2rafa
13hr ago
It’s the right amount, really. Someone on another small corner of the internet mentioned this as one of those few small, good places a few months ago. Someone in the comments mentioned a few good users. Would you want more?
Meaning because they can be individually guided to do anything? Don’t they tend to have issues with fine motor control? Not just cognitively but also physically in terms of how it expresses itself in hands and limbs.
2rafa
13hr ago
On Twitter and Reddit, maybe. Here, maybe not? The Culture War thread gets 1500 comments a week and 20,000 views. Presumably most of those are posters checking on their own threads, the average regular might individually reload it 10-50 times in a week. We definitely have some prolific lurkers here, but I doubt the ratio is close to 100 for every poster, or even 10.
2rafa
20hr ago
I think a lot of adults who work professionally in nightclub management and operations (almost all of them, really) start as promoters. Being able to consistently get people to show up is the single central requirement when starting a club, and traditional lenders (even those who are willing to lend to restaurants and bars) balk at clubs because of their compliance issues, almost universal ties to drugs and organized crime, extreme failure rate and high likelihood of being defrauded even if the business is profitable. The investors are therefore almost always other club owners or investors, or dumb rich kids (ie club goers).
2rafa
20hr ago
There was quite a lot of appeasement toward Russia after 2014 and it’s quite possible that if the full scale invasion didn’t happen in 2022 relations would be almost fully normalized by now.
Interesting. I think AI makes a lot of ‘traditional’ prepper collapse scenarios much less likely in an all-or-nothing way. The prepper fantasy of the rural homestead where you’ve packed enough food to be self sufficient after the apocalypse in some isolated corner of Montana or Wyoming isn’t going to be much use against truly hostile AI. It’s a 20th century vision of the apocalypse.
The thesis re fixed income which I think is more reasonable is that governments will use any deflationary impact of falling prices to borrow/print more, which will push yields back up even if the technological impact on some prices is highly deflationary. That said, I’m no economist.
2rafa
1d ago
There is a certain investment thesis that I see increasingly on LW / AI Twitter / adjacent spaces online. Let me summarize it:
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If AI destroys the world, or someone uses it to, money doesn’t matter and probably even the most hardcore preppers are toast. There is no use preparing for this scenario other than maybe bringing forward some bucket list items if you’re a Yud level doomer.
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If AI leads to some incredible abundant utopia with a FOOM / hard takeoff scenario, money won’t matter and we’ll all be trillionaire emperors of our respective limitlessly abundant space kingdoms and/or VR wirehead heavens. Maybe Elon Musk will become some overlord, but the average equity investor won’t know or care.
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If things don’t change, and/or AI gets retrofitted onto the existing economy in a fake scenario to preserve social and economic status stratification and/or private ownership of property / means of production, people who own big tech / AI companies will be best off. Everyone else will either be a UBI peasant at best or Elysium / Manna underclass at worst.
If the realistic possibility space consists of solely these scenarios, the only logical investment strategy unless you’re retired or retiring in under 5 years is to YOLO everything on AI/tech/etc stocks. But that is a big if. This thesis is especially enjoyed by tech industry workers who argue that either AI will replace them, in which case this must make money, or it won’t, in which case at least they still have a high paying jobs.
I don’t think it takes a genius to see why this is more than a little flawed.
2rafa
1d ago
It also has one of the most easily recognizable initial hook (or whatever it’s called) of any mainstream pop/rock song. It’s almost unmistakeable.
2rafa
1d ago
The concept isn’t explicitly gendered. Straight men especially hate singing songs sung from the perspective of a woman talking about men. In this case, Mr Brightside benefits both from the fact that it’s from a generic male perspective (avoiding that risk; women are much less worried about looking ‘gay’ for singing along to lyrics like this than men would be about the inverse) and from the fact that romantic jealousy is a near-universal emotion.
It’s not explicitly gendered as a concept (romantic jealousy) even if sung from a male perspective, its subject matter is near-universal, it has catchy lyrics, it doesn’t involve any highly vulgar sexual references and it’s sung by a man. Plus it’s energetic and upbeat, and it captures what a lot of people like to believe feels like the ‘happy sadness’ of the end of a big night. This combination is rarer than you think. Toxic is an all time song with catchy lyrics but straight men won’t sing it out loud most of the time, and it doesn’t have the slight melancholy of that song. Mr Brightside is inoffensive and universal, happy and sad, and nobody’s embarrassed to sing it.
Yes, one must acknowledge the Downs sufferer as, in most cases, very happy. Often happier than people with the correct number of chromosomes. The death cannot be justified on any QALY-adjacent basis for the dying party, even if it possibly can on the surviving one (but not necessarily).
The death should be understood as a social consequence of the fact that It is considered unacceptable to abandon your child to the state unless you are dead, dying, or totally incapable of looking after it. Severe illness or the fact that looking after them would make a comfortable, low stress life very difficult or impossible is not considered an acceptable reason. Families that don’t care about abortion would be scandalized by a mother deciding she just doesn’t want to deal with the stress and giving a baby up.
And I think that’s the counterargument to @HereAndGone’s point. Mothers’ domestic labor, time spent on child-related work and interaction has gone up even after the automation of a lot of time consuming domestic work. Mothers are expected to provide a holistic level of total life management, love, care, education, training and self-actualization to their kids that their grandmothers and great grandmothers never were. You are a bad mother if you mother the way mothers did for thousands of years.
In this new world of ever higher expectations, of total commitment, raising any child means something very different to what it was sixty years ago. It isn’t chill. It takes all of your time. You’re not occasionally checking in on the kids playing by themselves while gossiping with your friends in the afternoon. You’re alone, or maybe working, and then you’re micromanaging their lives. Adding a severely disabled child for whom you will have to do this for the rest of your life rather than for 18 years makes for an even worse proposition.
2rafa
2d ago
It’s not eugenic reasons. If a woman aborts a fetus with down syndrome because she calculates that it will ruin her life, this may be a eugenic act but it certainly isn’t done for “eugenic reasons”, any more so than a violent thug killing someone with some condition is doing it for “eugenic reasons” instead of unrelated ones.
2rafa
2d ago
The frustration is not with the individual sentiment, but the communal one. Eugenics was not a left or right position, among the most committed eugenicists were as everyone knows moderate Swedish social democrats. What is taboo is the idea that one can improve human stock societally.
2rafa
4d ago
Right I agree. Countries with un-debatably fake elections usually announce things very quickly, you don’t want the tension of an unclear result creating even the faintest oxygen for your opponents.
2rafa
4d ago
I think the last time I looked at the satellite view I was in school, bored in IT class.
2rafa
4d ago
Seems like a very positive move to separate the “job creation” component of a lot of this regulation from the actually necessary part. Maybe eventually this will make its way back to us.
2rafa
5d ago
Pratt has run an impressive campaign and will probably make it to the runoff given the current margin with the DSA candidate, Raman.
He probably won’t win in the actual election, though. LA’s demographics would make it very hard.
The general impression (however incorrect in this case) was that it would go in substantial part to Trump personally. Even GOP voters know that it’s precisely Trump who paints himself as an immensely rich and successful billionaire, so this is giving some very rich guy a lot more taxpayer money, which is hard for politicians to justify.
More generally, every government rewards its supporters, and there are far more under the table ways to do it than this kind of fund. Trump has already done so much of it through the crypto companies, expediting approvals for various Trump tech aligned businesses, endorsing or engaging in partnerships with startups that have his sons on the board etc. If he wants to reward his supporters, this is the way to do it.
The main strategic issue for the right isn’t making it more profitable to be on the right, it’s on making it more personally challenging to be on the left. He needs to much more aggressively steal from and prosecute and expropriate violent leftist activists, make their life hell the way the left did to the right in power. This has far better long term utility. Put people on no fly lists, have banks close their accounts, stop renewing passports and drivers’ licenses.
2rafa
6d ago
There is random schizo violence, NYC homeless schizos pushing people onto the subway tracks for no reason as the train arrives, but Digwa clearly doesn’t fit this psychological profile.
Sure, normal people don’t murder strangers (or indeed anyone), every murderer is an extreme outlier by the very fact of their crime. This is true even for “violent assholes”.
But I don’t think this is an unprovoked random killing. I don’t think he sees this kid walking by himself from a distance and decides “I’m going to kill him”. The nature of the crime, the time, and the perpetrator don’t match that.
Where young men obsessed with weapons do just go out and use them (some school shooters, for example), they usually plan their “mission” extensively. They either go for huge impact / publicity / casualties and/or plot some kind of escape route (Digwa’s strategy was clearly thought out after the event). The same is true for most racially and/or religiously motivated attacks by angry young men.
To me by far the most plausible type explanation is that this was some young white ‘frat bro’ (the UK equivalent are probably these university sports teams) type who taunted Digwa (who probably had some racial prejudice given his immediate reaching for that excuse) and he reacted extremely violently, seeing it as a ‘just’ response. This lines up with eg Nowak filming the interaction (probably not out of fear), “what are you gonna do little guy, stab me?” style.
You can’t say things like this without people thinking you’re justifying the killing, which I’m most definitely not, but I find it extremely implausible this was a completely random (or random racially motivated, in that he picked a white guy at random) attack. The outrage is the police response, and maybe more broadly mass immigration in general (although the Southport murders were more impactful there).
It seems obvious to me that Nowak was probably somewhat drunk and belligerent, and probably in some way taunted Digwa. Of course I am wholly on the side of the right in this incident; in any case, whatever Nowak did ought not to be used to justify a death sentence.
But, let’s be real, violent criminals of the non-homeless-schizo type (and Digwa wasn’t in that group, if anything heralding from a moderately competent minority, probably average IQ) don’t randomly murder people with zero provocation.
The flashpoint happens when people who don’t normally riot riot. These people have been rioting for a hundred years. They have huge walls in their city precisely because they’re sectarian conflict enjoyers. There are few non-natives in Northern Ireland, the government will quietly move some of them to England and things will quiet down.
What many Americans fail to understand about most major Western European cities (ie not Belfast) is that the battle has been lost a long time ago. In Paris, London, Brussels and in many tier two cities in these countries (Birmingham, Marseille, Rotterdam), natives are far below 50% of the population, and most of those who remain are old. My personal calculation is that perhaps as little as 20-25% of London’s young male population (unless you stretch to include outer, outer suburbs practically in Essex) is wholly indigenous, maybe the bottom end of that range. Other major cities like Vienna, Malmo, Frankfurt, Berlin, Lyon, even Geneva and Zurich are not too far behind.
You can’t start a revolt with those demographics. In fact other than the sectarian history, the reason these riots are happening in Belfast and didn’t happen in London after eg Lee Rigby is precisely because even then the demographics just didn’t exist to riot. The only riots in the last 20 years in London were the largely immigrant ones in 2011.
Just as in the US, the last realistic chance to alter history with regards to mass immigration was probably in the mid-late 1990s, maybe the early 2000s (before around 2003) in parts of Western Europe at the latest. The choice now will be between the far left and whatever corrupt rightist caudillo strongman regime emerges out of the remnants of the traditional hard right (as it already is in France under Bardella, and will in Britain under whoever replaces Farage, or indeed even him), as per the Latin American and arguably even Putinist example. The former will be vaguely green, red and gaza flavored, and the latter will have some aesthetically christian and anti-islam elements, but neither will be truly nativist. One need only look at how Le Pen, Bardella and Meloni have moderated in recent years to see that.
But remigration? We’re talking about old and rapidly aging countries with fractured populations, right-wing-but-tiny militaries, extensive surveillance, well-funded domestic intelligence agencies, demoralized and diverse police, disarmed populations, low morale and now - thanks to AI - the ability to monitor, disrupt and analyze population-level movements and communications on social media, in CCTV footage etc en masse in a way the Stasi couldn’t have hoped for. These are not ripe conditions for a revolution.
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