domain:aporiamagazine.com
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
27m ago
The current hit thing is Frieren: Beyond Journey's End. Which does a nice job of hitting all sorts of power fantasy beats with stereotypical characters but telling different stories with them.
Throwaway05
29m ago
Tell me what you think about this:
I've long conceptualized trans thought content as a combination of:
- Actual trans people (rare).
- Social contagion (this being where the lonely MTF types come from).
- Malingering (mostly in a forensic setting).
- Borderline identity instability (actual hospital presenters).
When I think about item 4. my model is more women who seems to be trans while having a borderline breakdown or are just chronically severe.
It sounds like you spot more often in men, in comparison to me. I think my blind spot here is that my personal life people I know who are MTF seem to not be borderline - mostly dissatisfied with the world, lonely, looking for ego sources, which writing that out sounds borderline adjacent but I don't get the vibe from knowing them (?compromised objectivity?).
You point out your high profile types though and I go oh yeah shit sounds right.
I think this may just be my pot of MTF based off of my background however.
Really interested in your thoughts because no fucking way in hell can I have a convo about this in an academic hospital.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
33m ago
Ahh my apologies, apparently his name is David Friedberg. I got you to confused somehow.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
36m ago
That isn't my point.
Throwaway05
37m ago
I think it scratches the same itch as things like lego building, if that helps your mental model at all.
He is indeed my long lost, blackpilled, twin brother.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
41m ago
The issue being dismissed for as long as I was alive might have something to do with it. Also the whole point of MAGA is that it's not basic "muh fiscal conservatism".
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
53m ago
I'm surprised people, sane ones are dismissing the entire issue despite the concerns. You go online and the Maga reaction is to call Musk shcizo for questioning a very real concern.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
54m ago
No one knows. If the firms don't deliver soon, they may cause economic duress to others. Most big firms have invested heavily, where's your ed at is a good lefty newsletter that has detailed pieces on this exact phenomenon.
In a long enough timeline, we Wil automate away a lot, the short term isn't super hopeful.
A complete replacement is very very hard, self driving cars are 90 percent of the way there which means we both still drive daily and will continue that for a few more decades.
DelendaEst
59m ago
IMO it was a combo of Bush I tax cuts (the ones Clinton attacked him on to get elected), the dot com boom and post cold war growth creating a larger base for those taxes, and gridlock between Clinton and the GOP limiting new spending.
If Bush II would have used the surplus in his first year to pay down the debt instead of doing tax cuts and spent less by not going so hard on the War on Terror the debt would be in a much better place now.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
1hr ago
Yes, it was the most depressing of the three, I loved reprise because it's described as Trainspotting but with literature instead of heroin. Oslo, 31. August was very painful.
Pretty sure I have reviews of the three up on themotte, highly recommended them, watch the Oslo, 31. August, the worst person in the world and finally reprise so that you end on a higher note.
The worst person on the planet was the weakest of the three, despite being a great movie.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
Empirically, there are some rich people living in Sweden, where the total income tax can be 55.6%.
If you go to a poor person and tell them they will have to pay another 20% of their income as taxes, it might well be that they will face the choice between emigrating and raising their kids under a bridge.
By contrast, if you tell someone making 1M$ a year (after taxes) that they will have to pay another 200k$ of taxes, they will have to adjust their life-style a bit or accept that their net worth will grow slower than it would otherwise.
By revealed preference, the US seems to be a pretty great place to be rich. Rich people could already move to poorer countries where they could afford to be attended by dozens of servants, and yet they mostly don't. I do not think that having to cut the private helicopter and riding limo like the plebs would change that.
If you are rich, you can afford to worry about tail risks. Despite all the CW, the US still has some of the best institutions in the world. If you are accused for some political crime, would you rather deal with the US justice system or the Romanian one? Do you want your kids to go to Ivy League or get the best Romanian education? Or consider political stability: the US voted for Trump, while Romania voted for some pro-Russian populist. While their courts invalidated the latter election, I have much more trust in US institutions to limit the damage a populist can do. Romania has been in the NATO since 2004, which limits the risk of invasion, at least as long as NATO continues to be a thing. Mainland US has not faced a credible threat of invasion by foreign powers since at least 1900. Likewise, the US has a great track record of not having mobs or governments expropriate rich persons or guillotine them. If Romania experiences a severe financial crisis in 2045, "expropriate rich ex-Americans" might be a platform which would be popular with the plebs and tolerable to the native elites.
Then there are practical costs to emigrating. You might want to learn the language, lest you stay part of a small expat community. You will need to spend a lot of time to get the design of your villa just right, again.
Then there are power costs. Your bank account can be converted to the local currency just fine, but if you care about having political power where you live, you will have to build this up from the scratch. You know the proper etiquette for bribing a US senator, but likely you will not know much about how the local politics work, who will stay bought and who won't. Likely, your opponents will be local oligarchs who have been playing this game for generations. The elites will not see you as one of them, but as a resource to be exploited.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
That is a very non-standard meaning of "buying trinkets", Mr. Dumpty.
FtttG
1hr ago
he doesn't remember when he bought some of the records he owns
girlslaughing.png
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2hr ago
sometimes you have to think about more important things than winning the next election
Competent politicians recognize this as a strategem by which they may be tricked into removing themselves, and then most likely the "more important thing" they were convinced into sacrificing their political career for is then abandoned or betrayed.
DradisPing
2hr ago
The chronological or purchase order make a lot more sense to me. The only issue I can see is that I might not remember buying some of them.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2hr ago
Current US debt is not for "buying trinkets". It's mostly funding people's lives of questionable leisure, and providing life extension for the aged and self-destructive.
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
One could tax every property by default. A mailbox company in the Bahamas hold that tenement? Either they cough up the taxes, or they lose their property. A publicly traded company increased its market cap by 20% in a year? Great, just print shares for Uncle Sam worth 0.2% or the market cap.
This might deter foreign investment, but especially in housing, foreign investment is just driving up prices, which is a boon only to a minority.
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
This. Trump has a giant yet fragile ego. I think that the 2020 election denial can be understood not as a carefully designed lie to stay relevant, but as a knee-jerk emotional response. A world in which he fairly lost 2020 was a world where he was less popular than two-term president Obama and president-elect Joe Biden. This was not a world he could imagine inhabiting. Likewise, his 2024 statement to the effect that he would accept the election result if he wins.
In a way, when losing he is like an obsessive ex turned stalker, who can not accept that they got dumped, but tries to construct a world where they were forced by external factors to deny their love.
"How Czech Republic managed to get its Ministry of Justice investigated for money laundering of cca 4000+ bitcoin from a darknet drug marketplace"
“It was so ultra-legal that it couldn’t be more legal,” the justifiably former Minister of Justice Pavel 'Don Pablo' Blažek. [1]
Finally, some a bit 21st century news. I put this into CW and not 'fun' because 'populists might benefit'.
In march of '25 , the Ministry of Justice in Czech Republic accepted about $40 million gift in the form of 864 bitcoin. I briefly remembered the news item: MoJ is selling bitcoin in auction.
Now, the justice minister has resigned, the ministry is being investigated for money laundering, the minister is being investigated for abusing his position and Tomáš Jiříkovský, who gave the gift is missing.
The timeline, so far, seems to be something like:
2013/3: Tomáš opens Sheep Marketplace (SM) opens. Initially scarcely used and amateurish, it gets a lot of users after Silk Road collapses.
2013/10: Silk Road closes. People flood to SM
2013/12: SM hacked, 5400 client bitcoin stolen according to its admins. Real amount is unknown, possibly up to 96,000.. Tomáš closes the market and pockets the rest of the bitcoin clients had there.
2014-2016: Tomáš runs 'Nucleus', another darknet marketplace. He tries to launder the stolen money and attracts NCOZ (Czech FBI without counterintelligence duties).
2016/4/12 Tomáš is arrested by the Czech police. 2016/4/13 Nucleus marketplace stops responding and again, client bitcoin (5400) go missing. It's obvious Tomáš was running Nucleus. Police never investigate him for this.
2018: Tomáš is sentenced to 9 years for drug trading, embezzlement and illegal weapons to 9 years. His electronic devices areconfiscated. State intends to wipe it to prevent the perp from benefitting from the proceeds of a crime. The perp's lawyers contest this. 2021: Tomáš is out due to good behavior. He starts to petition the courts, first to prevent data destruction, then to return his seized devices.
2025/1 The courts finally rule that he can get them all back.
2025/3 For no ostensible reason, Tomáš proposes to gift the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) about $40 million in bitcoin that's supposedly not stolen. There's going to be an expert witness present to attest to that it's not stolen darknet bitcoin, the transaction will be overseen by a notary too. This happens and is covered in crypto news, who are of course unaware of who is involved.
2025/5/30: this hits the news, perhaps due to Tomáš, who seems to be an ADHD guy with a vocational school degree only, making the list of richest people in Czech Republic. Revelations soon follow: the expert witness was paid by Tomáš. The wallet was opened 10 hours before the notary got there - they did not want to waste his time while dealing with the encrypted wallet. It's determined up to 4000 bitcoin were sent from the wallet to various addresses before the notary got there to witness the gift to MoJ.
2025/6 Tomáš departs for parts unknown - probably because people missing their bitcoins are are offering bounties for his whereabouts. Minister of Justice resigns. FBI gets involved.
Some important notes: most everyone involved in this case is connected to Masaryk univerzity in Brno (~750k), the second largest city in Czech lands, much hated by people from the capital.(1500K). Tomáš's grandfather was a professor there. The prime minister and the justice minister both studied there. Tomáš lived in Břeclav, a town close to it.
My suspicions: based on the lot of Czech language info I've read on this case, it looks like the justice minister ensured the courts ruled to not wipe the devices, and some of the other bitcoin were likely gifted to people backing the staunchly pro-war and pro-American government parties. The courts obliged but in their verdicts strongly protested and said the bitcoin were proceeds of a crime. Of course, this implies the prime minister knew about this too. But the it's believed is the justice minister is more influential than the PM, and claimed to be ' regional godfather',
If you want to know more, some sources in Czech:
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoinov%C3%A1_kauza
https://zandl.substack.com/p/97-jak-tomas-jirikovsky-a-ministr
[1]: the two time justice minister is suspected of being a grey eminence / involved in many shady influence deals. https://www.idnes.cz/zpravy/domaci/pavel-blazek-ministr-spravedlnosti-rezignace-profil.A250530_165132_domaci_ikul
functor
3hr ago
Could AI be the next big thing without impacting the economy and labour market?
Computers revolutionized the construction industry. CAD software makes it far easier to draw buildings and share the drawings. Phones makes communications vastly easier. Instead of a worker getting stuck or having to physically find someone they can make a video call. Manuals and documents are freely available online. Online shopping makes order parts cheaper and easier while allowing builders to press prices. Accounting, scheduling, recruiting sales and other supporting activities are easier with computers. Even on the construction site computers control machines. A modern truck is full of software.
Yet the productivity in the construction industry has flat lined and is if anything declining. Land prices can take some blame but renovating a building has not become cheaper.
Could we see similar effects with AI? A company in 2035 has completely automated customer service, AI drafts contracts, does sales and codes. We may have self driving cars and humanoid robots. Yet we might see barely 2% GDP growth and no real boom in productivity. Why has the tech sector revolutionized work without dramatical increases in productivity and can the results be better in the coming 20 years?
My impression is that they think the deficit/debt is both less immediately important and less tractable than dealing with immigration. The attitude is something like "Let's kick out 10+ million illegals and then see where entitlement spending is at". And without giving details, I'll just note that I see people who don't speak English interacting with expensive government benefits every single day. I would be very surprised if they weren't mostly right, in that mass deportation was de facto the largest cut in entitlement spending in history.
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