Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
6hr ago
The US had to be cajoled and suckered into joining the War, three years late. WWI is actually a very strange thing in that, while there was popular enthusiasm for it that we can't imagine today (essentially, the chickenhawkery seen on the right with GWOT and from libs with Slava Ukraini, but actually followed through by going to the Front), the path from assassination to war was the first disaster of modern bureaucracy. The sluggishness of Austria, the complacency of Germany, the paranoia of Russia, the confusion of France, the duplicity of the British Foreign Office, and the do-gooding sociopathy of the Wilson Administration all, when you look at the details, look far more like the spring of 2020 than they do anything out of the 19th Century.
Bartender_Venator
6hr ago
He or I could write the same post about DSA guys in barcade neighbourhoods of big cities (though I don't have much reason to - everyone on this site is familiar with redditors) and you'd give it the exact same response. Also, it's "diametrically", not "diagonally".
Bartender_Venator
7hr ago
The Spanish royal family has not been genetically Spanish in any meaningful sense since the House of Trastamara died out. However, they are still not white, as they married into the House of Savoy and are therefore Italian.
Bartender_Venator
7hr ago
One of the great paradoxes of political economy is that the free market is the creation of the State, and must be carefully stewarded by the State if it is to survive. In fact, after law and public order, it's probably the paramount criterion of good governance in the modern age. How free are your markets = how good is your State.
Bartender_Venator
16hr ago
Luna is incredibly useful if you have a task scoped right for it. Funnily enough, low effort seems to perform better than high/xhigh, because the latter keep trying to find a way to galaxy-brain their way around simple evaluation tasks.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Maybe I should have expanded on that: when you use LLMs a lot you have to be careful about putting their own tics into your style. It's something I notice myself when I'm dashing off posts here. Much of the post is very evidently human writing, and then, in one or two paragraphs (I'm guessing the ones you kind of dashed off in between the more major events), you're dropping LLMisms that stand out.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Kristin Stewart could have done it perfectly if she didn't take the arthouse route. She even has similar physiognomy to Gosling.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
The old version was begging for a verdict. This version was loading a gun.
Too much Claude man.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Open borders and demographic replacement is a, if not the, mainstream Blue Tribe progressive position, though obviously they would not use those exact phrases.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Bro you are looking at a story of successful modern-day assimilation. This guy has assimilated as thoroughly into the Blue Tribe as any Rawhide Kobayashi.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
What I find really funny is that, right before the war, I was in Ukraine, and I said "Kiev" - my guide's face darkened, he took me around the back of an armoured van, and he explained "I know this is what you say in the west, you should not say that here, it's sensitive, might cause trouble. You say Kyiv" and coached me on how to pronounce it like a Ukrainian until I got it right. But it's nothing at all like how westerners now pronounce "Keev", it's more like "Kyuff". I know that you should never expect libs to understand any of the cultures they valorize, but this drives the absurdity home to me every time it comes up.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
I also do not recommend adopting the parenting habits of poor families in the Bronx, just pointing out the distance in experience. I was a horrifically picky eater growing up, but kids often grow out of it (it helped, also, to grow up in the first generation to learn that broccoli, brussels sprouts, etc. could actually be delicious if you char them instead of mushifying them).
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
It does seem to me that the most parsimonious explanation is that the developers involved in this are mostly treating it as a gold rush rather than coming in with well-thought-out plans. OK, maybe it's cheaper to convert an old company headquarters into a data center, but it's also certainly understandable that people don't like it. Not helped by the AI companies' intentionally terrible PR strategies.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
I think it's important to note when someone's pulling a fast one like that.
I honestly struggle to discern which of these possible points he's making:
- We should confiscate the wealth of antisocial financiers and redistribute it
- The top end of the capitalist economy is parasitic, the wealthy should be taxed heavily and the money given to the workers via subsidized groceries (n.b. the top band of NYC income tax currently starts at $50/60/90k/yr depending on marital status)
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
I agree. Rural communities correctly believe that their local government will absolutely shaft them in return for short-run gains, and data centers pattern-match to that hard - and in many cases probably are tech companies trying to shaft the community by promising the local government short-term gains. I'm not sure how to fix this except for tech companies explicitly targeting governance trust/quality in their location decisions.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Well, the only way out of capitalism, that doesn't involve replacing big macs with eating grass to survive, runs through building an AI capable enough to simulate the economy and coordinate economic decision-making (this was already obvious in 1970). It's really a mark of the deep intellectual unseriousness of leftists that they're freaking out about Current Thing AI instead of scheming to align it their way.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
I'm a great believer in the Hamiltonian-Listian outlook too. However, in the long run, price is the only true discipline in economics, and you can't count on wise men forever.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
It would greatly reduce confusion if in future mods drop a modhat comment saying "banned and removed for ban evasion".
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
I could imagine a cyberpunk future where ultralights are the main form of solo transportation.
The Okavango Delta and central Botswana are pretty much like this, particularly the Okavango. More dieselpunk vibes, though.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
The shared reactionary/populist explanation of that is that the people don't want to have no elites, they want to have good elites, and we certainly don't have those. But the idea that abolishing the jury trial is the solution assumes that the fish is not rotting from the head down. South Africa abolished jury trials because even the Apartheid regime realized that the populace were too racially polarized to deliver justice, but they had a judiciary and assessorate genuinely committed to the rule of law and to public order, whereas many of our judiciary and many more of our professors of law are less committed to that than the man on the street.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
This is the Moldbug thesis: everything that actually works is a vertical command structure restrained/guided by price mechanisms. With, uh, certain fluctuations, because the price mechanism is a cruel mistress.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Nobody hates shoplifters like a low-wage clerk who has to watch it every day and isn't allowed/able to do anything. One time in Chicago I thought the kid at the counter was about to launch into that one Chris Rock bit.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Yeah, poor kids in the Bronx don't have those sort of preferences, or if they do they get beat with the cooking spoon till they don't.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
That article does not support the claim you're using it to make.
There's a natural desire for symmetry, equivalence, in these things, but symmetry in intranational political psychology is by definition rare. The data center thread earlier gives a better view into the mindset of the modern Republican - he is essentially moved by suspicion. Where Lauren is over-credulous, Bob is over-suspicious (well, accurately suspicious with respect to Our Institutions, but it takes incredible epistemic depravity to justify Bob's level of suspicion).
For Edward E. Expert, my experience is that they basically say what they think. If you read The Economist and Foreign Policy, and I guess some academic journals about race and so on, you have his number.
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