domain:asteriskmag.com
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
17m ago
Vindaloo
Portuguese, is it not?
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
17m ago
which is something like there's this overabundance of book smart people who have extreme problems modeling second order social effects.
I wouldn't really call that "book-smart", just "being a midwit".
hydroacetylene
19m ago
American Catholicism declined following thé decision to relax social controls; obviously post hoc non ergo propter hoc, but also prior hoc ergo non propter hoc.
I certainly agree that the American Catholic Church was not going to maintain its fifties peak. But the looming decline was not in 1965 something that was generally known.
hydroacetylene
23m ago
I'm excluding Mexico because that whole situation is 'complicated' by the existence and influence of powerful Cartels
This is not, by Latin American standards, particularly unique. Thé much poorer golden triangle countries south of there are(or, in the case of El Salvador, we’re up until recently) even worse. Columbia and Ecuador certainly have extreme problems of their own with the same thing. And some of the Caribbean nations are just as bad. Brazil also has a problem with it, although granted everything I’ve heard about it is that Eastern Europe style bribery is also common there.
We know about Mexico’s problems with the cartels because it’s huge and nearby. Something like a quarter of thé world’s Spanish speakers live in Mexico, it’s the standard dialect, it’s relatively wealthy(by Latin American standards), it borders America, etc.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
24m ago
I saw it and liked it, though I felt that the overall narrative of the movie lacked coherency. Then I found out that in large part, the movie is an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's Vineland and now I'm impressed that PTA was able to take something from Pynchon (I've never read Vineland, though now I want to) and make it that accessible on the big screen. I can definitely see why it could be seen as resistance bait, though, and I'm sure for some folks the CW angle could be enough to sour them on the movie.
hydroacetylene
29m ago
Maybe to an extent, but both factors are structural- restaurant kitchens are inherently tons of not super pleasant work performed alongside drug addicts for long and often unusual hours, and if you raise pay too much you have to raise your prices above what the market will bear.
hydroacetylene
31m ago
Yeah, but the structural limitations of seafood markets far from the sea have nothing to do with the presence or absence of Japanese people.
You know who cooks thé food at the restaurant scene in DFW? I’ll give you a hint- regardless of the ethnic coding of the food being served, the kitchen operates in Spanish. This is true regardless of the quality level. You don’t need actual ethnics to have good ethnic food. People like sushi, so it’s worthwhile to train Hondurans(or whatever thé local source of cheap semiskilled labor is) to prepare it.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
35m ago
two weeks three years to kiev sovl
hydroacetylene
37m ago
Entirely plausible that the Zionist lobby both does not understand how the youth engage with social media and has the heft to get this specific policy pushed through in the United States. I still think there’s other things going on but it’s not ‘Jews did WTC’ tier jewbaiting.
hydroacetylene
40m ago
Grizzlies are much more aggressive than Eurasian brown bears and it’s entirely reasonable to worry about an unprovoked attack if you’re hiking in grizzly country. It’s not a super likely scenario but it isn’t ridiculously implausible either.
pigeonburger
1hr ago
In Canada:
Air temperature (as in the weather) is in C. Pool temperatures are in F. Cooking temperatures are in F. Body temperature in F.
Short distances are in In/Ft/Yd, but laws often are written with metric (for instance, in driving), but travel distances are in km.
People's weight and height are in Lbs and Ft/In.
Volume units in cooking are lol whatever; there's a preference for imperial measures but you'll have to deal with stuff in liters too (milk, soft drinks are sold by the L or 2L).
dragonfly
1hr ago
My general recommendation for YouTube recommendations is use your adblocker to hide the recommendations entirely. If you want to watch something on YouTube you can search for it. If YouTube wants you to watch something, why should you care?
celluloid_dream
1hr ago
Claude Sonnet 4.5 is out!
What are your personal benchmarks to put a new LLM to feel out its personality and capabilities? I have a few:
- Coding tasks I've requested in the past. Boring, but necessary
- Song lyric interpretation: to see how much it "gets". Example "Sacrifice Theory" by AFI. I like this one because there are two levels, and there has been clear improvement over the years how many hints the models need before they realize the double meaning (vampiric ritual, but also performance at a live show)
- Just for fun: "If a Claude be washed away by the sea, is Europe the less?"
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1hr ago
A lot of people are clearly downvoting the idea rather than the argument; I've been perhaps too quick to assign you to this general category.
I don't vote on any posts.
Your questions scanned to me as a fairly impressively-polite phrasing of 'are you full of shit' (sincere appreciation there; it's an art) and to be blunt I just didn't experience any desire to satisfy you about that.
The mods generally take a dim view of your phrasing.
What I'm talking about is kind of a broader sense of mutation load. Like, abstract it up a level or three; I'm not sure how many. It's a general concept, and principle, and with yesterday's post I bet you can see where I'm suggesting the pieces might be tied together.
Abstracting it out from something concretely genetic to general 'fitness' implies that you know some (at least for some local maxima) 'wild-type,' which I'm very skeptical of. Both of it's existence, and your ability to understand it in a meaningful way.
More broadly, particularly without references I can follow (feel free to recommend a paper or book), your posts are mostly a series of just-so stories. I could easily write a just-so story how the optimal social structure is a group of genetically superior Alphas ruling over inferior betas-epsilons social strata rather than whatever you propose. Or how Chinese are mathematically gifted but fail to be creative from centuries of curating rice paddies rather than swashbuckling adventures on the high seas (but you beat me to it this week).
And you chronically ignore huge environmental influences on most of the traits you discuss, the inverse error of blank slatists who ignore genetic effects. Any complex trait you study will have significant gene-environment interactions, and the things you want to discuss are almost certainly several levels of abstraction away from genetics. Your core assumption that people with different genetics will necessarily experience the world differently is unsupported, so far as I can tell - the last time I raised it, you didn't convince me. If you want to convince me - write fewer words and less syllogism, and provide more hard data. Every post is rife with all of these issues, and I don't have time to comb through 20,000 words a week to write a reply.
So looking at it that way, I think the divergence comes in line three: "Good times make weak men." Yes, but also no! Good times make new men who are better in some ways and worse in others. Then comes the winnowing. See?
No, I don't see. What is your evidence for this?
Venetians grew obscenely rich relative to their Italian neighbors as a trade hub with the orient, plenty of peoples lived in harsh environments (polar regions, deserts in Australia and Africa, Tibet) without genetically selecting themselves into Fremen ubermensch, indigenous nations given guns conquered others without, many of the strictest selection pressures of the last millennium have been infectious diseases rather than anything you care about. You'll necessarily add epicycles to your argument (Australian aborigines never conquered the globe because you need a harsh environment but not too harsh?), but it doesn't matter, because it's all just made up and I can just as easily make up convincing sounding things as you.
I believe your data in the lab studying butterfly psychology or whatever, but the problem is in the application to human history/genetics/sociology. Even were you an expert in all of those fields, which I don't think that you are, our knowledge is significantly more limited than the absolutely deterministic fable you're telling.
Thank you for the rigour. Please keep it up if you don't mind, even considering that I've been a less-than-stellar host to you thus far.
Are you Russian? I get the same feeling talking to Ilforte/Dase. The Russian genotype and way of experiencing the world seems to favor verbose and beautifully written arguments, and disfavor concision and data. Give me more data, and I'll probably participate more.
For example: I've always wondered what would happen if you could run a Lord of the Flies experiment with 2-3 year olds. How long until they redevelop language? Tools? I presume you think we're genetically superior to the people of antiquity, so would it be significantly faster than the millennia it actually took us? Would they form similar social structures to their parents (per your example of 'Tropicals' giving any surplus to their extended family), or would it be stochastic/determined by their environment and numbers?
For what it's worth - if we could run the experiment above, I don't think it would come out anything like you'd expect. Are you aware of any natural experiments along these lines?
Rov_Scam
1hr ago
As an avid outdoorsman, my personal recommendation is something small and compact, like a .22 pistol. That way, when the bear is on top of you, it's a lot easier to get the barrel into your mouth...
All kidding aside, concerns about attacks by wildlife are usually the mark of a greenhorn, and rabies is a particularly odd thing to be concerned about. Your scenario about deer isn't really plausible, since deer fight by butting with their antlers and kicking, not by biting. They do get rabies, but not in numbers large enough to report outside of "other wildlife", and deer attacks on humans are rare to begin with, especially considering how often we encounter suburban deer that have lost their fear of humans. And if you're hiking in the deep dark woods, you aren't likely to see many deer to begin with, since they prefer forest edge ecosystems where there's more to browse.
If you somehow were attacked by a rabid buck, stabbing at it with a knife would be about the worst possible thing you could do, and shooting it wouldn't be much better. Rabies is usually transmitted through saliva, but it can be transmitted through blood as well, so drawing blood probably isn't a good idea. Rabies is usually transmitted through raccoons on in the East, skunks in the Midwest, and foxes in the Southwest, and bats can transmit it anywhere. Trying to defend against these small mammals while they are attacking you and unlikely to do any permanent damage seems like just increasing the risk of shooting or slicing yourself and making a bad situation worse. And if you do get attacked and are exposed to rabies, it's not like it's a death sentence. Rabies has an incubation period of several weeks, plenty of time to get to a doctor for prophylactic treatment, which is almost 100% effective. It's even more effective if you wash the wound thoroughly immediately after getting bitten.
celluloid_dream
1hr ago
On typical days, (15-30km, 1000-2500m elevation gain), no I don't bring any of that. I used to carry a medium fixed-blade survival knife, but even that has been replaced with a small folding climbing blade instead.
If I'm alone and going to be passing through prime bear habitat, I'll grudgingly bring a can of mace, but if I can justify leaving it behind for any reason, I will. If faced with a rabid squirrel or deer or whatever, I'd probably grab the nearest stick or rock and improvise. What's a knife going to do in that situation? I'd be more likely to cut myself than deter the thing. Honestly, I think the energy advantage from carrying a lighter load beats having a dedicated weapon.
As far as two-legged predators, I trust anyone out that far into the wild to either be friendly, or else dangerous enough that I'd be fucked regardless.
faceh
1hr ago
Also, strong argument that almost all the well-known Sea Shanties are directly derived from Irish musical heritage.
Does this melody sound familiar?
(About 6-7 years ago I went on a kick researching European Maritime culture and learned a lot of interesting stuff).
Corvos
1hr ago
Sure, I'm just saying it's a real game-changer for me. I've been stuck at a reasonably advanced plateau for a long time now because a lot of literary Japanese structures are hard to look up, and having something that can reliably figure out what structure is being used and what the referents are is incredibly helpful.
faceh
1hr ago
I specifically requested an Irish accent for maximum dissonance.
I haven't played too much with asking it to do different languages with different accents, but it does a pretty good job of adding Indian-accented English to songs.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1hr ago
Most Westerners won't ever interact with immigrants (or locals when they vacation abroad in poor countries) beyond a context of low-level service industries so food is the obvious thing to associate with them. It is also in the interest of the immigrant groups to hype their cuisine since ethnic restaurant industry is very common way to earn good money if you have no capital/know-how/education that is valid in the new country.
You might also hear from some less educated wanna-be liberal Westerners that "<immigrant_group> works hard and is good at <construction/farm labour/cleaning/etc>" as a praise. But this line of thinking will feel dangerous to higher-mind people as they will recognize they are praising brown people's propensity for mindless drudgery, or at worst a modern system of quasi-slavery quite often.
And almost everything else about any poor immigrant group's culture beyond ethnic food and cheap labour (and maybe fun weddings) will feel very icky to average Westerner so they would rather not think about it beyond any extremely sanitized context like Buddha statues and yoga studios.
faceh
1hr ago
Generally American corporations have spread to everywhere they are allowed.
Hell, even some places they weren't allowed!
I feel that calling corruption incompetence is disingenuous. Most European nations were equally impossible to operate in legally a few centuries ago. That's just how poor economies and politics tend to mingle.
This doesn't seem accurate if you exclude the Eastern European states.
Corruption in the U.K., France, and Germany was/is generally carried out by non-state actors. Organized Crime, Mafia, and maybe international corporations. I'll certainly grant Italy is up there. And I think the BIG sign you're in a true Kleptocrat state is if your military is taking bribes and/or selling equipment on the side, which I do not believe is happening in Western European nations.
Scandinavia as a whole has no reputation for corruption that I'm aware of.
The prevalence of corruption of State actors themselves seems more common in Russia and the Post-Soviet states, any given Middle Eastern or African Country you could name, And Central and parts of South America. I'm excluding Mexico because that whole situation is 'complicated' by the existence and influence of powerful Cartels.
At the very least, 'civilized' countries have formalized the process for bribing the government so its mostly done in plain sight and with an air of plausible deniability. That said, individual cities/local governments in the U.S. Certainly read third-worldy in their approach to graft. I wasn't aware of it being common practice to bribe cops even in Chicago but a quick Google search turned up this recent story lol.
So maybe the correlation between corruption and competence can be seen in how 'naked' the bribes and graft are or if there are robust detection and enforcement mechanisms that aren't themselves hopeless compromised.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
but Instagram and YouTube both recommend me by far more overtly anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic content than TikTok does.
No one cars about the pro-palestine content causing offense, they care about social media being used as a tool for organisation.
I think it's referring to his grandfather, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jose_Yglesias "the patriarch of a writing family."
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