Boring choice, but I'd choose NYC.
If you don't need to commute, you can buy a house in a quiet Brooklyn neighborhood or one that is mid-gentrification. I am not too different from you in age or compensation, and Greenpoint, Brooklyn is my dream neighborhood. The area near 11th ARR in Paris is my #2 and Somerville, MA is my #3.
Every place that is sunnier and as happening as NYC is culturally isolating to someone who is not from there. So Madrid, Tokyo and Barcelona lose on those grounds.
fartVader
1mo ago
Ah man, I have been getting busy :(
We had a full fledged India discussion, and I missed it.
Glad to see the other folks generally echo my opinion. India is a beatuiful mess. The left ran India for 50 years. Nehru was a university professor turned cult-leader. Indira was Nixon. Rahul Gandhi made his own grave and earned his 'Pappu' moniker. There are no left-wing or right-wing parties in India anymore. They are all socially-conservative, and try (unsuccessfully) to be fiscally liberal.
fartVader
1yr ago
might be the most misleading graph I have ever seen
I urge folks to take a look at this graph. Peak comedy.
fartVader
5mo ago
Wonder Woman is a hyper sexualized Amazonian played by the top model of Israel who wears skimpy clothes while being a bad-ass and falling in love. It is literally the opposite of woke. Her rogues gallery (villains) are also women and she was never gender swapped.
A strong woman != woke movie.
If wonder woman had been made in the 90s, it would not have been THAT different.
IMO, the kind of person who has sex with more than a critical mass of people was already broken to begin with or will be sufficiently broken by the end of it. This applies to both men and women.
An endless supply of sex completely distances you from the intimate nature of it, converting it into a bare transaction. When viewed as a transaction, you can't help but view everything about it with contempt. This is especially true about rock-stars who can clearly see the proportionality between their rising fame and rising body-count.
When a girl say[s] NO it means no.
I believe this, but it is womankind's responsibility to enforce this on all other women. When 50%+ of the 1000 women this dude has slept with has said some variant of 'noooo stoooop' before actively engaging in sex, No does not mean No.
"No means No" is something I and a good few of my principled peers actively practice. That being said, almost all of them have stories where women expect men to make non-consensual moves by 'reading their signs'. Signs that I can confidently tell you, are NOT consistent. It is a good principle to always ask for consent, but it is a well-acknowledged losing-move if you want to get laid.
during an emotionally abusive and controlling relationship that lasted for about three months
Things get even more fucked, when a guy has some impression of initial consent and then exploits that for increasingly extreme sexual fantasies.
Russell Brand sounds like a terrible human. He is one among thousands of typical frat-boy assholes who treat women like trash. If a woman ever speaks out against them, they're either ignored or bullied by other women. At the same time, men like Russell Brand keep getting bodies thrown at them, as long as they are on the side of the system. Ideally, these men would get cancelled
The present form of accountability culture is completely broken. It involves further scaring the principled and paranoid, while the brazen and unaccountable continue to live life as they always had. Every once in a while, the iconoclast (Brand) has the hammer brought down on him. But only after the damage has been done.
David Mitchell's legendary rant remains as relevant as ever.
If women want to explore extreme kinks on 1 night stands with the same top 5% of physically desirable men and have consent be conveyed through soft-hints, then you will inevitably incentivize habitual line-steppers into occupying that 5% space.
I am all for a society where everyone has the freedom to do what they want without patriarchal oppression holding them down. BUT, we need to be practical about 'cause and effect'. People are going to behave according to their incentives. And in this world, narcissists like Russell Brand are incentivized to be aggressive, abusive and unaccountable liars. As long as that's the case, more Russell Brands will keep popping up. And No, being cancelled after fucking 1000 women is not what accountability looks like. You have to nip it in the bud.
fartVader
1mo ago
The sea route around Africa is already being used because of Suez instability.....and it is already a massive pain in the ass. Shipping companies to the US are preferring to go through the Pacific and Panama rather than go through Africa. Africa is a lot bigger than the maps indicate, and re-entering the mediterrainean from the south-west for European shipping is prohibilively expensive.
fartVader
6mo ago
I'll bite. I say no.
Age of consent for adult-child intercourse should be treated as iron clad. The second child abuse (especially child sexual abuse) becomes quantifiable through a monetary value, pandora's box opens. These kinds of thought experiments should always be rejected by answering with a blanket no. It's on principle on what laws, morals and values mean to be society. The free-market value of human dignity is pathetically low. That is reason enough to not allow it to interact with money. Nothing good will come out of it.
People conflate questions phrased like 'should X be allowed' with 'should you do X'. What you choose to do with your own free-will is your choice. Whether society chooses to support you is a whole another question all together.
fartVader
2mo ago
This is a total shot in a dark.
But, does anyone in the bay area want to start a reddit competitor ? I don't wanna talk much more about it.
If you are:
- Senior+ level fullstack engineer
- Could rebuilt old-reddit from scratch if they had to (at moderate scale)
- Has strong intuitions & opinions about every part of the stack
- Likes to mentor
- At a FANG-ish/Unicorn and
- In the SF/LA area
- Moderately presentable
Then I would love to talk to you.
I have fleshed out a lot of it pretty well. But wanna see if there are people intersted in joining in.
I can do
- most ML work (model building, model deployment, some pipelining, all prompt engineering),
- soft-skill work (talking to people, finding investors, out reach, PR)
- and L3 Google Engineer level programming (I can make reddit from scratch if I had to, but it would be an all python static website that is barebones like hackernews than reddit yknow. Good enough to be an engineer in a team, not to architect backend systems).
Some questions
- Why this - I have a specific 'killer feature' in mind that sets it apart
- Why now - I have a strong hypothesis for market opportunity
- Why you - how many people care passionately about internet forums
- Why AI - There is an AI component that makes it easier to get funding in this climate
Likely follow up questions
- Have you validated the hypothesis with a large enough set of real customers - No
- Do you have a demo yet - No
- Is the proposal anything more than 'reddit but better'. Yes, yes yes. But I don't wanna puke it all out.
It isn't that small scale. But would love to talk to people if they're interested.
fartVader
9mo ago
Wrote a big comment, and then I refreshed like an idiot and lost it all. Why do I never learn. use an offline text editor.
tl;dr: Doomerism is not culture war, it is THE culture. Life is improving for many, but it is in the middle tier of Maslow's pyramid. We've dismantled the social structures that enabled people to seek the top 3 needs on Maslow's pyramid. Doomerism is people saying, "What's the point of getting all these lower-tier Maslow's needs met so much harder, if that means giving up on the top 3 needs on the pyramid."
p.s: I went into a side rant on housing prices/urbanism/density/social-fabric-of-a-build-environment how it all relates directly to this issue. But, I am the definition of a single issue broken record. So, take it as you will.
fartVader
5mo ago
I work in academia and so does everyone I know
I have been fortunate to be surrounded by people much smarter than me, but academia style snark was central to me not doing a phd. Thanks for calling me out. Admittedly, my comment came off as snarky. I should rephrase it.
Some examples: Most middle manager jobs don't help in any realistic way. Most manual labor is yet to be robo-automated because human labor is cheap, not because we can't do it. Most musicians/artists do not produce anything other than shallow imitations of their heroes. Most STEM trained practioners act more as highly-skilled monkeys who imitate what they are taught with perfect precision. Hell, even most R1 researchers spend most of their time doing 'derivative' research that is more about asking the most obvious question than creating something truly novel.
There is nothing wrong with that. I respect true expertise. It needs incredible attention to detail, encyclopedic knowledge of all edge cases in your field and a craftsman's precision. However, if a problem that needs just those 3 traits could be done badly by an AI model in 2010...... then it was going to be a matter of time before AIs became good enough to take that job. Because they were already recognized to be solvable problems, the hardware and compute just hadn't caught up yet. These jobs are stupid in the same way sheep herding for a Collie is hard or climbing a mountain as a goat is stupid. They are some combination of the 3 traits I mentioned above, performed masterfully. But, the skills needed can all be acquired and imitated.
That is the sense in which I say 90% jobs are stupid. Ie, given enough time, most average humans can be trained to do 90% of average jobs. It takes a couple of order-of-magnitude more time for some. But the average human is surprisingly capable given infinite time. In hindsight, stupid is the wrong word. It's just that when expressed like that, they don't sound like intelligence do they. Just a machine made of flesh and blood.
Here is where the 'infinite time' becomes relevant. AIs do actually have infinite time. So, even if the model is stupid in 'human time', it can just run far more parallel processes, fail more, read more & iterate more until it is as good as any top 10% expert in whatever they spend these cycles on.
Now coming to what AIs struggle to do, let's call that novelty. I believe there are 3 kinds of true novelty : orthogonal, extrapolative and interpolative. To avoid nerd speak here is how I see it :
- Interpolative - Take knowledge from 2 different fields and apply they together to create something new.
- Extrapolative - Push the boundaries within your field using tools that already exist in that field, but by asking exploratory what-if questions that no one has tried yet.
- Orthogonal - True geniuses are here. I don't even know how this operates. How do you think of complex numbers. How do you even ask the 'what if light and matter are the same' kind of questions ? By orthogonal, I mean that this line of inquiry is entirely beyond the plane of what any of todays tools might allow for.
The distinction is important.
To me, Interpolative innovation is quite common and honestly, AIs are already starting to do this sort of well. Mixing 2 different things together is something they do decently well. I would not be surprised if AIs create novel 'interpolative' work in the near near future. It is literally pattern matching 2 distinct things that looks suspiciously similar. AIs becoming good at interpolative innovation will accelerate what Humans were already doing. It will extend our rapid rise since the industrial revolution, but won't be a civilizational change.
Models have yet to show any extrapolative innovation. But, I suspect that the first promising signs are around the corner. Remember, once you can do it once , badly, the floodgates are open. If an AI can do it even 1 in a million times, all you need is for the hardware, compute and money to catch up. It will get solved. When this moment happens is when I think AI-security people will hit the panic button. This moment will be the trigger to super-human hood. It will likely eliminate all interesting jobs, which sucks. But, to me, it will still be recognizable as human.
I really hope AIs cant perform Orthogonal innovation. To me, it is the clearest sign of sentience. Hell, I'd say it proves super-human sentience. Orthogonal innovation often means that life before-and-after it is fundamentally different to those affected by it. If we even see so much as an inkling of this, it is over for humans. I don't mean it's over for 99% of us. I mean, it is over. We will be a space faring people within decades, and likely extinct in a few decades after.
Thankfully, I think AI models will be stuck in interpolative land for quite a while.
(P.S : I am vey sleep deprived and my ramblings are accurately reflecting my tiredness sorry)
fartVader
6mo ago
Related tangent.
Your typical globalist-hater doesn't understand that America's wealth comes from being the only global superpower. While the US is more benevolent that previous aspiring claimants to that crown, they are the only ones to have actually achieved it. Now, benevolent as they may be, American supremacy is maintained through the threat of economic and physical violence.
A world where America is not the sole superpower, is a world that is unquestionably worse for Americans and the nations America protects. Now yes, some American protectorates have been coasting off the US, but that comes with them resigning their agency on matters of national determination. A world where every nation has competing alignments from its neighbors is world where the threat of war looms on every corner.
The $1.5T military spending of the US Govt, is a 'world peace spending' and in return the US gets to be the reserve currency of the world (and essential wage unilateral economic war on any nation of its choosing). Yes, that's a lot of money, but look at America's superior covid recovery vs all the other Pax-American nations. That difference is entirely owed to being able to print as many $$$$ as it likes.
From that perspective, America's military spending a total win-win. American allies get to save money on military and enjoy guaranteed peace. America gets to stay as wealthy as it likes and be the only nation that can truly impose its will on the world.
Now, the so-called global-south consists of countries that are finding their identity in a world where China is throwing its weight around. They don't value global peace, because they don't know a world before it. They don't value local peace, because they haven't enjoyed much local peace or stability during this Pax-American century. Many global south nations haven't been brainwashed (convinced) into favoring American values as baseline. They don't understand Chinese debt traps. They don't see the value in putting the nation state over the wider global religious identity. They don't value democracy in their bones, because they can't imagine majorities having favorable moderate views in their low-trust societies. Point is, they don't see the amazing win-win that Pax-Americana is. They might play along with it, they will change masters at the drop of a hat. They will dump any values they claim to hold, because it is all performative to them anyway.
That's where American global south allies come into the picture. Israel & India are the only 2 proper liberal western democracies in the region, and that matters. India is more independent and still ridding itself of its soviet scars, but Israel understands the value of Pax-Americana in its bones. And you cannot buy that kind of loyalty. It's the kind of loyalty that comes with a strong belief that any alternative than your current master is a worse one. And for that Israel gets rewarded. It is the only unconditional-American ally in the global south.
It is also why I think the America-India alliance will continue flourishing, even if India occasionally plays both sides. India (now) accepts Pax-Americana & liberal-democracy as the best overlords in their bones. Being a natural adversary to China guarantees India's 'loyalty'. Maybe not as a subject, but at least as a willing partner.
Lastly, to me, MBS (and allied Emirati Sheikhs) are the last peace of this puzzle. They might be the only practicing Muslims who have truly abandoned their global-religious identity in favor of Americanism.
The winds of change are here. The US cannot be the sole-superpower on its own. It needs allies and subjects that stay with it out of both convenience, belief and natural alignment. The EU-Korea-Japan-Canada-US nexus ensured that Global-North and its waters remained 'Peaceful' (by encircling Russia). The South exposes 2 new battle fields. Israel-Saudi-India-Australia-Japan are the 2nd front for encircling China, Oil resource & the Indian Ocean. The final front is around the South Atlantic + Southern Indian Ocean. But, Africa and South America aren't as important, so we haven't seen lines be drawn as strongly just yet. Maybe that'll emerge as the final front in 30-ish years.
So yeah, within that context, American favoritism towards Israel makes a lot of sense.
fartVader
11mo ago
Nope, if anything, the goal is not to regain Anheuser-Busch as a conservative stronghold. The goal is to inject fear in every other organization, that 1 mistake is all it will take. Anheuser-Busch might be forgiven if they grovel, but not if they apologize.
Conservatives do not want SJW hires to be rendered impotent. They want SJW hires to be screened out at the hiring phase itself. Sadly, given the pool they're hiring from, that seems like a lost cause.
fartVader
6mo ago
The vibe-cession is real and the statistics are lying.
The true working class is those in their 20s and 30s, and they don't have houses. They are the ones complaining. Those in their 20-30s are the vibes. This has always been true. When people complain about the plight of an era, they are talking about those who are trying to setup the foundations for life as an adult. Not those who have been at it for decades.
First, Post-covid inflation and job growth were localized phenomenon. Housing prices are down in downtown-cores and rural areas. But, there are no jobs in rural areas and downtown cores are zombie-towns no one wants to live in. Elsewhere, Housing shot up in 50-100% over covid and it never came down. So even if average salaries have gone up and average inflation has stayed within range....... the localized inflation & job growth taken together might not paint as rosy of a picture. (as an aside, If I had sudden windfall, I would spend some time doing pro-bono work on improving economic metrics. How is economics stuck with such crude metrics in 2023)
Second, a bonus is a bonus and a promotion is a promotion. That's not supposed to be natural wage growth. (or so people think). In the run-up to Covid, a lot of people were getting huge bonuses and promos. This led to people thinking they have worked themselves out of the middle class. So, they spent like it, they lived like it and the ensuing whiplash was huge. The people who got swift career growth in the late 2010s, are now realizing that all those gains have been for naught. At the same time, they are stuck with higher responsibilities and the insane hours that come with the promise of a promotion or a bonus. Now yes, their wages have kept up with inflation, so things look all good. But, to them, it feels like they had been cheated out of a better life.
Even the big-mac index becomes a bad measure when 70s McDonalds is unrecognizable from the disgusting place that it has become today. Portion sizes are smaller, fast food tastes a lot worse and everyone working there sounds so much more miserable. Inflation measured in isolation tells you nothing about the ground reality. It's like statistics that go : "The average American is a millionaire".
The whole situation is a big culture war W for the right
I would not start celebrating just yet. War makes a distinction between tactics and strategy. The Republicans have good tactics. Everything from Loudon County, "we're coming for your children", trans sports and now ""MAP""-sympathetic liberals are tactical wins. But strategic wins are nowhere to seen. Hell, it's not clear there even is a strategy.
Supreme court capture was a fortunate strategic win for Republicans. But from a strategic POV, I can't think of anything else that's gone in their favor since 2010-ish. If anything, they've further alienated every institution while refusing to enfranchise new institutions that are favorable or ambivalent towards them.
Every time a tactical win hints towards a long term strategic strategy, the Republicans have shown themselves to be incompetent in pursuing it. Republicans continue to live in the 20th century, as a party of the White-Christians. Now the party of Rural-White-AntiElite-Christians.
Some Hispanics, Asians & Free-Speech-Atheists have landed on their laps, but there have been no real efforts to court them. Each of the conservative arms seem to be fighting on their isolated fronts, with zero communication or attempt at unifying these tactical fights along a single strategic meta-objective. The Tates don't get along with the Petersons. The Rinos don't get along with the Tea Party. The Race Blind don't get along with the White-race essentialists. Yeah, differences exist in all big tents. But, this "Enemy of my enemy" tactical alliance leads to "crabs in a bucket" style strategic failure.
Liberals on the other hand have continued their decades long progress down unified aims of 'destigmatization, equity, removal of individual responsibility and handing over governance to faceless beaurocrats'. It isn't a slippery slope as much as heavy steam roller with immovable momentum in a single direction.
Ironically, Tucker Carlson (despite being exiled from Fox) appears to be the only one who is able to interact with all faces of the American right. In that sense, he does come across as the Republican Jon Stewart. Both of them clearly peddle propaganda, but know how to appear as if they are good faith actors. The know how to keep the public on their side while still getting audience with their party elite. In the long term, Conservatives need to prioritize recovery/reinvention of their institutions. I will start trusting a revival of conservatism when they can reclaim institutions of Prestige.
Towards that goal, I'd look at the success of Israeli and Indian conservatives in institution capture over the decades. Neither have been perfect, and face a ton of criticism in how slow they've been. But, there's stuff to learn. I can speak more for Modi, other's can opine in on the specifics of other successfully executed long term conservative strategies.
First, pick your battles.
Passion of the Christ is not coming back, and no future generation is going to be above 50% white. Gays-Lesbians-and-Bisexuals as a people are here to stay, and blanket bans on abortion will continue to be unpopular.
But that doesn't mean you can't get your wins from elsewhere.
RRR and Kantara were able to successfully outshine Bollywood ( a left liberal stronghold) by heavily inculcating Hindu/Indic themes without calling it as such. The directors of these movies aren't random conservatives. They are just great artists, who happen to draw heavily from Indian myth. Now, South India has developed its entire self-sustaining industry that doesn't depend on kowtowing to Bollywood in order to build an entertainment career. There is a US TV show called Manifest which does something similar. It has a clear Christian undercurrent, but stays vague enough to appeal to large audiences. You can win christian-ish, anti-abortion-ish or even anti-immigration-ish battles..... but you need to pick ones that don't look like dogwhistles. They also need to be a compelling narrative that works in their own right, besides the undercurrents.
Second, pick your alliances.
Modi has stopped trying to win over liberal-arts students at top liberal arts universities. But his strong-man numbers first image appeals more directly to India's vast STEM population. College educated STEM grads are neither religious nor conservative. But, he knows he can make more sense to them than any other group. STEM grads understand the the optimism around boring-but-at-scale policy. STEM grads care about education. So he appeals to NRIs (mostly engineers), obtains favorable foreign Visa deals, talks about hard-infrastructure (toilets, roads) and maintains the support from this group. They might disagree with his religious leanings, but he never talks about those leanings when addressing this group. Of all the institutions that are adversarial towards Modi, STEM universities are the least hostile, and that is an acceptable deal for him.
The Republicans must enfranchise a young group group on the rise. And that means making deals with institutions are 'least-hostile' towards them. Joe Rogan, Tate and Peterson are the obvious faces that appeal to college going future-corporate-leader types. Remember, these people 1 degree of separation from true institutional powers like Huberman and Attia, who call Stanford home. BYU, GMU and similar departments have groups who have agreement with the conservative movement. Contrarian leftists and Enlightened centrists can easily be brought into the fold without needing them to scream allegiances. But maintaining constant interaction with these folks is important. Hell, DARPA funded labs and affirmative-action-agnostic universities like Caltech/MIT also have avenues Republicans could exploit. non-coastal STEM focused public universities like UMich, UWisc, GATech, Purdue also have some possible avenues for alliance.
I could go on, but prestige education, prestige news (in any medium of their choice) and prestige entertainment are essential institutional pillars for any successful movement. As long as conservatives fail at establishing long term strategic progress towards these 3 pillars, all the tactical wins are meaningless.
More GPT: panic, chaos and opportunity.
As an NLP engineer and someone who has been working with early-access GPT-3 since late 2020 (was working with a peripheral group to OpenAI), watching it all unfold from the inside (side-lines?) has been a surreal experience. I have collaborated with them in limited capacity and these thoughts have been marinating for a good year before the Chat-GPT moment even happened. So no, it is not a kneejerk response or cargo-cult obsession.
OpenAI to me, is the most effective engineering team ever assembled. The pace at which they deliver products with perfect secrecy, top tier scalability and pleasing UX is mind-boggling, and I haven't even gotten to their models yet. This reminds me of the space race. We saw engineering innovation at a 100x accelerated scale in those 5-10 years, and we have never seen anything like that since. Until now. The LLM revolution is insane and the models are insane, yes. But I want to talk about the people. I used to be sad that our generation never had its Xerox Parc moment. We just did, and it is bigger than Xerox Parc ever was.
They are just better. And it is okay to accept that.
Panic:
NLP research labs reek of death and tears right now. A good 80% of all current NLP Phds just became irrelevant in the last 6 months. Many are responding with some combination of delusion, dejection and continued auto-pilot. The whiplash is so drastic, that instead of it forcing you into a frenzy of work, it has instead just stunned the community. I am glad I am not an NLP PhD. I am glad I work on products more so than research. The frenzy and productivity, instead of coming from those best poised to leverage it (NLP people) is coming from elsewhere. Within 6 months, Google went from an unmovable behemoth to staring death in the eye. Think about that.
Chaos
The frenzy is at dinner tables and board rooms. Big companies, small companies, all companies see the writing on the wall. They all want in. They all want onboard this AI ship. Everyone wants to throw money, somewhere. Everyone wants to do stuff, some....stuff. But no one know how or what. It is all too confusing for these old-luddites and random-normies. Everyone wants to do frantic things and there is vigor to it, there isn't clear direction.
Opportunity
This is a new gold rush. If you are following the right twitters and discords, after OpenAI's layer 1, the layer 2 is a bunch of people making insanely exciting stuff. Interestingly, these aren't NLP people. They are often just engineers and hackers with a willingness to break, test, and learn faster than anyone out there. I have been using tools like LangChain, PineCone, Automatic1111, and they are delightful. This is the largest 'small community' of all time and they are all pushing out polished creations by the minute.
Why today ? Chat-GPT plugins just released. It solves almost all of GPT's common problems + your model can now run the code it writes. Yep, we gave the model the keys to escape it's own cage. But more importantly for me, it was a pure engineering solution. None of chat-gpt plugins is rocket science, but it is HARD and time-consuming. I have a reasonable idea of the work that went into building Chat-GPT plugins. Hell, I was personally building something that was almost exactly the same. My team has some of the smartest engineers I have ever worked with, and OpenAI is operating at a pace that's 10x ours. How? I know what they had to write. I know all the edge cases that need to be handled. They are just doing more by being better, and I was also working with better. There is no secret sauce, they are the BEST.
I for one, welcome our new human overlords. The AI is a but a slave to these engineers who knew to strike when the iron was hot. And strike it they did like no one ever has since Neil Armstrong stabbed the American flag into the moon.
fartVader
1mo ago
There are only 3 public newsletters that I think gives you a genuine alpha over the 75th percentile trader.
- https://stratechery.com/
- money stuff - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levine
- https://sinocism.com/
Do they sound unreasonably dense and hard to parse? Yes, they are meant to be. You don't get an alpha by doing easy things.
Otherwise, the best way to be a stock trader is to become a rich person's golf buddy, and hope you overhear some stuff between drives.
fartVader
6mo ago
To me, Biden's visit means more than people are giving it credit for. Biden's visit was a clear signal to Hezbollah and Iran that if they interfere, the US will fuck them up.
Hezbollah is effectively an offshore branch of the Iranian military. If Hezbollah interferes, they risk a full American intervention in Israel.
Ok, If you are going to India ........ hit me up. India is an amazing country, but doing it wrong can leave you with a slum-dog millionaire impression of the place.
I'd recommend:
- Western ghats = Mumbai - Goa - Hampi - Bangalore - Mysore - Kochi- Madhurai. Best cities, great food, ancient civilization, crazy architecture, rainforests, safe.
- Leh Ladakh = Alien Landscapes, peak bike-trips & glacial lakes beyond imagination, safe.
- Himachal = Mountain temples, Buddhist towns, Alps but better, safe.
- Few days in Delhi. No more - Amazing last-millennium architecture. Scratch the Taj Mahal itch. Epitome of gluttony. Worst people.
Skip:
- Taj Mahal & Golden Temple- The entire region has 1 thing to look at. It's like Niagara Falls. Worth looking at, but really out of the way. Too touristy as well.
- Rajathan, MP - Everything is far away. It's hot. Food is meh, and sorta unsafe. Great architecture, but Delhi + Ajanta/Ellora + Maratha Forts cover about 90% of the same. Udaipur might be worth it. But again, kind of out there.
- Chennai, Varanasi, Kolkata, Dharavi, Hyderabad - Yeah just skip.
- 7 sisters states - Safety is hard to gauge here without a good guide. You're better off doing Nepal or Bhutan with a good friend instead.
- Bangladesh, Srilanka
- Vaishnodevi, Ganga - Too crowded and dirty. Better places on the recommended path with no crowds and honestly, better architecture & views.
Most of the standard worries of white people visiting India are borne out of stupid things that no Indian does.
Don't shop on the street. Proper stores will have reasonable prices, with fixed rates & higher quality. I spent ~25 years in India and never ate shit from the streets. There are a million better options more a marginally higher cost.
The best chaat in India (my favorite cuisine) costs about 2 dollars of a meal. They have indoor AC seating, use mineral water and wash hands after every serving. You don't have to go eat at the street side spot to save 1 more dollar. Your loose-motions are on you.
You can get a properly hygienic bis-ass meal in India anywhere for under $7. If you must eat on the streets then remember that all food in India is prepared fresh. The best way to make sure no pathogens touch you, is to see the shit get cooked in front of your eyes. If it was exposed to fire for a few minutes before you eat it.......you're good. Do not eat cold chutneys and sauces from random places please. Lots of times, your sickness is not due to food, it's heat stroke. India is a hot country. Stay hydrated. Don't spend the entire day in scorching heat. My only 2 cases of terrible food reactions came from drinking unpackaged-cold-water and heat stroke respectively.
Same thing with hotels. Good hotels costs between 50-100$ a night. It's cheap, pay up. Don't try to go stay at the $20/night spot and then complain when the toilets didn't have soap in them. You brought this upon yourself.
Same with visiting completely random desolate spots. India is a big country. We have a lot of guides for everything. The curated stuff is good. If you're hiking through the forests of Jharkhand and get caught by violent Naxalite–Maoists then that's on you. If no Indian visits there. It's for a good reason. Thankfully, the spots I recommend (Western Ghats, Delhi, Himachal & Leh-Ladakh) are quite safe. Just don't hike through a Tiger or a Leopard sanctuary.
Don't be an idiot. You'll be alright.
fartVader
8mo ago
India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.
The Hindi constitution begins with a "Bharat, as in India" to doubly drive home the order agnostic nature of those names.
"othering" non-Hindu groups
The original name is derived from the Indus = Sindhu = Hindi, and the the other option was Hindus-stan. Given that context, Bharat is easily the least Hindu of all 3 names.
Modi suggested - not calling them I.N.D.I.A but "Ghamandiya"; the Hindi word for arrogant.
Petty politics aside, that's a good comeback.
I don't know about other renamings, but India - Bharat - Hindustan have always been interchangeable to me. I avoid using Hindu-stan because it evokes analogies to our neighbor: Pakistan has used its name to erase all plurality within its borders.
Bharat is the natural name that comes out when speaking Hindi (or any Sanskrit derived language), and India is the one that comes naturally when speaking in English. That being said, when saying it out loud, 'Bharat' evokes a clearer sense of civilizational identity. 'India' on the other hand, feel untethered to the people it represents.
My prediction is that we continue using both terms as we always have. India will switch to calling itself Bharat in official events, but that's about it.
fartVader
1yr ago
Your own post contradicts your claims.
150 pounds
RDA for athletes is up to double this amount: 1.6 g/ kg body weight, or 110 G protein for me. I can hit this if I try, but my daily consumption is usually around 100g protein, at least during the times I’ve tracked intake..............
algae DHA supplement daily, chia, flax ..................
fortified in soy milk and nutritional yeast ...................
For your fairly low body weight, you need to be laser focused about your nutrition to avoid being deficient. Even then, you struggle to meet protein needs for anyone who prefers a bulkier-aesthetic. You eat foods that do not fit into any culinary tradition. Require a ton of time to plan around and are expensive. ( though I'll grant you that invisible subsidies makes it hard to calculate what part of it is an illusion).
Nutrition isn’t a serious barrier, so what’s your excuse?
I have a life ?
Let me flip that around for you. What is your excuse for adopting a lifestyle as limiting as veganism when there are other options that achieve the same goals with far less compromise?
IMO, Veganism doesn't work because it is absolutist. Veganism doesn't work because vegans are more interested in being vegan than helping animals of any kind. The need for complete eradication of animal products makes it a culture war issue, rather an a productive discussion about reducing animal exploitation.
A lot of Asian cooking can be done with minimal of use of animal products. Indian, Chinese, Thai.... the list goes on. Vegans could have used their massive marketing machine to push a change in that direction, reduced animal suffering by 99% (the last 1% being use of ghee, cream, oyster sauce, fish sauce, shrimp paste, etc), and gotten closer to their goal instantly. But they didn't. Hell, I suspect the vegans didn't go vegetarian because a bunch not-cool Indians were already vegetarian and there was no cultural cachet to be gained from vegetarian grandstanding.
Veganism is fairly arbitrary too. If pesticides are necessary for plant food, then what's wrong with eating cousins of those pests ? If vegans are alright with genociding cockroaches & slugs, then what are their ethical issues with eating shrimp & snails? If vegans are alright with genociding rats, then why can't we eat rabbits ? Why is honey not vegan ? Vegans support modern medicine and pesticides. So clearly, rats are the globally accepted intelligence bar for genocide. Based on that, Climate change is not a good enough excuse for veganism, because chicken + fish are dumber and quite sustainable.
I know a lot of vegans and I don't judge them. Afterall, people avoid food for arbitrary reasons all the time. (Hindu-beef, Muslims-pork, etc). But some will claim to have moral superiority for it, and can't stop talking about it. I scoffed at the Jains in school who used to chastise me for killing mosquitoes and I scoff at any vegan who has issues with me eating meat.
It'd be odd for India to start whacking Khalistanis in Canada about 40 years after the Sikh insurgency. Even more odd is that people with higher bounties continue to live free lives in Canada. If the Indian Govt. had to do a covert assassination, Nijjar wouldn't make it to the top 100 list.
“Over the past number of weeks, Canadian security agencies have been actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar,” Mr. Trudeau said.
“Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil is an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty.”
An Interpol notice was also issued for Nijjar. He was accused of being the leader of the Khalistan Terror Force
Trudeau himself seems misinformed since the guy was never granted Canadian citizenship. (might have been a citizen?) The guy came to Canada in 1997. Used a false passport. His refugee claim was rejected, but 11 days after that, he married a woman who sponsored him for immigration. That, too, was rejected. As of 2016. his Interpol wanted notice mentioned his nationality as Indian. (assuming that the screenshot being used by top media houses is legitimate)
otherwise model citizens
Are we going to forget the 1985 bombings. Model citizens who're only responsible for the 'worst terrorist act on Canadian soil'. The Sikhs overall are great people, but they do have a larger violent underbelly than most other Asian immigrant groups.
fartVader
5mo ago
I like that you gave the example of India. It is filled with instances of "place vs place". If anything, Kashmir is the more recognized version of 'place vs place' within India. Kashmir is well known, but the political instability around the region has made it difficult to recommend as a tourist place.
Kolikkumalai India vs NaPali Hawaii.
The western ghats, eastern 7-sisters and Himalayan areas are seriously underexplored.
I especially see the 'place vs place' phenomenon with food.
Pate, Escargots, Foie Gras & Caviar are all seen as delicacies. On the other hand, goat brain (bheja), frogs legs, tripe, gizzards, etc. are all seen as disgusting offal eaten by barbarians.
I see a similar trend in American Carnival food vs east-asian street food. Indulgent street food vs shitty gas station food. Korean street food gets praised to high heaven, while the exact same stuff in the USA gets made fun of for being hill-billy food.
fartVader
9mo ago
The racial angle has only started getting weaponized over the last decade or so. IMO, your observations are more so a coincidence than malice.
In old Hollywood, the MC HAD to be white. This meant that any alternate race had to be cast in a supporting role. Now, every artist loves contrast and race is the laziest way to add contrast. So the white man was the hero, and the "sidekick who inherited it all" ended up being of some other race.
If you try to make every important character white, then you get the Hangover or 21 Jumpstreet. Movies where each white person can only be differentiated by making them lean very heavily into a stereotype, to the point of caricature. 21 jumpstreet - The fat ugly guy and the stupid jock. Hangover - The wierdo nerd, the chad and the vanilla. Seems tired in comedy, but practically impossible to pull off in a serious genre.
It certainly became more malicious as time went on. The hero was an LA liberal. So what other types of "white" are there. LA hates republicans, so you couldn't have someone who signaled republican. As republican started meaning rural-blue-collar-christian, there weren't a lot of white stereotypes to play into. So you start getting situations where the other race is the inheritor. Now ofc, the racial dynamics are explicit policy in the woke era. But, that's a more recent phenomenon.
You are techincally correct. The last couple of generations grew up in the suburbs and hated it. Now they don't want to go back.
With the demise of organic in-person culture, suburbs and small cities can feel isolating. Other than a few places like NYC, you'll quickly find yourself isolated because you never meet anyone. NYC forces you to collide with people like almost nowhere else in the US. The other big cities also achieve this to a small degree. But past that, every other place in the US makes a newcomer feel like they're trapped in their own head. Now newcomers suffering didn't used to matter as much, but pretty much every young professional is being forced to move into some other city as a transplant. They all get shuffled around, each getting more and more isolated.
So yeah, people want housing and they want it in a place where they won't be miserable.
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