A few weeks ago, in my community, based on rumors I thought Trump was announcing Venezuelan intervention and made a megathread for his speech and its aftermath. Nothing happened. A bit later it actually happened... On the other hand, I totally dropped the ball on Greenland - those topics would just emerge out of unrelated threads etc. Modding is hard.
veqq
4d ago
I've written a lot about Iran and political alternatives, but it's hard to find the posts. tldr: The people are good and friendlier to the West than many in the West, the government is the opposite and very repressive.
After big terrorist attacks, many groups claim credit to display impact and efficacy. Similarly, one can easily imagine relevant groups here claiming a martyr or presuming her involvement - it strengthens the besieged narrative too.
veqq
5d ago
Can we get some links to full videos that aren't on Mass Media website? Navigating those with all of their ads and popus - even with AdBlocker - is a nightmare. The first one I saw, also, was only a clip of about the final ten seconds.
This seems to have collected the different angles at the beginning and then random coverage afterwards (didn't watch that far).
This is just the main video.
veqq
8d ago
I expected an answer like "at this url click so and so button and you can see them"
Why are you affecting this tone. Surely you've mistaken me for someone else, because I've had an account since September 2022, which suggests the last warning was 8 months ago.
arguing
I would like to ask when I've argued with any mod (I try to never argue but only add color/details), but you began this interaction assuming insincerity. I didn't even defend my above comment, I was just confused that it wasn't the first such one I've made. Worse, the thing I thought was a warning with we didn't have a warning at all...
veqq
8d ago
Feynman Technique
It doesn't seem to be a technique at all, just... Trying to explain it, then try again addressing any issues you had etc. It's the basic process of learning/thinking (with others' critiquing) which is... what conversation is. I suppose this is a very interesting failure mode (of overall human networking), where too many people engaging with a topic before really understanding reduces overall knowledge!
You've been warned before about low-effort boo posts
When? Is there a way to see? As far as I remember, the only mod interaction was because someone thought to fellow users with "we" is bad.
veqq
13d ago
veqq
15d ago
For $60 on Aliexpress 3-4 years ago, they asked for measurements, then cut, made and sent a rather nice and thick leather jacket which has protected me from an attempted stabbing and from a guy swinging a chain. After a few years, there are still no defects. I am shocked by the quality and was surprised to see Jackie Chan wearing it.
I would say 150+ years of mass immigration before American total hegemonic power
Sure, people don't really care about "power" - but wealth? Already from the mid 17th century, America was more or less the wealthiest place in the world per capita and really broke away from Europe in the 18th century.
And precisely this mindset's why the US, yea West is decaying - instead of infinite striving for excellence, those raised here sit on past laurels and cope away anything better. Living without curiosity is comfortable lest you learn something new and convert everything around you into tech debt to work on - yet that comfort's disappeared, hence our entire community, formed around discussions of cost disease and cultural decline.
More glib, is America, are Americans really just better because of superior protestant-frontier culture - even though they lost their mandate and lack children to be replaced? What distinguishes Chinese in America from those in the PRC, home grown communists from foreign infiltrators, pedophiles from the heartland like Hastert and Foley from Afghan bachah-lovers and Pakistani groomers? REV Group closed factories and quintupled prices so an (inferior!) American firetruck costs a magnitude more than Chinese or even German vehicles, which our communities must pay for, our world is on fire, and you say nothing's wrong.
veqq
18d ago
Because an invasion of the homeland is so unlikely
Our homeland, Europe has been invaded.
Household consumption being 40% of GDP means households receive 40% of national income to spend. The rest goes to the state and corporate sectors, funding the investment-heavy model. Even if every yuan buys more calories than we thought, that doesn't change the share going to households versus the share going to industrial buildout.
Not so fast, different systems of national accounting and different relative prices complicate matters.
Chinese housing area/person roughly equals Germany's and energy consumption is nearly there, yet constitutes 25% of Geman PPP GDP per capita, with about 12.5k rent/utilities. Would both use similar systems, China's would be about 10k PPP, while lised PPP GDP/capita is... about 25k. Yet Chinese don't spend 40% on housing and energy, indeed housing's only a few percent of Chinese GDP (this is the imputed rent issue I harp on about). Remember, this is all PPP - supposedly adjusted...
Where US retail sales are 7.3T and Chinese 6.6T, US HFCE is 20T or 2.8x retail sales, while Chinese's is about 6.8T or 1x retail sales? (Then consider changing exchange rates when making the dollar numbers.) How can you compare US and Chinese numbers when the US' includes education, healthcare, travel, imputed rent and China's is just retail sales? @sarker
How is China getting the 70+% of its oil imports in this future?
Oil demand is decreasing if still slowly. Gasoline use is down. Last year, heavy vehicle use made up half of Chinese LNG consumption, which would look like substitution - but LNG demand is decreasing faster and faster. Huge solar and nuclear build outs are taking over (coal consumption is also dropping due to rapid construction of more efficient plants) and today, 22% of new heavy trucks there are electric. China is also building out synthetic natural gas plants enabled by cheap solar creating an effective price ceiling at $80 BOE.
veqq
18d ago
in purely thermodynamic terms, if literally everything is cheaper in China, you can ignore standard macroecon, largely eschew exports, subsidize domestic demand and make Qianlong's boast a reality.
Capital begets capital. Increased capital concentration decreases costs of production and labor requirements. Left to expand forever, no one should ever catch up - but everywhere but China (so far) the greatest capital accumulations eventually succumbed to suicidal regulation and extracting value to subsidize non-productive sectors.
veqq
18d ago
Won't the US enjoy a quantitative and qualitative superiority in AI though, based on the compute advantage, through to at least the 2030s?
What does that gain you when China can move matter?
veqq
21d ago
4, 10
Yes.
20, 30
Probably. What's even the difference between fake and wrong?
It's really hard to measure things or make conclusions from them. E.g. if this recent paper is true, modern neoclassical economics and DSGE models etc. are wrong (because tariffs have the opposite impact). I don't think we can really know. But we've had unmeasured endogenous money creation for a long time. Asset prices and credit cycles seem to drive the economy lately, but IDK how to incorporate those into some metric doing what inflation measurements should do.
No, you just wildly misunderstood[1] my point and think I (or rather my company) am too lazy to understand basic metrics. I am saying that OER is bad and not correlated to actual housing costs. Neither mortgage and insurance payments nor differences in total purchasing vs. rental costs are captured (depending on the geography, renting can be twice or half as much as buying). BLS lags and assumes price increases are gradual such that the sampled month only shows 1/6 of the change but rental prices do not go up a few dollars per month but have big, occasional changes based on new tenants etc. (Yes, this should be smoothed and averaged out but... I am arguing that's not what's done here.) To be clear, I don't think housing is currently a big inflation driver e.g. the New Tenant index showed a much faster decline.
[1] fair, not like I effort post or think about word choice. I e.g. don't know why I focused on CPI vs. the others which I also have problems with. CPE's the only one with fed targets...
Of course! I've lazy posted about this for years. Obviously, the basket of goods a person uses has gone up wildly more than the official numbers suggest - just compare the prices of food now and in your childhood. When you normalize different categories or baskets with wage increases, hours worked and labor productivity, it gets especially bad. We have also had wildly inflationary policy for decades now, which must increase to service debt while we're in a commodity supercycle where molecules matter again.
The dynamics are weird. I've known Iranian refugees who settled in e.g. Hungary (which doesn't want any and makes it quite hard) while Germany often denies cases of conversion to Christianity, some official going after the family etc. but accepts gay people. (Tangentially, sex changes are a mandatory solution to homosexuality in Iran - by 1987 Molkara convinced the Ayatollah.) There is a huge brain drain of them going to grad school in Europe or Turkey, so many girls doing MAs or PhDs in STEM to escape. The wealthy have also largely fled - in some nicer malls in Turkey every woman has that fake nose...
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