domain:cspicenter.com
hydroacetylene
1m ago
The sorts of stores that will still stock physical porn when my children are teenagers are the sort which won’t even let them in the front door without an ID. This isn’t the eighties.
SubstackNecron
7m ago
A full exchange of nuclear warheads will end the US as a political entity for at least decades and probably forever. If it reforms it will be much later. The current political situation will cease to matter at all to the survivors. Pretending this is not true is deeply silly.
SteveKirk
7m ago
It's flattering to think that he's involved in the community, but I expect most of these guys read articles that go viral among the VC set. Think this is how most of Scott's famous articles came to be widely known, rather than through dedicated fans.
I don't care if it's not real though because it would be fucking hilarious if it was.
sun_the_second
9m ago
You’re acting as though getting falsely accused of shoplifting is something that happens to middle-class white people all the time. How likely do you actually think that scenario is? I’ve gone my entire life without ever being accused of shoplifting.
Is this meant to imply that we should accept low-class nonwhite people being falsely accused, because they're not us?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
11m ago
Which one of you motherfuckers
Found JD Vance's grandma.
benmmurphy
17m ago
The motte is the more extreme version of slatestarcodex/astralcodexten. Vance is not based enough to hang out here. He probably hangs out with the normies in the slatestarcodex comments or that other weird vbulletin forum. What you would really hope is Vance is that guy that keeps posting on the reddit split off asking where everyone else is.
-_-_-_-_-
24m ago
Multiple companies announced the completion of their vaccines immediately after the election.
Which ones? Weren't Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson all in Phase 3 by the time the election happened?
I'm also aware that we can basically do massive climate change on the cheap whenever we want. Sulfur dioxide seeding in the upper atmosphere or a massive sun shade in space are orders of magnitude cheaper than carbon emissions reduction.
And it'd be better to begin geoengineering now than to wait 20 years, wouldn't it?
omfalos
25m ago
It feels wrong to wish death on somebody who has done (almost) nothing (truly) wrong.
___
26m ago
There's a widespread belief held by urban Jews that rural whites areas are heavily anti-Semitic (which is untrue), I would guess that it's probably related.
If the Russians were funding the Greens it would be because they wanted to push for shutting down coal and nuclear power plants which would increase Germany's reliance on natural gas as a way to fill the gap when the baseload becomes more unreliable.
The weird thing is I thought there was a thing about the German secret service infiltrating the Green party due to Russian ties. The problem is I don't know when this happened. In my head this must have happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union because of my age but also in my head my thoughts were 'I hate the Greens. I hate the Communists. But you really shouldn't be doing this in a democracy'. [weirdly enough the USA did the same thing to the Republican party 16 year later]. Also, if I search for the terms 'scandal over germany secret service green party' in Google I can't find it so maybe I'm hallucintating. I asked chat gpt and apparently it happened in 2000 which make sense to me but maybe this is chat gpt hallucinating as well. Chat GPT wouldn't supply me with links and I can't find anything on google in the front page.
wingdingspringking
32m ago
Agreed. If I could be guaranteed that Trump would be dead within 6 months and Vance would take over, I'd actually consider giving them money.
zeke5123a
35m ago
We’ve actually seen Polymarket front run the polls; not the other way around. My guess is there was a reaction to that polling but many other polls came out at the same time with Trump leading so hard to make heads or tails.
roystgnr
35m ago
Citation?
Steve Sailer is the one who keeps harping on the vaccine delay most, including a retrospective recently. Not the most persuasive source to cite, but he does cite his own sources and doesn't seem to be making up any facts, just adding speculative but more-plausible-than-the-official motives. The official story is that pharma companies did hold back the analysis of their vaccines until right after the election, but only because it's okay to violate experiment protocols when you're kinda feeling super nervous.
I thought the bottleneck was FDA approval, with mass production starting alongside Phase 2 success.
Pfizer announced 90% effectivity in a preliminary analysis of their Phase 3 trials on November 9, announced the analysis was finished on November 18, applied for FDA approval on November 20, and got the Emergency Use Authorization on December 11.
Certainly the FDA taking 3 weeks to approve was as unhelpful than Pfizer delaying for 2 weeks, but both decisions probably killed thousands in the end.
Of course, the real bottleneck was the FDA, because we could have saved tens or hundreds of thousands more lives if not for decisions like "Forbidding the human challenge trials we could have done in April", "Not jailing the people who did the forbidding and then doing human challenge trials in May", etc. But letting people die in large numbers because of mindless authoritarianism is part and parcel of modern society, whereas letting people die in less-large numbers because you want to hide information from voters feels like a new low.
zeke5123a
39m ago
Yeah agreed. To me polymarket seemed a bit too bullish on Trump. Again, I think Trump is the comfortable favorite but wouldn’t be shocking for Harris to win.
zoink
43m ago
COVID-19 vaccines: history of the pandemic’s great scientific success and flawed policy implementation The FDA and companies delay vaccine trial until after the US election
Further discussion 25:35 from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the Covid Vaccine (with Vinay Prasad)
SteveKirk
48m ago
Following that /r/SSC link was depressing. I hadn't realized how Reddit they'd gone, with leftists berating walls of <deleted> comments.
Guess that's what "no culture war" really means. Just one hivemind's boot doing all the stomping
MotteInTheEye
51m ago
There's a knock on effect of execution for murder or attempted murder on how expensive and awful prisons are. Gangs thrive in prison because the guards are not able to maintain a monopoly on violence, which is partly because many prisoners have nothing left to lose.
Edit: forgot to make the full connection to the current topic, which is that policing minor offenders like shoplifting would still get a lot easier with the consistent application of the death penalty even if they aren't the ones getting executed.
sapph
56m ago
I have a very good record of betting on prediciton markets and crypto. Turned an ~70K bankroll into a few million. That is not some Lebron level performance but its very good in my opinion. The motte isn't going to want to hear this but...
'Things the right wants to be true' are systematically overpriced. This has been true for years and it is probably still true this cycle. That doesn't mean Trump wont win or wont win in a landslide. But systematically the 'pro-rightwing' outcomes tend to be overpriced. I would not place a bet on any outcome where Trump wins unless you have a very good reason. I think trump is favored but the bets tend to be overpriced.
I will say there is one piece of counterevidence recently that seems important to my personal estimation. Prediction markets were way ahead of other sources in predicting that Joe Biden would step down. Places like Metaculus which are usually reasonably trustworthy (despite minimal monetary incentives) were hilariously overconfident. But I am skeptical of most 'trump wins X' bets from a financial point of view.
The greens were hardly pushing against fossil fuels (partly because they overlap with pro-coal labor unions). They were campaigning against nuclear and for vast investments in solar, both of which cripple the German grid and help Russia sell more gas at higher prices in the winter.
I'm not excusing German greens by saying they were just rational foreign agents (because I think they're legitimately insane), but Russian sponsorship of their activism goes back to the anti-nuclear campaigns by communist front orgs in the 60s. Today's senior greens literally had KGB handlers when they were young radicals.
This is not at all surprising (though the people over at /r/slatestarcodex seem to be surprised), given his association with Peter Thiel, whom he met in 2011 and has worked with/for over the years. Thiel played an important role in Vance's political career, donating $15 million to his successful Senate campaign. Thiel also helped "smooth over" JD Vance's relationship with Donald Trump in 2021, according to the New York Times
Even without this obvious connection to Thiel, I think it should be pretty evident from how he talks and conducts himself. He's young, smart, and went to a good school, is right-leaning and somewhat of a contrarian—why wouldn't he be aware of Scott's blog?
I mean, has mentioned Curtis Yarvin before on Jack Murphy's (cuck) podcast back in 2021:
"So there's this guy Curtis Yarvin..."
It's actually quite funny how easily you can spot other "rat-adjacent" people in the wild nowadays. I've met a few at a completely unrelated event. This didn't use to happen before. But, now, I could tell from just a few words into our conversation. So maybe the event wasn't all that unrelated, after all. Apparently, there's demographic overlap between these seemingly disparate interests. I don’t know if I like that there are others like me.
To Scott Alexander's credit, he has had an outsized influence on intellectual discourse online, which is now beginning to spill into real life. Looking at Google Trends, the search volume for "Effective Altruism" peaked in 2021-2022. This matches my perception of TheMotte's popularity at the time. But that peak might've only been the beginning.
The growth of the "gray tribe" in that period, whether they (you?) like it or not, follows a tangible "vibe shift" in culture. As Curtis Yarvin is quoted musing in a 2022 Vanity Fair article, the liberal regime will being to fall when the "cool kids" abandon its values and worldview. We've seen it already. A pretty funny example is Red Scare, who, following the winds of culture, went all the way from Sailor Socialism to larping Tradcath aesthetics. And with JD as VP, maybe it'll go truly mainstream.
I have felt the effects of internet gentrification and cultural appropriation over the years, as different obscure niches have gone similarly mainstream. I feel validation but also resentment and frustration at the loss of exclusivity and ownership.
"Everyone dresses like a duck hunter now [in 2022]."
But also Brandy Melville is in, Ozempic is in, being thin and pretty is back in fashion. Thanks, I guess? I like it (I like pretty, thin women), but I also hate it (I hate the lack of edge).
Terms that were popular only in small, socially ostracized circles of internet weirdos and incels are now mainstream. "Looksmaxxing" no longer scares the hoes away—it's all over TikTok. Why did people have to learn what the maxilla is?
I feel robbed.
I need to find something new. I am obsessed with trend forecasting. I need to find a niche to gatekeep.
Any suggestions?
This will happen very quickly after most of the boomers are in the ground as any look into pro-life vs pro-choice by age demographics will tell you.
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