domain:nfinf.substack.com
Goodguy
23hr ago
If Thiel is worried about a one-world state, I find it rather strange that he has worked closely with the US national security / intelligence apparatus, which out of all currently existing political entities is probably the one that is most likely to bring about a one-world state and indeed is constantly working to extend Washington DC's domination to every corner of a planet. Not that I think that the US national security / intelligence apparatus has any serious chance of bringing about a one-world state, but it's more likely to do it than any other political entity I can think of. Does Thiel think that he can get on this giant tiger's back and steer its direction?
As for science and atheism being incompatible, it really depends on what Thiel means by atheism. Science is certainly not incompatible with rejection of organized religions like Christianity and Islam. But one could make an argument that, because of the hard problem of consciousness, science is incompatible with dogmatic materialism/physicalism.
I wish I could see a full transcript, it's hard to come to any conclusions without one.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1d ago
The one I can't get over is Sam Altman going "Yeah, this is probably going to destroy the world, but in the meantime there's going to be some great companies!"
Bro, this is Captain Planet villain rhetoric.
The shopping centers nearby are so crowded that they no longer even bother going to them and generally avoid businesses near the freeway,
Ah the classic "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". For the particular family member, perhaps their individual utility has decreased but for the surrounding area the overall utility created has likely increased by a significant amount.
Maybe some people use it to commute, but the local area is still negatively effected. Whatever small shopping centers they might build into these higher density housing can't compete with all the amenities offered by the preexisting suburban sprawl. So you basically just end up plopping a bunch more people in an area with roads and parking lots not equipped for it.
The quality might lower for the people who there before, whose main claim to the general area around them was 1. They got there first 2. They used the force of government to take away the property rights of all their neighbors so they don't maximize the value of the land they own, but it opens up a lot for people who want to be there and were previously locked out because of artificial big government restrictions.
Also, the rent on these places wasn't any lower and rent has continued to rise precipitously in the area.
If you build a dam to block flooding, the size of the dam (supply or something) and the amount of rainfall (demand of something) both matter, and a small dam with high rainfall can still flood. But even a small dam will still stem the tide a little bit.
Rent is also a signal of how much people are willing to trade to live somewhere, so if it's a place people are desiring to live at more either by quality increases or less supply of alternatives then rent going up still is expected to begin with. "X is seen as lesser value than before" and "People are willing to spend more on X than before" aren't impossible to coexist, but they are a negative correlation that requires an even worse fall from alternative selections.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1d ago
If they execute on the plans, LA will be in the midst of America's biggest transit boom. I would wait a few years to find out if the up-zoning led to a loss in quality of life. Often, new infrastructure feels like a net negative until the whole plan gets executed. Many of China's once-ghost cities and trains-to-nowhere are a good example.
the shopping centers nearby are so crowded
Isn't that good for local business ?
Lights back up
That's just LA.
Also, the rent on these places wasn't any lower and rent has continued to rise precipitously in the area.
Wouldn't it have risen even faster if the apartments had not been built ?
DirtyWaterHotDog
1d ago
I saw the Mr Hyde version about a year ago, where it was just a nonstop, Tourette’s, yelling swear words, almost incomprehensible what was going on.
I'm surprised that Thiel claims to have just found this out. It was practically an open secret that bill gates was an excitable genius with a short temper.
But he is not talking about Microsoft, but about the stuff which Gates does with his ill-gotten money
From all anecdotes that I hear, he became a lot less 'nonstop' post-microsoft. He was an angry/passionate dude in the 90s and early 2000s. Calmed down after.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
If Peter Thiel is doing theology, I hope he does one on homosexuality?
I can't believe I used to like Thiel. Thinly insinuating that you yourself are the antichrist here to cleanse the world and bring about literal heaven hell on earth isn't going to win you any friends at all, or at least it shouldn't in a sane world, which who knows about anymore...
This really looks like the old movie trope about how the evil genius spends a lot of time explaining in detail exactly how evil and clever he is which then turns out to be his undoing as he's too caught up with his own evilness and cleverness to notice the foil making its entrance. You'd expect the quasi evil geniuses of our world would have learned to keep their maw shut but again, who knows with this world...
Part of me wonders if this is the result of the European origin of TPTB in cycling lead them to particularly want to forget the period when an American came in and dominated the sport.
I think this is not a small part of it. After the LeMond-Fignon battle there hasn't been a French winner of the TDF. And oh boy, if you get one of the home fans drunk on the side of the road and ask them the right questions, 100% there's quite a few that are salty about it. It probably has hurt local sponsorship as well which isn't great give it's quite burdensome for the local towns to host. The dependence of cycling on Lance followed by his fall, was probably bad for the sport in net. Not unlike the Tiger Woods effect, but golf has arguably recovered better. I have no doubt Lance ruled peloton with an iron fist, but I also doubt anyone at Tour level was riding clean in that era. Ignoring the ethical question for a second though, to me his greatest tactical error was not having a plan to bow out gracefully. Lance had enough clout to tie up the UCI and quiet LeMond, but he left a void when he left the first time. There's no way the Tour organizers were going to let Floyd Landis of all guys continue the American domination of the sport. The crazy thing is Lance probably could have gotten away with it if he had just staid retired, and like did anything else. I doubt anyone would have cared about the B-samples if he had just chosen to slowly fade from public view. The UCI busting Landis and then Landis immediately outing him should have been his warning not to come back.
I do think it's strange people accept The Court of Arbitration for Sport/UCI/ASO committee decisions for who "won" a given race. Like the race is "won" when you crush your enemies and see them driven before you. Take for example in the 2001 tour. The experience of following the tour was that on the road Lance Armstrong won the day he gave Jan Ullrich "The Look" on Alpe-d'Huez and Jan couldn't follow. Sipping champagne rolling into Pairs or hoisting the trophy on the Champs-Élysées were just formalities after that point.
olympic weightlifting
I know the problems associated with it, but I still think they should have brought back the clean and press when they redid the weight-classes in weightlifting. In its modern form the lifters are very explosive and athletic looking, but there's not really an event in the Olympics that has a pure test of static strength. I for one am willing to sacrifice the 20 km walk from the program if it means we can have the clean and press.
As far as general principles on records go, I treat it like my head cannon when I don't like what they've done with a show I like. I just ignore the "official" cannon. It's not like they can forcibly reprogram my mind (yet) and it's not like I'm going to all Custer's Last Stand to argue with someone about it. I just nod politely if someone wants to talk about the official cannon, then promptly go back to ignoring it exits.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
This is irrelevant; both the worker's and the CEO's quality of life once fired is beyond the control of the company.
Loquat
1d ago
Recently, I've been giving some thought to the question of what I would do if an intermediate amount of shit hit the fan, such that I couldn't just drive as much as I want but grocery stores were still available. The solution I hit on was the adult-sized cargo tricycle, which is an actual thing that multiple companies offer, and it seems like a decent option for transporting stuff in a degrowth future. Of course, then we're back to the problem of having a big bulky vehicle that needs parking space while you're shopping, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
1d ago
It rarely falls below what the worker would have had if the company was successful.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1d ago
They can also just be headcount inflators to make the manager seem more important.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Downtown courthouses often don't have good parking options, especially short-term. If you live (and maybe even work) in the 'burbs, when you have to show up downtown for one day, or maybe a week, the bus or train isn't a terrible option. For me, the most convenient option is to park at the office and take the bus directly downtown from there.
I could take the bus (directly!) to work, but it's 3x the time commitment as driving, and there isn't any shelter from sun/rain at the stops at either end. So I drive. On nice days I'll bike.
I haven't taken the bus literally anywhere else in the city I live in.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
So Peter Thiel, the SV investor, has recently given four lectures about the antichrist to a very select audience. While recording was apparently forbidden, someone recorded his lectures (or generated plausible recordings with AI) and sent them to the Guardian, which decided to quote extensively from them.
From my armchair atheist perspective, he does not seem very coherent.
It’s because the antichrist talks about Armageddon nonstop. We’re all scared to death that we’re sleepwalking into Armageddon. And then because we know world war three will be an unjust war, that pushes us. We’re going hard towards peace at any price." What I worry about in that sort of situation is you don’t think too hard about the details of the peace and it becomes much more likely that you get an unjust peace. This is, by the way, the slogan of the antichrist: 1 Thessalonians 5:3. It’s peace and safety, sort of the unjust peace.
I am not sure I follow. WW3 will be unjust, but trying to avoid it will lead to an unjust peace? (Given later quotes, that is the gist of it.) Of course, the only one who talks about Armageddon in 1 Thes 5 is Paul (in the previous verse), a figure which is traditionally not identified with the antichrist in Christianity.
He continues more coherently:
Let me conclude on this choice of antichrist or Armageddon. And again, in some ways the stagnation and the existential risks are complementary, not contradictory. The existential risk pushes us towards stagnation and distracts us from it.
For someone who is skeptical of x-risk, he seems to be rather scared of nukes:
I think we can say that if you had an all-out world war three or war between nuclear powers involving nuclear weapons, it would simply be an unjust war. A total catastrophe, possibly literal Armageddon, the end of the world.
First, IIRC, recent research has not been kind to the nuclear winter x-risk hypothesis. Depopulating most of North America would be bad, but not literally the end of the world. If only some people in Madagascar survive, then they can in principle build the next technological civilization over the next 1000 years or so.
Also, is Armageddon not a required part of the apocalypse and thus a good thing?
From the article:
As the antichrist is synonymous with a one-world state for Thiel, he also believes that international bodies including the United Nations and the international criminal court (ICC) hasten the coming of Armageddon.
They quote him:
I think Churchill just wanted summary executions of 50,000 top Nazis without a trial. [...] I wonder if the Churchill [approach] would have actually been healthier than the [Nuremberg trials].
Killing the top N followers of an enemy ideology is certainly what the Nazis would have done. Thiel must hate the ICC really badly when he would prefer a general precedent of "the victor gets to murder however many enemies they like". Also, {{Citation needed}}.
This out of the way, we can focus on the important stuff, like "which person could be the antichrist?"
My thesis is that in the 17th, 18th century, the antichrist would have been a Dr Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science.
Here he loses coherence again. The figure of Dr. Strangelove was a former Nazi working for the US government (think von Braun) who was also an enthusiastic developer of nuclear weapons (think Teller) around 1964. Isekaing him to the age of Galileo and Newton (when science worked very differently than under the DoE) seems like a strange proposition to make. Like describing someone as the Eisenhower of the antebellum South.
In the 21st century, the antichrist is a luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta [Thunberg] or Eliezer [Yudkowsky].
It’s not [Mark] Andreessen, by the way. I think Andreessen is not the antichrist. Because you know, the antichrist is popular.
That are leading figures of the climate movement, rationality/AI safety, and e/acc. Now, I may not be very up to date with e/acc, but lumping Andreessen with the "luddites" seems a questionable choice. But then, characterizing Greta or Eliezer as "wanting to stop all science" is almost as ridiculous. The Greta generation likes their technology. While there are certainly proponents of de-growth, for the most part they seem to be arguing for greener alternatives (e.g. solar power), not for getting rid of the benefits of industrialization and plowing the fields by teams of oxen. Realistically, this means researching green technologies. Eliezer wants to shut down AI capabilities research which would push the frontier towards AGI, sure. But apart from that one, fairly narrow subject, his writings suggest that he is very much for pushing the borders of knowledge.
Notably missing among the horsemen of anti-science are the anti-vaxxers (like RFK) and the Christian right who oppose stem cell research and CRISPRing fetuses.
Anyone missing? Well, so far he has not shat on EA.
One of my friends was telling me that I should not pass up on the opportunity to tell those people in San Francisco that Bill Gates is the antichrist. I will concede that he is certainly a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde-type character. The public Mr Rogers, the neighborhood character. I saw the Mr Hyde version about a year ago, where it was just a nonstop, Tourette’s, yelling swear words, almost incomprehensible what was going on.
He’s not a political leader, he’s not broadly popular, and again, perhaps to Gates’s credit, he’s still stuck in the 18th century alongside people like Richard Dawkins who believe that science and atheism are compatible.
Full disclosure: if you had asked me in 2000 if I thought that Bill Gates was the antichrist, I might not have rejected that possibility out of hand, given Microsoft. But he is not talking about Microsoft, but about the stuff which Gates does with his ill-gotten money, like fighting infectious diseases in developing countries. You know, the Disney villain stuff.
Claiming that science and atheism are incompatible is kind of a big thing to claim to make. I am as convinced an atheist as anyone, but I would still not call science and theism fundamentally incompatible. Having beliefs that do not pay rent in the anticipation of evidence seems bad epistemic practice, but as long as you limit yourself to unfalsifiable claims (e.g. of the 'not even wrong' kind), you can add whatever you want to the scientific world view. (Nor do I believe that being a theist makes you evil, per se. Theism increases the risk of some moral failings and perhaps lowers the risk of others, but the correlation is not so robust that I would really care about it.)
Of course, claiming that Dawkins and Gates are atheists stuck in the 18th century is very ahistoric. Almost nobody was openly atheist in 18th century Europe. The real blow to the theist world view came in the 19th century, with the origin of species. All the scientific discoveries of the 20th century were did not help religion, either, steadily pushing back the areas of human uncertainty which are the natural habitat of the priest.
The guardian also quotes him on Musk and Trump and Vance, but I think my post is long enough as it is.
As with Musk, the remaining question is did he turn weird, or was he always weird?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1d ago
There's some places where people whose output is zero or near zero are quickly rooted out and fired (assembly lines?) but in many fields ZMP workers learn to camouflage themselves and fly under the radar from management's perspective.
Or, if you like, NMP and ZMP workers can have de facto "acceptable production".
Pongalh
1d ago
Interesting because it's been much, much harder for me to hold on to fake email jobs than my jobs delivering pizza and flowers. I left all the latter, the former left me (save for one).
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
People aren't being overly literal. Including that comparison without making it explicit isn't a reasonable thing to do, because it brings it in without leaving it open for challenge.
BahRamYou
1d ago
I think your response actually supports my point. In theory "we" the stockholders could cut their CEO's pay, or "we" as voters could pass a law limiting all CEO pay. But in practice, no one is organized enough to actually be able to do anything about it. The CEOs get their pay not because some perfectly efficient market is finding the correct value for them, but because they have more political power where it counts.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1d ago
The newer Russian planes are fine compared to anything short of an F-22/35, but they can't build them quickly enough or at all (in the case of MiG 31s, or non-Flanker strike aircraft like the Su-22s and 25s, Tu-95s, etc.) to afford chucking them into the teeth of Ukraine's air defense network Gulf War style and they didn't start the war with huge numbers of them thanks to having next to no procurement budget during the 90s and 2000s. Does the Su-57 do anything that an Su-30/35 or MiG 31 can't also do (The R-37 is indeed clever.)? Who knows, because they've only built ~30 of them.
Mind you, even before being provisioned with Patriots and so on Ukraine started the war with a very good ground-based IADS thanks to being either the second or third-largest operator of the S-300 and other 80s era Soviet SAM systems in the world, especially given an all you can eat buffet of NATO recon. It would've been a tough nut to crack for anyone not named the USAF.
Jiro
1d ago
In order for it to be possible, all you need is zero, you don't have to have arbitrarily small, because it is certainly possible to produce 1000 times zero.
But it's still nonsense either way because people here are depressingly literal. "Produces 1000 times as much as another employee" implicitly compares an employee to another employee whose production is acceptable. The fact that the words "... whose production is acceptable" are not literally there doesn't change this.
Pongalh
1d ago
"Jurors." Interesting choice. Hm, is this literally true or is it meant to signify anti-sprawl boomer liberals who value civic participation or something? (Or possibly unsuccessful albeit decent, basic people with nothing better to do with their time? But even those folks mostly have cars.)
Pongalh
1d ago
Some writers have begun intentionally introducing mistakes into their writing in order to not be thought of as using LLMs. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sarah-waller-1b967671_i-recently-read-an-article-where-the-writer-activity-7381594464328359936-6dNO?rcm=ACoAAAIRfjcBLt5fKoXIZEwnmoXzpmaEixqxsJ8
Why do you think the board is any less incentivized to cut staffing costs than managers? They're the ones applying that pressure!
It's a bit different though. The pressure to cut expenses comes from the top down. But there's no one above the board of directors who can hold them accountable- they're already at the top! Many of them serve on multiple boards at once, and rotate in and out of CEO or other C-level jobs at other companies, so they have a strong "class interest" in pushing up CEO pay in general. They might get some bad press or worker grumbling about unfairness, but there's no one that can actually fire them for setting the CEO pay too high. In theory I guess the general stockholders could all come together to do it, but they're so disorganized that it never happens. The only practical way to force them out is for some corporate raider to do a hostile takeover, and even then there's golden parachute clauses designed in part to preevent that sort of thing.
also worth noting that the ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay has massively increased over the last few decades. So it may well just continue to increase until they're taking home some large fraction of the company's total revenue as their personal salary. Or maybe the CEO ends up with all of the company's stock (making it harder and harder for regular shareholders to oppose them) and they become a private company, like SpaceX already is.
edit: most of the starbucks board members are current or former CEOs of other companies. They directly benefit from raising CEO pay, since that sets a higher baseline for themselves to justify their own pay. This isn't some abstract "class consciousness thing," there's a very small group of CEOs and board members who are tightly connected.
Stanislav Petrov
I wonder if he was awarded 1% of all the USSR's money as a reward for his services? That should be fair, right? Or did he not get anything at all? Our intuitions for what's fair really fail at this kind of scale. (edit: he was not rewarded. it was seen as an embarassment for the entire Soviet system and was quietly swept under the rug)
Please do, I would love to read that!
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