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jake


				

				

				
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jake


				
				
				

				
2 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 06 09:42:44 UTC

					

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User ID: 834

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Talking of its inevitability would squeak in at a solid 1% of all comments, with 69% being "feds" and the last 30% being "that retard tried to kill a corpse."

If I were speculating here, I'd wonder about the increase in probability of an assassination attempt on any D politician other than Biden. It's gone up, but maybe not much--had 7/13 been a historically bad day, I would think it inevitable.

I think there's some measure of trolling in spirit here, but maybe some real insight too, just hiding. I see the argument, history not changing, no matter how fine the margin, is still history not changing. Trump got a pic that's getting him 100 million votes (re. my now-Over @ 105), but how's that +15MM votes and ~+3 states won (I'd take the over on 42.5) going to change his presidency vs one where he wins by a lesser margin? If a conspirator comes forward and says the attempt was orchestrated through USSS, Trump would have historic mandate, but that's a discussively comical magnitude of "if", and ifs aren't happenings.

It also makes me think of the other, other "great historic" picture of Trump: on the DMZ with Un.

In a different timeline this might have been a picture historically comparable to those of Nixon with Mao, and with Deng. But as good as the pic is, Trump left office, Nork's back to belligerent insularity, nothing happened. I wonder if I caught some psychic headwinds, I've been playing Dishonored (no kill total ghost ofc) the last couple days, and as I was walking yesterday around noon I fell down a Wiki hole reading about Korea's tumultuous more-than-20th century. Assassinations, coups and cults. Korea marched on, it's a tech, cultural and athletic powerhouse. One of their recent presidents was impeached, tried, sentenced to prison in 2018 and pardoned and released in 2021. Is that a happening? I don't know, how much did Korea change? The first woman in East Asia to be popularly elected as head of state, ending in scandal and prison, and how many people outside of Korea know? Not many, doesn't seem like Korea even felt the bump. So was it really a non-happening?

I'm not being coy. If "happenings" require a moment where a country is on the fulcrum and a decisive action forces the lever, maybe they are rare. (I'll use "moment" from here forward because "happening" is too slangy.) Was JFK's assassination such a moment? If it was federal actors, could you really say their moment was killing a President? They had to get to that point. So was it the conspiracy? But that doesn't come ex nihilo, they had to know they could conspire, so was the moment when the federal government changed so actors within could foment ideas of killing an adversarial Executive? Well when did those conditions arise? FDR? Where did that tyranny originate? Was he a communist? For the sake of this point and this point alone assume he was. So when was the moment? His swearing-in? Or was it being shown it could work, so the October Revolution? But was that a moment, or was it the long consequence of the Communist Manifesto and Marx? Well what was the moment in Marx's life? And what precipitated that moment?

"Nothing ever happens" is interesting to me, but even not reduced as I've done, so saying yes, JFK's assassination was a moment, the October Revolution was a moment, it's interesting to me because it's still necessarily a very holistic reading of history. In that there is a sensibility; holistically, Obama's election wasn't a moment, so many moments preceded and produced the America of 2008 and he was in the right place at the right time. Trump likewise, so many decisions were made and moments happened before he ever ran, before he was the nominee and the victor. Holistically these are really the long outcomes of the thoughts and actions resultant from the psychic ebbs and flows of the masses and any particular moment, even a very loud one, might be nothing, and it's not until much later that we know. Yeah, right now we don't know. We can't know. I like the zen of "Nothing happens until it does." There might be wisdom in it, "Don't rush to history."

Tom Crooks rushed to history. He grazed Trump, killed a supporter, died after catching a bullet or several to the head, and nothing happened. Maybe.

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.

I thought that, but the header text says

The editors of The Modern Library were privileged to have the assistance of a distinguished Board made up of celebrated authors, historians, critics, and publishing luminaries. In 1998 and 1999, members of the Modern Library Board participated in the “100 Best” project, voting on the 100 Best Novels and 100 Best Non-fiction works, respectively.

Maybe whoever wrote the header forgot that bit, as I'd assume it'd have an obligatory mention.

The question of conspirators is how many at the rally would need to be in the loop. My assumption would be as the number goes up, the probability of a defector quickly approaches 100%. If 50, I'd assume someone has already turned. If 25, is it halved, or is 25 still in the >99% territory? What's the necessary minimum? I think it might be a far fewer than 50, even 25.

It could be just 1. Whoever's in charge on-site. Call them SC, site chief.

The cops defer to USSS in these events, so they follow SC's orders and they're neutralized. SC decides to keep USSS away from that building, says the cops will cover, then gives the cops the go-ahead to be inside if it's too hot. If SC's controls all comms, as could make sense to prevent crosstalk, then they can ignore the cop reports and not pass the intel along to the President's personal detail. I'm skeptical of what's been said of USSS sniper ROE, but if they do have such strict rules, then they wouldn't need to be in the loop. They would do their job exactly as expected: wait for the guy to shoot, shoot him back. Loose end is killed, easy.

Had they achieved such a crime, then they use the chaos, bounce around the blame ball, give a few token heads, maybe even big ones, but who cares because they've won. They assassinated an opponent so they'll certainly rig an election, then re/consolidate power.

Before now I thought it would take so many people to be in the loop that someone would turn, but as I wrote downthread it now seems entirely plausible that it would only take 1 person on-site to open the door, or prop up the ladder.

My major questions are these:

  1. Short activity, some of the information in the tweets is wrong but the short interest was shooting up, there are plenty of reasonable explanations for that but not this one, last Friday was there in fact a major put acquisition with a fast expiry? If so, that's investigation-level suspicious

  2. Sniper ROE, my assumption would be they have very broad rules for engagement, so if the rules changed, how long ago was it changed, and is there documentation? If that's wrong and they do have broad ROE, 2a, why didn't they shoot? 2b, why didn't they talk to the detail? Or radio to command? Or hell, if nothing else, why not just shout? Did they radio it in and it was ignored? If so, I would immediately assume conspiracy, and that someone's going to turn

  3. I see people elsewhere saying there was an atypical amount of media presence at the rally, is this true, and if so, why?

  4. Most significantly, allowing Trump to go on the stage. I've seen clips before of USSS being highly proactive about pulling the President. If this guy had been initially identified an hour before, then someone with the USSS confirmed "suspicious guy on roof" at 5:52, what is the minute-by-minute explanation for that information failing to reach his detail?

Austin Private Wealth is the group in question, they're a fee-only fiduciary with just over $1B in assets managed. Their filing on Friday 7/12 listed 12,000 puts on $DJT. They put out a statement saying a third-party vendor caused all of their options positions to be multiplied by 10,000, and so the actual position was 12 puts. I don't know enough about the workings of actual investing groups to speak here with any definitiveness, but it seems unusual to me that they would buy 12 puts--assuming a $1 premium, that's $1200. That's nothing compared to their total holdings. Maybe there's a diversified spread and they had like $50,000 or $100,000 of puts, and I'm sure that'll come out if they did. Or maybe it was a hedging move if they have 1200 shares of $DJT, but I think they'd have probably included in their statement if they had such stock. "We didn't have this large short, in fact we hold $DJT." Simple.

But that also ignores a worse question, from my cursory research their holdings would be reported under SEC Form 13F. Maybe this is wrong, if it is the following can be crossed out, but if that's true: multiple people from APW should have, and possibly would have needed to sign off on it prior to its approval, so did they all fail obscenely in their fiduciary duty? Or did they fail it by only one person being charged with verifying and then approving. If the financial guy doesn't notice a position worth $1200 has been marked as $1.2 million, should he keep managing your money? Now multiply that by as many options positions as they had. It's insane. They should absolutely be investigated if for no other reason than the claimed lapse in duty, unless it's a regular thing for investment groups to give astronomically wrong filings to the SEC. But there is presumably a lengthy paper trail here, so if they're lying and they did have a 1.2 million share short, I assume it's a matter of time before someone with the proper finance bona fides uncovers what happened.

All this meaning: if APW did in fact have a 12,000 put position, then that combined with their statement now denying it and their attempted obfuscation, is clear evidence of conspiracy.

As for #3, sure, all plausible. #4 yeah remains to be seen. I don't think I emphasized enough, but that is the question above all other questions. When did they know? If people go to prison over this, it will be on that question. The CBS report says at 5:51 they had a suspicious person with a rangefinder, that's enough for me to say someone had a failure in duty worthy of prison. But that's criminal negligence, for failure to protect the President and the people around him, the death of Compertore. Whether it was malicious aforethought is the deeper question, and one that, again, remains to be seen.

Elsewhere in the thread someone quoted ABC news, in turn quoting the Butler county sheriff, who confirmed the story of Crooks being confronted by an officer just before firing.

To have that confrontation, the "sense" to ignore the cop and make those shots at 150 yards with iron sights--no adrenaline pumping, no jitters? Crooks must have been a crack shot with frozen veins. I guess I assume a second shooter wouldn't miss (+ all the other questions that raises), because otherwise that explanation would make far more sense than "random schizo is as coolheaded as scout sniper."

We're in a black swan sprint. Attempted assassination of the previous President, the incumbent President announcing (or "announcing") he's not running for a second term and now a growing din that he's dead or all but. My grandmother experienced a cluster of transient ischemic attacks. She was sharp, in her mid-80s and about to make a long drive to Texas for her annual checkup, to the next day being unable to ever drive again and maybe ever think again. Her body lived a few more years, it's a bad way to go.

I started with no conclusion about the attempt on Trump's life but for transparency's sake I am the type to assume it was a hit. I think neutrally reported evidence now shows it was a hit.

  1. Cheatle testified the USSS was alerted between 2 and 5 times to Crooks

  2. CNN on forensic analysis showing reports from 3 weapons; and I don't know this guy, I'm not endorsing any of his analysis or quoting it here, but at around 18:40 is a clip where 3 distinct reports can be heard.

  3. CBS news on the USSS saying their counter-snipers fired a single shot.

  4. I can't find anything from the other law enforcement at the event saying one or more of their guys discharged their firearms, I think we'd know by now if one of the cops took shots.

  5. Cheatle declined to answer if Crooks acted alone.

  6. Cheatle testified the USSS has no recordings of radio comms from the event. Recording everything could be a policy that only applies to the details protecting the sitting President, but given everything else we know I take the adverse inference.

I think the adverse inference is justified because of the chasmic hole of "third gun." A third person was firing a weapon at that event, we don't know who they are (or were), we don't know where they were when they took those shots, and most importantly, we don't know why we don't know. If they were killed in whatever building, that's a corpse that got disappeared in the middle of a crime scene where somebody tried to kill a former President. If they got away, they got away. That doesn't happen without help. Conclusively: at least one person at that rally charged with protecting Trump tried or helped someone try to kill him. The necessary next question is how high does it go?

My bad, should be fixed.

I think this would be fair if I were citing arguments and analysis of the biased. Like if I were quoting the guy from the second link in #2, where he argues the origin and target of the shots, that'd be fair. Or if I were quoting the research being done by the Heritage Foundation. I'm not, I give them no current stock. Everything above other than the link in #2 is either an unbiased (or counter-biased) reporter, or where it's a biased reporter I only linked it because it contains Cheatle's testimony or raw footage/audio. The guy speculating on USSS protocol is biased, but he's also providing a counterargument: it could be protocol they don't keep recordings, or reasonably-selectively keep recordings, and the rally didn't qualify for entirely justifiable reasons.

My willingness to relatively quickly take the adverse inference is probably a result of my disposition, but I can say on 7/13 I wasn't thinking it was a hit, and by my own logs I wasn't looking hard at it until 7/16. I didn't write on some of the questions raised until 7/18, and even on 7/19 I would say I was only on the verge. The audio analysis is what pushed me over and that's because there's no argument against it. Three weapons were fired, Crooks fired some of the shots, the USSS counter-sniper fired the last shot, and there is a burst that is unaccounted for. Short of federal law enforcement and the domestic intelligence apparatus being in the midst of a clandestine nationwide manhunt for the second shooter and they don't want to give anything away, there is no other good explanation. But hell, it could be that, and if it is and they catch the guy, great.

So ask. You're here, you're more thoughtful than most, I'm happy to explain. I'll explain now, I hate power. Look at history, it's always the same story. Titans of men raise great nations and their people enjoy golden ages. But those men die, their power must be passed on, and inevitably, every single time, someone reigns who is wholly unfit to rule. Often they kill nations outright, at best they sow ruin for their children or great-great-great-grandchildren to suffer through or else die by. Some intrinsic inadequacy in our specific personage births tyrants, petty and brutal, and the more the population grows, the more tyrants appear and for the last century they have grown enough to infest the American government at all levels. I am cynical of them to a man, I know their crimes, certain ones I'd give you as "conspiracies" for the sake of magnanimity in this discourse, but there is a laundry list of abominable deeds perpetrated by the American government that there is absolutely no debate happened. Iraq at the top of the list. We started a war and maybe a million people died over a fucking lie. The perpetrators are still around, they weren't elected to begin with and they weren't fired, they weren't jailed. They're still working, or enjoying comfy retirements. Same as the generation before them, same as the generation before them. The machine never changed. The Company never changed.

The disposition isn't specific, it's broad. There are powerful career individuals in the United States government and I do not believe there is a single action they consider unacceptable to their morals because the evidence cries thunderous, they have no morals.

Last November Vivek Ramaswamy was giving speeches to tiny crowds where he was saying there's no chance Biden is on the ballot for 2024. A month ago this was still a "right-wing conspiracy", before the debate, Biden's obvious lack of fitness for office was a "right-wing conspiracy." Now we know for sure how the people running the executive were not elected, and they were enabled in their deceit and their necessary tyranny by an effective state-media establishment.

Now, the party who brands themselves as the "protectors of democracy" are by all appearances going to run a candidate for President who nobody wanted, and if truly democratic primaries had been held this year, a candidate who indeed no one would have voted for. The party, the media, the state, have justified extraordinary measures targeting President Trump under justification of him being a "threat to democracy", they fight tooth and nail against anything and everything they perceive as a move to disenfranchise voters, yet their most recent major move was to disenfranchise their entire constituency. This is a fact, I describe reality.

I also describe reality when I say if there was no conspiracy at work in the attempt on Trump's life it was neither for lack of motive nor opportunity.

The audio is clear, it's a clip from a single phone, I'm familiar with firearms but I don't think a special familiarity is necessary to recognize the three distinct reports. I don't need analysis to confirm what I can hear plainly, but that it comes from CNN should be enough.

It is significant. Certainly there's time still for one of the local law enforcement offices to put out their official report and it could be the report says one of their officers engaged Crooks. But we don't have it right now, and that is a chasm in the chain of events. A person was discharging their firearm in the same brief window of time another person was trying to kill President Trump. Who was it? Where were they? What or who were they aiming at? What or who did they hit? Why don't we know?

There could be a reasonable explanation, I won't dispute that at all, but it seems like your assumption that there is, is being applied to consider its current absence as unimportant. It's not, it's extremely important. Because there is an unknown gun firing, there is a possibility the bullet that pierced Trump's ear was not fired by Crooks, that's what's on the table, and until it is answered, it is the most important question about July 13.

In this particular hypothetical, they would get the kid as the patsy while their sniper gave them the video and the pink mist screencaps for the rank-and-file lefties to spam on every platform everywhere, which is objectively what would have happened. There is a clear morale reason for them to go for something messy. In the continuation of this hypothetical, now they might go for something quiet. It also won't work. A gust of wind and a head-turn saved him, call it luck, I call it providence.

I'm surprised China in particular isn't making better use of the internal division in the West

Were Harris to win in November, the probability of China taking Taiwan would increase. But they don't need to rush to exploiting the division when their plans mean benefitting long-term. Yeah, I've heard "The Chinese economy is about to crash" for at least 10 years, but the tiger stands. It might be paper, but the eagle might be a puff of smoke. If Europe and the US keep declining, then on the timeframe China works at, soon nobody will be able to stop them when they make open moves to devour Africa's resources. That's their actual goal, and if Western decline reaches that point, who gives a shit about chip backdoors?

That said, China is helping sow the division. The whining about Russia for 8 years involved a mountain of stuff Russia was not doing, but China was doing, and at a far greater scale and efficacy. Russia wasn't on Reddit while China has been prolific at shaping narrative on the site. China had orders-of-magnitude more impact on Twitter, and yet decades more potent an impact still with TikTok. The Chinese hand on the scale has massively inflated the apparent size of the online left while also increasing its actual numbers. Whether they controlled trends directly or quickly passed it off to non-ideologically-aligned-as-such American subordinates, the result is the same. This "backfired" in congress forcing divestiture, but what makes TikTok beneficial to the Chinese will largely remain.

If you want, make a copy and DM me an anonymized/open commenter link and I'll suggest edits on the entire story.

Your writing is quite good, there are disruptions in flow from you doubling and sometimes tripling up on adjectives. Most instances you could omit one or all, two examples:

In the station, an ever-present soundscape practically smothers us, heavy and ominous and oppressive

Soundscape implies atmosphere and ubiquity, I think there's probably a better word choice. Heavy/Ominous/Oppressive aren't exact synonyms but here they're redundant because of "smothers."

"The ocean smothers us with sound" conveys it in fewer words.

I hear Whitlock faintly stirring* in the bunk underneath me. The bed creaks as he slowly, gingerly* sits up and begins to vomit into a bucket, choking and heaving and gasping* as the contents of his stomach unceremoniously escape his body. Once* the retching is over, there’s laboured breathing and a soft, low thud;* the low sound of a head being rested against a bunk pole.

"Stirring" implies a quietness, you could go with "I hear Whitlock's weak stirs."

"Slowly, gingerly" gingerly implies slowness.

"Choking and heaving and gasping" like the above, your omission of commas is meant to emphasize the unpleasantness but just "choking" captures it, and we already know he's having a bad time from the context, before and after.

"Once" is a word for temporal specificity, "when" is a word for temporal generality. When also reads better, "When the retching is finished there's laboured breathing"

"soft, low" redundant

I might omit to "there's laboured breathing and the low sound of a head being rested against a bunk pole"


Last notes: the rules for italicizing apply to titles of works, words not in English (though this would be often, not strictly always), and scientific terms. In prose you can style how you want so you can use italics for names like "Proteus" and "Mazu" but there are times it hurts the flow, especially back-to-back with "Caelus, Qianliyan."

Spirulina is proper when referring to the organism, for a food product it's just "spirulina cakes."

I've finished with suggested edits in the doc. It kept signing me out, that may be why it looks like several people were making suggestions.

I've done a lot of anon editing in /lit/ /wg/ threads, most of what I've read there is the kind of bad writing that editing can't fix. Yours is good, and you can see that in my edits being almost all words and parts of sentences you could omit. Using a few too many words is an easy fix. I liked it, I'll be reading more as long you keep us updated.

I meant to put these in my previous comment -- "That" can often be omitted, and there are some rules on writing numbers. The article says and I'll summarize, it's just narrative consistency, always writing them as numerals or always writing them as words. That is narrative, so in narration you'd write them all as numerals, and as dialogue you'd write them as the full words (though there are specific exceptions to this, the one I can name is street addresses, which are always written as eg "123 Main").

The concurrent player record could be inflated. It's a new IP by a foreign studio and while covered by culture war circles before its release, it was only after release and the record-breaking numbers that I saw it brought up among normies. A good comparison is Cyberpunk 2077, its peak was 250K just over 1 million, from a somewhat-established IP, the at-the-time preeminent studio, Keanu Reeves, and years of hype.

That said, if it were bad, Steam would show it, and the negative reviews I see are mostly "Game too hard", with a complement of "My computer can't run this." Some have better criticisms, "Invisible walls everywhere," "Buggy AI", "Repetitive", "Poor world design" and "Not enough variety in attacks." So probably a mix: something was done to inflate the numbers, but for a very good though not paradigm-defining game.

Low regional pricing (currency, Steam regional prices are set by currency,) discounts/e-rebates for store credit, free keys. Valve isn't freewheeling in China, Steam China operates through Perfect World.

But I just saw I was wrong about Cyberpunk's peak, SteamDB has it at 1.05 million. The difference isn't so stark now, and like I said above, the game is clearly very good, and I'm sure I'll play it eventually.

It can also be true that something other than the even very high quality of the game as responsible for its popularity. 2 million concurrent is incredible but I want to know is this a single player experience truly worthy of those numbers, or is it something else. I think we'd be seeing those numbers soaring among western gamers if it were paradigm-defining. It might be, in a month we might see over 3 million, with a million playing in the west. Maybe not, but even if it just playing to market, that's absolutely valid. MiHoYo of Genshin Impact, Honkai, Zenless Zone Zero, play to the western market in having attractive women and no hamfisted politics in their games. China could do nothing but publish AAA knockoffs with fanservice and no politics and devour the market, and they'd be valid to do it, but that wouldn't make the games amazing themselves, and that's what I'm interested in.

The Byzantines were dealing in solidi, easy to collect gold in fines and then use it for paying mercenaries. A hiring-mercenaries-level-conflict in the States would mean the dollar and economy collapsed. There'd be dealing again in precious metals, and bartering. Weapons, food, medicine, and those soldiers could well be offered another certain kind of good: women. If a faction pays in women, those women have no power.

What's wrong here is the particular equivocation of politics and war. Politics is not equal with war, politics are meant to avert war, but they are equal in that both are about the transferral of power. If we were to assign a sex polarity to the practices, politics would indeed be the feminine method to the masculine method of war.

Beyond that, I can tell you where this divide ends. We'll pass the core of this turmoil, enough to stabilize us as we move into the approach for the singularity.

Around 2030 we'll see the first examples of convincing human simulacra. These will be proofs of the concept but they won't be largely available until later in the decade. Boston Dynamics maintaining their exact rate of advancement will have robots with convincingly human articulation by the mid-30s, especially with AI improving at helping research.

In the 2040s, simulacra will be able to replace a great deal of labor and production of simulacra will become the national industry of whatever country that perfects them. My bias is Japan: they're most poised with the combination of established acumen, workforce and key socioeconomic factors, namely their inverted population pyramid. Low TFR will be neatly solved by simulacra taking over labor. As so-ordered a nation and people as the Japanese, they will implement the necessary policies to begin the country's move toward quasi-post-scarcity. Those few other similarly ordered nations will likewise swiftly adopt simulacra, and as tens of millions are produced by the year, and only increasing, simulacra will quickly become a reasonable household expenditure. I expect by the end of the '40s they will be ubiquitous in every country where they are legal.

For the price of a mid-range car, households will be able to purchase a lifetime of service from a chef-maid-assistant. So average households will acquire simulacra, further increasing demand, and lonely men will also buy them for all obvious reasons. That motivation for purchase will not end with lonely men. "She's a 10 (she's a hotter-version-of-pick-your-hottest-celebrity), but she's a robot" won't last. One of your friends will get one, and you'll interact with it, and even if you're obstinate about "it," eventually it will be her to your mind, because she talks, she laughs, she appears to think, she in all ways seems the part. You'll only know because you know, that won't be enough. It won't matter how they aren't "real" because they will be real enough. All but indistinguishable for the existential question of soul in the machine, and it won't be long before you're not so sure about that, either.

At ubiquity they will end dating. The bottom third of men who can afford them for a start, to half, to I'd expect a Pareto 80%. The man is accustomed to not having children, it's our evolutionary history, it may bother them, it won't stop them. What women say won't matter, a guy might want what only they can offer, but not at the cost, especially not if they've never had that success, and that already increasing population will represent an even greater percentage of the next generation. To put in such effort to settle for someone less attractive, less responsive, more burdensome, more risky, to settle for something human when he can have something machine-perfect. Work, go home, play games until she has dinner ready, watch a movie, fuck, maybe play more games, go to bed. His friends can and will talk shit, his base urges are satisfied, he won't care enough about what they say. His true needs will go unsatisfied and it will be a lifestyle harmful to his soul, but it will be so much easier.

Some women will have them, not many. I'd rather not invoke inceldom, I find the specific slant to their ideas irrelevant here, but it's true men pursue while women are pursued and that imbalance defines dating. The asymmetric effort of dating as a man versus dating as a woman, again the man pursues, he works, he pays; the woman is pursued, she is worked for, she is cared for. The simulacra will thus be unnatural as a thing women acquire as a relational prosthesis; why would she pay for what, for good reason, she gets free? The simulacra will have no being (or so we'll reassure ourselves), can father no children, can offer no increase, can offer no status. Women will have them as the chef-maid-assistant models, maybe even more sometimes, but they won't replace, not in the way they will replace relationships for men.

Harems will re-emerge, they will be the only option for most women, so they will be easier. Between simulacra and harems, female sociopolitical power will collapse. They will lose too much leverage with too many low-status men, while high-status men will each become a little king with his court of concubines who will certainly have no power.

The 2050s will see human gestation in synthetic environments, so clinic-based artificial wombs. Here I don't think that it will take that long for the breakthroughs in tech, instead it will be the economics and social impacts of simulacra that will give incentive to developing the tech. Again I expect Japan to widely adopt, as their already low TFR falls off a cliff from their herbivore men taking to simulacra. They will have a reduced need for a new generation from so much of their labor being automated but I expect there still to be decades between the ubiquity of simulacra and those simulacra reaching the capacity to automate >90% of all labor. This will also be the first sight of the real benefit to the age of simulacra, the offer of stability in overseeing the drastic reduction in human population.

Starting in the 50s or 60s we'll see government regulation on reproduction. It won't be severe because it won't need to be, so anyone who really wants a big family will be able to have one with minimal structural hindrance. It will be simple incentive-based, I've referred to the policy as the "Half-Right to Reproduction." Systemically its purpose will be to halve the population with each generation, it'll work faster than that. Every person will be bestowed with one half-right they can exercise at age of majority. Would-be parents can combine to a whole-right and exchange it for their child's addition to the government dole, UBI, which will also exist. As AI and simulacra come from almost all labor, the newly jobless will need placation else promiseless young men become bored and at-risk for chaos. AI-managed industry, so all goods, pharmaceuticals, medical care, farming, and also advances in 3D printing, will see the cost of goods plummet while their quality peaks. It will become progressively harder for the government to not adopt major socialist practices as capitalism finally begins to "win" in competing itself out of existence. The population can't keep growing in such a system, at least not until we have FTL and a thousand shipyards in Sol. Assuming FTL is possible, which I don't, but I sure hope it is.

Simulacra will play a critical part in stability in keeping men satisfied. Advancements in entertainment, so another 20-30 years of development in video games, the arrival of UBI and the removal of needing to work to live. The population will need to be distracted until most can die childless but "happy enough." Half-rights help this goal, because people can sell their half-rights or buy other's half-rights, all at government exchanges. The exchanges will always buy half-rights, subject to reversible sterilization. A guy will go to a clinic next door to the exchange, maybe incorporated into the exchange, get whatever implant that stops sperm from working, get the cash to order a simulacra, sail into the sunset. Easy.

I don't expect western nations to swiftly automate labor like Japan. We'll need to acclimatize to the idea, begin the inculcation of no-work-to-live in successive generations so that when they're older, or their kids are older, they'll be prepared for not having jobs. With that and the shrinking population, by the turn of the century Western nations will be ready for post-scarcity life. New generations will still be needed in the interim, artificial gestation is pivotal here for the other paradigmatic social change.

As relationships and childbirth are "solved," as countries most adopting simulacra and bespoke children grown in vats enjoy golden ages while their men break productivity records, why would a country not produce as many sons as possible and as few daughters as necessary? There will be outgroups, so the Amish and the like, potentially a new movement of tech-circa-1999, but they will be small, none meaningful political factions, or where meaningful, supportive of the new power structure. I'd also expect a "reserve" population for practical concerns of catastrophe and ovum stocks, but most women will belong to the elite population. This above all is why we will see minimal and then no opposition to sharp sex-demo disparity with the great decline in the population of the human female: with so few, being a naturally born woman will be a position of immense status, inherently aristocratic. They will necessarily be the best of the best. Those chosen, those expressly wanted few. A new nobility, and it will indeed be so easy.

Women will "benefit" first, eventually men will, as again the purpose will be to shrink the entire population. So each generation will more-than-halve itself until the population is at an "acceptable" – at least stable – level. The sex distribution will once again be at parity, and those naturally born biological males will also be inherently aristocratic, as all civilized humans belong to the new nobility.

And all of this will just work. What I describe will happen because it isn't fighting back, it isn't trying to undo anything, it doesn't require conquest over more than a century of culture, it doesn't require recovery from war or calamity. It will work according to slopes and entropy, it will work in congruence with human nature. It will be the easiest path through, so it will just work.

If it's physically possible we'll break the tyranny of the rocket equation and achieve FTL travel. We'll begin spacefaring regardless and when, in however long, man reaches frontier planets to settle and dominate, they'll return to lifestyles us today find familiar. Those humans will begin the real work, of understanding and healing the light scarring on our gestalt soul from the depravity of human civilization, culminating in what was necessary to pass through the 20th and 21st century – with what was necessary to pass the Great Filter.

It didn't have to be this way, now it has to be this way. Or else we're all fucking dead.

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.

I don't think it's anything we'd find surprising.

The narrative around its release would fall on political lines, the right would know she wanted dead kids, the online left would say with varying couching the kids deserved it, the establishment would focus at best on some random point about the essay while they continued the exact rhetoric they put out following the shooting: "Psycho murders multiple children, trans most affected." Especially if there are likely superficially true but substantively false allegations about abuse by the school.

I think if it were some astonishing new low in depravity we'd have read it, so we have read it, in the gestalt. It could be a rare bit of wise realism. Nothing will be gained from litigating her words, let the dead rest.

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.

I find most relevant the announcement from Pennsylvania's Department of State:

Pennsylvanians won’t always know the final results of all races on election night. Any changes in results that occur as counties continue to count ballots are not evidence that an election is “rigged.” See the full explanation at http://vote.pa.gov/FactCheck.

What an odd thing to say. So hire more workers, run campaigns, do everything necessary to ensure you have the results. If significantly poorer, significantly less bureaucratically competent and on-the-whole significantly less organized and civilized countries can manage elections in single days, the continuing tolerance of statements like this -- statements that are expressly narrative primers for fraud -- in the Union is so goddamn insulting. They have the ability, we know this objectively from other countries, and we know from this statement they could but decline to do so. This is ostensible incompetence at counting ballots covering for a highly competent fraud machine.

The general upside is they'll lose the national regardless of fraud in Pennsylvania. The dream upside is they lose the state while posting so many precincts with actual and effectual >100% turnout even the laziest audit torches them.