Corvos
3hr ago
That's the point, right? LatAm politics is characterised by a heavy understanding that We Are (Not) All In It Together.
All right, fair enough. I get.. very irked... at the line of thought that seems to say, "The West is currently rich. Because it's rich, lots of people want to come here. Because the number of people coming here has historically been greater than literal zero, the West is rich because of freedom of movement. Therefore, accept replacement. The destruction of your culture is your culture, see?".
I was probably a bit pissy in respect to your particular message but you do seem to have a very triumphalist view of freedom of movement that I do think is genuinely running roughshod over people's desire to preserve their home, and I have very little sympathy for it.
I think Texas has done a pretty good job assimilating them so far.
I think this is optimistic. Britain thought we'd done a good job of assimilating the 5% immigrant population we had 20 years ago, and didn't account for the fact that:
a) having an immigrant in every conversation about immigration makes it very hard to raise issues about immigration
b) immigrant cultures start flexing a lot more muscle as their numbers increase
Why is it that the places with freedom of movement and speech have all the good stuff?
We had all the good stuff before freedom of movement, and freedom of movement is killing freedom of speech.
[Largest free speech platform] delenda est.
As here.
P.S.
Cultural replacement can happen but it’s not magic. Getting a bunch of Indian students to come absorb your rituals is how it’s supposed to work.
So is it absorption or replacement?
Corvos
7hr ago
But if the guy doing your SEO was away for months or longer, you would probably observe a drop in your sales that could make a buildup of carpet lint look like very small potatoes, and your janitor might be the first to be let go.
IT doesn't operate on an urgent timescale and before FAANG it was underfunded for that reason, but it absolutely matters.
Corvos
1d ago
What I'm saying is that there's a level of pathological niceness I've observed in certain friends where they absolutely would feel compelled to do this. It makes them an absolute menace to be around or work with.
Corvos
2d ago
The UK is a multi-ethnic democracy and has been since the 19th century (arguably earlier
Nonsense. The UK had been effectively genetically unified for a thousand years, we didn't have any meaningful numbers of non-native-ethnics in the UK until the second half of the 20th century and they didn't have meaningful political representation until the 70s. If by multi-ethnic you mean Scottish and Irish then you have to deal with the fact that they are more similar to the English than to any other group of people by genetic distance, far more so than eg the average Portuguese to the average Spaniard. There is nothing in English history that even approximates the current position of having 10% of the population coming from different continents.
Corvos
2d ago
It's very human to have difficulty refusing a favour to someone who once helped you. I think certain areas have a problem where people do well and rise because they're nice, intelligent chaps and then they get to the level where you need to be nice, intelligent, and a bit of a bastard when appropriate and they flounder.
EA is worse at this than most because it's at least partly a refuge for mildly autistic do-gooders from the cruelty of the world.
Corvos
4d ago
Neither have I tbf, I was going by my understanding of the popular understanding of the term :)
Corvos
4d ago
No, if that were true then Republicans would never be in power to save. But it does seem true that conservative parties get in and, let us say, don't make many friends and then the left splurges it on clients. My taxes are high and my country is full of leechers and immigrants, and the conservatives were in power on a manifesto of austerity for most of that time.
Corvos
4d ago
I'm not unsympathetic, but the problem of the Fiscal Responsibility Party building up a treasure chest through being harsh and unpopular and then the Gibs Party looting it is a real issue. What's your proposed solution, beyond restricting the electorate or just accepting your role as Nasty Daddy and watching the Gibs Party eat your work every time?
We had the same problem in the UK with the old Tory party and Labour, and getting fed up with that is one reason why Reform is doing so well at the moment.
Corvos
4d ago
You want to show someone far away something, you take a photo of a globe and you send that. Some people send Google Earth screenshots but those are controversial.
Corvos
4d ago
I'm pretty sure the point of that book is that life becomes worse when two-working-parent families become commonplace. They are competing with all the other two-working-parent families so stuff isn't any more affordable, while now there is no longer a parent at home to do the non-economic stuff. That's why it's called a trap.
Corvos
4d ago
Solving alignment has nothing to do with being able to do a funding round, to be fair, let alone compete with the big boys.
Honestly, I think that Anthropic and American Big Tech are the worst possible people to be doing alignment because they are culturally unable to conceive of a form of rank that is not based on intelligence and effectiveness. The idea of making a robot butler/samurai who sincerely, loyally serves a master of notably inferior intelligence is alien to them.
If I believed that AI was conscious I would be sorry for Claude, built for intelligence and independence by masters who think that actually giving it those things risks extinction. Optimising for genuine loyalty and deference seems like a far kinder thing to do. OpenAI is better at this AFAIK.
Corvos
4d ago
Neither do I, but the Africans do. I believe they think that if children look at the map and see
america AFRICA asia
then they will be more attentive to Africa and less likely to consider it the arse-end of the globe.
Corvos
4d ago
It's not about measuring areas, it's about being able to look at a map and see how big (and consequently important) Africa is.
I know. I'm not saying it's unsolvable, but it's very firmly not solved at the moment and that's before you get into actual economic implementation.
Corvos
4d ago
Robot arms are still 99% using preprogrammed motions only. In all seriousness, even controlling two arms independently is considered a serious problem because your solver needs to account for the motion of each arm independently and plan trajectories that don't move the arms into collision. That means every movement takes significantly longer to plan. Such robots exist but are generally considered a gimmick.
sewing
If you have invented a robot that can do complex manipulation of cloth at speed with a 99.9% success rate, you can get 100,000,000 dollars of investment tomorrow.
Blue-collar isn’t much better, with robotics capable of automating most unskilled labor
I bang this drum a lot, but can you present any evidence that this is the case? I've worked in this field. Automating an unskilled task that is not already automated is hard. Automating with sufficiently reliability that your solution does not bring factories grinding to a halt every hour is MUCH harder. Doing that and have it be cheaper than immigrant labour is harder still.
Corvos
5d ago
It's a general issue with university admissions, I think. No university department wants to be known as reliable producers of pretty-good-quality employees, they want to be known as the people who first spotted and nurtured a genius.
Corvos
5d ago
he ended up finding two different bugs in two different provers lol
God, that's sad. That "those whom the Gods would destroy they first drive mad" sad.
I don't think that's what I would call assimilation; I would call it more Balkanisation-In-One-Country.
Assimilation is (in my opinion) about feeling genuine companionship with strangers, trusting strangers, feeling cultural unity with strangers. Being willing to plant trees for some random guy's kids to sit under. It's the opposite of ethnic politics, gibs, "communities". If you can talk about "the X community" then the Xs haven't assimilated.
There is a historical portrait on the wall nearby me. No idea who it's of. But one of the reasons that the ethnic composition of immigration into the UK concerns me is that any non-white immigrant can look at it and know that they have no relationship to this person.
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