lollol
1d ago
I said owned and operated
Touche. So I'll examine a few Sub-saharan car manufacturers and taking out the South African ones.
- Innoson Vehicle Manufacturing Company Limited is Nigerian and doesn't showcase their leadership team on their website but I know the founder is black and a brief look on LinkedIn and I see a black-majority employee base
- Katanka Group in Ghana doesn't have a good website but at least looks like a bunch of black executives and the employees also majorly black
- Kiira Motors, best website so far, is an Ugandan State Enterprise so a bunch of black executives and black employees
- Mobius Motors in Kenya unfortunately for me has a white founder, but a pretty black-looking workforce
Scrolling through the Linkedin people listing, I see plenty of engineers, product designer, technician, etc. Are they small? Yes, but the question was are there any black owned and operated. Are they at very real risk of just being bought out by the bigger international players? Yes, but that just comes back to my Argument 2. I think these are good enough examples to satisfy your criteria.
China, India, South Korea, were all very poor, and then they figured out how to build more and more technologically complex products and sell them and then they got richer.
You are right, and I don't have a good answer for this other than Argument 1. My instincts tells me that maybe there is an argument to be made of good governance appropriate for the timeframe or something about culture, there are plenty of other Asian countries that wasn't as successful. Bad for me but it seems like African countries might not be able to use the same playbook those countries used to pul themselves out of poverty](https://youtube.com/watch?v=tqZGsnUgCPA). Sorry for the chain of thought here but it's also something I'm grasping at. Time will tell whether I'm right or yall are right anyway.
PS: I agree Piston Automotive wasn't a good choice (I didn't do a deep enough dive), but to me they're clearly shows that they're black-owned but full of white workers
lollol
3d ago
Yes but as pointed out in Argument 1, there have been long periods of history where particular groups of people also had bad track records in warfare then at some point turn things around, it seems to me that it would have been just as easy to point to "ancestry" then too. It seems easy then that the same mistake is being made now. I will always remember this comment on /r/WarCollege that argues Paul Kagame is one of the most notable military leader alive and I always wonder how a person of that skill and intellect would have fared in a non-African conflict.
lollol
3d ago
Thank you for taking the time to reply, totally understand the cost-benefit dilemma of "should I participate?" you're talking about. Since I did make a top-level comment, I will try to reply to all that replied to me.
If race doesn't matter, then we can afford to wait around for historical time scales before passing judgement. If race matters, then the time to act is decades ago, and yesterday, and today.
That's definitely a dilemma, on one side is the possibility of inflicting injustice and persecution for who knows how long, the other side is making a civilizational-level mistake. I think I remember an AAQC that talks about how even if HBD is proven, they're not sure what would be the next steps and that some proponents of HBD does seem to be true "follow the science" types while some seems more interested in the societal engineering.
I suppose one can say that on a long enough timeline, everything will work out anyway so why worry about whether to act or not. At an individual level, migrate to majorly white societies and enact strict immigration assimilation laws. If race does matter, then over time, where suffering is stretched so thin it's minuscule, the "correct race" will win.
What happens rhetorically is that the side that made all of the guns used by both armies gets bonus points, and the side that used borrowed technology gets dinged. The losing side learned better, stopped selling out, and came back with bigger, better stuff to assert its comparative advantages.*
True, and I also still don't see how the disparity has to be explained by race.
The reason to give attribution to racial war ability is because there is first a difference in race, and a significant one. Two groups of slavs conquering each other doesn't leave much room for race. Second there is the matter of examples. Is there an African country that you think could stand up to Wagner? Probably Ethiopia at least. I won't count Egypt as I'm talking about people and not geography. South Africa used to have nukes, but "South Africa used to" could have been my whole post in four words.
I agree with you that right now I can't think of many countries in Africa that can stand up to Wagner. I've only recently gotten interested in African development so maybe I'll have a better opinion to share with all once I have more intuition on this.
I wanted to bring this part to the fore. This story is true, genes do sit at the root of everything, given you define everything as "life on planet earth." Yeah, genes really do sit at the root of everything. They're what differentiates between kelp and kangaroos, between horses and men. That's the point, that's the sore spot, that's your ultimate contention with the original post.
Why does it have to be gene? Why couldn't it be something like: god exists, who is white, and doesn't like black people? Or they were cursed ala "Midichlorians isn't the Force, it's only an indication of the Force powerscale of a person" kind of situation?
I was very unimpressed with the AskHistorians links, because they actively prune any arguments that are racial in nature. That's the water we swim in, but I notice the water. I'm not sure you do.
I thought of this as well, but it was hard to find scholarship that was digestible and that I myself feel sufficiently authoritative. I've lurked for a while but it's not necessary that I know what sources would people accept. And even then, I don't necessarily want to deny myself a source that I would often trust. TheMotte for me is the same, another water where I dip my toe in and try to synthesize "the truth" from other waters I take from.
Of course race matters, how could it not? We don't have to understand it for it to matter, after all, and we'd see it in the outcomes if it did (we do). So between saying it's not a problem, and starting with wait and see, there's not much here to sway me.
I do believe Argument 1, though the most abstract, is the most likely to instill some pause. Argument 2 and 3 aren't really attacking HBD itself but more the epistemology of the OG comment. From the vibes, I know that there's "not much here to sway" you, but maybe there was a slight flutter of the wings of a fly at least.
War does sharpen us, and so does culture war. I know that these are well-trodden grounds for you and others, it is probably tiring to debate and communicate over and over, so I really appreciate that you engaged with my comment.
lollol
3d ago
It's alright, thank you for your response and sympathy. I knew that I was coming in with a point of view that would come under attack AND that I am under equipped for the battle. But I do want to be the one who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again. I did look at RandomRanger response to mine at the time but I think it's a continuation of Argument 3. For example, I can examine this sentence:
Not a single STEM Nobel has ever been awarded to a black person.
Well conveniently for me there is W. Arthur Lewis who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. I can already imagine the counters, "Economics isn't a hard science", "It's not even a real Nobel prize", etc.. However, taking the sentence at its face value, for me it's a lapse in data.
Thank you for your response, here's what I think of it
GDP (or rather, what GDP is actually trying to measure, economically valuable output), doesn't compound. Countries hit points of diminishing returns, hit points where they are up against the edge of technology and the pace slows down, hit points of bad government, and other countries catch up because they don't have to invent anything new, they just rapidly adopt other inventions. Hence, how Japan caught up with the West in about 70 years, or how China is now blowing past the USA.
I'm really confused and maybe I need you to explain further but I am firmly of the belief that GDP compounds. It's also easy from my perspective that early wins/advantages leads to "snowballing" or sustained comparative advantage. And extension from that is others can close the gap if they don't have to go through the slower innovation/invention process and can achieve "faster compounding". I would attribute to China blowing past the USA in terms of manufacturing and certain technologies is because clearly they put way more focus and intentionally built the foundation for it in the past and now the future. Also we have to account that currently China has more people than the USA, that is undoubtedly an advantage.
If a country has good government, economic output converges toward what smart fraction theory would predict.
Ok, I would like to invoke my Argument 1 and say I will wait for an African polity that "has good goverment". I actually think that time isn't too far away, optimistically it will happen soon (so 1 or 2 decades), at worst I do think it will happen before I die (which should be about 40-60 years away). The invading part though I'm not sure would ever actually happen.
Consider this simple fact though: out of a billion plus people in countries all around the world, in countries of all different economic situations, in countries that were never colonized, or threw off colonial oppressors long ago, or had gentle transitions from colonialism, all different circumstances, there is not a single black owned and operated company that can produce an engine block (nor anything more technologically sophisticated than an engine block, like a jet turbine or a CPU). It's going to be pretty hard to be good at war without engine blocks and jet turbines.
Unfortunately I don't know mechanic skills, but I do believe a "powertrain" is more complex than an "engine block". I found Piston Automotive which is black-owned and "supplies powertrain systems, front-end cooling systems, chassis systems, BEV and PHEV battery packs, and interior systems for the automotive industry." and is a pretty big company. I'm sure I can find more. We can also find multiple car manufacturers in Africa that are black-owned (the first one I picked had a white-ish looking founder actually but the second and third one are very black-looking). You are right that there are currently no black-owned aircraft manufacturer that I can find. I do find lots of black-owned companies in the tech world. I think my Argument 2 is strong here, automotive industry is known to be capital-intensive, requires high vertical integration, if we just talk Africa, that's a lot of demand for a continent where 40% still living below the poverty wage.
Being good at modern war requires intelligence, and the lower average intelligence of subsaharan Africans is hardly tenuous, but this is well-trodden ground for people on this forum. You can start with Chapter 13 and 14 of the Bell Curve, a book that was "argued against" but never "debunked" (after spending a very long time evaluating the arguments from both sides, many years ago, I came to the conclusion The Bell Curve actually understates the case).
Let me attempt at a rewording of my conclusion:
- My bailey is: "I'm not denying that civilizational differences in war exists, I'm denying that the QC comment as presented made a compelling argument that the reason for the differences is ancestry"
- My motte is: "I'm not denying that civilizational differences in ware exists, I'm denying that the reason for the differences is ancestry"
My Argument 2 and 3 mostly expresses my bailey, Argument 1 mostly expresses my motte. Unfortunately, HBD is not well-trodden ground for me so thanks for the linked book. I've only occasionally read HBD stuff because of the usual QCs around it, but I didn't focus or really think about them. I suppose as of the last year I have been focusing on great powers competition (in the current world) so the QC comment crossed my bailey.
The last thing this forum needs are long AI assisted gish-gallop posts based on stuff the poster did not even read, think about, verify, and synthesize.
Let me expand.
- There are more AskHistorians links that I've read and not used, and of those I've linked, I did read, think about, and synthesize. But I did not verify because generally I believe in that sub)
- Some I just want to get the choice quotes and the surrounding larger context wasn't necessary so I linked directly to that quote. I definitely had to do research to find the right quote so I've read and synthesized. But I did not think nor verify.
- Some links are mostly color and context (like links to Wikipedia)
- I can think of one link that I feel regret on that I should have read more which is the one on Central Africa Republic instability that I just read the abstract and took that as enough for me to link to.
- I could go deeper and deeper and deeper, but I felt this was enough time and effort put in. Maybe my behavior would change based on your feedback, but that has to be seen next time.
Sounds good. It's harsh to hear but it's good to know one's own audience (whether they're receptive to AI usage and how much). I'll keep it in mind for next time. I could share all my conversations with AI so others can see for themselves how much I use it but I'll be better about that the next time I participate.
lollol
3d ago
Thanks for the feedback and also letting me expand more on my points.
- In retrospect, maybe yes, the "the comment has flaws in its logic" is the core, and "the comment is not QC worthy" is more of a secondary point. I think I wanted to highlight it though because when it comes to motivation for even writing and participating then the order is flipped. I have had times where I read a comment in this forum and thought "the comment has flaws in its logic" but didn't participate, it's only because the OG comment was marked QC that I thought I should make an effort and make a response. For the future though I would keep in mind that people find such complaint as tedious and not as effective for long-time members of the forum. Maybe it would be my version of "Carthago delenda est".
- Funnily enough, the AI even warned me and recommended me to take out mentioning it. It says that mentioning the use of AI would lead to mottizens of mistrusting and more easily dismiss the piece. I elected to still include that point because I wanted to be upfront, sincere, and candid as I believe communication (and in this case, "culture warring") is best when we all try to be truthful to ourselves and to each other. Also, I believe many would have sensed something not quite right about the tone shift from time to time (AI gets flowery and likes to list thing more than I do). So it's better to be honest than leading to some kind of "reveal" later.
- I would like to assert a difference between "quality of logic" and "quality of writing". My complaint about the OG comment is about the "quality of logic" (and tbh, the "conclusion") and I definitely had to resort to AI to better my "quality of writing" (grammar, spelling, style, tone, flow, structure, etc.). That's not to say that I didn't ask AI to help me with my "quality of logic", I did, and in more of a "I wrote this, try to find flaws in it" way. I do believe that's a good use of AI and doesn't detract from the value of what I want to say. Bad writing though for sure, but like I mentioned, I didn't want to drag out responding.
- It would be unfortunate that others might flag me as "that guy who uses AI" but I do believe my use of AI has been beneficial to me so it's worth it.
- I thought of the same point, the fact that the comment dragged a response like this from me meant that I improved my own reasoning and communication. But I do think AAQC are maybe 60-80% popularity based (in a kind of "wisdom of the crowd" way) so the best thing I can do is to add my voice to the choir and let others see and wrestle with the same question I had of whether the OG comment should have been QC.
lollol
3d ago
War, Genes, History, Capital, Data
Opening
I’m making a top-level response to the Quality Contribution (QC) of RandomRanger for the week of September 8, 2025: "But let's put sports to one side, what about the subject that sport emulates and trains for: war?". This will be blunt, but I’m open to being moved.
My stance: It shouldn’t have been a QC. The Motte defines QC as: "interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered." and the comment is certainly polished. But the bar that made me join here was higher: QC is a comment/post that explains something counter-intuitive, or something that changes my mind, or at the very least makes my view of the world more nuanced (and yes I know that I just repeated the same thing three times). This QC does the opposite: it uses an eloquent voice to sell a very strong claim about “racial war ability” that its own evidence doesn’t actually support.
The comment argues, and I quote, that: "there's no evidence that blacks are anywhere near as capable at warfare as whites and much to the contrary. Ye olde racist might be wrong 9/10 times but is right where it matters, regarding key civilizational abilities of which warfare is the most important".
Before I push back, I want to note what I think the QC gets right. It’s absolutely true that warfare is a brutally demanding composite of logistics, industry, organization, and abstract thinking, and that it tells more about a society’s real capabilities than feel-good representation in sports or prestige slots. I also think it’s fair to say that colonial wars were often “easy” given the power and capital disparities involved. My disagreement is not with those premises, but with the jump from those facts to a story about fixed racial essence.
In this comment I’m doing two things: (1) arguing that the specific racial thesis is not supported by the evidence presented, and (2) arguing that holding this up as Quality Contribution lowers the epistemic bar precisely where it most needs to be high.
Let's get into it. I have three rebuttals, and then some various thoughts that I put in an appendix.
1. "Too early to tell" isn't a dodge, it's history
Stephen Kotkin's "too early to tell" should be the first test for any broad assertions. Imagine The Motte in 1904, before the Battle of Tsushima, and the confident essays about how East Asians “just don’t have civilizational war in them.” Or The Motte in Tang-era China, self-secured about southerners who’d been ruled on and off for a millennium, then asks Vietnam about how permanent that looked. Hell, look at the Jews and how long did it take before they got to really rule themselves?
History routinely punishes premature essentialism. The fact that we can point to an era where one region dominates does not conclude a law of peoples for all time. And even within Africa, we’re barely a few post-colonial generations into modern state formation, compared to the half-millennium runway European and some East Asian states had to iterate on fiscal-military institutions.
On the timescales we are talking about, modern African states are a brand-new experiment. Their “industrial-era warfare record” consists of a small number of highly skewed trials, many of them fought under extreme external constraints. Declaring a permanent “war ability gap” on the basis of this very particular, very lopsided historical window is not caution, it’s overfitting.
2. "GDP not HBD” and that compound interest fights wars
War isn't about race, it's logistics, industry, and fiscal state capacity. If it can be pointed out how genetic components lead to the development of the bond market, increasing financial capacity to feed armies and wage wars, now that would be a much more compelling argument.
Right now, the examples in the QC are consistent with at least two stories:
- (A) Genes → institutions → capital → war outcomes, and
- (B) Geography, path-dependence, external shocks, and prior conquest → institutions/capital → war outcomes.
The data cited in the comment simply doesn’t distinguish between (A) and (B). If we line up a low-capital polity in 1885 against a peak-industrial empire, we didn’t measure “innate war-ability”; we measured who got to compound capital for 400 years and who got repeatedly reset or never even started.
Take a more personal compound-interest analogy. Start two players at $100k and $1M: the 8% guy with a head start beats the 8% guy without it, every time. It should be obvious to everyone here that the player without the head start has to be more hardworking, more brilliant, more cunning, more successful, and do that repeatedly over a sustained amount of time to have a chance. If one side got centuries of relatively (I acknowledge "relative" is a load-bearing word) unmolested compounding (trade routes, gunpowder iteration, fiscal states, etc.) and the other got geographical isolation, depopulation, extraction, arms restrictions, and arbitrary boundary-drawing, then you don’t need chromosomes to explain outcomes.
This is what I mean by path-dependence (see Appendix point 7): outcomes depend on the sequence of early moves, not just the static “inputs” we see today. Once one cluster of polities industrializes early and builds fiscal-military states, and another cluster is repeatedly raided, partitioned, and ruled through extractive institutions, you should expect a persistent gap even if the “human material” were identical.
If you want to argue for (A) over (B), you’d need cases where institutions and capital are roughly comparable but ancestry varies, and then show a robust systematic gap. You’d also need to say what sort of controlled datasets or natural experiments might actually distinguish “genes → institutions → capital” from “history/geography/path-dependence → institutions → capital”. The QC never even sketches what such a dataset would look like, let alone shows it. Before we invoke genes, we should at least exhaust the far more direct account in terms of path-dependent sabotage, disinvestment, and the inertia of early advantages.
3. Mutilating a dataset and how successes are flukes, failures are inherent
Methodologically, there’s a clear pattern in the comment. When an African/Black polity wins, it’s “disease,” “terrain,” “numbers,” "politics," or “European rifles.” When whites lose strategically, it’s “just politics.” When blacks lose, it’s taken as evidence about their essence. That’s not a neutral reading of history, it’s a one-way explanatory filter that can only ever point in one direction.
On top of that, the metric itself is baked to produce the conclusion. “Only once did a black army inflict a major campaign-ending defeat on a white army” sounds impressive until you notice how narrow and hand-picked that category is: “black” vs “white” armies, in “major campaign-ending defeats”, under modern conditions defined by European great-power wars. If you define your dataset so that African victories mostly don’t count, then treat what’s left as a natural experiment in “racial war ability”, the result isn’t surprising—you built the maze.
Apply the same moves to European history and it becomes obviously silly. Napoleon’s march on Moscow? “Oh, that was just winter and supply lines, doesn’t tell us anything about French military competence.” Stalingrad? “Just weather and Hitler’s politics.” If you treat all your side’s failures as contingent and all the other side’s failures as intrinsic, you can prove anything you like about “innate capacity” without ever admitting you changed the rules midstream.
Now, to some of the specific cases.
Yes, the 1896 Battle of Adwa shows that forces with almost equivalent technologies (French vs Italian rifles/artilleries) but one side has the superior numerical advantage would lead to ... predictable results. That's not surprising nor evidence for some proof-of-contradiction for inherent racial ability. But notice what happens rhetorically: when Africans win at long odds against a European power, it gets filed under “numbers and technology, nothing to see here.” When Africans lose to an industrial power, it’s suddenly racial essence again. Heads I win, tails you lose.
And the 1935 Italian comeback was because of airplanes and ... chemical warfare. That's industry and international impunity, not racial revelation. The only tenuous argument that I think can be made here is why there wasn't industrialization of Ethiopia between the two wars, and well, industrialization is hard.
Haiti isn’t an asterisk, either. Attrition by yellow fever was probably the strategy as much as winter is Russia’s. I think a general who was also "well known as an 'herb doctor'" would be aware of the health advantages between his people and the colonizers. If Napoleon freezing outside Moscow counts as “Russian generalship plus winter,” it’s odd that disease in Haiti gets counted as “just disease.” Subtracting an adversary’s environmental advantages but keeping your own is a one-way filter, not an empirical method.
“Portuguese defeat were primarily political defeats, not military ones.” That’s a category error if you’re using those defeats as evidence of “innate capacity.” A great general once said: "war is a mere continuation of [politics] by other means", or in other words, to impose your will on the enemy at an acceptable cost. If your battlefield kill ratios are fine but you cannot hold territory, sustain the war, keep your coalition intact, or secure the population’s compliance, you have lost at the thing war is for. You don’t get to call tactical performance “essence” and strategic failure “mere politics” if your thesis is about civilizational war capacity. That’s not an exception, that’s just defeat.
Finally, let's jump to modern day and examine the vignette of "a fairly small Wagner force can go on safari and take a whole African country, they can go in on the Central African Republic and take their gold mines, take the country's foreign policy." Right, old-superpower-backed paramilitary group vs capital-starved country fractured by decades of external meddling. Again, not attributing industry and capital and international impunity, but assigning ancestry as the reason. If this scenario happened in Europe — say, between Russia and Georgia — we don’t suddenly say “there must be something deficient about Georgian ancestry.” We correctly treat it as a story about power, capital, and position, not chromosomes. The fact that the same kind of mismatch in Africa gets read as “racial war ability” is exactly the asymmetry I’m criticizing.
Closing
The QC claims that "there's no evidence that blacks are anywhere near as capable at warfare as whites and much to the contrary." On its own terms, it never actually establishes this. It interprets a highly skewed historical record under one favored story about essence, filters counterexamples until they don’t count, and then declares victory.
I’m not denying differences exist between peoples. I’m denying that the QC, as presented, can tell us where those differences come from, or cleanly separate history, capital, contingency, path-dependence, and politics from “innate ability.” It treats a lopsided, distorted record as if it were a clean experiment in racial war-ability, and then summarizes the result into "essence".
At best, the evidence on offer is compatible with multiple causal stories: one where genes sit at the root of everything, and one where geography, timing, conquest, and accumulated institutional and capital advantages do most of the work. Nothing in the QC even tries to tease these apart. It just assumes the genetic story, then reinterprets every data point in its light.
To me, that shouldn’t qualify as a Quality Contribution. QC should make it harder, not easier, to confuse the complicated truth from the stories we tell ourselves. If we’re going to invoke genes and civilizational fitness, the standard of care should go up, not down. Holding this up as exemplary lowers the epistemic bar precisely where it most needs to be high.
What would satisfy me? At minimum, an attempt to say what sort of controlled datasets or natural experiments might actually distinguish “genes → institutions → capital” from “history/geography/path-dependence → institutions → capital”, and some acknowledgement of how far our current evidence is from that ideal. And even then, I’d still want an answer to a simpler question: even if Europe and East Asia did get lucky in some deep way, why must that luck be retrofitted into a story about racial essence, instead of leaving it as just that, simply luck?
Appendix of unconnected thoughts
- In the world of the fantasy webnovel epic The Wandering Inn, every race in that setting has tried to conquer the world at least once. Most came close, some even won and ruled for a while, and then gotten beaten back by the others in due time. So yeah, maybe we should wait for some black-dominant polities doing some world conquering in the next few centuries or even a millennium before making a statement.
- It is dangerous to believe that there is some inherent, innate strength by being of some particular race, biological marking when the relationship is so tenuous. That's all the steps needed before arrogance, and then ignorance, and ultimately, defeat.
- There is a saying in East Asia that "the marketplace is a battlefield". Relate that with others sayings like "war is a mere continuation of politics by other means", "everything is political" and it seems to me everything is already a war of some kind.
- A great weakness with this response is my sources. Many are just AskHistorian links, some I didn't read deeply, none did I followup on their sources. Although I suppose I am like most people where we're often swayed by "argument by link-dump" than “argument by reasoning, supported by sources.”
- I did initially have a "not very well thought out" response. I was especially surprised that the comment got a QC and then after a few weeks of pondering, finally decided to write this over the course of another few weeks.
- I did use AI to focus my writing after a decade of unused and to also fit the tone and style of this forum. I do have to say AI is really good at making snappy, quotable lines.
- “Path-dependence” here just means that outcomes depend on the sequence of events and early moves, not just on the current “inputs.” If one set of polities industrializes early, builds fiscal-military states, and compounds capital over centuries, while another set gets raided, depopulated, partitioned, and ruled through extractive institutions, you should expect a persistent performance gap even if the underlying “human material” were identical. History has memory and the path matters.
- I could have taken longer to write this and make sharper points. I am getting really good at using AI to point out the flaws in my logic and writing. But I am getting a little tired of dragging out and only working on this like 30 minutes to an hour a week so it's better to release something near-full-ass than not at all.
lollol
3d ago
Roland Fryers Promise program in Harlem
Just want to have an addendum but from a cursory search: Promise Academy is a charter school under the Harlem's Children Zone (really an umbrella org for multiple programs/initiative) founded by Geoffrey Canada.
Roland Fryer is a Havard economics professor that did a study on HCZ and is still actively researching on education reform.
lollol
19d ago
Where are you getting these numbers, I checked just now at 10:53 New York time and found:
- 2025 Virginia gubernatorial election - Results: Spanberger 1,963,731 to Earle-Sears 1,443,617
- 2025 Virginia Attorney General election - Results: None/blank cause official numbers aren't out yet.
lollol
2mo ago
There is, one with $6.2 billion in the balance. And the same character show up:
The potential purchase also arrives amid wider regulatory shifts. Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chairman the Federal Communications Commission, which will need to give the transaction the green light, has long advocated for loosening industry restrictions.
lollol
2mo ago
Not very well thought out thought at the moment but I think my counters to this are:
- Correlation is not causation.
- History is long, but is it really that long yet? We might need more sample sizes of one racial group trying to war against another racial group.
- Hard to A/B test this.
- Hard to define racial groups.
- Civilizational abilities == racial abilities is debatable and can't be assumed.
lollol
3mo ago
The other problem for democrats in an all out gerrymandering war is that they simply have fewer seats to eek out. The most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; red states going tit for tat isn't actually something they can escalate that much against
Is there a ranking of states and how gerrymandered they are somewhere that you would recommend? I briefly looked at https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/redistricting-report-card/ and wasn't able to find like a CSV or something.
Alright, adding another dose of Vietnamese news that my old man relayed to me (I am not doing any verifications of what he said) a few weeks ago that I keep forgetting to add to this thread. There are currently major bureaucratic upheavals in Vietnam.
- Vietnam’s administratively used to be divided into provinces, which were divided into districts, which were divided into communes. For an American observer, this can roughly maps to states, counties, wards/subcounties/districts. Note the “used to be”. Vietnam will no longer have districts (the 2nd layer).
- Vietnam used to have 63 provinces, there are now only 34.
- Lots of major secondary effects from 1 and 2. There are now lots of bureaucrats getting “early retirement”. They are getting benefits package that altogether is definitely going to create meaningful inflationary pressure at the national level. There are also now fighting up and down the layers between the remaining bureaucrats who want to keep their government jobs. You obviously don’t need two head accountant (or accounting team) for the newly-merged province. Or how can you justify having your job as the commune head when the district head of the newly-dissolved-district wants to come down to take your job.
- Tertiary effects on businesses because of 3. Like most developing countries, there is a lot of palms to grease at all levels. And evidence of corruption from your opponent is great for your political safety net. It wasn’t uncommon to be called-to-the-police-station-for-some-tea before, but that was just the perks for people in power, now it’s about survival for them.
- New accounting laws were passed last year in December but only recently came into effect that would significantly enlarge Vietnam’s taxable base. Obviously, this and 4 is driving up demand for accountants who are good and loyal. I don’t know the exact details but it seems there were a lot of businesses (think a local furniture maker) that had nominal taxes or were untaxed or really easy to cook the books, now they will be under greater scrutiny.Oh and how can we forget all this under the looming tariffs which apparently Vietnam has the highest in SEA.
All in all, major turmoil, but we will also see how the effects of this shakes out over time.
lollol
4mo ago
Howabout the Amish? they definitely separate from mainstream society. They seem popular, but I don't think it's from attracting outside people into that lifestyle but by breeding more from within themselves. Amish aren't particularly disagreeable seeing as they regularly participate in farmer's market or make transactions with non-Amish people (I've only heard generally good vibes about Amish construction/furniture).
lollol
5mo ago
Here are my thoughts on the race:
- The people of the current era want fighters to represent them, no matter the political ideologue. Cuomo didn't have as much appearances or events as Zohran. This is similar to the dynamic of Biden, then Harris for a little bit, vs Trump. The people can sense when someone is putting in the work for their vote.
- Unlikely but Eric Adams still has a chance like Joe Lieberman did in 2006. Lieberman is at least respectable though, unlike Adams, which seems almost every New Yorker has some level of distaste for.
- I solidly believe the heat made a difference as elderly people are less likely to turn out to vote, this would be the first election I know of where climate change matters.
- This is going to be like AOC in 2018, tomorrow this news will be across the world. Lots of eyes, and resources are going to be pouring in.
- Yes, absolutely win for grassroots campaign.
- There are some talks going around how if we look at the geographical breakdown, it's a separation between transplants (Manhattan LES, Brooklyn Williamsburg, etc.) vs natives (Bronx, deep Brooklyn, deep Queens). I still want to wait for the full numbers though before more speculation.
lollol
5mo ago
And of course these dating apps keep their data secret so we can't even look and judge how well they work for their stated purposes (not well).
Side tangent but I think you would enjoy this blogpost from someone who works at a dating app (not sure which dating app though).
https://blog.luap.info/what-really-happens-inside-a-dating-app.html
I think this is the best bit:
Can dating apps work?
There are a lot of people saying that dating apps are evil, that Match Group exploits people's feelings. That's true on one hand and wrong on the other.
First the expensive resource on a dating app is girls, not girls because they will pay you, but because if you have girls it will attract guys, what impacts the retention of girls on a dating app? The number of likes they send, so the first goal of a dating app is to make girls like, clearly not something evil. There is no interest in making them pay as none will do it. (Hot girls can be replaced by bots, or by girls that promote their Instagram, they should just not like everyone but they don't need to be real for the system to work, in truth it is not super complex to acquire these girls, so no need to have bots.)
Second the most expensive resource on a dating app is hot guys, because without hot guys you won't get girls, well hot guys are the users that have the best retention, without effort they will have a 50% retention, so in fact you just have to wait some time and the app will fill up with those guys, need a specific strategy? No, do nothing. Is this evil? No.
Then the last most expensive resource on a dating app is guys that are willing to pay, what can you offer to guys that want to pay? More likes received. Well good news more likes received = more retention for these guys. So the things these apps do, is how to make a guy pay the most to access likes? It is very similar to any business, a football club has the same objective, a restaurant has the same objective, a gaming app has the same objective, a gym has the same objective. The ones that are left behind are actually the ones that are not paying. Tinder for example, they are just the best at converting you into a paying user and keeping you, and they will not keep you if you don't get likes.
The problem of dating apps is not the product in itself it is the users of these apps. People that complain about datings app are either:
MALE
Not willing to date (so they complain they cant accumulate matches as fast as they would like),
Make no effort to be attractive (everyday we would receive emails to the support of guys saying "im not receive likes and im not the less attractive", well yes you are ),
FEMALE
Not willing to like anyone (We have plenty of girls that can scroll through 300 profiles and not like anyone and deleting their account saying "I dont like anyone" well
Liking users too attractive that would only want to have sex with them
The hard truth is that if you are a guy and you dont go on a date with at least one new girl per week and dont have your picture taken by a professional photograph you are loosing your time on a Tinder-like dating app
And if you are a girl and you dont date at least one guy per week and you dont lower your appearances standards then you are also loosing your time on a Tinder like dating app
So for me dating apps currently work, and actually they are the biggest place people meet these days. But using them is very disappointing
lollol
8mo ago
Pretty much what @SigurdsSilverSword said. I guess maybe a better term might be free-roaming?
lollol
8mo ago
I will try to illustrate my frustration with this argument. This is like two groups of kids in a playground where one group is building this sandcastle and yes those kids have these weird rules or behaviors or rituals that ranges from annoying to abhorrent for the other group of kids. But then the other group of kids come and just destroys the sandcastle. I think my feelings about gutting the IMLS would mirror some gun range enthusiast’s feeling if a liberal president went and hampered the Pittman-Robertson Act with regards to federal grants to gun education.
PS: I’m extra frustrated because conservatives do demonstrate their ability to grow and nurture their own ideologues of specific professions such as the Federalist Society. But then I can’t think of a reverse equivalent (other than liberal gun owners which isn’t a profession) so my argument isn’t going anywhere.
lollol
8mo ago
I think this is a big stretch in argument, very far away from what I am arguing for or against. I don’t know the right terms but I do believe this is along the lines of a “strawman argument” or “moving the goalpost” or “dodging the arguments” or, to borrow another commenter that pointed out to me what I was doing, “retreating from the bailey to the motte”. I do not think the IMLS budget is remotely within the realm of comparison or analogy with the totality of US debt. I was rebutting on the characterization with which @phailyoor was describing the three line items. That if I apply their criteria on whether that was government waste, I found at least 2/3 not a waste, and definitely satisfy their criteria of providing “books or computers or printers or anything”. Emphasis on “I” and “their” because obviously they did not find the same conclusions.
lollol
8mo ago
Yes, I realize that now and that my initial 3 points weren’t enough. I will now attempt to not dodge your question. I don’t know what the maximum number of line items is. I probably start to get dizzy when things add up to about a few billion dolllars. But I do know my minimums. And that if comparing between two slices of salami to cut, yes I would look for the qualitative difference. And I would find my a way to cut $266m somewhere else than the IMLS without a replacement.
lollol
8mo ago
Ok, well since the Trump Administration is in power, seems to me like instead of shutting things down, why don't they just....change how they grant the money? Yes, do just that, grant more directly to the state library services so that the regional politicians can be more judicious and be capricious with how the money should be spent. Take a step further and give all the money to the red states so they can go build some beautiful civic architecture, I am very much in agreement with that. What I disagree with is cutting the funding and that libraries and museums would have to reduce hours etc.
lollol
8mo ago
After knowing that none of this money actually goes to books or computers or printers or anything
I'm going to take your exact examples without looking at the links.
a tribal college in northern Michigan to continue offering library services during a building renovation.
This looks to me exactly like books, computers, or printers cause it seems with the funding absence, there will be less books/computers/printers available for that area.
a historically Black university in Virginia $52,000 to digitize an archival collection about the women’s college it absorbed in 1932.
This is literally about creating more books. Or at the very least, making the books more accessible.
a $150,000 grant to help school librarians better support students who are autistic.
Ok, don't know what exactly that is, I will concede on this example.
I think 2/3 is a good score.
I'm going to copy-paste some stuff so maybe you've already seen it.
My bailey is: "I'm not denying that civilizational differences in war exists, I'm denying that the QC comment as presented made a compelling argument that the reason for the differences is ancestry" My motte is: "I'm not denying that civilizational differences in ware exists, I'm denying that the reason for the differences is ancestry"
My 3 mostly expresses my bailey, Argument 1 and 2 mostly expresses my motte. I made a mess of the comment because I didn't clearly point out the two. But thanks for sharpening my thinking.
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