domain:thezvi.wordpress.com
When you have something of great value, it tends to become the only thing that people ever want from you. We can consider Elon Musk as a figure of intense material and symbolic value. He's one of the wealthiest men alive, he runs X, he runs SpaceX, he had a spectacularly public falling out with Trump, and these factors undoubtedly dominate in virtually all of his interpersonal interactions. It's probably a bit hard for him to just be a "normal guy" with "normal friends", innit?
This is something that is far more blessing than curse; a member of the aristocracy may chafe at the fact that their inherent social standing is all they will be known for, but it's sure better than being the serf that finds themselves without much value by default and who will need to scrape and bleed if they want to reach even a fraction of that. This dynamic shows up in the relations between the sexes as well, even in symbolic ways. Hell, women's clothing is skewed far more towards that of the aristocracy than men's clothing is; many items of male fashion evoke utility and/or discipline in some way (even male formalwear derives from military uniform), whereas many female fashions are expensive, throwaway fripperies which embody the idea that status is earned through not having to display utility, and being able to attain resources without having to dirty your hands by doing hard work.
Really there's a grand irony here that I think puts the lie to the idea that women would want to be treated like men: The only reason why women can even complain about that is because of that inherent value. The only reason why anyone even listens to these complaints in the first place is because they are women, and people feel their needs should be catered to and that their complaints carry more weight than that of the male sex. It is okay if women consume resources; they are the appropriate beneficiaries of help, and attending to their complaints is a worthwhile use of others' labour. The same is not true for men. Even the people making complaints along the lines that women can never stop being seen as women often self-consciously capitalise on the fact that they are either female or acting on behalf of women to give their point more weight.
If we are to start treating women like men (something I fully support, by the way, PLEASE actually start doing this), the answer to this complaint should be "suck it up, buttercup, and deal with it". The fact that it is not, and that women expect people to actually take these complaints seriously and spend time, resources and effort dealing with the supposed problem, tells you everything you need to know. Nobody, not even the women making these protestations, truly want women to be treated like men. So many women have been spoiled with this pernicious and unrealistic idea that tradeoffs are not or should not be a thing, that they can "have it all" - but the reality is that they can't, and that results in them never being happy and treating equality like a buffet where they can just pick the parts of the bargain they like while leaving behind everything they don't (so, the last century or two of gender activism). Try as you might to force reality to conform to that fanciful ideal, that's not how anything works.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
2d ago
She seems like a decent-sized Hollywood star but not particularly big, and in terms of her physical features, she's definitely very attractive, but not in a way that would stand out compared to other Hollywood actresses known for their beauty or some popular Instagram model.
She's the current it-girl, and it's been a little while since one was blonde and non-apologetic about being herself. At least that's my sense; I don't follow acting particularly closely.
As far as I can tell, she hasn't made any particular political or ideological statements,
That may well be a significant factor- relative political silence codes as conservative (ish) in a field overflowing with people eager to make unnecessary statements. Plus she does MMA and restored a vintage Bronco.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Franco was a failure because of a handful of specific mistakes- among them choosing a compromise candidate for the throne rather than a carlist and choosing to repress the basques.
All of these had reasonable explanations at the time, and probably would have been survivable if it wasn’t for Vatican II. The Catholic Church bureaucrats maintaining his regime(fascism does not have enough staying power) were very affected by this. ‘Not enough power for the Catholic church’ is a baffling criticism of Franco.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2d ago
I found Rebecca Ferguson much more attractive in Dune, despite her being over a decade older.
This by a very wide margin. And call me an Ayy-ophile, but I also liked the appearances of Anya Taylor-Joy and...whoever played Margot Fenring. Forgot the name.
Obviously I am racist, but I also just honestly think that Chani in the new Dune movies was a caustic harridan and woke mouthpiece, and from what little I've seen of her actress otherwise, she doesn't appear to be much more likable IRL. With those traits, race doesn't even get to be a factor.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
2d ago
It's far and away the most high-budget professionalized "It's okay to be white" phenomenon.
Trolling feels too generic for this; is there a term for this kind of "the backlash is the real signal" thing?
Well, this one was from a different young twenty-something steeped in Tumblr leftism, ready to pounce on the slightest "racism" in ways that displayed their serious ignorance.
But they were quite vehement that the people at DC (specifically Julius Schwartz, Dennis O'Neil, and Neal Adams; not that they knew that) were engaged in deliberate racist messaging when they (back in 1971; again, not that they knew that) created an "Eastern" villain (Middle Eastern with some East Asian ancestry, I believe) to threaten the "Western" — and "implicitly white" — Gotham City like some kind of "racial ghoul"… and then named him exactly that. Oh, sure, they deliberately misspelled it to look pseudo-Arabic, but c'mon, "Ra's al Ghul"? It couldn't be any clearer what they really meant.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2d ago
I do own a perfectly modern smartphone and use it, but with the practiced disdain of someone who refuses be beholden to it. I make a point of not using it in human company, and I absolutely will chide anyone who pulls out a phone mid-conversation. I often leave it at home when I go out, so as to travel lighter and not be disturbed. I have every app except the nominal "phone" muted at all times, and even that is muted at night (lest some annoying robo-call wake me).
Humans are tool-users. I just insist on not being abused by my tools, and I try to remain independent of them. Hell, I even regularly spend a few days with my glasses off just to make sure I can function without them. I sometimes go out barefoot to make sure I'm not shoe-dependent. I'll spend a few days without coffee to spite the addiction. And so on. I'm sure this is all just pontless eccentricity and won't ever do me much good, but I grant myself these little things.
Grant_us_eyes
2d ago
Straight guy as well, and I'd consider her pretty mid for a normal woman, much less a starlet.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2d ago
Modern "reactionary authoritarian governments" are still too modern — I don't recall any of them restoring feudalism and hereditary aristocracy, let alone pre-Reformation attitudes on the role of the Church. Franco was, ultimately, a failure, primarily because he wasn't nearly reactionary enough.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
No, that's your solution. Acquire some reading comprehension!
2rafa
2d ago
The deal is very good for the US but all the spending pledges are, as with Japan, pure fiction and essentially the counterparty just tallying up broad estimates of outbound foreign investment, government procurement and so on. The “EU” has no mechanism to force $750bn of investment, no framework to make it happen, and certainly can’t force sovereign governments to spend x amount on their own militaries in American weaponry. But, as the Gulf Arabs also figured out, if you add together all of your companies’ total spending in the US over the next y years that was already going to happen, it sounds like a big number.
As far as trade deals go, the EU sacrificed a a moderate amount to continue exporting at near-current levels to the US. The tariffs are too low, given huge US salary differentials for skilled manufacturing, to reshore manufacturing that is currently done in Europe to the US. But tariff revenue will rise and, on the margins, some US skilled manufacturing will become more competitive.
octopus_eats_platypus
2d ago
I own a dumb-phone and keep my cell in a box for when I need to use it for GPS/internet/etc in some situations (like when travelling).
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Yes, the conditions in the state of nature are indeed horrifying. I wonder if the past 200,000+ years of human evolution had anything to do with the incentives, motives, and options typically leveraged by its participants? Surely modern peoples are trained to understand those core motivations, and are honest about them, at all times, and not forming their basis of what is and is not good and proper based solely around purely instinctual self-interest. (Now if you'll excuse me, a pig just flew past my window.)
If I understand your sarcasm right, this seems like a fully generalizeable counterargument to most human progress. If you want to argue "back in the ancestral environment we (likely) did not have a conception of sexual consent, so I do not see why we need one now", the same argument could be made against other civilizational projects like trying to limit the murder rate, curing diseases or preventing starvation.
For women, they want someone as old and powerful as possible (more secure, more resources, more even-keeled)
I think that both in the ancestral environment and agrarian societies, age (above 20) was directly negative in a husband, but sometimes positively correlated with beneficial qualities.
Evolutionarily speaking, if you are a 14 and looking to marry, you perhaps have 15, 20 years of fertility ahead of you. Sure, there is some heavy discounting because chances are that you will die in childbirth or some unrelated cause before you reach age 30. Any children you have will be a net drain on resources until they are perhaps 14 (when they will either be in the position to sell themselves into sexual/domestic/reproductive bondage or work to produce their own calories). If your expected age at the birth of your last child is 25, that means you would want your husband to provide for your family until you are about 40 (or possibly 50 if you are really lucky wrt fertility).
That is a tall order in the best of circumstances! If the husband you marry is 20, he would have to be able-bodied at age 46. If he is 35, he would have to be able-bodied at age 61.
Now, I will grant you that in the ancestral environment, humans might not have had a conception of fatherhood, or long-term monogamous mating patterns, so let us consider agrarian societies instead, where both of these were generally a thing. (Absent paternal involvement, the trade-offs for age in mating are that on the one hand, paternal age is indicative of a higher genetic fitness, but also will increase the mutational load.)
In an agrarian society, almost everyone is a peasant. Most girls will not marry some noble land-owner. Working marginal fields is back-breaking labor, my guess is that most men give out before 40. What happens then is very dependent on the customs of the society. In the best case, your husband dies quickly and you inherit his land and can marry some landless 20yo who will be happy to breed you for the rest of your fertility window. In most cases, this is not how societies organize. The realistic best outcome is that your husband had a younger, landless, unmarried brother who will just take both the land and you over for him, but more realistically, he will inherit the land and marry a fresh 14yo. He might keep you around and feed you and your kids while times are good, but if he has to chose between his wife and his kids and you and his nephews, things will look grim for you. Realistically, the land might never have belonged to your husband in the first place, but just been leased out from a local noble, who will simply proceed to lease the land to some other guy once your husband fails.
Obviously, if you can become the nth wife of some guy rich enough that he does not have to work the field, that would be preferable from an evo PoV, but realistically that is not an option most girls have.
In conclusion, from evo, you would want to go for a rich man if you can, but settle for a young, strong man if you can't.
I hope you'll forgive me if I end up not going to more than one church or cemetery from the list haha.
Fair enough. I'm a bit of a fanatic when it comes to obscure historical sites and will often seek them out and hit many of them up in one day. I mean you probably know that since you've read a travelogue of mine.
If you're going to just one of the cemeteries I would probably say Highgate is the main event (though I've heard to get the most out of it you need to book a tour; they bring you into the catacombs).
Lizzardspawn
2d ago
Why is nobody talking about the trade deal that EU stroke with Trump
* BASELINE TARIFF RATE: Almost all EU goods entering the U.S. will be subject to a 15% baseline tariff. The 15% tariff is not added to any existing rates.
CARS: Cars and car parts will be subject to the 15% tariff, compared to the 27.5% they face now. The European Commission said it would eliminate remaining low-level duties on industrial goods from the United States, although EU officials said for cars they would cut the import duty from 10% to the previous U.S. level of 2.5%.
PHARMACEUTICALS AND SEMICONDUCTORS: The White House says EU pharmaceuticals and microchips will be subject to 15% tariffs. The European Commission says this will only be the case after the United States concludes Section 232 investigations in the coming weeks and sets new global tariff rates for the two sectors. For the EU, the maximum rate would be 15%. For now, there are only subject to low or zero pre-existing duties.
OTHER SECTORS: The United States is also carrying out Section 232 investigations on grounds of national security into timber, trucks, critical minerals, commercial aircraft, polysilicon and drones. EU officials say that for all of these, a maximum 15% tariff would apply for EU goods.
METALS: Tariffs on European steel, aluminium will stay at 50%, with the same tariff also applying from August 1 to copper. However, the EU and the U.S. have agreed that they will be replaced by a quota system, whose details still has to be negotiated, EU officials say.
European exports within the agreed quota would face the most-favoured nation tariff rate agreed under WTO rules, which are low and in some cases zero depending on the grade. Exports outside of the quota would be subject to 50% tariffs.
- ZERO-FOR-ZERO tariffs: According to EU officials, the U.S. and EU will have zero-for-zero tariffs on:
all aircraft and aircraft parts,
certain chemicals,
certain generic drugs,
semiconductor-making equipment,
some agricultural products but with the exclusion of all sensitive products like beef, rice, ethanol, sugar or poultry.
Natural resources and critical raw materials. More products could be added.
WINE AND SPIRITS: A zero tariff regime for wine and spirits - a point of friction on both sides of the Atlantic - is still under discussion. EU officials said talks were more advanced for spirits.
AGRICULTURE, FISH: The EU will open new market access for U.S. Alaska pollock, Pacific salmon and shrimp, subject to quotas. It will also offer improved access for U.S. soya bean oil, planting seeds, grains and nuts as well as processed food such as tomato ketchup, cocoa and biscuits, again subject to quotas.
STRATEGIC PURCHASES: The EU pledged to make $750 billion in strategic purchases, covering oil, liquefied natural gas (LNG) and nuclear technology during U.S. President Donald Trump's term in office.
This will come as a mix of spot purchases for oil, long-term contracts for LNG and government procurement for nuclear technology. The amount has been estimated on the basis of Europe's planned phase out of energy purchases from Russia. The EU will also purchase 40 billion euros ($46 billion) of U.S. AI chips would be on top of the $750 billion.
European companies are to invest $600 billion in the U.S. over the course of Trump's second term. Japan's package will consist of equity, loans and guarantees from state-run agencies of up to $550 billion to be invested at Trump's discretion, Tokyo says. EU officials, in contrast, said Europe's $600 billion investment pledge is based on the combined investment intentions expressed by European companies.
DEFENCE PROCUREMENT: EU member states will purchase U.S. military equipment. The deal does not specify an amount.
OTHER ITEMS: The EU says it will cooperate with the U.S. on automotive and food safety standards, while retaining its current rules. Cooperation could take the form of streamlining certification for U.S. pork or dairy products. The two sides will also cooperate on investment screening and export controls as well as addressing 'non-market' policies, such as China's subsidised production.
TLDR is that EU makes Trump a blowjob and in return they get the privilege to swallow. The deal is one sided and quite good for the US. The other thing is that if EU is hoping to weather the storm and then it will be off - yeah right. There won't be a person as stupid as Carter in the white house anytime soon. No matter if 2028 is dem or rep year - this deal will be requested to be honored.
Trump's idea to sell access to US market is not without merits even if it is implementation is botched as hell. And no one is brave enough to even propose retaliation.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2d ago
Thank you again. I hope you'll forgive me if I end up not going to more than one church or cemetery from the list haha.
I really can't ask you to go to the effort of finding pins on maps, I'm sure I can manage that myself once I've decided on a target.
Alright, this took a while, sorry about that. Note I have excluded all popular tourist sites like St Paul's, Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, etc. Also note this list is not exhaustive, I might add more later.
Churches: There are too many historical churches in London so here is a list of those you may find relevant. The entire stretch from St Bartholomew's Church to Southwark Cathedral in this list is rather nice, but all of these churches are packed close together and are rather easy to visit. Really many of them are worth visiting and possess their own draw. St Bartholomew's Church is London's oldest parish church, Temple Church is a unique round church built by the Knights Templar as their English headquarters, All Hallows by the Tower has a crypt with an exposed section of Roman pavement, Fitzrovia Chapel boasts beautiful mosaics, etc. I would recommend you do some research and figure out which ones you want to see.
- St. Bartholomew’s Church
- London Oratory
- Westminster Cathedral (if you haven't already been; this one is somewhat well known)
- Chapel of St Peter and St Paul
- Temple Church
- All Hallows by the Tower
- St. Etheldreda’s Church
- St Bride's Church
- St Clement Danes Church
- St. Mary-le-Strand
- St Stephen Walbrook
- St Pancras Old Church
- St Magnus the Martyr
- The King’s Chapel of the Savoy
- St Olave's Church
- St Dunstan-In-The-West
- Fitzrovia Chapel
- Southwark Cathedral
- St Mary Aldermary
- St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate
- St Margaret Pattens
- St Mary at Hill
- St Mary Woolnoth
- St John Priory Church
- St Martin Ludgate
Magnificent Seven Cemeteries: Yes, I put cemeteries on here. These are sprawling Gothic cemeteries, established in the early 19th century to prevent overcrowding in small parish churchyards. These cemeteries were built by companies that attempted to tempt customers with beautiful architectural features, things that make them worth visiting today. There are many important graves in these necropolises - Highgate Cemetery for example is the resting place of Michael Faraday and Karl Marx alike.
- Highgate Cemetery
- Abney Park Cemetery Trust
- Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park
- Nunhead Cemetery
- West Norwood Cemetery and Crematorium
- Brompton Cemetery
- Kensal Green Cemetery
Heritage houses: Some of these require tours and may or may not be closed. Check before visiting, I can't say I remember the schedules (I know Spencer House is only open to the public on Sundays, though during the week it is possible to enter via a prebooked tour). Again, lots of stuff here: Handel Hendrix House is the back to back residence of George Handel and Jimi Hendrix, Leighton House was the high-class home of a painter who had the interior lavishly decorated with intricate Orientalist aesthetics drawing from North Africa, the Middle East and Sicily, Sutton House is one of the last surviving Tudor houses in London, and so on.
- Handel Hendrix House
- Leighton House
- Charles Dickens Museum
- Dr Johnson's House
- Spencer House
- Clarence House
- Fenton House
- Sutton House
- Kenwood House
Historic alleyways/neighbourhoods:
- St Michael’s Alley
- Magpie Alley
- Artillery Passage
- Goodwin’s Court
Misc:
- Freemasons Hall
- Crystal Palace Subway
- The Charterhouse
- Museum of the Order of Saint John
- Lock and Co Hatters
- Hampstead Hill Garden And Pergola
This is a lot, so I'll also add a link to a map with all the sites pinned for your convenience in a bit.
aqouta
2d ago
Alright, your solution is jews driven into the sea, got it. Glad we got to the bottom of it.
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A person accused of harassment drives to the police station in order to give a statement. The investigating officer (1) watches from the lobby as the suspect stumbles out of his car after parking, and (2) observes a fresh injection mark on the suspect's arm while taking the statement. The officer tests the subject for intoxication, and arrests the subject after the suspect fails two of three tests. Five officers immediately search the suspect's car, without impounding it* or getting a warrant for the search. They find, not just a second intoxicated person in the passenger seat, but also illegal drugs and a gun with an illegal "large-capacity magazine" (capable of holding more than ten rounds). The suspect is charged with three felonies. (The prosecutors don't bother to charge him with the misdemeanor of driving while intoxicated.)
-
The defendant moves for suppression of the evidence, but the trial judge denies the motion, and the appeals panel affirms. The federal supreme court has ruled that, if there is probable cause that a person has driven while intoxicated, then the "automobile exception" applies—there is no need to get a warrant before searching the vehicle, because vehicles are both readily moved outside the current jurisdiction and so pervasively regulated that their users have a reduced expectation of privacy in them. It is true that the state supreme court chose to significantly narrow the automobile exception, ruling that it does not apply when the vehicle already is at police headquarters and therefore is not at risk of disappearing before a warrant can be obtained. However, when the state supreme court said "headquarters", it meant a secure impound lot at a police station, not an unsecured ordinary parking lot at a police station.
-
The state supreme court reverses. "Headquarters" includes an unsecured ordinary parking lot at a police station, especially when the vehicle is parked close enough to the building that the officers can keep an eye on it from inside. After the second intoxicated person was removed from the car, it was securely under the control of the police, and there was no exigency justifying a warrantless search.
*Under state law, if a person is arrested for driving while intoxicated, the vehicle that he was driving must be impounded for twelve hours.
Books should be structured as expandable trees. One-paragraph summary of each chapter, expandable into summaries of component points/stories, expandable into the full text. Can read the whole book in five minutes or five hours.
It was always unlikely that the best format for long-form information in the pre-hyperlink world (books) would continue to be the best format in the post-hyperlink world. Authors should experiment more with different ways of structuring complex and interlinking sets of ideas.
Are there any fun websites left?
I visit tantrailluminated, themottel, hackernews, /g and not much else. I want to get some real recommendations for decent websites that are not stuck in the internet peasant class, aka dependent completely on big tech. Themotte has lost some users; jumping away was a great decision in hindsight. Nothing is worth sovereignty. Below is some more text wording this out, totally optional.
I wrote a poorly worded post recently since I have become more concerned with the excessive concentration of internet firms and the ever-increasing data they harvest. 15 years ago, I could go on cracked and read articles, visit IGN forums, and everything else had a dedicated forum with its own rules. You did not have constant texts, hell the telemetry data was amateurish given what we have now, Newgrounds was not totally dead, YouTube was not another arm for corporate media. Retvrn to 90s nostalgia is not my aim, we live with an ever-worsening society in ways that this place has gotten worse.
The pervasiveness is hard to grasp until you actually try quitting. I quit the internet for a week, and I did that by removing it from my phone. For starters, I could not get a can anywhere, which is terrible since there is no parking here in most areas. My payments suffered as most people here take online transactions, which a dumb phone cannot support. Calls were terrible, and since we do not live in a pre-text world, I could not call people without texting them first. Everywhere I went needed me to use an email to sign up. Nearly all interactions guys my age have with girls is texting, so instead of actually having sex or feeling any amount of spark you do upon meeting someone physically, the peak for most is exchanging nudes. Its startling how every single app intrudes into everything in life and wants to keep going.
The worst thing was that the internet chatter being removed from my life made me find it hard to meet or connect with people. Most discussions are functionally gossip by the technical definition, a discussion about a third person or event or thing not in the room with us. I only stopped because the payments and the taxi thing made it nearly impossible, now that I write this, I might actually do the experiment again, but this time without forgetting my atm pin. Anyway, I am trying to state that the eternal September we find ourselves in is worse than we thought it was. Everything is homogenised, somehow has corporate interests and is usually noise. It's not noise, the way me writing this is noise, but in filler that leaves you empty. Every time I write things here, this comment, for instance, where I will retry my offline experiment, adds to life. The internet 20 years ago was still largely a place where you wasted time, but today it's a place where you are being actively poisoned.
Everyone I meet is a screen addict, everyone. I am yet to meet someone beyond a few who are not on the screen 24/7. Good websites are not all-consuming noise. My favorite, Tantra Illuminated, is a place for active consumption; you can't just turn it on and consume passively. I wrote all this out to point out there is a cultural shift where more and more of our world quite literally is online, and it's increasing whilst still churning out worse things. The ideal site, hence, is not over-consuming and not for passive consumption. I use this search engine wiby.me on the recommendation of Luke Smith, you find way less information, but it's not as dead as what you see on seo optimised search engines. Its gotten to the point where not only are there fewer good sites, they are harder to find and have worse things posted. I will clean this post up soon, apologies if its too verbose. My time online has made me aware of the malaise I inhabit and see in others around me, online or otherwise.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3d ago
Thankfully, they do not, writing is a way to mke things more concise, I wish to give a summary of how prevalent it is as the dark patterns keep getting shoved more and the states battle out to make it harder for you to have any freedom. I had a very positive view of the tech world whilst growing up since my dad's students were engineers, over time I saw the entire field shift from a sort of change from the old world to more normified conultant like existence.
Rats are people who matter. Scott and co hang out with such kinds regularly, the thing is that big tech is unfortunately worse than we think. A very good friend of mine said that these are empires of the New World that are unmatched by any of the past, as they have no boundaries. I disagree, they also have no values or things they protect beyond whatever the nation they try to leech off of them recommends to them. Zuckerberg is just as powerless in front of XI as you or I. I have long had this hypothesis that large valuations have made the internet and computers or related things, worse since they inflate the senses of the people who work on them. He may be super rich, his kids may move in better circles, but he is still not sovereign. In a wierd way, you are less sovereign, you can only get hurt in bad ways and never get away with doing anything that the cathedral does not want.
Stallman did the FOSS thing because he stood for something. Indian undergrads paste AI code in GSoC because they want an internship; it is not wrong to want a job. I do not want everything to be just seen as an aid for that thing. East Asians and Indians also grind out Olympiads to get better, more prestigious degrees, even though these are exams that should be left for those who really like math. Programmers were better when this profession was low status, people who did it because they liked it. Now its just a means to make a firm that might make you rich, it usually does not solve real problems or advance the world in a good direction.
Most people my age instead idolise a lot of the people who founded these firms, as they won, even if it meant the world taking a loss. I draw a line there. We make tech to make the world better, whether plumbing or electricity, not to con fellow man. My previous startup experience exposed me to the newer sort of thinking where the goal is to raise fast and sell; it was never about doing anything real. The pathology is never worded out directly, hence my feeble attempt.
Board games nowadays are primarily played by younger, indoorsy people. That's generally going to be left-leaning people.
I think that answer only kicks the can down the road. I agree that we naïvely expect young, bookish people to lean left rather than right - but why is that the case?
OliveTapenade
3d ago
I don't disagree with anything you've said. In fact, I would have thought that "big tech is evil" is pretty much conventional wisdom - though that might be a product of the circles I move in. Nonetheless I would be shocked if most people on the Motte have positive opinions of Google, Meta, or Apple.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
There's a video where someone got a gmod Wallace Breen to do their face scan: https://x.com/Dexerto/status/1950662036087783541
AI would surely be quite helpful here.
Yeah, Trump won this particular round of chicken. Of course, another way to spin it is that 15% tariffs are not a world-shattering amount, especially to the numbers he originally proposed. But all in all, it seems a bit more than just a token amount to allow him to save face.
If two people are in a positive-sum, mutually beneficial relationship then it is very likely that one of them can leverage the relationship for short term gains. "If you really love me, you will cancel on your buddies and go watch that movie I like with me tonight instead" will probably work fine the first time you pull it if your partner is invested in the relationship. On the short-term, tangible level, that is a clear win.
But just because long-term consequences may be more difficult to quantify, that does not mean that they are not there. Every time you pull a stunt like this, your partner is adjusting their valuation of your relationship a tiny bit downwards. Eventually, your partner might suddenly decide to move out and dump you.
Mutually beneficial trade relationships are not so different. I would argue that for past decades, both the US and the EU have immensely profited from the free trade with each other. Zero tariffs are a rather obvious Schelling point. But now Trump with his zero-sum mindset is in charge, and thinks that either the US is fucking someone over, or it is getting fucked over. In the short and medium term, the EU needs trade with the US, so they can not afford a trade war. In the long term, Trump is a red flag. If I was the EU, I would be working hard to secure other trade deals with other nations, so that when another MAGA president decides in a decade that he will not settle for anything less than 30% unilateral tariffs, we are in the position to tell him to fuck off.
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