rokmonster's profile

rokmonster Lives under a rok. 4d ago · Edited 4d ago

As with anything sociological, an examination of the Korean situation is incomplete without an economic background.

Wages have historically been low in Korea.
Korea is a cutthroat meritocracy.
Men (or their parents) are still mostly valued as "providers".
Housing prices in Seoul, the only city worth living in, have almost tripled since 2018.
This generation of women is the first generation to be fully entering the workforce.
Buying a house is a precondition to marrying under Korean social norms.
Koreans, in comparison to Westerners, don't like to violate social norms.

What 1 (low wages) + 2 (cutthroat meritocracy) imply is that Korean men have to work hard to get promoted to management if they want to support their family. This has historically taken the form of 60-hour work weeks (8 hours plus "voluntary" company dinners, Monday to Saturday). As women enter the workforce, the culture of company dinners has been pared back, and now it is 8 hours plus unpaid evenings if one wants to have a chance at being promoted to manager. (Women don't on average put in those hours, since 60% of them plan on leaving the workforce when they are married and have kids.)

Adding 3 (the social role of men as providers) means that their value is measured by the thickness of their wallets, and their wallets are on average not very thick, because 1 (wages are low) and their wallets are getting thinner, and less valued, because 5 (because women are entering the workforce).

Now owning a home is a precondition to marriage (and childbirth) in Korea, and this means that it is mostly the upper middle class which can afford to have kids. So you get a whole generation of women who were raised by their mothers in houses where their fathers were working 60-hour weeks to be that upper middle class. They grew up in material luxury, but their fathers would home drunk late at night after these company dinners and pass out immediately. They see their mothers working thanklessly in their home, barely time for a conversation with their fathers, and want none of it. Thus the mythology is born. "Korean men suck."

These women in the upper middle class have gone onto college, where they major in the humanities and are exposed to the imported concepts of third-wave feminism. Men are the oppressors, women are victims, and life sucks because of patriarchy. Life does suck. They try going into the workforce and see that wages are low and the culture sucks. Must be the patriarchy holding them back. (To emphasize the point, men in their cohort who enter the workforce had their mandatory military service counted as work experience and so enter at a higher pay level.)

Growing up in the upper-middle class with material opulence, these Korean women have high expectations for their quality of life, and instead of finding a marriagable high-status husband, their age-matched prospects are only poor men who are struggling to get ahead in the rat race. Then when they are looking for a husband, none of the available young bachelors have any money or free time. Nobody is buying that house! If they are schooled in third-wave feminism, the message is clear: "Korean men suck."

These feminist women go into jobs like journalism, where they write tons of articles about how terrible the men are, with no consideration for the economic constraints that got the entire society into this position. They hit age 30 (or 35) and are forced to marry by social forces (and that ticking biological clock). If they are marriageable, they end up settling for a man who they are not happy with, read HuffPost, and inhabit "mom cafes" online where they post screeds about how terrible men are. If they have poor personalities, they write screeds even more vociferously about their bosses and the men who rejected them. Somewhere, they read that foreign men are feminists and get the idea that foreigners will support them. (And boy the stories I have of what happens when they actually meet foreign men!)

(Women who were aware that their fathers were making sacrifices for them see the feminists going off the deep end and no longer feel comfortable calling themselves feminists.)

Young Korean men, on the other hand, see their fathers working 996, and instintively understand that their fathers are working as a sacrifice to provide material wealth for the family. They see that the women of their cohort (especially the self-proclaimed feminists) do not appreciate these sacrifices, and especially don't appreciate the sacrifice they made in lifetime to keep the country safe from the North Koreans. The women appear thankless and shrill. The men put their heads down and try to work harder to get ahead. If they are responsible, they save every last penny to buy that house when they get married.

The left-wing Moon administration rejiggers the housing market to try to lower housing prices, and ends up adding fuel to the fire and doubling housing prices in three years. The left/feminist wing also hushes up several cases of sexual assault by the left-wing mayor of Seoul, who commits suicide when the allegations become public. The right-wing candidate vows to abolish the "Ministry for Women and Family" (English translation: "Ministry for Gender Equality"), which is seen as a think-tank and jobs program for these radical feminists. In response mostly to housing prices but partly to the MfWaF who hate them and the hypocricy of the leftists covering up sexual assault, men in the next election vote for the right-wing candidate.

Korean journalists - especially ones who know enough English to write for foreign journals like CNN and the NYT - are largely drawn from those upper-class women who went through college in the humanities and were radicalized on third-wave feminism. The election of a right-wing government is portrayed by these Korean journalists (who never studied economics and don't want to talk about the rapey left-wing mayor) as a sign that Korean men hate women. (The actual surveys show that they hate "feminists".) Western media comes to believe that Korean men are sexists engaged in a gender war, as everything available in English is filtered through the lens of Korean feminists.

Edit: And as my Korean friend points out, Korean journalists frequently cite foreign (CNN, NYT, etc) articles about Korean gender wars to assert that these things are real, without thinking about the filter effect and the fact that the foreign journalists' friends are all upper-class English-speaking Koreans (i.e. filtered for feminists).

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 3d ago

Haha. You fell for the bait! Ok, some anecdotes that come to mind now. Might add more later:

Careerist girl in her early 30s spent years watching South Park. Gets really good at English (in a South Park drawl!), but remains single for years. Discovers the Man of Her Dreams on Tinder. Spends two months raving about how perfect he is, how Tinder is different in Korea. Then learns he was also dating three other Tinder girls.
Staunch feminist sits next to foreign guy on the subway. Guy completely ignores her. She tries to get his attention, he keeps ignoring her. She gets up and starts berating him for "manspreading," threatens to take his picture and put it on Twitter. Incident resolves when he threatens to take her picture and send it to the police for harrassment.
Tall (= tough dating prospects) artistic (=open-minded) girl falls in love with a foreign guy. Everything seems to be going well, except he's not very patient about her lack of English fluency. He takes her home to meet his family ... and it turns out they all live on a trailerpark. Relationship survives until he goes on a date with another girl. When she does meet a guy who is patient with her, that's one of the points she brags to her friends about.
Staunch feminist in her early 30s meets foreign guy. Everything is going well, except that he walks out of a movie when it gets to a particularly girl-power scene. She has a two-week identity crisis over meeting someone so "anti-woman".
Early 20s reader of The Ethical Slut finally finds the rich foreign gentleman she's been trying to snag. Comes back raving about how the first date was amazing, he must have spent $500 between dinner and the hotel, she's finally found the man of her dreams. A week later he has to go on an international business trip, and stops answering his phone. Oddly, his phone is ringing like it's still in Korea ...

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 3d ago

Without doxxing myself, all I can say is that I am immersed in Korean life. My source is mostly synthesis of what people have told me over the years while talking to me candidly and first-hand observation while experiencing the rat race. In my workplace, I saw men putting their children to bed on Kakao Facechat. In my extracurricular activities, I met a few mid-30s journalist women who were writing for foreign-language outlets. I saw friends get married, be disappointed, and turn bitter, and know many who cannot afford to get married.

So you should treat the above as original research, almost anecdotal. I was trying to convey the economic and social forces which push men and women into discontent with each other (well, mostly a subset of women into discontent with men), but also the filtering effect of what gets to English-language media, and the citogenesis effect of the English-language media on Koreans' understanding of their own culture (which I think is despicable).

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 1d ago

That's a good question, but I don't know anything about Japan.

Also, I somewhat dispute that the gender war has "turned hot" in Korea. I think this "gender war" mostly journos trying to make a big issue about gender, for the reasons outlined in the second half of my grandparent comment. Surveys in 2021 showed that in every demographic surveyed, "inequality between men and women" was considered less of a problem in 2021 than in 2016. Also, if you are not terminally online you won't notice any gender war. (But Korean society does tend to be terminally online, so most people are aware of some feminist/anti-feminist drama. )

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 3d ago

It's not just the ownership that matters, it's that renting is frouned upon, housing loans are not cheaply available (30% down payment is common, IIRC), housing is treated as an investment, the closing price for typical condos is now 20x~30x the median annual salary. I only know one 20-30 year old who purchased a condo in the last 5 years without parental assistance (and the one guy sold his startup to a conglomerate for millions.)

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 9d ago

Damit. Why didn't you link to the YT video the first time? Would have saved me a lot of time drudging through Pelosi's official statements. This is the kind of link I can save for use in future online arguments.

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 2mo ago · Edited 2mo ago

Nancy Pelosi telling people to go out and Celebrate Lunar New Year (as in telling people to go out in public around large groups) when fear of Coronavirus was right-coded. Its right there in an official communication.

While I agree that there was a very interesting dynamic with left-coded cries of "racism" being used by public health and "pro-science" professionals to pooh-pooh the need to close ports or intitute quarantines on points of entry in January 2020 (1), these particular statements by Pelosi were boilerplate well before the pandemic from 2006 to 2021, and only stopped when China went full Wolf-Warrior diplomacy in late 2021 and early 2022.

As evidence, I give you some other official announcments. The omission of years prior to 2017 just means I didn't bother looking for them, and the URL wasn't obvious.

Please check your arguments to verify that they are solid before presenting a weakman argument for your point.

(1) IMO, the Trump admin could have used the national emergency to close all border flows, left the US epidemiologically secure like Taiwan, and used the inevitable leak as further justification for border security. But Trump is incompetent, Trump's staff was incompetent, and the CDC isn't competent enough to quarantine tourists anyway.

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 1yr ago · Edited 1yr ago

I'm moving to a job on a campus in the US. The question of what to do about social justice, political conversations, and social justice training requirements has been vexing me for a while. I just got my first email from someone who has pronouns in their email signature, with a link to the campus policy on pronoun use. (Tl;dr: staff are "encouraged," to use pronouns and "expected" to treat people in accordance with their claimed pronouns.)

Here are my options:

Poe's strategy: Agree and amplify. I use all pronouns as claimed. I believe we should racially segregate as much as possible because that would be good for making Black communities into safe spaces for Black bodies, but we should do this by forcibly unhousing white people, because anything else would be gentrification. I take full responsibility for the racism of all the people of my race, and think we should give full reparations to all Black bodies. This probably codes as high-class, but there is a large chance of being unable to keep up with the charade and a small chance of being cancelled as a result. There is also a chance of value drift and the mental risks inherent in living a lie.
Mainland Chinese strategy: I don't talk about politics or social issues at all. If asked, it's because I can't keep up with it. (This is mostly true!) Probably codes as low-class in the US, but I won't be cancelled for my opinions, because I don't have opinions... at least until BLMII (LGBTQIA+ boogaloo) comes around and everyone who doesn't fly the Rainbow-BLM flag is cancelled.
Mask strategy: I don't talk much, but when pushed I shrug and concur with moderately pro-SJ shibboleths that I still believe. When in private with a trusted interlocutor, it's mask off. This is what I currently do, but SJ isn't a significant factor at all in my current social environment, so I am able to spend more time mask-off than mask-on.
Earnest SJW strategy: This is the highest-class option, but I don't think I can pull it off. I don't know the language, I'm doomed to stumble, and don't want to break my reasoning capacity that much, and it goes directly against my values, interests, and tribe.
Earnest Mottizan strategy: True honesty. I oppose SJ (because it is in direct opposition with my values) and I'm not afraid to say so... in a friendly way with a smile on my face. I support equal rights, but not equality of outcomes, which I don't think is ever possible. I think most SJ is just an elite conspiracy to shift focus away from class issues, with the richest of the rich supporting it because they are wealthy enough to avoid its negative side effects... which hurt black people too. I think unfettered immigration is bad for blacks in America, and I don't think SJ really helps the people it seeks to help, instead infantilizing them and removing their agency. I think the biggest problem facing black america is lack of interest in education, and the biggest problem facing women in STEM is that STEM careers suck: the pay is for tools, and no smart woman would enter them when other careers are low stress and more lucrative. My experience living in a more conservative society has taught me that most SJW claims are false in traditional societies, etc. Etc.

So, I guess what I'm asking is: what's the safest strategy, what's the best for my career, and what's the best way to spread my values? For those of you in US academia, what approach do you follow, and what works or doesn't work?

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 1yr ago

There is another aspect to this. If you allow the victims a say in the punishment it increases the probability of victim intimidation for certain crimes, especially if the legal punishment is weak. The victim of a house invasion for example has to worry that requesting a higher sentence will result in their house being invaded again as soon as the perpetrator is out of jail. In Korea this was recently an issue as a 12 year old rape victim decided not to pursue charges against her home invading rapist, who was looking at 2 years in prison.

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 1yr ago

That doesn't explain whay this is a problem in America. Seoul Subways are cheaper (1/40000 median income for a one way ride) and also lack bouncers (police enter the train 5 stops after an incident). We have a few screamers and a lot of drunks but hard drug use on the train does not exist.

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 1yr ago

Martian colonies have an asteroid dropped on them, and whatever pathetic escape craft we make in the next 20 years get swatted before they reach the orbit of Saturn.

In 20 years the AGI apocalypse will not be nearly as romantic as that. It is much more likely to look like a random bank/hospital sending you a collections notice for a home loan/medical treatment you definitely didn't agree to, bringing you to court over it, and putting you up against the equivalent of a $100M legal team. The AI-controlled Conglomerate wins in court and you spend the rest of your life subsistence farming as a side gig while all your official income is redireted to the AI Conglomerate.

For extra fun, if you are married, social media and increasing economic struggle poison your relationship with your spouse and both of you apply for the services of AI Legal. The hotshot AI Legal representatives fight acrimoniously, revealing every dark secret of both you and your spouse, and successfully breaking apart your marriage in divorce settlement. Honestly, you don't remember why you ever loved your ex-spouse, or why your children ever loved you, and you totally understand your real-world friends distancing themselves from the fiasco. Besides, you don't have time for that anymore. Half your salary is interest on the payment plan for AI Legal.

As a smart and independently wealthy researcher, you look into training your own competing, perhaps open-source AI model to fight back against the Machine, but AI Conglomerate has monopolized access to compute at every level of the supply chain, from high-purity silicon to cloud computing services. In despair, you turn to old web and your old haunt The Motte, where you find solace in culture war interspersed with the occasional similar story of despair. Little do you know that every single post is authored by AI Conglomerate to manipulate your emotions from despair into a more productive anger. Two months later you will sign up to work for a fully-owned subsidiary of AI Conglomerate and continue working to pay off your debts, all while maximizing "shareholder" output.

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 1yr ago

The story of how and why they did this is long, and despite being matters of public record, not widely known, but that explains the difference.

Could you provide links to this story, or at least provide a hint where to start looking? It seems worth knowing more about, if only so other countries can avoid the American issues.

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 1yr ago

Maybe affordable unit requirements mess with this? idk

"New residential development" in NIMBY cities (as opposed to rural America) usually means tearing down existing single-family homes on large lots and replacing them with high-density housing on small lots, which consists of multi-floor, multi-family apartments, at least 20% affordable or subsidized units, and no yards. While the developer makes a lot of money on these due to the high-density, the price paid per household is almost always lower than the area average, the area loses some of its greenery, and the average social class of the area falls.

I think getting rid of the affordable housing requirement would result in some developers focusing on large high-density, high-cost, high-quality condos near in-demand areas, but the affordable housing requirement puts a limit on unit sizes and quality overall, and makes NIMBY the equilibrium position of a neighborhood.

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 1yr ago

How do Chinese children learn to read, if their every word is an ideogram? Do they all have abysmal literacy rates, like these "balanced literacy" children from the US?

First of all, there are only ~3000 commonly used Chinese characters, and they contain patterns which make them easier to memorize once you memorize a few hundred. At one character per day, you can learn all the characters in 12 years of schooling. Realistically, the characters are introduced much faster than one character per day and used much more frequently.

One might compare this to the number of phonetic exceptions in English: I remember 5-10 new words for the spelling test every week, from 1st grade to 9th grade.

Note however that if you are going to memorize English words without learning them phonetically, there are many more English words than Chinese characters. A few orders of magnitude more.

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 1yr ago

Mostly survival and personal career progress. I'm planning on leaving after a few years, but I would prefer to do my small part to improve the culture.

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 1yr ago · Edited 1yr ago

You're onto something here. Where I did my degree, the following was pretty much understood by all the students after their first few years:

The purpose of research grants is to get research done for the funder more cheaply than is possible in other sectors of the economy.
The purpose of Professors is to get funding and write grant proposals. This means anticipating what research will be trendy and making a lot of friends among the people who staff grant proposal review committees.
The purpose of the older graduate students is to do the research, write papers, and write grant reports, while mentoring the younger students.
The purpose of the younger students is to study and learn, while assisting the older students on writing grant reports and doing experiments. Oh, and to teach undergraduate classes.
Graduate students needing additional mentorship must actively seek it.

(We didn't have post-docs or research staff, but they basically allow scaling of the grant-writing work and supervisory work of professors.)

This was a decent system for graduate students who were self-driven and capable. It had many different failure modes, however: It rewarded professors for just enough surface level knowledge to come up with cool sounding projects that were in reality infeasible. It was hell for students who were given the new projects, because they had no mentors in their specialty, and had no idea that things were infeasible. Older students could be abusive or predatory, and unscrupulous younger students could wait until an older student had worked out nearly all the kinks in an experiment and then swoop in to take credit for the results. Professors had a bias for sudents running simple but creative experiments over meticulous work that was actually necessary long term for good engineering.

Like you, I had a professor with only a surface-level knowledge of my research domain. I was often given bad advice and advice that wasted time. (The students figured out that our PI didn't read papers, but read abstracts and skimmed figures, which made for some funny misinterpretations of the literature.) The PI's feedback on student work was vague and hard to understand. However, when it came to overcoming stuck research projects my advisor was a genius. The experiment-breaking result became the new goal of the experiment, easily publishable. My advisor also eventually communicated an understanding of how to write a good research paper, after which all those vague comments suddenly made perfect sense. So the relationship turned out quite valuable.

The worst part was the social environment. In order to get the PhD students had to become first author on multiple papers, but the PI would assign multiple people to each research project, bringing in more people the longer it took. I'm not sure there was sabotage (I'm dumb enough to fuck things up myself, thank you), but there was definitely spying and theft of results between students. The students needed favor with the professor to buy equipment: seeking the favor of the professor resulted in schemes much like those of medieval courts. Reading The 48 Laws of Power during my PhD, the content of the book depicted the social environment of the lab quite accurately.

Overall, it was a fun time, but I would probably recommend a gap year after a masters degree instead of a PhD. Travel the world, get more life experience, suffer less stress, have more fun, and in the end you didn't spend four years becoming the world's foremost expert in some experiment that is only performed in one lab.

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 1yr ago

The current course of Western (and Eastern) democracies sponsoring Ukraine in absolutely humiliating Russia is the safe, nuclear-war-minimizing strategy:

If NATO directly (tanks-on-the-ground) intervenes on behalf of Ukraine, then it risks initiating a direct Russia-NATO conflict. This is much more fraught with nuclear risk than the current status quo.
If NATO does nothing (because of nuclear threats), then Ukraine loses the war. Russia is validated in its belief that forceful territorial expansion works, and is empowered to attempt further expansion. (Future Russian wars of expansion have the same risks of nuclear escalation as the Ukraine war). If, as Peter Zeihan argues, the geopolitical goal of Russia is to secure its borders in the face of declining population, then we can predict that Russia will keep pursuing wars of expansion until it can secure the Polish and the Bessoarabian Gaps. Thus the result of letting Ukraine lose the war is likely a direct Russia-NATO conflict, just delayed a few years. Again, the nuclear risk is higher than in a Russia-Ukraine war.
If Russia uses nuclear weapons, NATO does not have the option of non-retaliation. To do nothing would legitimize other nuclear powers in the use of their nuclear arsenals to secure territory: North Korea against South Korea, China against Taiwan, Israel against Iran, ...
However, if Russia, facing defeat, resorts to (tactical) nuclear weapons, there are non-nuclear retaliation options on the table. In particular, UN sanctions and trade embargoes become almost guaranteed. (I hear Putin and the Russian oligarchs envy the life of the Kims and their generals in Pyeongyang.) Russian shipping is very vulnerable to NATO submarines, etc...

The current status quo, with NATO selling arms to Ukraine, avoids all these risks, so long as Ukraine doesn't push toward Moscow. There is a long history of Russia and the US arming partisans in (proxy) war, and arms sales are nothing new. To skip over the relevant historical examples of the Korean, Vietnam, and Russia-Afghani conflicts, just a few years ago there was a Russian mercenary battalion which was decimated when attempting to assault a US outpost in Syria, and despite the conflict being much more direct, the situation didn't escalate.

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 1yr ago

In English, they say they're the Communist Part of China, or CPC.

This is a complicated topic to say the least. It seems to have arisen from a non-issue to an issue just as tensions between the US and China rose in 2020. (I'm reminded of the euphemism treadmill.) While the Chinese diaspora seems to prefer CPC, the English-language scholarly literature has long used CCP. Even the official media outlets of the Party seem to have no problem calling themselves the CCP occasionally (ex. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201710/27/WS5a0d0875a31061a738408157.html).

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 1yr ago

My understanding is that the Starlink has three potentially profitable strategies, all of which depend on inter-satellite links to really be breakthroughs:

HFT without fiber latency. This is where clients will be able to pay eight to nine figure subscriptions per year, with major routes forming a high speed web between New York, London, Brussels, Singapore, and Tokyo.
Military/aviation. It's hard to put a dollar value on military contracts, but this is probably seven to eight figures per year total, since military already has their own communications web.
Worldwide consumer access with less than worldwide infrastructure. Note that once access (downlinks) are installed for the above contracts, the marginal cost to expand civilian access to the globe is almost nil. The cost of satellite launch may be spilt between customers across the entire broadcast range: Africa, Europe, Asia, all the ocean shipping and cruise ships, etc.

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 1yr ago

This is the opposite of how grocery stores actually work in true urban areas: in the walkable urban area, the grocery store (and its selection) scales to fit the space available, so that it can afford to rent out a profitable location. My neighborhood grocery is less than than 30 ft wide and 90 ft deep on the ground floor of an old 3-floor building, but that building is halfway between a residential area and the subway and right next to a bus stop, so the foot traffic on the sidewalk is on the order of 10 people per minute. (The walk from subway to residential area is 10 minutes, tops.) They do their best to lure in customers by placing fresh fruit and sale items literally on the sidewalk. (I hear this would not work in America, because all the food would grow legs and walk away.)

Before a recent move, this grocery store was in an adjacent building with even less floor space (which building was torn down to install a 20-floor monstrosity). A tradeoff is made to between selection and bulk: the "snacks" aisle only has one, maybe two display items of each product, and the average American grocery run (with a grocery cart) would buy them out of their standard inventory. (They don't have grocery carts, the aisles are too narrow for them.) Fruits and vegetables are available fresh and in bulk, but you get what is seasonal or standard for local cooking. You pay a lot more than at a big box store like Costco, but that's the price of convenience and for having a store halfway between the subway and the residential neighborhood.

But I don't think the store would possible in America. The only parking is the loading area in the back, the display which lures people in would be subject to too much theft for the sole proprietor to make a profit, the aisles are too narrow for wheelchairs, and the entryway has a few stairs up from the sidewalk, which would fail any ADA requirements.

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 1yr ago

How would we know what the effect (or intended effect) is? Perhaps the CCP wants to sway the election left, and their only thumb on the scale will be spreading pro-D get-out-the-vote videos on election day. Or perhaps they want to sway the election right. Perhaps they just want to keep Chinese citizens abroad from hearing about corruption at home, and all it takes is a thumb on the scale to keep China out of the minds of TikTok users. Perhaps the goal is intelligence collection rather than propaganda, and anything viral is fair play, as long as it gets data from the highest number of devices. Or perhaps the goal is the disintegration of Western Society, and all the inane influencer trends that go viral are centrally programmed so that the most inane and least productive ideas enter the largest number of impressionable young brains. It is even possible that they want to swing the opinions of the American electorate to be anti-China, so that the anti-China US turns into a bogeyman to distract from a stagnating domestic economy.

My point is that we have no way of knowing what the CCP propaganda goal (at any moment in time) would be and the algorithm is a black box (with different output for every user), so it is entirely impossible to see the broader effect the algorithm is having, let alone whether that effect is intended. The result is that anyone concerned about epistemic safety would support banning the black box.

I concede that the same concerns apply to other media companies, too. While I would argue that there is a qualitative difference between TikTok and domestic social media companies in that the owner and programmers of Facebook at least in theory lives in the same society as me and share some of my values, the ability to cause a partisan shift in voting rates or voting direction - by say 10% - is too large of a power to entrust to any black box controlled by a single entity. As they say, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 1yr ago

If you're actually raising a child, would you tell that child at some point in their life that you had had an abortion previously?

I am in the situation of being the baby that was supposed to be aborted, but contractions started and so I was born instead. It wasn't really a choice on my mother's part: she needed to undergo chemotherapy and they couldn't do it while she was pregnant.

I think I first understood the import of this story in late middle school, and it didn't have much of an effect on me: I was surprised, but my parents love me and our relationship didn't change. I probably went back to thinking about what teenage nerds think about. Now that I think back on that story it just makes me feel lucky. But I'm an outlier who leans toward stoicism, positivism, and "life is tough. Get over it". YMMV.

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 1yr ago

The article you linked is from early January 2022. In 2021 (the Omicron wave!), excess deaths could attributed to Covid directly or to the general failures of the healthcare system as the system was dealing with Covid (including people hesitant to seek care due to Covid concerns).

Frankly, your link makes me more skeptical of you.

you better believe no respectable institution is even going to be looking at vaccine side effects, not with their grant money controlled by the NIH.

There are 25+ countries in the world with functional public health establishments. Surely one of them is actually doing follow-up studies on vaccinated vs. unvaccinated populations. I'm sympathetic to the idea that the vaccines were a population-level experiment with unknown 4+ year side effects, but ... it's been two years now. We should start seeing signals.

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 1yr ago

Please expand on those real and serious reasons. If Russian aggression is to be limited to Ukraine, why attempt to stir unrest in Moldova? (Why leave Moldova out of your bet?) Why do senior Russian officials admit an intention to "denazify and demilitarize" Poland? Was it because Ukraine was leaning towards joining Nato? If so, the same calculus must surely apply to Finland, too: "Finland’s accession to Nato would have serious military and political repercussions.".

I won't take your bet, but that's only because the Russian armed forces have broken themselves against the Ukranians and are rapidly losing the strength necessary to pursue a campaign in the Baltics. I propose the following alternative conditional bet: If Russia takes Kyiv in the next three months, then Russia will invade another of its neighbors before 2033.

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rokmonster Lives under a rok. 1yr ago · Edited 1yr ago

I'm skeptical the Kursk was about national pride at all, although I would believe you if you told me it was corruption or officer-level CYA. Nuclear submarines, their limitations, their strengths, their uses, and their construction are highly prized national secrets, to it stands to reason that the Russian Navy would be reticent to welcome foreign aid, let alone rescue subs or divers from NATO navies, which would no doubt be beaming video direct to Langley.

To put it another way, from the perspective of Russian Naval command, the secrets of the Kursk are arguably worth more than the lives of the crew (even before accounting for corruption and CYA), as those secrets protect all the other submarine crews. But telling that to the public in so many words is a great way to ruin future crew recruiting efforts.

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