domain:betonit.substack.com
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
37m ago
Maybe his petty squabbles were with a different ideological subset of posters
As someone who caught a few bans from him, I'd say in that sense he was very fair.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
42m ago
imo there should be a blanket policy that mods have to recuse themselves from moderating direct replies to their own posts (just get a different mod to do it).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
43m ago
Er… what is Hlynka-in-theory?
As @ArjinFerman correctly points out he was very liberal in handing out bans. Maybe his petty squabbles were with a different ideological subset of posters, but they were petty squabbles nonetheless.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
53m ago
It is not realistically possible. It would be like firing a very powerful rocket into the air and having it land on a specific crater on the moon with no guidance system or understanding of orbital mechanics. Even if you try to "point" the rocket, it's just not going to happen.
Oh bullshit. Intelligent agents co-align. That is they modify themselves and one another to be more aligned with one another. It's not a rocket that has to be perfectly aimed, it's a billion rockets with rubberbanding.
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
Hlynka-in-theory, as a conceptual perspective, as opposed to Hlynka-in-practice.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
1hr ago
Thanks for the recommendations. I might try all of them minus the natto. And yes Unagi and Uni, won't miss those.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
1hr ago
Yeah, I might change my mind on the onsen if its preceded by a day of winter sport.
campfireSmoresEaten
2hr ago
Reminds me of that Norm Macdonald joke from the 90s.
"Well, earlier this week, actor Marlon Brando met with Jewish leaders to apologize for comments he made on “Larry King Live”. Among them, that “Hollywood is run by Jews.” The Jewish leaders accepted the actor’s apology, and announced that Brando is now free to work again."
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
What makes you think Hlynka wouldn't ban her even sooner? He had an extremely short fuse as a moderator, and his decisions always struck me as arbitrary.
ControlsFreak
2hr ago
There is truly a Hlynka-sized hole in the moderation team. This kind of petty shit is getting worse and worse, and the King's court is really struggling to conceptualize their subjects as agents.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2hr ago
Is there really anything more to Balaji Srinivasan’s whole “network state” idea beyond that tech billionaires should get to build city-states, with groups auditioning online for their patronage; combined with a serious mischaracterization/misunderstanding of Zionism, and Herzl’s role within it?
ControlsFreak
2hr ago
If it's cardio and a motivation problem, just go to something like a spin class. When I was doing it, it was much cheaper than personal training, given that one trainer could manage the entire class of people rather than just one. I used to joke that I found cardio so boring that it was impossible to motivate myself, so the only way I could do it was to have someone basically yelling what I was supposed to do at me.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
2hr ago
I think dogs understand very concretely, and very short causal chains (say 2-3 steps). It can understand “I find thing, my human gives me a treat.” Or “when human makes that one noise, he wants me to sit, and gets angry if I don’t.” But I’ve never met a dog who could reason more than a 2-3 step solution. A dog won’t fetch a bunch of sticks to make a raft or a bridge.
Humans probably have a much larger causal chain understanding, but even then, it’s not infinite. We can reason causes and build machines, but beyond a certain complexity, it’s too much for the median human to understand.
A dog couldn’t trap you in your home because it’s simply not smart enough to understand or anticipate the moves you’d make to get away. It thinks “I go out the front door for my walk, so if I block the front door human can’t leave.” But it can’t anticipate side doors. It can’t anticipate you bribing them with a treat, it can’t understand what a key is. So you can easily leave.
Humans, with an IQ of 115 or so, are in the same situation with a true AGI. We know how we think, we know what we’d do, but the AGI will be so much smarter that it will be able to work around whatever “controls” we stick in its brain.
do_something
3hr ago
fun conspiracy website
Is there really nothing wrong with Canadian government to the point that most problematic part is cute but almost certainly false story?
I went to see Civil War to a small local movie theater with friends yesterday. It was mostly a confusing experience.
Spoilers:
I knew that the movie would try to present an "second American civil war" without trying to get too political - a befuddling decision itself - but the movie doesn't really commit to any narrative.
Is the WF justified in rebelling against the authoritarian president? Maybe? They vaguely indicate that the president is bad (he's on a third term!), but the loyalist forces are not shown doing anything particularly bad (unless you count that fed riot cops are tetchy in a situation where a suicide bomber might strike at any moment), and all the war crimes are committed by WF or the presumably WF-affliated Hawaiian shirt irregulars who execute surrendered uniformed troops. But since there's no weight to either side it's not really a "war is hell, both sides are bad" thing either.
Are they trying to portray Wagner Moura's character as someone who is doing a toxic masculinity? Maybe? Is it bad that the one community has decided to go on conducting life as normal expect with snipers on roofs? Maybe? The clearest narrative ark is the Kirsten Dunst character being on a suicide run after "losing her faith in journalism" (lol) and, in the end, willing her photography mojo to Cailee Spaeny figuratively through the lens of a camera, but since we've established that photojournalism is basically useless for anything besides taking cool photos and seeking thrills, we should we care?
The only scene with actual tension is the one with Jesse Plemons and his racist militia, and that's partly because Jesse Plemons is a great actor (some said during Breaking Bad that Jesse Plemons is a dollar store Matt Damon, I argue that eventually we'll see Matt Damon properly as a dollar store Jesse Plemons), but also in large part because these guys at least seem to hold an actual ideology and be actually doing things that happen in actual civil wars, ie. running a death squad on ethnic/religious basis. I've seen some indicate that the whole rest of the movie is basically a long intro and outro to the Jesse Plemons scene.
It was probably a good idea for them to make a war movie about reporters. Since many journalists are a obsessed with the idea of their social relevance, getting 5 stars in magazines doesn't seem particularly hard, especially since I don't think the movie was advertised as concentrating as heavily on journalism as it was.
2.5/5, 2 for some cool shots and for not being too long (though you could have easily cropped out half a hour by cutting back on some early stuff and the unnecessarily long DC fight scene) and 0.5 extra for the Jesse Plemons scene.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3hr ago
military reserves who in practice just steal the budget
Only until there's an actual conflict.
I'm reminded of this 2020 Los Angeles Times piece: "California once had mobile hospitals and a ventilator stockpile. But it dismantled them"
In 2006, citing the threat of avian flu, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced the state would invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a powerful set of medical weapons to deploy in the case of large-scale emergencies and natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires and pandemics.
“In light of the pandemic flu risk, it is absolutely a critical investment,” he told a news conference. “I’m not willing to gamble with the people’s safety.”
The state, flush with tax revenue, soon sank more than $200 million into the mobile hospital program and a related Health Surge Capacity Initiative to stockpile medicines and medical gear for use in outbreaks of infectious disease, according to former emergency management officials and state budget records.
But the ambitious effort, which would have been vital as the state confronts the new coronavirus today, hit a wall: a brutal recession, a free fall in state revenues — and in 2011, the administration of a fiscally minded Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, who came into office facing a $26-billion deficit.
And so, that year, the state cut off the money to store and maintain the stockpile of supplies and the mobile hospitals. The hospitals were defunded before they’d ever been used.
Much of the medical equipment — including the ventilators, critical life-saving tools that are in short supply in the current pandemic — was given to local hospitals and health agencies, former health officials said. But the equipment was donated without any funding to maintain them. The respirators were allowed to expire without being replaced.
Together, these two programs would have positioned California to more rapidly respond as its COVID-19 cases exploded. The annual savings for eliminating both programs? No more than $5.8 million per year, according to state budget records, a tiny fraction of the 2011 budget, which totaled $129 billion.
Better to have and not need, than need and not have, after all.
And as for idle courtiers, they may have been individually of little use, but they generally came from accomplished families; thus, if nothing else, they represented a reserve of quality genes, in a way a modern welfare bum most certainly does not.
And, of course, today’s monarchies spend gobs on welfare
Which monarchies are you thinking of here? Are you counting the monarchies-in-name-only that are democracies plus a powerless figurehead? Or are you talking about Middle East petro-states distributing shares of oil revenues to the citizenry, much as we do here in Alaska via the Permanent Fund Dividend?
Neither Bhutan nor Eswatini seem to be particularly generous welfare states — and is there anyone in Monaco poor enough to need one?
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
3hr ago
I spent a good part of saturday clearing dandelions out of my parents-in-law's small garden. Not a lot of surface area, but I ended up with buckets full of roots, stems and leaves, and my daughter got to play copiously with the white fluffy seed things. Dandelions are great. Fun to look at, fun to play with, fun to commit localized genocide upon, and they always come back.
So it's not just in the city.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3hr ago
Given the (pretty good, IMHO) case Michael Lind lays out in this Tablet piece about how demographic trends still strongly favor utter dominance by the Democratic Party, what can people on the right do, then? Note, I'm not asking what the Republican party does, which is move left to capture moderate voters so to remain electorally viable (per the median voter theorem and Duverger's law); I'm asking what voters who care about the policies that would thus be abandoned, as opposed to the "politics as sports" folks who are happy just so long as "their team" beats the other guy.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3hr ago
The inciting incident was supposedly a Spanish captain boasting that Christian missionaries were but a prelude to Iberian conquest.
Well, there was also the Shimabara rebellion, which seriously cranked up enforcement of the ban, and of sakoku more generally.
RedRegard
3hr ago
By the time Christians conquered Japan in 1945 they didn't really care to convert defeated populations anymore.
Early attempts by the Jesuits to convert Nippon led to a freakout over national security and the expulsion of the Spanish, though not the Portuguese, and there was also the extreme suppression of any lingering Christian belief. The inciting incident was supposedly a Spanish captain boasting that Christian missionaries were but a prelude to Iberian conquest. Japan successfully maintained its near-isolation for the next few centuries.
But the Abrahamic religions are downright viral.
jkf
4hr ago
The big problem is that Young Pierre Trudeau and Young Castro could easily pass for brothers.
One could just shift the conspiracy a generation backwards I suppose -- do we really know what Pierre's mother was up to?
Was he ESL? Otherwise, wtf you don't even need to have heard the word if you're familiar with English. Camp with a prefix that means to be in or engage in, and the suffix ment makes it a noun. I've only ever heard the word in stories about protesters and combattants, and never heard the definition. I'm basing this on context clues and being fluent in English. Is there some nuance I've been missing this entire time?
Because, uh, it feels like the only way lacking that level of English comprehension should be possible while still becoming a Sophomore at any college that fancies itself prestigious is if the sophomore in question is ESL. I guess they could be there for athletics or similar?
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