georgioz
1yr ago
Young and Beautifu
I actually read Lana Del Ray "Young and Beautiful" Lyrics. And it to me seems like she said "I've seen the world, done it all". It is kind of defeatist music.
georgioz
1yr ago
Populism does not have to be without program or theory. One of the first recorded establishment vs populist clashes was that of Optimates vs Populares like Gracchi brothers in ancient Rome. Populists can have intelligent and well read champions and specific program like land reform, tax reform or election reform in case of aforementioned Populares.
In case of Bannon he named Sander's crowd who called for socialized healthcare, education and overall larger redistribution is one form of populism inside Democratic party, MAGA nationalism with things like subsidizing domestic industries employing workers can be used as populist strain of Republicans.
georgioz
1yr ago
I'm just curious to hear people's thoughts on this, both about this pattern of thought of erroneously retroactively changing worldviews or thinking events were inevitable, as well as about the 2016 election.
For retroactively changing worldviews, this I think is something very common in general life. My guess would be that people really think in narratives and stories. This is how humans make sense of the world, it is hard to keep track of myriads of possible worlds that could be spawned by butterfly flapping its wings somewhere in Amazon rainforest. One other area where I see it all the time is sports. You can have a great player who is MVP for five years and then if he bombs for a season you will see plethora of I knew he always sucked comments. Similarly people are also prone to overhype especially new players calling them GOAT after one season already having a narrative in their heads. In fact it often is these very same supposed fans who come hard on that player if he bombs, or even if he does something outside of the game that offends fans.
I remember one analysis of this fact mentioning that fans often project their own emotions and insecurities onto the player developing a strange parasocial relationship. If the player do well they have a kick of dopamine themselves, if the player does badly they can really get down. Inventing certain narratives especially those that externalize this pain can then serves as methods of dealing with cognitive dissonance for people. Inventing stories out of the whole cloth reduces inpredictability and thus anxiety and stress. Another one of those examples is centered around "Just World" fallacy - you have to have control over the world so if something bad happen it feels psychologically good to invent some reasons for that. Oh, she got harassed because she wore suggestive cloths/all men are pigs.
I know that in Slovakia we have quite “benevolent” laws, when things like EULA are not recognized, as we require intent in form of paper. Which makes sense - you cannot recognize who clicked “yes” and then keep someboy responsible, we are very much paper country in that regard. Also we consider downloading anything as legal - not uploading in torrents - but in general I saw a lot of rulings favorable to “pirates” here - as long that they were careful for normal things. Things like child porn are a big NO and you can expect to attract attention like a magnet and some large physical operation with some very “liberal” explanation of law. Don’t do it here.
My rule of thumb is that anybody who solely uses the unit of power for battery storage like "12 GW" is a moron and should not be part of the discussion at all. Peak output of storage is not the hard problem, the overall capacity is.
I had to look into several sources to check what we are talking about. Here is Bellefield solar + storage that claims to have battery storage of 1 GW output for whole 4 hours for overall capacity of 4 GWh. California consumes 259 TWh of electricity per year, Texas uses 365 TWh. Even if the output of this battery was infinite, it could power California or Texas for around 8-10 minutes. You would literally need thousand of such storage sites to cover potential output loss for one week.
Just to add my two cents into the whole disgusting affair - it reminded me of genre of movies and documentaries in my homeland of Slovakia with respect to Romani people, so I was somewhat inoculated. There is even a "thriving" boutique tourist segment where people are shown the worst gypsy slums either the urban ones such as Lunik IX or literal 3rd world villages we call "settlements" in Slovakia (here is aerial view of another one), where we have news pieces such as rats feasted on a body of little Roma boy, aged 18 months. Here is a video from that particular gypsy settlement related to another fatality due to fire.
Roma people live in Slovakia and elsewhere in Europe for centuries since they moved there probably from Punjab region of India. As far as I know, they faced incredible levels of racism with laws such as in Switzerland in 1510 where they were supposedly put to death on sight. The problem seems to be intractable, during communism gypsies were forcefully integrated with somewhat mixed results: while in some cities such as capital of Bratislava the effort was relatively successful - they literally put Romani families into blocks with soldiers and police officers. But elsewhere such as with Lunik IX it resulted in unbelievable slum. The sad thing is that while relatively substantial proportion of Romani people are assimilated and have decent life, there seems to be this permanent underclass of gypsies living in slums rife with alcoholism and cheap drugs such as toluene. You may integrate/save individuals but culture and population as a whole just propagates into the next generation.
It was obvious for a long time that Culture War was not healthy for Scott's professional career as he continuously withdrew from touching it by longer and longer pole. TheMotte started as a thread under Slatestarcodex subreddit before getting separated after it drew some heat into its own subreddit and eventually moved over here. The overall thread is that Scott became more mellow and kept himself at distance from CW stuff - and not without reason.
As for Litany of Tarsky it cannot be taken that seriously as object of destruction can be anything: human life, some other value or even Truth itself. I take it more as just a stronger way of saying "be intellectually honest". It works if it is more inward looking - don't be afraid to be wrong in your intellectual pursuit and destroy your previous belief. It does not mean you have to be Pavlik Morozov and destroy your own family by "telling truth" to police about their misdeeds because they should be destroyed by the Truth. I don't think it is supposed to be an argument in favor of always telling the truth to Kant's inquiring murderer in the skin of NYT journalist - although the edgy style of writing and general disposition of rationalist community may actually lead many to exactly that conclusion.
georgioz
3mo ago
Sorry, it was just bad writing. It should read something like "Hypothetical person identifies as nonrestrictive ...". It is common to use "I" in hypothetical examples in my language but maybe it seems weird in English.
By the way I actually think that it is more prudent to care about people close to me as opposed to people far away. And it is mostly due to the fact, that helping means involving oneself into other people lives, which also brings certain level of responsibility. As Scott Adams says: There is nothing more dangerous than resourceful idiot, in my language we also call them "idiot with initiative". You know the type: a good meaning person who decided to water your succulents so they rot, the moron who cleans your cast iron skillet with soap only on larger scale. You can also think about it as skin in the game principle where you are responsible for outcome of your actions however well meant. Only in the case of charity it also goes the other way - that people who disagree with your type of help can actually address you directly and hold you accountable. In Catholic teaching this is reflected in the principle of subsidiarity.
georgioz
4mo ago
Sexism isn't a general thing that people can do to others by discriminating on the basis of sex, it a specifically BAD thing that only MEN can do to only WOMEN (and other non-MEN).
Sure, I understand that concept. Bellow I even used similar example of Christian with strong beliefs. You can observe him praying, visiting church services and praising god and all that. But by understanding his beliefs you also can infer that he also believes in Satan as a force of evil. It would probably not be very far fetched to say that maybe such a person can accept that somebody got ahead in his life - getting rich etc. - by having nefarious help from demonic forces. Heck, with very strong belief you can see demonic forces in most innocent aspects of your own life.
That is the gist of what I wanted to say - that having strong beliefs has consequences. And I do not think that feminists are against using sexism to advance cause of women in the same way Christians would be against using demon worship to get ahead - like achieving pregnancy or destroying their enemies. The bar would be much lower for feminists in this case as the belief system is identity based as opposed to outcome based. "Sexism" against men is not real sexism, a boardroom full of women is the most feminist thing ever and opposed to being sexist.
georgioz
4mo ago
If somebody sincerely believes in Christian God, I think it is safe to assume that he also believes in Satan even if that is not the word you hear often. We can play the game all day long but it is not psychologizing to assume that.
For the n+1-th time, emotions are not incompatible with rationality.
Write that to the OP.
Further, presumably @zataomm takes umbrage to arguments that rely entirely or mostly on emotion, not a claim that emotion is entirely out of place in an argument.
So do I. I do not understand why anybody should give a shit what reading some arguments made OP feel: if he is disheartened or if he hates humanity or if his hand hurts today as he slammed it against the table reading these arguments. It is tangential to the discussion and it has nothing to do with the topic at hand, which is his incredulity with why people are emotional if somebody defends bestiality.
Which is BTW the hidden point that may have gotten over your head: the other people maybe also feel disheartened and lost faith in humanity and hate the society after reading arguments supporting bestiality. This would be equally emotionally "rational" response. So by rationally examining his own elevated emotions, the OP answered his question at least as it pertains to certain part of the outraged mob. Now I hope his curiosity is at least partially sated.
The principal-agent problem here is that hiring manager as well as the candidate are both employees. You already have conflict of interest where hiring manager may have interest in having this new non-standard perk available for his spouse as well. Also your definition of principal as "institution" is very strange, principal should be some person be it taxpayer or donor etc. You just dodge the question - there was some other agent in HR department who created benefit of "spousal hire", so this other agent (the hiring manager) is supposedly representing the best interest of "institution" in form of official benefits policy created by this other agent (HR benefit specialist)? What is next - that department of education as another agent in chain from taxpayer agrees with this policy as well? I am sure government bureaucrats would love to have the same policy for themselves. This just obfuscates what is going on here.
Maybe the confusion lies in the naming? Because it is official benefit and not some underhanded secret thing then it stops being nepotism and becomes "spousal hiring" instead? So if a new management of some University that governs endowment of tens of billons of dollars creates a new transparent policy that select superstar researchers and top university leadership will have free and unlimited access to room full of booze and hookers on campus, then this does not mean drinking and whoring on the job, it is just "award negotiated during hiring process"? I think it is in fact much worse if you take some morally shady practice and make it legal and official, it means you are trying to remove stigma from it.
Very good read, thank you. And I agree with the author that most Role playing games are not really those. I played D&D and Shadowrun, but my best game was Vampire: The Masquerade. I remember that my first character I spend maybe a week designing died during my first session. It was a result of unlucky roll and yes, my Game Master could have salvaged the situation but he would not. I then had a talk with him and he really did not like the roleplaying aspect - my character running around with weapons was literally "out of character" I wanted to build.
The next character I created more closely resembled me, it was easier to think about his actions that way and it eased me into the whole acting stuff. I eventually made some different characters and I really liked the actual roleplaying aspect, I think it really helped me socially in my future endeavors. To this day I have fond memories of my crew. We had a lot of fun sometimes playing through the whole night until dawn with Massive Attack or Tricky playing in the background and smell of cigarettes and cheap coffee filling the room. Good times. Plus the VtM and assorted games had incredibly high quality supplements that I read just for fun to gain some occult knowledge. The whole setting was incredible rabbit hole into one of the best worldbuilding that I have seen in my life, I have read supplements for other games just for fun.
Also I played Cyberpunk 2077 on release and I rate it as 8/10, luckily I did not encounter any bug at all. I did not mind little things people endlessly harped about such as behavior of the police. I went through the story, which to me was excellently constructed, acted and voice-acted. I got my load of fun for the buck I paid as far as I am concerned. I hear that a lot of things were fixed and polished and I am eager to return to the Night City with any future content DLC. Also for anybody out there who likes these sandboxy but story driven RPGs like The Witcher, RDR2 or Cyberpunk I can recommend a hidden gem I found recently that I already poured more than 100 hours into (my mark of superb singleplayer game): Days Gone. Thank me later.
Xi did not clamp on anything. China runs on corruption - there is 100 million members of CCP who suck the blood out of Chinese people. Corruption is how things are done. The whole thing has analogy of Medvedev´s anti-corruption campaign in 2009, the only purpose for it was to eliminate political enemies like it was done with Khodorkovsky in 2003.
I am not saying that corrupt officials should not be arrested. But it would be as if gang leader turned political leader did a campaign to eliminate murderers, thieves and drug dealers. The only thing that would result is domination of his gang and corrupt and ineffective police force under his thumb.
georgioz
1yr ago
Alternative explanation is that these large corporations are also existing in kind of incestuous environment. CEOs of various companies know each other and are sitting on boards of various companies together, or they can influence these companies by different means - such as controlling access to technology or market etc. Everybody knows how huge corporations can get what they want from government regulators and other actors, I see no reason not to think that they use similar underhanded tactics against or together with each other. I can easily see a conversation between Cook and Iger along the lines of: "You hire my nephew for this position in Apple and in exchange we will contract company of your nephew for that project at Disney".
georgioz
1yr ago
Quite to the contrary. A $1000 show means a guy next to you may be somebody to do business with. It becomes a networking event first with performance being secondary. It is something happening even to top 300,000 global wealthiest people - they attend certain events almost out of obligation. There actually are even lower level analogies, something like Vienna Opera Ball
georgioz
1yr ago
It is really simple. Since 2008 FED pays interest on cash that banks "deposit". So let's say FED buys government bonds from bank by printing money, but it also offers interest on money that the bank deposits with FED. So there is no incentive for banks to do anything with that money such as loan it or buy some other instruments. The cash basically becomes interest yielding vehicle. As you see right now FED pays 3.15% interest to any bank that does not move money from their reserve account. So they don't do it, easy as that.
georgioz
1yr ago
That, or it may be genuine discussion of what should be considered racism and racist. To go for more benign example take claim like "psychology is science". It is at the same time a claim about what is psychology but also a claim of what properties science should have. Somebody saying "psychology is not science" can disagree with you about properties of psychology and/or properties of science.
And of course as said previously, this can be used as sophistry. You can use word games to become parasitic on some pre-existing meaning or valence of certain word (e.g. racism is bad) in order to either make the new thing (like disparate impact) seem a little bit like the original category (racism), or to change the meaning of the word (racism) a bit - or both at the same time.
georgioz
1yr ago
They could become neutral. Meaning no transport of goods, no panzerhaubitze 2000 and most importantly a major diplomatic ally for Russia when it comes to diplomacy in the west. It would also throw screws into the whole sanction mechanism given that Germany is together with France the major player when it comes to EU internal politics. Even easing on some of this stuff could serve Putin very well.
Some comments. According to Statista the difference between starting salary of people with high school diploma vs college degree is $30k vs $50k. However I think it would be interesting to see also the whole calculation, college degree has a lot of costs, namely tuition plus all the necessary costs of living such as rent, food, books and so forth accounting to around $35k a year. Additionally there is opportunity cost of not earning any money and delaying one's career by 5 years. If we compare apples with apples of somebody who can work and save all the income because all his needs are taken care of by parents, then we really have a difference of fresh college major out of school compared to high-school graduate with 5 years experience with around $100k minimum already put into real estate or stocks, more realistically it would be $200k or more. This difference is even larger if college education was debt financed to large degree (probably the only possibility for child of poor parents). In such a case instead of having 100k+ assets bringing interest you may end up with 200k+ debt with 5% plus interest rate.
Second elephant in the room is also quality of college and one's major. The most popular degree now in USA is "social science and history", these graduates earn around $42k after graduation compared to computer science graduates with $75k. So it would be worthwhile to actually calculate which majors are actually worth it. Of course there are also gated profession like doctors or architects and so forth where college is by law necessary to get the job in the first place. I think these professions should be automatically removed from any comparisons as they literally hold the students hostage. Of course the problem is that in last couple of decades we experienced runaway credentialism where jobs that used to be "free" now require some degree or certification by state, like for instance even simple hairdresser job. The problem with mass college attendance is the classic problem of people standing up to have better view of the game in stadium. Eventually most people will have to stand to view the game with experience of aches and tiredness, while those incapable of standing will be completely cut out not seeing anything. Of course this does not change the calculus of degree being worth it for every individual.
Third, college already counts with some survivorship bias. You mentioned possibility of college dropouts, which is massive - apparently around one third of people do not finish their degrees and will thus count as high-school graduates. So there is risk involved which should change the calculation for any prospective college student. Also college self-filters people capable of adhering to schedule and so forth. If you are a teen with family or drug/alcohol or crime problems, you will not be able to finish college no matter how subsidized it is but you may be able to finish high school. This to me is not a relevant comparison when calculating the benefit of college for individual. Again to have an honest comparison we should really compare college graduates with high-school graduates who are fully capable of finishing college but who decide to go and work right after high school.
Fourth and a major assumption is that all salary advantages are solely the result of college education. As if nepotism, corruption or even plain old social networks that can find a good job for young Ariston do not exist. There is huge correlation between parental income and college attendance. Children of rich parents have high income is of course no-brainer. I would wager that if one did similar comparison of future income of children flying first class on intercontinental flights we would get similar results - however it would not mean that your average schmuck should have his child fly 1st class to Paris every ear in order to improve their chances of good income when adult.
georgioz
1yr ago
Not exactly forums, but I do comment under various bloggers on older platforms or on substack as well.
If NATO, with cca what, 900 million population, GDP (ppp adjusted) maybe 4x of Russia, cannot somehow manage to have conventional forces supremacy in Eastern Europe to prevent Russia from attacking, what use is NATO?
Exactly, and Putin may put this into a test, especially to test how will let's say countries like Portugal or Italy or even Hungary or Slovakia or Finland or Romania react to the situation when their soldiers will return in cardboxes by thousands in peer-to-peer warfare. And we already see the pathetic situation we are in right now - US cannot get a bill of $60 billion passed to support Ukraine, and even that has some Israel support as well as organizational support for European theater inside. And we are still talking about 7% of US military budget and 0.2% of US GDP. And let's not forget that USA and UK actually have some obligations towards Ukraine as part of Budapest memorandum where Ukrainians gave up their nuclear arsenal in exchange for guarantees of territorial integrity from US, UK and Russia. Of course Russian word is as usual not worth the paper it was put onto and US/UK try to weasel out of it by saying it was actually "assurance" and not "guarantee". Anyways even besides that, this is still seems crazy to me - you are supposedly willing to pour trillions of dollars to build up defense against hostile power threatening NATO but you are unable to spend comparatively infinitesimal fraction of money to actually fight it? To me it seems like an invitation for Putin to test the resolve.
Plus the reality check of actual efficacy of all that GDP put into military. Fucking North Korea who is economical dwarf was able to send 3 million shells to Russia. US production is around 30,000 a month so North Korea was able to send years of production to Russia. And we are not even talking about what Russia was able to do since the war started - triple the production of artillery shells to 300,000 a month.
So why am I now hearing this defeatism ? Eastern European countries joined NATO because they were told it'd make them 'safe' against Russia ? Was that just a bluff ?
I actually see it as the opposite. The ultimate defeatism is things I reacted to such as "too many Ukrainians are dying, let's give Putin what he wants" or "don't support Ukrainians by 0.2% of GDP when they are in hot war against an actor that threatens NATO, it is too much money that can be spent on social security". So if we care about non-NATO soldiers dying and spending on level of peanunts, then how is NATO going to absorb tens of thousands of their own citizens dying or spending hundreds of billions or even trillions on potential hot war? Will it not be too tempting to again give Putin what he wants and effectively dissolve NATO as a defensive alliance? These two things are related in my eyes and I bet that those new NATO members are watching it in disbelief, they may have been hoodwinked by mushy allies. Also it is not as if this happened for the first time, Czechoslovakia could talk about that a little bit
georgioz
30d ago
Yes, the OP mentioned the fact that even if we take the EA utilitarianism into account it is hard to calculate utility lost by killing untold number of moths and larvae compared to inconvenience of not crushing them when walking around the tiny apartment. Another interesting thing that jumped at me was that the EA poster decided that next time she has to kill the insect ASAP, informed by emotional response of seeing moths dying slowly. To me it is interesting to compare with how EA is so obsessed by saving future unborn people. I am very glad that this got posted, unlike your accusatory oneliner.
Yes, this is the infamous COVID drop many people "bragged" about how they managed to time their shorts. Only then many of those people continued to short the stocks "knowing" that COVID will be even worse and that markets will crash completely any time soon. Except the rest of the year stocks experienced strong growth that basically erased all the losses by the end of the year and the growth continued for the whole 2021 as well. Some people lost all they gained in February/March and then some. I am strongly against timing this stuff, I did not lose the nerve during the drop - I actually bough a little bit more as usual.
My formula was (72.28/53.11)^(-3). It also works backwards when you calculate 53.11(1.1081)^3 = 72.262. There is of course some rounding error. Also my gains were in EUR and it benefited from lately stronger dollar. In dollar terms the ETF had around 7.6% annual return, which is more then reasonable.
Yes, it is literally World ETF so it also holds some Emerging Markets which results in slightly higher expense ratio. But in my eyes it is worth it, no need to construct some complicated portfolio rebalancing it all the time and losing money on fees.
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