DirtyWaterHotDog
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User ID: 625
DirtyWaterHotDog
1hr ago
Not everything is culture war material.
NFL ownership leans Republican. They aren't culture warring against Trump. The choice of Superbowl performer is a maximally capitalistic decision meant to increase viewership. And looks like it worked. Bad Bunny garnered the highest viewership, is generating conversation the day after and caters to an audience that might not have usually tuned in for the game.
The Superbowl halftime show has never cared for Americana, as can be seen from the last 10 Superbowl performers. It's a well known strategy too. Never pander to a captured audience. What are middle-Americans going to do ? Not watch the NFL ? Ofc not. You see this happen everywhere. European football is now trying to cater non-Europeans because Europeans are a captive audience. The locals hate it, but they won't vote with their feet. They can't.
Bad Bunny isn't some DEI choice. He was the #1 streamed artist for 5 of the last 7 years. If anything, he had to wait a lot longer than the other top artists to land a Superbowl performance.
sugar plantation sex
2026 is when you decide to be mad about the values portrayed by the artist ?
Here are the last 5 performers:
- 2020 - Shakira / Jennifer Lopez - Columbian & Puerto Rican sexy dancers
- 2021 - The Weeknd - Canadian (this one was great NGL)
- 2022 - Dre / Snoop Dogg / Eminem / 50 cent - Celebrating hip hop. (Gangster culture)
- 2023 - Rihanna - From Barbados. Opened with a song promoting kidnapping and torture (bitch better have my money) and the highlight was Rude boy (song about if a dude's dick is big enough)
- 2024 - Usher - Sings about dancing in the club and touching privates
- 2025 - Kendrick Lamar - about Drake not being black enough and pedo allegations
So yeah, idk what you are complaining about. The half time show has always been about spectacle and popular music. Turns out, pop music is about sex & drama because people want sex and drama. For Bad bunny, his performance was about sex and drama, but with a Puerto Rican twist. In line with with people have come to expect from the Superbowl.
The Super Bowl is one of those stages for the US.
The US mastered capitalism, and the Superbowl is its biggest performance. It represents allegiance to market forces and to the over-commercialized sellout culture it creates. In that sense, Bad Bunny is a worthy representative for what the Superbowl half-time show represents.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2hr ago
Get used to being triggered. Quantitative Finance is famously ruthless and will chew out anyone with an ego.
If you think this sub talks about humans in a dismissive manner, wait till you meet someone in Quant. Quant alongside top AI-startups are the 2 most sought after jobs in the tech industry. They get 100k+ applications. They use ruthless high-pass filters before they begin to read resumes. Pedigree, prestige, track record....call it what you want, they serve the purpose of bringing a 100k applications down to a digestible hundred that are worth looking at.
I'm a Legacy American
So a white Christian whose religion tells him that lending money and working with derivatives is a sin ? (/s)
So you're saying you're superior to me by blood, essentially
You're putting words in the GP's mouth.
So in an efficient market, there would be a job for me.
The market converges to an efficient state given enough time. That time become near infinite if there is low discoverability, which is true for non-conventional candidates. Hell, Quant relies on the assumption that the market is always temporarily inefficient. And exploiting those inefficiencies is how you make money.
There are 2 ways to get noticed by Quant.
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Conventional - Ladder climb - Ruthlessly compete in a crowded field of elite candidates and consistently come out on top. This is the prestige path. Get into an ivy and out-compete fellow smart kids in math. Win math & coding competitions. etc. If you are in front of the line, you become the boring and obvious choice.
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Unconventional - Be interesting, be visible - This is a 2 partner. First, do something that makes you interesting. eg: Run your own backyard trading strategy and make $$, win big on prediction markets, be a world leader in an obscure nerd only card-game, make an open-source tool that all the trading people are using, etc. Alongside that, you also need to be visible. Find a way to get your face in front of Quant people (recruiters, employees, etc). If you are interesting enough and visible enough, they will give you an interview. This is the back door. It combines some unconventional excellence with network.
The paths are well defined. if #1 isn't for you, then do #2. If not #2, then idk what's left.
try to go all-in on coding instead?
I am not sure coding is going to be around for much longer
DirtyWaterHotDog
9d ago
Does that increase the odds that top 10 reddit user (maxwell-hill)[https://old.reddit.com/user/maxwellhill/] is Ghislane maxewell.
DirtyWaterHotDog
11d ago
Dead center. Guess I'm an 'it depends man'.
DirtyWaterHotDog
13d ago
Various interpretations, all positive for the US.
Either:
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Xi's soft power in China is limited. From the looks of it, Xi wants to invade Taiwan, and faced real push back. If the generals were just old, they would have been forced to retire with awards and honorary titles. The corruption allegations are punishment for pushing back against Xi. An overt purge is only needed when gentle methods fail.
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China's inner circle is compromise-able and the CIA is pulling off Eli Cohen-Mossad style Hollywood operations on the regular. As Reddit tier-list subs would say: 'CIA upscale'.
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Xi is moving to a hard dictatorship, the canonical imperial Chinese failure mode. This story can only end with the XiongNu buring Xian, and Xi being taken as a sex-slave.
Purges have long been the norm in CCP China, often done silently. The high profile and overt nature of it signals weakness by Xi. Jack Ma's (the the Chinese software startup industry's) purge was along similar lines. But, in that case, Xi could frame the narrative as communism vs capitalism, infrastructure vs consumption. Treason and corruption charges towards long-believed patriots of the highest level never sell the same.
blue tribe doesn't want immigration policy enforced
Digression, but the blue tribe is not a monolith.
Commenters may argue that "The purpose of a system is what it does". Therefore, Biden's intention was to flood the US with immigrants. However, outcomes based evaluations opens a can of worms that may not help the red tribe cause. Broadly, I don't believe the outcomes were the policy objectives, as much as the equilibrium result of internal infighting.
On this forum, we acknowledge sub-tribes within the Republican tent. Tech right, single-issue abortion voters, isolationists, heritage Americans, conspiracy theorists and anti-wokes, and so on. As the conversation evolves, I'd like to see the criticisms be targeted at different sub-tribes among Democrats, instead of the blue-tribe at large.
Sadly, Biden was senile and Kamala was a powerless face. This made them particularly ineffective. As a result, faceless staffers & unelected ideologues who caused the worst outcomes have avoided the public eye. Makes it hard to identify the leaders within the blue tribe who want open borders at the expense of American people. There is some real guerilla warfare going on there.
DirtyWaterHotDog
15d ago
You're right. I have a bad habit of using hyperbole to introduce the dynamism of speech into my writing. Been working on it.
It is highly polarized. And that's bad enough.
DirtyWaterHotDog
15d ago
You may call them reasons, but the people will always view them as excuses.
DirtyWaterHotDog
15d ago
you have to learn to ignore the noise. There are good discussions on here. The rhetoric has gotten heated the last few weeks. Most times, it's less .... heartless.
Personally, I find 2026's /r/SSC to be full of wannabe Mensa types. The internet is dead. a healthy dose of diverse echo-chambers is the next best thing.
DirtyWaterHotDog
15d ago
DirtyWaterHotDog
15d ago
Fair.
Still think Darwin award behavior isn't reason enough to be shot. The average person is not very bright. The system should be built with an assumption of dysfunctional behavior from randos.
DirtyWaterHotDog
15d ago
understand that the purpose of this sort of protest is bad optics
Yeah, that's politics. Why are you surprised ? The adversary baits you, but do you need to bite ? The protests are getting more heated, because Trump is biting onto the bait.
The US is maximally polarized, but it has been for a while. The other party does everything it can to block their adversary. It's Mitch blocking Garland's confirmation. It's red governors banning blue city policies. It's business as usual.
In Canada, the farmers protests were clearly a conservative bait that Trudeau bit into, and it caused his downfall. The farmer's protest is another example of a political torpedo that would have brought Modi down in India. He avoided a few baits, primary among them was Sikhs replacing the Indian flag on the red fort. But no. No anti-protest rubber guns, no tear gas, nothing. He held his nerve, and IMO, it saved his govt. He eventually reformed the bill to involve state-by-state adoption and had to take an L. But, it could have been worse.
Look, as a kid, when I made fun of my sibling, he'd eventually snap and break something. I'd get punished for instigating, but he'd get a bigger punishment for giving in and breaking something (I promise we are very tight now, and I believe I have been a good brother on the balance). Point is, it doesn't matter what the bait is. The individual is still responsible for how they respond. Humans have an intuitive smell for this. Govts, laws or individuals, it doesn't matter. Biting onto to bait makes you a sucker. You may call them reasons, but the people will always view them as excuses.
DirtyWaterHotDog
15d ago
Yes, they have an agenda. But I couldn't find the detentions and arrests bar chart anywhere else.
The statistics I am interested in, were still sound. I deliberately highlighted the 3x number which is over an entire year, instead of the rather ambitious 2026 projection. Cause aside, 7 deaths in 15 days is anomalously high and warrants explanation.
That's usually how it goes. The dirt is usually unearthed by those who want to bring you down. Back during the excesses of the work movement, opposing statistics required swimming through doomer incel sewers. Just because they wanted to radicalize me into giving up didn't mean their numbers were wrong.
DirtyWaterHotDog
15d ago
Chernobyl happened, does this mean nuclear power is evil or forever forbidden?
No, but we recognized that there is such a thing as a nuclear plant that's been built too haphazardly. Just like Trump's expansion of ICE.
Note, ICE was still deporting about 60% of the current amount of people during Biden's terms. They mostly dressed in official clothing (vs plain clothes), avoided masks and avoided overt display of large weapons. the criticisms of ICE have to do with the 2025 avatar of it. Not the institution that existed before.
Car accidents happen and vehicular manslaughter happens
To be fair, I am very anti-car, pro-transit and pro self-driving cars. I say this begrudgingly, because I love engineering cars and consider them the pinnacle of late-20th century art. But, fast cars should be driven on the track, not the road. Until recently, banning cars was impractical. But the US has been extremely reckless in tolerating a 3-4x higher automobile death rate than other developed nations.
while carrying a gun
What's wrong with carrying a gun in a public place in Minnesota ? Isn't are American LEO not trained to handle situations with gun-owners peacefully ?
DirtyWaterHotDog
16d ago
Instead of luck, maybe the rightists could use some competence instead ? They have dug their own graves.
I bet if ICE roamed in suits with slicked back hair, they wouldn't have half the issues they're facing. Instead, they chose maximally aggressive optics, and they're getting the obvious reaction. You expect Americans to view ICE favorably when they dress and act like bank robbers from a crime procedural ?
Were they forced to to digitally alter images of people to make them uglier ? Was the white house forced to post AI memes about detention centers with alligators in them ? The right is setting themselves up to fail for no good reason.
Either way, ICE's operation isn't particularly effective either. The number of convicted criminals being detained has remained unchanged. There is a modest increase in detentions for those pending charges, but nothing ground breaking. At the same time, the amount of arrests (esp. of non criminals) has skyrocketed. The deaths in custody numbers tripled, and 2026 has gotten off to a horrifying start. More people have died in ICE custody in January (15 days) than died in the entire year of 2023 !! (This warrants 2 exclamations)
With the Somali scandal, Trump had a solid narrative for the midterms. If MAGA loses the mid-terms, it is because they are both incompetent and intensely dislikeable. Hilarious that Trump came to power by swinging non-white voters and gen Z. Now that the same voters are turning their back on him ( in polls at least), it is somehow a sign of the woke mind-virus and immigration led anti-Americanism.
Reddit is not real.
That being said, I am surprised that the US doesn't have more violent rebellions. That's what the 2nd amendment is for right ? From a purely strategic perspective, say you believe that Trump's people are a few years away from turning the US into a dictatorship. In that case, wouldn't you want to be violent before they consolidate all power and not after ?
DirtyWaterHotDog
16d ago
The video looks BAAAAD. Would like to see resident Trump supporters explain this one.
DirtyWaterHotDog
18d ago
I visit France often. It is much safer than the US.
Marseille - France's stabbiest city has a lower homicide rate than SF or Austin. About the same as NYC and 17x better St louis.
Street protests and setting things on fire is how French people connect with their heritage. It's a performative French revolution. It's fiery, but they never destroy infrastructure like riots in the US. (Whether that be due to protests or a super bowl win)
Some suburbs are no go zones, but that's better than inner city no-go zones that a stranger can innocently walk into.
There is an issue with Parisian gangs and Mediterranean gangs. The later are a pan European problem. The former looks like a form of torture French people love inflicting on tourists to avoid over tourism. (Only partly sarcastic here)
DirtyWaterHotDog
18d ago
The Chinese, ever so respectful of American competence, would never pick an overt saboteur as an agent.
Chinese CIA, to maintain cover, picks a competent administrator as agent.
Goal is to only do the bare minimum and occasionally sidetrack projects as sabotage.
Agent becomes president and starts doing the basic stuff with only occasional sabotage.
still more than any president has done.
America start flourishing even more.
Americans love him and elect him another time.
I'd watch that film.
DirtyWaterHotDog
18d ago
Not even close. The high literacy and civic engagement are a civilizational inheritance. It took hundreds, if not thousands of years to build.
The clan systems are embedded in Arab and Afghan societies in a manner that isn't comparable to anything in the west. Even during peak colonialism, Britain gave up on trying to control Afghanistan. Can't control a group that has no institutions what so ever. Arabs are a bit different. They had it, but after the mongols burned down Baghdad, middle-eastern Arabs did not have a unifying civilization for a very long time.
DirtyWaterHotDog
18d ago
Fair. I too have concluded that democracy needs some base conditions to work.
Tribal clan systems (Arabs, Afghans) are incompatible with democracy. Pre-industrial states struggle to balance democracy and essential growth. Democracy and violent societies don't work.
DirtyWaterHotDog
19d ago
- Joined December 2025.
- 118 comments
- dislikes Indians
- doesn't believe in democracy
- is fascist
Dude slow down. TheMotte is already in a MAGA spiral. It isn't intentional, the forum is well moderated. But, the median individual is a right-wing American and left leaning non-Americans are forced to have thicker skin. We've lost enough intellectual diversity through splinter events. There's no need to make this place more hostile.
Also welcome to the forum. I am one of the Indians here. Please get better at profiling. I await a moderate amount of hate, phrased in a civic manner.
DirtyWaterHotDog
19d ago
Canada's position as a middling power is self-inflicted.
Post-melt, Canada's geographic position is as strong as the US. It too is a blessed land, that can sustain any level of ambition.
They can pump more oil. They can build arctic ports. They can mine rare earths. They can be agriculturally self-sufficient. They have some many options. They even have a sufficient number of elite engineering institutions to sustain local excellence. European and Asian middling-powers are constrained by what their land can support. Canada has no such limitation.
DirtyWaterHotDog
19d ago
Vance is being discarded in favor of Rubio. There is a reason he was absent (and it isn't the pregnancy announcement) today.
Rubio is likeable, clearly smart, kinda white and kinda hispanic. He is one of the few pre-Trump Republicans who survived the purge and doesn't have a brown wife.
Housing theory of everything takes over though.
Italy and Spain have the same problems. High youth unemployment and low access to housing.
Young adults have no prospects and continue living with parents in a tiny house. Can't convince anyone to have kids in such an environment.
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