greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
User ID: 68
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
However, though it isn't his fault directly, having Trump in charge would impact my everyday life negatively, mostly because it would fuel another 4 years of incessant leftist whining all around me, from all my friends and family, along with people starting to (erroneously, IMO) see and declare that racism and sexism is everywhere again.
The left, initially blindsided by Trump, turned it their advantage in 2016-2020, starting with the explosion pronoun and gender issues in 2017 , impeachment and FBI investigations in 2019, and then ending with Covid restrictions and mass social media censorship in 2020. I don't think it will be as bad if Trump wins again. The difference now is the left no longer has as much control over the narrative, as seen on Twitter now with Elon's takeover. I think many of these issued are played out.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
They are rare. Today's autocrats have nothing on the autocrats of 50+ years ago who imprisoned or murdered large swaths of their citizens and political opposition with impunity. Social media, smart phones, and the 24-7 news cycle means much more scrutiny on world leaders. And also the rise of the US as a 'world police'.
But large conspiracies are not impossible. Many conspiracies continue to exist even when all or most information is publicly available. For example, there was a large scale effort to convince the public that Covid had a zoonotic origin. Perhaps it did, perhaps it didn't. But evidence in support of a lab leak was deliberately denigrated by nearly all authority figures. There was no need to maintain a secret channel of communication. Once consensus was established, peopled picked up the signals to stay on side, and ones who didn't were punished. The best evidence in favor of a lab leak (that the pandemic started near a lab doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses) was never secret. It was just not spoken of.
Yup a notable example of a large scale conspiracy are the trading strategies used by Renaissance Technologies, which after many decades and hundreds of employees and considerable speculation online are still a secret. Not a single one of those employees spilled the beans to the public, thanks to NDAs and financial incentives to stay quiet. It is indeed possible for large groups of people to keep secrets for a long time.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
I doubt even the most principled libertarian would be able to resist spending tens of billions of dollars forever.
Some of the most principled libertarians worked in academia or were writers, the opposite of or private enterprise or cutthroat corporate capitalism. So it does not seem implausible the most principled libertarians would not spend the money.
Hal has been floated as a candidate for years and the evidence never bears out. Why would Satoshi create a Hal persona? Whoever Satoshi is, he took meticulous steps to not be found , and probably never will. If I had to guess he is a non-native person living in England. It's probably not Nick Szabo or Lens either.
again, to the media, it's evident they are different people
https://coingeek.com/the-running-bitcoin-challenge-in-hal-finney-memory-is-on-again/
“When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away,” he wrote. “I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin. I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test. I carried on an email conversation with Satoshi over the next few days, mostly me reporting bugs and him fixing them.”
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
They did know, but nobody spoke up because there is a culture of silence at Google.
It's not so much as a culture as the incentives encourage it. It's dream job. Imagine growing up poor or lower middle class and now being in the top .1-1%.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
I don't see a feedback thread, but can we make the comment scores/votes visible internally instead of having to wait a day? The score would be visible to whoever made the post but invisible externally, until the 24 hours has passed. This would be useful feedback so I can delete the post if it gets downvoted too much instead of having to wait a day. Sometimes it's hard to predict how unpopular a post is just by the replies, like about my posts on cities and crime which was heavily downvoted. Had I seen the vote count sooner I would have deleted it. I feel bad about having posted it and regret it.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
being downvoted to oblivion is worse than being seen as stupid
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
the main problem is the things we want to treat or modify , like weight, are highly polygenic or only partially explained by genes
Go back to the CW threads from 2020 or 2019 and they’re stuffed full of low effort drive-by posting from default redditors (of all political persuasions). Low quality writing, bad argumentation, random schizoposting, autism, baiting, boring incelposting, /pol/ trolling, all the usual stuff was commonplace. Seriously, go back and check! (Some was surely moderated, but not all.)
that is what made it better in some ways. things have gotten worse since 2022 in that things seem too serious and the stakes too high instead of just chit chat. i don't feel like having to always take a side or be conscripted to fight the culture wars.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
This culture of feeling pleasure over the misfortune of the hated Lindell promoted by such media and such echochambers might be influencing your happiness at his misfortune.
it is hard to frame him as a victim, imho. Mike profits from pillow sales by generating media attention. Likewise, the mainstream profits from ad revenue despite also being wrong a lot. The incentives encourage lies and sensationalism on both sides. There is no downside for the media being wrong. They book the ad revenue profit, issue retraction after the damage has been done and ad revenue realized, and move on and people forget.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
I don’t think Trump is the kind of guy who does something unless he believes he has at least a chance of winning, and I think he does believe he has a chance of winning this year.
It's possible Trump believes it is rigged, but sitting it out is 100% chance of loss, vs a rigged election and some chance nonetheless.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
This would be fine if so many employers did not req. degrees. Employers love degrees because it's an effective filtering mechanism.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
I think this is instead an argument about selective schools, but for a normal job track does it matter? I mean law schools do, but individually making the choice to go to Iowa A&M to become an accountant or a teacher or an engineer doesn’t matter a lot unless the alternative is, like, Stanford. And you can totally take your student loans from woke.EDU to go to podunk state. Whether it’ll do any good I don’t know, but it’s entirely doable.
It matters . They are competitive for a reason. But of course, it is possible to be successful graduating from a lesser ranked school.
Yeah, college is not that great, but the alternatives are even worse. 4 years and some debt is a small price to pay for a lifetime of extra earnings and low unemployment rate (plus additional $ from compounded returns by investing said earnings in stocks and real estate, lower insurance premiums, etc. )
Regarding IQ, there is the Wonderlic, which is used by many employers and is implicitly understood to be an IQ test (and produces a Bell Curve like a real IQ test) , and a lot of people on Reddit can attest having to take it. A full-scale IQ test would take hours to administer and req. a professional psychologist to proctor, which would be impractical for employers. The Wonderlic takes 12 minutes and can be administered and scored by the employer, and the Wonderlic also shoulders the legal burden of the test, which has resisted legal challenges, what few there have been. Also, it's not like employers ever used IQ tests even before credentialism become nearly as rampant as it is today. The degree solves many things at once: it filters for IQ, work ethic, and political correctness-all in one.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
It's always McDonald's. Maybe the bathrooms are to blame. This is why so many stores now have the keypads.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
Part of the problem with trying to answer this is methodology varies greatly depending on country or city, such as the definition of homeless, which varies. It's possible for people to not have a permanent residence but also not be sleeping on the street.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
Yet it was also clear that it was a lawless shithole, abandoned by all but the hardiest pedestrians for point-to-point car transfers. And even then, they seemingly increasingly avoided the urban core. This is what marks the biggest difference between Seattle and places like Johannesburg; there, in the poor and violent downtown, one can see that the material situation is dire.
More than anything else, though, the trip underscored just how much of a farce the extreme urban decline of West Coast cities has been. Other countries have real problems. When their cities become hellholes, it's because their economies have collapsed, or because they've been taken over by extremely well-organized criminal gangs funded with cartel money in a nation too poor to pay for honest police, or because they're locked in years-long siege situations with militarized gendarmerie, or because they recently imported millions of people from cultures that hate them and don't care about their rules. But on the West Coast the shithole city problem wasn't the fault of any of those things, not even mass immigration (certainly not of the legal kind, although honestly very few of the hobos appeared to be Latino). Nor was it a grand act of clear-headed sadomasochism, amusing as that would be, because I can't really say most of the people I met there were happy about what had happened.
Having lived in 'Blue' and 'Red' cities, I had the opposite experience and assessment. The Red city despite a Republican leadership was/is full of homelessness and tents. Being hit up for money is a daily experience . I got vibes of it being unsafe at night, and I had to be mindful of my surroundings. The Blue cities are orderly to a fault. None of the looting and lawlessness that one frequently encounters on social media as being supposedly representative of those areas. I noticed a few tents by a freeway and a single homeless man passed out in front of a 7-11, but otherwise nothing indicative of widespread decay.
If one was a street criminal , the Red city is a better target compared to the Blue one ,despite the Second Amendment, only because in the former people seem more atomistic and no one is keeping an eye out on each other, unlike in the Blue cities, in which people seem more mindful of each other.
It's evident that the social problems blue areas face are as prevalent in red areas too, even worse, at least from my own experience. Like everything else in life, ymmv.
Just because a modern big-city downtown does not look like a picturesque scene from 1900 Paris with dapper Parisians sipping on coffee and making small chatter, on the tiny chairs on the cobblestone, does not mean it's a hellhole or decayed.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
imho, the genome and genetic engineering is one of the biggest letdowns of the past century. The idea or promise of harnessing thee genome to improve or optimize life has not materialized except for select/limited instances. Cancer treatments have not improved much, only detection. Yes, there has been progress in immunotherapies on certain type of cancers, but not on the more common sarcomas.
The hope of modifying humans is still in the realm of sci fi, and see little reason for this to change. After a century, the state-of-the-art treatment for obesity is an injectable that effectively turns people into anorexics, not something that rewires the brain or other aspects of metabolism to make people thinner
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
A month ago he wrote an article about how women score 2-3 pts lower on IQ tests compared to men...hmm. So he wants to still be allowed to talk about it
I know Trace doesn’t like HBD much, but wow is that like the whole story of his FAA traffic controller storyline. If you listen to the Blocked and Reported episode, he and Jesse aren’t shy about pointing out it was an insane policy to completely jettison meritocracy, but they dance around the general point that if you set a fairly high intellectual bar for a job, it’s going to look like the racists are right. If you allow self-selection, you also very well might make it look like the sexists are right.
They want the popularity that comes with courting HBD views, as Trace and Hanania both had viral success wit HBD articles or articles that lend themselves to an HBD-based conclusion, but not to cross into bad optics by attracting the wrong people.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
I am sure if anyone is good at protecting assets it would be Trump. The guy is an expert at this sort of stuff. unlike other notable large civil judgements, Trump actually has the ability to satisfy the entire judgement, so it will be interesting to see if he is forced to pay out. It is also possible it will be negotiated to a much lower amount and sealed, so we will have no way of knowing how much is actually paid.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
the smarter grifters keep it civil and then use asset protection to avoid having to pay anything . the line between civil and criminal is up to the DA to decide. it can be referred for criminal prosecution.
All thebpenalties come with interest, so the defendants collectively owe around $450 million, not counting the $80+ million owed to E Jean Carroll. Even for Trump, that's serious money. Trump has of course said he will appeal, but to do so he will need to put up the full amount in bond first,
And what are the odds he will pay? Probably not that good. AFIK, no one has collected on the Alex Jones Sandy Hook verdict either, due to asset shielding. Does anyone actually pay these huge civil verdicts out of pocket? I think his much greater concern is losing a criminal case, and even then, Trump is Teflon and nothing sticks to him. And given his advanced age, he may die before paying anyway. Trump is smart enough to savvy enough to know what lines not to cross. Trump being precluded from running would also have to be weighed against the risk of civil unrest and a major retaliatory blowout turnout in 2024.
He made a lot of promises and initiatives that were half-assed or had little hope of happening, like promising to stop social media censorship, the wall, etc. but this is typical of politicians. Firing James Comey was an unforced error though.
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