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sohois


				

				

				
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sohois


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 06:51:38 UTC

					

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User ID: 477

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One aspect worth considering is the extent to which Chinese companies want to compete in the US (and other Western car markets).

And by "compete" I mean really go for the jugular and sell their 10k electric car for 10k (+ the extra you probably have to pay to dealers and the like compared to third-world markets).

I buy a lot of Chinese tech, because their extremely lax attitude towards copyright means you'll generally get all the bells and whistles of the good Western stuff but at a fraction of the cost. Except that this is only true if you buy in China or ship through AliExpress. As soon as Chinese manufacturers enter into Western markets directly, they immediately slap a big premium onto their products, far more than could be explained by local regulation or supply chain costs. BYD have started selling cars in Europe, and when I saw I immediately went to their website to see how competitive their cars would be... and the prices aren't competitive at all, coming in 2-3x the local Chinese price and offering little over Western EV prices.

As long as Chinese producers see the West as just a cash cow rather than a market to really dominate, Western manufacturers will be ok.

I feel like responders to 2rafa's post would have benefitted from defining what it is "good writing" means to them. Whenever conversations start about writing quality it seems like every person takes their own idea into it without explaining what that is.

Is good writing the overall feel of the narrative to you? Is it the plot itself? The prose, the dialogue, the characterization, the worldbuilding?

If I think of a great video game narrative, I tend to think of games that do something interesting with the medium, something like the adventure game 999. However, I wouldn't describe 999 as having good writing - the plot and dialogue are merely ok, it's how it utilizes the medium to deliver everything that makes it shine.

Similarly, some games basically abandon "writing" altogether; someone below mentioned Ico, and Ueda's games always opt for very minimalist stories, which is something you can get away with in a game but not in other mediums. However, simply opting out of writing shouldn't be called "good writing" even if it produces a very good game.

Meanwhile, titles like Deus Ex and Metal Gear Solid have very interesting plots and worlds, but the prose and dialogue are distinctly sub-par. I think this is what 2rafa means when they say the writing is bad.

Of course, both titles offer a lot to discuss in that regard. For example, how much of their experiences are defined by the technology of the time? Infamous lines like "What a shame" and "A bomb!" in Deus Ex might work a lot better with modern animations and voice acting. On the other hand, Kojima's 4th wall breaking was bold at the time but would be passé if done now. Plus, if they weren't very good games in other aspects, would anyone remember them?

Translation might well impact on prose and characterisation, but I've never heard of plot being altered. And it doesn't take much effort to find Japanese games with absolutely nonsensical plots

Walk into a Brunello Cucinelli, a Hermes, a Thom Browne, or similar and you'll find hundreds of pretty normal looking clothes selling at 1k+ prices each.

Does anyone mention or link to the Themotte in the comments of ACX? Either in Open threads or elsewhere. Given how much of the community came from slatestarcodex originally, it would seem obvious to try and bring more over from substack. I doubt many of the current readers of ACX have ever gone back and looked at Scott's old post talking about the creation of the motte.

I'm not from the US and have never bought a copy of Sports Illustrated; it's only really known outside because the swimsuit issue had reached iconic status. But as yourself and most other posters have indicated, the swimsuit issue and changes around it probably had little to do with the overall success of the magazine. It was apparently a weekly magazine up until 2018, and you have to assume that the other 51 editions every year would need to do well for it to have survived so long.

However, I don't think the failure of the title is an indication of a failure to market towards "red bloodied males", nor do I subscribe to FiveHourMarathon's view below that it represents the shattering of general sports interest. In both cases because there is still a "red blooded", general sports magazine that appears to be quite successful - The Athletic. This just looks like a classic case of a media business failing to really transition to a new business model with the arrival of the internet.

I came here to add the same, although you will also need to pay for hellochinese

This reads more like Moldbug started an essay but then got bored and just posted the intro.

This sort of outcome is what makes it very, very difficult for me to take the AI doomerism seriously. Yes, we may get Paperclip Maximiser AGI, but I think it's much more likely to come about by "humans in notional charge think it will make them trillions and so follow blindly its advice" than "machine becomes agent and decides on its own goals".

I'm not sure I follow your logic here.

You don't take AI doomerism seriously because you think that AI doom is likely but through a different path than the 'paperclip maximizer'? I'm pretty certain that the AI safety crowd are just as worried about manipulative oracle AIs as they are about mindless paperclip maximizers.

You didn't really address the above post, unless you are saying that Isreal is responsible for civil wars and general unrest in countries in Sub-saharan Africa. Why would they do such a thing?

Whenever I've seen opinions on the wider Elder Scrolls series, it has always been that the most recent edition has been a tragic dumbing down of the series. People who played Daggerfall find Morrowind to be a mass market, lowest-common-denominator mess. People who played Morrowind think the same of Oblivion, and those who played Oblivion find the same issue with Skyrim.

I've only played the last two, but from what I've seen of the other games there is certainly some truth that the series gradually became simpler, more accessible - but perhaps at some cost. I wouldn't be surprised if a similar plan was in place for Fallout, until New Vegas came along and ruined any chance of people looking positively at the others.

Yes, this site is built on rdrama code. You can tailor it exactly to your liking. The purpose of all that action is to scare off users who can't figure that out

One thing with housing is that we have examples of localized unaffordability that are much more extreme than most national housing issues, so the local response should give us an idea of what a nationwide response might be. Think of areas like San Fran, Vancouver, London, or most notably Hong Kong. These are often areas where there is some control over house building rates or other local powers that could swing things.

Hong Kong is both the worst in terms of affordability and the one with more control over local issues, but what have we seen there? The only protests in recent years have been from pro-democracy groups. The residents have just accepted worse and worse housing. Even if you believe the CCP's control is a unique situation, it's not like we've seen differently in other overpriced metros.

I think that this works for some aspects of the show but not all of them. The Guilty remnant, for example. didn't need an explanation - you can just assume that they were a weirdo cult capitalizing on a tragedy like plenty of other weirdo cults. But IIRC there were a number of other bizarre occurrences and red herrings thrown out that couldn't just be handwaved away and seemed like audience hooks that never got resolved.

I enjoyed The Leftovers but also find it to be a bit overrated. Perhaps my view is in part influenced by the foreknowledge that this was a show from Damon Lindelof, writer of Lost, and seeing people claim that the show "fixed the problems present in Lost" and was Lindelof redeeming himself with a well-handled mystery.

Except it wasn't at all. Where Lost struggled mightily to give answers to every little crazy incident, often to no benefit, the approach of The Leftovers was just to abandon the majority of mysteries every season and never mention them again. This meant it avoided lots of trite explanations or dumb exposition, but I wouldn't call it resolving the problems that Lost had by any means.

I suppose the answer to Leftovers' strong reception is in the idea that "it's really about the characters". After the Lost finale, this line was trotted out a lot to defend the show, that it didn't matter that the mystery box was unsatisfying because actually you just wanted to see what happened to the characters. To an extent you did care about the endings for the characters in Lost, but really it was much more about the mystery box. With the Leftovers, you could actually claim that it was really about the characters, and being an HBO show with a fine cast and big budget, its character stuff was really strong.

Nonetheless, I was disappointed to go in expecting a satisfying mystery box and not getting that. (I'm also expecting the exact same thing to happen with new mystery box show Severance)

Cyberpunk kind of managed to squeeze in a Trans character without calling any attention to it: the bartender at the Afterlife bar was trans, but the only way you know is because the truck she drives has a trans flag on it (IIRC). Their transness isn't remotely important to their questline, it's just a thing that's there.

Chinese restaurants in China also have very large menus.

I couldn't say why Chinese cuisine developed in such a way that led to this, but if you're wondering how they manage: Chinese food has very little mise en place. 95% of dishes in the average restaurant will require little more than chopping up your ingredients and frying rapidly. Take a look at someone like Wang Gang, a professional Chinese chef. The majority of recipes he shoots are <5 minutes, even accounting for editing tricks.

A new release sold 13000 copies, much lower than the figures for some of the other books.

Why would you post something that harms your own argument? Or are you saying that the 15million figure is the comparison? Except that's not the same time at all, those books were released in 1991 and that's 20+ years of sales, not to mention a massively book industry

Tbh this seems utterly pointless for judging anything about the wider "left-wing takeover" or even Disney. We have a list of declining book sales for Disney in a medium overwhelmingly known for movies. We have no comparisons to other books released at a similar time. We do have a comparison to a book series released decades ago, which is likely irrelevant in the current market. We have no analysis of anything else Disney does with the property, or Disney's own success.

You say this:

But it doesn’t matter for Disney

No shit it doesn't matter. Even if sales of the book series blew away the Thrawn trilogy that the author cites, it wouldn't even make a dent in Disney's P&L. Where's the look at Disney's overall financial health?

Every large corporation has issues with "fiefdoms" forming: is there any evidence that Disney is worse than, say, Ford? Or P&G or Salesforce or Shell or Walmart or Apple? Any evidence that left-wing or "woke" politics is causing particular problems for Disney over the pet issues of other large corporations

If you want to complain about a book series, go ahead. But I think you need to bring much more evidence to link this to any kind of issue with major corporations

I'm not sure Bethesda have really made a great game for many, many years and I don't expect that to change with Starfield. Like everyone else here, I think they'll probably make something very engaging but which will feel hollow in the long term

Bannerlord is essentially player generated though, it merely provides the scaffolding for player decisions

I can imagine a future where there has been enough production or robots/drones/whatever that any human forces become irrelevant, but it would only be one possible future. Other futures where arming a mass of human auxiliaries can give an edge in any conflict would seem to be more likely to me.

i also feel that this framing of "the 1%" simply exterminating everyone else assumes a lot more sociopathy than actually exists. Leaders throughout history have certainly spent lives freely, but we've hardly ever seen them completely disregard their "lessers". Even the genocidal maniacs like Hitler and Stalin typically just targeted certain groups, not all humanity.

And speaking of Hitler and Stalin, the current crop of dictators would almost certainly count among the 1%, and many of them seem to possess very strong nationalistic streaks. Clearly the likes of Xi and Putin would go to great lengths to protect their wealth and status, but I can't imagine they would completely abandon their countrymen - what's the point of elevating to godhood if there is no one around to worship you? Plus, I'd say that speculation about elite vs masses is much less likely than good old fashioned wars between nations and races, if anything would lead to near extinction.

What binds the 1% together as a military force beyond wealth? Who says that the forces of a Musk would align with a Bezos would align with a Gates would align with a Soros?

"Do you agree with [professor]" is the subject of every university-level exam.

Unless you have Japanese levels of public behavior and honesty, you're going to keep getting violence, filth, and corruption.

I've used public transport systems across European cities for long periods of time (i.e. natives are <75% of the local population) and have generally had pleasant experiences in all of them, so I don't know that this statement holds up.