mo ago
I find the lack of self awareness of the British middle class and above to be fascinating. Despite losing an entire empire they still can't see the issues with their behaviour. Do you not think Marcus Aurelius and Alexander the Great found some of their peasants dumb and brutish? Yet they lived among them, fought alongside them and worked hard for them. The UK has some of the most working class people in Europe. Despite having industrialized far ahead of most of the rest of Europe, your country failed at uplifting its people. They are behaving like hoodlums because the people who are supposed to take the role of the parents in the country have completely abdicated any sense of responsibility. Your ancestors took illiterate peasants and got them to build Australia, Canada and the US. Current elites are crying because people called them the wrong pronoun. Current elites are hiding in an area they can barely afford to live in and whining that the proles are throwing trash bins at the cops. William the conqueror was royalty and acted like it. The current elite act like boy emperors in China in the lead up to some major war. A fish rots from the head, and a society does the same.
The British elite got their people to build the first railway system in the world, the current elite couldn't build HS2 while Uzbekistan has high speed rail. The UK is failing as a state because the elite is corrupted to the core. They cargo cult aristocratic traditions while failing at leading a nation. The fate of Britain is going to be a Guatemala with few areas in which people can play with horses and pretend they are nobles, just like their ancestors in the 1800s.
If a class of pre-schoolers have chased the teacher out of the classroom, it is the adults fault for abdicating their role as adults. If the population is revolting against the elites, it is because the elites have abdicated their role as elites.
The post above is written in the spirit of Versailles in 1789.
functor
10mo ago
They have no other option.
They have created a society in which people have less sex than ever, have fewer children than ever and can only dream of getting the housing their parents had at the same age. They have no idea how to fix it so the result is to find ways to make the people who point out the problems seem illegitimate.
There were large riots due to the problems immigration has caused. Nobody in government has a serious and realistic plan for fixing the massive issues so instead of acknowledging them they simply have to blame a handful of Russian accounts. It can't have anything to do with crime, lack of social cohesion, rampant housing shortages or any other issue that the politicians simply can't fix.
If someone is living with their parents at the same age that their parents owned a house the problem has to be their micropenis. They are loser incels and therefore not worth engaging with. There is no political option to create affordable housing as it would completely crash the financial system to bring down housing prices to 3x an average annual salary. Therefore, what is left is repression and arguments that are insults.
Incels are a real threat to the system. The system has failed to create a society in which people can find housing, start a family. People are angry and politicians have no solutions. Lots of young men with nothing to lose and no prospects are the greatest threat to any regime.
The birth rate makes the UK pension system completely unsustainable. Filling the gap with third world labour is going to cause major issues for which nobody has any answers. So if you ask how this is going to be solved your dick is small, you are ugly, your momma is fat and you are a Russian bot so you have no legitimacy.
functor
1mo ago
He isn't right-wing, he is a life long leftist who has been consistently right about the forever wars, the surveillance state, military industrial complex and the over reach of intelligence agencies. As a right winger I don't like his social policies but I deeply respect the work he has done with Ed Snowden on the NSA and his continued reporting on the war machine.
functor
3mo ago
That is because it doesn't resonate with you. The story does resonate for young, attractive women. Young attractive women face a lot of bitterness and resentment from older, less attractive women. The story is effectively a warning to young women and a lesson for them. If you are being backstabbed by other women, withdraw from social games and wait until you snag a high quality man.
It also teaches be humble, be kind to those around you etc even if you are an attractive women. Don't let that attractiveness turn you into a monster.
functor
7mo ago
Universities went from being places where autists can engage in niche hobbies to being to taking most people and people who have no real interest in the subject. How many english majors really want to spend four years engaging in bizarre books? They are there to party, please their parents by getting a degree and get an office job.
I met an older pol sci professor who talked about the shift in his field. Back in the day doing a PhD in international relations meant becoming an expert in a part of the world. This is a monumental task as the student has four years to go from barely being able to find a country on a map to being able to advise diplomats and large corporations on intricate details of that country. It meant plowing through vast amounts of text and being able to quickly gain an understanding of complex systems.
The increasingly popular alternative was to chose a theory as a PhD. Thesis: investigate how some feminist theory views women's education in developing countries. Conclusion: more education in thrid world countries will liberate women. This PhD is much easier to write than one trying to explain the geopolitics of the middle east.
Having one political theory makes it even easier, furthermore the current woke dogma is fairly simple as an ideology. It doesn't take much to become proficient in it.
A part of the reason why alterntive ideas are met with immediate rejection is because they would reveal a lack of knowledge and arguments by someone with alternative views. It is shocking how many academics don't have cursory understandings of explanations other than their own. I have met profs at education departments who have minimal knowledge about heritability, which partially explains their defensive stance when probed with questions on the topic.
functor
8mo ago
The big class war of our era is between the people who live off the system and thsoe who pay into it. The welfare class and the sociologists are on the same side while a plumber is on the other side. The welfare class and the sociologist both want a big public sector while a plumber has little need for the welfare state. The women voting left trope isn't entirely true. Single women who get paid through the government are solidly left while women who don't fall into this category are far less radical. Women aren't really swinging the the left as much as they are increasingly single and employed in the public sector.
Much of the radicalism among the left probably stems from many in the left investing 6 years into getting a master's in something with a strong ideological bent, being entirely reliant on the government for the job and their social status. They are terrified of ending up as someone in East Germany with a masters in Leninism.
The most important thing the right can do in order to secure a long term future for itself is to reduce the size of the left's client classes.
functor
4mo ago
In Sweden we had a mass shooting where a man was kicked off welfare and then decided to kill 10 people at a welfare office before finishing himself. He screamed "not everyone should work" before letting off a few rounds. His energy seems to reflect the European attitude on paying for a military.
Currently the attitude in Sweden is beyond bizarre. John Bolton would be considered a tankie right now. Their, is just fanatical worship of the US military industrial complex combined view of any being in opposition to the US as a fundamentally evil. I have never before seen people justifying the invasion of Iraq and Vietnam at the scale happening now. The average Swede has been turned into a Dick Cheney, except they only see the world as good vs evil.
At the same time as they want complete and utter American domination of every corner of the world they are shitting all over Americans and talking about boycotts. To make matters worse, most people can't give any legitimacy to any other view point. There are true believers in the neo con project, people who are fundamentally evil and those who are brainwashed by Russians.
functor
7mo 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.
functor
2mo ago
Is it so much crippling fear and social anxiety as much as it is not socially acceptable? It isn't anxiety that prevents people from eating pasta with their hands in a restaurant as much as it is simply not how it is done and people would think you had an episode if you did. Most people wouldn't even consider the option of enjoying a carbonara with their hands a restaurant because that is not how it is done.
Social etiquette has been changed to the point where hitting on women isn't socially acceptable. So people don't do it. Just like people don't wear bathrobes at work or listen to music without headphones in an airport.
Very likely these men aren't standing there trembling with fear, they are simply not even considering the option of wandering way outside the realm of the socially acceptable. They are sticking with convention and the standards of behaviour their society set.
Online dating is popular because it is the socially acceptable way of interacting with the opposite sex. Mutually matching on an app is the HR approved way of initializing an interaction with both parties consenting by swiping right on each other.
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
7mo 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
10mo ago
The me too moverment didn't understand statstics.
Most men don't hit on many women, some men sometimes hit on woman. Some men hit on thousands of women each year. Those guys have a personality disorder. Women's experiences with men are skewed by a small group of men who are highly overrepresented. I have met feminists who think that there are lots of hidden rapists becasue "everyone knows a victim but nobody knows a rapist". What they are forgetting is that there are far more rape victims than rapists. The left likes broad measures that don't really work but are implemented against an entire population instead of identifying the culprits and dealing with them. Pretty much all bad behaviour is the fault of a small number of people. If the 1% of the population that does the most drunk driving was stopped, drunk driving rates would fall substantially.
The me too movement made it hard for ordinary non and well meaning guys to talk to a girl at the gym, at the office or in the grocery store. It will not stop the guys with the personality disorders. This worsens the relations between the genders as women's experiences of men become increasingly skewed to psychopaths and bipolar men.
On another note there seems to be a feminist fantasy of men being really passive and girly but being so attractive that women can't resist them despite their behaviour.
functor
5mo ago
A lot of the people panicing aren't concerned about bribes and corruption being unconvered. There are plenty of people panicing over that but they are fewer than the number of people freaking out online and those who actually risk having crimes uncovered are probably less vocal. The big fuss is about the recession that is about to hit upper middle class people who only are employable in the public sector. They react in horror seeing George town pol sci graduates being tossed out and told to "learn to code". The Chief diversity officer, or the person with a cushy high status USAID job that allows them to fly business class to Tanzania twice a year doesn't want to learn about all the new exciting opportunities in nursing. This can be compared to the freakout over lots of PMCs being tossed out of twitter. Those people aren't supposed to be treated like factory workers who get laid off.
With 4 years of Trump we could really see a 10-20% reduction in public sector cushy PMC jobs. That is a sizeable downshift in employment equivalent to a proper recession. I would be freaking out as well if I thought it was realistic that there would be a 20% reduction in employment in my field over the course of the next four years.
functor
10mo ago
Labour got fewer votes in this election than the last one. There was no labour hype, there was just a collapse of the tories. Labour got 33.7% of the vote in an election in which the turnout was 60%. About 21% of those eligible to vote voted labour. Among ethnic british people less than 20% voted labour.
functor
5mo 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
6mo 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
11mo ago
It isn't an economic issue. It is the UK no longer being British. It is the loss of a people, an identity, a culture och sovereignty. The UK belongs to the people who built it for the past thousand years and those who will inherit it for the next thousand. It isn't up to the current people to give it away to strangers.
functor
11mo ago
Immigration would be really easy to reverse. Start handing out real punishments for hiring illegal migrants. The US is a surviellence state in which the NSA pretty much knows the physical location of every person in real time and spies on all communication. Yet they can't seem to cut off services to people who are in the US illegally.
functor
11mo ago
Also a huge portion of the college degrees require a big left wing government. Sociology majors need a welfare state. Much of the regulation the government invents requires college educated bureaucrats to enforce. A radical reduction of the state would be an absolute disaster for gender studies majors. Lots of college educated women work in child care and other fields that are built around feminism.
functor
11mo ago
Isn't this common throughout history? Women support the powers that be. In Saudi arabia women are more muslim. In the Soviet union they were more communist, in the third Reich they were more national socialist. Young men get fed up with the system and women keep supporting the position of those in power. Young men overthrow the government and install a new system. In 80 years women will be virtue signalling how much they love Victor Orban and Trump while young men will be rallying against whatever comes after the populist right.
functor
5mo 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
6mo 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.
functor
6mo 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
11mo ago
If you truly think Muslim immigration is the worst problem facing Europe, then that person needs to accept LGBT rights, a massive welfare state, supporting Ukraine, and so on, and you might get somewhere.
Absolutely not, the polar opposite. A few years ago an Afghan migrant stabbed 8 people in a town not to far from where I live and essentially nothing happened. If the king had brought in a bunch of Afghans into that town in 1900 and the Afghans stabbed people they would have been kicked out. If anything it is doubtfull whether a bunch of Afghans would have been allowed in at all. While today's elite hide in suburbs far from problems the aristocrats of yesteryear would have been sent in first to deal with problems. I worked in a tech park in which thousands of tech workers worked and a few gangs of youths terrorized the place. It would have been completely unthinkable that a group of muslims in the past could have terrorized an area with thousands of men and nothing would have happened.
The issue is not migration, the issue is atheism, no-fault divorce, LBGT, obesity, lack of classical architecture, consumerism and hollywood. The issue isn't migration, it is a symptom. Migration happened because countries are weak and won't be reversed until countries heals. In many ways migration might actually be highly beneficial. We need muslim migrants to act as battering ram to deal with the welfare state and pride. Islam might very well be what saves us from diversity.
More LGBT and Ukraine flags means weaker people and more migration.
I worked in a tech hub next to a ghetto. A large number of engineers were terrorized by a small group of young men. There were more engineers who were fit gun owning veterans than there were criminals.
The criminals were generally in poor physical condition, disorganized and not an especially impressive force.
Had the cops not been there the criminals would have been dealt with swiftly. However, the police protected them. If they stole a bike, nothing happened. If an engineer with friends shut it down, they would have had their lives ruined. The criminals didn't mind getting arrested for smaller crimes. The engineers were terrified of even getting arrested. The imbalance in the risk acceptance between tech workers and criminals completely shifted the power dynamic on the street. When they mugged a developer on the way home from work it wasn't by physically overpowering them, it essentially a game of chicken in which the developer was more afraid of going to prison. It is simply cheaper to clean up graffiti on a weekly basis than to spend an night waiting in the bushes with bats and dealing with the problem.
The justice system is too harsh toward people with a life while not being effective at keeping people who can't function of the street. Ideally the dysfunctional crowd shouldn't be punished but warehoused in a place that provides them with structure, meaning and a well balanced life. Mental asylums need to be scaled up.
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