Corvos
1hr ago
I’ve read all five. Don’t worry about it. The quality is a bit uneven IMO but that’s not going to be a big part of things going forward.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1hr ago
I just started Oathbringer, the third novel in the Stormlight Archive series. I really enjoyed the second half of The Way Of Kings and the first two-thirds of Words Of Radiance, but I found the
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1hr ago
More words to justify treating simple and clear descriptive names as if you are a Harry Potter character afraid of summoning He Who Is Not To Be Named. This is not any kind of rational or principled opposition to a nebulous "enemy." It's literal superstition.
There are any number of people and organizations we all hold in disdain or worse. Inventing euphemisms or derogatory epithets to avoid naming them is the level of response I expect from young teens.
Turniper
1hr ago
Better to get divorced, charged, or threatened when you've got a million in the bank, a paid off house, and an umbrella liability policy than when you don't have any of the above. For some things, there's preparation. For others there's not much more you can do than have a good attitude and a steady hand.
Trying to mitigate every possible risk just ends with becoming Brian Johnson and probably dying at 82 anyway.
thejdizzler
1hr ago
Just had a random thought. Arguing on TheMotte about politics is kind of like stepping back in time to the 1800s before radio and TV. This is an era of politics that people like Postman like to idealize, and I see why. You come to admire and/or believe in other posters because of their arguments/style rather than good looks. At the same time, it's not like this place is a beacon of rationality (despite being better than most of the rest of the internet) at all times, which I think highlights the rose-tinted glasses nature of this kind of thinking. That said, I've enjoyed getting to know users here by the way they write, rather than how they look.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1hr ago
I don't follow Tiktok at all, but it's spread to YouTube and reddit and other social media. "Unalived" is usually used as a euphemism for killed or committed suicide. "Grape" also sounds like it's supposed to be a joke to me, but it seems to be replacing the "r*pe" obfuscation that I guess is supposed to be less "triggering" than seeing all the letters.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
1hr ago
many of the kindest and most considerate people I have met have been whites who took great pains to live up to the color-blind promise
I corroborate this. In fact I would say out of the top 10 people I know well who I could see as such, 8-9 were white. They were all liberal too.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
1hr ago
the UK, visiting all the Royal tourist spots, never getting harassed by police at odd hours over edgy Twitter posts
This doesn't happen unless you openly call for physical violence, and even then only if you are stupid enough to put your real name to it.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1hr ago
White Witch, Black Curse (The Hollows, Book 7), by Kim Harrison. Book 11 of He Who Fights With Monsters was fine, and it wrapped up all of its major plot arcs, but I don't feel the need to run out and read book 12 right now.
birb_cromble
1hr ago
I spent some time in Virginia, Maryland, and South Central PA about 20 years ago.
I can absolutely corroborate the profound weirdness of the crimes that started occurring as the illegal immigrant population increased in a given area.
We always had a lot of bar fights, domestics, and drunk driving arrests, but as the area started getting flooded with migrant labor, the profile of the crimes started changing.
There were not one, not two, but three distinct men who were arrested for stabbing women in the ass in stores. Specifically women, specifically in the ass, and specifically in stores.
We had another rash of complaints about a serial truck bed shitter.
Later, we had a rash of cattle mutilations that turned out to be... I guess you'd call it poaching? Rustling? Either way, it was illegal immigrant orchard workers cutting their own steaks from the local dairy cows.
Don't even get me started on the cock fighting and dog fighting operations.
Believe me when I say that the character of a place does change once the illegal immigrant laborer population reaches a certain critical mass.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
No dispute on that; but a policy of official actual colourblindness would go a long way towards marginalizing these people. The average Asian doesn't care about Stop Asian Hate one way or the other, an official policy of marginalizing it would not be made up for by popular support.
AADOS oppression olympics racebaiting activists have enough support from the communities that they will continue to exist as notable organizations regardless of official attitude; I don't think this is the case for Asian or Hispanic equivalents.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
1hr ago
So, what are you reading?
I'm adding Jews in the Soviet Union, Vol. 1, another open access book, to my list. Looks like the full series isn't published yet, but volumes 1, 3 and 5 are out.
crushedoranges
1hr ago
There's a failure case, in between integration and remigration back to the homeland, that second and third generation immigrants feel like they belong to neither country: that you're fostering a nihilistic cadre of resentful young people with nothing to lose.
Just, uh, speaking from personal experience.
crushedoranges
1hr ago
Full disclosure: I am of Asian descent, living in Canada. The problem is that the well-integrated ones aren't in charge of culture or policy: and you have the activist weirdos who gain positions of responsibility. And because in general liberal whites are kind of trusting, they take it on face value that they represent the communities they are from.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
I wouldn't put high odds on anyone getting two chances to take out Trump. If you don't get him, there's a very good chance he's going to get you. And when you stay your hand the first time, it eats away at your support when people see you hesitate and don't know if you'll go through with it.
Coups come into this world like bastard children, half improvised and half compromised. If the deals and moves line up you can take it or you can let it go, but you probably can't time it.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2hr ago
I actually dislike when people reflexively avoid "died" as well. I very rarely will say someone "passed away", because I think it's better to be direct about what happened. The person died, it's ok to say it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
The earlier Trump resigns the better the path for Vance in 28. The stronger his case as incumbent.
TowardsPanna
2hr ago
Thank you for the link. I suppose Occam's Razor here is that the controversy adds to the virality and that's that.
I never watched the video either, but I had the same reaction to the text. I don't doubt that the cops in question were horrible predators.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2hr ago
We are experimenting and learning and inventing. Every modern AI is a brand new prototype, mass released to the public only because of how interesting and useful they are despite their newness.
Nearly every new invention is massively overpriced compared to its long term potential unless the "invention" is a refinement of an old invention optimized specifically for its affordability. Cars used to be crazy expensive luxury goods, now they're expensive but affordable staples of modern life, much cheaper than trying to walk across the country on the Oregon Trail. The literal first refrigerator was vastly expensive as the inventor prototyped it out without a factory to stamp them out, now everyone has one. The first GPT-4 quality LLM was vastly more expensive to design than GPT-4 quality LLMs will be 10 years from now. We have no idea where AI intelligence will plateau, and we have no idea what cost it will asymptote towards over the next few decades as people discover more and more efficient methods and technologies. Current quality is merely a lower bound, and current costs are an upper bound, not the true long term potential, and probably not anywhere close.
The answer to every (non-safety) criticism of AI is that we're not there yet. But we're getting somewhere.
This was addressed in one of the holy texts:
More important, unarmed black people are killed by police or other security officers about twice a week according to official statistics, and probably much more often than that. You’re saying none of these shootings, hundreds each year, made as good a flagship case as Michael Brown? In all this gigantic pile of bodies, you couldn’t find one of them who hadn’t just robbed a convenience store? Not a single one who didn’t have ten eyewitnesses and the forensic evidence all saying he started it? [emphasis mine—and note that this was written in 2014!]
I propose that the Michael Brown case went viral – rather than the Eric Garner case or any of the hundreds of others – because of the PETA Principle. It was controversial. A bunch of people said it was an outrage. A bunch of other people said Brown totally started it, and the officer involved was a victim of a liberal media that was hungry to paint his desperate self-defense as racist, and so the people calling it an outrage were themselves an outrage. Everyone got a great opportunity to signal allegiance to their own political tribe and discuss how the opposing political tribe were vile racists / evil race-hustlers. There was a steady stream of potentially triggering articles to share on Facebook to provoke your friends and enemies to counter-share articles that would trigger you.
TL;DR: controversial topics go more viral than benign ones.
Edit: also, to address the specific case of George Floyd, at the time, the video footage that went viral was very chilling to watch. (Or so I’ve been told by friends, conservative ones, who had watched the video; as a rule, I try to avoid viewing such things.) When one sees a man being choked to death slowly over the course of eight minutes while protesting “I can’t breathe!” then it’s hard not to viscerally feel that an injustice has been committed. (And if I remember correctly, the video went viral long before the man’s extensive prior criminal history or fentanyl usage became common knowledge.)
raakaa
3hr ago
Are you confusing the real economy and market with the dating market?
I don't think this engaged with Prima's question about why women would settle for poor […] boyfriends
Evidently there is a link between the real market and the dating market.
(And if the descriptor “stupid boyfriends” means “un(der)educated boyfriends”, then “women taking out massive loans for fake degrees that don't pay” is an example of another “market distortion” identified in the original comment that affects the dating market. Now, there’s nothing inherently gendered about this strategy, so a man who is willing to sacrifice earning potential in order to meet the criterion of not being a “stupid boyfriend” can do so. But then he gives up his ability to not be a “poor boyfriend”, so he fails that criterion too.
None of this addresses the “not being a ‘smelly boyfriend’” criterion, of course.)
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3hr ago
One of the HPD officers that had arrested Floyd is serving a 60 year sentence for felony murder for the 2019 Harding Street raid, a "drug bust" on fabricated evidence that killed two white homeowners with no major criminal history.
Nice! I just hit 200 on my current story, nipping at your tail! I put yours on my to-read list, always looking for good new scifi. Haven't really found anything recent that scratched the itch since Theft of Fire.
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