DirtyWaterHotDog
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User ID: 625
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
That's why I specifically compared it to other bicameral systems.
slow down the passing of legislation
Can't slow down a stationary object. The Senate can only limit the power of the house, a house that already moves at snails place. The Executive and Courts wield their power independently.
give a seniority track to successful politicians
Works better when people were dying at age 50. When the average age of the Senate is higher than the life-expectancy 100 years ago, you know something went wrong.
reserve of statesmen
All elections become popularity contests. Why make the senate elected, if the goal is to bring in experienced statesmen.
The American system was created for a different America. A white-protestant nation run by proven men who rose up the ranks through merit (college, military achievement). 75% of the Senate had a college degree in 1945, when less than 5% of the nation had gone to college. The need for fund-raising and media-access meant that running for office was exclusively limited to the elites. This meant a high degree of consensus on what America should be. Therefore, they worried about the excesses of democracy.
In 2025, America is a diverse nation with public-office having exceptionally low barriers to entry. Consensus is nonexistent and core values of various groups are at odds with each other. In such a place, the system should encourage compromise. This means giving power back to the house.
If an downstream institution can unilaterally torpedo a bill (Senate filibuster), then the house would never go through the painful process of reaching compromise. The congress can override the president, but not the senate.
Ok this might just be funny to me, but the CloudStrike Crowdstrike worldwide outage is the funniest thing to happen in computer security this decade.
If you haven't caught up, 100+ million (billion?) computers around the world were simulatenously broken in an instant. It's black comedy for sure. Hospital & emergency systems around the world have crawled to a halt, and there will be a few hundred deaths that will be traced back to this event. Millions of $$ will be lost. But, the humor comes from the cause of it.
Here is how things panned out:
CloudStrikeCrowdstrike is a 100 billion valuation tech company that provides security services to a bulk of the world business.- Most sensitive organizations (govt, military, healthcare) will refuse to work with you unless you are compliant & all your machines have this installed.
- It is effectively an anti-virus that sits 1 level below your operating system, 'protecting' your organization from 'bad outcomes'.
- On Friday afternoon (which we all know is the best time),
CloudStrikeCrowdstrike deployed a software update that began this outage - For any other software this would be a simple restart or uninstall away, but since
CloudStrikeCrowdstrike is a 'trusted' secuirty tool, it sits under the OS layer, bricking the whole device. - Alright, so how do they fix it ?...... THEY CANT !
- The beauty of bricked device, is you can't send any more software updates to it. You must do it manually. Raw dog it like the 90s.....all 100 million of these computers.
- That's bad, but surely they can give those instructions to people and each person can fix their laptops themselves. Divide the labor.....
- NOPE !
- This software is used in vending machines, kiosks, tablet displays....and all sorts of devices that sometimes don't have keyboards and other times haven't been looked at for years. But at least there is a fix right ?
- Yes....... but it needs you to start the computer in safe mode....which you can't because 'Bitlocker'.
- Ah yes, Bitlocker. Turns out, another security measure, makes it so that 99% of a company's employees can't open safe mode.
- So yes, a few hundred IT people will be responsible for fixing hundreds upon hundreds of laptops, daily, for weeks !
This is the Y2k that was promised.
The world spends billions in computer security every year, and no virus has managed the kind of world-wide disruption caused by one simple bug by the premier security company in the world.
No direct culture war implications, but goes to show just how much of a house-of-cards the tech ecosystem is. 1 little, simple, stupid bug can bring the whole world to a halt. Yet, the industry continues quarterly-earnings chasing.
Jobs keep getting cut, senior members get aged out, timelines get thinner and 'how many features did you deploy' remains the only metric for evaluation.
In tech, staying at a job for more than 3 years is seen as coasting. Devs are increasingly expected to do everything, because 'everyone should be full stack' and everything that isn't feature development (testing, staging, canaries) get deprioritized. Overworked novices means carelessness, carelessness creates mistakes.
At the same time, devs get zero agency. Random HR types make list of regulations mandating certain checkboxes for compliance, while having near-zero knowledge of the risks-and-benefits of these technical decisions. Therefore, the implications of a mistake are opaque to decisions makers. So by being compliant, you've suddenly given CloudStrike Crowdstrike a button to shut your entire business down.
This kind of error should literally be impossible in a company of the size of CloudStrike Crowdstrike . If such an error happens, it should be impossible for giant corporations to crumble zero backup. Incompetence on display, on all sides. Having worked in 'prestigious tech companies', especially in 2024, it isn't surprising. At times, the internal dysfunction is seriously alarming, other times it's a tuesday.
I'm not going to hope for much out of this. Just like Spectre & Solar , people will cry about it for weeks, demand change and everyone will get collective amnesia about it as the next quarter rolls around.
End of the day, tech workers are treated as disposable labor. Executive bean counters are divorced from the product. And the stock price is the only incentive that matters.
As long as tech is run by MBAs and smooth talkers, this will go on.
Some choice photos:
DirtyWaterHotDog
4mo ago
Is NeZha 2 any good ?
NeZha2 is China's first big blockbuster. It's being heralded as a 'Deepseek moment' for Chinese cinema and I'm confused.
I saw NeZha 1 with my Chinese roommates and I didn't like it. The animation was expensive, but had a stock footage-ness to all of it. The jokes were Minions-esque slapstick and the core story was straight out a children's book. The movie felt miles behind nuanced works like InsideOut or Up. Ghibli is on a whole another planet. Minions is probably the analogy I would go for. Note - I saw it in Mandarin with subtitles, with a PRC Chinese person explaining any nuance I might've lost.
Now, the Minions movies made a ton of money and the west's block busters have been especially bad post-covid. I get it, it's kettle calling the pot black. Normies have terrible taste, so I'm going to avoid equating commercial success with quality. My comment is from the perspective of taste.
And I am a China optimist. My best friends are PRC Chinese and they're smart. I don't doubt that Chinese companies can compete in global entertainment or automobile markets. But why is everything that comes out of PRC China so tasteless ? There is clear absence of nuance, craft and love in every industrialized piece of crap that comes out of there. Deepseek is special because it feels inspired. DJI & Nothing also have a spark within them. But elsewhere it feels competently executed but empty. Nezha is no different. Great execution, no soul.
Is this hype organic ? Am I just a hater ?
based on two defects
From the document, this came across as an argument rather than a statement of fact (Sec Transp argues that the 1991 exception for congestion pricing was vague so he he's going to interpret it as he sees fit )
Reading between the lines, it's pretty much a 'Biden let you do it. I wont. Fuck you' letter. It even acknowledges the positive reception among the public.
It comes across as another example of Trump pushing the power of the executive to its furthest limits (every executive outdoes their former on this, but Trump 2 is a whole another level)
Congestion pricing is popular. Its in a deep blue state and doesnt have a partisan bent. (Republicans take the subway too). Im not sure why Trump is so appaled by it other than simplistic 'highway good, transit bad' memes.
Unsurprisingly, there has been nothing said about the flagrant disregard for rule of law by the executive of New York.
Executive overreach vs executive overreach. About damn time Democrats started playing politics rather than fumbling around like baboons.
I recognize that FHWA under the prior Administration concluded, when executing the November 21 Agreement, that the CBDTP was eligible for approval under VPPP, and that my determination represents a change in position.
What is the precedent around retroactive change to previous approvals, esp. when the capital expenditure is already done ?
Man, is it hard to get anything done in the US. No wonder the infrastructure is crumbling.
Congestion pricing launched after surviving multiple lawsuits filed on both sides of the Hudson River.
How did stuff ever get built in the US ? The system offers infinite tools for opposition to block every project. How did the interstate system get built ? Was there a clear before-after for when this kind of systemic obstruction became commonplace ?
I'm surprised that Trump fans didnt see the civic disobedience coming. Politics and the balance between the various pillars is a massive grey area, always has been. The boundaries around this area are primarily upheld by expectations of civility and perceptions of what gets you voted out of office. "X is illegal" is never that straightforward.
Trump won by throwing civility out the window, slaughtering every sacred cow and still got the popular vote. Dems are learning the obvious lessions. Trump is about to find out why certain pandoras boxes stay closed. (Assuming the dems are somewhat competent )
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
Temporary victory, but I'll take it. Nice to see pro-transit efforts can't be unilaterally blocked by Trump.
You can't fight Pakistan for the same reason you don't pick fights with a pig. Pakistan doesn't point a gun towards you. Pakistan points a gun and its own head and threatens to shoot. Every Indo-Pakistani war was started by Pakistan, because India has nothing to gain from it.
War doesn't work, because war creates unpopular deaths for India while creating martyrs in Pakistan.
Economic retaliation doesn't work because Pakistan has no economy to speak of. Resource bottlenecking doesn't work because they are already on the verge of famine. Anything more will mean civilian deaths.
Full decoupling does not work because we have long borders. The US can't enforce a border with Mexico, and that's all flat land. Imagine trying to maintain a border up in the Himalayas. Don't even get me started on their nukes.
The failed state of Pakistan is a nuisance past redemption.
If Pakistani leadership stopped to think for a second, they'd realize that India is their natural trading partner. Afterall, these trade routes go back millennia. Karachi is clearly aching for maritime trade with India's west coast. Lahore is 30 miles from Amritsar. Faisalabad is 100 miles from Amritsar.
Geographically, Pakistan's urban areas hug India in the same way Canada's hug the USA. Can you imagine if Canada arbitrarily decided to have zero trade ties with India. Yes, Pakistan is client state to China and could trade with them. But China is too far. Beijing is closer to Anchorage than it is Islamabad. After 100 years of poisoning the well, I am aware that India-Pakistan peace is broken for good. But, what a waste.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1mo ago
There's definitely an averseness towards the median Indian. I mean the demeanor of the average Indian immigrant: Kumail Nanjiani in Silicon Valley, but additionally unkempt, ponchy and flaunting a chicken neck. In my experience, Indians immigrants are the least fit and worst dressed of any ethnic group. OKCupid was primarily rating this subset. No wonder they were rated terribly.
How Indian do you look ? Often, Indians can blend into other ethnicities with demeanor, accent & fashion changes. Gets you past a person's initial mental block.
As long as Indians have their basics out of wack, it's pointless to discuss their attractiveness. Kumail's transformation is a good example, if slightly exaggerated. I can give other examples. Women are obsessed with Dev Patel and Sendhil Ramamurthy[hot]/[not]. Both look like average Indian dudes in their less-handsome roles. Many Indians are blessed with thick hair, beards and eye brows. Play to those advantages and you'll get +2 boost.
The woke are right about one thing : representation. Women want to date the man of their dreams, but the dreams are manufactured via media. With Indian men getting fresh representation in sexy-man roles, there now are Indian men who women pine for. It's on you to fit into those molds. Additionally, it helps that Brown has become a generic identity. If you don't want to be Indian, you can be brown.
4chan/twitter hate for Indians can be safely ignored. A woman who goes swimming in those sewers is probably too nuclear for a simple man any way. There are exceptions ofc, but as football fans like saying, "[too much ball knowledge means too much ball knowledge].
DirtyWaterHotDog
1mo ago
suspect is undiagnosed BPD
Looks, intelligence, wit and mentally healthy. Pick 3 ?
DirtyWaterHotDog
1mo ago
That isnt my experience. Colonialism is frequently presented as one/all of.
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Yes it was extractive, but still more competent than the natives.
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Yeah, but we civilized them.
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They killed themselves in civil wars after we left anyway.
Worst of all, even in 2025, Colonial powers have little remorse for their actions.
France still lays claim to the 150 million in Haitian ransom. The British refuse to accept blame imposed on Churchill for the Bengal famine. The portugese inquistion was famous for grotesque torture in Goa. The Spanish straight up genocided the entire now-world despite knowing it was their germs causing it. Not many apologies to go around.
Yes, they werent as effective as communists or nazis at killing. And they werent as comically cruel as imperial japan. But, these were still fairly fucked up periods for the colonized nations. IMO, Pretty close to slavery.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
I've had a few moments where I thought I was watching fake videos or Indian propaganda. Then looked into it and turned out the Terrorists/Pakistanis are really that comically evil.
No wonder The Boys fell off after season 2. Can't compete with reality.
horror stories from Canadians
I've posted about this extensively on TheMotte. But here it goes again.
Since the 70s, Canada has imported India's lowest-skilled. While Indians were considered model immigrants everywhere else, Canadian-Indians were busy committing 9/11-level terrorist acts. Canadian-Indian bad actors are part of a large web of criminal gangs, human trafficking rings, and drug distribution cartels. Trudeau turbocharged this problem by opening the floodgates. In India, the flight of uneducated and unskilled migrants to Canada was rampant enough to become a meme. Many among us (governments included) warned Canada that these channels were being exploited to facilitate crime. Trudeau did not heed our advice. The outcomes are a result of Canada's stubbornness.
Indian immigrants in other nations do not have the same demographics. They're well-integrated, peaceful, and high-earning versus conservative, uneducated, and of flexible morality. Of course, #NOTMOSTCANADIANS, but you get my point. Projecting Canada's problems with ethnic Indians onto other nations makes no sense, and the statistical differences prove my point (crime, earnings, education).
50% of the extant population in my county was supplemented with Indians like Canada has seen.
Ethnic Indians are 5% of Canada's population.
If the stories of off-the-boat Indians shitting in bodies of water like it's just what you do are true, it's fucked.
You're scared of the bogeyman. These people don't exist.
I have never met an Indian who shits in bodies of water. I've never seen it among people I know in India, let alone outside the country. The kind of Indian who does it can't speak one sentence in English, let alone get a passport or a visa to ever exit the nation. I don't want to laugh at their misfortune. Street-shitters are a desperate and downtrodden class of people. They're barely tolerated in AC restaurants in India, let alone a foreign nation.
"You can't make me go back! Anything but that!" attitude of second-generation Indian-Americans is profound.
Ah, I'll leave this for another day. The ABC vs. Chinese or ABCD vs. Indians conversation is strongly colored by insecurity, ungroundedness, and colonial mindsets. For now, I'll say that it has little to do with their dislike of India. India (and developing nations in general) run on survivalist mentalities based around class systems. Second-generation Indians are insecure about their place at the top of the survivalist-Indian hierarchy. Their actions should always be viewed with that fact in mind.
And then there is the shameless nepotism and scamming. It's more or less known that if you make the mistake of putting an Indian in charge of hiring, suddenly your company is hiring only Indians. That most resumes from Indians and credentials from institutions that service mostly Indians are completely fake and can't be trusted. I've seen repeated stories out of Canada that local education institutions, which have leaned into servicing Indians, have become so overrun with fraud that employers have begun just chucking applications from those institutions in the garbage. Been burned too many times.
You have causality backward. White people are unwilling to work for wages that desperate Indians agree to. This makes it so that the only people who meet the hiring bar and are willing to accept the wages are Indian immigrants. Similarly, Tier 3 Canadian institutions start cash-cow programs with little educational, career, or prestige value. The only kind of person who sees value in such a program is someone with ulterior motives. The program gets fraud-friendly candidates because it’s structured to only draw fraud-friendly candidates.
Detached from the outcome attitude.
While we're exchanging anecdotes, my experience has been the opposite. Doctors back in India are caring, invested, and treat you like a human. I've found American doctors to be cold and impatient.
I've never had an experience where an Indian went one millimeter outside of the minimum of their job description to service a customer.
My experience couldn't be more different. My Indian (and first-gen Chinese) coworkers clearly work harder and produce higher-quality outcomes than the natives. But the natives keep getting rewarded because the company can't afford to lose citizens.
The Viveks of the world speak in broad terms that these Indian workers are just better than me.
Yeah, Vivek felt resentful and hurt in his comments. I don't agree with his comments, but I can see how your average white person would feel attacked by it. Fair enough.
My way of life is disappearing, my culture is being squeezed out, my history is being erased, my co-ethnics aren't reproducing.
Yeah, it has to do with your co-ethnics. Indians (among other first-gen immigrants) are more spiritual, family-oriented, and 90s-American-like than native 2025 Americans. Your complaints are rooted in Gen Z Americans rejecting classically American values. Don’t point to us immigrants. This is all you. If it is any solace, this seems to be a global problem. Everywhere, urban kids of the next generation are rejecting ideas that their 'elders' held close to their hearts. Time is ruthless.
I've seen very little self-awareness from Indians about what they are really fleeing from or what makes them different.
I see your point. For every Indian who seeks integration, there are smart and educated Indians who ghettoize. It's how immigration works. Jews, Italians, Cubans, etc.—they all ghettoized in their first generation. In time, they integrate.
I don’t agree with your Japan analogy, though. America exported every part of its culture for a whole century. It forcefully molded workers at other English-speaking corporations into pseudo-Americans. America is a 'global' phenomenon. Irrespective of the truth, that’s the image it portrays and sells. If immigrants drink the Kool-Aid, then that’s on America for shoving it down our throats. You might argue that this was the doing of the filthy globalists, and it isn’t the will of 'true' Americans. But to me, that just sounds like you saying that you're a powerless normie who is angry about being powerless in their country. If you didn’t want to be flag bearers of globalism for 50 years, then you should've found your way to power and reversed the trend. Even in 2025, Trump may cosplay as a nativist, but he's as global coastal elite as they come.
Paul Graham is the most honest billionaire (low bar) in silicon valley. Paul groomed Sam, gave him a career and eventually fired him. Paul is the most articulate man I know. Read what Paul has to say about Sam, and you'll see a carefully worded pattern. Paul admires Sam, but Sam scares him.
Before I write a few lines shitting on Sam, I must acknowledge that he is scary good. Dude is a beast. The men at the top of silicon valley are sharp and ruthless. You don't earn their respect let alone fear, if you aren't scary good. Reminds me of Kissinger in his ability to navigate himself into power. I've heard similar things about David Sacks. Like Kissinger, many in YC will talk fondly about their interactions with him. Charming, direct, patient and a networking workhorse. He could connect you to an investor, a contact or a customer faster than anyone in the valley.
But, Sam's excellence appears untethered to any one domain. Lots of young billionaires have a clear "vision -> insight -> skill acquisition -> solve hard problems -> make ton of money" journey. But, unlike other young Billionaires, Sam didn't have a baby of his own. He has climbed his way to it, 1 strategic decision at a time. And given the age by which he achieved it, it's fair to call him the best ladder climber of his generation.
Sam's first startup was a failure. He inherited YC, like Sundar inherited Google, and Sam eventually got fired. He built OpenAI, but the core product was a thin layer on top of an LLM. Sam played no part in building the LLM. I had acquaintances joining Deepmind/OpenAI/Fair from 2017-2020, no one cared about Sam. Greg and Ilya were the main pull. Sam's ability to fundraise is second to none, but GPT-3 would have happened with or without him.
I personally, struggle to trust people I consider untethered. MBA types, lawyers turned CEOs, politicians. Top 0.1 percentile autists must excel. In the absence of a grounding domain, they start demonstrating excellence in accumulating Power. Power for power's sake. Sam is a perfect archetype.
Moreover, Sam being a gay childless tech-bro means he isn't naturally incentivized to see the world improve. None of those things are bad on their own. But they don't play well with top 0.1 percentile autists. Straight men soften up overtime, learning empathy from their wife, through osmosis. Gay communities don't get that. Then you have silicon valley tech culture, which is famously insular and lacks a certain worldliness. (even when it is racially diverse). I'll take Sam being married to a 'gay white software engineer' as evidence in favor of my hypothesis. Lastly, he is childless. This means no inherent incentive to making the world a better place. IMO, Top 0.1 percentile autists will devolve into megalomania without a grounding soft touch to keep them sane. Sam is not exception and he is the least grounded of them all. Say what you want about Mark Zuckerberg, but a wife and kids has definitely played a role in humanizing him. Not sure I can say the same for Sam.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
- fake france
- fake NY
- fake midwest
- fake seattle
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
Vivek and Vance seek power. Ackman seeks money. It's different.
Lastly, the current trading system, while far from perfect or fair to the U.S., has served us extremely well so we need to be prudent in how we change it so as not to upset the world order in such a manner that it disadvantages our country over the long term.
The fear is palpable
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
Fighter pilot.
Resilience to stress is more important than excellence. Both of them can fly a plane. Only one of them knows how to keep his cool in stressful circumstances.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
The rivers are already shut off for all intents and purposes. Pushing it further can set scary precedents in the sub-continent.
India could go upstream and cut off rivers at the source, but Pakistan's best friend (China) controls even more important rivers upstream. If China did a tit-for-tat than India would lose a lot more than they'd gain.
It's the main reason I consider Indian inaction to the Chinese annexation of Tibet to be the worst strategic misstep of a newly independent India. And for those who say 'India did not have the resources', Tibet is a defenders dream. All supply lines are cutoff for half the year. You can't lay siege, you can't set up shop, you can't invade. Well, I have enough reasons to dislike Nehru already. But here's one more.
In the months surrounding the People’s Liberation Army’s October 1950 entry into Tibet, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru read the same cable traffic yet drew radically different conclusions. Patel’s 7 November 1950 memorandum to Nehru warned that Tibet’s fall would erase the Himalayan buffer, expose India’s “almost undefended” northern flank, and reveal “China’s carefully laid plan to establish its domination” across Asia. Nehru, by contrast, saw the episode as unwelcome but unavoidable; he registered a formal protest, yet pressed ahead with recognizing the People’s Republic of China, advocating its U.N. seat, and negotiating the 1954 Panchsheel Agreement. Their divergent assessments shaped Indian policy for a decade and still frame today’s debate on how the annexation might have been answered differently. (sauce - O3 mini with search)
Ofc Patel was on the right side of history. Everything I read about him makes him seem like a 'Lee Kwan Yew' style pragmatic statesman that India needed. But ofc, Nehru chose naive optimism as he always did. Oh, how I wish the man had just gone to Cambridge and been a brown Francis Fukuyama instead.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
And for a while they were doing good. India was a languishing in socialist democracy (hindu rate of growth) and a Bangladesh was still finding its feet as fledgling nation. In the 20th century, Pakistan was in a better place than India or Bangladesh. In the 90s, they nearly doubled India in GDP-PPP/Capita terms.
Even as a badly run but stable nation, Pakistan has a lot to offer. It has tons of rare earths. Pakistani-Kashmir is heaven on earth. Punjabi river systems are well-suited for industrialized agriculture. I would much prefer for Pakistan to thrive as nation of 250 million people, than this clown show they've been running.
DirtyWaterHotDog
4mo ago
to facilitate the transfer of US military resources from Europe to the Pacific
Why do it in a roundabout manner ? The cold-war with China is in full swing. It's 10 years too late for appearances.
the adults actually have everything under control at all times
Has that ever been true? Vietnam, Afghanistan & Iraq were net negatives for the US. The country has a storied tradition of wasting money in ways that 'adults' would deem unwise.
this was a genuinely impulsive decision on Trump's part, and that he's not following any particular ideological roadmap.
Same here. Trump (and those who he listens to) is a tactical genius and strategic buffoon. He's good at bullying as a means of getting small wins. But, he lacks the patience for grand games. His evaluation of the world is simple and myopic.
<semi_rant_begins>
China's rise and its inevitable challenge to America's supremacy had kicked off by 1978. Their current momentum has been half-a-century in the making. It took the half-century before that for America to build Pax-Americana into what it is (was?) today. Even at full-throttle it will take America ~2 decades to craft a new public image of itself. Trump wants to draw new cards. But, the old cards were good, and it may take a few draws before America finds itself with good cards again. In the short term., change will likely be for the worst And if the cards don't work out, the long term might be doomed as well.
Think about it, 2015 America was in a great place. The first world wanted nothing to do with China. There was balance.
Western Europe, Japan, SK & America were aligned in keeping China at arms lengths from their markets. BRICS nations were seen as long-term possible contenders to the first world. South Africa is aligned with the west. India didn't get along with China. Brazil's location makes it naturally align with America. Russia allied with China, but had delusions of grandeur that kept it from ever being subservient.
In this world, even if China had won, who would be in its umbrella ? Iran, Pakistan, Russia, SEA, Africa & some South American countries ? That's the grand alliance ? What did America have to fear ? Between South Asia, Poland, Turkey & HispanAmerica.... the 1st world had enough mid-industrialization partners for outsourcing low-margin industries. If robotics automation stayed on track, the 1st world's requirement for offshore labor would've ended right as these aforementioned nations became too expensive for outsourcing. Biden ran a cluster-fuck of a govt. But, the pre-2016 neolib consensus seemed to be doing just fine.
In 2025, I'm not so sure.
Will Europe, Canada & HispanAmerican nations seek opportunistic short-term deals elsewhere, instead of operating within America's umbrella ? China has a lot of money to throw around. Canada could solve its housing problem if it formally allowed Chinese nationals to park money here. Europe could make their money go further if they opened up to Chinese shopping portals like Temu and embraced Chinese electronics (Huawei, Xiaomi). Chinese belt-and-road style loans might start looking tempting to feudal countries if their elites weren't America educated (and therefore America aligned). Small nations would get on their knees and suck Xi off if China offered to divert the fire-hose of Chinese tourists to their nations. India could adopt a China-style make-everything-in-house strategy going forward. It wouldn't take it to first-world-dom, but it could operate within its means. India is poor, but 1.5 billion is a lot of consumers.
America dominates many sectors, but it is especially powerful in Tech and Entertainment. Guess what, both sectors are trivial to disrupt. Semi conductors, Pharmaceuticals and Heavy engineering take decades to build excellence in. But tech and entertainment can be disrupted overnight.
It would take less than 2 years for China to offer full replacements for O365, AWS and Windows. They already have competent alternatives for Facebook, Google, Tesla & Apple ready to go. Where would that leave the magnificent 7? With NeZha 2 & BlackMyth, they're already showing technical excellence in entertainment. Yes, America tells better stories, but that's only because American stories resonate. If Trump continues being a bully, will anyone want to see the next Rocky 4 or Captain America ?
I still don't get what was so broken about America that Elon & Trump needed to turn everything on its head.
<\semi_rant_ends>
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
"Urban crime" is a scoped to make all cities look bad, when the issue is of some neighborhoods in some cities.
Oakland or Baltimore are generally violent. Downtown Seattle or SOMA SF have homelessness and nonviolent property crime associated with it. I dont recommend living in these neighborhoods and I am in complete agreement on the dire need for possibly non-compassionate methods for resolving these issues. But these cities/neighborhoods are rarely the subjects of discussion.
Statistically, transit focused American cities are exceedingly safe. NYC & Boston are the nations 2 big transit cities. Both the cities and their transit corridors are quite safe. Hell, you can fall asleep late at night on the subway and wake up in East NY (murdertown).... and it's still safe inside the subway complex. As mentioned before, bad neighborhoods are ofc crime ridden. But connecting them to a common transit doesnt bring crime to your doorstep.
That being said, I'm glad that the YIMBY/Transit crowd has decoupled from the compassionate/pro-homeless crowd.
Strict enforcement of public safety is essential to getting people to use transit. The caltrain (well run) vs Bart (total mess) are great examples while being within a few miles from eachnother.
DirtyWaterHotDog
3mo ago
What's your current take on the ongoing Ukraine diplomatic drama? Are the Trump Talks likely to lead to the Trump Treaty? Or are they just ongoing comedy and flailing? What does a durable peace treaty look like these days?
Trump squandered hard won leverage for nothing in return.
Ceasefire is a good idea. But the terms hugely favor Russia. By freezing current boundaries, they give Russia full control over the Dniper river. For all intents and purposes, this will doom Ukraine to Russian control. Trump held all the cards, gave Russia everything they wanted, and asked for nothing in return. I don't get it.
The standard argument is that American resources can't be stuck in Europe. The next war will be in the Indo pacific, and resources need to be focused there. I agree on all points. But then, why not force Russia to economically decouple from China ? Post-Ukraine-war, Russia has become economically dependent on China, ending up as the clear junior partner in a fast developing 2nd front. Before the war, Russia was economically coupled to the EU. From an objective perspective and from the perspective of political maneuvering, this sudden ceasefire doesn't help him or his allies. The US might be able to refocus on China militarily, but I don't see them gaining economic leverage on China.
Everything from now is speculation and likely won't happen, but Trump's actions increase the possibility of the following events if nothing changes. Here goes: Ukraine is too dug in. Lot more Ukrainians will die before they formally concede. Now that Ukraine is caught with their pants down, Russia is free to mount a fresh offensive come spring. EU will have to choose between focusing their large capital expenditures on reindustrializing vs rearming. With the (arguably misplaced) paranoia of a hot-war with Russia, they will be forced to pick the latter. Therefore, they'll losing vital ground to China as it eats more of Europe's high-skill industry lunch. Ukraine's reliance on EU will make it bad optics for Europe to repair ties with Russia. As a result, Russia will build deeper ties with China formalizing the 2nd front for good. By creating strong incentives for an economically strengthened China, a concrete China-Russia block & a weakened EU, I fear that Trump might have kick started the end of the empire.
I don't believe that Trump is a Russian asset. But the man is following every step of the 'is a Russian asset' playbook.
P.S: My fanfic assumes that the publicly shared details of the deal are what the deal is.
North American housing crises are manufactured. There are no limiting resource constraints. Limited zoning limits the number of houses. Fewer houses means expensive houses. There are other factors at play, but zoning is the disproportionate cause for high prices across the continent.
Canada is facing the worst of it because of the immigration tsunami and a shoddy economy. But, that's like blaming the rain for leaks, when you've got a gaping hole in your roof. Any place in the world would be affected just as adversely, if housing policy was this hostile. Sydney & Honolulu are 2 such examples. It's tempting to think you can trudge along like coastal US cities. But, coastal USA gets around it through sheer brute force. The economies of coastal USA can sustain any level of dysfunction. Be it California's $100b HSR or NYC renting out the whole city's hotels as refugee shelters. Other places aren't so fortunate.
Canada needs to build a shit ton of housing ASAP. The country has practically infinite lumber and just imported a ton of low skill labor. Put up some 4+1s and this will be solved in under a year.
There is no mincing words. Canada's shambolic housing policy is a wealth transfer program from the young to the old. Canada's economy is not doing great, and you'd expect it to affect everyone's QOL equally. Through this (almost direct) wealth transfer, the liberal govt. has decided to let the young bear all the misery, while the geriatrics have the world's greatest retirement.
P.S: I'm Indian and Canada's current immigration policy is a joke even within India. To quote Trump, "They’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us". India's best don't aspire to go to Canada. They go to the US, Urban India or Western Europe. The OP talks about housing costs and Canada's wider problems with productivity. I'll stick to that. Can always talk about immigration later.
If you think game devs & video game designers sit in a room together, then you're dead wrong. Devs are the exploited labor. If devs were the problem, then indie games would have been an even bigger woke fest. That opposite is true.
The problem is lack of cartelization. Or : "Tech dudes are pussies".
Here is the day to day in the life of a developer:
- Report your progress to your VP who decides if you get promoted. MBA.
- Report your progress to a product PMs who decides what needs to get done. MBA.
- Build the software to the exacts design created for you. BA Painting.
- Submit legal review to the legal team who decide if you're infringing on external IP. Lawyer.
- Rinse and repeat
They have no agency.
Have you ever worked in a law firm ? The partners, managers, associates....all lawyers. Everyone else reports up to them. Hospitals : Admins, Head of departments, Regulators.... all doctors. Everyone else (nurses, insurance, etc) must report to or work with them. Same is true for heavy engineering or any industry that needs deep expertise.
Tech prides itself in being anti-credential. But in the process, it has become anti-expertise. When the door is open for everyone, the politically savvy are going to run rounds around the meek devs.
The problem started with Steve Jobs. Steve portrayed himself as the cool 'designer' who figured out how to take socially inept coders and transform the world with it. This set the narrative for the tech industry as it exists today. It is exacerbated when a startup CEO sees massive growth, and must hire people to 'manage' all the growth. Rather than promoting socially competent senior devs, they hire 'ready made' MBAs. This sets up empire-building MBA culture in the entire middle management (VP - Director) band.
Tech guys created an industry, and MBA types stepped in to make all the money from it. MBAs understand all products as a supply chain. Create more, create faster and more time pressure. Ofc, that's a terrible combination for anything that needs the slightest bit of expertise. So, that's how you get the modern game dev industry.
To be direct:
- Arts grads (writers, designers, directors) come up with woke stories
- MBA CEOs follow the money & NYT. NYT tells them more woke. Money tells them more Fortnite.
- Tech see major issues. But, are pussies so they build what they're told at insane time pressue
- Thing doesn't get made in time because in any high-skill job - more time pressure is worse quality is broken game
- Deadlines keep slipping for reasons any dev could have explained. But to MBAs, whippings must continue until morale improves
- Devs keep getting abused
- Game releases as a broken unplayable mess
- Consumers give shit reviews. IGN says 10/10 because video game journalism also isn't run by gamers or devs.
- Art grads and MBA CEOs have never played a video game in their life. So they don't know the video game is shit. IGN must be right. Gamers are sexist.
- MBA CEO says numbers must go up. So, burn all good will by overselling cosmetics exploiting gambling whales.
- Shit game but breaks even. Convenient explanation so board-of-directors doesn't fire MBA CEO.
- CEO gets bonus. Art team gets credit. Dev team gets fired. (cost cutting measure to show good quarter)
- 2024, good will runs out, gamers out of touch with companies. Customer rebels. No sales.
- -> WE ARE HERE
All the recently successful game companies are run by hardcore tech dudes. Epic and Roblox are obviously having a moment minting money. Both their CEOs were hard core tech dudes who built the core tech that underlies their companies. The 2 games that recovered from shambolic launches (No man's sky, Cyberpunk) are both run by hardcore tech people.
When looking for tech people running game studios, I found this quote from the founder of No Man's sky's studio.
My degree was straight Computer Science which generally frowned on anything games related
Tells you everything you need to know about Gaming as an industry.
DirtyWaterHotDog
5mo ago
with a tiny fraction of the compute budget, with no ability to get SOTA GPUs
Shouldn't US intelligence already know about these GPUs ? You can fit 5000 GPUs on a standard shipping container with no special handling required. It should be trivial to smuggle 10 shipping containers for acquiring these GPUs. Scale.AI CEO is the child of Los Alamos researchers and deeply embedded within the US military industrial complex. If he knows it, then US intelligence knows too.
The panic is mostly among twitter speculators.
small AI lab
The R1 paper has 200 authors on it. By their own acknowledgement, they aren't small. Over 2023 Post-GPT4 OpenAI had around 400 employees, and most of these were product people. If R1 had 200 researchers, they'd be around the same size as an OpenAI with $10B in funding.
lot of OpenAI's current position is derivative of a period of time where they published their research
I was working closely with OpenAI as far back as 2021. Technically, tthey weren't that far ahead . They just executed so much better.
They discovered some incredible insights on the continued scaling of model capabilities with size and data. But, once you get that insight, you can't hide it (it's self evident from the model) and is easy to adopt for others in the field. Between Google's Palm 540B & Lambda 2021, the research community clearly knew all the secrets. Openai's other big innovation was the quality of post-training & rlhf, which made talking to it feel far more natural. The Palm models weren't bad, they were just too ADHD to stay on topic. That too wasn't a technical secret as much as an organizational secret. Back then, AI applied-research-2-product pipelines were quite immature at big tech. So, the institutional will power for something like this was lacking.
It's not a surprise that competitors can catch up quickly if they know what's possible and what the target is.
Alibaba was a major player during the pre-GPT LLM battle (yes, LLMs existed for a good half decade before). I'm more surprised that it took this long for China to catch up. On embeddings & cross-encoders, Beijing academy of artificial intelligence (BAAI) had consistently been state of the art. In Vision, they've been mogging everyone since Kaiming He published Resnet at MSR Asia (China) in 2016.
Anyway, do you believe DeepSeek?
Yeah, I believe in China. Motherfuckers are cracked.
DirtyWaterHotDog
4mo ago
hiring staff to deal with real regulatory and compliance requirements
Comes back to 'Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats'. The overhead is a result of the regulations. The removal of overhead doesn't remove regulations.
What funding do woke movements need ? They're staffed by privileged upper class volunteers who're signed up in unemployable non-STEM programs. Wokeism works precisely because it needs no funding.
Yes! And my younger cousins seem to agree. You speak of MMOs, but back then, the MMOs were special too. (Ragnarok, WOW)
IMO, media peaks in a certain era and you just have to accept it. New art forms appear to have a sweet spot at the intersection of maturity and novelty. That's when their best versions are created.
For example, take movies. They hit this sweet spot from 75-95. Jurassic Park, Rocky 1-4, Terminator 1-2, Die Hard, Shawshank, Godfather, Schindler's List, Star wars etc. There are equally great movies made after 95, but they don't have the same novelty. There are equally important movies made before 75, but they seem to lack maturity (of exploiting the art form). Afterall there are only so many stories to tell. There are only so many heart-strings to tug at.
For games, that happened between the late 90s - Mid 2000s. Half life 1 - Skyrim marked an era of special video games.
A telling sign of the end of this era is when authenticity takes a back seat to subversion & commentary. This is most stark with architecture. Mid-way through modernism (right after mid-century modern and at the beginning of Brutalism) Architecture ran out of authenticity. Sometime in an earlier era, Architecture had peaked and run out of novel ideas. So everything novel fails to evoke primal emotions and everything evocative is derivative. I see this trend with games. Where everything is about references, callbacks and subversive characters. It doesn't mean it can't be interesting or entertaining. Borderlands 1 & 2 did an amazing job at exactly this. But, it can't ground an era and wears-out-its-welcome quickly. Ofc, there are still great games (Souls-likes, Larian, etc), but ofc, they're derivative. Derivative works will never be as special as the 'the first'.
Over long time horizons, there are paradigm changes. As the core constraints and tools of a field change, it allows for novelty. But it can be decades of centuries between such paradigm shifts. Until then, a mature art form must languish between derivative and subversive.
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