domain:anarchonomicon.com
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8m ago
It is also possible to order Italian staples in the wrong regions and get mediocre food. Ordering pizza in Rome or carbonara in Bologna is like ordering a well-done steak in Paris - it's a signal to the kitchen that you don't care about food quality.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
9m ago
Code review has a paper trail. It's easy to make a paper trail for reviewing your teammate's performance too.
You're not thinking outside the box.
TheBailey
soapy mop
9m ago
Odds are very strong that I'll empty the thing before I die
Even if you expect to exhaust your HSA before you die, my proposed strategy still either beats or ties the “shoebox strategy” as long as you anticipate your HSA lasting through age 60, you're currently under 59, and you're not currently maxing out your Roth contributions.
If your older-than-60 self incurs medical expenses at least 7.5% of your gross income and itemizes, those expenses can be deducted—unless you used them as an excuse to make a tax-free HSA withdrawal. So if your future self is going to need the growth on today's existing HSA dollars to pay for medical expenses, you will still be better off burning any at-hand receipts to make HSA withdrawals today and coincidentally making Roth contributions of an equal amount. (And during years your future self is spending less than 7.5% of gross income on medical expenses, or fails to itemize, my proposed strategy does no worse than the “shoebox strategy”—you're still making 100% tax-free withdrawals from growth on money your past self had put into an HSA.)
ChickenOverlord
11m ago
Thanks! I'll probably wait for the buyout then
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
16m ago
The price you get in a buyout is the price agreed upon in the deal. Which looks to be $210/share in cash. With the price being 202-ish right now, you are only looking at an $8 premium on waiting for the deal to conclude.
So yeah, if you just wait, you'll get paid out $210 per share. Why wouldn't you wait? Well, there could be legal challenges to draw the process out, or maybe stop it entirely. Maybe you have an investment you want to make right now that you think has a better return on investment. I had shares in Activision during Microsoft's buying, and I think I bailed at something like 90-95% of the buyout price because the lawsuits were just dragging out forever, and I wanted to take my money and run.
hydroacetylene
17m ago
And the actual experience of integrating all those Catholic immigrants into American society over the course of the 20th century absolutely did get experienced, in many ways, like a kind of soft ethnic cleansing, or it certainly was by the parent or grandparent generations watching their home cultures and home religions get completely melted away by mass culture, Hollywood, public schools, and later universities. There was a huge amount of legitimate trauma.
The Catholic Church In America had a ginormous amount of cultural soft power; thé hayes code was set by bishops as much as anyone else for just one example.
The important thing to note is how much of this soft power was renounced voluntarily. And sûre, maybe it couldn’t have been held on to anyways. But they didn’t really try; the decision to integrate was more or less voluntary.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
19m ago
· Edited 11m ago
That's a lot of debt. EA has about $2 billion in annual operating cashflow (which will drop after the take-private because some of the $600 million or so in stock-based compensation will become cash bonuses) of which $250 million a year is being reinvested in the business (excluding major acquisitions, which EA seem to be dependent on). The reported profit after tax is $1.1 billion, with depreciation most of the difference. At a low-end LBO interest rate of SOFR+200, the interest on $20 billion in debt is going to $1.2 billion per year.
Absent another pandemic or other dramatic increase in revenue with minimal investment required to deliver it, EA are going to have to eat their seed corn in order to pay the interest. I wonder if JP Morgan are doing a favour for the Saudis by lending slightly too much on this one.
yunyun333
19m ago
Saudis have dumped a ton of money into sports ventures like LIV golf and saudi league ft. ronaldo. They've also spent (a lot less) on esports/gaming such as the esports world cup where they crowned their own sponsored org as the victor two years in a row. The end goal, presumably, is to gain positive cultural influence in the west as opposed to simply oil, repressive islam, and terrorism. Maybe for pride as much as anything else.
cjet79
20m ago
I don't think assimilation is harder today, or at least its a wash with the various technological and social changes. Especially for assimilation into and out of American culture, because so much of American culture has become world culture.
What does it matter that they can face time back to Italy when Italy is also watching MTV, eating at McDonalds, buying coffee at Starbucks, and talking about 21st century technology using barely converted English words? This same phenomenon makes traveling as an American simultaneously easier and more boring.
Lets not forget that past immigrant populations found plenty of ways to resist assimilation. Every "Little [Country]" in a big city is usually a past example of an immigrant population congregating together and avoiding assimilation as long as possible.
Matt Yglesias posted on X an argument in favor of immigration (having trouble finding it now).
...
why would presumably smart people like Yglesias make such a sloppy argument?
I think you pre-emptively answered your own question.
Anyways, its not like its hard to find a more thought out exposition on why immigration proponents want more immigration. Bryan Caplan did a whole book on the topic where he tried to make the arguments approachable for laymen: https://www.amazon.com/Open-Borders-Science-Ethics-Immigration/dp/1250316960
Twitter/X is a place where you can throw out a lot of arguments. And see which arguments stink or are good depending on the reactions. You are implicitly buying into a culture war framing on the whole thing by treating arguments as soldiers. You can certainly downgrade your opinion of certain commentators if they make a bunch of dumb arguments, but dumb arguments in favor of a thing does not make that thing wrong or incorrect.
cheesecake_llama
20m ago
You argue that the relative lack of technology back then necessitated a higher degree of assimilation, but it’s not evident why this wouldn’t actually have the opposite effect. It could very well incentivize immigrant groups to form even stronger enclaves.
For instance, if I were to visit China, but you took away machine translation and the ability to easily contact my family, one of the first things I’d do for security and comfort would be to find a reliable expat community. While technology does allow people to hold onto their roots, it also enables them to branch out.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
21m ago
As an European, I have happily never been subject to having to learn that there are 231 cubic inches in a US gallon.
As an American, I have never been subject to that either. Europeans love to bust out obscure conversions that nobody knows as evidence for the imperial system being bad, but nobody knows it because nobody needs to ever make that conversion. So who cares? I long ago memorized the very short list of conversions one encounters in everyday life:
- 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard (also 5280 feet to a mile though that isn't exactly everyday)
- 16 ounces to a pound, 2000 lbs to a ton
- 3 tsp to one tbsp
- 2c to a pint, 2 pints to a quart, 4 quarts to a gallon
I'm willing to concede that metric conversions are easier than these. But they aren't hard to learn either, and there aren't that many of them. It's not actually onerous in practice. I think that the inadequate equilibrium framing is not wrong, but it risks overstating the extent to which the equilibrium is actually causing problems in anyone's life.
ChickenOverlord
24m ago
Question for investor types here: I bought several shares of EA right before the Battlefield 6 beta, with the expectation that the actual release (coming in a few weeks) would be a massive success and drive the stock up. This news about the company going private has already caused me to make 15-20% total gains. Better to sell now, or is the price EA will pay to buy me out likely even higher?
Throwaway05
34m ago
who claimed that she had a low opinion of Italy because when she went there on vacation, she didn't like the food.
If I can rant for a second I'm going to say this person has utterly terrible taste, or more likely it is a skill issue - it's easy to end up at terrible tourist only places and order American Italian dishes instead of actual Italian food.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
35m ago
You know, there are two stories about EA, and I don't know which one is true, or if it's a synthesis of both.
One is EA the strip mining vulture capitalist. Rolling up to independent studios with deals too good to refuse, and then putting them on permanent crunch status churning out mediocre sequels until the studio gets shut down.
The other is EA the naive savior of struggling independent studios. Studios that find themselves in over their heads, with cost running away from them, literally about to run out of money with their next opus still 6 months to year from release. So EA comes in, thinking if they give Lord British, Peter Molyneux or Chris Roberts a years worth of financing in exchange for ownership and some oversight, the ship could be righted.
In the 90's, I was 1000% on team Origin, Bullfrog, Westwood, etc.
After each of these luminaries ran their respective Kickstarter scams and mismanaged the projects to degrees that are legendary, I'm more sympathetic to EA.
Anyways, the point I'm eventually getting to, is I will laugh my ass off if EA turns out to be every bit the lemon to the Saudi's private equity firms as buying up Origin and Bullfrog were to EA in the 90's. Personally I can't remember the last time I bought an EA game, and it's hard to imagine anything about this acquisition making them worse. There might even be some upside! It's hard to imagine the Saudi's letting another game be as gay as Veilguard was.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
36m ago
I think at the core the real problem is that no universal arguments are actually possible in these spaces, and it really is who / whom all the way down. I'm not saying that to say Yglesias is arguing in bad faith; I mean, instead, that I think he believes something about universal arguments that simply doesn't work. Ironically, the argument I'm about to make might get slotted into an intersectional, post-modern, identity politics one these days, except on impermissible lines.
But let me make an analogy. I have a friendly acquaintance who has a PhD in English. Really clever and funny guy. And, importantly for this story, he's a not especially rabid or antagonistic atheist of Russian Jewish descent. And at some point, a decade ago, we were at a barbeque, and he was talking about the time that he had spent, earlier in his academic career, in a university in northern Utah. Obviously a very homogenous, very LDS part of the country. And at some point, he made some joke in passing about how stiflingly and uncomfortably Mormon the whole place was, but fortunately "we" had managed to get a lot of Supreme Court rulings that were making being that way much less possible in public, "we" were half way there, and "we" just needed another batch of Supreme Court rulings to finish the job and make it possible for "normal" people to move there and not be hassled by the religiously homogenous. I want to say immediately that 1) he said this in a somewhat wry way, and 2) the "we" he was clearly referring to, and that he assumed I was an unobjectionable part of, was "smart, cosmopolitan, well-educated progressives". He didn't have a particular strong atheist or Jewish identity, as far as I could tell (and in the best of progressive Jewish fashion, he married a progressive Catholic woman later).
And on the one hand, I can totally imagine that, for a clever, wry, atheist academic of Russian Jewish extraction from New England, being in homogenous LDS communities would be pretty alienating. And I could totally imagine seeing progress, for such a person, as being synonymous with dampening all possible public expressions of homogenous, assumed religiosity. And from that view point, mass immigration especially, along with progressive public schools and university educations and Hollywood narrative promulgation, are all unabashed goods, creating a more comfortable, more desirable world.
But as a matter of fact, much of my extended family is true believing LDS, some of it out west, and I'm very, very familiar with the LDS stories of their founding, and the religious persecution they faced early on, and the incredible lengths they went to and sacrifices they made to carve out space to live out their own values and their own beliefs. And if the actual criteria for universal progress in America is "to what extent can a wry progressive academic atheist of Russian Jewish extraction move anywhere in the country and always feel comfortable", as far as I'm concerned, that's equivalent to saying, "we all must agree that progress means all sincerely religious people need to accept social changes that functionally amount to a repudiation of the kind of religious tolerance that evolved after the horrors of the 30 Years War. And in practice this will be experienced as something like a soft ethnic cleansing". It is literally meaningless to say you can just be LDS as a matter of silent belief in your head that doesn't get expressed in the world through community behavior. That's the kind of religious tolerance the Bolsheviks and current China support.
And the actual experience of integrating all those Catholic immigrants into American society over the course of the 20th century absolutely did get experienced, in many ways, like a kind of soft ethnic cleansing, or it certainly was by the parent or grandparent generations watching their home cultures and home religions get completely melted away by mass culture, Hollywood, public schools, and later universities. There was a huge amount of legitimate trauma. There's definitely an undercurrent of all of that in my reading about the 60s, the 70s, forced busing, and the white ethnic turn towards the Reagan coalition later. J. Anthony Lukas's "Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families" is a great book about a lot of these tensions. Arlie Russell Hochschild's "Strangers in Their Own Land" likewise captures some of that sense in rural Tea Party southerners now.
I know I'm kind of focusing more on religion than "ethnicity" here, but to be honest, even going along with a "racism" frame about immigration is already a way of asserting something about why these issues matter that seems, as far as I can tell, audaciously out of step with the actual on-the-ground experiences of why immigration actually ends up so fraught in practice.
Noah Smith recently wrote a tweet that was something about how he had lived in cosmopolitan neighborhoods with lots of diverse immigrants all his life, those neighborhoods were always great and benefited from that, and therefore anyone who had a problem with such neighborhoods was just wrong or ignorant or something.
Franklin Foer a year ago wrote an Atlantic piece (archive version of the original version here: https://archive.is/rzozj) that is really quite interesting titled "The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending", and it covers a lot of interesting ideas, but it does it really good job of fleshing out a much more detailed version of the argument that my PhD friend made, too.
I'm legitimately sorry this post is so Jewish example heavy - those just happen to be the most well-articulated examples I have at hand, and the Foer piece in particular is quite interesting in all sorts of ways - but I do want to emphasize that a lot of the university connected non-Jewish progressives I'm currently around would likely agree with much of these arguments, so I really do think it's a progressive thing.
I know I'm not quite responding to the parent post (especially about the role of changing technology in making assimilation harder), but I think it's actually really important to be much more clear-eyed about the reality of the previous cycle of mass immigration and assimilation. Some of the facts on the ground have changed (broadcast media and Hollywood matter less, social media complicates things, there was a way that intellectual confidence and energy in internationalism was ascendant in that previous era in a way that it clearly isn't now), but it's also definitely the case that much of the retconning about the previous experience of immigration is very... selective... about who has written those stories, and which experiences get captured and recounted.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
39m ago
Yeah I considered adding that in as the closest example that doesn't quite fit.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
39m ago
Then we should go back to calling each other hideous hermaphroditical characters
cjet79
43m ago
I'd say that food is a massive and very important aspect of culture. Its behind language in importance. But maybe as important as religion. Definitely more important than holidays (since many holidays are heavily defined by religion and food).
You eat food every day. You share meals with family and the people you like most in the world. Food can lock in memories, and eating it again can bring back those memories. Its one area where attempts to relentlessly optimize everything enjoyable and unique out of life have mostly failed (meal replacement options were only ever popular in small enclaves of weird programmers and rationalist). Food is one the first ways people like to meet their romantic partners. Food is how we celebrate.
Aside from language, what is more foundational to the lived experience of a culture than its food?
Yeah.
Assimilation is harder just by being constantly exposed to the home culture, let alone the fact that currently, there's almost zero formal pressure to adopt Western Cultural norms, since there's a whole industry of thought devoted to arguing that Western Cultural norms aren't better' and are in fact 'enriched' by adopting competing norms.
I don’t think this is some kind of groundbreaking point but why would presumably smart people like Yglesias make such a sloppy argument?
A) As you say, they're not as smart as they portray themselves (95% confidence) and these arguments genuinely don't occur to them and they're not going to consider them deeply even if they did.
B) They are indeed propagandists (which goes to the above point, you don't need to be smart to be one, if you can repeat the desired arguments 'convincingly.'), but they're independent propagandists and they're mostly in it for money and a crumb of status.
C) Sloppy arguments work when you are never, ever, ever forced to engage with the other side, or a smart interloper, or even acknowledge the holes in your argument unless someone with a higher status in your tribe points it out... at which point they generally snap into line and adjust their talking points as needed.
THAT right there is my primary objection to "public intellectuals" like Yglesias, Hanania, Noah Smith, they literally never seek out the strongest argument on the other side and attempt to debunk it by engaging with the strongest intellectuals who oppose them.
I watched Alex Nowrasteh get absolutely creamed because he wants to uphold the "Right wing violence is rewarded/celebrated by the right and generally denounced by the left" narrative, THE SAME DAY that the left is venerating the death of a violent lefty.
These are not serious people. They have to engulf their ideas in bubble wrap and display them behind six layers of plexiglass in order to keep them from being shattered by the whisper of an opposing argument.
I can’t help but think repeating a catechism has value to building political unity even (perhaps especially if) it’s fake.
Undoubtedly. That's the part they've monetized. Since a huge number of the audience you're courting is within one standard deviation of the median IQ, you just have to impress those guys to and keep them paying you to have an impact and make a decent living.
So a ~120 can probably impress the 100-110s enough to get them to accept him as 'one of them' and pay a bit of money to hear their preferred opinions blurted back to them with a bit of extra polish and a layer of respectability.
After that point, its just a matter of guarding your market share.
hydroacetylene
57m ago
I mean, I’ve met third gen Hispanics in America. ‘Basically Mexican’ they are not. Assimilation totally happens if the immigrants are willing.
I don’t know if Somalis are willing or not.
Quantumfreakonomics
59m ago
Here is the Yglesias tweet. Note that this is very specifically a response to a screenshotted Matt Walsh tweet.
The Walsh argument (if you can call it that) is thus:
-
There exists at least one place in the United States (Dearborn) which has a majority Muslim population and Islamic cultural norms.
-
It would be bad if the entire country was majority Muslim and had Islamic cultural norms.
-
Therefore Dearborn Michigan having a majority Muslim population and Islamic cultural norms is bad. (This isn’t explicitly stated, but I think it is strongly implied.)
Matt Yglesias responds to this by pointing out a counterexample; Little Italy 100 years ago had a majority Italian population and Italian cultural norms, and yet this didn’t result in the Italianification of American society.
This is not intended to be a fully general argument in favor of immigration. It is a response to a specific bad argument. If you are already anti-immigration, you probably read Walsh’s argument and fill in the gaps with your own pre-existing cognitive scaffold, but none of that is actually there in the text that Yglesias is responding to.
TikTok as a Weapon of War
When the TikTok forced divesture was passed over a year ago, after failing to gain sufficient support in earlier efforts, it was immediately clear to me that alarmism over Chinese ownership of the algorithm was only a pretext obscuring the political forces that actually dictated the sale: the Jewish lobby induced Congress to act in order to transfer TikTok to a new owner who would censor and manipulate the content algorithm of TikTok to be in favor of Israel and the Jewish people. This certainly wasn't a leap, there were secret recordings of Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL saying that something has to be done about TikTok. And then hundreds of Jewish groups lobby for the forced divesture, and then it happens in a highly divided Congress, with some lawmakers explicitly citing this pressure as being decisive in securing support for this legislation that had previously failed.
Still, @2rafa disputed that characterization of the forced TikTok divesture. But now that the dust is settling we can review what has happened:
TikTok and its algorithm is now essentially under the control of Zionist Jew Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, who has been described as the largest private donor to the IDF (FWIW I could not find any evidence Ellison has given private donations to the US military). Ellison's son, David Ellison, acquired CBS news last month which is reportedly going to hire Bari Weiss to manage the editorial direction of the organization:
As part of the deal, I am told David plans to give Bari a role at CBS News that would, among other things, task his fellow Millennial with guiding the editorial direction of the division. Bari’s avowedly pro-Israel and anti-woke worldview—not to mention her broadly shit-kicking anti-establishment disposition—would inevitably inspire blowback from various corners of the newsroom, and could dramatically change the editorial posture and reputation of one of the most storied, and certainly self-important, institutions in American journalism. For David, that’s likely part of the point.
TikTok's algorithm, which is now under the control of Ellison, will be audited and retrained. But the significant reforms to content moderation on TikTok are already well underway, in July a Jewish Zionist and former IDF solider Erica Mindel was hired for the position of "Public Policy Manager, Hate Speech":
The position involves developing and driving the company’s positions on hate speech, according to the job description...
It also involves “spearheading long-term policy strategies” regarding hate speech, monitoring online content, and advocating for the company’s policy stances. It specifically states that the position involves “serving as a subject matter expert on antisemitism and hate speech in internal and external meetings” and “analyzing hate speech trends, focusing on antisemitic content.”
Netanyahu on the TikTok acquisition
Most remarkably, in a focus group session with American social media influencers last Friday in New York, Benjamin Netanyahu himself simply admitted that the acquisition of TikTok was the most important development in enabling Israel to wield social media as a weapon of war:
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu briefed American influencers on TikTok, calling it the “most important” weapon in securing support for Israel on the right-wing.
He went on to say, “Weapons change over time... the most important ones are the social media,” and, “the most important purchase that is going on right now is TikTok... I hope it goes through because it can be consequential."
Near the end of the clip Netanyahu says "if we can get those two things [TikTok and X] we can get a lot... we have to fight the fight. To take, give direction, to the Jewish people, and give direction to our non-Jewish friends or those who could be our Jewish friends.
What's astonishing is that they are now simply admitting what they are doing openly. They aren't even hiding it. When Netanyahu discusses social media as a weapon of war, the war he is referring to is not against Hamas, it is against us and our access to free public discourse, the information we receive in news media and content algorithms, and the propaganda we're exposed to on a daily basis.
Last year in 2024 a major scandal in alternative media erupted with the investigation into two Russian media executives from Tenet Media, in a $10 million scheme to illegally fund Tenet Media and influence it to promote Russian propaganda. And certainly this is a major problem. But this Russian propaganda campaign does not even remotely reach the levels of deeply-embedded foreign influence in American news and social media in comparison to Zionist influence.
Larry Ellison is a foreign agent. David Ellison is a foreign agent. Jared Kushner is a foreign agent. This enormous level of foreign influence in our information stream is a huge problem, and it's not limited to Netanyahu and Israel. It's endemic to the entire international Jewish community across the entire world. The level of support among the Jewish community for this foreign influence deeply embedded in our society is extremely high and the opposition is basically non-existent. The extremely small number of what 2rafa calls "self-hating Jews" who acknowledge what is happening and oppose it are outliers. The rest either actively support it or deny the problem, citing "anti-semitic conspiracy theories" about Jews controlling the media and wielding it as a weapon of war against the minds of the gentiles. And yet Netanyahu, a foreign leader, travels to New York and simply admits what they are doing. Russian or Chinese nationalists engaging in this behavior would be wildly intolerable, but Jewish nationalists are systematically engaging in this behavior with total impunity.
Netanyahu's meeting with the social media influencers seems to foreshadow more pressure on X, now that the TikTok problem is being solved according to Netanyahu.
5434a
1hr ago
It's been a while since I re-read it but I think it was in Robert Pirsig's Lila (good book, not too long. I think you'd like it) that floated an idea along the lines that when progress becomes unstable the pursuit of progress will in faltering fall back to the last stable/secure state.
Do you foresee your fictional world of Minecraft Tidus slipping back to and re-stabilising at the level (if not the same location) of the last stable state upon its slopes, or as you seem to hint see it tipping over into ruinous decline back into the ocean?
plural
1hr ago
For much of horror it is an amplification and expansion of a mystery. Instead of who killed whom and why, it becomes how is this possible and how do we stop it? And often the answers will not be available but that's part of the appeal of horror that it can't answer everything or more often that it won't. You get what the story provides, horror makes it easy to be sloppy, yeah, but it also makes sure it's a genre that can allow anything to happen.
Now, what you're describing is the tone of horror. The telltale signs that show or trick the audience into believing that anything can happen. In other genres it's very rare for things not to work out, for evil to triumph, for the protagonist to lose and die, but it's accepted as part of the genre of horror. If characters can die horribly than it's more possible that important characters can die. If important characters can die then evil can win. If evil can win then you're watching something that you can't predict.
But this goes beyond plot contrivances. Unless a story goes out of its way to tone-match to another genre then horror is the catch-all bottom of the pit for anything weird. If it's time travel and it doesn't go out of its way to try to be a comedy or make damn sure known that it's scientific then it ends up in horror. Horror is the genre without a safety-net to make sure that it stays within certain boundaries. Sure, it makes it easy to have things end up worse because genre boundaries usually exist for a reason to make things more enjoyable but for a lot of people the risk is worth the reward because they crave things that are different, odd, unexplained or even gross.
Aside from the rest, the gross, the gore, is a taste that not everyone has but it's a human appetite that's really not served elsewhere but there are people that watch pimples being popped, or surgeries, or even actual people dying. There's an aspect of just straight up visceral response to the thing be it disgust or awe but just a shock out of the humdrum of thinking that someone being murdered doesn't matter or is nothing. A movie about a serial killer that strangles victims doesn't destroy is disrespect the body enough to make people care or be invested, the deeper we go the more we force the audience to get invested in what's happening. For most of Saw the people in the traps are people that are bad and a lot deserve to die but the horror at the disfigurement, destruction of their bodies, the struggle against death, we suddenly care whether they live or die when we probably wouldn't before if it was a just .22 to the back of the head or a rope around their necks. I don't like the saw movies, really, but I have to admit the entirety of the gore and grossness makes the deaths inside it feel closer to real than they would have otherwise and each successive one makes you want the next character to survive the trap(s). It's more expensive than swelling violins but it's probably more effective as well.
But I'll go back to what I said before, you're describing the tone of horror movies which is basically a costume these days and it's specifically trying to make you believe that anything can happen to heighten excitement. There are quite a lot of horror movies that aren't horror but just wear it as a costume these days and there are quite a lot of movies that are called horror just because they have more gore than is acceptable or set a large expectation that good guys can lose. Maybe tone is what horror actually is but I don't think that Silence of the Lambs or Green Room are horror just because they have some or a lot of that tone.
It sounds like you just don't enjoy horror and that's fine. Horror is the bottom of the pit avoiding every other genre's safety nets for good or ill.
Very few, but who cares? The person who has the hot cyberpunk studio Ghibli waifu picture is now happier than they were before. Maybe 1 in a million will be so inspired (or so good) by this that they'll get super into prompting and become a legitimately good "chimera" artist who blends AI gen and human taste to make actually great art. That's a (tiny) win for the human race as a whole.
I have no interest in seeing their stupid waifu, but I also don't go on DeviantArt or whatever so this won't effect me at all. Maybe I'll see their great art 15 years later in an art exhibition on AI digital art.
I agree this will lead to massive explosion in slop, but human-generated slop was already at functionally infinite levels prior to AI, so I'm not sure if there's a net loss here.
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