domain:rifters.com
Corvos
7hr ago
Hmm. Major questions for me are:
- To what extent is China’s economy now independent on exports? That is, to what extent can China exercise their right to not export items without catastrophic damage to their industries?
- Is the most likely non-Chinese partner for rare earth processing America (I imagine so, Trump will see this as a great way to bring EU in line), Russia via India, or can Europe do this in house?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
7hr ago
Every now and then I start to regain hope that the worst of my outgroup probably aren't as bad as all the memes imply, and then I read something like that article, and my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined. "Fascism" was mentioned in every other sentence of the opening paragraphs in between denunciations of milquetoast liberals and other traitors to the progressive cause in the most extreme terms:
notorious transphobe, fascist and serial instigator of harassment campaigns Jesse Singal
Peter Thiel and a few of the other fascist luminaries
Eric Raymond, to give one example, is both a highly capable engineer and clearly has a strong attachment to hard-right politics, racism and homophobia.
My eyes nearly rolled back into my skull at
noted race scientist Scott Siskind
Please tell me these are meant to be epic dunks and sick burns rather than earnest descriptions of ideological opponents. I knew that our common ground has been shrinking for some time, but if this is unironic we are, without exaggeration, inhabiting completely separate realities. Disagreeing about "terrorism/freedom fighter" at least implies some sort of common understanding of facts -- the subject under discussion is understood to be a violent activist, the difference in opinion is on whether that violence is justified, and that can be debated. But I don't even know how to begin talking to someone who earnestly believes Scott is a "noted race scientist."
quiet_NaN
7hr ago
Oh yeah, and we already try teenagers "as adults" anyway, especially when they break the above laws, so clearly this is just ageism.
Okay, your position is consistent. I think it is widely unpopular (the right would be upset about 14yo's getting transgender surgery, and the left would be upset about them buying guns and shooting up schools, and both would be upset about 14yo's doing onlyfans or having a sugar daddies), but it is consistent.
Rights are not "bestowed". Men have those rights because they are capable of the organized violence required to force their recognition. Every one was fought for.
I agree that "to bestow" was the wrong verb. A good verb would be "to recognize", which conveniently avoids the discussion if rights are somehow real or just a legal fiction. (As a non-cognitivist, parse "persons have a right to life" as "boo on killing persons".)
I think you are not historically wrong about how rights came to be. "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" and all that. In it's pure form, this leads to feudalism. A warlord/noble/thug claims some lands, as well as the commoners on it, and as long as nobody else is is willing to fight his troops for it, whatever he claims is his right.
But I think that if you recognize only the rights of the ones who are willing to kill over them, this sets really bad incentives. You do not want to organize a society in a way where the winning move is to be the person most willing to flip the gaming table and wage a few centuries of war. Where making fun on Mohammed is illegal because his followers will react with violence while making fun of Jesus is allowed.
The obvious alternative is the Schelling point "one person, one vote". Sure, it started as "one man, one vote", and curiously enough this reflected the egalitarian qualities of musket combat, where a poor guy with a musket can shoot a rich guy with a musket just fine (at least compared to how unequal that combat would have been earlier, when the poor guy would have arrived with a spear and the rich guy would have been a knight in plate armor on a warhorse).
Still, this is a good Schelling point because it is widely seen as fair. If you award votes by actual fighting power, so the Borderer gets two votes and the pacifist Quaker zero, this will incentivize defection. (No, you do not have to worry about having to measure the fighting power of people, because more opportunities to measure it than anyone could possibly want will come up naturally.)
Add to that that wars between peer powers have become a lot more ruinous around 1900.
The traditional might-makes-right answer to the suffragettes would have been: "If you want the vote, prove that you are serious about it by killing a few millions of us." I am not sure how this would have turned out (the objective is to be more trouble than giving in to you is, which can be accomplished just fine without fighting openly), but my guess is that it would have gone badly in the long term, at least once the civil rights movement came around. Empirically, countries where people tried to decide the question of them having certain rights or not through violence (e.g. the Troubles), have fared rather poorly.
chooky
7hr ago
How do you deal with the fact that digital money, including credit cards, makes 25 cent multiples basically pointless? Do digital spenders get screwed or helped by these price increments? Is it really the case that businesses with low-cost items (eg grocery stores) do not have 5-20 cent price increments currently? Surely not.
China just chose the nuclear option:
TLDR:
China’s Ministry of Commerce just created an extra-territorial export-control net around rare earths and anything made with Chinese rare-earth technology. The bar is set extremely low, so this will ripple through EVs, wind, electronics, and defense supply chains worldwide.
(Assuming that this isn't a ploy designed to be a bargaining chip in order to get Trump to overturn export restrictions on advanced chips).
Now, while rare earths are very much not rare (though they do come from the earth, mostly), 90% of the actual processing happens in China, even if many deposits are elsewhere. Why is that the case? Well, rare-earth mining is not the most eco-friendly of industrial processes, and everyone else prefers it happen outside their backyards.
Just about every consumer and commercial electronic item is wrapped up in this. China dominates processing and magnet making, so the 0.1% trigger will catch a very large share of motors, drives, sensors, HDDs, speakers, drones, missiles, EVs, and wind-turbine components that contain NdFeB or SmCo magnets.
Assuming that a pleasant agreement isn't reached by Trump and Xi, this is going to do numbers on the trout population, and the economy. I don't even have to specify which economy, it's that global. It'll take years to onshore or friend-shore processing, even if deposits could ramp up to meet the demand. Really, I can't stress the chaos this will cause if the Chinese truly exercise their discretion, so we're going to have to strap in and see. Maybe nothing ever happens, maybe it does.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7hr ago
It sounds fine to me for the message they're trying to push. Am I turning into a boomer?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7hr ago
· Edited 7hr ago
I think that what you are saying might be an orthogonal aspect of the modern left-right distinction, though? The Soviets, the Chinese and the revolutionary French all had no issues with "justice, prompt, severe, inflexible". In the scenarios we are talking about, the putative violence on either side is metaphorical, anyway - the Right "tortures" left-wingers with "facts and logic" or hanging-transsexual animated GIFs, while the Left "executes" right-wingers by summary bans and damnatio memoriae.
Even with the death penalty (for criminals, not heretics), I do also see some tendency towards being attached to the aspect where there is no quick timeline and the subject is kept in the dark whether they will be spending a day or a decade on death row. Admittedly the "free helicopter rides" meme does put more of a dent in my theory, though.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7hr ago
- Yeah, agreed on that. They can, however, cultivate a narrative that further increases the salience of the things that the mainstream-left media already loudly objects to. And this seems to be their strategy, at least with their decisions with the Hyundai plant (I haven't seen the "gotta catch em all" video)
- I think they are strategically trying to instill a sense of impotence and anger in a specific group of people (specifically the group of people who vocally backs sanctuary cities and similar things), on the working theory that if those people feel angry and impotent they will do counterproductive rage-signalling things instead of actually-obstructive process things.
benmmurphy
7hr ago
A weird thing I've noticed is if you link to chess.com in a youtube comment then your comment well be automatically deleted. Also, the next level of weirdness is I posted a link without the domain and only the path and youtube also deleted that comment. But I suspect this is probably some automatic comment deletion evasion logic and maybe if I didn't make the first comment the second comment would have sailed through. The weird thing is chess.com is a large commercial entity and apparently they haven't tried to sit down with youtube and fix this. So I presume chess.com must have done something very naughty to piss off youtube into censoring all their links.
Also, this is super annoying when you want to link to games in youtube comments.
Corvos
7hr ago
At the risk of being pedantic, we were training dogs for millennia before the shock collar was invented, and also in many countries the shock collar is banned, so it cannot be necessary even if sometimes useful.
I make no comment on the morality, I think that depends on how it’s used.
Dirty_DemSoc
Registered Demoncrat
7hr ago
I think that the concept of borders is more than a little bullshit, but I’m under no illusion that more than a tiny minority of the country agrees with me on this.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7hr ago
Radio is now a "medical treatment" in the sense that unlicensed people are no longer allowed to do it without a license from the board, yes. It's not a medical treatment under the lay interpretation of those words. Terms within a legal context sometimes mean something different than terms outside a legal context. It's quite obnoxious as a layperson trying to understand laws.
OliveTapenade
7hr ago
This has been relevant to me in professional contexts - I don't want to get into specifics, but I have seen laws drafted on 'conversion therapy' that, if taken literally, would make it illegal for a pastor to pray with someone.
It's not that rare a situation that a religious person feels same-sex attraction, wants to resist that attraction and not act on it, and requests help and comfort from one of their spiritual authorities, or even just from brothers or sisters in the faith. Yet I have seen proposed laws that would criminalise that.
Dirty_DemSoc
Registered Demoncrat
7hr ago
I think a proper civil war in the Alex Garland, ‘true sequel to the OG Civil War’ is highly unlikely, and that pretty much the only way one could emerge from the current sociopolitical circumstances would be Trump (or some other dictatorially-minded future President who thinks that Trump’s biggest failure was not going hard enough) attempting a coup, and (a) failing to pull it off as a fait accompli, thus allowing (b) a -more-or-less- coherent coalition of opposing states to emerge that attempts to depose them militarily. Other than that specific scenario, I view a true Civil War breaking out to be roughly as likely as a communist revolution breaking out in America.
Low-level sectarian violence, or a transition to a more repressive style of government (with an accompanying rise in violent protests that ultimately fail to succeed in dislodging the regime they’re protesting) seem far more likely to me.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
7hr ago
It took me way too long to realize cutting your dicks off wasn't all that contrived.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
7hr ago
I just wanted you to know that I’m not ignoring this, but I only have so much time in the day for typing long replies, and this thread is already buried. I’ll save my thoughts on this for the next time this topic recurs.
veqq
7hr ago
El Salvador uses US money, specifically a cartoonish amount of interesting US 1 dollar coins: https://imgur.com/a/6wcXnGi
An average meal costs $1.50-2.50 (although little Caesars is still $5), a milkshake perhaps 50 cents. 3 amazing tamales for $1. A furnished bedroom with private bathroom for 2 in a central location $5-7.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7hr ago
I don’t think that checks out.
The death penalty is extremely right-coded. Even back when opposition came from Christians it was considered progressive.
Instead, I would say conservatives are more comfortable with solutions that require any sort of violence. Domestically, that means “tough-on-crime” policy, low tolerance for riots, and at least lip service given to the Second Amendment. It might also apply to the neocon style of foreign interventionism.
FtttG
7hr ago
Price including the sales tax is the norm in Europe, the lack of it was one of the biggest culture shocks the last time I was in the states. I understand some jurisdictions have passed laws against drip-pricing - the idea that the price indicated must be the final price (i.e. including the sales tax) seems like an obvious extension of that principle.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
7hr ago
What do you need a $200 bill for?
We're in an interesting situation where inflation has made these chicken shit denominations worthless but large denominations are not useful since big transactions are handled by check, card, wire, etc.
I don't even know when is the last time I've held a $100 bill despite selling my last car for cash money. I got an envelope of twenties for it.
ChickenOverlord
7hr ago
I might be pulling a mathcel move (so somone correct me if I'm wrong) here but it looks like Bluesky's decline has slightly accelerated in the last week: https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth?t=7d
Compare the last 7 days to the last 4 weeks. I would expect the figures for the last 7 days to be roughly 1/4 of the figures for the last 4 weeks, but in most categories it appears to be almost half.
No idea if this has anything to do with the CEO waffles nonsense or if it's for completely unrelated reason. Bluesky was already in decline anyway
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
7hr ago
Put, like, Bessie Coleman on one of them but keep Andrew Jackson. None of these ‘literally who?’ Activist women like they’ve got on quarters now, though.
Coleman is definitely a "literally who." How about, like, Louisa May Alcott or something?
Yep. I recall the 1995 film Dead Man Walking featuring Susan Sarandon as a nun iirc, whose heart bled for convict Sean Penn
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