domain:kvetch.substack.com
SSCReader
24m ago
That seems like a lot of side effects for something that doesn't happen that often.
Places with no cross walks? Places with no sidewalks so people have to walk on the road? Places where people have obstructed the sidewalk by parking on it? The fact people have to get out of cars onto the road when parking or when getting into their car?
Not to mention how it allows you to murder someone just by waiting nearby until they walk into the road to get into their car. Shoulda yielded to me! I was in a car, he wasn't! Sure he was about to get into a car, but he wasn't actually in one! Yeah I aimed for him, waited for him and accelerated to 80mph but so what?
Culture War nexuses
This isn't exactly some thought-out post, more just a culture war observation. Every now and then there happens an event that feels like a CW "nexus" where it is the intersection of like five different hot topics in one moment. I had this thought while walking yesterday and wondered if someone else had any other examples. Here's two of mine:
A couple of weeks ago in Toronto a group of Indian immigrants, presumably in a gang of some sort, robbed a government-owned liquor store. They pulled a knife on an off-duty cop there. When they left, they were pursued by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) and regional cops. In a rented van the thieves went the wrong way down the 401, the busiest highway in the world; the OPP stopped pursuit and told the regional cops to do the same, but they continued to follow. The getaway van hit a car going the opposite way. The other car's inhabitants was also a family of Indian immigrants: new parents, a baby, and their newly-arrived grandparents (via family reunification presumably). The getaway driver, the grandparents, and the baby were killed. The getaway driver was out on bail on weapon's charges, had a suspended license, and was under court order not to drive.
If you've been paying attention to any political issues in Canada you can see how this neatly ties together a bunch of hot topics into one incident. I have another:
In late 2022 a cement mixer in Berlin hit a female cyclist. The driver got out of his truck to check on the cyclist and was stabbed by a mentally ill homeless refugee. An ambulance arrived to transport the critically injured woman to the hospital, but on the way was stopped by climate protestors who had glued themselves to the road. The cyclist died but the truck driver survived.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
39m ago
protestors who had glued themselves to the road
When protestors started using the roads, I came up with the idea of making roads (outside of crosswalks) open range cars. Meaning you can do what you want but if a car hits you not only is the car not liable for any damage done to you are liable for the damage any damage you do to the car. That remains true even if the car speeds up or aims for you. The car has a priority right to use the road, and other users must yield to that right or bear the consequences.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
56m ago
It's pretty bold to move to a white country and then complain about white people "hogging the accommodations." What are the imputed damages of your homeland being a place that can't accommodate white people because it's such an undesirable place the live?
Botond173
2m ago
Let's not get carried away.
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It was by no means extraordinary anywhere. It may seem extraordinary to many youngsters, I suppose, because they compare a world of fancy touchscreens of all sorts, social media, the laptop class lifestyle etc. to a world of stagnant socialism without any of those, and conclude that there must have been a huge improvement in the average quality of life, when in fact there was no such thing, and it's all just self-delusion driven mostly by Russophobia. I can very much assure you, for example, that there is no, and has never at any point been, consensus on this supposed extraordinary increase in Hungary.
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To the extent that there was tangible increase in prosperity in Poland, most of it is obviously explained by the severity of austerity measures introduced in the final years of socialism. It's a matter of relative difference, and people's emotional revulsion at a regime which permitted the evil Russkies to station their orcs on sacred Polish soil and whatnot.
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I find it somewhat odd that you added Belarus to this list. As far as I know, it was, in fact, the one post-Soviet country that largely survived the '90s without economic collapse, social disintegration and widespread anomie, at least compared to the other unfortunate post-USSR republics.
But anyway, let's not pretend that this is not even surprising. Slovakia has been an independent polity for a combined period of roughly 35 years (1939-45, 1993-). Was there even one political assassination such as the current one during those years? As far as I can tell, no.
YoungAchamian
4m ago
To borrow a quote on this subject from my boss: "Silicon Valley Brain-rot". I wouldn't go that far but the sentiment exists.
I don't know what it is about the Bay but I can only hypothesize that for some reason when you stick a bunch of uber-nerdy, neurodivergent, high openness and high neuroticism people in an environment. Shake it up a bit, eventually the most neurotic, nerdy, and neurodivergent rise to the top. Big Yud has essentially L. R. Hubbard-ed himself into the leader of a cult that goes catatonic over the wildest sci-fi shit.
My analysis on that tweet is such:
- Peak Quokka: Altman is a huge follower of Yud and genuinely believes, through a failure to not realize he lives in a bubble, that Yud's AI teaching inspired all the greatest minds of the AI world.
- Less Quokka: Altman is a genuine follower of Yud and due to his ego, believes He(Altman) will make the biggest contributions to AI, thus since Yud inspired him Yud is a huge impact.
- Cynic: Altman is a shrewd power player, as evidenced by the whole board fiasco. He knows that if he refences a big name in the Bay Bubble AI Sphere, it will signal boost him at no cost. It acts like a scissor statement to the Pro/Anti doomers, generates lots of clicks and draws talent from both camps to OpenAI.
I'm somewhere between less-quokka and cynic but hey, I'm just a young AI engineer in defense, not in the bay, and definitely not making an impact like all these titans, so what do I know.
georgioz
2hr ago
The law would apply equally to somebody funded by Russian organization or let's say Misk foundation that is backed by Mohammed bin Salman. I personally think there is a huge difference between let's say Club of Slovak Toursits which private NGO funded by hikers as opposed to organization funded by governments like China or Saudi Arabia or Quatar - it is hard to even call them NGOs in that sense. Was it also not part o the whole controversy of "Russian collusion" where all everybody was up in arms that some foreign player is meddling in domestic politics?
To me this adds transparency to NGO sector, that leftist call it as "chilling effect" or even as you say that it will "shut down" the sector - which is not true at this point is telling. Of course they are arguing from slippery slope and there may be something there, but it is a different argument from what is happening now.
That takes a sort of good thing and goes too far and makes it a bad thing. I jaywalk all the time. Usually with the flow of traffic which makes things way more efficient (pedestrians crossing opportunistically means you don’t need 40 seconds of pausing the road for them to cross).
Your idea would make it legal for the car to speed up and kill me while driving outside of the flow of traffic conditions. Also would provide no zone of safety if I make a mistake. This applies to cars too. If I accidentally pull out in front of you it’s better you brake than have a right to ram my car.
More broadly this applies to all sorts of things. If someone in a business deal has their lawyer make a mistake in the other sides favor is it better to bankrupt the guy or adjust the contract. Maybe for the other side it’s even more profitable to burn the guy but for society as a whole it’s better to adjust and continue with the deal providing a good/service for society. In business deals like this if you always chose short term gain it would mean all deals needs more lawyers for longer contracts detailing every possibility and more eyes to catch mistakes. But lawyers overall are a negative sum game as they costs money and produce nothing.
Of course in many ways these protestors who glue themselves are shitting on the commons. We won’t run them over because saving ourselves 2 hours isn’t worth killing them just like it’s not worth killing a pedestrian who fell into the street when you could have just breaks. Yes the pedestrian is an annoyance to you and costs you 10 seconds and the pedestrian is in the wrong but the commons are that everyone is sometimes partially in the wrong and inflicting maximize damage on them for a small gain to yourself doesn’t benefit the whole of society.
For the protestors though you could argue running one over when they are costing 300k people one hour or like 13k days gets close to being net efficient.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
39m ago
How does SG’s healthcare work?
If there’s ever a country I’d expect to have the dreaded “death panels”, it’d be this one, I guess.
Folamh3
58m ago
Stellula
1hr ago
Maybe I’m using the term wrong? Low entropy as in: very little actual information. Something that could realistically be summarized in a sentence or two, gets expanded into a giant wall.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
1hr ago
This is a wild statement that you need to proportionally support with citations.
It's not wild at all to say that Jews proudly identify as Jewish and frequently engage in pro-Jewish activism, and frequently engage in very public activism against anti-Semitism, including very well-funded campaigns using every avenue of the propaganda apparatus. And then, at the same time, they engage in advocacy against pro-White activism and consider it "hateful" for someone to identify with being white with any of the same feelings they invoke to promote and celebrate Jewish solidarity.
Imagine if White people behaved like Jews, considered themselves a Chosen diaspora among the world, engaged in intense activism for their ethnic interest and used every avenue to criticize, censor, suppress Jewish identity and activism. Jews do not want White people behaving like Jews.
yofuckreddit
6m ago
I agree with you on all counts. I don't dismiss eating less and exercising more because I don't want or need to do those things, just that they're already such table stake requirements that it should be a given.
The eating less part is very difficult for me since I'm a fast food addict and consider eating one of life's great joys. But I cycle 75 miles a week and do full-body workouts frequently as well.
RegularlyExpressed
10m ago
I wonder how much of the relative smallness of Berlin is due to late German unification, and hoe much is due to being damaged in WW2, followed by being split in two during the cold war and dragged down by being located in communist East Germany.
stav
46m ago
It's a signal there are too many non-whites (even 1 is too many) and them buying homes in white neighborhoods should be illegal
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Some comedians were complaining about how the world is impossible to parody nowadays, but this is taking it to a whole new level. I mean... I can keep adding layers, but it's not going to push it from "real news" to satire...
Recursive_Enlightenment
1hr ago
One of my crazier ideas is that the US should pay the government of Singapore to run our health care system.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
An urban growth boundary would be a terrible thing. Letting people build on farmland they own is no different to letting people build on urban land they own.
But the YIMBYs aren't pushing to let farmland be developed. They don't want greenfield development, they want to be able to densify existing neighborhoods.
You wouldn't get the Kowloon Walled city, you'd get a smooth gradient of housing densities slowly decreasing from urban centres to rural locations.
We have that in much of the United States. It's decried as "sprawl" by urbanists. They don't want that; they say it leads to car dependence, long commutes, ugly parking lots, pollution, high infrastructure costs, gun ownership, and general resistance to dependence on government. They want to preserve undeveloped or agricultural land from the predations of housing developers, while densifying existing cities and suburbs.
This is part of the spin I see a lot in conjunction with insane conspiracies even in supposedly rational progressive circles - one example being that there was no blood seen at the scene and that people around did not panic, so maybe it was just some stunt. Yes, these things are unironically shared among a lot of pro-opposition people, this is where we are now - in culture war filled disinformation age. When it comes to the assassin then yes, on one side he had photos with pro Russian aligned paramilitary organization Slovenský Branci (although supposedly to convince them to not support Russia as part of his movement against violence) and he also had some rant against Roma/gypsies - BTW not that rare even among progressives in Slovakia. However he also voted for progressive president Zuzana Čaputová, he strongly supported Ukraine in the current war and he participated in anti-government protests that were organized basically since Fico took power as every government action was painted as a huge problem, threat to democracy and all that.
His actions were politically motivated and he decided to assassinate Fico for reasons broadly in line with current opposition rhetoric. I think he really fits the description of "stochastic terrorism" - an unhinged person with fringe views who was sensitive to heightened emotions around the current issue™ and just decided to act extremely on a given day. This gives plausible deniability of any responsibility to any side - look, he is unhinged and we do not bear any responsibility for anything or even pin it on the other side due to cherrypicked issues like that he was racist toward gypsies so he was no true progressive. By the way there was also an interview with his son who said that he was not medicated that he did not have any history of actual mental illness and that nothing suggested that he would do something like that - that is why I use the term unhinged.
And I am not even saying that as some judgement, I just think this is the world we live in. We may see more and more of these types of operations where political violence is used with cloud of plausible deniability that can itself feed into the overall culture war further polarizing everybody into even more insanity. What a world to live in.
2D3D
3hr ago
Strictly speaking the dynastic quality of Lee Kuam Yew to Lee Hsien Loong is clouded by Goh Chok Tongs equally unremarkably competent 'seatwarmer' Prime Ministership of 14 years, which is no small quantum of years save for the long tenures of LKY and LHL to stand as contrasts. Detractors point to an early health scare in LHLs career as the reason for extending GCTs PM tenure, but other commentators note that LKY would not have allowed an incompetent son to be in a political leadership position. I leave it to readers to determine whether LHL is a nepo baby inheriting a position he did not earn or a man groomed from high school to helm a thankless position. I for one err towards LHL doing a fair job of unclenching his fathers grasped fist on Singapore only to replace it with his own everpresent guiding hand.
As for Lawrence Wong, it is fair to say that he is less charismatic than the other leaders we are used to, but to be frank Singaporeans do not really trust charisma. Old guard oratory opposition firebrands like Joshua Benjamin Jeyaratnam and Chee Soon Juan were unable to rally the populace to their cause of freeing Singapore from Lee Kuan Yews harsh view of society and the world, and modern sweet talkers like Jamus Lim are viewed by the polity as soft idealists who will fold when push comes to shove. In short, the relative lack of charisma is not a shortcoming for PM Wong. Why Singaporeans are unreceptive to charisma is likely a combination of successful government propaganda about being wary of false prophets but also a brutal calculus by even the educated population who view politics as something best left as a topic of complaint and not a cause to rally against.
One can readily observe that Singaporean politicians are overwhelmingly senior civil servants and military generals (who are basically civil servants in the Singaporean administration), and my personal view is that save for extremely few egoists the vast majority of politicians are simply guys who got asked by their boss to take up the role of politician. Singapores political administration, especially in the Lawrence Wong cabinet, is a cabinet of civil servants forced to the top. Is being forced to the top bad? For these men, yes it is. Singaporean civil servants often command far higher salaries than politicians, and the educational pedigrees of these politicians certainly puts paid to accusations of incompetence-blind nepotism. This chart below is a snapshot of the difference between Singapore and Malaysia: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Y5CGZO4eQBY/TQS1sT9gTrI/AAAAAAAAChQ/7X-cnkUP7yE/s1600/Singapore+Vs+malaysia+Politic+2007-Final.jpg
It is a common observation in the Admin Service - the elite civil servants, recipients of extremely competitive scholarships that allow Singaporean kids of even modest income to massively overrepresent at all elite universities - that it is better to rise to Director or Deputy Permanent Secretary of a major ministry, than it is to become a member of parliament. It is an easier career progression path and salaries are inevitably higher than junior politicians, much less the eye watering salaries admin service scholars can command when they jump to MBB or FAANG - typically 0.3m is the starting salary for jumpers who go straight to VP or higher, compared to Admin Service deputy directors (the typical jumping point) who command 0.15m at that juncture.
All this is to reinforce the point that for these men of means and brains, there are much better opportunities for self enrichment than being a politician. Between a blisteringly robust private sector and an extremely aggressive Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau which set its sights on a prominent minister, there is little opportunity for a politician to self enrich and better opportunities outside the cosy confines of the civil service-politocian pipeline. As an extreme example, one of the main Prime Minister prospectives, George Yeo, lost his seat in 2011 and 'retired' to be director of multiple major conglomerates both in Singapore and overseas. Rest assured that he is making 4x the money for 1/2 the effort as when he was a minister.
So what does this mean for Lawrence Wong? Well, it means that he is, in effect, a chump. His boss told him 'I need you to take over' and like a good boy he said 'yes sir'.
https://www.theonion.com/black-man-given-nations-worst-job-1819570341
(He isn't black, but the point still stands)
PM Wong is certainly not a deer in the headlight about to be run over. If not LW then others in the cabinet would have been picked, notably Chan Chun Sing who is bafflingly removed from the new executive core despite his immense popularity among everyone that worked with him - maybe looking like a 20 year old boy trying to fit into his dads suit harms him more than even the voting populace thinks. The Singapore civil service is, by this point, a well tuned machine churning out remarkably competent administrators and bureaucrats who have proven competent at navigating their institutions away from ruin. Perhaps that is the best placeholder government a society can hope for, a solid ship well maintained till a visionary captain finds his hands at the helm. Till then, the bureaucrat-politicians of Singapore will navigate as best they can, which honestly seems like a better deal than what the rest of us (globohomo retards time-capsuled in 2012 liberalism that we are) have to go through.
freemcflurry
4hr ago
If we were really going to be libertarians now I'd have some sympathy for that. In practice the Democrats only ever want more freedom on issues that will benefit groups they like (blacks and immigrants mostly) with things like open borders, getting rid of zoning etc. Everyone else gets a boot on their face with high taxes and totalitarian environmental regulations. I don't want regulations to be repealed only when they will hurt me but left in place in all other cases.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
5hr ago
I almost wish we could level the entire area south of I-280 and redevelop it into a megacity with housing for 20 million people according to Chinese urban development practices just to spite the nimbys.
You don't even need to import Chinese development practices, you can just retvrn to the housing principles of your European ancestors. Paris proper has a density that is 3x the density of SF proper and it doesn't even have any residential high-rises and only one office high-rise.
Thoroughlygruntled
1hr ago
And joined in an unholy bootleggers and baptists coalition with the environmentalists. CEQA might be the most economically destructive law ever written.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
3hr ago
Because I wasn't born yesterday and I'm not narrowly focused on a particular set of proposals being made by some groups today -- and I don't believe others are either. As @zeke5123a points out, "there are a million ways to cut red tape besides allowing multiple family building in single family zones", but for some reason these organizations are ONLY focused on ways to increase density. Remove urban growth boundaries, agricultural set-asides, and other government blockades to development? No, it's all about jamming more people where single-family development already is.
And I've been hearing how horrible "sprawl" is from basically the same area of the political spectrum for decades. I do not believe the people organizing the YIMBYs have different goals than the New Urbanists and other anti-car anti-suburb leftists, only different tactics.
It's insane to me that this is allowed. The justification for immigration is that these are net contributors and we need them to prop up the social safety net but instead actually we're letting in people who will never work again (or not for long) and will almost immediately start collecting benefits. There was a similar deal a while back in the US when a Pakistani Uber driver was killed after his car was hijacked by a couple of, um, youths. The guy was 66 years old and driving for Uber. He had only immigrated a few years previously. The citizens who fund this stuff in the US and Canada are getting fleeced. You work for 40 years and instead of getting to leave it to your kids it all gets sucked away to pay for people who just showed up and never contributed a dime.
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