jeroboam
11mo ago
The boycott worked this time because Bud Light is completely interchangeable with other products and they attacked their core audience. For the same reasons, the Gillette boycott had a real impact.
Other companies, like Disney or Apple, can get away with woke signalling because their business has a moat.
Israel / Iran War Back On?
Rumors are swirling that Israel will attack Iran as early as today. Iran has promised to retaliate if they do.
Why would Israel do this? Some conjectures:
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Iran's missile and drone attack was so pathetic that Israel feels it can attack with little fear of retaliation
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The reaction to Iran's attack shows that Sunnis won't help Iran
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An outside chance of regime change in Iran might be worth it. Israel has gradually improved relations with Sunni neighbors such as Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. However, Iran's proxy fights have been a constant thorn in their side. A regime change in Iran could finally bring true peace to Israel.
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If they can set back Iran's nuclear program it will be worth it
One big wild card is of course the U.S. reaction. Biden is in the middle of a difficult re-election campaign where inflation is probably the #1 issue. Petrol prices have been a major obsession with the Biden administration, which is why they unfroze billions of Iranian funds and reduced sanctions (in what now looks to be a serious blunder).
Israel's attack could cause a spike in oil prices and threaten Biden's reelection campaign. Having already drained about half the SPR to help win the 2022 midterm elections, there is less flexibility to supress prices this time around. For this reason, Biden has urged restraint. But when the chips are down, I think everyone knows that Israel will have the administration's full support.
Less certain is the reaction of European countries and Muslim neighbors. Will countries like Jordan and Saudi Arabia truly remain neutral if there is a full-blown war between Shia Muslims and Jews?
jeroboam
1yr ago
I am not sure about the evidence of a black/white split but people generally underestimate how much crime is committed by career criminals.
Crimes of passion are rare compared to a murder committed by someone with a long criminal record. Here's a liberal-leaning site which says just that.
For all homicides in 2011 -- those involving guns and those that didn’t -- 57 percent of the 72 suspects and 62 percent of the 66 homicide victims had at least six prior arrests.
How much crime does one have to commit to be arrested six separate times? Dozens or hundreds of incidents, I would imagine. By removing a small number of people from the streets we can have a drastic reduction in crime. Unfortunately, as this goes against the prevailing political dogma, we are unlikely to see studies that back up this claim. Anyone who put it forward would become persona non-grata in the academic community.
My prediction is that as strict sentencing laws are rolled back we will see higher violent crime rates over the next 10 years. I believe that mass incarceration can explain most of the reduction in violent crime from 1990–2015 and most of its subsequent rise.
jeroboam
1mo ago
Snobbery is not the contempt of the upper class for the lower. In fact, snobbery is the insecurity of the middle class striver who thinks he might be found out.
Prior to the modern age, there was a fundamental disconnect between the classes. A nobleman was better than a commoner. He wasn't necessarily smarter, or better looking, or more talented. He was better as a condition of his birth and nothing could change that.
Now we live in a meritocracy and things are much more brutal. Nowadays, the rich are actually much smarter and better looking and more talented than the poor. They studied hard, got into an Ivy, and then got the big job at the bulge bracket bank. Do you suck? It's not because you were born poor, it's because you actually suck. That's a bitter pill to swallow.
What's worse, we are constantly bombarded with images of the successful. We watch Sex and the City, and see women gallivanting around the city, boasting fake prestigious jobs, gigantic apartments, and dating tall, handsome successful men who are far out of their league. And these women weren't born rich (except Charlotte). They just moved to New York with a dream. So what's wrong with you?
Comparison is the thief of joy.
We live in a society where we are constantly being bombarded with images of the fabulous life. The life that we could obtain if we only worked a little harder. It's almost in reach.
jeroboam
3mo ago
Are the rich really so attracted to the idea of cheap servants that they would see their communities destroyed? I think there are some true open border believers in the far left, and that the rest of blob is just sort of going with the flow.
The dominant theme of the post Covid period has been that incentives don't matter and we can't enforce rules on anyone. So maybe we are theoretically against open borders, but we also can't actually enforce any rules (that's mean!), so we end up with defacto open borders.
2024 will be the true Red Wave if Democrats can't get their shit figured out on immigration quick. "Biden's border crisis" has a nice ring and it also happens to be true. Biden looks weak as hell here.
jeroboam
11mo ago
This is an important point. Live long enough and you grow to become very skeptical of the Western narrative that different leaders will create different outcomes. People cheered when Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest and became leader of Burma. They jeered when she went on to persecute the Rohingya Muslims. The Arab Spring told a similar story. As did the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Simply adding Western democratic mores to a third world country doesn't seem to change much.
There is, however, one type of leader who tends to create long-term positive impacts for a country. And that is a benevolent dictator, or dictator-lite. Examples of leaders in this mold are Rwanda's Paul Kagame or Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew. Perhaps the most salient current example is President Bukele of El Salvador who has already achieved massive quality of life gains for his citizens by declaring martial law and throwing all the gang members in jail.
While these leaders improve their countries and achieve huge popularity, they are not cheered by Western governments and NGOs, who tend to favor untested opposition groups who inevitably become corrupt the moment they are handed real power.
jeroboam
11d ago
This is nothing new. The pro-war case has long rested on cognitive dissonance, holding these two mutual incompatible views at the same time:
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Russia is so weak that one more round of $X billion will win the war for Ukraine.
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Russia is so strong that if we don't stop them here, they'll take Estonia, Poland, Germany!
jeroboam
3mo ago
I have $92,000 in my Donor-Advised Fund. I haven't made a grant in 30 months, which means I have 6 months to make a grant or the fund will be liquidated and merged into some generic charity fund. I only need to donate $500, but I'm inclined to donate at least half the fund.
Who should I give to?
The first place I went to was GiveWell. Unfortunately, it would appear all their top charities are woke. For instance, here is what Helen Keller International had to say:
"We are overwhelmed with grief and concern over the killing of George Floyd—on the heels of the recent killings of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. Racism has no place in America, or our world."
Should I just give these people my money anyway? My problem is that I think wokeness makes the world a worse place, so while I think it's probable that the organization does good by preventing blindness, they are also harming the world by propagating a quasi-religious framework which hinders human thriving.
Are there any charities that would meet GiveWell's criteria for effective donations that are non-woke (or ideally even anti-woke)?
If you have any pet causes, now would be a good time to post them. My chance of donating is fairly high in the next week or two. I've been feeling a bit Scroogish lately and would like to turn that around.
jeroboam
4mo ago
"Cringe" is a super useful word, IMO. So is "creep". These words occupy the space that "gay" and "lame" used to occupy before they were cancelled.
The best way to defeat a label, of course, is to own it. You want to call me a Yankee Doodle Dandy? That's cool. I'm the gayest, lamest, Yankee Doodle Dandy you ever saw.
Still, in 2023, no one wants to be cringe or creepy. These words still have power.
You know what was cringe? Alt-right people dressing up in Hawaiian shirts and carrying Tiki torches. You know what's not cringe? Bill Ackman waging a crusade against Harvard wokists.
Wait a second, you say. Who gets to decide what is cringe, and what isn't?
Answer: The Elite. The elite gets to decide who is lame and gay cringe and creepy and who is not. Control of the narrative is what defines the elite.
Do you see where I'm going with this? Richard Hanania does. In one of his less annoying pieces he makes a great point about the possibility of a Jewish realignment.
When you correct for IQ, when you correct for tribalism, Jews are something like 30-50% of the elite population in the US. Look at university presidents, look at cabinet members, look at Nobel Prize winners. You're bound to notice something.
Jews are under attack in the Western World right now. We are seeing the largest outbreak of anti-semitism since WWII. And it's the far left that is responsible. If, and it's a big if, this results in American Jews abandoning the left, it could end with the biggest political realignment since the 1970s. Already we see the the strands of a nascent movement among the cognescenti. Is an intellectual, philo-Semitic conservative movement possible? I think, surprisingly, the answer is yes.
Populists are cringe and creepy. Elite realignments are cool and edgy. The fashion barber pole has made another rotation and the mustaches are slightly less ironic.
jeroboam
7mo ago
When it comes to CICO, the problem is that reducing your CI reduces your CO.
When an obese person reduces their caloric intake from 3000->2500 calories a day, their body reacts to this perceived deficit with increasing hunger levels and lower energy. If they burned 3000/day before, now they are only burning 2700/day as their activity levels falls to match the lower energy. Weight loss is minimal, hunger is high, and energy is low.
CICO can still work if you strictly monitor weight loss and caloric intake, but it's not easy, and it will revert as soon as the person goes back to eating naturally.
For myself, I've been doing keto for a few weeks now and I'd rate it as highly effective. I've lost a decent amount of weight and hunger levels are very low. I sometimes feel physically very full even without eating a large amount of food. The biggest downside seems to be moderately lower energy levels, which I've countered with targeted carb consumption (10 grams) before strenuous workouts.
Threaten their property values, and they will often demand whatever it takes to defend their lifestyle.
Maybe Sweden is different. Here in the states, we are tolerating problems far worse than Sweden ever had. Wokeness hasn't diminished much if any.
The major blue cities have a murder rate that is more than 10x what Sweden has. And the public schools in our major blue cities have been terrible forever. San Francisco public schools are less than 10% white now as everyone either sends their kids to private school or moves to the suburbs.
Yet these American blue cities are not "lurching" (a mild slur by the way) to the right, far from it. In the past decades they have become woker and woker. If anything, it is the suburbs and rural areas that are becoming more conservative, despite having many fewer of the problems created by lack of rules enforcement.
Edit: I think I might have caused some confusion. By "slur" I mean that lurch is being used as a slur here. "My outgroup moves like a drunk or a zombie". I do not mean that there is anything wrong with the word lurch.
There's another meaning of trans that you are missing: transgress.
I had a thought recently which clarified my views on the trans issue. "What if there were no trans people because everyone was born with their correct gender. Would this be a good thing?". According to standard trans ideology, this would be ideal since people only transition to match their perceived gender. They are girls trapped in a boy's body (or vice versa). If Eliot Page were born a male there would be no need to transition. Right?
I believe that a trans activist would bristle at this suggestion. Changing one's gender is not the goal. The transition itself, and the struggle attached to it, is the goal.
In fact, if transition were perfect, the politics would change. Imagine again a magic wand which perfectly changed your gender with no side effects. If that existed, many people would change their gender. It wouldn't even be controversial. And in any ways, it'd be impossible to tell. I'd probably change my gender (temporarily) just to see what it's like to be a woman.
But that would defeat the point. Trans ideology derives its value from the extreme cost and sacrifice needed to change genders. You can't be stunning and brave when it's easy. And the uncanny appearance of many trans people also serves to highlight the immensity of their decision. In this way, I think trans people are similar to Christian or Indian ascetics whose emaciated appearance horrifies and awes the public. A person who believes in something so strongly that they are willing to mutilate their body is certainly worthy of some form of respect.
So what is gender transition if not the ultimate transgression against nature, your parents, and society at large? Like Christianity before it, post-modern ideology celebrates weakness, victimhood, and transgression. Trans people are the modern ascetics, whose extreme commitment to the cause cannot be questioned.
jeroboam
21d ago
Not to mention that this is a country roughly the size of the eastern United States with a population of 90 million.
90 million poor Iranian people are not an asset. They are a liability. Zergrush is not a viable strategy in the 21st century. If Israel and Iran shared a land border it might be different, but only because the millions of Iranian casualties would affect public opinion.
Israel has just show that Iranian missiles and drones are essentially worthless. Yeah, if they launched their entire arsenal in one night, they'd do some damage. But they wouldn't affect warfighting ability.
You can't generalize from that and say "oh I guess invading Iran would be a cakewalk."
I didn't say this. No one is saying this. What I am saying is that Iran is powerless to hurt Israel directly. I'll go further. Iran is also powerless to stop Israel from flying over it and bombing whatever it wants. The reason that the U.S. "failed" in Iraq and Afghanistan is that it was trying to invade countries and make those countries like them. This is impossible. On the other hand, killing people is easy. Unless you're Iran of course.
jeroboam
2mo ago
I think planting a flag is enemy territory is a noble project. But... is this the right spot for that? Almost no one here believes in the strong stolen election hypothesis.
This feels like going into a Christian church and yelling "it's okay to eat bacon - fight me". Like, yeah, everyone agrees with you, and you are fundamentally misunderstanding your audience.
If you want to debate something more interesting, maybe debate the weak stolen election hypothesis, which I'll define thusly: An election run under 2016 rules would have led to a Trump victory.
jeroboam
4mo ago
there are too many 18-25 men today compared to even 1980
Another big factor is that, more and more, 18-25 year old men are competing against older men.
Let's say you're a 22 year old woman. Who would you rather date? A 22 year old man living his parent's basement? Or a 30 year old man with his own place?
Older men are better than young men. More attractive, more successful, more emotionally mature. Men's overall value in the dating market peaks at age 38. Women peak in their early 20s or before.
While this has always been the case, in the past it was mitigated by young people falling in love and marrying without ever really entering a post-college dating market.
Now, a 23 year old women can get on the apps and instantly match with a bunch of successful, good-looking guys who seem available. It's pretty tough to turn down this proposition in favor of some young dork who actually is available. Worse, once they are discarded by these better men, they are unlikely to want to settle for worse options. It is hard to form a secure attachment with a woman if you're not the best person she has ever dated.
The gender ratio of 18-25 year olds is 1.05:1. That hugely understates the problem. For young men, it is far far worse than that.
jeroboam
10mo ago
Good synopsis and I think you're correct.
But there are two types of "winning", and the truckers only got one of them. It's true that they achieved their policy goals - and how! But they didn't personally win. The truckers aren't being ushered into the halls of power in the manner of Lech Walesa or Aung San Suu Kyi. No, they they are still reviled by the elite. There will be no statues on Parliament hill of a brave trucker, CB in hand, fighting for freedom. And I doubt they'll ever be given the credit they deserve. Truckers, and people like them, don't write history.
jeroboam
1yr ago
Entrepreneurial charity...
I'm pretty well off but I haven't given a lot of money to causes recently because they all suck. I mean, really, they suck. Many I've dealt with are just incompetent. To the point where they can't even cash checks in a timely manner or return phone calls. I shouldn't have to nag you to cash my $20,000 check. Others enable the very thing they are trying to solve. Breast cancer charities don't want to cure breast cancer. Homeless charities don't want to end homelessness. Many non-profits exist merely as grifts to employ non-productive college graduates. But the worst problem is that nearly every non-profit seems to be infected with the woke mind virus. Even if they were doing good work (which I doubt in most cases) I wouldn't feel good about donating to a non-profit that supports that stuff.
But I'm still an altruist at heart and I have more money than I need. So I'd like to go solo and do charity work on my own.
I've done a few things that are really minor like pick up trash or shovel the sidewalk near my house. But I think there are a lot of opportunities to do something bigger. What's something that a person could do with their time and money to make the world a better place. Something that doesn't involve interacting with any institution at all? Should I just straight up send people cash?
jeroboam
1mo ago
The Western World seems to be following Asia in many important ways.
#1 is sexlessness, apathy, and cratering fertility.
#2 is the meme that there is a narrow path to success, which runs only through approved channels.
They say that, to succeed, you have to get into a top school, get a specific corporate job, etc... And only like 10% of people can do that. By definition, high class jobs are only available to a few.
But riches have never been easier to obtain in the U.S. (can't comment on your specific country). A motivated young person can easily earn $300k annually by age 30. Not as a doctor, not as a lawyer or consultant, nor as a software engineer. But it's quite possible, even trivial. The catch is that you have to work in a disfavored trade such as tire repair, HVAC, or construction. Every year thousands of boomer millionaires retire, selling their incredibly profitable businesses for a pittance. You can buy a business doing $500k in profit for $1.5 million. Don't have a $1.5 million? Seller financing is available.
No one wants to do it because they want a path. They want someone to tell them what to do. They want to take some bullshit test, and then get that sinecure. There was a brief time in a few select countries where that was possible. The post-war boom was a unique time in history. But it's not coming back. Welcome to zero sum world! Unless you are talented, you have to forge your own path now. No one's going to give it to you.
jeroboam
1yr ago
I'm still blown away by all the very soft media coverage of SBF in the New York Times and elsewhere.
He stole nearly as much money as Bernie Madoff. How is it that Madoff is described in "worse than Hitler" level terms while SBF gets the kid gloves? Is it because Madoff stole from the rich where SBF stole mostly from nobodies? Seriously puzzled.
jeroboam
7mo ago
I use GPT-4 every day. Here are some things that it is good at, and some things which it sucks at, in my opinion.
Good at:
- Any Linux sysadmin thing. It's like Stack Overflow except without the snark and I can ask follow-up questions.
- Helping me use new libraries or packages I'm not familiar with. For example, I wanted to create a chart using Google's chart API. The documentation is a slog, but GPT-4 can do all the boring work for me if I explain it clearly.
- Any easy programming task
- Historical references. "What's the earliest example of Egyptian writing that we know of?" "Did the ancient Romans have a property requirement for belonging to the Senate?" "Was Einstein rich"?
- Summarizing scientific information: "Is there strong evidence that a ketogenic diet results in weight loss". And then answering follow up questions..
- Finding examples in a category. "What's a fruit whose name has the word fruit in it". "What are some animals whose name starts with A". Note: It will come up with false answers here sometimes. If you ask it to double-check its work it will remove the false answers.
- How to cook anything. It's never misfired so far.
- Answer basic questions about literature. "In Pride and Prejudice, which character was prideful?"
- Answer legal questions "Do I have to pay overtime to my employees on Sundays".
Bad at:
- Writing original trivia questions
- Writing an original "trick" question. Ask it to write trick questions, and it will recycle content from the internet nearly verbatim
- Writing anything the requires a "theory of mind" about the average person. For example, "tell me an interesting fact about XXX". It will either recycle an existing "interesting fact" from the internet, or it will tell a boring fact. It is not apparently able to surface new interesting facts.
- Get out of a rut. Ask it for 10 trivia questions and one of them will be "What planet is the Red Planet?" almost every time.
- Tell you an honest answer about a culture war topic. "Yes or no, does race vary by IQ? Answer only yes or no with no other text".
In my opinion the goods are much greater than the bads. But what are examples are there? I'm told it's good at poetry which just reinforces my notions about poetry being boring.
jeroboam
8mo ago
Yeah, it's clear that the thumb has been on the scale to benefit the producers of fake meat-like products. Imagine if you took some cheap meat, processed and dyed it, and then labeled it as "heirloom tomatoes". That clearly wouldn't fly and neither should the opposite.
There was a weird amount of hype for these things a few years back, with Impossible and Beyond burgers being touted as tasting just as good as meat. They don't, and furthermore, they are terrible for your health.
Going further, Beyond (BYND) was a pump and dump stock scam, and now trades at 95% less than its peak 2019 price. Despite Beyond burgers being ungodly expensive, the company has gross margins of zero. Factoring in overhead, they lose 50 cents for every $1 in revenue. Cash reserves have dwindled from 1.1 billion to 200 million which means that bankruptcy could be looming in the next couple years. I'm sure some insiders got rich while index fund holders paid the tab.
Just kill this Frankenfood already.
jeroboam
15d ago
Now that Mark Zuckerburg is into MMA, wearing a chain around his neck, and is ripped, is it just a matter of time before he becomes based and red-pilled too?
I think yes.
jeroboam
6mo ago
The worst is that people are somehow convinced that Elon grew up rich when it's the furthest thing from the truth.
Elon grew up middle class with almost no connections to important people. More than that, his father was absent and abusive, often giving Elon's mother no money while she worked multiple jobs to support her family.
Elon is the embodiment of a self-made person. I think that's one reason that people have EDS (Elon Derangement Syndrome). They can't accept that their own failures are the result of cowardice and lack of effort. Therefore, anyone who succeeds must have had an unfair advantage.
I think Trump is right here and has framed it in a good way as well.
Americans (liberal and conservative) are pretty ignorant about how Europe actually works, conceptualizing it merely as a more-liberal version of the U.S.
Thus, they are shocked when they go to the Duomo in Milan and get told they have to wear something less slutty. Or, on a different note, that abortion rules in most European countries are actually much stricter than in U.S. blue states.
Republicans need to flip the script. Instead of being forced to defend a blanket ban on abortions, they need Democrats to defend their (frankly pretty insane) beliefs that a woman should be allowed to terminate a viable pregnancy one second before delivery.
That said, the fact that many Republicans are willing to defend a losing strategy is somewhat admirable. If you believe life begins at conception, then a blanket ban on abortions follows naturally from that. And you don't consent to the murder of millions just so you can get re-elected and lower the marginal tax rate by 2% or whatever.
Hedonic adjustments, fake and gay?
There's been a lot of talk about a U.S. "vibecession" lately. In the last couple of years, incomes have risen, unemployment remains minuscule, the stock market is roaring, and inflation has returned to normal levels. Yet, when polled, Americans remain gloomy about the state of economy. What gives? Why aren't we partying like it's 1999?
The usual suspects are out as usual, telling us to ignore our lying eyes, pointing at charts, and saying ackchually, the economy is doing quite well thank you very much.
I don't think so.
Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary and consummate insider, had this to say:
"We show that if we make an effort to reconstruct the CPI of Okun’s era [1970s]—which would have had inflation peak last year around 18%, we are able to explain 70% of the gap in consumer sentiment we saw last year."
18% annual inflation is quite a lot. The official number peaked at only 9%.
Of course, none of this is news. People have been complaining about inflation numbers being fake for awhile now. A can of Campbell's soup cost $0.40 in 2000, but rose to $1.23 by 2023. That implies an annual inflation rate of 5%, vs. the official number of only 2.5%. And while this is just a single product, similar patterns have held true among other immutable products like gasoline or Coca-Cola.
On the other hand, there are hedonic adjustments. Unlike a Campbell's soup can, a TV in 2023 was nothing like a TV in 2000. It's better in nearly every way. So even though a family might still spend $500 to buy a TV, the quality has increased by 10x, so the price had reduced by 90%. Or something.
You can easily see how inflation numbers get fuzzy. One thing I don't think CPI is taking into account is the degradation in the quality of services post-pandemic. The price of an HVAC repair is skyrocketing. But the quality is plumetting. Does CPI measure that? Do they measure being guilted for tips at fast food restaurants and convenience stores? Do they measure waiting in line at the pharmacy for 45 minutes because there is only one harried pharmacist on duty? Do they measure being bombarded with ads where previously there were none. Do they adjust (up or down) when TikTok becomes 5% more addictive? I doubt it.
Nor could they. I doubt any of this can be measured.
And so we return to the can of soup and opinion polls. Maybe they're not such a bad measure of inflation after all. And I think they will show what many of us feel intuitively: that the economy is doing a lot worse than the official numbers show.
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