tkt
8d ago
tkt
23d ago
That's kind of funny, hereabouts it's AFAICT a whole trope that men are prone to bonding over the shared (ridiculously alien to regular modern life and in many ways unpleasant) experiences of the semi-mandatory military service, and the ladies will get vocally frustrated if the dudes don't have the good sense to keep away from that immensely boring-to-them topic when they're around.
tkt
2mo ago
no soft power
The thing is that the US has crazy, overflowing amounts of soft power, it's just divided up between sides of a political scene pumping out content to to own the opposite side. So the half of Euros that buy into the Left side of the flood will of course be getting the message that America is basically Idiocracy, a country of cartoonish bigoted white supremacist cro-magnons. The growing share that is inundated more in the Right side of the slop will see America as the pink-haired jerks who are coming up with all this trans woke covid-lockdowns refugee rights stuff and exporting it here wholesale so we have to suffer it too. Pick either side of the stream and we get the crisp message that America is a sad, twisted, evil dystopia except for some plucky underdogs who barely matter.
derisive attitudes
IME though that feels halfway like an universal white-collar bonding ritual to assimilate and make friends most places in the world and be at home. US migrants elsewhere sure go for it. A surefire topic the cosmopolitan class of any country likes is how dumb and backwards the general populace is, how cringy the local folkways, and how surely other countries have it better.
tkt
3mo ago
FWIW I work on a tangly close-to-hardware C++ codebase that jumps through ridiculous hoops for perf optimization. A half year ago the frontier models did look incapable of doing anything useful here. Now after the new Gemini came out I gave AI another try, and so far it seems to actually get nontrivial tasks done with some prodding. Might be a lucky set of tasks I’ve had on hand, IDK. It’s getting together working, clean code changes in a minute that I think might take me a half hour and several rounds of trial and error.
tkt
4mo ago
What are the Ukrainian people afraid of, being conquered by Russia?
Well, maybe the recent example of how it went in the Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics as Russia-aligned puppet states? Reading Telegrams at the time, they managed to degenerate the nicest, wealthiest, most industrialized and most pro-Russian regions of Ukraine into two ridiculous Mad Max failed states of tortuous adventurer warlords, with a drafting effort that makes the current Ukrainian one look tame. The conditions and governance sounded so surreally bad that I'd have chalked it up to shameless war propaganda, except it was all coming from people wholeheartedly on the Russian side of the fence and in on the action.
One can come up with all sorts of arguments a totally overrun Ukraine would end up nicer than LPR/DPR, like another Belarus or something, or arguments it could be about as bad. "As bad" is godawful compared to Europe with migration. The current grinding forever war seems way nicer than LPR/DPR, or even a serious risk of going LPR/DPR.
tkt
5mo ago
With most now-rich founder tech CEOs I could buy that. With CPUs, GPUs, OSs, social networks, whatever, there was a stable of plausible looking competitors and one caught a lead and rolled up into a progressively fatter cat that no other could compete with, network effects and all that, and maybe any one of them could have done just as well. ('anybody' seems a stretch, say, I'd most likely screw it up if asked to be a team lead of a team of any size. I might manage to manage a kitten but wouldn't bet on it. Very happy that tech companies have an IC track. And probably it takes a more select type to be a startup founder that doesn't fizzle out than, say, a Starbucks franchise boss or line manager wherever)
But SpaceX? Why would you expect some socioeconomic factors to turn up the same thing if there wasn't a idiosyncratic space maniac Elon driving it? There have been any numbers of attempts at space startups with comparatively incredibly lame results. Probably the most serious one has been Blue Origin where (if we believe the AI slop Google gives me for the search prompt) Bezos has likely poured in 100x as much of his own money as Elon did, and managed one (1) orbital flight so far, and some tens of 'hey we edged just over 100km so we can claim our tourists visited space' which tends to be peak space startup achievement. Is there any reason to think that swapping out Elon some random other boss wouldn't end up with at most a Virgin Galactic, instead of the wildly implausible looking outcome of first catching up with the established fat cat aerospace companies that had been doing this for decades at scale and made a giant government-funded grift of it, and then undercutting them on launch cost by 20x?
tkt
6mo ago
I mean the issue is that we're not selecting very hard for actual high skill / rare skill people.
As a one-time applicant, H1B kind of seems to anti-select for high skill a bit. If you have legible skills in demand (like when I had lucked on a momentarily hot PhD topic), you probably have other options too, and are less likely to keep taking a stab at a vaguely demeaning 1/5 hit rate lottery with 1 year between draws, a ridiculous stack of paperwork to get that lottery ticket, and a delay of months to even find out if you got the short straw. I did one attempt at H1B, didn't win the lottery, then the firm trying to hire me wanted me to go for O-1 next which had its own set of offputting hoops to jump through; and rather than stay more months in a bureaucratic limbo working from the wrong time-zone, I ended up signing on at a local subsidiary of an US bigcorp instead.
In this European office, taxes are higher, salary maybe has a bit of a cut vs. California, and climate is worse, but OTOH there is more vacation and no 60h work week hustle, cost of living is modest, I'm way in top 1% of the country's income stats, and would likely feel less well off at SV. If I was dead set on maximum earnings, my first pick now would be to try and finesse a transfer to Zurich where in turn I'd make more after taxes than US. Some friends in my techy bubble did manage to migrate to the States, at least one via O-1 and one via some roundabout route of being a postdoc researcher first. They've expressed envy that my office's mostly Europeans instead of mostly Asians that are 90% of the workforce over there.
OTOH if H1B is your one great shot at exiting a drab developing country, you're probably way more likely to keep plugging at the lottery year after year and finally make it through.
tkt
6mo ago
TBF it probably helped I was in a provincial university in the boondocks, a ways from the city center, so it was a hassle to go there on bicycle, narrowing down the food options. Like, the nearby options for anything with fries or bread or pasta were mostly famiresu chains that are sort of a weird uncanny valley imitation of some American diner. There was IIRC way more pasta and sandos in Tokyo. Going to the city center there was the best pasta I'd tasted to date but I wouldn't burn an hour+ of a day on the bicycle too often to get there :P. And I was on budget, which would bias me toward the school cafeteria or cheapo rice bowl places like Sukiya that didn't really give an urge to have the meal with extra everything. Going to visit as a grown up tourist with techie salary I engorge myself way more on the good stuff, so I guess moving there wouldn't have the same salutary effect anymore, unless I simultaneously went broke.
tkt
6mo ago
Japanese food is extremely dated in nutrition and food trends. It is so to such a degree that I suspect it’s a sort of fashion or cliquish refusal to update rather than a lack of knowledge or interest. (South Korea next door has a very modern and nutritious food culture- eating healthy is significantly easier there than in Japan.)
On personal anecdote this feels kind of more of an indictment of the modern Western nutrition and food knowhow, whatever that consists of. I spent an year there, and basic Japanese university cafeteria chow + restaurant food had me lose 15kg, going from overweight to borderline normal, in a few months, without any special effort on my part. Like, a bowl of rice + some toppings would have me totally lose any sense of hunger for the rest of the day while keeping me energetic and alert (and doing more exercise than ever since), and I'd have to consciously try and eat more than that. Seems to work fine on the native population too.
tkt
9mo ago
It feels very highly British that the article brings up a crime of "criminal conversation" and a "peculiar court".
tkt
11mo ago
And they have plenty of human capital
Hard to say. Most of the births are now in the countryside to poor peasant farmers. Hardly “elite human capital”
One of Scott's book reviews had a neat thesis that homesteading peasants are the first step of the magic formula that produced the Asian tiger countries.
But even beyond this, Studwell talks up the almost spiritual benefits of land reform. In a typical land reform measure, an equal amount of land gets allotted to every peasant family. This is about as close as anything ever comes to the completely fair starting position that eg John Locke liked to fantasize about. Everyone gets to work for themselves in their own little small business, reaping the consequences of their own decisions. The generation who grow up immediately after a land reform tend to be thrifty, hard-working, honest, and civic-minded. They go on to found all of the giant world-spanning Toyota-style companies you get in the next round of development.
Totally would expect this to produce a better sort of human capital than the Western combo of iPad + tiktok + sleeping through primary ed.
Tried very cursorily to search if the Chinese peasants are the homesteading sort and got as first hit a local paper which sounds like yes, and they now want to run down the homestead system. Maybe that's how they finally fall flat.
Dunno how much it actually factors into anybody's decisions here, but the Trump admin's urgings in the spirit of 'oh the strait is open now, just sail, we've blown everything up and it's pretty safe now actually' and 'hey Euros/Japanese/etc please send escort ships, come on, don't be sissies' and related forum discussions of how doing otherwise is pathological risk aversion, feel a bit unconvincing while the US has a ridiculously formidable naval presence thereabouts, and keeps it way, way away from the Gulf, flying all the sorties in an expensive tricky way using tanker planes.
Like, I'd expect that those carrier groups include several of the very best ships on the planet for defending against every sort of airborne threat. If the new lethal warlike US Department of War visibly doesn't dare risk dipping a little warrior toe in the gulf, is it very surprising if most big slow unarmed tankers won't be that enthused either, nor the inferior warships of every other country. Maybe something even changes up a bit if the US actually brings in those Marine landing ships instead of leaving them hovering menacingly a few hundred km away.
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