2rafa
5hr ago
A lot of it really is the same people who played back then, now in their fifties and sixties. The same is true of EverQuest, the average player today is probably late 40s / early 50s now, some in their sixties and a few in their late 30s or early 40s who are the kids of the former category and started playing at 10 or 12 with Dad.
2rafa
6hr ago
Britain had its own baby boom, but it was bifurcated into a wave in the late 40s and one in the early 60s, with an era of postwar austerity in the lean 50s in-between. America had more of a consistent boom.
2rafa
6hr ago
There’s a strong case to be made that Contrapoints to some extent agrees with core aspects of the Blanchardian hypothesis. Not in its entirety, but they understand that they approach life in a certain context as a performance and that gender is part of that.
There are trans forums where they dislike Wynn for this reason, because they understand that there’s an acknowledgement, on some level, that it’s drag.
2rafa
6hr ago
Moving against dual-citizenship would seem to be effective
As Randy Fine noted in response to Fuentes a couple of months ago on this subject, to his knowledge (and I think he’s probably more accurate than not) no Jewish congresspeople are Israeli citizens. In the same way, very few Jewish American billionaires or otherwise powerful figures are Israeli citizens. Zuckerberg, Ellison, Altman, Iger, none of these people have Israeli passports in all likelihood (I say because it’s possible they do in secret, but it’s very unlikely - there is no reason for them to).
2rafa
6hr ago
Each party to the debate is speaking to his own audience. This is often an under-appreciated dynamic in this kind of situation.
2rafa
1d ago
After about two weeks, I figure either they have the evidence to catch you and you're in jail, or they don't and you put it out of your mind and never tell anyone.
Unlikely, the odds are very much against you, the only ‘smart’ move is to use your head start to get as far away as possible and then blend into a new life, like that American guy who hid in Wales for 20 years. Even stuff like AI facial recognition on public sector camera footage (outside any federal building, on an officer, a police car, in any government office, facility, bus station, subway station, outside a court, a school etc) is going to be much more common as those things increasingly feed into centralized FBI systems. The further you go, the less likely you trip some kind of alarm (the way the would-be Welshman did).
2rafa
1d ago
There are suburbs for upper-middle class and wealthy people across the developing world, from Peru to Nigeria to Kenya to the UAE to Malaysia to China, that explicitly model themselves on American suburbs, at least aesthetically, and often copy even semi-distinctive McMansion elements from the aforementioned. They are usually gated communities and are often still denser than American suburbs (so they look more like communities of townhomes do in the US) but that is the intention.
The difference is that in many of these places there are also a lot of wealthy people of all ages who live in apartments, which is rare in the US outside of NYC. In Indianapolis or Omaha or even Los Angeles you might find young high earning people who live in downtown apartment buildings, but very few families do. In China, like in Paris, Munich and São Paulo, you find many families who still live in apartment buildings even when suburbs are an option.
2rafa
1d ago
The Israeli crisis is due to NIMBYs and planning laws, not lack of space though. The settlements are ideological, there is plenty of land within even 1948 Israel for suburban development. I don’t mean deep in the Negev either.
2rafa
3d ago
The EU exports about 5 million cars a year and imports 4 million. Tariffs can be adjusted and are unlikely to provoke some kind of Chinese ban on…Chinese exporters selling car components (the recent Dutch case was very different). The manufacturing workforce in places like Germany is also ageing rapidly. The car industry is just a very emotive thing. There are other far larger problems with the European economy, but they won’t be solved until either the EU falls apart or the Germans naturally reassert themselves once more.
2rafa
3d ago
The competition with China is asinine. It really is time for the West to look inward, abandon Asia to the Chinese (not even really that, given so many in the region have their own severe differences with them, including most of their neighbors - the Russia truces are only ever temporary, the India tensions will continue indefinitely) and resolve the ongoing demographic and political crisis, which feeds into so many other economic and social issues.
China is pretty nice now in the tier 1 cities. Sure, the Chinese work long hours, but so do many Americans (you know who works the ‘996’? New York investment bankers, hotshot corporate lawyers and apparently Silicon Valley AI startup engineers). The food is good, the societies are clean and safe. You can’t be too nasty about state policy, but the same applies in much of Europe, and even in the US you still “just” get your life ruined and yourself cancelled depending on what you said and who is in power.
In 50 years, will Britain still be British? Will Germany still be German? Will America - the America of the prosperous and peaceful time still within living memory - still be America? Trump (or Miller, I guess) was right about this. Countries aren’t soil, they’re people. The people in China 50 years from now will be the descendants of the people in China 50 years ago (by and large). Can the same be said for Europeans, in Europe or in North America?
Forget about Chinese cars and datacenters; the Chinese have rarely dreamed of world domination, they are content in their backyard and with the occasional moment of international abuse around fishing fleets and ripping off poor countries with expensive development loans (many of which backfire on them anyway). Whether America rules the world or not is irrelevant to most of its people - at the height of the British Empire, the greatest in world history, the people of the metropole worked in squalid Victorian factories and lived in disgusting, fetid tenements. Even today material conditions are much better. Plenty of small countries do just fine.
And it really is important to emphasize just how bad the demographic transition is. I would rather live under the Chinese thumb in Hong Kong than “free” in Rio de Janeiro. I would rather live pretty much anywhere in China than in Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan, Niger, much of Central America, Eritrea, Haiti. And yet this is what Western lands are becoming. Better to submit to Xi Jinping than suffer Houellebecq’s Submission, although in many ways even that text is far, far too optimistic about what awaits us.
2rafa
4d ago
I agree that it’s good to voice these things, publicly. But I’m not sure it matters. Remigration from Europe would be the largest or second-largest major population transfer in human history. It would require unfathomable state capacity and run roughshod over the constitution of every major Western European country (that has a constitution), that kind of action would itself require consistent supermajority governments over many years, when many are ruled only by unstable coalitions with nobody capable of getting even a simple majority. Even the National Rally, Meloni’s party, the Austrians are all moderating rapidly, only the AfD is still ‘hard right’ and there is every chance they get shut down if they start doing better than they are (my guess is the BfV wants to spin out a softer, more libertarian, Bardella-esque wing).
In many cases (I know you might disagree) the same forces - lethargy, ambivalence to the grand forces that shape civilization, a prioritization of the comfort of retired voters above all else, firm allegiance to the shibboleths of the vaguely post-Catholic social democracy upon which the EU was founded - that created the present economic calamity also created the immigration one. A lack of action is built into the system.
2rafa
5d ago
Peak oil was wrong in terms of supply because of fracking (which people thought would make a negligible contribution to overall production), wrong on timing because of miscalculations about China and wrong on demand because of the speed of the electric car revolution, especially in Europe and China. Obviously the original argument that fossil fuels are a finite resource (in the timeframe of human civilization) is factually true, but it’s also kind of meaningless.
2rafa
5d ago
I agree, it’s a bad model. Cashback gambling for the purchase price of a random thing isn’t a big incentive because (a) the total amount you can make - even if you use your spin only on, say, your largest credit card purchase every month - is never life changing, and (b) because the comparison to the other rewards you mention will be unfavorable. The big premium cards also ensure the annual fee (which is like $800 for the American Express card now) covers the ‘rewards’ so that it doesn’t matter if people only put a few purchases on it. A database and captive audience of gambling addicts could be very valuable, but having that because your business is lending to them is, as you say, less valuable.
2rafa
5d ago
I think the market is less friendly to the Ellisons on WBD. Netflix was willing to pay so much, and to offer much more in a hostile scenario they’ll need to find more lenders willing to lend against Oracle. Oracle is the single most exposed business to the data center (I won’t say AI) bubble, colossally indebted, CDS spreads are insane given its profile, it has $100bn in debt (the largest non-bank issuer in the US), and the share price is down 50% in three months.
2rafa
5d ago
Peak Oil was a relatively dumb theory that was only taken seriously because of the unusual 2004 to 2014 spike in oil prices, which was speculative and driven by short-medium term bullish views on Chinese and other EM consumption, and then prolonged abnormally after 2011 by fears of Arab instability. Weird ZeroHedge types seized on this market dynamic as proof that oil prices would never fall and that actually 100/barrel was just the start and justified it with outdated peak oil fearmongering from the 1970s. In 2014 it became clear that Chinese demand would be lower than predicted, global growth was low, and US shale production was higher than forecast.
2rafa
6d ago
Creditors did approve over the summer, as (of course) they have to.
Why did they approve? The debt was junk rated, with a negative outlook, trading well below par. Absent a spinoff there would have been further painful restructuring anyway. Some (about 25%) would end up with the profitable streaming business now being acquired by Netflix. And, most importantly, WBD agreed as part of the plan to a major debt buyback plan that made creditors happy.
In the end, approving was the least bad option for them.
All-time win for David Zaslav. Sold the company at triple the market’s valuation a few months ago. Saddle the cable TV assets with impossible debt, spin them out for almost nothing, ride off into the sunset. Even Patrick Drahi would struggle to be this smart.
Will AI replace all human-created media? I doubt it. I think there will still be a market for camera-filmed media, albeit a smaller one. People watch thousands of hours really bad reality TV where the sole attraction is that it’s real people involved, for example. Maybe movies will die out and it’ll just be the stage left, or hobbyists. Either way, this would have been a bad deal even without generative AI, and it’s an especially bad one with it.
Some funny comments about a Warner buyout spelling the end of a big tech bubble for the second time, too.
2rafa
7d ago
I suspect that the widespread advent of AI has (even if these aren’t transformer models, although they could be) significantly increased the utility and usage of things like transaction modelling tools over the past couple of years. Before you would maybe check transactions at local stores for specific ingredients or review the purchase history of suspects. Now you can do much more complex and computationally expensive ML on the whole national or regional body of credit card data that can actually find that needle in a haystack.
2rafa
8d ago
A combination of non-public information like CCTV footage, plate tracking, cell tracking, physical and digital forensics (including, as the below reply suggests, credit card data which they can run models on to pull relevant and unusual patterns literally trained on previous cases) make the FBI far more powerful than 4chan. The timing is what’s more convenient. It could be this is someone the last administration didn’t want to arrest on the chance they lost the case.
2rafa
8d ago
Call it cucked, but I would rather live in a civilized country that’s a little more hostile to me than another third world shithole. Not that we’ll have the choice, and not that I’d gladly take President Groyper, but I could make my peace with a President Carlson.
The impact and influence of hyper-online nationalist Chinese netizens is often very much overstated. The reasons are multifaceted but are essentially that most western “China watchers” are (by very nature of their own demographic - mostly white young men in the Anglosphere - their education and academic interests, their experience in China proper, and their literal profession and their clientele) mostly interested in Chinese views on geopolitics. The reality is that most Chinese have few to no prominent views of geopolitics beyond the bland centrally taught views of the wider society in which they live, they are almost uniquely parochial even when compared to Americans.
So these guys hyperfocus on a relatively small minority of very online young Chinese men who have very strong opinions on what Chinese foreign policy should be and who have strong views on things like the Ukraine War, Israel Gaza, American foreign policy in South America, immigration to Europe and other stuff that people discuss all the time on X.com. Thus even serious professional China analysts often post about the views of “Chinese netizens” as if someone in China was writing about, say, groyper views those of all “American people”, uncritically.
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