sohois
1yr ago
Given Scott's endorsement in 2016, I'm not at all surprised he's not changed his mind this time around.
In 2016, you could argue for "high variance". There were plenty of supporters who believed that Trump would bring his business acumen to bear to sweep away inefficiency and to make deals, or that he would successfully take on the establishment and "drain the swamp". There was a positive case to make for him.
But this didn't happen. In his 4 years, Trump was a pretty generic Republican, average to below-average in most respects. He failed to achieve most of his policy goals and was not a dealmaker or businessman in office. Perhaps the only area you might praise his achievements was in foreign policy, but even those successes look very short lived. Then right at the end, he veered towards the down part of the high variance argument.
It seems like now the overwhelming arguments for Trump are all "He's not Harris" or "He's not the democrats". For Scott whose policy positions are probably closer to the democrats, this is not going to be particularly convincing, as he lays out.
sohois
1yr ago
Make your point reasonably clear and plain. Try to assume other people are doing the same.
What does this mean? Are you suggesting that Israel Jews have engineered fertility crises in every country except their own? You're not supposed to put words in posters mouths but such a vague assertion forces people to speculate.
If this is what you mean, why would Israel Jews do this? What do they have to gain from plummeting the birth rate of, say, South Korea? How would they engineer a plummeting birth rate in South Korea?
sohois
1yr ago
I wouldn't recommend Buster Scruggs as your first film from the Coen brothers, it's a collection of short stories that I suspect was made largely to satisfy Netflix's insatiable lust for content. Not that it's a bad collection, just not what I would recommend if you wanted to get introduced to the directors. I would heavily recommend starting with Fargo
sohois
1yr ago
I expect any Biden supporters could create a list of negatives about Trump just as large as your Biden list.
And indeed, a huge swathe of Democrats did proclaim everything was rigged when Trump beat Hilary. A subject that was much mocked by posters on the right of the spectrum.
sohois
1yr ago
Who knows? But any explanation needs to account for why both candidates saw a massive increase in their vote numbers. Biden wasn't the only candidate who got more votes than Obama ever did.
sohois
1yr ago
Trump went from 63 million votes to 72 million votes. How do you explain an average first term producing that amount of extra votes, unless there was a general increase in voting turnout for 2020?
sohois
1yr ago
I dismissed a terrible line of logic. I didn't comment on the other points. This place is for rational discussion, and the argument that a poster thinks a candidate is bad therefore it is impossible that they attracted votes is just not at the standard of the motte.
Even Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote. Why would it remotely be a surprise that a far less divisive candidate attracts more votes, after a mediocre term for Trump that had the misfortune to end with a pandemic?
sohois
1yr ago
Do you seriously expect me to believe that the candidate that I hate could be successful? How is that possible when I hate him so much?
sohois
1yr ago
Yeah, the only reason they had the challenge system was the recognition that human line judges would make mistakes. There's no point getting an electronic system to review itself
sohois
1yr ago
Your calculations need to account for working age population. Of that 7.2 million figure, how many will be too old or too young?
I think the bigger issue is: Does the world know that this sudden IQ transformation has occurred in Liberia? If not, how are hedgies and AI firms going to discover all this talent? I'd imagine only a small amount of the country even has the computer and networking capabilities to begin working remotely for overseas firms.
sohois
1yr ago
Because the West is a culture of engineers, and we should play to our strengths
But renewable generation also requires engineering effort, why is that not playing to strengths? Fully solving issues related to storage, grid connection, forecasting, etc. will require plenty of engineering skill.
Manufacturing of renewables is not my area of expertise so I can't comment on your second paragraph. Although the domestic security issue is presumably not going to apply equally to every Western nation.
sohois
1yr ago
Most nations have some nuclear in their generation mix and will continue to have nuclear for the foreseeable future, but I'm not sure anywhere in the West outside of France will have a significant percentage covered by it. Peaking plants will probably continue to be gas or hydro as nuclear is not suited for this purpose. But ultimately as with renewable generation, the investment in battery technology mean that storage plants and DERs are simply better placed in terms of cost/benefit again.
sohois
1yr ago
Skibboleth alluded to this point below: the time to build nuclear was 30-40 years ago when the cost/benefit made sense. In the intervening decades, money has poured into solar, wind, and more niche renewables, such that they are now well ahead in terms of marginal cost per unit of energy, even taking into account the intermittency downsides.
There's probably a ton of room for research into fission to produce similar advances, but the question you have to ask now is why? Renewables are already there. Other than an aesthetic preference for major engineering projects or a desire to poke greens in the eye, the only benefit is just to cover intermittency, but there are plenty of alternatives for that as well
sohois
1yr ago
This is by far the simplest explanation for me. A director and screenwriting team that don't really know what they're doing.
sohois
1yr ago
The overdose death rate increased by 2,400% between 1980 and 2020
When prohibition was in full effect across the united states?
This just suggests that prohibition or no prohibition is largely drowned out by other factors in terms of the harms inflicted by drugs
sohois
1yr ago
The whole case seems like a Toxoplasma of Rage classic. A scumbag whose guilt for the murder is near certain, but at the same time procedural errors in convictions get guilty people off all the time, or at least delayed. It's a surprise that the anti-death penalty people lost on this one as they rarely seem to take such high profile defeats. But for me the big question is why this awful, guilty murderer has been made a cause celebre. Sure, I just referenced toxoplasma of rage, but that only explains public attention. Why did the innocence project and other anti-death penalty campaigners choose this case to focus on? It's clearly going to be a disaster if anyone pays the slightest bit of attention!
sohois
1yr ago
Forums definitely wouldn't work if you carried on with motte-style megathreads, you'd have to create a new topic for each culture war item.
Which is basically what DSL does, and I find it perfectly readable. You do lose the accessibility that megathreads have, hence why so many people stay here and don't go to DSL, a lot of more niche topics would never get any attention with individual posts.
It's interesting you bring up Slack and Elements, as they are basically the next stage in internet discussion - which is Discord. As reddit cannibalized forums, so discord is cannibalizing reddit. And yet, I think if you polled older internet users who had experienced all three, you would get majority agreement that forums > reddits > discord. Nonetheless, the internet inexorably moves towards the latter.
sohois
1yr ago
Reddit threading only works for 1-1 conversations. As soon as you add in a couple of responders, you're either having multiple separate convos or just ignoring a lot of responses.
Whenever I write a top level post here, I'm usually responding to two, maybe three people and leaving the rest unanswered, because there's no way to keep up with 20 different responses. Each response is isolated, likely ignoring the content of other people's replies and failing to generate any kind of group discussion. It's one of the big annoyances of reading the Motte, you often have an interesting OP, 50 replies, and then perhaps 1 or 2 more in-depth conversations as everyone is replying to one person and not to each other.
Contrast with a forum thread, as soon as a top level post is made you have a group conversation ongoing, with people engaging with multiple other responses and a lot more depth.
Reddit threading is good for Q&A style discussion, and it works a lot better for "megathreads" like this one, but in most cases a forum is simply superior
sohois
1yr ago
The most stunning revelation I have seen on the motte is the fact that people actually like and prefer reddit-style discussions
sohois
1yr ago
I work in the energy sector. I have a number of colleagues whose primary motivation for their work is combatting climate change, and not other political goals
sohois
1yr ago
The capacity of a state is orthogonal to the merit of its actions. A lot of people would say that wars and the ability to conduct military actions are a bad thing, but everyone understands that a strong military is indicative of state capacity. Likewise welfare and education. These are massive administrative challenges that modern governments handle fairly well.
sohois
1yr ago
At least in EU, state capacity is the lowest it's been since 1800
Feels like this is hefty hyperbole or you are taking a very narrow view of state capacity. States in the 1800s were much, much simpler; even 100 years ago, the populations of western European nations were considerably smaller than they are now. Universal healthcare, pensions and wider welfare were all post-WW2 inventions. Regardless of whether these are good things, they are absolutely colossal administrative tasks.
In transport, 19th century nations were able to quickly roll out train and canal infrastructure, but they were building over nothing and there was very little in terms of good road networks and air traffic was yet to exist. Modern nations are running much larger transport networks with far more participants.
In infrastructure, national electricity networks were pretty much not a thing until post-WW1. Now there are grids crisis crossing nations with far more complex load balancing and generation mixes.
Universal education was another thing that didn't exist until the late 19th/early 20th century, and even once it was introduced the years spent and scale of schools needed were much smaller than today.
I think the reason for the poor view of modern state capacity can be mapped to a divergence in capacity and complexity. If you took 1800 as a starting point, you would see capacity grow with basically constant, linear growth, whereas complexity is exponential. Thus, there was a long period where capacity had a healthy gap to complexity, but eventually complexity surpassed state capacity and the gap has only grown. So even though absolute capacity is higher than it ever was, it looks like governments are incapable as the scale of challenges has grown a lot faster.
I've had posts appear in the "Highlights from the comments..." threads under a username in the past. Not seen any bias towards real names, the bigger issue is that it's likely too late for a comment to get noticed amongst thousands of others
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