domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
It's a huge, huge topic, and from a Mottizen perspective a lot of the received wisdom on wine is very questionable. My advice:
- Go region-by-region and familiarize yourself with it. There are some regions I know much better than others, and a lot of depth to go into in each one. This is particularly the case if you're in a marginal wine region, like Niagara, that specializes in particular varietals due to climate.
- Find a really good local shop and talk to the owners/go to their events. Can be a pleasant way to spend an evening and wine lovers like to go in-depth on why a wine/region is the way it is. Consider joining a wine club that will give you a couple varied bottles along with tasting notes.
- Stick to wines around the $20 price point for trying new stuff (maybe $25-30 now with inflation and tariffs). Even the experts will tell you that, for the most part, the price difference between $20-$80 is marketing. If you want to splurge, go above $80 on a varietal you know you like.
- Pairings do make a huge difference, particularly cheese. With a meal, the 'ideal' pairings are generally pretty well-known, just look up what you'll be cooking.
- It's ok not to like varietals. I don't like merlot and I can count the chardonnays I've liked on one hand (though one Franschoek chardonnay in particular is a grail of mine, has an incredible smoky flavour. Sadly my uncle has a long-running beef with the guy who owns the vineyard so no schmoozing in for me). Don't be afraid to develop your own taste.
- Don't be a snob. If AlexanderTurok drank wine, he'd be a wine snob. Nobody wants that at their tasting.
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
2d ago
“Let’s see Paul Allen’s cock.”
FtSoA
2d ago
I can't help but notice that it sounds like your problem is "the homeless", more than "homelessness". Progressives, on the other hand, are trying to solve or alleviate "homelessness" - ie the problem experienced by the homeless where they, er, don't have homes.
You are correct that the two problems are distinct.
Where you're wrong is that progressives tend to deny the distinction, and they suck very badly at resolving either due to ideological precommitments that do not align with reality.
Keep in mind that if the vagrants are outside city limits they are no longer of any practical or legal concern of cities.
Improving the actual homeless people's lives is the outspoken priority of progressive authorities, and even if you disagree with that priority, you don't get to call them ineffective because they aren't very good at solving a completely different, if related problem that you think should be higher-priority.
The are pretty fucking bad at it, is my point. Ends, means. Inputs, outputs. Intent, outcome.
Law and fucking order is also supposed to THE primary concern of cities, and all of government actually. So when you foster an open-air drug market next to a playground you're using my tax dollars to fuck over my other tax dollars.
ulyssessword
2d ago
Can you explain how you got there?
FYI, no he can't. He was permabanned for this post (although the ban wasn't linked properly so the little symbol doesn't show up).
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
FtSoA
2d ago
Tariffs are very anti-market.
Trump is also fucking with the Fed, labor statistics, and is demanding drug prices be lowered.
These are all very bad things that will likely do great damage, more in the long run than in the short run.
faceh
2d ago
I'd be the guy in the office suggesting "hey we can publish the report, and show both the standard estimate and the estimate with the empirical fudge factor side-by-side so its clear we're not hiding the ball."
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
I have Godmakers somewhere but never got around to it. Not familiar with the others. Would you say they’re worth it?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2d ago
I mostly agree, but I would assume that evolution incentivized attraction to total fertility. If you shack up with a woman in her late teens, you can, at least in theory, get many more kids out of her than you can in the late 20s. We live in a very unusual period of time, when we can take negligible infant or childhood mortality for granted.
ThenElection
2d ago
She says her other children adore him and will fight over who gets to look after him when they are older.
I really hope that the parents are actually saving enough to pay for services for Jaxon the rest of his life. Thinking your kids will do it, even if you can get them to say they're eager to in the moment, is a terrible plan.
phailyoor
2d ago
I absolutely don't relate at all, and I imagine that many men are on the same boat. But I can understand that a large minority of people feel this way and that minority of men due to their tendencies end up taking the virginity of an outsized proportion of all the women out there, thereby ruining it for the rest of us.
Those pokemon collectors are absolutely ruining it for the rest of us.
FtSoA
2d ago
I mean, the market puts little to no value on their lives. I am simply pointing out that there is nothing different about keeping people alive for the sake of keeping them alive in PEPFAR than any other boring charity like food stamps or Medicaid. I suppose these people kept alive can also threaten to immigrate, which is a bad thing. So yeah. Why is this "effective?"
If you don't accept the philosophical foundations of universalisms wrt human life then, yeah, sure. No argument from me. Using markets to determine the value of a human life comes with a lot of caveats in the best of times.
Foreign aid is arguably unconstitutional, but the inception of PEPFAR was not approved by Congress. They may arguably have adopted it later on, but the inception was just GWB going rogue.
Sure, I don't know enough to debate its whole origin story. And had I been president I would not used taxpayer dollars in such a fashion. I'm actually not aware of detailed constitutional arguments/cases for/against foreign aid as a whole category. It seems if a national defense argument can be made, then it's going to be allowable by default.
PEPFAR does nothing of the sort. It just lets anyone who contracted a deadly STD keep on living with no scrutiny as to whether they can or will make the world better by their continued existence, and past performance indicates not so.
I don't think I disagree with you here, overall. I'd just say that we could have compromised/hedged and ended U.S. involvement as a handoff, not as a near-immediate shutdown.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2d ago
The state of the art of AI in Star Wars isn't much better than today. Funnily enough, I recall that there was minor plot point, where a malevolent bounty hunter droid of minor infamy ended up seizing control of the Death Star's mainframe, and began growing into a superintelligence.
Unfortunately it had very bad timing, as mere minutes later the place got blown up in a spectacular fashion.
So much of the Star Wars franchise doesn't plain make sense. It's soft science fantasy at best, and even I'm not shameless or contrarian enough to earnestly make that claim.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
FtSoA
2d ago
Of course, this still biases charities towards sounding good rather than doing good, but that's really really hard to avoid.
Amen.
See also: Welfare Democracy
Ultimately, donors have to do their due diligence on efficacy and voters on sustainability.
GoofyGoose
2d ago
Sure there are accounting identities involved. But the way I interpret the phrase is as saying that the action favored by Trump has a necessary consequence because of such an identity. For example, if your assets increase, either your liabilities or equities increase.
This is not the case for employment (what the comment I was replying to mentioned). There is no accounting identity in monetary economics (that I know of) which links interest rates and employment. There is the Phillips curve, but we can argue about the slope, causality, etc.
Lowering interest rates is not crazy, even if Trump suggests it. Even Milton Friedman recommended it.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2d ago
I liked it for the unique take on 3D, which only he could do. Unfortunately, Avatar 2 was a mix of 24fps and something much higher, switching at the least inopportune times.
I don’t want to watch a video game, I want cinema. Heck, I think I wouldn’t mint in on 20fps, or 12, as long as it’s consistent.
FtSoA
2d ago
Classical liberalism is a strictly transitory phenomenon that will degenerate into something else.
In the long run we are all very much dead. But perhaps giving up on classical liberalism altogether is premature.
And the "something else" is hard here. If we have reached the End of History, but liberal democracy is insufficiently "liberal" to be economically feasible then where we go next seems bad. I'd argue going back to the old ways.
So I'd say, reality has an anti-classical liberal bias
I'd argue many people do, not economic reality. Public choice theory teaches us this. Then you can get into "liberal" vs. "democracy" but that's a whole thing.
wayfarer
2d ago
there's no way in hell it would work IRL.
Like FTL and several other things. Obviously, if Vernor Ving could implement either IRL he would be doing this rather than writing books.
Writing good stories with say FTL is much easier than inventing working FTL.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2d ago
Yeah I actually did appreciate the follow up. It's a shame, I wish he could stay because he's clearly intelligent and willing to stick up for his views. I've even defended him multiple times. He just can't seem to avoid outright asking to be banned and personally attacking people. Alas.
iprayiam3
2d ago
I'm not sure what's to write that can't be extrapolated from your Avatar take.
The world of Star Wars is obviously post-singularity. The things the humans do like vehicle maintainance or piloting based don't make sense for humans to do based on the observable technology. A lot of the central conflict has to do with long haul trucking trade and shipping .
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2d ago
I find it funny that I gave explicitly religious reasons, but you then made it into a class resentment post. Can you explain how you got there?
Elon Musk is almost a caricature of the "materialistic transhumanist tech overlord," but you won't see him defending himself against such attacks. (You might say this is because he's unaware of them, which might be true of some Silicon Valley Tech Rightists, but isn't true of Musk, considering how much time he spends on Twitter.)
I'll admit I liked Elon a lot before his recent flame out - I still think his companies are doing well. I don't necessarily think that space and electric/self-driving cars have to be related to transhumanism, though I will admit that Elon and I's moral systems are deeply at odds.
P.S. To preempt the accusation that I ignored ThomasdelVasto's point, I reject the whole theory that poor, low-IQ people are harmed by competition with rich, high-IQ people. People are willing to risk dying in the desert to move from low-IQ to high-IQ countries because high-IQ has massive positive externalities.
I'm confused because again, the poor, low-IQ people thing being harmed wasn't really the thrust of my post? My post was arguing on one hand that for religious reasons I don't like this technology, and on the other hand I do think it's socially corrosive not necessarily because high IQ is bad, but because current class relations are bad and this will further the divide.
P.P.S. I know I might get banned for this post. I was drawn to the forum because I'm a long-time Scott Alexander fan, from back when "right-wing SSCer" meant "secular guy who talks about embryo selection and national IQ," not "guy who thinks we need to go back to 1710 ideas about religion and government and that eugenics is evil." For me, unlike many of you, the former wasn't just a gateway drug to the latter, so I'm "left-wing" now. You can follow me on Substack and Twitter.
I don't think we should go back to 1710 ideas about religion and government at all. In fact I'm quite an oddball when it comes to my views on Christianity, syncretism, and I'm pretty hands off on governance. I have pretended to arrogance before during my EA phase, and have decided I don't really know enough about politics to wade into it. I'd rather stick to my own weird corner of oddball religious stuff, philosophy, history, etc. Perhaps that's cowardly of me.
I'd encourage you to question why so many post-rationalists, like myself, who were deeply involved in the SSC rationalist movement as you were, become Christian or at least religious. There may be good reasons for the shift.
While in practice I'll accept that it's complicated, both sides of the aisle seem to have, in some cases begrudgingly, agreed that "discrimination on the basis of national origin" is verboten. Under the lens of the Civil Rights Act, a company saying "We won't do business with Israeli nationals" (note the number of dual-citizenships and US citizens residing in Israel, which is more than in Canada) is a pretty transparent violation.
It is a bit less clear that this applies to foreign companies: "we prefer to buy from domestic suppliers" is well within the Overton Window, even "would prefer not to buy from China" is probably not objectionable (and "do not do business with Iran and North Korea" is effectively mandated, although those congressional mandates presumably trump congressional civil rights law). But in this particular case, "will not buy from Israel-linked companies" is pretty strongly associated with attempts to discriminate against persons of Israeli origin. I think this case is maybe winnable, but you'd likely need to be squeaky clean on the persons (not corporate) level.
Now, there are also good arguments to be made about absolute freedom of association here, but most of those have, to my knowledge, mostly lost in court. Overturning the better part of a century of civil rights law is something that is neither a small ask, nor popular outside of a handful of principled libertarians (and witches). I don't think that's to be done lightly.
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