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I've recently finished:

On the Marble Cliffs by Ernst Junger. Continuing my journey through Junger, I enjoyed the book but felt like I didn't understand it as deeply as I should have, it just felt like Animal Farm to me. If anyone who knows more could link me an explainer I'd love it, I feel like there is a lot of depth I'm not hitting.

Coup d'Etat by Edward Luttwak. Deeply disappointing, I like Luttwak and this is positioned as his best and most fun work, it was mostly pretty banal advice and analysis. Not bad, just not earth shattering.It's presented as a handbook for how to launch a coup, and it does have interesting views on what is a coup versus a revolution etc. It's inherently a "fun" book as a practical manual, and an easy read. I got a later reprinting that contained some updating to talk about later incidents, I think that might have made the book weaker, if you want to read this I'd recommend trying to find the original version.

JFK Jr. An Intimate Oral Biography An oral history of JFK Jr's life, as told by his friends and those who knew him. My wife wanted to read it so we read it together. I have OPNIONS on JFK Jr. now, which I think I will share soon.

The Sun Also Rises: I love Hemingway, and finally got to this one. A brilliant examination of masculinity, while also being a really fun book. If you haven't read it, you should.

To Have and to Have Not: I was on a Hemingway kick, so I picked this up at our library's annual book sale. This one is...not a masterpiece. It's a fine enough little noir set in the Keys, but...it feels kinda flat compared to Hemingway's best works like For Whom the Bell Tolls or The Undefeated. The lead is a classic Hemingway Hero without any of the conflict or interest, and just kinda floats through. I'll also say that while I'm normally not offended by racism or language, especially where period accurate, this one kinda feels over the top. Blacks are only referred to as niggers, both in the abstract and to their faces, while chinese are chinks and to be betrayed and murdered for no apparent reason as a matter of course. IDK, just didn't hit for me.

Currently, I'm kind of in the middle of:

Band of Brothers I have a personal connection to the subject so I've always meant to read it, finally started it the other day while bored and motored through half of it...only to find that the libgen copy I had gotten was only half the book. oops. Gotta find a real copy now.

I'm planning to start Ride the Tiger by Julius Evola. I've been Evola-Curious, and this seemed like a good place to start. And then on the flip side I've been listening to a lot of Daryl Cooper and he talked so much about how evil Eldridge Cleaver was that I downloaded Soul on Ice just to see what all the fuss was about. I'm also looking to read more by Ernst Junger, after enjoying Storm of Steel and Marble Cliffs, if anyone has any other recommendations. I'm probably going to start Hemingways Over the River as I picked that up at the book sale as well. I remain in the middle of Infinite Jest as part of a book club with a friend of mine.

You don't need to do this. You just need to ban pedophiles when people report them. Which Roblox seems to be refusing to do.

This is the bit that baffles me. I remember the whole Ashton Challenor situation on Reddit and how much pressure it took for Reddit to crack. AIUI, the people doing this on Roblox aren't even employees or mods or anything.

I mean, also as a Canadian - I’d definitely take “Invasion by US military under Donald Trump” over “Liberals import 3% of our population per year.”

YMMV.

I preface this by saying that I'm happier not being on discord or knowing very much about it.

But isn't the whole thing driven by adults entering a child's life with ill intentions? Like isn't that the definition of grooming? I'd suspect that the request for nudes comes when the relationship is already underway.

We're going to see a surge of neo-religious sex cults over the next ten to twenty years, as the friction between wanting sex and getting sex reaches levels possibly never before seen in human history, and both male and female adherents will be happy to turn their consent and loyalty over to some new Manson or Jim Jones in exchange for being given permission to just get laid.

It's interesting because women vulnerable to cults mostly do not want to 'just get laid', they want a committed affectionate relationship. Obviously, the psychologically healthy reaction is to enter committed, affectionate, sexual relationship with a man. But for cults that's dangerous because it reduces dependence on the leader.

But as far as these kids know, the person asking them to send nudes is roughly their age. They don’t know they’re talking to a 40-year-old. Plus, I would say that, in general, kids are desperate for the approval of the adults who are already in their lives, not of random adults whom they’ve never met.

Kilts become A Thing in at least some blue tribe cities by 2050. Sneered at by minorities and the red tribe.

I'll do you one better: Kilts become a thing in the Blue Tribe by 2030, and by 2050 the kilts that came into fashion in 2040 are Red coded, the ones like that are "Youth Pastor Kilts" and show that you are hopelessly out of date in NYC or whatever. There's a type of skinny jean today that I would have been scared to wear in seventh grade for fear of being called a faggot, and that when I see them today it's a lame real estate agent or something.

My predictions:

We're going to see a surge of neo-religious sex cults over the next ten to twenty years, as the friction between wanting sex and getting sex reaches levels possibly never before seen in human history, and both male and female adherents will be happy to turn their consent and loyalty over to some new Manson or Jim Jones in exchange for being given permission to just get laid.

Major legislation on electric bikes is going to become necessary in the United States, either at the state level becoming standard across most states or at the federal level. I'm noticing a huge surge in biking in my area, as electrical assist bikes make it easier to get up hills. At the beach I started seeing a ton of electric bikes though, and a few electric adult tricycles. People are going to get themselves hurt, and it's going to result in legislation.

The USMNT will continue to protest that the NEXT world cup cycle is "our year" through at least two more times that the US hosts the world cup before ever making the final four.

Washington DC will go into a near full death spiral as a city over the next decade-plus. It will be 2040 before anyone considers living there again.

In imitation of Ronald Reagan, within five years the US will take part in a Panama or Grenada type tomato-can war to prove something or other. It won't go as planned, first as tragedy second as farce.

An NFL team will be accused of using AI for major coaching decisions this season. It will never be exactly clear the extent to which AI was used, and the results will ultimately be mixed.

There are plenty of people who are no particular danger to children in their care despite making rather poor life decisions overall. Very few custody agreement violations present much danger to the child, even if at some level they need to be enforced.

Have you ever seen a child before, much less interacted with one?

Yes? They're desperate for adult approval.

Czechoslovakia, and if you include them as western, the Mexican Empire and Yugoslavia.

If he was somehow born naturally, we wouldn't euthanize him for being incredibly boring.

But is there no difference to you between actively creating these beings vs letting them be if they happened to come to exist on their own?

If a standard AI is suffering, why did we give it the capacity to suffer?

I would submit the possibility that in order for a system to have the capacity for general intelligence, it must also have the capacity for suffering, boredom, desire, etc. We don't have to give it if it emerges on its own.

"In the moment", probably, but that's far from clinical.

It's also hard to overrule a judge and even harder to get rid of one. They aren't vulnerable to the normal ways of forcing public servants to follow instructions form above. Western democracies are designed to make it difficult for politicians to directly control the judiciary.

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;

But we've proved it again and again,

That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld

You never get rid of the Dane.

As a Canadian, I would be in favor of this on the condition that you get your own shit under control before you start messing with ours. When I make a list of possible solutions to Canada's political dysfunctions, "Invasion by US military under Donald Trump" does not rank highly.

My parents (admittedly over 60 now) can't reliably open a browser on a laptop. They certainly have no idea what a QR code is. The idea that parents will be able to find the parental controls, understand what they're doing, and set them independently is unlikely in many cases, so they have to trust their children. In ten years it may be quite different but right now I think that's still the reality and realistically Discord has to bear that in mind.

There's a reductio ad in either direction right?

On the one hand, replacing every American with a higher-IQ Chinese or Indian person might raise the GDP by 15%, but it's weird to say to say it would be good for "America."

On the other, admitting Jensen Huang to the country obviously benefits America, even if it dilutes the pool of Americans. 1/333000000 dilution, versus a roughly $500 estimated increase in GDP per capita.

Has there been a non-Baltic Western state that dissolved in the last couple of centuries? I can't think of any offhand. Austria-Hungary was dissolved by force post WW1, as was Germany post WW2.

A good LLM swears up and down that "kang" meaning something like "presenting others' work as your own" existed entirely unrelated to and predating "we wuz kangz", in the Android ROM community. This seems very implausible.

AOKP (Android Open Kang Project) was a major project from 2011. This thread attests "kang" among Android ROM enthusiasts in 2010 and does not reflect knowledge of that type of humor. No etymology is solidly attributed anywhere (that XDA thread suggests MMO slang "gank", wiktionary claims (unsourced) an otherwise-lost username of a guy who stole stuff without attribution). 2010 feels too early to me for "we wuz kangs", but then I reflect on other things that were around at the time and am not so sure.

Can anyone speak on this?

Both are insane. The former perverts the intent of the legislative branch of government, and the latter is some form of bizarro judicial equivalent of jury nullification.

The numbers have always been somewhat imperfect but very much not politically gamed, imo. I mean, did Trump want the BLS for the past three months to have changed longstanding procedure in order to put out drastically worse jobs numbers reflecting the estimated impact of the DOGE cuts and other things? Many government agencies are much more wedded to procedure and neutrality rather than a private sector financial analyst who would prioritize being right, though it is worth noting that the Atlanta Fed moved reasonably quickly to correct for the impact of gold imports on GDPnow.

For the BLS, however, this is now somehat changed, and there will be less trust until a real person gets out in charge again and says the right things.

If the individual is allowed to be out in public unfettered he will have some non-zero contact with children. For example if he gets sent to do community service picking up trash in a public park, there likely will be children playing in the park at some point. The bigger issue is making sure that someone like that is not in a position of trust or authority over minors that they could leverage inappropriately. If they can't be trusted in public spaces at all, they should be incarcerated. Obviously this guy should have been deported though.

Forget ethics. This seems like a huge financial loss. With AI, there is at least the argument that the AI will be able to scale infinitely once trained. This does not seem true of the clone or whatever.

So, what are you reading?

I'm still on Red Dynamite.