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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2781 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 7, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Will AI interface headsets allow people with Down Syndrome to perform complex occupational tasks? Could we see chefs with Down Syndrome in the future, being guided by Claude?

I was also thinking about this with regard to 'how AGI could win the Iran war for the US'. A more obvious application is eliminating pilot loss by having the AI fly the planes. But maybe you could also get the ground crew to be replaced by random Arabs with headsets who're told what to do/supervised by the AI.

It doesn't seem very practical though. Surely the cost of supervising a person is higher than the cost of getting a robot to do things tirelessly, precisely, with full feedback and sensors. Homo sapiens main strength has always been intellectual, not physical!

Meaning because they can be individually guided to do anything? Don’t they tend to have issues with fine motor control? Not just cognitively but also physically in terms of how it expresses itself in hands and limbs.

Arabs have issues with fine motor control? How do they write, then?

What?

You said, "Don't they tend to have issues with fine motor control?" You meant Arabs, correct?

Whoops, I was looking at the wrong parent comment, from Randomranger. You clearly meant downs syndrome.

I didn’t consider motor skills. But yeah, the idea is that you could break complex tasks down to following super easy instructions with flashing arrows and an image.

Why is Trump going to the Knicks game tonight?

I heard on the radio that the owner invited him.

He's a huge sports fan and New Yorker?

Tons of celebrities and people of note are in the building today, I heard a pair of court side seats resold for over 500k.

How can you (at least some of themotte posters, if you are not such a poster, i ask to you guess insight into their view) can say 'no appeasement towards Russia' given that the West has huge appeasement towards low IQ populations to that degree that even Ireland (once dubbed "the black man of Europe") who never did anything bad to non-Europeans participates in appeasement towards low IQ populations?

  • -11

There was quite a lot of appeasement toward Russia after 2014 and it’s quite possible that if the full scale invasion didn’t happen in 2022 relations would be almost fully normalized by now.

What you mean by appeasement after 2014? The West gave Russia some material wealth? Signed some beneficial (for Russia) treaty? Putin asked to put some of military stuff to back where it was in 1991 and officially limit NATO expansion. He was answered that even if Clinton ever has promised something Yeltsin back then, it was non-binding (in shorts, sucks to be you if you believed that). Or do you mean the West didn't kick Russia out of its institutions, didn't sanction to hell, and continued to trade goods -- for all of which Russia paid market price? What a chutzpa.

Has anybody ever said something like "we will condemn Ukraine's government to phase out Russian language if Russia stops putting Russian language requirement on its minorities"?

Wait, why would we? Russia is our enemy.

The low IQ populations are also presumably the enemy. So, if the West appeases low IQ-populations that are internal enemies, why not Russia too?

@aardvark2 I believe a majority of Motte posters would say no appeasement to both low-IQ populations and Russia, so the view is internally consistent.

As for Motte posters who are both anti-Russia and pro-low IQ populations, I cannot speak for them.

Seems like a category error to me: Russia is a nation-state, not a population. And if you're trying to suggest that Russia is a low-IQ nation, I don't think that's right. Russia is much like the United States of America, a geographically large multi-ethnic society. Its sharpest people are pretty sharp (in fact, there's an argument to be made that it's leadership class is better than Western equivalents, but that's a bit ol' tangent).

I'd like to hear that tangent. Was Russia's leadership class always better or is just relatively better in the present, due to the culture wars in the West?

I agree with @DradisPing that the Communists were terrible (although this didn't necessarily have anything to do with their talent pool; Soviet engineers were very innovative). I have an earlier comment where I compare Russia to other countries, and it seems fairly clear to me that despite being dealt a bad hand (despairing population, low TFR) Russia has a low debt-to-GDP ratio, fairly high GDP PPP per capita, and fewer drug deaths (per capita) than the US - all the sorts of managerial items that suggest, to me, fairly good governance.

Another way of looking at it is that Russia's GDP PPP is above (or roughly on par with) Estonia and Latvia (but behind Poland and Lithuania) even though it has less debt than those countries! And the Baltics and Poland have been in the EU for twenty years!

I think this framing is overly reductive and simplistic, but to me it strikes me the same way it would if you had two siblings, one of whom moved into the city, got their bachelor's, and enjoyed all that market access had to offer, and the other stayed in their small hometown. If you checked back in in 20 years and you found that one of them hadn't paid off their (substantial) student loans despite working a well-paying job in the big city while the other's only substantial debt was a mortgage, and they both had a house and a car and a TV, you'd have to conclude the second brother was better at managing his money. If the second brother had managed to accomplish that despite crippling depression and a year in jail for a DUI you'd be more impressed by his self-management, not less.

Caveat that the war may change all of this in the long term.

Getting into devastating wars is part of Russia's time-honored history, they do get a bit wrecked but always end up surviving, though the elites may get shuffled up. The wars may even be a source of eugenic pressure keeping the IQ high, as the generally low IQ front line chaff is killed off.

Not always better. Despite always having ardent defenders on the left, the communists were just terrible.

Basically in the post communist era it's been clear that Russia was much poorer than it should have been. So a lot of bright minds went into government to improve things.

In the West improving things inevitably involves fighting tooth and nail with entrenched powers.

I post-Soviet Russia smart people can dedicate their lives to looking for easy wins.

The big problem that the West has is that their elite has been focussed on how to get rich in the global economy. That doesn't require them to improve things in their actual countries at all, and in some cases making them worse will be more personally profitable.

But are you correcting for the fact that Tsarist Russia was basically a feudal backwater? It’s not like the communists inherited a shiny industrial state and then drove it i to the ground. They’re the only reason the industrial state exists at all.

So historians tend to have either a pro-Soviet or anti-Russian bias. If you start looking into the numbers Russia was well behind the great powers but industrializing.

At the dawn of WW1 Russia had more km of railway than anyone except the US. Note that sources split the UK and British India, so you can easily argue that the UK was ahead. Obviously that's spread over a massive territory, but it's still something. The Trans-Siberian Railway was pre-communist.

During WW1 the Russian Empire was making it's own artillery, rifles, and armoured cars.

Sure it was underdeveloped, but it was a major oil producer during the age of oil. A more moderate government would have been able to industrialize a bit more slowly but with far fewer corpses.

The big problem that the West has is that their elite has been focussed on how to get rich in the global economy.

That’s been true since Columbus; clearly it can coexist with a desire for local improvements. Conversely, local industry does not automatically trickle down to local quality of life. For every urban core there were a dozen company-operated mill and mining towns operating on the margin.

On the other end, if you look at the top American companies or billionaires, they all sell stuff to Westerners. After all, we have the most money. If those purchases mean anything at all, we’ve been getting something out of this massive, interconnected mess. Clothing, food, electronics—none of those markets look the same under an autarkic model. The real benefits came from extending specialization of labor.

Alright. I’m interpreting your question as something like:

“If the West likes giving things to low-IQ populations, why is it so against giving things to Russia?

This, uh, may be beyond my powers; I’ll give it a try.

  1. Not all gifts are equivalent. Offering housing and social services is much easier than offering an entire country.
  2. Not all recipients are equally deserving. Offering support to poor individuals is much much easier than offering it to an entire country.
  3. Routines matter. There is an established procedure for refugees and such to enter Western countries. Following it led to the current situation. There are also established procedures for one country to get things from another. Russia not following such procedures led to the current situation.

It makes sense to treat these two situations differently, because basically nothing about them is the same.

  1. It's not only material things, but also anti-racism training in police and affirmative action. Often, children of rich blacks are favored over children of poor whites. Housing would be much cheaper provided in those peoples' countries of origin.
  2. It could be hypothisized that BLM rioters aren't deserving, and the only reason they don't blow you with FPV or bomb is that because they don't have an ability. American blacks are quite rich compared to median world person.
  3. it's not about being a refugee (which most of Europe's immigrants are actually not). E.g. wikipedia articles about gypsies and irish travellers look as biased as a brand advertising its shiny new product. Meanwhile they are considering extraditing Ukrainian men back to Ukraine. What do they have for refugees from Russia, lol, restrictions.

What do you mean? Just a few months ago the West went to war on the Middle East, again. Does that look like huge appeasement to you?

It was Israel (which can be argued to be a high-IQ middle eastern country rather than western) that made USA attack, not the West collectively. Also, it could be argued that they perceive Iran as middle or high-IQ country. Also, the West is known for killing brown people in some far away places while worshipping the ones in their countries.

Russian soldiers aren't refugees or immigrants.

How is it ever relevant to my question? I could answer to you comment in a similarly dismissive way -- "russian soldiers aren't in EU or planning to attack it, case closed". Well, in case you don't know, the West made many things which made worse for most Russians, even those who are not involved with Russian regime or war in any way. It's now more difficult to leave Russia. They are restricting crypto for Russians -- so if you're a Russian who doesn't trust their corrupt govenment and wants to store some wealth in crypto, EU wants to prevent that.

I think the question is, why is there no sympathy for Russians wanting to escape conscription when there are so many handouts for US minorities?

One answer may be white guilt over slavery. Since Russians are thought of as white, or maybe white with some asian influences, they are part of the oppressor class and are ineligible for the sympathies of white guilt.

I think the question is, why is there no sympathy for Russians wanting to escape conscription

The current answer to that for most of western Europe is "because there's currently no credible fear of conscription for Russian men". The moment the Russian military actually starts drafting and punishing conscious objectors, I expect full asylum rights for Russian men that can show a well-founded fear of persecution or a risk of serious harm.

This is already happening, a Russian anti-war activist could apply for asylum pretty much anywhere in the EU.

My old company took in a bunch of Russians fleeing potential draft at the start of the war. One was a bit of a dick but the rest were great workers and are doing well AFAIK.

What ”the West”?

Israel and US starting a war all by themselves is very different from ”the West” going to war.

del (wrong location)

Buddy, I can’t even tell what you’re asking, but I find it vaguely insulting.

Oh, I made at least one typo and probably more grammar errors that I did not even know. Reworded it.

How can you can say?

Good question.

It's still not legible. The question is bizarre. Rephrase the whole thing please.

Anyone have any theories on the song Mr Bright side by the killers? Specifically why it's been so popular for so long?

I like the song, it's good. I just don't know if I'd label it as one of the greatest songs of the last 50 years, which is what is implied by it's longevity in top song charts.

I wouldn't know, I'm a Fountains Of Wayne supremacist.

Every culture has catchy songs everyone knows. This is now one of those.

I must have heard this song 200 times and I never learned the lyrics beyond a few fragments:

Coming out of my cage and I've been doing just fine

It started out with a kiss, how did it end up like this?

he takes off her dress

Jealousy

the price I pay, destiny is calling me

I'm Mr. Brightside

I have a feeling most listeners do not know the full lyrics or the actual narrative of the song. I can vaguely recall a memory of people trying to sing it and not knowing any lyrics besides these fragments. But these words are very potent anyway: kiss, taking off dress, jealousy, price, destiny. Charged words, both genders like it.

The song is just well-designed musically. It’s recognizable within the first second. The guitar intro is really nice. The chorus beginning with “jealousy” is inviting and awesome, peaking with a shout of “price I pay, destiny” (cool!). Reminds me of the Coldplay “I used to rule the world” song — this is an inviting subject to have in your head. Universally relatable feelings (jealousy, defeat).

Maybe, maybe, the lyrics infect our mind subconsciously, and the infidelity / sexual fear exerts a kind of Eyes Wide Shut effect that sticks in our mind. But I don’t know if this is necessary to explain it.

Playable anywhere, from inside a car to a bar to a large wedding.

I heard it at a wedding recently, and it's such a weird song for venue that given the lyrics. The friend I was with suggested ignoring the lyrics and liking the vibe, which I guess I can understand.

At least at my wedding, I'd have opted not to have songs about that subject matter.

This is, sadly, the rule rather than the exception for songs played at weddings. Sting was inspired by 1984 when he wrote "Every Breath You Take" and has repeatedly emphasised that it's an ugly, sinister song about possession and control: when people tell him that it was their first dance at their weddings, his response is "well, good luck". Similarly, "One" by U2 was written during The Edge's messy separation from his first wife: when people tell him it was their first dance at their weddings, he's horrified.

My favorite example of this is that, apparently Bryan Adams's Summer of '69 was meant to be about the sex position, rather than about the year 1969.

Well, you just mentioned Bryan Adams. Day ruined.

My takeaway from this is that musicians really should realize that most people don't give a shit about or often even listen to their songs' lyrics.

If you asked me to recite the lyrics of my 10 favorite songs, I might be able to remember all the words to 2 or 3. It's just never been that important to me. Maybe because my early music exploration years were mostly spent listening to Norwegian black metal and underground punk rock, neither of which have the most intelligible lyrics. If anything, most musicians tend to be much better musicians than writers, so paying close attention to lyrics tends to decrease my enjoyment of music. Most artists simply don't have much interesting to say. That doesn't make their music any less amazing.

Or they only listen to one line and never pay attention to the rest. Such as people playing Born In The USA in attempt to be patriotic, when the entire rest of the song outside the chorus is extremely bitter about the USA.

That's on Springsteen. Maybe arena rock isn't the best vehicle for biting political satire. You can't write a bitching march and then complain that armies like using it for parades.

Even when that song first dropped I knew there was something about it that hit different. It's special for sure.

It also has one of the most easily recognizable initial hook (or whatever it’s called) of any mainstream pop/rock song. It’s almost unmistakeable.

You mean the guitar riff?

It’s not explicitly gendered as a concept (romantic jealousy) even if sung from a male perspective, its subject matter is near-universal, it has catchy lyrics, it doesn’t involve any highly vulgar sexual references and it’s sung by a man. Plus it’s energetic and upbeat, and it captures what a lot of people like to believe feels like the ‘happy sadness’ of the end of a big night. This combination is rarer than you think. Toxic is an all time song with catchy lyrics but straight men won’t sing it out loud most of the time, and it doesn’t have the slight melancholy of that song. Mr Brightside is inoffensive and universal, happy and sad, and nobody’s embarrassed to sing it.

It’s not explicitly gendered

Huh?

Now I'm falling asleep and she's calling a cab
While he's having a smoke and she's taking a drag
Now they're goin' to bed and my stomach is sick
And it's all in my head, but she's touching his
Chest now
He takes off her dress now

Do you mean the viewpoint character isn't explicitly gendered? I suppose that would mean that the song appeals just as much to straight men as to lesbians whose bisexual girlfriends cheated on them with men, but surely the latter demographic is too small for it to have any meaningful impact on the song's cultural staying power.

The concept isn’t explicitly gendered. Straight men especially hate singing songs sung from the perspective of a woman talking about men. In this case, Mr Brightside benefits both from the fact that it’s from a generic male perspective (avoiding that risk; women are much less worried about looking ‘gay’ for singing along to lyrics like this than men would be about the inverse) and from the fact that romantic jealousy is a near-universal emotion.

Compare Before He Cheats. Excellent cheating song, but no man is really going to sing it.

The "Mr." Brightside chorus pretty heavily genders it, but it genders it male, and most women don't mind singing from a generic male perspective.

Although its actual relationship to homosexuality gets weird if you look at it from the right lens. The song's about Flowers actually seeing his girlfriend getting kissed by another man and then spiraling -- there's no ambiguity there, he's answered interview questions spelling it out -- but the lyrics are bizarrely compatible with the singer being jealous of the woman and being cheated on by the man. And that's separate from the male-worshipping tones a lot of cuckolding picks up.

((Though actual gay cuckolding looks hilariously different.))

The easy misdirect joke ("and they're going to bed and my stomach is sick, and it's all in my head and she's touching his CHEST now") is just dirty enough to draw a laugh from everyone, but not dirty enough to make it impossible to play on a "clean" playlist; easy enough that even the dimmest bulb can fill in the blank but checks and scans. I genuinely attribute a lot of its popularity to that execution.

It's a jealousy song, which everyone can relate to in some way, but not an infidelity song really, I always thought the song is explicitly ("but it's just the price I pay, destiny is calling me") about the mixed feeling of jealousy you get after you break up with a girl because you're moving, presumably in the song about being a rock star but also an ordinary experience around going to college or changing jobs. You still have feelings for her and get jealous at the thought of her going out and sleeping with another guy, but you had to break up with her, this is you looking on the "bright side."

Because it's one of the last really big, universally known rock songs before rock lost the last remnants of its cultural force (or was killed by poptimism, whatever?) Sure, there are some well-known songs coming after it (Sex on Fire, Chelsea Dagger etc.) but I don't think they compare in bigness. Seven Nation Army is a competitor.

Also, it came in just at the right time to lodge itself in the minds of the Millennials, a generation that's bigger (IIRC) than the generations coming both before and after it.

universally known rock songs

I gave it a quick listen and based on that I've either never heard it or have managed to entirely ignore it as just another piece of annoying and forgettable pop punk slop with absolutely horrible production values. It triggers my ctrl-w reflex in 10 seconds. I wouldn't be so sure about it being "universally known".

It's probably more (universally) popular in anglo countries. Yes, I know, that's not what "universal" means. Still...

I was going through a terrible breakup that involved a big betrayal when this song came out and I couldn't listen to it without my heart rate racing. It captured that "my whole world is turned upside down" energy too well. I think that's what people are relating to.

I'm fine listening to it now.

The beat does a really good job ramping up in a way that mirrors your heart racing as you enter a death spiral of jealousy, before mellowing out again. It really is one of the all-time great breakup songs. And that's coming from a grouchy millenial who despised the song as corporock trash when it came out.

Agreed, it has a lot going for it even if the lyrics are a bit try-hard.

Although I no nothing about the professional music industry, I think "Mr. Brightside" is probably a song that nearly every songwriter and pop(ish) performer has a huge love-hate relationship with.

They "love" it because it's a simple enough song to write and arrange. The detailed Wikipedia entry on it has quotes from The Killers that say as much. The song itself was a "yeah, I guess this one isn't that bad" level of initial excitement. It was certainly not a "we knew this one was special" kind of track.

Some of the lyrics are high-school sad poetry levels of overwrought;

Swimming through sick lullabies

Choking on your alibis

But it's just the price I pay

Destiny is calling me

I'm just imagining the "cool" 10th grade literature teacher saying "Wow, these are such raw emotions. But, maybe you should spend more time thinking about, you know, word choice and avoid cliches."

Which leads right into why, I think, a lot of artists also "hate" this song -- it shouldn't be such a staple. There's nothing very specific or unique about it. It's a Rorschach test for each and every listener to map their own personal experience to. The experience of infidelity (to some degree) is common to many (most? idk) people. And it has a unique emotional resonance. Until the advent of true maturity and, very often, never, people always think their experience with cheating was the absolute worst. So, a song that makes (almost) everyone who listens to it feel like it's "their" song is bound to be huge.

But, again - why does this very median song (especially the lyrics) just "hit" so well compared to the thousands of other songs about infidelity and the harshness of romance? I think it's genuinely mysterious. And I think that's maddening for people.

To add another, slightly different concept in support, I also think that Mr. Brightside hits a kind of midwit depth of emotionality. To a lot of listeners, Mr. Brightside seems "deep" and doesn't come across as the overproduced love songs of, say, Mariah Carey. But it isn't nuanced. Once we get to the chorus of "[she's touching his] Chest now..." it's damn obvious whats happening and how you (in the person of the singer) should feel. Compare this to a classic like "Casey's Last Ride" by Kris Kristofferson which is a subtle meditation on isolation, loneliness, the remembrance of love or something that felt like love (is the unnamed paramour in the song, perhaps, a prostitute?). That kind of depth is something to genuinely wrestle with. It's ponderous and weight. Mr. Brightside gives you a much cleaner payoff -- "dude, like, this song. Bro, this is exactly what happened when Kayley/Ashleigh/Tara/Madison cheated on me with Chet/Chad/Braden/Glorp." You get to feel the emotional satisfaction of "literally me" paired with the intellectual self-satisfaction of "nobody gets this but me."

I think it's worth comparing Mr. Brightside to it's cousin; "Misery Business" by the band Paramour. This is a song from a female protagonist viewpoint (sung by a female lead, the quirky-alt-chick archetype Hayley Williams. You'll remember her from being the profile photo of literally every girl with a LiveJournal from 2004 - 2012).

The plot arc of the song is something along the lines of;

The female "protagonist" in the song sees a guy friend being mistreated by his existing girlfriend. She, the protagonist, somehow steals the guy and starts dating him. The song is then a kind of victory chant to the other, unnamed, female antagonist.

If Mr. Brightside had a, well, brighter side, it very well might be "Misery Business." And it has a lot of the same features I pointed out before; goofy teenage quality lyrics, personalized "literally me" accessibility, and just enough depth to make it seem authentic and meaningful.

I'm not trying to be critical of either of these songs. I'm just trying to figure out why they are what they are.

They are both far better than "Imagine" by John Lennon.

The experience of infidelity (to some degree) is common to many (most? idk) people.

I think I'll do a poll.

The detailed Wikipedia entry on it has quotes from The Killers that say as much. The song itself was a "yeah, I guess this one isn't that bad" level of initial excitement. It was certainly not a "we knew this one was special" kind of track.

IIRC The Killers had an entire batch of songs ready to go for their first album, but when they heard the debut album by The Strokes they thought "oh shit, we've got to up our game here", threw all of their songs out and started from scratch. The only song they kept was "Mr. Brightside".

It's always an ex-post narrative for this kind of thing.

However, I'd say, the vocals and video strike something within both men and women:

  • For men: Sigh. Argh! Fuck.
  • For women: Teeheehee, yes. Let’s you, him, him, and him, fight.

Some parts of the vocals are frequently misheard, to the extent such parts make any sense in the first place (e.g., “jealousy, turning saints into the sea" vs. "Chelsea... turning sex into a scene"). The song is also notoriously ambiguous accent-wise, as an American song that became a British staple.

The instruments are interesting. The instrumentals sound quite busy to me. However, busy in a good way. I suspect the instruments land at slightly different times at greater distances than what tracks usually feature.

The anxiety, tension, and ambiguity, with the catchiness (so much of the song is loud and relatively singable) resulted in something special.

The music video has women prancing around as sex objects with heavy make-up in cUtE period dresses (although unclear as to any period in particular), and Eric Roberts as an older-suitor/sugar-daddy-type figure, which further add to the female appeal.

Somebody Told Me is objectively better.

I would totally disagree, and I don't particularly care for any Killers.

I think we can make a reasonable argument that STM's chorus is much better, but the rest of STM is very, very mid. The verse, from a catchiness standpoint, is completely disposable, which is a huge problem because the song takes forever to get to the first chorus. Brightside, on the other hand, opens with a signature guitar melody and then immediately jumps into catchy verse. Even if we acknowledge the lack of actual melody, the rhythm of the Brightside verse is very successful; like many of the best emo-punk songs, it's frequently unclear if the good part of the song is the verse or the chorus (many Paramore songs would be a major example). While the guitar riffs in STM might be better, the synths really drag the song down, and there is, again, no competition with the opening guitar notes of Brightside.

Even if we acknowledge the lack of actual melody

I'd say we must acknowledge it, but in the "Pros" list rather than the "Cons" list. Try to combine it with any other lyrics or try to do an instrumental version and it would suck, but that panicked "I'm trying to escape from D-flat but failing" verse melody really works in the context of a story about a guy who's feeling like his life is falling apart in front of his eyes, and the contrast with the melodic "escape" at the end of the chorus makes the lyrics there feel like they might actually be admirable optimism, not just naive fantasy.

A major reason for its enduring popularity is that it's a song almost perfectly optimised for karaoke and drunken sing-alongs. The vocal range spans one octave, with most of the melody consisting of alternating between the tonic and the subtonic, which are only a semitone apart. At no point in the song is the singer called upon to do anything remotely complex, melodically or rhythmically. I've often noted the strange fact that the only song people are called upon to publicly sing multiple times a year ("Happy Birthday to You") features an octave jump, which most untrained singers simply can't reliably pull off, especially when singing a capella. By contrast, "Mr. Brightside" is a song that anyone can sing, no matter their level of musical training or state of inebriation. The simplicity of the vocal melody is such that even a literally tone-deaf person could probably make a decent fist of it. Helping the fact that it's so easy to sing is that the lyrics for both verses are identical, so one has significantly fewer lyrics to memorise than one would expect.

Space Oddity is the best karaoke song.

I think the talent floor to do a half-decent rendition of "Space Oddity" is significantly higher than to do a half-decent rendition of "Mr. Brightside". The former has a much more complex vocal melody, structure and arrangement.

I think I set myself up for this, but, um, the talent floor is very low for the way I sing it...

And it takes a professional to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at all well.

One and a half octaves, and we as a country used to all have singing practice every Sunday morning. Amateurs can do a fine job with a week’s practice.

Baffling choice of song for a national anthem. The entire point of them is that they're meant to be sung by masses of people, many of whom have no musical training.

Its military content and somewhat bombastic tune made it popular among military and marching bands, cementing it as the unofficial anthem long before Congress made it official in the 30's.

I'm sure it slaps when performed by a marching band made up of talented musicians. But as a national anthem, a song meant to be sung by masses of people, most of whom aren't professional musicians? Very peculiar choice.

People do successfully sing it literally all the time though. Every sporting event in the country opens with the Star Spangled Banner, and it's almost always great. Americans sing our national anthem more than any other nationality on the planet. And for everyone except the microphoned soloist, it doesn't really matter if they hit every note perfectly. That's the beauty of large choruses--everyone's tone-deafness sort of washes out and it aounds great no matter what. I have never once been disappointed by the crowd singing the national anthem at a baseball game.

The Star Spangled Banner fucking slaps, and I'm tired of pretending it doesn't.

I'm not even criticising it from a compositional standpoint, I just think the level of technical skill it requires is beyond the reach of most untrained singers. I'm not even American but I've seen more than my fair share of "fail" videos where solo singers hit bum notes or have audible voice cracks when they get up into the higher register ("land of the free"). When sung by a singer who knows what they're doing it's a suitably stirring piece of music.

It's not really meant to be a sing-along though, and most people don't. It's an anthem, not a hymn.

I agree. IMO a much better anthem would be "The Maine Stein Song", slowed down and with more appropriate lyrics.

Chopping and screwing is an American tradition.

IIRC correctly The Killers did the opening for the recent Champion's League final. They looked old.

I think it hits a time and place like some of the 90s music did but little of the 2000s music did. For people who watched the music video it's quite odd and sticks in your mind.

IIRC correctly

Personal PIN number. ATM machine.

Ass to mouth machine? What kind of sicko are you??? /j

We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Oof got me.

What employees have you fired so far?

In Zvi's recent post, I noticed an interesting pairing of two things:

Sell your house. Stuart Thompson lets Gemini (because he had a free account there from work that saved him $8 a month?!) walk him through everything involved in the sale, including being his agent. The problem is, Stuart does not seem to realize he does not know the counterfactual?

Stuart A. Thompson: In the end, using A.I. netted me more than $90,000. That includes the premium over the asking price, plus the roughly $36,000 in fees I didn’t pay.

I mean, yes, the agents he talked to early on told him he’d lose money, and instead he turned a profit. But only after the sale did he talk to another agent for an expert opinion, and that expert expected a higher sale price than Stuart got, meaning he almost certainly listed too low. Stuart thinks that after the agent fee he still basically broke even, but I’m guessing he put in more work and stress this way, and took on more downside risk. I know that if I am ever selling or buying, I will be using AI extensively as part of the effort, but I am going to stick with Danielle Wiedemann. I am confident that her help, connections and advice were worth far more than the fee, and would be again.

and:

For those confused about the radiology example, yes, AI is better than radiologists at reading x-rays, and many other components of professional services, and does so at cost epsilon, and this is super useful. Even if no one is out of work quite yet, often there is a ton of value in ‘pretty good answer, vastly better than you could otherwise get without a professional, for cost ~$0’ when the professional costs $1,000 and up.

It was a bit stark, because getting a pretty good answer, vastly better than you could otherwise get without a real estate professional, would seem to cost ~$0, when the professional apparently costs something like $36,000 and up. So why not fire the real estate agent?

There could be a variety of reasons involving the nature of the work, regulatory barriers, etc., but one thing that comes to mind is that Zvi has paid for a real estate agent before and is consciously thinking about what that situation is like when thinking about whether he would hire again. Whereas, I doubt he's hired a radiologist before and is probably not in a situation where he's thinking super seriously about the considerations that would be involved if he had a need for such a service.

This leads me to ask, "Which employees have you fired?" In this case, "employees" can be read broadly, covering folks like real estate agents/radiologists, who you may procure services from on occasion, in addition to actual employment relations if you're a manager/business owner. But I want to particularly hone in on examples where you have paid a human for a particular service in the past and have subsequently encountered a nearly-identical need, but have chosen to not pay a human now for the service.

This question is in significant part simply selfish. I might be missing some aspect in my life where I can save a bunch of money. That would be cool, and I'd like to do that if I can.

I think I'd go for the house selling rather than the radiologist replacement. Big difference between "dang, priced it too low, I could have made another $20,000" and "dang, AI missed the tumour that's going to kill me".

The fundamental problem with AI in medicine is that even if you can use AI for self diagnosis you still can't do anything about it without seeing a professional. It's a bit like still having to hire a realtor but now you get to suggest a target price.

You shouldn't use either an AI or a listing agent in this market. What "connections" do you need to sell a house?

I haven't fired anyone, but I've probably reduced their hours while increasing the service I get. I didn't fire my mechanic, but I'm often able to diagnose problems more effectively and go into my mechanic saying "x is wrong" rather than "idk man you tell me." I haven't fired my engineer, but when I have a casual question on regulations I ask chatgpt and it points me to the relevant code section, rather than paying my engineer to do so.

I haven't fired my engineer, but when I have a casual question on regulations I ask chatgpt and it points me to the relevant code section, rather than paying my engineer to do so.

What sort of engineer? What sort of regulation/code? I want to profit.

I use a LLM before every doctor's visit to get myself familiar with the issue so that I know what exactly to talk about to my doctor. Based on my experience, as long as it's not urgent care or a serious issue, an average (specialized) doctor's visit lasts about 7-10 minutes, where most of the time is you answering some questions for the nurse. Then the main doctor comes in for 2-3 minutes and that's it, here's your $200-400 bill. So, to get any real help, I need to come in with a clear understanding of what my issue is and what type of treatment I'm seeking, that way I can direct the conversation and get actual help. One time I was vindicated with my approach when I was about to be prescribed a drug with a common side effect of drying out meibomian glands (eyes), which would've definitely left me with permanent damage and lifelong pain had I not researched my issue, learned that this drug is a common solution to it and that this was it's main side effect beforehand. I had a laser eye correction surgery few months prior, and FDA has an advisory notice to not take this drug for at least 6 months before/after laser eye surgery. The doctor was dumbfounded when I told her about it, genuinely seemed like it was her first time hearing of this. A LLM didn't have access to my full medical history, so it didn't directly bring this up either, but I was able to connect the dots and research further once I learned that one of the side effects had to do with drying out your eyes. I think you could easily replace large chunk of all doctor visits with an LLM and get comparable, perhaps even better level of care. But I doubt it ever happens, healthcare is a big pie and beneficiaries will fight to keep it as is.

I used AI to replace what I guess could have been a doctor's visit. I had some questions about an OTC medication I was taking for seasonal allergy issues, so I went to Gemini. The initial question seemed a bit basic to bother setting up an actual doctor's visit. It gave good answers to everything, helped identify some issues it was causing me, and suggested some other treatments (other OTC medications), one of which I tried and was much better. It's honestly a way, way better experience than anything I've done with the "proper" healthcare system. AI will give you an answer to any sane question at any hour of the day or night immediately, doesn't mind at all if I ignore a conversation for a week and then ask another question to continue it, and it actually listens to things you tell it better than most doctors. I know it's not as reliable as a real doctor, but I think I'm smart enough to apply common sense, ask for references to properly validated information sources, and only actually use treatments purchased from a real brick-and-mortar drugstore that are advertised to treat the proper conditions and used in accordance with their labeling etc.

In comparison, a proper doctor requires the slog of finding one of the appropriate specialty that my insurance accepts, setting an appointment that might be a week or two away, travelling to the office, usually filling out a ton of forms answering a slew of questions unrelated to my actual complaint, usually getting seen late, talking to a nurse first, then actually talking to a doctor for a few minutes, and that's the only time they'll actually answer any questions, since apparently email is too insecure, so nobody uses it, even if I positively give zero fucks who knows about my allergy issues. Though even if the system worked perfectly and I could use email or some similarly convenient modern communication medium to ask questions of a doctor, it's a bit much to expect a real expert to answer any question instantly 24x7. I know there are some things that will basically always require a real doctor, but for the minor stuff in the gaps, this feels like a great solution to me.

My experience with ai medical is the same reason I wouldn't dare use it for therapy. It will indeed let you just keep talking and asking questions forever in a way your real doctor will not. Which is fine when I need answers about my hip hurting (probably a muscle strain from my move, thanks chatgpt, and it is getting better now that I'm trying to avoid certain activities, thanks chatgpt) but I could imagine obsessing about a thing that was emotionally upsetting me for an unhealthy long time. With a person you are concerned about their opinion of you and that trims the excesses of narcissism, as does the ticking away of an expensive hour.

Right. Generally, a doctor knows when to stop chasing zebras and chill the fuck out about something. AI will happily enable your neuroses as long as you can keep typing.

Currently having ectopic beats and AI is just telling me the same things over and over again - someone should tell me to fucking chill.

Which tbf it is also doing.

So good reading this in my current state.

The AI radiologist has the same problem as the self-driving car and the AI lawyer. Tech companies can tout their products all they want, but unless they're a value add for a radiologist who isn't getting fired, they aren't going to be adopted. Whenever you hire a professional to do something, part of the cost is paying for the work, but another part of the cost is paying for someone else to be responsible for the work. I can do a lot of things on my own car, but I'm not touching anything that can cause catastrophic damage if I fuck it up. Even if taking it to a mechanic doesn't reduce this risk, if the mechanic fucks up they're responsible for it. Same thing with the radiologist—if it misses a serious problem who is going to take responsibility in a malpractice suit? The hospital? The tech company? Considering that both have spent decades vehemently denying that they have any responsibility for how end-users use their products or licensed professionals under their employ, as the case may be, I doubt either of these is going to change their position just because of AI. The first lawsuit will likely suck up whatever cost savings they see, and I doubt the carriers would be on board.

Lawyers and doctors are a rather special case though (and self-driving cars appear to have been solved given Waymo's rapid expansion). When a company hires a product manager, a customer support person, an executive assistant, a marketing executive, a salesperson, a software developer, or the myriad other back office roles that fill a standard corp, they are not especially worried about potential liabilities (financial roles excepted). You don't need many of those roles to be replaced before serious economic consequences become apparent, and the protection of law or medicine is rendered moot.

That being said, I do think there will be a lot of inertia just by the nature of corporations. Most big corpos are already too big and could probably have slashed 20% of their workforce even before AI. It's part of the nature of the firm and not something easily shaken off.

radiologist

I recently got a cheap knee MRI at a local facility and wanted to double-check the radiologist's report and maybe learn something about how to read MRIs. So I uploaded the .zip of obscurely formatted images to Claude (highest-powered free model as of a week ago, on high setting) and asked for an opinion. It did a great job of parsing the file and coming up with a plausible-sounding stream of orthopedic gobbledegook, but failed to identify a partially torn quadriceps tendon, which was far and away the most significant finding in the radiologist's report and is generally consistent with symptoms and history. When I nudged it a little bit, it seemed to pick up on the quad tendon, but when I asked it to highlight the finding on the relevant frame it identified a random location on the IT band as the quad tendon. I wasn't quite sure myself at first, not having a ton of experience with either AI or reading MRIs, and I got Claude fairly confused by asking about the difference between sagittal and coronal before I figured out what was going on. (All this took several days, since I was hitting my token cap fairly quickly on high setting.). Super impressive natural language processing, but I'm not sold on its radiological abilities, and I seem to recall hearing quite a while ago that the days of human radiologists were numbered.

Yeah I am sure that AI will come for Radiologists and everyone else eventually but we are still far away. They aren't right all the time, and the expectation is you are right all the time for one (and when they are wrong they are sometimes wrong in the most basic of ways).

That says nothing about being about to talk to primary teams about the read, rare findings, and how to manage incidental findings, as well as other basic radiology tasks.

People want this fight to be over because they hate doctors or certain kinds of expense, but we aren't there yet.

I wonder how its radiological abilities compare to ultrasonic nondestructive testing analysis? Seems like a similar field, and I believe it was getting touted for the latter as well.

It looked like much of the skill of ultrasound specialists was in moving the device around to get the correct locations in real time, and then they would mark it off on their checklist, and a doctor would look at it later (but also they already have an opinion on morality in the moment). So an LLM could replace the analysis, but not the moving the device around while jostling the item being scanned (at least for pregnancies).

Yeah, I was thinking much more of the interpretation that the initial reading-taking.

I mean, yes, the agents he talked to early on told him he’d lose money, and instead he turned a profit. But only after the sale did he talk to another agent for an expert opinion, and that expert expected a higher sale price than Stuart got, meaning he almost certainly listed too low. Stuart thinks that after the agent fee he still basically broke even, but I’m guessing he put in more work and stress this way, and took on more downside risk. I know that if I am ever selling or buying, I will be using AI extensively as part of the effort, but I am going to stick with Danielle Wiedemann. I am confident that her help, connections and advice were worth far more than the fee, and would be again.

Quite bogus. The second agent was told that the house was sold at the price it did with the help of AI. He gets zero points for scoffing and saying he would have totally gotten a better price for it.

So, what are you reading?

I've finished Said's The Question of Palestine, Thoughts below. Not much progress on Savrola. Giving McLuhan's The Classical Trivium another try; the third or so that I've read has stayed with me.

Taking a break from being censured by the NH house, Travis Corcoran released the audiobook of "Red State Mars".

I'm enjoying it so far. I do find the action scenes tend to drag a little, but I feel that way a lot. It's a me problem.

Sort of pulp, but classier pulp; the Harry Stubbs series, which use the setting of the Lovecraftian Mythos in 1920s London. Lead character is a good guy and a decent bloke, the adaptation of events in Lovecraft's stories to the adventures is well-done, and for once someone walks away with the majority of his sanity intact (mainly because he has the good sense not to dig any more into forbidden knowledge than the absolute minimum he needs for each case).

I'm currently trying to memorize Isaiah 40 in KJV. I read it aloud once or twice a day to brute force it, the way a churchgoer might eventually memorize the Lord's Prayer while never intending to.

Been making my way through a fiction backlog. Tried Recursion by Blake Crouch two weeks or so ago, which was an extremely fast paced and not-all-too-deep mind-bendy read where the stakes increase astronomically towards the middle and end of the book, sort of like the kind of thing a turbo-charged Christopher Nolan would write if you plied him with a lot of LSD and crack. There is one Big Lie you have to believe in order for the book to make any sense at all, and towards the end of the book the characters completely overlook an obvious solution to the main conflict of the story after over a hundred years of iteration with only a relatively thin plot justification for the oversight, but if you can accept that (and the very simplistic prose) the story's good fun.

Read The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch on Saturday after having it on the back burner for a while; it was entertaining for a bit but the prose was clunky and story-wise it felt all over the place, since it was trying to pull together so many elements - murder mystery detective plots, apocalypse scenarios, time travel (of a sort), deep space travel, incomprehensible starfish aliens, timeline-hopping Nazi vigilante groups, and more - and it never felt particularly unified as a result. The book doesn't always explore these plot points to its fullest extent and threatens to become incoherent under the weight of its own story a lot, and I never got the sense that there was an underlying gestalt to the entire story, which is something I generally like with twisty sci-fi. Also somehow nobody ever sees an ethical problem with creating whole temporary universes filled with people who think and feel, all of whom will blink out of existence once the traveller leaves.

Currently on Quarantine by Greg Egan and enjoying it a lot so far, though some of the futurism has aged rather poorly in retrospect.

Tried Recursion by Blake Crouch two weeks or so ago, which was an extremely fast paced and not-all-too-deep mind-bendy read where the stakes increase astronomically towards the middle and end of the book, sort of like the kind of thing a turbo-charged Christopher Nolan would write if you plied him with a lot of LSD and crack. There is one Big Lie you have to believe in order for the book to make any sense at all, and towards the end of the book the characters completely overlook a relatively obvious solution to the main conflict of the story after over a hundred years of iteration, but if you can accept that the story's good fun.

I was not a particular fan of that book, and you've amply described the reasons why, though I'll add that I'm not generally a fan of using present tense for fiction, either. There are special circumstances where it's just fine to do so, of course, but for me, it didn't work in Recursion and ended up being One More Thing that annoyed me about the novel.

Very little progress on Blood Meridien, I don't like the nihilism and general darkness induce audience apathy. The prose is masterful despite shorter sentences than I'd prefer, though.

Reading The Story of Philosophy by Durant. It's ok but wayyyy too focused on the analytic tradition. Durant's writing is fun and entertaining but I don't like his opinions that much. He's pretty scornful of religion and seems to really like the enlightenment atheists, which is a turnoff.

If anyone has a similar recommendation but with less of an ideological bent, I'm all ears.

About a quarter of the way through Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the third book in the Neapolitan quartet. So far this book seems much more fast-paced than the first two, which could be painfully lethargic at times.

Finished Artemis by Andy Weir. It turned out roughly as I would have expected. It's a simple nice fun Sci-Fi story, would probably make a good movie if anyone cared to produce it.

I started reading Day Of Ascension by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I haven't generally been real into the Warhammer stuff, but trying it out to see if it scratches my itch for plots that don't go in the direction I would expect.

probably make a good movie if anyone cared to produce it

They're going to, allegedly, though seeing as how a new Weir adaptation (Project Hail Mary) made it out first, I wonder if this is ever going to happen for real.

The vast majority of books that get optioned don't get made into movies, but I'd bet "author with two books that made hit movies and a third that has two super-popular director/producers interested in it" has better odds than most.

IMHO Artemis was pretty disappointing. The Martian is one of my favorite books and my kids loved it too, and Project Hail Mary is one of my kids' favorites and I loved it too, but with Artemis I felt like it wasn't deep or creative enough to work as a mature novel but it also wasn't kid-friendly enough to turn into a family movie. I'm still mostly glad I read it and very glad he wrote it - you don't know how art will come out until you try - but I hope that the newly-and-properly-recognized demand for More Weir Movies has enough patience to wait and see what he comes out with next.

Cured: the Tale of Two Imaginary Boys by Laurence Tolhurst.

Side note: I thought that Alanson said that he was wrapping up his Convergence series, but evidently not.

Wrapped up The Glass Bead Game. I think it's better than I initially thought and there's some cleverness around how Hesse writes the authors writing the biography. Still, I feel that despite the salvation of Castalia being the main thrust of the book, and clearly being successful based on the device of the frame story, it never became clear to me what good Castalia actually is. The Benedictines exist in the book as a kind of religious foil that have persisted for over a thousand years and preserved useful learning and culture. What good is a bunch of eggheads playing the glass bead game without coming up with anything new or useful? Several characters bring this up in the book but the objection is simply never answered head on.

The other thing is that I really don't like Hesse's, shall we call it, anti-didactic worldview. We see this in Siddhartha where he basically says that there's no way for one generation to stand on the shoulders of a previous one in terms of figuring out the good life. Here Hesse seems to go a step further and say that even ordinary lessons are futile. The hero Knecht never learns anything from anyone (sure, whatever, hagiography) and his first and last lesson to Tito consists in death by drowning (but still has the intended effect). It seems like a pretty corrosive outlook for any kind of developed society. I guess it's a step up from the Talmudic view that each generation is strictly less enlightened than the last.

Tried reading Mo Yan's Red Sorghum but couldn't get into it. Mostly torture porn of Chinese peasants at the hands of the Japanese. Prose is decent but one wonders how this guy got a Nobel. The word "sorghum" appears 500 times in the book, and it shows.

Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh. Huge amounts of filler but an interesting core of interviews and anecdotes remains. Tough to imagine the psychological state of Weil during the year between the flaw being found in his proof and the fixing of the flaw given his obsession with the problem since childhood.

Currently on Chadwick's The Decipherement of Linear B.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most engaging parts of Said's The Question of Palestine were when he did literary analysis of novels and colonial writings. A lot of interesting facts or claims or documents about Israeli oppression and violence appeared, which will keep me busy for some time in reading up.

The prose is characteristically smooth, and ultimately his appeal for common sense, dedication and looking beyond the initial appearance of the Other had an impact, albeit mainly in abstract. This was likely because of my own lack of historical knowledge, which made it difficult to come up with an opinion on the topic at hand.

But also, Said's case sometimes seems to rest on the ability to ignore what people say and observe instead the context underlying their actions and words. I'm a firm believer in putting less faith in what people say, but one wonders if in this case it doesn't amount to casually dismissing the Israeli position while pig-headedly proclaiming that the cause of Palestinian liberation is really about democracy.

I can't easily call to mind any specific instance of this from this book, but in the third book in this trilogy, Covering Islam (which I'm still reading), Said takes issue with the framing of Hezbollah as a "terrorist, militant Shi'a group backed by Iran," and says that they are better understood as guerrillas whose purpose was to resist the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Failing to call them guerrillas means that "resistance is both dehumanized and rendered illegitimate." Granted that the context matters, isn't it natural that the religious element, the anti-Zionism and the ties to Iran matter to Israel and its allies from a security perspective?

It doesn't help that many things which have lost some trust with me are cited: Chomsky, United Nations, Amnesty International, etc. I suppose it goes both ways, as Said makes me wonder if perhaps I have been too hard on Chomsky after reading about the Khmer Rouge stuff.

I've come to believe that Said's books are genuinely important, but mainly because figuring out what he got right and got wrong may point a way forward to understanding. On their own, I have decidedly mixed feelings.

In broader strokes, many parts serve as a plea for things of merit. Ultimately Said wants a solution which allows both Israelites and Palestinians to see each other as the human beings that they are. A quote from Covering Islam, because I didn't highlight the interesting ones in Palestine, and because the same theme runs throughout it:

But what I really believe in is the existence of a critical sense and of citizens able and willing to use it to get beyond the special interests of experts and their idées recues. By using the skills of a good critical reader to disentangle sense from nonsense, by asking the right questions and expecting pertinent answers, anyone can learn...At that point, humanistic knowledge begins and communal responsibility for that knowledge begins to be shouldered.

I really like this side of Said, whatever else I may think. Unquestionably, these books have encouraged me to keep listening and thinking, and to seek a more involved understanding than I have thus far.

Said takes issue with the framing of Hezbollah as a "terrorist, militant Shi'a group backed by Iran," and says that they are better understood as guerrillas whose purpose was to resist the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

At the time Said was writing, this was straightforwardly correct. (Israel are in belligerent occupation of southern Lebanon from 1982-2000, and Hezbollah was founded to resist that occupation). The morality of what Hezbollah is doing changes after 2000 when it is no longer resisting an ongoing occupation (although the legal status doesn't - they can continue prosecuting their justified war against Israel until a peace treaty is signed and the only legal objection to what they are doing is that they are attacking civilian targets) - and the fact that they did what they did after 2000 allows us to retrospectively reassess their motives from the earlier period.

It doesn't help that many things which have lost some trust with me are cited: Chomsky, United Nations, Amnesty International, etc.

Amnesty was trustworthy up until shortly after the end of the Cold War, and it doesn't become obvious that they have gone full woke until after Said died in 2003. So I wouldn't hold reliance on Amnesty that against him.

I was talking to a Progressive friend on Friday and the left's favorite topic came up: Billionaires. Or more specifically how it is impossible to be an ethical billionaire. Obviously there are loads of moral axioms loaded into that statement and several different framings that can be used to identify that. I'm curious if you take the idea outside the obvious marxist definitional stance, and look at how the billionaires got their money. Can you have a billionaire who ethically got their money? If we grant things like selling merch made in third world sweatshops a la TSwift or not paying employees the fair "value" of there labor as unethical. Anyone have some ideas. I said Gabe Newell, owner of Steam and did not get a convincing counter-argument for that, even in a marxist theory frame. I wonder if there are others?

Steam is only successful because of the availability of servers on which to run it and the proliferation of personal computers allowing everyday people to play video games on them, which they pay Steam for the license of. I'm sure somewhere in the chain of events leading to the production of servers and consumer PCs, one can find some sort of unethical or exploitative behavior by some supplier or vendor somewhere, and so Gabe Newell is clearly an unethical billionaire.

More to the point, you can play this 6-degrees-of-Kevin-Baconunethical-production with anything, and so the entire concept is just a fully general argument that's meant to be pulled out of the quiver and deployed as needed when convenient.

There is a much easier one that another friend pointed out: CS-GO skins are essentially child gambling. Loot crates are absolutely designed to be addictive gambling.

You could point to any country that has run into hyperinflation so that all of its citizens become billionaires+. Talk to them about Zimbabweans in 2008: they were all billionaires! You could even get your hands on one of those billion-dollar zimbabwean notes and pass it around as a kind of "ethical immunity totem" as you discuss the issue.

They love saying that slogan because they have trained themselves online into rhetorically browbeating anyone who even slightly disagrees. Purity testing is a part of progressive (communist) culture.

It is a last-gasp of marxist zero-sum class warfare. If they they let go of Marxism, they really might have little else to add to the conversation.

You could even get your hands on one of those billion-dollar zimbabwean notes and pass it around

This is actually amusing. not as a "immunity totem" but as a effigy. Give it to another friend so we can "publically" condemn them. Real abducto ad absurdium.

I feel like this comes down to whether you consider ethics a legal code of bare minimums, or ethical behavior is a maximal standard we all strive for and ultimately fail. I think it's reasonable to say no billionaire was also a saint.

It depends on what one considers to be ethical or unethical. Which is a substantial problem - I'm not sure even your "obvious" examples are really that unethical.

Third world "sweatshops" are a bit of a mixed bag. Sure, they're a harder day's work than being a Starbucks barista. But is anyone actually forced to work on one? As far as I know, that's never been a thing. That means they can't get workers unless they're a better deal than their local competition, usually subsistence farming, as far as time and difficulty of work versus payment. In addition to that, they bring foreign currency and industrial infrastructure into the nation, get some local laborers and probably managers used to how to operate an industrial business. That's a big part of how you actually lift a third-world country into the first world. And the companies are getting cheaper labor, yeah, but they're not going to bother bringing industry into that country without getting something for it. Yeah, it's sad not everyone in the world is a first-world latte-sipping poet or something, but you don't get there from subsistence farming by wishes and magic, you get there by gradual economic progress, some of which might look like "sweatshops".

Even if we granted that they were "unethical" somehow, would that make Taylor Swift "unethical" automatically? As far as I know, her money comes mostly from ticket sales, album sales, other royalties, and such things. Making merch is probably a tiny part of her budget however it's done. If that's enough to make her "unethical", is anyone with any actual power "ethical"?

Not paying employees what some uninvolved party thinks is the fair value of their labor seems a bit iffy too. Usually neglected is the stability value they get too. Owners risk losing some or all of their money if the business does poorly, but the workers either continue to get paid, or get fired at worst. They don't stand to lose much. That's worth something too.

Focusing exclusively on billionaires seems a bit iffy to me too. It seems to me, what we're really concerned with here is power. Yes, billionaires have a moderate amount of power, but they're not the only ones. Why shouldn't we focus on Government too, both elected and un-elected officials too? They're the ones with the power to tax us, fine us, imprison us, start wars, etc. Why isn't any government official who doesn't magically make the world operate like some activist wants also "unethical"? Billionaires can only create great products and services we all like to make money, and they lose it again if their businesses fail. Governments can impose terrible economic systems like marxism on a nation, causing millions to starve to death.

Can you have a billionaire who ethically got their money?

Inheritance.

Yeap, pretty much, I was thinking about this recently and at my current rate of accumulation and throwing money into the stock market, assuming things about passive investing holds true AND my child and grandchild also accumulates the same way I do then maybe my great grandchild will be a billionaire (plus and minus a generation). We would all have gotten our wealth ethically, though I suppose because the immoral capitalist ways of seeking profit (whatever they maybe) has been laundered through broad passive investment in the market. Oh right, that would be a billion not counting inflation so the value is totally different.

No he won't, the fortune will be divided along the way.

I started from 0, and no matter how many kids I have, they definitely won't have to start from 0. But yeah, lots of massive assumptions about how my progeny spend their inheritance.

not paying employees the fair "value" of there labor

You misunderstand. The fact that they are billionaires and their employees are not is proof, in these peoples' views, that the employees are not paid fairly. It's a tautology, or close to it.

I think that’s not quite right. The intuition is that if the billionaire couldn’t be a billionaire without (broadly) your labour, then you should be recognised as a small but vital part of the whole operation and you deserve more than the bare minimum it would take to replace you with the next available economic unit.

It’s the transition from absolute value (the value of your work to the enterprise) to marginal value (the value of your work relative to the next best candidate) that people find confusing and upsetting.

Striking is a power play but it’s also a way of saying, “see? Your company literally can’t function without the work I do, so it’s bullshit that you make billions from it and I make $5 an hour”.

you deserve more than the bare minimum it would take to replace you with the next available economic unit.

Sure, but how much more? To simplify, it's enough more that the billionaire is no longer a billionaire. Alternatively, the argument might be that the billionaire should have been taxed until he's no longer a billionaire (I've seen this put as "every billionaire is a policy failure").

The people who coined the expression "every billionaire is a policy failure" were claiming that a business which generates enough profit (above a normal return on the actual tangible capital put into it by investors) to make the founder a billionaire is presumptively exploiting market power in an anticompetitive way. For example, in this model Zuckerberg is a billionaire because he has gained enough market power that he can force you to look at adverts in order to communicate with your own friends.

I suspect in practice most people in private would agree to a hierarchy in which, say, in a software company the janitors are important but less important than the eggheads, who are important but less important than the CEO. In the privacy of their own heads, I think a lot of low-level workers envisage a hierarchy where the janitors earn X, the eggheads earn 2X, and the CEO earns 3X.

Didn't Ben and Jerries have to get rid of their 10x rule for CEO after they were unable to find anyone qualified for the role who was also willing to take that salary?

Didn’t know that but wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest.

We're basically talking about the same thing. A company in which the CEO earns 3x more than the janitor means that the CEO isn't a billionaire or the janitor is at least a centimillionaire (simplifying a little bit) which is plainly impossible.

which is plainly impossible

I don't think it's that clear cut. If Amazon would have been set up e.g. like the Mondragon Corporation (a worker coop), a janitor with the company from the very start would have been a worker-owner from the beginning, accumulating dividends in his individual capital account within Amazon. His salary would have been lower than Bezo's by orders of magnitude, but the share of the company both of them held and the size of their dividend accounts would have been the same.

Now, Mondragon isn't nearly as large or successful as Amazon - but they are relatively large and successful.

This is a perfect example. Amazon's market cap is 2.7T. It employs 1.6M people (the true number is even larger due to employee turnover, contractors, etc). That would make Bezos' and the janitor's share worth $1.6M. Even Amazon can't make the janitor a centimillionaire.

This is the wrong set of numbers. Amazon's net book value is about $400 billion. The extra $2.3 trillion is the market's estimate of the PV of future profits - it is value that can only be realised by selling parts of the company to outside investors, and would be invisible if Amazon was a co-op. Total profit to date is a better metric of what could plausibly have been exploited out of workers, and is somewhat less than $2 trillion. And most of that comes from AWS, so it doesn't come from exploiting the warehouse workers.

If Amazon had been a Mondragon-style co-op, the money available for distribution to workers (including Bezos) would not have included that $2.3 trillion - it would be latent value that would ultimately accrue to future workers when the promised profits were realised. If corporate Amazon has never paid a dividend (it hasn't) or bought back more shares than it issued to fund acquisitions and employee share options (they haven't - shares out increases over time), then it hasn't put cash directly into Bezos' pocket (Bezos' billionaire lifestyle is funded by selling rights to the $2.3 trillion of future profits) and the hypothetical Mondazon could not have distributed more money to workers than it in fact did while still investing in growth like Amazon did.

One of the problems maintaining co-ops which don't have an explicit social mission (such as professional partnerships) or which have de facto lost their social mission and become ordinary commercial businesses (like the UK's building societies) is that turning a co-op into a stockmarket-listed company, or selling it to an existing listed company, allows the current generation of members to monetize that value.

In the Mondragon system, the share itself actually has no value, since it is not tradeable by design.

The thing that has value is the capital account, and those typically only vary by how long a worker has been with the company - and it only gets filled with actual profits. So Bezos and janitor #1 have pretty large capital accounts, but the rest of the 1.6M employees have less, since they haven't been with the coop for as long.

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In practice, yes, but I’m saying I think that you’ve got the causation wrong. People think that if they’re working a small but necessary job in a company where the CEO gets 1e9 then they should be getting at least 1e8. They don’t object to the leader of a big company being rich, they object to someone being paid 10000x the menial staff who actually make the place run.

Especially since, let’s be honest, terrible CEOs are common and cost basically as much as the regular kind. My founder is a very business oriented guy who made his money as a director in a world famous startup, and even he vents about some of the CEOs he’s dealt with who couldn’t find their arse with both hands.

I know JK Rowling has taken steps to force Warner's to source ethical products for their Harry Potter theme parks so she at least made an effort, and I'm inclined to think an artist selling books is likely pretty low on the totem pole of evil moneymakers in the first place.

I have a hunch that the "people claiming there are no ethical billionaires" and "people who think Rowling is unethical (being a TERF)" is a venn diagram that's pretty close to a circle.

I would broadly agree that they would view it as a circle, but it actually makes for an interesting follow on. Are billionaires unethical because of how they got their money or because what they do with it? If it's the former, JK Rowling would probably be a good example of an ethical one. If it's the latter than being a billionaire isn't really the core component because there are plenty of people who behave poorly that aren't billionaires. (in this case by being a TERF) The billionaire part is irrelevant.

Presumably, a billionaire only has to fail one, not both, of those to be "unethical." Either they became a billionaire via unethical means, or, having become one, they then proceed to behave unethically.

I remember when she actually used to be the token good one, until she gave it away and became even better.

Then she had to open her mouth.

Cthulhu only swims left. You either die a left-coded feminist hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a right-coded TERF villain.

She is Exhibit A in how no one is safe in a purity spiral.

not paying employees the fair "value" of there labor as unethical.

You can pay fair market wages to everyone your company employs and set agreeable terms with all your contractors. That doesn't mean the wages are "fair value" under whatever framework they're using, or that the circle of concern stops there.

I think all of the examples are going to be in software of some kind. Notch made a billion dollars from Minecraft with only minor contributions from others, and I heard of a billion-dollar aqui-hire in AI. There are probably a bunch of $10M+ projects run by a single person, and scaling that up 100x doesn't seem impossible.

The other possibility would be sports or celebrity. If your personal labor is creating a billion dollars of value, then it seems fine to get a billion dollars.

The athlete's wealth is still built on the foundation of a fundamentally exploitative industry that devours black and brown bodies in the name of profit. Both the leagues themselves, and the sportswear companies making their sponsored products.

As the saying goes, there's no ethical consumption under capitalism. We're all complicit, and we must all seek absolution at the feet of the party.

I agree that I think we are pretty much restricted to software which is interesting considering how much hate I've been hearing about SWEs on the left. It's probably impossible to be considered an ethical billionaire under the framework if you manufacture something or have a company that employs lots of people because the rejoinder is "if you got rich why didn't your employees". Software bypasses that. Sports or celebrity is interesting because there's a part on how they got rich, if it was from merch sales then you pretty much got rich by exploiting third world sweat shops. Not very "ethical" I think they said TSwift was unethical but didn't enquire about the reasoning because I am not a swiftie.

Software bypasses that.

A little bit, but not much. Sergey Brin's net worth is 300B. The average FAANG engineer is probably somewhere on the order of millions, maybe ten or twenty if they really got in early and grinded. There's a vocal portion of FAANG SWEs who are not satisfied with a measly few million NW when the boss is at 300B.

Then you've got situations like the Windsurf acquihire where the boss and his college buddies top guys get a huge payout and the rest of the company gets a middle finger.

I mean I don't think it's possible to be an ethical billionaire in the same it's not possible to be ethical in general - someone is always going to be upset. Superficially Gaben looks like a good answer, but then you find out how many people in the development and publishing space hate him for steam being "freeloaders." Consumer hate is rarer but still comes up with respect to some decisions they make.

So if we reframe the question as "who are the most ethical" billionaires I'm sure you can find some, it's just usually not people the man on the street knows about.

Consider the Duff brothers from Mississippi - they made their money running a tire company.

Or Judy Faulker in the healthcare space, Epic gets a lot of flack but most of that is actually regulatory burden or angry competitors.

Plenty of people make a billion in generally unethical spaces (real estate, investing) while being no more unethical than everyone else in that space, sometimes even more ethical (just very good or lucky).

Judy Faulker in the healthcare space, Epic

Epic low balls SWEs, back in the golden years of the SWE field, when entry levels were commanding 6-figs, EPIC would try to pressure hire you on a 60k starting. Many ex-EPIC folks are like ex-amazon folks. People did not stay there long. Idk if they stack ranked but it wouldn't surprise me.

Pretty much any large company with employees is going to run into the framing of: "If you got rich owning the company did your employees who were doing the major work get rich too? Did you fire anyone who was there too long so they didn't get equity? Did you give any equity?"

Not here to litigate the company from what I understand it has some bad parts as an employee and also some incredibly good parts.

Doesn't change that she actually attempts to accomplish ethics in business, took on the minimum of outside investment, doesn't overcharge customers and all kinds of other good things.

Upsetting people doesn't make something unethical, though.

I realize I'm probably preaching to the choir, but the most ethical billionaires would have to be those who did the most good* without trampling any particular rights. Given how hard business can incentivize one or another form of such trampling, then, it would be really hard to find a billionaire with clean hands. At some point they'd have signed off on a sketchy deal, or exploited labor laws, or just hired people who did. How much of that responsibility should transfer?

You could probably get a pretty good proxy of political affiliation by asking a series of comparison questions. Ask whether a person is culpable for X, Y, Z, with decreasing levels of personal involvement. Someone who believes in holding a CEO responsible for his bottom-level managers' hiring decisions is much, much more likely to subscribe to various left-wing policy planks. Collectivism is not limited to redistribution.

Assuming OP and his buddy could agree on a standard, they could in theory go down the Forbes list and rule people out accordingly.

*Yes, yes, we also probably disagree on some key points of the "good". Not going there right now.

Assuming OP and his buddy could agree on a standard, they could in theory go down the Forbes list and rule people out accordingly.

Probably going to be hard, because I think I really oppose their idea on this, but its interesting from a devil's advocate perspective, if its just impossible to be an ethical billionaire, in that they have created an unprovable tautology, or if even within this framework, one could find an "ethical" billionaire, and essentially prove their statement wrong.

Right. I bring up Judy because she did a lot of good (made medical records electronic) uses her power and influence the success of people and patients over the success of her company (as she sees these things) and generally does not engage in evil billionaire behavior.

It's so debatable though - lots of people who work for the company hate, lots of the people who work for the company love it, she does lobbying (evil) but it's almost always for the good of the company and the medical record industry (which has some bad parts but is usually good for people).

She's done a wild amount of good for the world but you could easily find people willing to shoot them.

Likewise with the brothers I'm sure you have some underbelly to the tire world and they didn't entirely make their money with right place right time, I Just don't know what it is.

A motivated socialist is going to find both of those and GabeN evil but that's not going to really capture things (or encourage people to not be evil which is a thing society has lost).

I think your comment abuts something which bugs me about the progressive crowd - nobody is ethically if they do something the slightest bit wrong, but if a system results in great evil it can still be good as long as no individual is making an evil move. It's weird.

I mean I don't think it's possible to be an ethical billionaire in the same it's not possible to be ethical in general - someone is always going to be upset

This is precisely why the focus is on billionaires. The left-wing claim that "there is no just consumption under capitalism" does too much: it breeds either neuroticism or Hasan Piker-style hypocrisy where you justify buying $10,000 watch as if it's the same thing as needing to buy a house or consuming unethically sourced products from some company with monopoly power.

I take it more as scapegoating than anything.

This is precisely why the focus is on billionaires. The left-wing claim that "there is no just consumption under capitalism" does too much: it breeds either neuroticism or Hasan Piker-style hypocrisy where you justify buying $10,000 watch as if it's the same thing as needing to buy a house or consuming unethically sourced products from some company with monopoly power.

The latter is the whole point. "There is no ethical consumption under capitalism" is a way of saying "Don't sweat the ethical implications of your day job in HR at Evilcorp, latte habit, and collection of Apple products - the thing that matters is the work you do to overthrow the system."

American Orthodox Christians, what are your plans for the St Peter's fast? Do you even fast in the US?

As usual, I will be starting my digital fast this Monday and will return on the 12th of July. I have 20 new fragrances to test and my novella to finish.

How seriously you take it probably depends on your jurisdiction and church culture, but I was always aware of it growing up. In part because I attended an Antiochian-run summer camp where they would serve us fasting food on Wednesdays, Fridays, and during the Apostles Fast. This year I will probably not fast very strictly since my wife is pregnant and we have a young child.

orthoxerox - if you don't mind me asking, what is your relationship to Orthodoxy? In my time lurking I think I have pieced together that you are a Russian who identifies as Orthodox in some sense and follows some of the practices, but that you are not really a believing Christian. Is this accurate?

(I realized I may have to ask the above question again later if I hope to get orthoxerox's attention, since the fast started today!)

Happy St Peter and Paul day! I used to be a believer, but I identify as an atheist these days. I use Orthodoxy practices mainly as Schelling points now: if you have to take a break from digital entertainment, might as well use the existing fasts.

How many of these are even post on themotte?

There's at least a few of us.

Ahh man thanks for the reminder. I didn't even know. I'm not sure I will do anything, got a lot of really tough personal stuff going on at the moment.

How do you test fragrances without access to fragrantica?

Why do you think I don't have access to it?

Aside from Fragrantica (don't think I've ever bought from there), sample-packs of fragrance vials are readily available on the clearweb for a double-digit number of vials a pack. One can also farm specific vials of interest from department store salespersons, although it might take a few trips before getting to 20.

Oh no I meant for tracking information and looking up notes! I don't buy through fragrantica, I either do commercial sample packs or from one of the websites that buy bottles and break them up into small vials.

Enjoy!

We're two teachers and three children on summer break, enjoying a birthday, an anniversary, and the only babysitting we ever get, so we will be visiting mountains, restaurants, swimming, and not fasting. But I'm being a lapsed Orthodox, and most American Orthodox will be fasting until June 29th, some into July, depending on jurisdiction.

https://www.satyress.com/

Is this satire or do I simply not understand startup culture? I'm officially at the point where I can't tell anymore.

The name of the website wasn’t a clue?

Have you ever gone though an airport that sees through your clothing using a Rapiscan imager? You'd think that, at some point, someone would have spoken up to ask: "Are we sure everybody is going to read that first A as a short A?"

"Are we sure everybody is going to read that first A as a short A?"

"Don't worry. We've programmed them not to enjoy it."

People buy fursuits. Tell me with a straight face there is no market for your very own fursona robot (for whatever purpose at all you might wish to have one, say riding on its back to the convention).

‘Satyress’

Yeah, I get that it's supposed to be a pun on "satire" but the robot also looks, very vaguely, like a satyr and the female of that would, presumably, be satyress (even though I don't think in mythology there are female satyrs). If you're all hot about being otherkin, your very own robot satyr(ess) might be just the thing you want to spend more money than is sane on.

It probably is an entire spoof, but no worse (or better) than Juicero. If somebody can figure out animal/mythological type, not just humanoid type, robots there could well be a market for them. There's probably a market for everything.

Satyr (1 2)

In a world where juicero got $120M in funding? No.

I don't get it. Satyress is one step removed from "satire". Juicero is...?

Satyr, not satire. The words are widely and incorrectly believed to be related, but in fact "satyr" comes from the Greek word for a mythological creature that would fit just fine into modern furry porn* and "satire" comes from the Latin word for a fruit salad.

* Human body, horse ears and tail, unrealistically huge dick

When I first saw juicero, I thought it was satire. It turned out that it was, in fact, not satire.

Probably more incapability than insincerity. I'd give a rough BOM cost under <10k USD to build a functional prototype with that design and core capabilities at unit size one, probably three or four times that in compliance costs, quadrobic 12-dof motor control is (very) annoying math and tuning but well-solved in the open-source world. And while they're choosing a stupid way to solve a bunch of random problems -- selling to .gov sources is basically impossible for a startup this shape so they're trying to sell to randos, but selling to end-users has some major political risk so you get an intentionally-bulky robot -- they're at least some problems that already exist like 'I have to cut a fallen tree apart and I don't want to lose a leg to a chainsaw'.

But they've been around over a year, have a lot of renders, and no actual action shots. Or pretense of action shots, which is what makes me think it's not self-aware enough to be satire.

But the complete lack of social media presence or public push does leave satire on the table.

It's a joke.

A disapointing joke. Like TacoCopter.

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