domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6hr ago
I'm tired of hearing about Elon Musk and Jensen Huang. America went to the moon and back before we opened the immigration floodgates
LOL, perhaps you'd like to hear about Werner von Braun instead? America went to the moon largely due to the efforts of 'liberated' Nazi engineers in building the rockets. And one of the planners of US spaceflight and the namer of the Apollo program, as well as the chair of the Saturn Vehicle Evaluation Committee? Wait for it, you're going to love this... Abe Silverstein. So, like the ICBM, the lunar program was a product of a partnership between Nazis and Jews.
Robert Goddard, at least, was a "heritage American" so it wasn't entirely an immigrant endeavor.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
It’s not peer pressure, man. It’s pressure from elders. Men in these communities who become productive and law abiding citizens promptly leave- in the case of dirt poor white and Hispanic communities often through travel jobs. The only male role models available to young adolescents are losers(deadbeats) and assholes(criminals). They follow lives of crime to be like, and get the approval of, the assholes- because who wants to be a loser?
Jiro
6hr ago
What would they say, in your view?
They'd have no principled basis for it at all.
Actually saying "but they have to be evil" would be one step towards allowing their opponents to do assassinations as well, since "he isn't evil" is a much weaker argument than "it's wrong to assassinate".
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
The Nazis did not advocate for non-state violence; their atrocities were carried out by state backed military/paramilitary forces.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
6hr ago
it's not this or that column from over a decade ago, it's the way that Klein in general, in his politics and more importantly in his whole affect, symbolises a type of holier-than-thou policy wonk who calmly explains why you're wrong about everything, why your values suck, and why it all needs to be bulldozed.
That's the point- that old column is a particularly concentrated and surprisingly open synecdoche for everything else about him. If someone doesn't understand why the right doesn't like Klein, they could go listen to 30 hours of his podcast... or they can just read the one article that displays most of his worst traits.
No, the column isn't the reason; it's a handy- ha ha- Voxsplainer.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6hr ago
Arbitrary and capricious enforcement of paperwork offenses (and illegal immigration is a paperwork offence)
Illegal immigration is not a "paperwork offense", except in the case of those illegal immigrants who could have cured or avoided it by doing the right paperwork. Most of them, no matter what paperwork they would have filed, would not have been lawfully admitted to the US.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
Way too dangerous in a country with more guns than people.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
Might I suggest that rational planning is not the best model for what these people are thinking?
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
6hr ago
Too gay but also not gay enough.
That's not entirely a joke but I think the current issue is some post-Kirk comments that weren't entirely mealymouthed and immediately walked back. Could be wrong though.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
Americans genuinely expect their preschoolers to actually believe, yes. Keeping up the illusion with older kids is going out of style but it still happens.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
Ah, yes, the parents that give coal for questioning Santa.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
Elementary school.
Skeletor
6hr ago
For what it's worth I put that one in because I have heard others talking about it. Personally I cannot remember ever believing that Santa was real, but neither can I remember ever being edgy about it.
When I was a very young kid I was disappointed that I wasn't allowed to ambush him and obtain evidence, like he was a cryptid. I was at the "sure I'll assume good faith, but" stage of developing skepticism. Good times.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
I mean, even ignoring that, a chiropractor normally doesn’t do actual surgery.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
6hr ago
I'm left wondering how much harm could be done by a lone man with a grudge against the world and no interest in taking credit for it
Yeah this is stressful.
Tangentially related, and this will probably result in me being put on a list, but I'm always mystified when I read/hear/whatever about a mass shooter who kills like 5 people and then kills themselves/gets shot in a Walmart in their town or whatever.
If you're planning on dying, and hate the world and want to extract revenge on it. Why not go to your nearest sporting event/concert and wait for it to let out? Or rent a car, drive to New York, and unload in a PACKED subway station at 8:30am on a Tuesday.
It seems like so many of them leave so much carnage on the table (which is their goal?), but I guess this is likely mostly answered by the fact that people who try to commit mass shootings aren't highly competent utility maximizers.
Not the one you responded to, but it appears obvious to me that 14yos are more adult than the law treats them, in many cases. Things like drinking should be acceptable in moderation under parental supervision, if only to teach the teens the limits so that they don't have to learn them getting blackout drunk among similarly clueless but eager peers at 18. (Of course, we then arrive to the issue of many parents being prone to bad decisions.)
Really, the law on drinking age appears now to be designed to account for negligent parents. What is a properly parented 14yo gonna do if they're able to buy alcohol? Get illicitly drunk once?
Regarding crimes, at 14 a human should have enough moral knowledge to know that beating a human being while they're down is unacceptable and enough self-control to stop themselves from doing it. They can be excused to some extent for crimes of passion, but there's a point where "passion" no longer cuts it.
sohois
6hr ago
AVs seem like an incomparable category. I couldn't pinpoint the beginning of AV hype the same way you can point to the Transformer architecture for LLMs, but the early examples of AVs 10-15 years ago I recall were pretty impressive. It was like 80% of the way to human parity right from the get-go; it made sense that people were predicting a rapid replacement of human drivers, because they'd made such an impressive start. (I appreciate that AV efforts probably existed long before this but I think it's a fair starting point)
And then over the next decade AV capabilities crept up to human levels at like 1% per year. There were no significant breakthroughs, no evidence of rapid progress, and as you state it is only now that we're getting commercially available taxis in specific locations. Even when Waymo started rolling out proper AV taxis in some cities, it did not signal a sudden leap forward in capabilities as you might expect.
Contrast to LLMs. GPT-1 came out in 2018, a year after the Transformer paper, with GPT-2 following a year later. GPT-2 was impressive compared to previous language generators, but still only perhaps at 33% of the level of an average human. with 3 it jumped up to 50%, 3.5 went further, while 4 was perhaps at the 80% level that AVs started at. Every few months since then has since more and more large leaps, such that current models are winning mathematical competitions and are measured at PhD level in a huge variety of domains.
Chart the progress of both technologies, and they'll look completely different. It's fair to think at some point natural limits will stop the endless scaling of LLM capabilities, but thus far extrapolating a straight line has worked pretty well. AVs never even had a line to extrapolate from.
This is the core of it. The activist in charge of enforcing this will consider everything conversion therapy. I think 10 years ago Jesse Singal covered a case like this in Canada. There was a gender clinic where the doctor simply let little girls and boys know "Hey, you can like boy things as a girl, and it doesn't mean you are a boy", and he was accused of conversion therapy and his clinic was shut down. Activist found someone willing to make much more lurid accusations against him, but then when Jesse Singal found that guy, and asked him about his experiences, it turned out it was a completely different doctor!
Rest assured, if this law stands, any course of treatment which fails to maximize trans outcomes will be considered "conversion therapy". I wouldn't be shocked if it even impacts de-trans individuals seeking care, as their doctors won't be able to provide "conversion therapy" to help them return to their natal sex, as best as is still available anyways.
This is the point where the potential harm is. If a child spends 1-2 years thinking "Santa breaks my model of reality but I can't think deeply about this because the presents will stop coming" then they are learning to suppress curiosity for fear of punishment.
No way man, I think it's a great practice. You institute a society-wide gaslighting conspiracy toward children that involves nothing but generous rewards, but which is so fantastical that they're bound to figure it out eventually, and then you let nature take its course. Everyone learns that sometimes everyone else is just bullshitting, even if they really do mean well.
I wish we put this much effort into teaching everyone other equally important lessons.
Plus there's the part where you realize the conspiracy and then get to join in on it. I mean that feeling as a kid is the closest thing to being invited to join the Illuminati that any of us are likely to get. You've gained sufficient wisdom that the adults require your collaboration.
zeke5123a
6hr ago
Ha! I told my kids that if they were good, Santa would give them a present. If they were bad, a lump of coal. And if they were really bad, Krampus would pick them up, put them in his sack, and carry them of.
They laughed and responded: you’re joking right?
I played around for a few minutes like it was real but ultimately told them that Krampus isn’t real. They had a fun time with it. And it showed they understood play and could figure out some things were absurd. Notably however they didn’t seem to question Santa haha
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6hr ago
Thank you. That's a very kind thing to say. For what it's worth, I am far happier debating you, as a sincere and charitable interlocutor, than I am with many others I strongly disagree with.
Edawayac_Tosscount
6hr ago
What struck me about this case wasn't the male ennui angle, but rather that the subject of the story had horrid opsec. Calling 911? Querying ChatGPT? Keeping his phone on him at all? Retaining the lighter he (probably) used? (source: https://apnews.com/article/california-wildfires-palisades-los-angeles-deb1c78c1d83d233cf3b540644814ea2)
If this man had practiced even rudimentary opsec he could have become a serial firestarter.
If you asked me before this news article "could you commit an act of terror?" my off-the-cuff answer would be to scoff and say "yes - once." The news is full of mass shootings, stabbings, vehicular violence, not so widespread as to materially impact me but memetically virulent enough that I realize it's colored my impression of nihilistic terrorism as inherently incriminating - try anonymously mass-shooting and you won't stay anonymous for long. Yet here's a case where the inherency I'd presumed disintegrates, and now I'm left wondering how much harm could be done by a lone man with a grudge against the world and no interest in taking credit for it: if all you care about is maximum damage then there must be a subset of terrorist strategies that'd indirectly cause mass death without inherently presenting yourself as a target of investigation.
WandererintheWilderness
7hr ago
I actually talk to immigrants, including illegal ones, every day. Legal immigrants think ICE is snatching anyone, legal/illegal/citizen who happens to be brown and black-bagging them to never be seen again. I have had multiple strangers tell me they believed this.
That is exactly my point. This is the widespread belief. I agree it's obviously not actually happening, but it is so widespread that I don't think that fact can be attributed to "bad faith lies" alone - at least, not in the sense of lies perpetrated by enemies of ICE and which ICE is fighting back against with any real vigor. I think the prevalence of that paranoia proves that ICE is very bad at optics. Either they are deliberately encouraging this kind of paranoia, or at the absolute minimum, they are inordinately terrible at fighting back against the smears. Which brings me to my next point -
Then please justify that claim.
They have not made any PR efforts to counteract that impression. (To my knowledge! I would be happy to be corrected! But if they have, why do they never come up in these threads?) If what we're looking at is the result of an unwanted smear campaign, then where's the counter-propaganda? Where are the ICE spokesmen releasing prominent public statements to the tune of "we have nothing against legal immigrants and we will do everything in our power to make sure they are safe, we take the risk of a raid affecting the innocent very very seriously, you have nothing to worry about", to camera, in so many words? It's one thing to be accused of being evil by your enemies' propaganda. It's another to let that propaganda spread indefinitely without supplying your own side of the story. At that point, I can't help but think that you like the story your enemies are telling about you. Particularly when half of your own supporters will cheerfully say that yes, you are creating a climate of fear and that's a good thing because [galaxy brain reasoning about incentivizing self-deportation].
The catch is that a single person taking a shortcut may "cause no damage" but if a lot of people all take the same shortcut, all that "no damage" can add up to damage. We're not in a situation where there's just one illegal immigrant, analogous to allowing one trespass.
The single-time, single-person trespass also doesn't include an analogy to the illegal consuming social services or anything like that.
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