sohois
1yr ago
It's entirely because they have the World Cup. You don't see anyone really going after the likes of Kuwait or the UAE.
sohois
1yr ago
At that point, why even bother with a reddit-like design? We might as well have migrated to DSL and just become a regular old forum
sohois
10mo ago
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
sohois
1yr ago
So your homeless shelter doesn't get built near your neighbourhood, or anywhere else in your city. Now what? You've addressed the point that such shelters will impose externalities on those living near them, but shelters themselves are not the cause, the homeless people are. And the lack of shelters will not actually remove those homeless people.
Perhaps they simply congregate in your city centre, making it increasingly unpleasant to be in as happened in many major American cities. Maybe they just start congregating in a random place, pitching their tents in some neighbourhood for no apparent reason - and perhaps they pick your neighbourhood, and you've got the problem anyway. What's the solution to this?
Obviously, with the homeless there are non-housing related options: you could try and simply ship them away to some other area, or have the police be much harsher on vagrancy and imprison many of them. In the first case, what's to stop these other areas from sending them back, or the homeless themselves from simply returning? Will you end up in an expensive cycle of carting the homeless back and forth? For the second, what about prison capacity? I can't imagine prison construction is any more popular than shelter construction, so where do you plan to build the extra prisons needed for the homeless population?
Admittedly, this example only applies to homeless shelters, and there are other examples like loud or foul smelling factories which might be better.
Let's turn to the housing question instead. As many of the other replies have noted, there is nothing wrong with wanting a nice neighbourhood, filled with familiar people. A lot of poor people are just unpleasant to be around and bring issues with them, and high housing prices do act as a barrier. But I think nimbys making this argument are not being logical or following the idea through to its conclusion.
I assume you're a homeowner in Madison, right? Maybe your house is worth $1 million or something. But I'm also going to assume that this is not a particularly large or impressive house, given the pressures on housing costs you mentioned? If we remove those restrictions and start heavily increasing density in the area, then perhaps your area will become less pleasant, with more bad people around.
Except: you'll still have the capacity to afford $1 million in housing. That's not going to vanish just because there are more houses in the area. Even in the yimby paradise of Japan, they succeeded in keeping property prices at the same level for ~20 years, not actually in lowering them - and if there was some unprecedented success in lowering housing costs, this would almost certainly take many years to accomplish, given existing homeowners time to realize value.
So now, instead of living in your $1 million 3 bed suburban house surrounded by other $1m suburban houses, you move to a $1 million 6 bed McMansion, surrounded by other McMansions. Your ability to spend money to preserve a certain living situation has not changed. What that money can buy has improved.
There is an argument that this only applies up to a limit: if you're already wealthy and can afford a 20 room mansion, there's no real room to move up. But putting aside the fact that this is a tiny niche of the population, if you have that kind of money there is already a solution: just buy land. Give yourself a couple of acres around your house. Don't want an apartment complex to block your view? Buy the land there, pay an appropriate fee to cover the loss to society.
sohois
1yr ago
No subsequent event has made me regret that decision.
If you had bought bitcoin or ethereum in 2012 you would likely have much greater wealth now. So this seems a very odd statement, unless you don't care at all about money
sohois
14d ago
What are you looking for in terms of age and mileage? How far would you be willing to push to get a better deal? I went from buying private, to buying at auction, to buying salvage at auction and repairing them myself so I've run the gamut. I'm going to assume you won't be doing the latter, but auction is still a viable route if you're okay to gamble a bit.
If you're going autotrader, then 10-15k will be more than enough to get a 'prestige' sedan, a BMW or Merc type. For comparison sake, I just sold a Jag XE, 2015, for around the 6k mark. I'd imagine that a 2015-17, 60-80k milage sedan from any of those brands would be fine. You'll want a diesel if fuel economy matters, especially in Scotland where you won't be taking so many short trips.
Would I recommend the XE? Probably not, it will be a bit more work than you would like although I think it is the best looking in that category. Really I don't think you'll do much wrong just finding an e220 or c-class Merc in that price range. If you want more mod-cons and keep the budget low, a Mazda 6 perhaps?
sohois
1yr ago
LoL doesn't involve any physical exertion, nor does it rely on reaction time or fast twitch movements like many other competitive video games. There is 'micro' involved, but all the top players will have equivalent skills, meaning everything comes down to macro gameplay. Just because it is a childish game with a toxic reputation shouldn't blind you to the fact that being good at it requires mental skill more than anything else.
sohois
1yr ago
I just cannot believe any studio would be so careless as to commit such a serious misfire.
How so? The history of production studios is littered with big bets that turned into disasters. Streaming services especially have had hundreds of hyped failures in their recent pasts. Plus, it is not as though RoP is actually a Waterworld or Heaven's Gate or similar; as you say, the perspective is that it isn't a "ground breaking masterpiece".
And how hard is it to make a ground breaking masterpiece? If we again look into film and TV history, the only thing we see from massive budgets is a tendency for productions to look expensive. There has never really been a way to guarantee high quality just from pumping money into something.
The so-called Golden age of TV appears to largely be creator driven if anything. But that's not really a guarantee either. Assuming that you could even convince a David Milch or Matthew Weiner to come and spend years on your Lotr indulgence instead of something they find interesting, there aren't really safe bets there. Both the above had recent flops, Weiner for Amazon Studios in fact. Even if you made the argument they could just hire Peter Jackson, one only needs to look at the Hobbit films.
I believe there was an article linked here which spoke of one of the big issues in current TV - not enough show runners. Streaming has become so voracious that everyone who has the skills to make TV is already locked into contracts. So maybe the relative no-names that Amazon hired were simply the best available? I'm sure there was a stringent enough interview process for them. Perhaps they hoped that they would grow into the role, and it didn't work out?
sohois
13d ago
I think given your budget you probably don't need to overthink it or look too much at advice here. You have enough to afford something recent without too many miles so really the only thing you want to think about is which car you like the look of. Plenty of people don't worry too much beyond that and do just fine.
Any of the prestige sedans will work for you. Some people will claim X brand has so many issues or to avoid one specific car, but most of this will just be anecdotal. No one owns enough cars to say that "every BMW is a pain". There will sometimes be known issues with certain models - e.g. the Jag XE ingenium engine had problems with the timing belt in early models. But these are rare and not normally catastrophic to deal with.
Other than Teslas, which have pretty poor reliability used, you can buy any of Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar, Volvo, Lexus, even Alfa Romeos are offering reliable cars these days. I would just look through these brands and find the one you like the look of most, then go and buy one. Personally I like the look of Jags, XE and newer XFs. I think the 2010 stylings of Audis and BMWs was a bit safe. Mercedes always does a decent job. I like the Volvo s90 a lot but that might be outside of your price range, and I'm less keen on the lower end volvos.
It's true that maintenance will be more expensive, much the same as a big house will cost more than a small house. Nice things always cost a bit more. But you would still be looking at a yearly service + MOT of around £300-£400. If you have issues it will run up the price, but this is true of any car. Of course you can also spend plenty on valeting, modifications, bodywork, tyres, etc. but this will be your choice.
When you come to buy, there are a couple of things to be aware of:
- Look for cars with "full service history" if you want maximum peace of mind, as this means they have been taken care of
- With a private sale, you can get extra detail by doing a free HPI check at sites like: https://hpicheck.com/. These will also give you a rough valuation
- Avoid cars marked as Cat N or Cat S. This means they have previously been written off
- Even if you know nothing about cars, just use your senses when test driving. Does it sound weird? Are there funny smells? Does it feel weird?
You're not that likely to get saddled with a lemon in the used car market, and although caveat emptor applies, there is some legal protection for complete deceptions. Mostly just a bit of common sense will be enough.
sohois
11mo ago
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?
sohois
1yr ago
People seem to credit him for inventing rationality and AI safety, and to both of those I can only say "huh?".
This seems pure pedantry. Obviously, the concept of rationality and ideas around optimizing for truth or utility have existed for a very long time. And there is plenty of science fiction which featured dangerous AI.
But I really can't imagine anyone even vaguely familiar with Yudkowsky or AI alignment or the rat-sphere would struggle with the claim that Yudkowsky "invented rationality and AI safety."
Capital-R Rationality is the modern groups that formed around the Bay-area subculture which Yudkowsky largely founded. It is MIRI, CFAR, Effective Altruism. It's Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, Julia Galef. It's LessWrong, SSC, and even this very forum.
And AI Safety? Yes, the concept existed. But the entire modern edifice of AI alignment all arose from Yudkowsky's initial writings on LessWrong. He was responsible for drawing attention to it, he lead MIRI for a while, he set down a great deal of theory.
I'm really struggling to believe someone smart enough to post on TheMotte would so easily be confused by this.
sohois
1yr ago
One of the reasons why lockdowns perform poorly in data measuring lockdown vs no lockdown seems to be that people largely restricted their own behaviour such that you had many people voluntarily locking down. This can be seen in graphs showing collapses in things like restaurant visits before any lockdowns are introduced.
So there's definitely a question of whether no lockdowns wouldn't have seen many negative economic impacts anyway. And, as you mentioned with places like Sweden, we live in a globalized world. Supply chain impacts from other countries locking down - especially china - would still have hit if some nations decided not to follow lockdown orthodoxy.
sohois
5mo ago
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.
sohois
8mo ago
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)
sohois
1yr ago
"Do you agree with [professor]" is the subject of every university-level exam.
sohois
1yr ago
I'm actually going to argue against slatestarcodex, despite it being the genesis of this place. /r/SSC was very intelligent, but I think a number of factors have drastically dragged down the level of discussion there.
One is just size, with the subreddit having grown rapidly as Scott's following has grown, and that will always bring down an average. And there is the problem of the motte itself: a lot of good commentators might have started at /r/ssc, but ended up migrating most of their comments to here, or to DSL, or even to lesswrong or the ACX open threads.
The somewhat directionless nature of the subreddit is another problem, since the early selection effects of the subreddit have now faded away, bringing in a lot of random commentators.
I'll still go there regularly, but nowadays it seems like only 1 in 10 comments is worth bothering with, compared to a much higher proportion before.
sohois
1yr ago
The Broken Earth trilogy is quite a bizarre read from a cultural perspective because of how it mangles its messaging despite ostensibly being very progressive. A straussian reading* of the book would have you thinking that eugenics is good and correct and racism is absolutely the right choice. But Jemisin's public notoriety clearly rules out that she's trying to do something like that, so you have to assume she is just really incompetent at creating a consistent political message - except that the books themselves are still really good, so I have no idea how it ended up so muddled.
*So the book is about a world that is riddled with massive, years-long natural disasters. Human towns are all organized by caste, with people set apart as good workers or breeders or administrators and so on. The towns are advised to maintain good ratios of these castes and to encourage breeding that helps this. This is never described as eugenics or really discussed within the books, it is just accepted as the right thing.
The main characters of the book are from a race blessed with magical, geomancy-like powers. This race is discriminated against harshly and called "roggers" or something obvious like that, I can't remember exactly. However, because of their power, every member of this race is basically capable of slaughtering entire towns, and children often have very little control over their powers and are shown accidentally killing other children. In this context, the fear people have of them is clearly the correct stance and in most cases it would be wise to avoid the geomancers or require them to be closely controlled.
sohois
1yr ago
The responses below have already explained the scandals that brought Boris down, but another point is that Boris failed to get any credit in the bank; after the Brexit deal, his government basically achieved nothing despite a large majority.
There were plenty of external factors that Boris had no control over, for which he was pretty unlucky. Covid, of course. Even if Boris had stuck to the original plan of "let it rip" and herd immunity, the rest of the world is still going to lockdown, destroying supply chains and driving inflationary forces. British borrowing would be in a better place at least, but that wouldn't stave off inflation and a recession.
The invasion of Ukraine is probably still happening. In fact the response to this was one of Boris's few successes, so if it didn't happen he wouldn't be better off. And even if he had immediately commissioned a dozen nuclear power plants after the GE, there is nothing he could have done about the energy crisis which engulfed Europe, due to the blunders of Germany.
But there is plenty he could have done. Immigration was a major driver of Brexit, with voters eager for reductions to both legal and illegal migration. Yet the Tories responded to heavy reductions in EU immigration by massively expanding visa numbers to other nations. And they have seemingly done nothing for waves of English channel crossings that have occupied papers day after day.
Another big promise was "leveling up", spreading economic benefits to left-behind areas of the country that had switched to the Tories and reducing the dependence on London. Other than the continued lumbering forward of the HS2 rail line, I can't recall a single policy that might have done anything about this.
sohois
1yr ago
I think reddit style discussion works much better when discussions are very large, with many participants. Forums are much better when it's smaller in scale, and you're not constantly producing these monstrous chained quotes. If you get rid of the megathread approach, small scale discussions would dominate I believe
sohois
12d ago
If you're doing a deal online, it will be with a used car dealer like Cazoo. Which there probably isn't anything wrong with, you'll get peace of mind, but you also pay a big premium. If you're buying from a private seller, you'll need to do it in person, and the best platform is Autotrader.
A lot of private sellers probably won't be willing to take the car to a mechanic for you, and used car dealers certainly wouldn't.
I'm not sure on automatic premium, probably sub 1k for an identical year/mileage car? So about a 10% premium at your budget.
sohois
1mo ago
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.
sohois
1mo ago
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
sohois
3mo ago
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.
This is probably too "boo outgroup", but given the direct relation I felt it was probably worth sharing.
Our once and former (?) moderator TracingWoodgrains has been called out as "a sociopathic troll" who exists to create anti-transgender drama. This is according to transgendermap.com, a pro-trans website which has built a list of communities toxic to the transgender movement.
The focus on Trace comes from their look at Blocked and Reported, and includes a list of ideologically affiliated subreddits, including:
It seems that the move came at the right time, since if we weren't particularly noticeable before, we likely are now.
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