domain:youtu.be
Bingbong
13m ago
Yeah I was just in Beijing. Definitely a trend towards Biang Biang/Shaanxi places lately.
Bingbong
14m ago
Sichuanese has definitely taken off hard in the last decade or two, though having just been to Beijing I'd say there's a decent diversity available. Personally I just assume Hot Pot margins must be insane.
Bingbong
15m ago
I do find it interesting how as international tourism gets more accessible to upwardly mobile developing nations their tourists tend to catch a lot of flak for visibility and doing undesired things. Chinese arguably got the most 20 years ago (though as somebody who travels a lot I think they've worked out most of the rough edges now), then Indians now since there's such a large mostly-affluent population. Even in my own experience I find that rich Africans (from Africa) tend to be some of the absolute worst in terms of obnoxiousness and interactions with service staff, but I assume that's downstream of the Nigerians I see being 1%ers in their own country and that being their typical cultural modus operandi around service staff.
popocatepetl
24m ago
So this place is kinda dead now eh? What happened? There’s a ton of stuff happening in the culture war and the main thread is wildly boring with posts not at all topical
"Willing to comment, not willing to effortpost" syndrome.
I have no doubt that if someone made a toppost about the train stabbing of Iryna Zarutska, it would generate hundreds of comments in response. But that requires someone to do the work of writing a summary and well-posed take, first.
anon_
27m ago
No, it relies on the fact that American talent is very well tapped. Once that marginal talent is mostly taken, there is more elsewhere that's willing to come because we pay workers far far more. Far more than even "worker friendly" socialist places.
Or at least it used to be that every high school counselor in the US was an effective magnet for figuring out which hick-born genius should go to MIT or CalTech and build rockets or computers.
anon_
29m ago
That sounds great -- but it's not an argument for throwing all the H1Bs out. Make it $250K and it returns to being a truly high-skilled program.
All in all it's a M&B -- the motte is "the H1B salary floor is too low and it's not skilled enough", the bailey is "immigration bad".
anon_
30m ago
The other part is that the firm has the option to open a subsidiary office somewhere else and hire locally there. This is a substitute for trying to recruit those folks to physical move stateside.
That has lots of drawbacks: there will be additional overhead for travel, management, legal, compliance and whatnot. The remote office will be less productive (all told) and probably at a weird time zone.
Still, people forget that even in the world of tariffs, there's literally zero legal penalty for a US company to just open an office abroad and hire people.
anon_
33m ago
Hotels that charge $20 a night in Thailand provide maid service every single day. Why can’t Americans afford to pay someone to clean a room?
Americans are so wildly successful that their time is worth far more than the entire $20 just to clean a room. This is not a sign of failure, it's quite the opposite.
This 7 hour flight cost me only $301. I sat in the cheap seats in the back, but it was an empty enough flight that I had an entire row to myself.
This just means the data science guys messed up and over-specified the flight. The airline likely lost money on it, it's not sustainable to run an airplane at less than 70-80% utilization (paging /u/madmonzer to fact check me).
[ As an aside, there might be different accounting when the airline has to run a money-losing connection in order to capture the profitable long-haul international seats. Still, better to run it on a smaller plane rather than leaving an empty. ]
anon_
37m ago
he cartels already have extant and significant distribution networks that new operations have to create from scratch.
At the same time, the cartels' distribution networks are ... not super cost efficient. I expect they are paying (either directly, through inefficiency or through outright theft) at least 20-100x what WalMart is paying :-)
anon_
39m ago
Why would they wait till legalization to ramp up their extortion racket? If it were possible to expand it in a profitable way, then they (meaning existing or new cartels) would do so.
anon_
40m ago
You can go further than merely psychoactive drugs. Robin Hanson & Bryan Caplan had a thought experiment about letting people buy (in his reification, at an unmarked physical store) anything that would otherwise have banned: poison, snake oil, chainsaws with no safeties, electronics that frequently shock the user or catch fire. One could even imagine a requirement that each customer recites on video (before being allowed entry) "I understand that everything in here would have been banned and is dangerous".
I bring this up particularly because psychoactive drugs are just one example of dangerous good. People have weirdly specific intuition about those drugs that often doesn't really track how they feel about the larger class. It also seems to track the culture war: legalization is a darling of the left, which is otherwise gung-ho to regulate everything else.
Yeet_far
45m ago
This is based on a never-published paper which was wrong. If you want a deep dive, see https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivb-working-days/
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
56m ago
At the very least, the threat of hell for being rich should be enough to get them to abstain from these sorts of purchases.
God presumably knows you're rich whether or not you make ostentatious purchases. Certainly he knows that Warren Buffet is rich, that little house doesn't fool anyone. If you're going to hell for being rich, you may as well enjoy yourself before you go.
odd_primes
57m ago
Honestly the easiest way to get started is to go on CivitAI, find something similar to what you want, and then start playing with the knobs and dials from there. Many images have attached metadata including ComfyUI workflows. This gives you at least a known-good configuration to fall back on when something goes wrong.
The /g/ board on 4chan also has a long running Local Diffusion General which has a bunch of guides and resources for getting started.
One thing to note though is that ComfyUI is a bit of a security nightmare. Custom nodes are basically just python scripts downloaded and run from the internet with little to no security screening by the maintainers. If you're experimenting with this on a computer with sensitive information, I'd recommend not installing random custom nodes with two stars on GitHub.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
I knew traditional (non-software) engineering was screwed up, but I thought they were less youth-worshipping than tech, not more.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1hr ago
I keep reading your references to Bangkok, but Bangkok is not really representative of all Thailand. Surely this is something you are accounting for?
GeneralElephant
1hr ago
But why would you expect that the American labor pool is full of lemons but the Indian pool is not? Sure assuming identical distribution of talents there are 3x but why then are Indians not subject to lemon effects that OP claims make it hard to hire qualified Americans?
OP’s argument is that it’s easier to hire overseas workers because the international labor market is different so you don’t have the lemon problem you have in the US. Why does OP believe this?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1hr ago
Are we talking about outside of Bangkok?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
Other people have discussed the drugs aspect, but would it work even if drugs were so freely available and untaxed that cartels had no competitive advantage?
We've done the experiment; Prohibition, banning the most popular drug. Organized crime got supersized. They didn't go away when Prohibition did, but they didn't cause nearly the problems. So I would suspect the cartels, too, would get much smaller with drug legalization. There's always a niche for organized crime -- if anything's taxed or contraband, there's smuggling, and if not there's always protection rackets and burglary rings and that sort of thing -- but it can change drastically in size.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1hr ago
Israel lures all of its enemies' leaders to a meeting and blows it up for the 4th time is kind of tired.
More evidence that everyone has already made up their mind about in the Epstein case was released.
Got an interesting take?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
So their argument is: anyone who would be addicted already is, and the only effect of keeping the drugs illegal is that criminals are in charge of selling and producing them instead of capitalists/entrepreneurs who are above the law, and that there will be less stuff that is spiked/laced because of regulations.
A pretty extreme version of the position, maybe. It doesn't have to be the "only" effect to be worth it. Just the biggest one. Every dollar siphoned from the cartels reduces their capacity. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, as they say.
I think the strongest counterarguments start by observing that people don't handle legal drugs that well. There are something like 15 million alcohol addicts in the States. Not drinkers, addicts. Would legal fentanyl really be less harmful? Or consider tobacco culture. Kids get ahold of this stuff and try it as an edgy symbol of rebellion. Some of them develop the habit. Is that dynamic going to be improved in any way by harder drugs?
Throwaway05
1hr ago
but compared to almost every other country there is still some strange probability, of maybe 20%, that you eat something that tastes perfectly average and leaves you feeling diffusely sick for the next day like someone force-fed you a liter of gutter oil.
If this is happening to you the issue is likely something along the lines of too much fat or too much salt for your digestive system.
It's relatively common in America for Americans to have that problem with salt in Americanized Chinese food for instance.
Shrike
1hr ago
The other groups in Afghanistan were not nominally Islamic, they were all practicing Muslims.
I suppose this depends on who you ask but the Taliban seem to think that practicing pederasty is incompatible with correct Islamic practice.
There’s no clear evidence that an afterlife is instrumental here.
There's very clear evidence that an afterlife is instrumental. You're shifting the standard to claiming that the belief in an afterlife will always and everywhere prevail. But remember, you said
Do you think their constant obsession with the rewards of the next life have aided their cooperation and virtue?
And I would say – yes, clearly.
I think “under certain circumstances Christianity actually condemns selling everything to the poor” is an enormous cop-out.
Why? Why shouldn't Christians be judged according to their own teachings? I don't even disagree with you that Christians often fall short of their own teachings – and it's fine to criticize that – but it's important to understand those teachings first. If Christianity specifically teaches that one's first duty is to one's family and dependents it is silly to criticize Christians with family and dependents for not impoverishing them to give to charity (see perhaps most notably 1 Timothy 5:8, which compares failing to provide for one's own house with apostasy!)
Now – I don't disagree with you that Christians often act as if they do not believe what they say that they do. I do this, to my shame. But – to your point about faith – the people in the first century whom you suggest had such an easy time believing in Christ ALSO did this! If your idea that belief is harder now is correct and that is why Christians today act as if they do not believe was right, we would expect the first century church not to have that issue. One need only read the writings of first century Christians to be disabused of that notion.
And today people do this in other areas quite frequently (for instance lots of people know that drinking is bad for them...), unfortunately. The fact that people today, or in the first century, act contrary to their own professed belief and knowledge has little bearing on the belief itself (alcohol IS bad for you even if you act as if it isn't!)
I know one particularly prominent Catholic family and they have enormous mansions and nice cars...It can only be that they don’t genuinely believe in the rewards of heaven, which if believed would necessarily result in maximal charitable activity (certainly not mansions and luxury cars). At the very least, the threat of hell for being rich should be enough to get them to abstain from these sorts of purchases.
Well perhaps they are familiar enough with Catholic doctrine (as I think I am, although I am not Catholic) to know that that's not how salvation works in Catholic teaching.
The verse you are probably thinking of is as follows:
Then Jesus said to His disciples, “Assuredly, I say to you that it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. And again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” When His disciples heard it, they were greatly astonished, saying, “Who then can be saved?” But Jesus looked at them and said to them, “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” - Matthew 19:23 - 28.
Not stated in the text here (even as a riddle or hyperbole): "rich people go to hell." Nor is that a teaching of Catholic doctrine as I understand it.
Now, it IS true that there's a certain tension in Christianity, especially early Christianity, with wealth (see for instance James 2, but note that James does not advocate for kicking the wealthy out of the church!) But on the flip side, I certainly can't think of any sort of general command in Christianity for people to sell all they have and give it to the poor (the instruction in Matthew 19 was to a specific individual – although quite arguably it applies more broadly! – and you can see in Acts 5:1 - 4 that even in the early church described in Acts 4 liquidation of wealth to give to those in need was entirely voluntary.)
It’s famously unusual.
I don't disagree that the very specific thing you said never happens is unusual. :)
Last week I wrote about the NYT’s coverage of the Minneapolis school shooting, where the headline and article repeatedly used “Ms.” and “her” for the shooter, Robin Westman. That may follow their style guide, but in the context of a mass killing, it reads less like neutral reporting and more like ideological signaling. The pronouns end up being the story, while two murdered children fade into the background.
Now there’s the coverage of the truly awful video released of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee stabbed to death on a Charlotte train. There are familiar editorial fingerprints from the ‘style guide’. The NYT capitalizes “Black” but leaves “white” lowercase. Elon Musk pointed this out and it’s getting traction. This is a policy shift the NYT, AP, and others made in 2020 after George Floyd’s killing, with the reasoning that “Black” marks shared cultural identity, while capitalizing “White” risks feeding white-identity politics.
That may be defensible as a policy, but applied in a case where a Black suspect kills a white victim, it lands as bias whether intended or not. The style guide twice now ends up louder than the tragedy itself.
When editorial rules like these are applied without reflection, they pull focus from the human story. It truly makes me upset because these were horrific events. There’s no reason to show off your liberal bona fides at all. Just show compassion for the victims and don’t preemptively build up scaffolding for when it will be used as culture war fuel.
Frankly, I think that articles like this make race relations in America worse. I don’t think that the killing has anything to do with race, at all. It’s about violence in America, which is so insanely out of control. I think cloaking it in platitudes about decreasing crime rate stats also shows how scared of second-order effects news organizations are.
I read a book recently about the history of imprisonment in Texas. It talks about restorative justice and prison labor etc. I don’t know what else you’re supposed to do besides reassure the public that this man (or anyone inflicting evil on others) will never see the light of day again
More options
Context Copy link