domain:putanumonit.com
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
15m ago
Bridesprices are Lindy(as is borrowing from Shylock to afford it)
Brideprice is negative (i.e. dowry) in the vast majority of cultures with strong monogamy norms. In the particular case of cisHajnal culture, the wedding-related flow of funds is traditionally from the bride's extended family to the newly-formed nuclear family.
sohois
17m ago
I'm not 2rafa, but I would argue similarly on immigration. The advantage that the US has with immigration is that all their illegal immigration is Hispanic. They're not all people you would want in your nation, but the US has already integrated a huge number of them. There aren't big push factors coming that will massively bump numbers up in future, and in legal immigration the US system works pretty well, largely creaming off the best from the rest of the world. The US has relatively limited welfare which means most illegals are in some sense productive, or at least not active drains outside of the criminal elements. The US is also massive and very decentralized. Some states and cities will become swamped and turn into third-world entities, but there will still be dozens of productive urban areas with low levels.
In Europe, illegal immigration is coming from Africa and the middle east. These immigrants are much lower quality. They are poorly integrated, many going into ethnic enclaves and reigniting old tribal conflicts with other groups of immigrants, to say nothing of the dangers of Muslim immigration. They are attracted by generous welfare which they are increasingly exploiting, adding nothing to the host nations. Numbers are large and likely only to grow larger as their home regions increasingly destabilize. I can't speak for legal immigration for continental Europe, but at least in the UK they've somehow ended up importing millions of terrible unproductive immigrants in addition to the illegal flows.
Structurally, each individual nation is also poorly positioned to weather these floods. Productivity is often focused in a single primate city, and once you lose a London, Paris, Brussels, Milan, etc. you've lost most of the nation's growth. Individual areas can do little to fight against the waves. And all this is to say nothing of the respective strengths of the economies
Every Western society is now more urbanized and educated, plus there's porn, video games and everything else people blame for the fertility decline. It's going to be much harder to do anything today than in the 50s or 60s. Implicit, unspoken social technology that worked then has now broken or been broken.
I mean, think about what was happening in the 50s, what caused it then? A prolonged period of wages growth would certainly help but there are plenty of countries with huge wages growth today and cratering fertility. There's no reason to expect that to result in success. In Sweden they'd just come up with the welfare state. We still have welfare states and there don't seem to be much gains to be made there in terms of fertility despite huge amounts of money sloshing around.
We're left with other aspects of the 50s and early 60s that are a harder sell for the general public.
The golden age of eugenics. Mad Men-style sexism. Nuclear family as standard. The mindset and assumptions that put all of these into practice. Plus an overt, explicit understanding of what the goal is, precisely what we want and why rather than free market fundamentalism. Something besides treating the fate of nations like inexplicable changes in the weather, to be observed and adjusted to rather than altered and improved. That's what we're missing I think.
P-Necromancer
34m ago
1 million tokens is a lot! (Gemini 2.0 had 2 million, but good luck getting it to function properly when it's that full). That is 750k words. All of Harry Potter is just over a million.
You know, I hadn't really internalized just how big this is. You got me curious about it. I uploaded something I'm working on -- 240k words, which, with Gemini 2.5 Pro, came out to about 400k tokens.
Honestly, I'm impressed that it works at all and very impressed how fast it works. Thought I'd at least have time to get up and get a drink, but it was already responding to my question inside 30 seconds. Just being able to throw compute at (essentially) reading a book feels magical, like nine women making a baby in a month.
Unfortunately, that's where my praise ends. It... has a general idea what happened in the text, certainly. I wouldn't give it much more than that. I'm used to 2.5 being impressively cogent, but this was pretty bad -- stupider than initial release GPT 4, I want to say, though it's been long enough I might be misremembering. If you ask it concrete questions it can generally give you something resembling the answer, complete with quotes, which are only ~30% hallucinations. Kind of like talking to someone who read the book a few months ago whose memory is getting a bit hazy. But if you ask it to do any sort of analysis or synthesis or speculation, I think it'd lose out to the average 10-year-old (who'd need OOMs longer to read it, to be fair).
(Also, the web front end was super laggy; I think it might have been recounting all the tokens as I typed a response? That feels like too stupid an oversight for Google, but I'm not sure what else it could be.)
Not sure where the disconnect is with the medical textbooks you say you tried. Maybe the model has more trained knowledge to fall back on when its grasp on the context falls short? Or you kept to more concrete questions? As of now I think @Amadan's semantic compression approach is a better bet -- whatever you lose in summarization you make up in preserving the model's intelligence at low context.
(Royal Road makes it so you can't export an epub of your own fic without paying, and without that option, I'd be doing a lot of copying and pasting)
FanFicFare can do this for free. It's also available as a calibre plugin, if you want a gui.
Though, bizarrely, Gemini (at least via Google AI Studio) doesn't support epub uploads. Concerns about appearing to facilitate the upload of copyrighted material? Kind of dumb considering epub is an open format and they allow PDF, but I could see how it might be spun in a lawsuit. Anyway, RTF should work, but didn't for me. Eventually got something workable out of pandoc:
pandoc -f epub -t markdown_strict-smart-all_symbols_escapable --wrap=none
Now we hit the real point of contention. Can the average American afford their own apartment, own a car, and pay for an adult lifestyle?
No - the question is "Can the 30th percentile 20something American man afford these things?" Half the population being too poor to date is a failure condition, telling young men to spend their 20s careermaxing and start dating in their 30s is incompatible with the cisHajnal marriage pattern, and the reversed gender pay gap for young childless people makes things worse.
cae_jones
54m ago
The upper class in Qing China had some ritual involving a square of white silk, which was supposed to come out bloodstained as proof. Or so I've read in a historical fiction which may or may not be accurate (in which the newly weds deliberately faked the results so they wouldn't have to have sex the first night).
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
57m ago
Speak for yourself!
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
58m ago
Yep, I link people to that book all the time.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
58m ago
No, she has to be white or at least east Asian.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
Einstein said that with hindsight being a plumber would have been a better day job than being a patent clerk because it makes you tired in different ways, so you are more able to do physics in the evenings.
Not sure if he was true, and of course it relies on plumbers making enough to put food on the table in 40 hrs a week (then, as now, not a problem for plumbers specifically, but an issue for a lot of blue-collar jobs that would otherwise make good day jobs for struggling intellectuals).
georgioz
1hr ago
As other people point out, it's unlikely that an african war will cause a truly large migration surge to the US
This is just variation of "everything will be as it was so far". Syrian war caused mass immigration, despite other wars such as Iraq-Iran war or any number of other wars not causing the same. When the first Congo War happened, the country had around 40 million people mostly in incredible poverty of $1 per day. There were no cell phones, these people could not afford to pay $10k to get into US or Europe. This changed rapidly in 21st century.
No, african famine is likely to cause migration surges
This has it backwards. What truly caused WW1 in Europe was a population boom. German population increased by 50% between 1860s and 1910s. Russian population increased from 70 million to 170 million in the same timeframe. France had almost no increase from 37 to 39 million. Of course it caused pressure on resources, including multilateral Thucydides traps.
What most people do not realize is that up until colonization, Africa was malaria ridden hellhole of death and despair. In 1900 the whole population of Africa was 140 million, which was less than Russia alone. By 2050 the population of Africa is projected to grow from 1.5 billion currently to 2.5 billion - an order of magnitude larger than EU or US population. Of course this growth will cause tensions - as it did in every place and every historical period. The West does not know what will hit them if a continent of 2.5 billion people gets caught in a war unleashing other horses of apocalypse in conjunction. And in my estimation it is not if, but when. And that when is measured in years or decades, within our lifetimes.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
I'm strongly suspect that Obama claimed to be foreign born in his application to Columbia, and I would guess he was accepted in part because of that status.
Ridiculous. US-born blacks who can keep up with Ivy League-level classes are harder to find than overseas blacks who can, and therefore more valuable to Ivy League admissions offices.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
If a game gets worse when you play the meta then it's just a shallow, badly designed game.
David Sirlin's Playing to Win is the canonical essay on this point. His day job was balancing console fighting games, but he also develops viciously competitive two player board games as a side gig.
Do you think that the school does that in 12 + 4 years? The sciences need comparatively few things to really grok to be able to figure out everything else. Physics is 3 pages of formulas, inorganic chemistry is 2, math and geometry ditto (honestly you shouldn't bother remembering theorems - you should be able to quickly prove them on the spot when needed). I was able to read and write at age of 5 - and i was hardly among the most gifted. To know programming you only need to understand recursion, pointers, boolean algebra, hash tables, monads and O(n). That takes an afternoon. I think you really overestimate how much does it take to be mediocre at something - and mediocrity is what schools aims for. And kids are pretty good at investing in stuff that really interests them and becoming gods. Check games.
When people were having problems with integrals in Math 101 in college - I was just explaining to them - it is just the area of a function. Guess what - they understood it in 15 min.
Literature - change the books that are studied and kids will read them and fast.
The school is a combination of daycare and job program. This is why it is so inefficient.
For some reason unknown modern society severely underestimates kids intellect and overestimates their wisdom.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
The "underrepresented major" type, think arch and anth at Oxbridge (iirc) or music at MIT
This doesn't work in the Ivy league, where you are admitted without committing to your major. It is a big deal at Oxbridge, probably the last surviving rich-kid backdoor.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
I think our society does still need a basically aristocratic class of people who are afforded the luxury of focusing purely on pursuits of the mind. The problem of ensuring that they’ve interfaced enough with the real world to prevent them from spiraling into the delusions of Pure Political Theory™️ is a very real one, but I’m not convinced that making them flip burgers or pick strawberries for a year is the optimal way to achieve that end.
Back in the day, elite career paths included an early training job that was supposed to force you into contact with the reality of working-class life in a way which reflected your status as a potential future ruler. Leadership with training wheels, effectively. The canonical example was sending young officers into the field with an experienced platoon sergeant, but something similar was happening in old-school corporate life where the wet-behind the ears graduate management trainee would be given a shift manager role in their first or second rotation where they would work alongside an experienced foreman.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
(but then why have representatives in the first place?)
The good answer used to be "because the infrastructure doesn't exist to do direct democracy on a greater-than-city scale".
The okay answer with major caveats is "because unitary executives are more effective at getting shit done than a Roman system". This obviously only applies to the executive branch.
The bad answer which I suspect is like 80% of why we still have parliaments is "there is no procedure in most nations for abolishing a parliament without the parliament's own consent, which 100% of its members are strongly incentivised not to give".
aldomilyar
1hr ago
Why would I want to let my gifted kid nerdsnipe themselves into a track with likely minimal real world applications so they can then be runover by academic hiring affirmative action after accumulating their paper qualifications?
pbmonster
1hr ago
Dota is arguably one of the multiplayer games that deals best with this - just by cranking the complexity up so high, it takes the min-maxers weeks or sometimes months after a patch until the meta has settled completely. And even then, individual disposition/skill can still make non-meta strategies very viable, because the game is overall pretty well balanced.
Now, you can argue the game was more fun 20 years ago, when played with 9 friends sitting in the same room, with nobody having any idea what they were doing... but that's probably nostalgia.
RenOS
something is wrong
1hr ago
You need to distinguish some things.
First, you need to treat technological and social progress separately. Our civilization has been steadily progressing technologically for several centuries at this point, but it has been one of the biggest lies/self-delusions that the social changes happening alongside were consistent improvements. Some were, some weren't, and mostly it was just a change in the trade-off curve the ramifications of which we still probably haven't fully experienced and can't appropriately judge.
Second, the current state and the pace & direction of change; I agree that western society increasingly seems sclerotic, overregulated and overinterdependent. Nevertheless, the peak we have reached is pretty damn impressive, and even rome took centuries to fully break down, with golden ages lasting decades, long after its eventual fate seemed sealed.
Third, private and public. The reason why conservatives lean happier is that they are, on average, grillers. If you just ignore the public dysfunction, pretend there is nothing you can do about it and focus on ways to improve your own life, it's actually quite easy to get by and be happy. Imo this is the reason why civilizations peak; After reaching some level of prosperity, it's much easier to just pay off dysfunction to not bother you instead of fighting against it. At first it's a great deal, since in % terms it's very little, and there is a lot of inertia about not falling into dysfunction staving off the bad incentives. But what is incentived, grows, and eventually it's "suddenly" substantial, but now so many people depend on it that there is now way of getting rid of it without a revolution. Usually the society is still overall quite prosperous, so they just try to limit the growth at this point, or if you have really competent & conscientious people in charge they may even manage to find a way to slowly whittle down the dependency a bit. But it's a lot of work for almost no return for yourself, while frequently making lots of unnecessary enemies. So, the smartest and most competent at best actively avoid politics & just improve things in small localized ways, or at worst take advantage of the situation to redirect more stuff their way while paying off the important interest groups.
pbmonster
2hr ago
Can you elaborate?
Do you really think you can take a random sample of 12 year olds from "playing outside all day" to "enough reading/writing/arguing/calculating to do productive work in the modern economy" - in 4 years?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2hr ago
MayorofOysterville
2hr ago
Most Western Democracies aren't electing either far left or far right extremists mostly the policies stay the same. Wasn't Biden a steady moderate elected by a skittish electorate? It didn't seem to have much effect even if he wasn't demonized the way Trump or Obama were.
Adoption has changed a lot over time, as multiple people here can testify. In times of war and scarcity, there will usually be more well-adjusted orphans than families wanting to take them in, so if you adopt you're likely to have a good experience.
However currently families wanting to adopt far, far outnumber well-adjusted orphans. It's not rare that you have to wait years, and even then you'll more likely than not end up with problematic kids. We know a couple who waited and eventually gave up because the only cases they got offered were so horrible that they didn't think they'd be able to handle that.
One of my colleagues helps out those foster families willing to take in the hard cases that are the majority and it's just sad. Teens with the mental development of a three year old are among the easiest. One girl just doesn't sleep at night, screaming for most of it. Others are so heavily physically disabled that they need help with everything.
Maybe you get lucky and the kid you adopted with fetal alcohol syndrome will turn out mostly fine except for minor develpomental deficits. Maybe you get super-lucky and an actually healthy kid somehow finds its way into the foster system. But generally it's hard and thankless and more likely than not, you will get kids that are dependent on support for life. You probably will not make a big difference, either.
Adoptions from the third world work a bit differently, especially from asia, but this can be very expensive.
More options
Context Copy link