domain:ymeskhout.substack.com
wemptronics
21hr ago
How poor would you need to be to enjoy money and opportunity at little cost?
Strategic Indo-Pacific military base home values are looking up. Mauritius has a GDP of ~15 billion USD. Put one and one together and the question becomes why wouldn't they want the islands? I wonder if the Chagos Islands might now be the single most lucrative asset for Mauritius. On top of the strategic value, Chagos adds a yuge additional Exclusive Economic Zone away from home. Surfers eagerly await imperialist eviction.
Did they or did they not modify the gun for testing?
Don't whine about "dismissed." Either debate the point or accept it.
I will continue to support Sig as much as I view appropriate. I certainly will push back on illogical fearmongering from haters with motivated reasoning jumping on the bandwagon of the moment.
iprayiam3
21hr ago
Ok here’s an example. My kids got real into Pokémon this summer. I am a touch old to have ever really been into it but close enough that their interest peeked some passing interest in learning more / remembering certain things. But I’m not trying to deep dive here like a book.
So instead of browsing bulbapedia or whatever, I ask chat gpt stuff like:
What was the difference between red and blue version? Is mewtwo the most powerful Pokémon? Did ash ever fight Giovanni? Do people generally like or dislike all the extra Pokémon bloat?
And various branching follow up questions. It’s quicker than trying to google the answer then read ad-riddled slow loading pages or just seeing the AI summaries at the top. Then regoogling the follow up.
So it’s nice when ChatGPT gives me a little article light history of Pokémon red and blue.
It’s annoying when it does stuff like following up with saying ‘Would you like me to write a little song to help you remember the difference’ or other stuff to provoke its own directional prompts.
Or when it starts with sychophantic commentary. Like “is mewtwo the most powerful Pokémon” gets a response that start like:
“Now you’re getting to the real heart of the Pokémon phenomenon!..” And then continues in an overly eager conversational tone.
Just give a fucking article like answer.
TwiceHuman
21hr ago
Tech is making it more feasible, but keep in mind that these ideas have not been promoted to the extent that they've become feasible. There's forces pushing back against them. What are these forces if not competent people?
Second point makes social norms and systematic censorship into the same thing. The second one can be automated, and it only requires following strict rules. The problem with this is that one can follow rules for so long that they stop considering the reasons behind them, and also that rules are rigid - they lack the flexibility that people have, they cannot take context into account. In short, "Seeing like a State" is a great book.
You cannot really outsource trust. Here's my reasoning: If you're more intelligent than the person you're outsourcing your trust to, then you don't need them to judge for you. If you're less intelligent than them, then you cannot reliably assess whether or not you can trust them. They could just be lying to you.
So, how did you decide that Trump was actually lying? You likely updated your belief over time based on things you couldn't verify. Don't get me wrong, Trump does lie a lot, but if they compared Trump's inauguration crowd to somebody elses, they'd take pictures of his at the time of the day where the least people arrive, and then find pictures of the other crowd which makes it look at flattering as possible. People who support Trump experienced the opposite, they saw the flattering image of Trumps crowd, and the unflattering images of the other. And who told you that Haitians don't eat cats? I don't read the news, this is one of the reasons I'm so clear sighted.
Populists have increasingly told the public laughable lies
The "fact-checkers" are the same people as the liars. Every original fact-checking website is propaganda. The term might have caught on, leading to independent people having "fact checking" blogs online or whatever, but the concept is still ridiculous. Plus, no meaningful conversation can be had about any modern events, it's just people throwing sources at eachother that the other party already considers completely untrustworthy. If you ask me, nothing but raw evidence is worth anything, and people should use just that (and if they can't, then they're not competent enough for truth-seeking in the first place)
Again, people have been lying for 1000s of years, it's an ancient problem, so why have there been no "fact checkers" until now? It's simply because the modern world is retarded.
You make a good point about the family traditionally being one unit, but being judged by your family is still way different than being held responsible for how people (edit: ones who are complete strangers) use the things that you've sold them.
Foreign-born
The problem is not immigration itself, but the mass import of people who are incompetent, culturally incompatible, 10 times more likely to commit crime, or otherwise a net drain for the destination. Again, only the modern world is too stupid to realize this.
A Jewish man is walking through Belfast one night when he gets stopped by two men in balaclavas with Armalites.
One of the men asks in a thick Belfast accent "Prod or Taig?" The Jewish man looks confused. "What?" "Are you a Protestant or are you a Catholic?" the other man asks in an even thicker accent. The Jewish man says "Well, I'm a Jew". The first paramilitary gives a long suffering sigh. "Yes, but are you a Protestant Jew or a Catholic Jew?"
That's the joke.
I have heard a different version which plays off it:
A man is walking home late at night in Belfast. Suddenly he's pulled into a dark alley and feels a knife at his throat! A hoarse voice whispers into his ear, "Are ye Protestant or Catholic?" Thinking quickly, wondering how to answer to save his life, the man has an inspiration. "Neither! I'm Jewish!" he says. "Well now, I'm the luckiest Arab in Belfast, so I am!" says the attacker.
Edit: I see my near namesake beat me to it!
Edit Edit: There is also a version where it's an atheist and the final question is: "Yes but is it the Protestant God or the Catholic God that you don't believe in?"
Rov_Scam
21hr ago
Great question. Yes, the existence of a recall, while not a tacit admission of guilt, can be used as evidence that a product is defective. But part of taking prudent legal action is knowing when you're beat. On the one side you have a victim, possibly a law enforcement officer, who is seriously injured or worse because a gun went off when it shouldn't have. On the other side you have a company with millions of dollars in military and police contracts insisting that the product is perfectly safe even though the exact same thing has happened several times before and the plaintiff has an expert who can describe the defect and explain to the jury exactly how the accident occurred. Make that argument to the right jury and a 5 million dollar wrongful death verdict balloons into 50 million in punitive damages. If the company hasn't figured it out yet, the jury will help them, and they will keep helping them until they either fix the problem or go out of business.
Do a recall now and it will cost a bundle, but a certain percentage of people will take advantage of the recall (especially considering that a large number of guns are owned by institutional customers), preventing some suits from being filed, and accidents that do result in suits net them some advantages. First, punitive damages are much less of a risk since they took affirmative steps to mitigate the problem. Second, it may reduce the liability if the company can prove that the user was on notice that the product was dangerous and should be modified or discarded, and neglected to take advantage of the recall program, based on a theory of comparative negligence or voluntary assumption of the risk. The downside is that it would cost a hell of a lot of money, but they could theoretically have to do it anyway. If a police department bought a bunch of these and was apprehensive about using them, they could try to sue on a theory of breach of implied warranty. This wouldn't be an easy case, though.
Thoroughlygruntled
21hr ago
Even the shitty dive bar near me has a pride flag in the window. And practically every establishment claims to be "black/woman/lgbt owned" for social credit points. If you live in a Blue area, the gay bars really have to try to stand out.
JustAGuy0
Neo-Butlerian Jihad advocate
21hr ago
These two lectures by Haviv Rettig Gur for Shalem College are an excellent primer on Israeli-Palestinian relations, one each from the Jewish and Palestinian perspectives respectively (note that both Gur and Shalem College are very much Zionist, not just Jewish).
Israelis: The Jews Who Lived Through History
The Great Misinterpretation: How Palestinians View Israel
It's very much a historical series, talking about the Aliyah in it's first stages during the Ottoman Empire and the interwar period, along with the experiences of the European/American Jewry (and the contrast that extends to today in their responses to Palestinian nationalism)
ControlsFreak
22hr ago
Does anyone have a bead on the use of public (free?) LLMs for reasonably complex1 mathematics? Anything decent? Is there anyone writing on their personal use of it for that purpose somewhat regularly? Maybe some tips for structuring a prompt?
1 - Actually, I hope to keep this particular problem entirely real-valued.
TwiceHuman
22hr ago
That's likely due to the influence of Christianity being stronger than the influence of classic liberalism. But isn't this also explained by most people being stupid? I think most dumb ideas are prevented by a low ratio of the population (perhaps 10%) knowing that they're dumb ideas. When the ratio of knowledgeable people falls too low, bad things happen. This is especially true today, since the dumb average person has more decision power than ever, and since there's a lot of money in promoting dumb ideas (smarthomes, cars with internet access, useless LLMs in every product, etc). It's memetic warfare. Since most people are too dumb to think ahead, they will need to experience negative consequences first hand in order to learn. And these learned lessons are quickly forgotten. Online IDs are being now implimented in the UK, but this was actually tried before in the past, around year 2020. The idea was already shut down once before, and the arguments that people wrote against it online were a sort of vaccine, but like I said, insights disappear, and then people retry terrible ideas.
I can't answer your second question as I've never watched Fox News. I basically reject everything modern. How could anything I say be downstream of recent propaganda when I came to these conclusions more than 15 years ago?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
22hr ago
"Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?"
"Neither. I'm Jewish."
"Sure, sure, but are you Catholic Jewish or Protestant Jewish?"
netstack
Texas is freedom land
22hr ago
Care to tell the old joke? I’m not sure how I’d google it…
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
22hr ago
Hard being an incel in this Chad only world. Can't even cope in peace without foids texting me.
pigeonburger
22hr ago
I can imagine some recalls are just about adding a redundant safety feature to address perception of a weakness even if the existing safety features already work perfectly. While this is unpleasant for engineer brains, it can be necessary as typically marketing requirements trump engineering purity.
rae
22hr ago
Not sure if this is a class or geographical thing but that does not reflect at all the reality I live in, and it still doesn't answer why Tim Cook or Sam Altman are billionaires despite having zero interest in women.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
22hr ago
Truly a tragedy, flood of nudes in your DMs. Feeling for you brother.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
22hr ago
I agree with everything you said and that's why I'm very much in favor of MAID
If we assume all of that exists (which we have to, because, in this hypothetical, we're getting married) ... then how in the hell could the sex be bad?
Because the incentive/evopsych structures still dictate that sex is a job for women and a perk for men, and marrying someone where (for you) that isn't true but (for them) it is creates some interesting consequences. It's also not necessarily apparent, since the art of picking up women is delayed gratification, shelving the naked self-interest until after the contract is signed, and in dating (as a woman) you're evaluating whether or not the terms of the contract are acceptable.
One could, in my view reasonably, make the argument that there's only one way to find that out; especially when you notice that the entire traditionalist courting/dating/marriage structure is built around "job for women, perk for men". If you want to find someone who's a little more evolved than that, well...
and one of life's most insanely pleasurable activities.
Provided you care enough to be of that mindset. Many do not, and while being eager to have sex early might not necessarily be the best proxy to evaluate that, nobody's really come up with a better answer.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
22hr ago
Jingyuan Yang (JY): 杨景媛 Mingtao Xiao (MX): 肖明韬 https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hant/武汉大学图书馆争议事件
I have never been on Chinese wikipedia and I must admit suddenly opening a Chinese webpage which is entirely text almost felt like something physically hit me in the face. So many boxes and sticks.
It is difficult to comment on this episode, especially since you drop the information that the guy supposedly wasn't actually touching himself but rubbing some eczema spots. In my personal experience mainland Chinese men (or at least international engineering student types I interacted with) have by far the worst personal hygiene or etiquette awareness I have ever seen in any group of people. But I also never heard or seen them act openly sexually creepy so I am struggling to even visualize this episode.
I must ask: I read about Korea (and heard about Taiwan from personal acquaintances) that in these countries there seems to exist some serious animosity between young men and women. Would you say the same applies to PRC as well?
The ICJ has a conveniently abbreviated press release that can be found on this page. tl;dr: The UK granted independence to Mauritius in 1968 only after purchasing from Mauritius indefinite ownership of the Chagos Islands and evicting those islands' inhabitants. This was not a proper execution of the UK's duty to decolonize Mauritius. The UK must give the islands back to Mauritius. (Resettlement of the former inhabitants is a separate issue.)
I was actually repeating what the little copy of the Dreaded Jim on my shoulder said (it looks like a tiny Foghorn Leghorn).
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
23hr ago
· Edited 23hr ago
It’s unfortunate that a majority are now meeting in situations of initial anonymity (online + bars), which makes it hard for anyone to judge safety and makes performance utterly necessary. I wonder what the percentages look like in 2025.
Every time I look at that chart, it scares me.
I hate to break it to you, but most legal documents are basically uncheckable. Even a notarized document can likely be faked without too much trouble. Government-issued documents (id cards, passports, banknotes) are certainly harder to forge, but also require someone who is familiar with the safety features.
That is not at all the point. The point is that verbal statements reported by third parties are notoriously unreliable. If Susan says: "Bob said I can sell his car", that is bound to create a he-said-she-said situation. Nobody will ever untangle if it was a honest misunderstanding or if one of them was lying.
This is why Susan needs a signed document to sell Bob's car. Can she easily forge Bob's signature? Sure. But that is now a serious criminal offense! If it is found that Bob never signed the paperwork, she is looking at jail time, and can not claim that she just misunderstood Bob's intention.
With assisted suicides, the difference is that nobody is going to put Susan's urn into jail.
I am sure that for every such sob story, there is also a sob story where someone could not get their next-of-kin to sign a paper stating that they were aware of the patient's intention to opt for MAID. A patient in Ireland would be hard-pressed to compel a relative to sign such a document through the court system. Likely, they would get themselves committed.
So I can totally understand that Swiss law does not require patients to provide a notarized genealogy with all the relevant death certificates to prove that whom they say is their next of kin is that.
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