jake
6mo ago
"Elite Human Capital" moves like offering a solution to save some trapped kids, then calling someone closer to the situation a pedophile because he disagreed.
What I've always found interesting about the insult is that I thought way more people knew what goes on in Thailand, but then a ton of people were bewildered about Musk "randomly" calling "some guy" a pedophile.
The man in question is a white expat living in Thailand, and white men don't move to Thailand for the diving.
jake
29d ago
Neither are what I requested, and neither are what are cited in the modern discussion of Israel and Palestine. The modern discussion says specifically there are immediate and frequent examples of Israeli soldiers outright murdering Palestinian civilians. A single example from 20 years ago that resulted in a full investigation and trial is none of these.
As for the other example:
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said troops had opened fire near the village of Nabi Saleh after Palestinian gunmen fired shots towards a guardpost. Tamimi told reporters there had been no other gunfire, and that he had just buckled up his son in order to drive to an uncle’s house when their car was shot at.
A man who had every reason to lie said there had been no other gunfire. Had there been, it absolves the IDF. They would still be wrong to shoot the car, but they shot it because they were under fire and understandably assumed the worst. It's a casualty of war, it happens, it's not wanton murder. And to not make you think I take the IDF at their word, I never do, but they at least check. That article mentions the case of Shireen Abu Akleh, where the IDF admitted one of their soldiers fired at her. How many times has any Palestinian organization admitted a group they first claimed as civilians murdered by the IDF were in fact militants killed fairly? Has it happened a single time ever? If it hasn't, it's not because they've never lied about it.
That's the problem with articles, journalists wrote them. The writer of the second article is a person who is specifically motivated to defend Palestine and criticize Israel. I can't believe them, categorically, and again by the way, same for Haaretz or whatever Israel-favoring publications, I presume every sentence as untrue. This is why I ask for video.
What I am asking for is clear video evidence from the current Gaza War of a civilian being murdered. That they are objectively a civilian, so objectively civilian circumstances (Ideally, anyway, right now can't be held as a standard in Palestine) so a woman who could not possibly be concealing explosives or else couldn't be considered as in a place where that's a reasonable fear, or a child who can on-sight be determined as not carrying explosives--as this discussion can't be held faithfully without acknowledging one side employs women and children as suicide bombers--and that they are then clearly singularly targeted and shot. Ian Carroll, who I've liked clips by him, talks about it, Darryl Cooper, same, talks about it, IDF snipers wantonly dropping civilians, and it is those videos I have never seen, those videos I have looked again and again to find, and all I can ever get is people talking about the supposed incidents, not actually showing them. I don't want to watch them, but I need to know the truth more than I need to avoid the heartsickness from seeing the horror I already know is so much in this world.
jake
5mo ago
- America develops new TB treatment
- India, South Africa, et al., misuse it
- Misuse drives further drug resistance in TB
- New treatment doesn't work anymore
Whether it's made locally or shipped to such nations the solution remains prohibiting methods of treatment that risk further drug resistance, e.g., changing to requiring the locking down of patients for the entire duration of treatment.
jake
5mo ago
LLMs are convoluted calculators, not demons. Demons, if they ever roamed the earth, haven't since the Harrowing of Hell.
I doubted economics from simple reasoning. How can there be a debate? There should be a right way, or a comparatively optimal way, some country somewhere would have implemented. There's not. Humans can't solve it, humans can't approach solving it, and in support of this I wondered, what has economics actually done for humanity? There I asked GPT not for arguments or numbers, which would be suspect, but a list of its contributions. The list is either a bunch of things people have known for centuries, or things that just helps bankers, pass, or game theory. But by all means, please correct me if you know an area where economics has profoundly improved humanity.
jake
5mo ago
Trump’s order also includes a mechanism to escalate the rates if the countries retaliate against the U.S., as they are possibly prepared to do.
For decades, auto companies have built supply chains that cross the borders of the United States, Mexico and Canada. More than one in five of the cars and light trucks sold in the United States were built in Canada or Mexico, according to S&P Global Mobility. In 2023, the United States imported $69 billion worth of cars and light trucks from Mexico – more than any other country -- and $37 billion from Canada. Another $78 billion in auto parts came from Mexico and $20 billion from Canada. The engines in Ford F-series pickups and the iconic Mustang sports coupe, for instance, come from Canada.
“You have engines and car seats and other things that cross the border multiple times before going into a finished vehicle,’’ said Cato’s Lincicome. “You have American parts going to Mexico to be put into vehicles that are then shipped back to the United States.
“You throw 25% tariffs into all that, and it’s just a grenade.’’
In a report Tuesday, S&P Global Mobility reckoned that “importers are likely to pass most, if not all, of this (cost) increase to consumers.’’ TD Economics notes that average U.S. car prices could rise by around $3,000 – this at a time when the average new car already goes for $50,000 and the average used car for $26,000, according to Kelley Blue Book.
Over the last several years I've come to believe economics is a more fraudulent field of study than social science. As I'm not an economist, I asked GPT for what economics has contributed to mankind and the best I saw in its list was game theory. Meanwhile car manufacturers are shipping car seats "multiple times" across the border before they're actually put in a vehicle. It all feels so incredibly fake.
jake
1d ago
Would mark as "bad."
Everything following "The probability of one person in a selection of 5500 deaths being skilled enough to be a Top 10 redditor is zero" is charity extended to my interlocutor. With sub-1% chance of death and sub-1% chance of a voluntary stop, the probability of it being Ghislaine Maxwell is already over 90%.What's the probability alone of someone incorporating a bit of personal information into their reddit username? 5%? How's it change when our options for maxwellhill are Ghislaine Maxwell and person who probably doesn't exist?
jake
1mo ago
If we ask what most defines the bad governor the singular example is "He has an innocent man put to death." Whatever the truth of Pilate's reasoning, he was in dereliction of his greater duty to good governance. You call to cold practicality. Kill the innocent rebel, end the movement, prevent instability and possibly save many lives. Those bad but "necessary" decisions don't come from nothing, rather they come as the long consequences of earlier bad decisions and failures. How many seemed necessary at the time?
There is also a nice irony to preventing instability. Jesus, who held tremendous draw, offended the elders. They wanted him killed and they were appeased. Bar Kokhba also had draw; thus went Judea.
jake
2mo ago
The universe, our solar system, our planet and all life are the consequences of the Big Bang and the laws of physics. These events happened, cosmological and Earth's natural history, but they are simply and solely what happened. They neither support nor repudiate the Genesis account. The skeptic takes the Genesis account as expressly literal and says "but history." In this they err, but understandably so as the American skeptic particularly will have been exposed so much to Protestants who hold to Young-Earth creationism. The apologist in turn errs in accepting the skeptic's framing as they concede the point of natural history as supporting the naturalist paradigm. This is true for the YEC, whose first error is that belief, it is also true for the OEC/believer in Theistic Evolution who accept it as having explanatory power.
But the apologist is correct in the importance of faith, the point is ubiquitous. I assume you are familiar enough to know the recurrence of "The Jews fall to apostasy and ruin, God personally delivers them, and yet they fall once more." They knew, still they fell, again and again. It's never been about what you know, it's about what you hold in faith. That we see no glaring gap in natural history is not because if there were we would have no choice but to believe. We see contiguous natural history because that is what happened. Faith is for why.
jake
5mo ago
Yes to clause one, half-yes to clause two.
If free trade does not produce as necessity holistic benefits, it is not an economic benefit. Policies based on "in benefiting a narrow percent of the population this may incentivize behavior that will yield wide benefits" are not holistic; policies based on "this will yield wide benefits" are holistic. Where FTAs yield the former, yes, where they yield the latter, no.
jake
10mo ago
The barely teenage groupies who had sex with guys like Mick Jagger were raped. A 14 year old girl is not capable of consenting to sex with a man of that level of fame. They were adolescents caught up in a wave of historically unparalleled wall-to-wall social and peer pressure. The music was good and they could feel it, but those teenage groupies had no context, they were fans of the Beatles and the Stones because they were that-which-is-most-popular. I'm sure you've seen the Beatles on Ed Sullivan; those girls didn't spend the entire performance screaming because they were there to hear the music. This phenomenon can be seen today with Taylor Swift. She is measurably popular because she is popular, and I say that as someone who likes a fair number of her songs and who doesn't care what she's chosen to do with her life. Back then, what would show a girl's "fitting in" more than for one precious moment being the desired object of one of the most famous men alive?
Much of this applies to the teenage girls who were legal adults, who while I would say in their case had nothing happen justifying prosecution, were nevertheless coerced with a lie. The lie of status, the story is perceived status, but it was always and only ever fake. "For that moment, he wanted to fuck me" for that moment, an immensely famous man on a world tour unsurprisingly wanted to have sex with a young and attractive girl who would do anything for him. She tells that story for the exact reason that she wasn't good enough; else she would have married one of those guys, or we would know her as a model or an actress. I'm sure we do in some cases, but those guys went to a lot of places, and those places had a lot of groupies. They weren't sleeping with future models every single night, even though they could have been sleeping with actual models every single night.
All that aside, of course it's not unthinkable, because we live in the time when it isn't unthinkable. But if you had some method of traveling to 1960 and conveying absolute proof of the consequences of the sexual revolution, it would be unthinkable, and it would have never happened. They would see the evidence and they would know it made everything worse. And even ignoring everything else here, everyone knows we happily indulge in things that aren't bad for us, been to the store lately? Seen the sinful glut of Oreo varietals choking half the shelves of the cookie aisle? Four kinds of Funyuns, ten of Doritos, several dozen flavors of Pringles? Who's that for? (It's me, and I love it. Get it?)
Sexual traditionalism is nominally about safety, they're practicably about preventing all the work required when they forget to put their condom on and blast STDs and unwanted babies out into the commons.
Yeah, well enough, though your point might be a bit unclear. Ultimately I'd just stake Chesterton's Fence on the subject, whatever it's ostensibly about, it sure did work for a very long time.
jake
10mo ago
Those high-status men are still fucking the help, it's just now they don't have to worry about troublesome heirs. That's why men of status supported the sexual "revolution," not liberty but the libidinous enabled to sleep with whichever women they wanted. It's David and Bathsheba replayed again and again on our entire civilization. Their beautiful wives and beautiful families wasn't good enough, so make it "easier" for the help, rather than harder for those despicable men. Remove the negative consequences from that specific act, which have indeed drastically decreased, but if I compare a maid being tossed out to the subtle and myriad horrors of modern life as a woman I'd say it's at best a tie, and a tie that favors tradition. What benefits some all too often harms most and social pressures and economic interests have a funny way of taking once-niche-choices and demanding them of the whole. Like pressure to become Strong Female Protagonist when most would rather be Stay At Home Mom.
Seatbelt laws are nominally about safety, they're practicably about preventing all the work required when someone gets launched through their windshield and meat crayons the road. Regardless, Big Seatbelt isn't dictating national elections.
jake
12d ago
and I think his claim to believe in God is one of those useful lies to the voter base rather than anything he sincerely believes in
By the way, and I should have said this back at Christmas, but alas. I'd say the probability of your assessment of Ramaswamy falsely professing belief is very high now. I won't go all the way, not because I mind admitting being wrong, you can treat this as my admission of being on the wrong side of assessing him, but because it's not my place to say on this whether someone believes what they say. "He's given adequate reason to doubt him," yes. I do think one of my arguments holds up, that a more competent actor would have found a way to say it without lying, because he dropped a few poorly chosen words on an issue and got himself banished to Ohio.
Have I read what life was like for the aristocracy? Have I read the sort of fictions I close that comment with criticizing? Would I have been spared your angle of comment had I instead written "dating sucks because of love stories"?
You quote my answer, there were not enough instances and nothing close to enough time to see the skill evolved. Like those noble women whose "myriad" options were noble men, so past number and time the third hindrance was the scope too limited for beneficial selectivity. Beneath the nobles the true stock of humanity experienced life exactly as I described. The fifteenth century peasant girl did not exert a meaningful control on the father of her children; nor for the those girls in sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And whatever controls they may have exerted they were still nothing compared to when the phenomenon of autonomy and variety of selection emerged in full in the twentieth century.
genetic testing has started to indicate that female infidelity is truly a woman’s way to choose when more traditional methods are removed from her
A genetic inclination and justification for infidelity is a very sharp argument. I worry that whatever research comes from highly motivated reasoning.
Why else do you think teenage boys so actively, so instinctively, try to impress the girls around them?
Why do young men jockey for status? We can consider chimps where we understand we're seeing juvenile displays of fitness targeted not really at a particular female but the cohort, or we can consider Alexander, where we understand we're seeing juvenile displays of the coalescing inclination, desire and ability to subjugate.
I need only gesture vaguely at the world to support my thesis, short as it is, as there is no shortage of evidence on the lack of skill in the human female to select good mates. This is a qualitative judgment, the man who propagates has succeeded in the eyes of nature, but this is also a quantitative judgment, evolutionarily a single child is as good as none. I accounted for the potential flaw in my thesis in taking the kindest interpretation for the decline: that men and women equally lack acumen in mate selection, that we are equally to blame and equally blameless. I took this interpretation as acknowledgment of my ignorance, because despite the evidence, I may be wrong, and this is how. It is exactly how, for given all evidence, there is no alternative. Either both sexes lack the skill, or only one, and as the defining graph of post-industrial civilization is female liberation, if it is one, we know which.
I'll finish by speaking to my cohort. The woman who was the queen of my class in my large high school, as lovely a person as she is beautiful to this day, is a single mother with a single son, never married, her bastard's father in the picture briefly. I don't think if she chose better she would have chosen me, I only had eyes for her best friend anyway (who's living her best life with her "roommate"). I have no resentment except a fateful sort about the tragedy that is her life as it could have been. Socially, today, one child is more than good enough, she should have several, and were our world better she would have been swiftly taken with a man of due quality and spent her years since as the happy stay-at-home-mom. Incidentally and I find joyfully, this is exactly what happened with the third in that trio of friends: Queen, Sappho and Blessed. Blessed eloped the summer after we graduated, we now live in the same neighborhood and this time of year I can count on regularly seeing her walking with her growing flock and oh, how she emanates life. That is a woman who could choose a man. If only it were all so easy.
jake
2mo ago
What does it mean to hold yourself in what you think is the right way if there is an absolute standard for righteousness?
What does it mean to hold yourself in the right way if righteousness doesn't exist?
jake
2mo ago
I've leaned on its empiric benefit here because I question the receptiveness of this audience to moral condemnation.
It's the one-two, we of low agreeableness thinking we know better than the tradition civilization stands upon, and of simple rebelliousness at the idea of being judged and found unrighteous. I hate to invoke Pascal, but something runs parallel here. If I am wrong about the universe, I will not be wrong in how I have held myself. If you are wrong about the universe, you will have been wrong about the very nature of your soul. We can slap fight about whose personal investment functions as greater cognitive vulnerability, but it's not me, and I know I'm right.
At any rate, we live in a world of ideas so foolish only a smart person could believe them.
jake
3mo ago
Due process is reciprocal. The court presumes innocence by giving the accused the opportunity to defend themselves. That defense must be substantiated, claiming "I have an alibi" and then failing to provide that alibi is not a defense, and the court will not treat that claim as evidence. Same for immigration. Immigration enforcement presumes innocence by giving the accused the opportunity to provide documentation. In practice, any person who cannot provide such documentation is here illegally. Show a state ID, you're good, assuming it isn't from a state that issues IDs to illegals. "Difficulty in acquiring an ID" is, same as voting, inadequate. Functioning states do not express special concern for those so lazy they can't be bothered to get something so universally required as ID. That is highly aberrant behavior, it's something deserving institutionalization or apathy. Relevant for the one valid defense, "I am chronically homeless." Okay, permanently institutionalize them.
jake
6mo ago
Less percentage, though as the article says it's believed a minimum of 40%. Thailand is the sex tourism capital of the world, it's also the child prostitution capital of the world. Legal prostitution where almost half are children, very bad signaling from a white man living there not for obvious foreign professional reasons — such as being: a director or otherwise highly-compensated role in a multinational corporation; an entrepreneur on a temporary visit pursuing a deal; a journalist on assignment; a diplomat or attaché — and making it fair to suspect ill motive. It gets worse, the man, Vernon Unsworth, lives or lived in Chiang Rai, that's a city in Thailand's rural and mountainous north. So it's not just that he moved to the country that's the world capital of child prostitution, he moved to the region in that country where it's most prolific.
I wouldn't accuse him of being a pedophile on this alone but I would tell him honestly, the choices he has made have drastically increased the probability and consequently the reasonability of suspecting him of pedophilia. Enough he has forfeited fair indignation when someone calls him a pedo.
jake
10mo ago
The mitigation of risk is the natural result of technological progress. It isn't always bad, penicillin and the whole of medical research being obvious examples, it's also not always good, see my above comment. Contextually I thought I was clear, it seems not, that I was describing specifically "protection from the highly predictable consequences of poor choices." A person who does something unjustifiably foolish and knows it's foolish if for no other reason than its possible consequences, deserves whatever they get. Living in society means you're going to get sick, it's not unjustifiably foolish to live and go about among other people. Living in temperate climates is a hair different as maybe it would be ideal if most humans lived in a climate like Southern California, but there are resources we need that come from harsh climates, and we've long since adapted to living in climates that require heating in some parts of the year and cooling in others. It's also not the same sort of risk, not today; two hundred years ago if you were unprepared by say, not bothering to get enough wood to burn to keep yourself warm in the winter, you'd deserve whatever happened.
And I say this, people say this, because the American Democratic Party would operate in a categorically different manner if it couldn't campaign on protecting its voters from the consequences of their poor decisions. What would they be if they couldn't deliver on abortion and welfare? What would they be if they couldn't back the mass importation of foreigners who will be dependent on government subsidy? For my money they'd be far stronger, as remaining options and ideological inclination kept them as the natural allies and champions of domestic, native-born labor — the platform they once owned.
jake
10mo ago
Not 20 years, but simulacra will be in their spread to ubiquity in the 2040s. The largest western nations need too much downsizing and too much conditioning for a rapid shift. While by the 2050s we certainly could automate something like 80% of labor, with population projections putting the US over 400 million by then we're not socially equipped for more than 300 million people becoming suddenly permanently unemployable. With controls implemented by 2060, projections assuming a minimum halving effect means by the mid-2100s the US will reach a stable population, this despite post-scarcity conditions being probably common in western nations including the US by 2110.
Any economist who doesn't account for >90% of human labor becoming obsolete by 2100 is either hopelessly ignorant or using economics as a cover for politicking. Because of automation, there is no economic argument behind any effort to increase the population of any country. We need to already be shrinking, the faster (peacefully!) the better.
jake
10mo ago
In 30 years, specifically in the 2050s, the world will look with envy on Japan for their plummeting population coinciding so perfectly with the Age of Simulacra. The foreigners they bring in for their current economic-demographic concerns will be kicked out and they'll begin their cruise toward post-scarcity civilization. A few western nations will adopt mass use of automata, the ones most affected by the wars in Europe might be forced to, the others will argue over the legality of automata and where allowed flourish, and where prohibited languish and fade away. China meanwhile will be working on their population problem, as they'll need to shrink their population by >1 billion, in <100 years, without total collapse. I think it'll be easy for the CCP, but I think the reality of that problem will put a halt to everything else. At least unless western hegemony finally and totally collapses, in which case China will just take Africa.
jake
10mo ago
Great to read the new section, keep at it. I think I won't make any more suggestions until you're much farther along/done, or if there's something specific you want checked.
jake
1yr ago
It's not a bad list, and it being 1998-1999 there's nothing to be made of certain omissions, but wow to miss Moby-Dick and Blood Meridian. Midnight's Children at least made it, but at #90, lol. Then for the lesser misses, Gravity's Rainbow, and even less so, one of Dick's works, probably Ubik--though remarkable for prescience rather than prose. But it's not like people don't know those books, and also they all made one of Time's lists. Ignoring Neuromancer is probably a miss too, but I say that looking back from 2024.
Speaking of Gibson, and the only point I could say of this, thinking of him reminded me of his short story Burning Chrome. If you (anyone reading this) are familiar with Cyberpunk 2077 but not Gibson's work, read it. A quite short story, published in 1982, and Gibson's the rare science fiction author with real chops for prose.
jake
15d ago
I know little on autism diagnoses. I have a cousin who might be autistic, and then also one friend who is autistic, she's a former FTM who transitioned ~2011, married a man at about the same time and they're still together, moved out of the country and detransitioned a few years later. She's appreciably different from any of my other friends, especially compared to the ones who describe themselves as on the spectrum, but she and I mostly swap pictures of our dogs and I've had some burning questions, assuming you don't mind answering:
- Did you read much as a child? If so, what?
- You mention childhood hallmarks of social issues, did you have few friends? One best friend? Are you friends still? How long have you known your oldest friend?
- Are you attracted to the opposite sex? When did you first notice?
- And this one's just angled at MLP; have you ever read or watched Japanese shoujo? If yes, had you before MLP?
Guy writes fun short story. "Source?" says one, "What did he mean by this?" says another. It's a joke, c'mon.
Was this meant to be a mean joke? Sorry man, you put in too much effort and snark, so the snark itself came off as in parody and the whole thing came off as decent satire. Well done, I did laugh, you stuck the landing.
You have an obsession with class but you shouldn't. Of the top 1,000 or so achievements of humanity you will find, well down the list of its contributors, maybe one single noble by name of Tycho Brahe. It's Shakespeare, scrutiny on his identity didn't come from a fair evaluation but noble arrogance at the impossibility of a commoner having such a way with words.
I think you approach something truthful here, but only approach. You wrote this (I hope; if it's AI consider me the sad fool), you show your intelligence, you also show how deeply you consider this topic. More than some of these respondents realize, but worse, more than you yourself realize, because I think your obsession with class fogs your mind by forcing you to write off branches in reasoning and take conclusions you otherwise wouldn't. There may be something to be said about the behaviors of large groups of people, and the way that relates with their "class," who they started around, who they are around now, who they will end their lives around. But class as Banana uses it, and as you may have fallen into, is more like a religious belief, something ineffable to which you always reason back. I can assure you the progressive metaphysical beliefs of western Brahmin are just that: without substance. You use them as though they're the map while they're just making it all up.
So why not, just for curiosity's sake, reconsider one of your conclusions? Any, you know this, your subject, your choice, but after shelving class as having explanatory power and instead as detail incidental to the territory you try to see.
What's prosocial about profiting in death?
Health insurance is a fleeting necessity. It's been useful as structural opposition to American single-payer, but AGI approaches as does the panacea, and the industry will cease to exist by 2100. Healthcare as a whole has to put a price on human life, health insurance does too, it's the cold calculations of what's needed to stay solvent and I would only say remain attractive to investors where this latter is necessary to the former. Not when it's simple profiting, and that's what's happening here, profiting in death.
There is nothing prosocial about that behavior. Civilization does have a long relationship with profiting in death, but the avarice underlying that is iniquity's millstone we trudge ever against. Great men have been driven by their want for something to make the most lasting achievements, but it is grossly reductive to categorize it as greed. If that is a fair term, then it applies truly to precious few men who have ever lived. Better to know those traits are found commonly, and those great men were motivated by something ineffable and gestalt, rather than mundane greed.
So to suggest, in this not being prosocial, that civilization was not raised on the line of people being murdered randomly in the street, is to view it in a hypermodern and wrong lens. Thompson was not a random person, he was a modern nobleman who led an organization that profits in death and reaped finally a historically appropriate reward. That historic archetype did fear murder in the commons, so whoever among them today who do not fear being struck down, or who did not, they are or were living in that hypermodern lens, and that's not civilization, it's castration.
AGI approaches, the panacea approaches. Some here, I hope all, will live to see the extinction of health insurance, but regardless, by the end of the century it will be gone, as will the majority of occupations in healthcare, and civilization won't bat an eye. In 200 years it will be a morbid curiosity of 20th and 21st century life, and probably considered in studies as part of humanity hurdling the real problem of the lost jobs and purpose caused by AGI. But those are the things that matter, not "lost" profit opportunities, and not a nobleman dead in the street.
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