domain:kvetch.substack.com
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12m ago
I think it is almost inevitable to have mass immigration from Africa when the continent will inevitably be drawn into one or more huge conflicts of countries with hundreds of million of people.
DRC (official population estimate: 100 million) has been in a state of chaos and civil war for decades, yet the amount of Congolese who have immigrated to the Western countries has remained comparatively small (120 000 formally in Western countries according to this link, even if you triple or quadruple this number to account for the illegal migration it would be less than a 1 % of that official estimate.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
25m ago
Query: do you think current atheists were born of atheist ancestors?
Let’s just say that I used to work as a developer for a large German company. Note past tense.
For the first year I could only install new software or drivers by making an official request and having the Indian IT support do it via remote access. You can imagine how well this worked for embedded systems development where you regularly need to use some new piece of external hardware or random IC manufacturer’s legacy software tool.
The best part? All of the daily work could have been done on a rando, burner laptop as email, team chat, source repositories and build system were all in external cloud services. Literally the only things I actually needed intranet access was to put my hours into the SAP system once per month.
georgioz
26m ago
I think that female pattern is a little bit different. They are as prone to parasocial relationships as men on onlyfans, but they fall for status and fame - think about boyband members, movie stars etc. As soon as some company will invent some good version of male full AI celebrity and provide it en masse to teenage girls, it will have capacity to oneshot them all.
How do you think religion in the West will interact with the Culture War in the next few elections, and in the future?
I think what will happen in the West is some mix of lebanonization, balkanization and brazilianization. The situation is similar to that of Yugoslavia or Lebanon or many other countries, where you have intersection of various ethnic, religious, tribal or even national interest in constant conflict resulting in confusing mess. There will be foreign shocks, I think it is almost inevitable to have mass immigration from Africa when the continent will inevitably be drawn into one or more huge conflicts of countries with hundreds of million of people. For religion, you can insert progressivism, christianity, islam and classical liberalism as actors in this religious conflict.
Culture War can lead to civil war, but I think that people in the West have a very skewed view of what it looks like. People like Tim Pool are too much married toward scenario of US Civil War or Spanish Civil War, which while confusing was more or less fought as a standard war. What will more likely happen is more akin to Lebanon or Yugoslavia, where decades old status quo of deliberately constructed balance if internal tensions slowly detoriated only to combust quickly, suddenly and violently. Or you can look into other conflicts such as what we now see in Ethiopia or South Sudan or even Syria, where you have incredibly confusing web of loyalties and where belligerents are unclear and alliances constantly shifting.
jake
57m ago
- Amish: >6.0 (Mennonites also appear high but I couldn't find recent data)
- TradCaths: 3.5/3.6 (3.6 anecdotal, "Kloster 2018" cited for 3.5)
- Mormons: 3.4
- Muslims:3.0/3.1
- Evangelicals: 2.3 (All following numbers use this citation)
- Catholics: 2.2
- Jews: 2.0
- Mainline Protestants: 1.9
- Atheists: 1.5
- Agnostics: 1.4
Religion will interact with the US culture war effectually, as the nonreligious population largely selects itself out of existence. This will swiftly accelerate with the wifebot and the half-right to reproduction, where it's mostly religious families buying the half-rights of mostly nonreligious sellers. Especially Mormons, when it becomes socially viable for them to pick polygamy back up (Smith and Young, laughing). Catholicism and Mormonism, there's your Western future.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
1hr ago
Big funds are smart enough to have 2 year noncompetes for quants though.
Completely unenforceable in the UK and (increasingly) large parts of the US too. Any decent solicitor can get them cut down to 6 months, the 2 year non-compete is just one of the many shitty tricks employers play to try and discouraging us from jumping ship. The mechanism of action of a 2 year non-compete is through chilling effects, not legal enforcement.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
True, but having both parents around is different to "and then dad shook us off like we were dirt on the soles of his shoes and set out for a new fun life with a new fun family". That has got to hurt. Even a distant, neglectful father has to be better than one who made the choice to reject you in favour of someone else (someone better).
HereAndGone
1hr ago
Very, very minor kerfuffle (the story seems to have quietly died) about our Arts Council asking questions about religion and sexual orientation on grant applications.
The Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) has written to the Arts Council asking for further details on the “nature and content” of questions asked of artists when they were applying for bursary grants earlier this year.
It follows worries raised by a number of artists who contacted the Irish Independent in recent weeks to raise concerns after they were asked about their sexuality and religious orientation, among other personal questions, when they applied for the bursary round in February.
The headline makes it sound like some kind of vaguely sinister data-gathering on deviants and there's nothing in the body of the story to explain why they asked these questions, but if you think about it, it's obvious why. Of course, this is because it's a government body and so has DEI targets to hit, and how will it fill out the paperwork about the percentage of queer trans disabled neurodivergent multiracial Wiccans who were awarded a bursary unless it gathers data in this way?
The same people complaining they were asked if they were gay will be the first to cry "discrimination!" if they don't get a bursary and will go running to the media about how they were refused because they were gay, when it's much more likely the Arts Council wants to give as many grants to gay etc. artists as they can in the name of representation, except they have to find out who is gay etc. first!
HereAndGone
1hr ago
My (naive?) theory is that Trump owes his victory as much to the Evangelical community more than any other - they very much represent his spirit.
I think it's not his spirit, but rather where else could they go? The Democrats certainly have no signs of welcoming traditional believers aboard, unless they drop all that stuff about abortion/LGBT+ (and male headship for the harder core). What I was mildly surprised by was Kamala Harris failing to reach out on grounds of "I'm Christian too" (yeah, I know: citation needed). She did the usual campaigning in black churches, but no broader appeal to the religious conservatives with stories about "I sang in the church choir as a girl, I attend this church when I'm at home":
Harris, on the other hand, is a rare political figure who may have downplayed her spiritual life in public, given anti-religious sentiments in her native San Francisco Bay Area and a complicated personal religious journey.
Harris is a Baptist who was raised by a Black Anglican father and an Indian Hindu mother, and she is married to a Reform Jewish husband.
She’s a longtime member of San Francisco’s historic Third Baptist Church and has a deep relationship with its pastor, the Rev. Amos Brown. As vice president, she has attended services at Baptist churches in the Washington, D.C., area and in 2022 spoke at the National Baptist Convention.
...In her 2019 memoir, Harris wrote about her mother’s making sure she was exposed to both Hindu and African American Christian religious traditions, adding that she and her sister, Maya, sang in the choir at 23rd Avenue Church of God in Oakland.
It's probably also complicated by the fact that that is an American Baptist-affiliated church, not a Southern Baptist one, but nevertheless she soft-pedalled on religion, as did Walz (quick, anybody have any idea, without looking it up, what denomination if any he belongs to?)
Whoops, looks like Walz is a souper!
"Tim, who was raised Catholic, became a Lutheran after marrying Gwen. He has called himself a "Minnesota Lutheran" and identified Pilgrim Lutheran Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, a congregation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, as his family's parish."
Corvos
1hr ago
I think there is an underappreciated gap between the 'artisan' worldview and the 'executive' worldview. In the former, skills are things you acquire through great effort and are the main achievements of a well-lived life. In the latter, skills are things you buy; your merit comes from the things you have access to and the use to which you put them.
Corvos
1hr ago
And also to minimise the scale of the breach, right? It's bad if an employee tells me that BigCorp and BiggerCorp are expected to finalise their merger by May, but it's worse if they give me 2000 pages of detail on the subject including all the due diligence on both parties.
KingOfTheBailey
1hr ago
I thought I was the only one who felt this way.
Mushguffler
1hr ago
Agreed, either gender matters or it doesn't. If it matters, then they used it wrong and should be scolded for it.
Musk couldn't drop the POE2 lies because that would mean admitting he isn't super talented at everything.
Only passingly familiar with PirateSoftware but yes, that strikes me as an apt description of Musk. Being entirely honest I can't fully blame him, to some extent his ego is obviously integral to the work he actually does, as is seemingly common to high-agency people (exacerbated by the immense hatedom he seems to have accrued recently, whether it is deserved is debatable but it obviously affects him) so I can understand not being willing to feed the haters, but people laughing at him for it are entirely justified and within their rights to do it. Should've kept himself to Weenie Hut Jr Diablo 4.
Let's say he was genuine and he truly considers paying a Chinese person to play the game for him as him being that good, is it not possible he considers reading a book summary as reading the book or paying someone to do work for him while he scrolls Twitter as working?
I think it's actually very possible, at a certain level of the sigma grindset, to start thinking that way; I've definitely met people who seem more concerned with the proverbial "checklist" of things they've done (books read, places traveled, etc) than with the actual experience/memories of doing them in the moment. Incidentally, those were mostly executives, heads of dept and generally high-powered wagies.
Somewhat uncharitably, I think the kind of jobs that involve wrangling other humans and a sort of uh, narrative shaping(?) - from as grand as steering a multibillion dollar company in accordance to your vision, to as mundane as convincing your team of juniors that they have a better deal than they actually got - eventually inevitably spill over into a certain self-deception/delusion; your Gervais-sociopathic powers over social reality gradually turn on yourself and warp your own perception without you realizing it. Not sure if it makes sense but that's the best I can describe it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2hr ago
Entryism can be undone by a second group of entryists doing what you did. To keep an open society traditionally catholic, you’d have to limit the number of nonbelievers allowed in, and certainly keep sharp eyes on those who enter “cathedrals” in your community. Harvard was started as a Christian university. It no longer is, and is oftentimes hostile towards the ideology of its founding.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
2hr ago
To think all the man vs bear discourse was focus testing all along...
2rafa
2hr ago
Even in finance the logic is that it’s always impossible to prevent a willing employee from committing crime and leaking sensitive information, monitoring systems are just set up so that if and when it happens (1) they can trace it to source and (2) convince the regulator they did everything they could and reported it as soon as possible.
2rafa
3hr ago
Even in Quant Finance where everyone is at everyone else's throat all the time
Big funds are smart enough to have 2 year noncompetes for quants though. I’m not sure if this is a California law thing or tech stupidity but there’s no way Zuck would be offering this pay if he couldn’t get these people before Summer 2027.
aldomilyar
3hr ago
Not especially vocal or belligerent people
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
3hr ago
There's a reason why the crazy pay offers are only being made to people who are likely to have IP sensitive information instead of e.g. newly graduating world class machine learning PhDs who are yet to be exposed to the IP at a top lab.
Yes it will backfire if the AI market goes south or even if Meta fails to produce a good product after all this IP theft.
Corvos
3hr ago
Yeah, I have a friend who works in a very sensitive area of banking and it’s a nightmare:
- Four layers of security before he can get to his desk
- Everything on the computer is absolutely locked down and the software is rubbish as is the authentication system
- Constant surveillance from cameras absolutely everywhere
I think other stuff too but I forget the details.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3hr ago
Very well written OP. At what point will chinese advances start affecting the US more than they are now. Previously Anthropics CEO and human job hater Dario Amodei wrote pretty unprofessional things about what the r1 had achieved.
American investment is far higher in AI than china's and has not produced the same level of results for the value. Will we see more expenditure at this point so that labs can double down and make more llms that have billion dollar runs or will they slow down the investments?
Really good post. Thanks for posting this here.
I'm going to see a performance of Hamlet next week. What are the best essays or YouTube lectures to help me understand the play or take an alternate view of it?
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