domain:philippelemoine.com
hydroacetylene
2m ago
Monks use the cell phones, automobiles, internet, etc as called for in their work. Monastic cloisters are at least partially wired for electricity, have normal plumbing, etc.
A vow of poverty does not mean ‘can’t use technology’, it means ‘can’t personally own things’.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5m ago
Essentially, this guy is complaining about the fact that he needs a couple of retired/semi-retired 50-65 year old guys to come out of retirement to found a transformers company and is complaining that their salary demand is... slightly under $500k? Of course, if you are at all familiar with the mid-high end engineering work environment this is not at all new to you. The thought of hiring a 55 year old is offensive to most people in hiring. The thought that they are just as important as a founder with seed money, probably moreso. So even though this startup cost is actually a drop in the bucket, it seems unteneble to this fellow (who is representative).
That's hilarious. "I believe I have a market of $50B, but to get started I need to hire one knowledgable retired guy who won't get out of bed for less than $0.0005B. What should I do, what should I do?"
Sometimes there are actual shortages (e.g. there's 4 qualified people in the world and 10 companies looking to hire them), where upping your price just results in a bidding war. But in this case it looks like it isn't; they just have to convince one of a number of middle-aged guys to get off his fishing boat for a while.
He goes on to say:
Huge red flag for investors (I don’t yet make the rules), basically they take it as a synthetic judgement around alignment: The person is going to own 15-35% of the company. Are they going to be willing to work hard, work fast, and succeed?
LOL, no, they're not there to "work hard, work fast". If you know what you're doing, you're not hiring them for that. They're not the Wozniak or Jobs and certainly not the Randy Wigginton or Bruce Tognazzini, they're the Mike Markulla there to provide "adult supervision" for your younger guys who are doing the "work hard, work fast" thing.
MayorofOysterville
6m ago
As far as I can tell yes. But he'd likely say that game theory would eliminated the rape gangs as women would choose to be "owned" and thus safe from the rape gangs that would target "unowned" women. Thus eliminating rape and thus creating utopia.
hydroacetylene
7m ago
Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary both went through phases of industrializing without that much added social liberalism; of course they lost a war so we can’t see how the experiment would’ve turned out.
2rafa
16m ago
In postwar South Africa and Rhodesia, it was often noted by visitors that the (white) working class lived better lives than even the upper-middle class in Europe and North America. Even a mailman had a pool, a gardener/pool boy, a nanny, a maid. You would walk down a jacaranda-lined street in Salisbury, immaculately swept, the kind of place that would house doctors and bankers anywhere else, and the average resident would be like a high school teacher or the guy calling out departures at the railroad station.
Of course the foundation of that material affluence was cheap black labor. And it was that very labor that prevented - when the time came - white South Africans from migrating to the Western Cape (where they might have been a permanent supermajority). After all, in that scenario, they’d live just like other Europeans in European-majority countries, and to have a maid and a pool boy and a nanny in Denmark you need to be (well into, the threshold won’t cut it) the 99th percentile of income.
The Thais, of course, don’t have that specific racial hierarchy (although the Chinese, like everywhere in SEA, are still a market dominant minority), and so labor costs are mediated by actual supply and demand without artificial restriction. The best way to think of the Thai economy is as a highly unequal middle income country in which the top 5% are relatively affluent and everyone else is relatively poor. In a way, that makes it like Brazil but with a lower crime rate (for the usual reasons). Things are cheap in Thailand because labor costs are low. The rest of the story has been discussed elsewhere below.
aiislove
16m ago
I love Cajun food. I used to have a Cajun stepdad, he sucked but his cooking was the best. Thai people remind me so much of Cajuns.
Standard Japanese portion sizes are smaller than Western portions, typically, but it's very easy to add extra rice, extra noodles, extra fried chicken, extra broth, extra eggs, extra whatever you want, at every restaurant.........
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
21m ago
I often see people bemoan the seemingly small number of American citizen engineers at tech companies, but I can say that of my friend group going through a highly-ranked engineering school, if anything most of the eligible candidates have ended up working in defense or adjacent spaces.
"Seemingly" is doing some work here -- there's a fair number of second-generation American (dot)-Indians and Chinese at tech companies. Though an ethnonationalist wouldn't count them.
Most of these places keep a low profile: "don't put that you work here currently on LinkedIn" is something I've heard, um, a few times, and few at Lockheed are bragging about GitHub followers or making the Hacker News front page.
A lot of engineers in tech are mostly unaware of this market for various reasons -- it only accepts citizens, it feeds largely from different schools (including my own alma mater), it's secretive. There's definitely some movement from the defense market to the open market, but of course the people who move don't talk much about their former jobs. I moved out of it before Big Tech got Big, so I don't know for sure, but I bet pay is a lot less. A lot more bureaucracy too, though the big tech companies are working on solving that.
aiislove
28m ago
Yes, actually that was a point I wanted to make and forgot about. The cost of labor is so high in rich countries that the quality of life for the middle class and the rich are degraded. The luxury of having freshly prepared food made with complicated processes that are ubiquitous in Thailand- affordable even to the people who make this food themselves!- is lacking in today's rich countries.
You put it a bit more uncharitably, I don't think there's anything wrong with people being able to afford to live cheaply if they want. In America we prop this lifestyle up with welfare schemes- why is that more dignified?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
28m ago
Ctrl f "social" bro
It's got science in the name.
hydroacetylene
29m ago
Ripping off rich westerners by local standards can still be very cheap by rich westerner standards if you’re a poor country dependent on tourism.
hydroacetylene
31m ago
I mean, I eat Cajun(basically meat- usually cheap, fatty cuts- and rice slathered in fatty sauce) food with French and Mexican influences. But my portion sizes are normal, so I stay at a normal weight.
I’ve heard about Japanese portion sizes, I suspect this is what happens there as well.
dev
33m ago
Here is my compromise for the United States:
- Give up to 100,000 provisional green cards a year based on getting a three-year contract to work at an annual salary at least 2X the American average income (something like $250k) If more demand than that, the visas go to the highest bidder. Also, give no more than 10,000 to a single country of origin.
- Give up to 50,000 provisional green cards to youth under the age 20 who score the highest on an old-school SAT test, test to be taken in the United States or a consulate at a cheating proof facility.
- Give up to 100,000 provisional green cards to people of any age who score the highest on a battery of scientific, engineering, and mathematics tests.
This replaces all H1bs, student visas, OTPs, diversity visas, etc. If the worker brings their wife and children that comes out of the quota. They cannot bring their uncles and brothers and nephews.
Now I know, the general response is "because those jobs should go to the locals!" but the thing is, talented local people already have jobs. If they're hard working and capable, then they're mostly already doing their part in achieving Y (or doing something else in another industry) because companies want them.
There is a vicious cycle here where we encourage native born Americans to enter the college->fake job pipeline, then we bring in immigrants to do the real work. This suppresses the wages for the real work, which creates all the more incentive for a native born American to get some kind of fake patronage job, and so forth. Of course, then the immigrants have children and we tell them they need to go to college and get a fake job, and thus we need even more immigrants and the entire thing becomes a ponzi scheme.
hydroacetylene
34m ago
So you miss cheap servants? I suggest relocating full time to South Africa or Brazil or something. Rich countries pay their service workers well enough for it to be out of reach of the upper middle class, except maybe as an occasional splurge.
aiislove
47m ago
I don't have a strong position on this so random thoughts:
- Japan makes you walk. I regularly travel between countries and when I look at my health app on my phone I can see exactly when I arrive and leave Japan because the steps taken in Japan are significantly higher than any other country I spend time in. The cities are set up such that you must walk far and wide. Train stations are large and mazelike. (This may not apply if you have a car in Japan- I have never driven in Asia.)
- Japan is the most difficult country I've visited to eat healthy in. Fresh fruits and vegetables are very expensive. (Yes there's cheap fruit/veggie stores but you have to seek them out.) It is the hardest country to find roasted meats without added fats in. Cuts of meat that are popular are very fatty. If you like seafood you will have a much easier time eating healthy (though you'll still be dodging breading and mayo.) I have struggled with my weight my whole life, the endless bowls of pasta and sandos and uber processed snacks everywhere are hard for me to resist.
- Asian food in general tends to be less calorically dense than western foods, and spiciness has a mild laxative effect that reduces calories slightly as well. I think these two are slightly less applicable to Japanese food vs. Chinese or Thai cuisines, but the effect is still there if you're comparing rice to baguette or more calorically dense western foods.
- I believe there's a social effect on people's sizes as well. I had a black friend in America who is overweight, lose quite a bit of weight, and then she said she felt like people could beat her up. She's since gained weight back. I don't really blame her. Being around bigger people does make me want to be a bigger person, while being around smaller people in Asia makes me feel like I don't need to eat as much. People in america in the 50s and 60s were much smaller as well, the fattening of america was a sort of arms race, and why I don't think ozempic is going to be as influential as people believe- some people want extra weight to throw around in their lives. In some places you don't need it.
MayorofOysterville
47m ago
Yeah I really want to know this too. It'd be wild if he was 80 and still using terms like "facefag" on the internet.
pbmonster
50m ago
For most of my use, the context window is more than large enough. I use it mainly to prevent context poisoning.
If a LLM goes down an unhelpful path (it locks onto information that is either too specific and in the wrong direction, or to general, or I catch it hallucinating), I find it very important for performance to remove those tokens from the context entirely. Saying "no, that's not what I mean. Let's go more towards X" is far inferior to just purging the previous answer and directly supplying X.
MayorofOysterville
52m ago
I realize I failed to elaborate and probably should have cut that date or expanded on it. But my initial reason for using those decades specifically was that the US was still above TFR despite that.
tkt
1hr ago
Japanese food is extremely dated in nutrition and food trends. It is so to such a degree that I suspect it’s a sort of fashion or cliquish refusal to update rather than a lack of knowledge or interest. (South Korea next door has a very modern and nutritious food culture- eating healthy is significantly easier there than in Japan.)
On personal anecdote this feels kind of more of an indictment of the modern Western nutrition and food knowhow, whatever that consists of. I spent an year there, and basic Japanese university cafeteria chow + restaurant food had me lose 15kg, going from overweight to borderline normal, in a few months, without any special effort on my part. Like, a bowl of rice + some toppings would have me totally lose any sense of hunger for the rest of the day while keeping me energetic and alert (and doing more exercise than ever since), and I'd have to consciously try and eat more than that. Seems to work fine on the native population too.
Jiro
1hr ago
This is because of how political groups in one country feed on political groups in another.
That's why Japan has much less of this sort of thing. It's really hard to have influence when the country is thousands of miles away and speaks mostly Japanese.
MayorofOysterville
1hr ago
I really disagree with that. I think most of Christendom, as in practicing believers, just want a republic with a more conservative baseline.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr ago
I'm reminded of the Monkey Dust "Jerry Brickhammer" parody of a fictional Hollywood production of Diary of Anne Frank with all the Nazis as Englishmen and the Jews as literally Irish, but it seems to have disappeared from the Internet along with a lot of other Monkey Dust material.
aiislove
1hr ago
I haven't heard that before but that makes sense. I've noticed poorer countries will often have nice, clean airports to give a good impression as well.
MayorofOysterville
1hr ago
Modern media sure, but Indian media obviously has different standards. I can't say I particularly mind it, Indian movies like that are just over the top about everything. Adult cartoons in the West still have those but they've mainly fallen off. Blood diamond and Lord of War had pretty over the top depictions of Africa but movies set in African civil wars just aren't that common these days.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1hr ago
I wonder what we believe today that those in the future will find laughable.
This was true back then but now we know the bible is trash when it comes to historical accuracy.
If you checked out of scholarship in the 80s, I can see why you would think so. That is a less defensible sentiment today. Fifty years ago, people got away with saying that King David is a myth, now we have his coins. Excavations have revealed architecture described in the New Testament that has been hidden since the 2nd century. Where it gets hazy is where you would expect it to be hazy - what archaeological evidence would you expect the Exodus to leave behind? There is some evidence, nothing conclusive, but I wouldn't expect there to be given the short time length of the event and the amount of evidence nomadic peoples typically leave behind.
But that doesn't hold many problems for the Traditional Catholic, as the traditional view has viewed the Joshua and Conquest in an allegorical sense. Joshua as a Christ figure, demonstrates the importance of eradicating evil entirely and giving it no quarter. A large part of reading the Bible is knowing what the genre is of the book you're reading.
To the Christian claims, the important thing to get historically accurate is the Gospels, and the Gospels were written in the genre of Ancient Biography. They at least tried to get it right, and there is increasing evidence that they were written early and by eyewitnesses..
All attempts to date the Gospel after AD 70 rely in the logic of, "Well, we know Jesus wasn't God, so He can't have predicted the fall of the Temple ahead of time (never mind there were other people predicting the fall of the Temple in the decade leading up to it,) and so the Gospels all had to be written after AD 70." And dating the Gospels before AD 70 is more like, "The Gospels tell their readers to do things at the Temple, and that is a weird prescription if the Temple is already destroyed. And Acts leads up the climatic trial of Paul in Rome but doesn't cover it, which would seem to indicate that it was completed before his execution. And look here, and look there, at all these weird coincidences that only make sense if they were written in the 50s and 60s."
Most of these don't hold because we proved actual infinity isn't logically contradictory.
Which proof do you think relies on actual infinity being logically contradictory? St. Thomas famously believed we couldn't prove the universe was finite through just philosophy, and his Cosmological argument does not require the universe to had had a beginning. Maybe you're most exposed to Kalam's argument, which is impossible to defend on pure philosophical grounds, though people try to defend it still with a combo of scientific evidence and philosophy.
There's also substantial movement inside the region so it's not purely a matter of Thai labor being cheaper. It's very likely supplemented with Cambodians, Indonesians etcetera so that even the Thai locals find the privileges surprisingly affordable.
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