domain:philippelemoine.com
ResoluteRaven
9m ago
Today's version of "learn to code" is "learn a trade." There is a dearth of electricians, plumbers, carpenters, welders, etc. right now and there are well-paying jobs available for those who choose to enter those fields. The other part of the answer is just that the last generation of coders came of age during a gold rush and now those mines have run dry. Not everyone is born in time to be a 49er.
All the same, the US is probably still the best place in the world to start a business doing whatever you can imagine. Want to breed exotic fruit trees in Florida and sell subscription boxes to rich patrons with adventurous palates? Want to figure out the secret recipe for Roman concrete and start a construction company building docks that don't degrade in seawater? Want to build a fleet of nuclear-powered asteroid mining robots and take control of a functionally infinite supply of rare elements? Want to join the Vesuvius challenge with your superior ancient scroll-deciphering algorithm, become the greatest classicist who ever lived, and then go on tour with your AI buddy Plato reciting all the lost works you discovered to a captive audience? In the rest of the world they ask why, but in America we ask why not?
Think what you will about the migrant caravans knocking at our southern border, but the fact that so many people choose to make that perilous journey, not only from utterly destitute countries, but from China, with its gleaming cyberpunk "cities of the future" and zero crime or homelessness and growing power and influence throughout the world, tells you what the American Dream still means to people.
I don't have any specific advice about long-term prospects. I'm preparing myself mentally for the singularity, societal collapse, and everything in between, and just count myself lucky that I'm around to watch the fulcrum around which the rest of human history will turn. We're all stuck on this crazy ride together and might as well enjoy it.
since this basically never happens.
That's exactly why there is shock factor. It does happen though just infrequently. I watched a true crime about a 14 year old white american boy who murdered his parents in cold blood. If it was a jogger who did it nobody would care because it's just a Tuesday.
You can interpret anything as non-woke if you want.
I'm looking for a woke angle and just don't see it.
There are vast numbers of shocking and unexpected things they could do in the entire field of fiction
Clearly given its popularity there actually aren't. In terms of shock value I think this actually tops forcing a bunch of poor desperate people to compete in death games for money.
TIRM
25m ago
The "experts" in health had a collective point in the era of COVID lockdowns. Very long lockdowns good, enormous riots better. It reached the point of comedy with "racism is the real epidemic".
I'm sure the great majority of cancer and HIV researchers didn't sign some pro-lockdown (but not for riots) statement. They kept quiet while the loud ideologically motivated few spoke collectively for them and advocated for the most ruinous policies of the modern era.
And now, who could have forseen there would be a backlash against all of them collectively? Having so thoroughly burned their credibility and made such bitter enemies out of mainstream Americans.
I think medical research in particular and scientific research in general is valuable and important. That's one reason why it is so horrible that they almost all kept quiet while the experts speaking for them called for schools to be closed for years. They choose a controversial partisan side. And now the other side holds a Federal trifecta.
fauji
54m ago
Now this is a wild theory, but how about a quid pro quo between Macron and Le Pen. Macron takes care of the accusation so that Le Pen is cleared and NF supports the amendment for increasing the presidential term limits.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1hr ago
When government is talking big game about showing a propaganda piece to children, there's no real way to counter it without giving it more oxygen.
It's natural to see people move to subversion. The battle to keep this particular piece of Netflix slop hidden away is already lost.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
It has to be quite exhilarating. All your instincts telling you you're done for, only to escape death without a scratch. I could see myself getting addicted to it.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
I'll take an L on my various "they ran out of mana" takes, clearly if they can make a goofy propaganda flic, and get so much buzz going around it, they still got something left in the tank.
Why anyone here would want to give even more energy to it is beyond me, though.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1hr ago
My favorite example of this is the weird enthusiasm with which Richard Davis loves to shoot himself to promote body armor.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1hr ago
One thing that seems preposterous to me throughout this entire thing is how a 13 year old boy is being treated like an adult. Everybody involved, even the psychologist just acts as if this kid is and ought to be a man who has control over his emotions, a sex life and full control over his actions.
It's bizarre.
I apologise, lemme find the link
edit - cannot find it
I am on a coworking space daily, 6 days a week. Helps a lot, I also track my screen time publicly, post my stuff done there daily. I cannot find where you mentioned me though
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
really isn't pushing some sort of woke angle
You can interpret anything as non-woke if you want. I could interpret the Sequel trilogy of Star Wars as an aristocratic anti-woke vitalist saga if I wanted. The First Order displays massive superiority in engineering and warfare, the decadent new Republic clearly has no clue what they're doing. Democracy simply doesn't work and needs ridiculous feats of luck to prevail over disciplined, efficient authoritarianism. There's a treacherous black guy who displays zero positive qualities and even gets his attempt at a heroic sacrifice cucked away from him. All politics is decided by great men/women of esteemed bloodlines...
But that's not the message from the writers, that's not what they were aiming for and that's not what most people are getting from the story. Adolescence is a Netflix original, not a Little Dark Age edit.
A story framed around a young teen middle-class/non-gang white boy being a murderer is innately woke since this basically never happens. There are vast numbers of shocking and unexpected things they could do in the entire field of fiction, that they choose this particular theme is question-begging.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1hr ago
No idea. It's just something I've seen kicked around on the motte in the past; I'm way too ignorant of Chinese goals to say if that's something they'd want even if offered it.
TIRM
1hr ago
George Floyd was murdered and his murderer is currently in prison. The system worked, to the degree it does for handling murderers after the fact.
I would rather point to Michael Brown of "hands up, don't shoot" fame. He severely beat a cop with his bare hands. Fractured skull while in a car wearing a seat belt level beating. But Mr. Brown failed to take the cop's gun despite trying. Many cops have retention holsters and merely grabbing the grip of their gun and pulling won't get it out. Michael Brown then briefly ran away, but stopped, turned and charged the cop. It was then this cop defensively and justifiably shot an unarmed man to death.
Despite attempted railroading by the Obama administration, this cop escaped criminal punishment for his entirely justified defensive shooting of an unarmed man. Good thing Yudkowsky doesn't have some special veto power to punish this cop regardless. There's a reason we don't just cut knots. We need unruined un-carved-apart basic government institutions.
A friend works on high-danger vehicles (let's say helicopters) as a software engineer. The first thing that happens when they push a software update is that as many engineers as possible get rounded up to take a flight on the helicopter.
Similarly Kawasaki Heavy Industries used to show off their confidence in the precision and reliability of their industrial robots by having the CEO and various others sit on a sofa while their biggest robot moved it around, although that's obviously more staged.
The American dream is still alive and quite strong, and we can see this by the large number of immigrants risking life and limb still trying to get into the country to this day. But for the average American it's a bit more faded and one big reason is pretty simple.
What is it? Life is simply better to begin with. Even the poorer end of rural Americans still tend to have somewhat reliable food, clean water, safe shelter, entertainment that even the kings of old could only dream of (who needs a royal jester when there's millions of them on your TV and computer), good looking comfortable clothing, and medical treatment among many many other things. That's not to say there aren't still problems but the lives of most citizens are substantially better than even many upper class of the 1800s.
You don't have to go to the big city living next to horse manure filled streets with one arm from a factory accident anymore because the alternative is somehow even worse. Despite the gap in wealth increasing substantially the actual life experience has narrowed. Even the average home is getting larger, putting them closer and closer to mansions despite smaller household sizes. There's simply less to aspire towards, and the American dream has always been one of aspiration.
Some of this really just boils down to my personal job security. Where do I go to start making money?
But the the rest boils down to where do my kids go to start making money?
It takes a somewhat adaptive and entrepreneurial mindset to really make major money from nowhere. Any simple answer is liable to go the same way they've always gone, a flood of new workers over time chasing the simple money.
But the good news is, if things go well, we might even need to worry about it too much. Perhaps AI and automation are so incredible that even the poorest of rurals will now benefit from the personal maids and private chefs with very little work done in exchange. The American Dream may dry up completely for citizens because we'll have reached the peak of the mountain and find ourselves nowhere else to climb. (And hopefully not some sort of great war over resources wiping out most humans or some other doomsday scenario).
Philosophically that scares me, how will we find meaning in this life where no jobs are even needed anymore? Can humans handle Paradise? But if we disregard that sort of concern for a second, then the life is better and you will have no need for an American dream any longer because that dream will be the default.
faceh
2hr ago
Perhaps, but look at the exact context of the incident that led to this.
George Floyd died while he was in handcuffs, face to the floor, with a grown man kneeling on top of him. He was 'unarmed' by any fair definition of the word.
A lot of people believe the cop's actions killed him, a lot of people believe it didn't, and say it was probably the drugs. Indeed, the mainstream conservative position is turning into Derek Chauvin deserves a pardon.
The rule proposed by Yudkowsky cuts the knot and just removes any 'bad' cops from the job even if we don't know for sure they're bad cops, so as to restore trust to the police as a whole, where the people who believe ACAB at least see that there's a consequence for the death of 'innocent' (yeah, I know I know) people in police encounters, and the "law and order" people can see that its the simple application of a facially neutral rule that holds the police to a 'high' but not unfair standard.
dr_analog
razorboy
2hr ago
That is an excellent point.
Though he's being held in prison in El Salvador? Because the US said so? And he has no rights as an El Salvsdor citizen himself to demand his release?
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
It's a short, four episode UK TV series about a teenager who murders a classmate. It's being interpreted as a penetrating look at the radicalisation of young boys by social media.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2hr ago
The first episode is pro police brutality. The protagonist of the first two episodes is a police officer, and the daughter corrects her parents when they ask about a complaint. The response is considered justifiable by the police and the child’s own counsel didn’t consider police brutality worthy of attention. The audience takeaway is that this action is justified — all the cool protagonists were involved, and it’s only an angry low class Dad who temporarily wants to file a complaint. Episode two is where we learn about incels and the “red pill” from the detective’s son, and that this is what caused the murder. The accomplice is also clearly depicted as being incel adherent, hence his obsession with looks and asking the detective about whether he got girls.
I have never seen a piece of media that is so clearly a psy-op. The series is designed to (1) make children afraid of ever coming across something online about incels or the red pill by introducing a strong terror response, for instance (a) imagining themself as the boy and having your father watch as the police inspect your penis [this is the director’s intent, hence the focus on the father’s face], (b) making the boy utterly humiliated and demeaned, for instance his peeing himself and crying and then being thrown in jail after being humiliated by a woman, (c) making you think you can be an accomplice also thrown in jail, hence the plot line of the body who was beaten by the black girl [the only time the “authority-coded” characters cry and sympathize is for the black girl]; (2) make women afraid of boys who look or behave like the boy protagonist, by associating the boy with all sorts of evils and shock and humiliation; [3] artificially raise the status of minorities, for instance the black police officer and the south Asian teachers, whereas there’s an ugly white police officer who is intentionally depicted as an ugly older incel
It’s really not about “bullying is bad” at all. That’s what episode three was about. Episode three is about raising the possibility that this is the case, and then the director shooting down the notion psychologically via (1) depicting the boy as aggressive and manipulative and violent, (2) making us unsympathetic to the boy and instead sympathetic to the dominant detective, (3) showing the detective denying any sympathy to the boy at the end and then breaking down, signaling to the viewer to sympathize with the woman and not the boy.
What I just can’t wrap my head around is —
-
is it a foreign country somehow spending, like, billions of dollars in espionage and subterfuge to get this show made and shown to the youth? Why would anyone show this to their own children?
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is it a domestically made psy-op in order to, like, “subjugate” white people in the UK further? Did the government think they were getting too uppity because of the grooming gangs?
Like there is nothing organic about the directorial decisions at all.
Throwaway05
2hr ago
I'm not sure what you mean.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
3hr ago
"Adolescence" isn't like that.
Like what? What is "Adolescence" and what is it supposed to (not) be like?
I think the best 'consequences' are those that follow naturally/intrinsically from failure to be honest. Lying must have a cost, one that cannot be avoided if you lie/defect consistently.
If you're flying a passenger plane, you probably shouldn't have an ejection seat or parachute if your passengers don't have such an escape option. That way you will be extra sensitive to possible danger. The norm that The Captain is the last to leave a sinking ship operates similarly. And you can also surmise that the more responsibility inherent to your position, the more severe the consequences should be for misuse or screwup.
Sometimes you can't make the consequences that immediate but you can still align incentives. Did you (or a company you run) design an airplane? You should be forced to take flights on that particular model of plane regularly for a couple years to showcase your confidence. Boeing should probably take this idea.
For politicians, I'd suggest that they must be forced to endure the direct consequences of rules they impose. If you are supporting criminal justice reform, you should probably be required to live at least part-time in the most crime-ridden districts in your jurisdiction. If you want to drastically increase police authority or make penalties for crimes harsher, you should be subject to 'random' investigations where you will be arrested and tried for ANY crimes discovered. "If you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide," right?
The penalty for publishing bad science or bad statistics, especially if you intentionally hide the stuff that would destroy your conclusions... well that's tricky. We discussed this a while back and I admitted to not having a solution. Prediction markets are a decent mechanism, require scientists to put their money at risk on a market betting on whether their results will replicate or not.
Many institutions seem to have failed or been corrupted by introducing 'false' consequences, where a member who is caught screwing up is 'publicly' reprimanded but privately, they're not punished, or maybe they're even rewarded, and rather than removed from power, they get shuffled off somewhere else in the system and hope that nobody notices.
Partially this is due to a 'circling the wagon' effect, if someone is part of your ingroup you don't want to let the outgroup hurt them so that you, too, can be protected if they come for you. Even a 'good' person would want to insulate their fellows from consequences since they are insulated in return.
But I suspect a lot of it comes from malicious actors FIRST convincing members of a group to remove the factor that actually punishes malfeasance, and then grabbing up as much power as they can for their own purposes... and other bad actors see that there's power to be grabbed and minimal consequences, so it becomes attractive to bad actors.
So the REALLY important factor is that the consequences actually have to filter out bad actors or incompetents from the system entirely, which allows the system to improve via iteration. You can't have consequences that ONLY inflict pecuniary loss, for example, if the person can afford to pay the 'fines' and yet continue to maintain their position of influence and authority.
"Subversion" feels too much like cope to me. Ok, if you could spam the feeds with AI generated clips that take the piss out of the intended message and it's authors, it might work, but deep diving into the film to try to extract a "subverted" message is accepting it's frame from the getgo. You're better off rolling your eyes and moving on.
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