domain:samschoenberg.substack.com
Shrike
1d ago
Obviously the best solution for the US is to bring all of these capabilities in-house (to one degree or another) but the funniest solution would just be to say "these Chinese have made their ruling, let them enforce it" and then buy secondhand from India, same way the Russians have been getting around our sanctions.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
This is a better take on the Palisades fire than my take.
And my general point still stands.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I'm thinking particularly of politics.
For an example... I remember being very struck by this listening to a podcast with Sophie Lewis, a family abolition advocate. Unfortunately the one I'm thinking of as since been taken down, but this kind of conversation. Other examples of the podcast I was originally thinking of have the same kind of high-strung, nervous energy that I was trying to describe. Another way of putting it might be just the way that Robin DiAngelo talks.
Perhaps a linguist would be able to explain this better than I can, but there's a feeling I get somewhere beneath the surface where, say, Steve Turley comes off as wanting to yell. He has the energy or vibe, I suppose, that I associate with having clenched teeth, or wanting to punch someone. I get the opposite feeling from people like Lewis or DiAngelo - not actually crying or having an anxiety attack, no more than Turley is actually laying about himself with a golf club, but a sort of... 10% or 15% concentration of the same ingredient that would, at 100%, lead to those more spectacular breakdowns.
I do think it's gendered - I don't get, for instance, any of the nervous energy I'm talking about from Ezra Klein. He comes off to me as professional and articulate, and I think in general men don't project anxiety as much as women (and when they do, they come off as effeminate and weak and that makes it very hard for them to build a brand). But I think it's fair to say that women are more prominent in the left-wing sphere, and right-wing culture warrior women do more to imitate the angry affect anyway.
aqouta
1d ago
I mean that feeling as a kid is the closest thing to being invited to join the Illuminati that any of us are likely to get.
Well you know, until the other big secret everyone pretends to believe, you know the one I'm talking about.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1d ago
Introduce a $200 bill. Inflation means that the $100 bill is no longer as useful as it once was. It is time to acknowledge this by creating a higher denomination note. Whose face should go on the bill? My preference would be Ronald Reagan, but if we absolutely must have a woman on the bill, let's go with Ayn Rand.
If we actually want it to be done we should have Donald Trump's face on the bill. Or maybe also introduce a $1,000 bill with Trump's face.
Just think, Trump could be the face of stockpiles of US currency in countries which don't have a stable currency of their own.
(to be clear I would unironically support this)
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
I appreciate you.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1d ago
I don’t think any of this will actually make currency more useful than ubiquitous payment processors, so I don’t see the need for #3.
...unless you consume things the payment processors don't like.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1d ago
The time wasn't right because there were too many useless coins.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
The problem is that local taxes are harder to deal with. You have state and local taxes to deal with which makes it almost impossible to make a national ad for a product if you have to include taxes. Just crossing a city/county line can change prices by a dollar or more depending on the product. If you cross a state line, you can get even bigger effects.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
1d ago
I've never used dating apps. It would be pointless; since I'm in the DC area, white women who aren't the type to put those "HATE HAS NO HOME HERE / NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL" signs in their yards are damned few and far between unless you go way beyond the reach of public transit (I have no car).
SnapDragon
1d ago
No problem, this is something we're all still trying to figure out. I wonder if there'll be a future career path of "prompt engineer", or, more fancifully, "LLM whisperer"...
ulyssessword
2d ago
Canada already rounds cash purchases to $0.05, and it works fine. Sure, you can avoid a $0.02 upcharge or get a $0.02 discount when using cash, but nobody cares about that much money.
That being said, I wouldn't fix prices at $0.25 increments, at least at the low end. There is a real difference in price between a $0.65 can of soup and a $0.85 one, despite both rounding to $0.75. Maybe one cent increments up to five dollars (no more 9/10 of a cent for gas), and 25 cent increments after that.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Pass a law requiring prices and salaries to be advertised after tax.
The difference is that Starbucks charges everyone they sell a coffee to the same sales tax, but different employees are very likely to pay different income taxes. In Germany, you get tax credits for being married to someone without much income (Ehegattensplitting, also known as Herdpraemie (stove bonus)) and having kids. Depending on circumstances, you can also deduct a lot of different expenses from your taxes.
The closest practical solution to your proposal I can see is that jobs are required to advertise what a fictional reference employee (18yo, able-bodied, single, no kids, no other sources of income or deductible expenses) would get as a paycheck. Of course, for a single parent who already has another part time job, the amount they will make will likely be different.
TeknOShEeP
2d ago
Ah, TIL.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
Where the feelings of aggression come in is he has a very intense stare, and I really do feel a sense of "this is an angry person looking at me with aggression" when he looks into the camera. This is a startlingly aggressive gaze for a youtuber to be making into the inanimate object of a camera. And the shadow that his ballcap casts onto his face doesn't really help.
Interestingly, at least this particular freeze frame does not actually register as particularly aggressive to me - I just read it as something like "triumphant expectation", like he thinks he just made a winning point in an argument and is waiting for me to concede.
I come from red country; the conservative men I know don't give off "aggressive, uncoordinated," vibes, but rather "more coordinated and chill than average."
To be clear, I didn't posit it as a general trait of conservatives; rather, it seems to me to be something that conservatives now appreciate in their influencers/thought leaders/talking heads.
For an example that separates the traits I am talking about from "working class markers" (as @OliveTapenade suggested), I got the same sense of unexpected aggression from the handful of Jordan Peterson clips I have watched. My feeling there was that he perpetually talked with a tension that sounded like a professional middle class father who was five seconds away from slapping his son so hard that he would fly across the room.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Surely Trump backs down here. US MIC hard-needs rare earths, can't do without them.
I think this is a targeted blow against the defence and EV industries, not against chips or electronics generally. Chips have only a tiny amount of rare earths. Only things with Big Motors or Exotic Electronics like military hardware are really affected. HDDs should be fine if we recycle more, F-35s on the other hand are in real trouble.
Yet another huge environmentalist error: https://x.com/skepticaliblog/status/1912469666272059526
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
Let me just tell you from learning the hard way: These women are doing you a favor by making it clear this is a dealbreaker up front.
PreformancePertension
2d ago
Also, this is not a website that I expect anyone to particularly like this line of reasoning (I don't myself), but the reason we don't have bills higher than $100 is that law enforcement and governments in general dislike high value bills due to their use in crime - untraceable cash and all that. The ECB massively regrets putting out a 500EUR note and only printed them for a decade before stopping and trying to take them out of circulation.
Throwaway05
2d ago
No worries, I'm just here to be ornery on medicine topics periodically. >_>
07mk
2d ago
Also, it is noteworthy that this case is literally "Burgers?". I guess life does imitate art.
Given how often Stone Toss gets parodied both by his fans and haters, I feel like someone must've already made an edit of that comic using "Waffles?" as a punchline, but I'm not clever enough to figure out what the joke would be.
anon_
2d ago
Sorry, you're right. I didn't mean orthopedic surgeon, I mean osteopath/PM&R types.
My bad.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
By contrast I find the generic left-wing affect to be... one of two, it's either an affected sense of superiority (the I-can't-believe-I-have-to-explain-this-to-you style), or it's a kind of fragility? I don't know how to describe it, but if the right-winger feels like they're about to start screaming, the left-winger feels like they're about to start crying. There's a kind of insecurity. In my experience the superior, smug style is more common among men, and the fragile, desperate style is more common among women.
Does this apply just to left-wing politics youtubers, or to any "generically left-wing" (~anyone who does not register as having the aggressive affect to me)? (What about, say, this prolific tech reviewer, or these two default left-wingers talking to each other about vaguely politics-adjacent things?) Do you have any examples that you would consider typical?
quiet_NaN
2d ago
From your link:
The new regulations create Beijing's version of US rules which block countries from selling chip-making equipment to China.
The US has used those measures to slow China's development of powerful chips that could be used for artificial intelligence (AI) with military applications.
Interestingly enough, I think that chip production does not require tons of rare earth elements. Even if the REE prices increased by a factor of 100, I am not sure if the chips themselves would be much more expensive. Of course, for ceramic capacitors the story is different, and a lot of other tech in data centers uses REE as well.
I think that the US (and it's loose allies, like Taiwan or the Netherlands) leading in chip feature size is them being ahead in a race which is relevant (at least if you believe that AI will not simply fizzle out, and care about who builds the paperclip maximizer).
By contrast, I am not sure that having cheaper REE extraction tech (which China likely has) is much of a game-changer. The price of Neodymium is a few hundred dollars per kilogram. As you need about 1kg for an EV, changing the price to 1000$/kg would increase the price of EVs slightly. For headphones, the relative price hike is probably even smaller.
That being said, investing in US REE refining is probably not a solid business decision. Sure, while China blocks exports your product is competitive, but as soon as they put their stockpiles on the market, you will no longer sell anything.
I think that the best thing you can do as a nation if a competitor controls a market of strategic importance is to (a) have a strategic reserve and (b) pay companies to produce the product at prices far above what the market would pay in moderate quantities, so that once an embargo happens you have some tech which you can scale up. (Arguably, (b) is also the strategy most countries use for military hardware. In three decades, Europe produced 609 Eurofighters. By contrast, in the six years of WW2, 800 thousand airplanes were produced by all combatants. The point of paying astronomical sums for a few Eurofighters is not that they will be very useful, but that if one ever finds oneself in the situation of wanting to spend a decent fraction of the GDP on fighter planes, one can ramp up the production in a few years rather than spending decades developing new planes.)
As a negotiation strategy with Trump, I think China's approach is decent, and as an European I wish them wholeheartedly success in standing up to Trump's protectionism.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2d ago
His manner of speaking doesn't come across as right-wing principaliter to me, it comes across as uncoordinated and aggressive. I think that's where your feelings of "this is like a drunken man" come from. It feels like he's rocking around and can't sit still. It comes across as sketchy to me -- I'm don't know the man, I'm just expressing what my snap judgment of his presentation says.
Where the feelings of aggression come in is he has a very intense stare, and I really do feel a sense of "this is an angry person looking at me with aggression" when he looks into the camera. This is a startlingly aggressive gaze for a youtuber to be making into the inanimate object of a camera. And the shadow that his ballcap casts onto his face doesn't really help.
I come from red country; the conservative men I know don't give off "aggressive, uncoordinated," vibes, but rather "more coordinated and chill than average." The feature that distinguishes a lot of the young conservative men I've met is they just feel calmer and pursue traditional milestones (marriage, children, etc). While there are lots of tells that this specific video creator is a right-winger, if you took the hat away I could easily see him being a Democrat, or a Libertarian, or a radical Socialist. He just feels like "angry man with bone to pick", not so much "proud conservative."
Well, it's like the problems of video games in recent years. They think theres a larger audience out there they can get but their current one is so toxic it's preventing them from getting it. Thus you have the choice of ditching your old users and hoping the new bigger userbase gets on board or slowly dying with your old users.
Bluesky is a profit driven company so of course they have to take the risk of more users and thus higher profits over guaranteed slow death.
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