domain:infonomena.substack.com
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
6m ago
SSDI abusers are generally past prime reproductive age, so the impact on long-term demographic dysgenics is nearly zero.
True. Which is why I prefaced this entire tangent as such; an excuse to ride my hobby horse of the more general public welfare topic.
RenOS
something is wrong
10m ago
Tbh this is just as bad a take imo as the fanatics wanting to get rid of cars in the countryside said bc they "just need better public infrastructure". Yes, cars are superior for rural regions and public infrastucture is just not feasible there, but for well-designed suburbia and especially for smaller cities, bikes are also just better in many circumstances. It has nothing to with hobbies, hippies or fitness fanatics (though regular exercise is one of the benefits of bikes!). They need so much less space, they're cheaper, more flexible, less dangerous for pedestrians, etc.
Reducing cars in the suburbs to pedestrian speed and giving them the blame for any accident is great, it means even smaller kids can run, play, and bike through the suburbs without me needing to worry much, It means I can walk and bike there without having to be attentive all the time, and as long as it is properly designed even if I need to drive through it's just a minute or so of slow driving.
In cities car culture is also awful, the smell got better but everything is just so clogged and noisy. Worse, the danger means that even if you want to bike, it makes you choose the car bc a single idiot can cost your life. When I was living in London, almost everyone biked for a while, and those who stopped always had an incident with a crazy car driver. I myself also had several such situations. The counter here is usually crazy cyclist, but crazy cyclists are merely annoying, even a collision will usually not even seriously hurt you (though I get very pissed when small kids are involved, but even there I can literally just jump in front & stop the bike if needed); Crazy drivers can kill you with frightening ease, and there is absolutely nothing you can do. There's a lot to dislike in the EU, but well-targeted car bans are great.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
26m ago
SSDI abusers are generally past prime reproductive age, so the impact on long-term demographic dysgenics is nearly zero.
The decision to treat never-married single mothers as deserving poor was, in the UK at least, both conceptually and temporally separate from the decision to bureaucratise poor relief. I agree with you that it hasn't produced good outcomes.
Lizzardspawn
31m ago
Ahh yes. Cleaning - such a gentle load on a person's back.
Botond173
40m ago
mixed cycle and bus lanes
That seems sort of dangerous. And yes, I'm sure Bordeaux counts as large.
Terracotta
55m ago
For every artist that can produce something anyone wants to look at, you have perhaps 1000x as many people who see something in their mind's eye but they don't have the skill to render it. That thing, maybe even that stunningly beautiful thing, never sees the light of day and dies with them.
This seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of how creation works, though. Good ideas arise from craft skill, innate talent plus long hours of practice honing your perceptive faculties and understanding of the medium.
Feel-good movies love ego-boosting scenes about the regular ol' Joe Schmoe whose genius idea puts all those snooty artists to shame. But in reality, there are no people who've only ever bothered to cook instant ramen, who also have genius ideas for a creative dish, and there are no one-finger piano plinkers who also have great ideas for an amazing symphony. Tyros will have either painfully conventional ideas that they don't realize are copies, or completely random ideas that add nothing. At most, in some rare cases, they might have natural inclination plus the germs of some concept that needs to be worked out through long years of development; so having that natural process short-circuited through easy access to AI slop will result in fewer good ideas ever seeing the light of day.
I guess the one exception might be niche porn as mentioned downthread, where each man knows best the precise configuration of tentacles, chains and peanut butter that will get him off. But that's less creativity than it is targeted stimulation.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
57m ago
I'm not sure why this would be the null hypothesis.
Not the. Just mine.
Fair points on your part. I won't argue against your historical analysis. That said, I still don't think situational barely-subsistence welfare at the discretion of local elites in pre-modern societies corresponds very exactly to universal high-standard-of-living welfare administered by nationally uniform buerocracies in terms of long-term demographic dysgenics.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
59m ago
"But currency is a liability to the central bank that issues it—a promise to stand behind the currency’s value in the future."
If thats why currency is debt, then youre including that promise into "what currency is". You would then have to, whenever you try to use the fact that "currency is debt" in your reasoning, also show that the promise wont be violated, else the argument is invalid. And you of course cant already use "currency is debt" to show that something will work out without breaking the promise, because thats a regress.
It's something you observe after the fact.
Thats fine, if you can tell at the end of each period whether you went over in the previous. It sounds like youre now suggesting something about inflation as the criterion. Is accelerating inflation the right criterion and old economists where just too worried about going over, or do you object to that criterion as well? What do you think of NGDP targeting?
I suppose it just looks more like just looking at the real world.
With private debt, the strategy of taking on more and more debt looks great right until noone is willing to lend you more. People rightly want a plausible model for "observations in the real world" before making them loadbearing. The temptation to ignore limitations based on "real world observation" is omnipresent in economics ("Most people are willing on the margin to help a bit without direct visible compensation, therefore communism"), and using theoretical problems as a setup to ignore theory is precisely what keeps critics of mainstream economics outside the mainstream.
The actual concrete accounting, logic, and plumbing seems much more useful to nail down and understand first, before starting to build more & more elaborate models on various assumptions.
Even without an end-date, economics always depends on expectations about the future. Trying to understand whats happening in the here and now before you get to those doesnt work.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
I keep gravitating back towards my own null hypothesis - public welfare is a bad idea through and through, and no matter how many epicycles its proponents attach in attempts to sanewash it, it will never be a better system than not having public welfare.
I'm not sure why this would be the null hypothesis. Coercively funded public welfare has been around since time immemorial, the consequences of abolishing it have been politically unacceptable even in poorer and harsher times, and members of the manual labour class who can no longer work hard enough to hold down a job due to old age have almost always been seen as the most deserving cases.
Poor relief through the Church in medieval Europe was not voluntary charity - it was institutionalised welfare funded by State-endorsed coercion. In England the system largely operated through the monasteries and there was a combination of real secular coercion (tithes were a compulsory levy which could ultimately be collected by force, and impropriation of rectories by monasteries basically meant that tithes beyond what was needed for the support of the parish priest were diverted to monastic "charity") and spiritual coercion (in a society where people actually believe in a religion which incorporates justification by works, "you will go to hell if you do not leave a reasonable percentage of your net worth to the local monastery" is coercive). In the middle of the 16th century the dissolution of the monasteries and the Reformation mean that this system stops working, and the resulting increase in visible destitution is as politically destabilising as the present-day street-shitting crisis in San Francisco. Eventually England gets a comprehensive system of tax-funded secular poor relief in 1601. The Malthusian turn in the 19th century doesn't change the principle - the workhouses were harsh but they weren't cheap. And "don't put the infirm elderly in the workhouse" was the first demand of left-populists and one of the top five demands of right-populists for most of the next century.
What did change, probably for the worse, was the shift from a poor relief system where who gets what was ultimately at the discretion of local elites who could rely on their own knowledge to distinguish between deserving and undeserving poor to a bureaucratised system. And that change was made by the workhouse-mongers who thought that the local elites were too soft - something that is still an issue in the UK in the present day, where governments of all stripes keep trying to centralise eligibility assessment for disability benefits because patients' own NHS GPs (in the late 20th century, the archetypal local elite) are too soft, particularly in high-unemployment post-industrial areas like the Welsh valleys.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1hr ago
How is that uncharitable? Im not interpreting it that way so that its less defensible, but because whats even the point of the post otherwise? The turkish border is not simply a complex border, it is from a domain so explicitly political that we all know its just down to negotiating peoples preferences. There are plenty of examples of complex boundaries you could pick otherwise. The biologist arguing with king Solomon is suggesting a categorisation thats better for understanding the world, and is rejected by Solomon on the basis of prioritising economic considerations. Even the quote in my last comment is quite clear about purposes: Turkey has its exclave to honor the Ottoman ancestor, and "man" has an exclave around someone if itll save their life.
The point of the post is to change categorisation from an attempt-objective assessment to a negotiation, such that to consider someone a woman even though it causes them distress, there has to be some downside to doing so thats more important in absolute terms. A downside that occurs with regards to a specific purpose, like scientific simplicity, can still be judged as "not important enough" because its only the general purpose (in Scotts case, maximising utility) that really matters.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
1hr ago
Sorry, but actually having nice things is not on the table during culture war.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
2hr ago
the best way to use it is to not use it at all
Yes.
ulyssessword
3hr ago
well, my eyebrows rise.
How many of them?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3hr ago
I looked at his Twitter this am and regret it. Essentially, and this hasn't always been true I think, I am on the opposite side of most of his rants. I won't link them because they don't need signal boosting. I also notice he is followed by Jordan Peterson, for some bizarre reason.
A tangent.
I keep gravitating back towards my own null hypothesis - public welfare is a bad idea through and through, and no matter how many epicycles its proponents attach in attempts to sanewash it, it will never be a better system than not having public welfare. I know this means that I effectively espouse the need to pay out the ass for private insurance, and that there will be a very large parts of the population near the bottom end of the socioeconomic spectrum that will look very disagreeable even to my middle class sensibilities. A low-wage class, a serf class, a dehumanized mass of barely viable specimens, or outright unviable ones kept alive by their barely viable associates, or unviable ones in the process of honest-to-god starving on the streets. But what will the world look like with another few centuries of public welfare and, I assume, no eugenics? The same low-viable population, only grown unchecked by economic pressure thanks to welfare always bailing them out at significant cost to the productive elements of society.
I keep being told that this is baseless, that the unproductive poor will be elevated by education, or that they will naturally stop breeding, or that each subsequent generation is a blank slate and those non-viable traits will not persist over long timeframes. Or, of course, that AI will fix everything for everyone anyways. Or that there's no point in worrying because the planet is doomed and we may at least die in solidarity and upholding basic standards of living and human dignity for everyone on the way.
But I don't see it. I just don't. What I see is ever-growing burdens placed on those who create value, to the benefit of an ever-growing proportion of those who do not. I'd call it injustice if that made sense to anyone nowadays, when "justice" means that those who don't work are sustained by those who do, forever, no strings attached. Until society as a whole produces nothing but parasites and their sustenance - and then either collapses or finally puts a stop to these dynamics, much later and more grievously than had it been done earlier.
"Do you want to see people dying in the streets?", one might ask me. No I don't. Of course not. But it strikes me as quite possibly the lesser evil, in the long run.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3hr ago
Regarding sperm:
Short-term abstinence may be associated with limited improvements in semen quality in healthy men but could be more beneficial for infertile men, especially within the first 4 days of abstinence.
Regarding testosterone:
These data demonstrate that acute abstinence does not change the neuroendocrine response to orgasm but does produce elevated levels of testosterone in males.
Also several bullshit studies. No credible peer-reviewed studies on cognitive or emotional benefits, beyond anecdotal.
YMMV, but oddly jacking off in the 21st century hasn't had much research.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3hr ago
It is, in fact, that. It's an artifact of Chinese. To some degree this can be done in Japanese (三日か四日 for 3/4 days) or (三四天 in Chinese) but it's more common in Chinese. Don't rely on me as an expert but that's my take.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
3hr ago
Random thoughts: This is a return to normal. The 20th century saw an excessive standardization of all work as office or factory work, i.e., external workplace work where employed and salaried workers work under direct supervision. Employers now realize that this needn't be universally enforced. You can in fact just hire people to do their job, let them handle the details, and judge them based on their effective output. It may take some bossware to make it function for jobs that rely more on putting-in-hours than on getting-things-done, but that's a fairly minor hurdle.
What was once the craftsman's workshop adjacent to his living quarters, the farmer living on his farm, the daytaler sleeping right next to tomorrow's task, is now the employee working from home. It's a revival of an older and universal theme that was briefly obscured by some of the excessive outgrowths of the industrial revolution.
KMC
4hr ago
cremieuxrecueil (allegedly trannyporn0).
Wait, what? I always wondered what happened to TP0. That would be interesting if it were true.
People I know who are unaware of themotte genuinely think he's a Canadian girl of rhodesian ancestry. He plays along despite fucking podcasts where his voice is octaves deeper than the average guy.
Yes, he's neither cat, nor girl, nor kulak. It's always amusing to me when people think he's a woman.
There are tons of great games that already exist sure, there aren't necessarily tons of great games that align with a given person's preferences (and no, you don't have to be really into hentai to feel this way). I say this as someone who is not very interested in a large portion of the much-heralded games out there - there's an extreme deficit of output I would personally want to play. Everything that comes out of the AAA sphere may as well be slop as far as I'm concerned since the approach that most large studios take when they construct games is basically diametrically opposed to mine. The increased output stemming from the democratisation of game development may well have resulted in an increase in low-effort content and a decrease in the average quality of games released, but the larger amount of content overall and the greater amount of indie games that are a product of one person's idiosyncratic vision which don't have to go through the pernicious diluting process known as decision-making-by-committee has resulted in me finding far more games I enjoy. Arguably 100% of my favourite games only exist because of this process of democratisation, and I can't help but feel the same about the usage of AI tools to speed game production up and democratise it even further. I do not care at all about how the art was made; I only care about its ability to convey the intent of the developer behind it.
In fact I once attempted to make a game on my own due to the sheer lack of games that I personally thought were interesting - making the art and animation was one of the most time-consuming parts for me since it is not my speciality, and I eventually resorted to using preexisting photos and assets put through a heavy dithering effect and intense colour-grading in order to shorten development time while still trying to retain a consistent aesthetic. It would have been so much easier if I had done so in an era where AI tools were available to me. There's a shit ton of games made by inexperienced/time-poor developers with interesting ideas but where the stock assets are very visible; perhaps the existence of generative AI will reduce their incidence and encourage further creation.
I'm not too concerned about being drowned in low quality games; if one would prefer to avoid encountering slop entirely, there are many mechanisms that facilitate content curation and their importance and prominence will only increase as time goes on. It's not as if people are being forced to scroll through every shitty game that's been spewed out by an unknown developer in order to find something they like, that's a caricature that doesn't reflect the reality of how most people discover content; they typically find games through curation mechanisms like forums, review sites or recommendations by friends. Pointing to all the low quality content and wringing one's hands about the unimaginable horrors of All The Slop falls flat to me, since even in an overcrowded environment you can still effectively limit the scope of your search to a subset of media that's most likely to appeal to you.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
4hr ago
He seems unhappy, I wish I could have spoken with him when he would comment on my posts. He is quite smart, canda is a good example as to why you should not have mass migration, the migrants there are rarely decent ones, many blue collar punjabis and gujratis who explicitly have very narrow views with regards to ethnic loyalty.
I get why people miss the 90s. Back then, the quality of people moving was not as bad. His accident, increasing amounts of fedposting, the canadian situation explains his current views. I hope he comes out of it ok. There are very real legal ramifications for what he posts at least in Canada. People here have been quite helpful to me, seeing someone whose name i recognize and have spoken with before spiraling hurts a little.
What about cutting me off on a highway?
I also meant cars not taking turns at stop signs, resulting in multiple cars entering the intersection simultaneously because people refuse to wait their turn or were not paying attention to who's turn it was.
Finally, the whole point of my comment was to point out that just listing your personal anecdotes about something as if they are demonstrable facts and not pure undiluted confirmation bias is silly and anyone can do it, hence why I started doing it too.
You need an argument stronger than "sometimes I see things that make me unhappy"
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