Bingbong
2d ago
Yeah I mean the main barrier to this stuff in the West at this point is keeping the homeless/drug enthusiasts out of the shared communal greenspaces which a lot of Asian countries are more willing to actually attempt.
Bingbong
2d ago
The biggest difference is the lack of a racially distinct criminal underclass that completely ruins places like detroit.
I mean this plus lack of drugs/homeless plus actual occasional infrastructure investment plus a sense from the government that the local variety of underclass isn't totally subordinate to the economic hack of importing in new underclasses plus manufacturing roles plus affordable cost of living.
I'm not gonna pretend I've been through every part of China and personally inspected the most remote parts but I've been through sub top-100 cities in China and they tend to be generally fine.
Bingbong
3d ago
Yeah it's not perfect but there's a sense of optimization and that things are being built towards some sort of developed future. Plus cost of living's reasonable and there's recent memory of things being much much worse in most of those regions.
I'd much rather be born in a Chinese low-tier city than like Detroit or Hull, more chance of upward mobility.
Bingbong
3d ago
I haven't been to low-tier Chinese cities for the most part but in my experience even the suburbs of the 1st & second-tier have a lot of redundancy and buildout even into the suburbs. Plus the insane scale of Chinese Ecommerce means that access to big box stores is probably less important than it is in most of the West.
Bingbong
3d ago
Yeah I'm basing this on ones I saw in the midst of the greater Guangzhou area and the sheer congregation of wealth there surely means you'd be paying a lot for the rare landed places.
Bingbong
3d ago
Maintain a Singapore quality city in the US and I don't doubt many suburbanites would trade the yard and those extra beds/baths for a condo.
I've got in-laws who live in Singapore in government housing, so I've spent a week or two staying over. One main issue of the HDB setup is that it makes it very hard to have more than 2 or 3 kids (arguably part of the point of the HDB system when first imposed to stop Malays and Singaporean-Chinese defaulting to ridiculous family sizes), but yeah it's otherwise a very well-designed system of '15 minute cities' and well-maintained public goods that work pretty well for family creation.
Bingbong
3d ago
My brother, why do you not live in India if there are no issues there? There's an infinite supply of potent human capital if only people with the drive and ability to organize and build a glittering future for the subcontinent instead of running to hang out in the West.
Bingbong
3d ago
Also as somebody who lives in Asia/wander aimlessly around China fairly frequently the attraction of the Pod apartment is higher when you've got a genuine 15 minute city. I've spent time staying over in friends' HDBs in Singapore and whilst there's no personal yard, there's good access to shared utilities & minimal nonsense from apartment neighbors compared to when I've lived in the West and had to deal with potential homeless/drug encounters
Bingbong
3d ago
Landed houses do exist in China but they're fairly rare. I've seen enough random townhouse developments from the train even on the edge of big metros (though I assume the cost of entry would be pretty insane)
Bingbong
3d ago
Yeah as far as I understand 996 is more about crunch/certain prestige roles as opposed to being a universal expectation of labor, also having done early-days startup grind in Australia and put in 80-hour weeks before it happens everywhere occasionally. Hell, I even know consulting friends who do it regularly despite minimal actual upside and eroding their hourly wages to something horrible.
Yeah. Apu from the Simpsons was the prevailing stereotype for a generation essentially, though I guess even his visa was originally obtained for tech research of some sort if I recall correctly.
If anything the newer cohort making their money through wishy-washy Tech & Consulting roles has probably done a lot to dent the image compared to back when it was motels, convenience stores and doctors. There's a sense amongst the general public that tech employment is a gigantic rort, and a sense amongst non-Indian tech workers that Indians have essentially zero qualms in giving eachother massive assistance in finding these roles and gaming the fuck out of a system defined by nebulously clinging to a gigantic money tree more than outright 'productivity'.
Like maybe I oversimplify but I feel that Indians are currently getting a direct conduit to a lot of resentment shown towards the 'laptop job' classes since the average man on the street finds it hard to define what said classes do, how people are qualified for those jobs and why their own applications are rejected whilst money is rained down upon the lucky few product managers and whatnot. I'm personally fortunate enough to have FIREd as a result of a couple years in the tech mines and a lucky strike or two, but even I find it hard to ken exactly what it is that the majority of people in Facebook, Google etcetera in the year 2025 actually 'do'.
Bingbong
10d ago
Oh yeah if you just want to roll an open mat's a way better use of your weekend.
Bingbong
10d ago
Big chunks of the Middle East are fairly pro-trans all things considered, if only as a weird loophole since homosexuality is verboten and punished by death so it's better to transition anybody with any inclinations.
Bingbong
10d ago
I'll probably end up with the same feeling about BJJ tournaments if I ever actually enter one.
Depends on who's running the show, belt level, age level etcetera but I find if you're in a reasonable weight class at white belt you can generally get enough matches from a grappling industries or something to stay engaged.
Bingbong
10d ago
Also the attention span is only so long. Killer was revealed, some sources alleged he was right wing and then on with the show
Bingbong
10d ago
If the majority of people had views like yours, the life of trans people would be significantly worse and some would commit suicide, see how it was before widespread trans acceptance in the West, or how it is currently in many parts of the world where being trans means your family disowning you
Yes but the huge reorientation of society doesn't seem to make a ton of headway on the suicide or social alienation issues, especially considering that human lives are quite long and most transitioners have decades left yet. It's a valid response from society to say 'No you cannot be Trans' and plausible that on the aggregate that aggressively tamping down on the issue is better than leaving a plethora of individuals stuck in weird individual culdesacs of human expression that ultimately produce more sadness than happiness.
The intersex bit is an almost complete nonsequitur. Next stage typically being some sort of 'Historical societies had a third gender, typically a designated sexworker or eunuch-lite therefore I am a hecking validerino'
Bingbong
10d ago
Gender Dysphoria is a genuine medical phenomenon feels more accurate than assigning it as a 'condition' perse.
Bingbong
10d ago
Has your friend tried dating vegan hippie chicks and convincing them of whatever he agrees with the GOP on?
Yeah feels like best path is to assume reasonable suggestibility on vegan hippies and emphasize the tradbits.
Bingbong
11d ago
When the ideological opposite has been the norm with super nitpicky factchecks for a good 4-5 years I don't really see the problem, even if it's juvenile to push it.
Bingbong
11d ago
Like a lot of these things the compassion made more sense before the development of an advanced medical apparatus that can give cases like this their personal Golden Throne for decades of low quality life and family sizes are a lot smaller than they used to be.
Plus the entire existence argument has to take into account that longterm disability is generally massively impacting either the family or causing massive intervention by the state
Bingbong
11d ago
then acting like they're the generous ones for letting people like me live in the country (without a shred of self awareness)
It very much is a mark of charity and the culture that allows these lessers to address you as such without being summarily defenestrated that allows you to rise above due to the charity of your socioeconomic betters.
Bingbong
11d ago
The level of disrespect they show towards not only other people but also other things means a lot of the time I'm interacting with (especially lower class) people
As in their lack of immediate obsequious submission for the better person (for he has money for he gets to armwrestle in the zero-sum Finance fields, unlike those peasants)? I wouldn't consider Indian culture especially defined by inter-class respect, at least going downwards, but if the Western culture didn't have a peculiar glitch in which lower classes were afforded a minimum of respect and voice and given an opportunity it'd be hard to imagine modern immigration existing as it does.
I do agree with the parenting thing, but I'd argue a confluence of factors (Small family sizes, Westerners tend to be more mobile both for work and for Florida in their dotage, housing is brutally expensive, modern medicine allows for stupefyingly long armwrestles against mortality by people with massive care requirements) means that the equation's a bit different than in a more-settled setting where labor is absurdly cheap and families are large.
Bingbong
11d ago
A post-scarcity world will make life wildly better for those actually affected by scarcity. Yeah, it'll be harder for the currently wealthy to exclude people, but whether you consider that a worthwhile sacrifice so that almost no one has to die of hunger or exposure is up to you.
Isn't most of the West essentially there already? By the time you're dying of hunger or exposure in the vast majority of cases in the Affluent West it's probably down to your own choices and anti-sociability than because anybody is explicitly depriving you of food and shelter simply due to you existing.
Bingbong
12d ago
Yeah but basic observational skills whilst traveling indicate that the gaps in per capita living standards don't really line up with raw GDP since so much of the surplus gets siphoned off into non-negotiables like real estate and paying for your fellow man's higher wages. PPP makes sense on that front.
I'm also kinda confused what happens with the whole Mangione cult of personality/'he was justified striking back against the evil Healthcare CEO' vibes if he's arguing he flat-out didn't do it and it was somebody else.
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