2rafa
maybe it will all turn out fine
User ID: 841
These things always get to a point (absent unknowable AI effects etc etc). Greece is the archetypal example. State pensions were cut by 45-50% in absolute terms over 5 years. There were riots and governments changed a few times, but in the end everybody knew it had to happen.
The UK or US could do the same by printing money which proles seem to accept slightly more than nominal cuts, but much as in Greece’s case, even the most stupid French politicians know crashing out of the Euro entirely in a moment of fiscal crisis would be even more catastrophic.
2rafa
23hr ago
We did bomb a bunch of Iranian bridges but bombing power plants wasn’t done because it was understood that that would cause the Iranians to bomb Gulf power plants which they didn’t have enough interceptors to stop, and which would starve or kill via heat huge numbers of people.
2rafa
1d ago
But that’s what I’m saying, you imply that Reddit still bans people for calling for genocide, and indeed it does, but so do we (and that’s a good thing for civility), so my point is that this isn’t a different standard.
2rafa
1d ago
Latin American conservatives mostly do what they can within the system they’re in but the problem is that either (as in Brazil) they’re prevented from doing anything by all powerful courts and a constitution that they can’t overturn or substantially modify (eg almost all Brazilian government spending is constitutionally protected ie a coup complete problem), the central government itself has relatively little power in the face of rampant lawlessness, powerful regional governments, organized crime and anyone who tries to realistically challenge that will either get killed or enough of their lieutenants on the ground will to make reform impossible (Mexico), or, in situations where reactionary coups are possible and do occur, any right wing movement finds itself so impossibly indebted to and a mere patsy for either a corrupt non-ideological military hierarchy that just wants to extract maximum loot out to Miami, organized crime groups (who mostly want the same) or a combination of both to the extent that unsustainable levels of graft eventually bring down any political project by stifling economic growth and competition anyway.
2rafa
1d ago
We don’t let people post the former here so I don’t see how that’s relevant (even I won’t strawman any regulars by implying they say that), and yeah there are plenty of semi mainstream subs where people post the latter, like BaR, RedScarePod, 4Chan, Greentext etc.
2rafa
1d ago
There are going to be a lot of very awful terror attacks in the coming months and years enabled by AI here. You think amusement park ride control systems are all 100% airgapped? Of course not.
2rafa
1d ago
Yeah, and while that subreddit is more centrist and less intelligent than this place, the general tone and the heterodox positions at the right wing tail are not dissimilar from us in terms of no no content.
2rafa
1d ago
Again though, there are a LOT of like dissident right euro and US politics subreddits going far harder on those topics than anyone here (even securesignals) and they’re not banned.
2rafa
1d ago
I thought they only ended it for NSFW content (and old.reddit, where I think for engineering reasons restricting only NSFW content was somehow more difficult since they never did it there). We were never tagged as this on Reddit and neither are most ‘edgy’ discussion subreddits provided they don’t directly post eg extreme gore. In addition, as a discussion club, presumably all of us would be logged into Reddit anyway, just like I can’t remember using The Motte while logged out.
I have no real opinion on the Reddit NSFW login wall but it’s clear to me that it’s very different from what’s happening on X (which is essentially trying to replicate the Instagram or Facebook dynamic where every casual user is forced to have their own profile). Reddit is just trying to force porn watchers (who are, outside of really hardcore addicts, mostly using the site in incognito mode and/or otherwise not logged in) off the site by killing traffic to those subreddits via the old.reddit workaround without suffering a Tumblr style backlash that would result from actually banning that content. This is good for advertisers and the business especially as many governments pass ID check laws for this content anyway.
X harbors ambitions of being an actual social networking and payments etc app platform which requires most users to have accounts under their real names, like the much more lucrative IG / FB. Reddit knows that’s never viable for it and never will be.
2rafa
2d ago
They’ve clearly taken their foot off the cancellation gas pedal since 2022, and even then we were just one of many many communities (some with far more egregiously ‘unwoke’ content) that were warned but not banned, most of which are still on the site. Stuff is broadly tolerated even on semi-mainstream subs now that never was back then, a lot of professional moderators/admins were laid off and a lot of volunteers quit for various reasons, and the AI that’s replacing them cares far more about things like direct use of slurs and harassment (which were never really tolerated and still aren’t here) than it did about simply discussing heterodox views.
I really think the chance we would draw any admin attention whatsoever in 2026 on Reddit is extremely minimal. But we could always do eg a ‘trial week’ and see.
2rafa
2d ago
We’ve done much better and survived with decent activity much longer than I expected, I will say that. But I think now is the time to think seriously about going back to Reddit before the community really dies, which is probably on the horizon if 25% a year declines persist for a second full year from the current baseline. Still, I know almost nobody else agrees.
2rafa
5d ago
Interestingly, When Harry Met Sally was primarily written by a woman, albeit with a lot of male input from Rob Reiner. When I think of fully male centered romcoms I guess I think of stuff like Crazy Stupid Love , which is really more of a buddy comedy than a romcom, and which was obviously written by a man.
2rafa
5d ago
Part of the problem with this administration, widely noted, is its tendency to maximally ragebait while being ineffective, which draws all the ire and force of the left while also failing to accomplish most of the right’s priorities (see deportations).
I have no problem with the government publishing or even streaming an important record of this historical event. The ‘martyrs’ argument is dubious; Islamist propagandists have plenty of footage they can use from Gaza, Iran, Assad’s Syria and so on that is more visceral and powerful.
But just announce it on the day, two hours before it happens, and then do it.
2rafa
5d ago
There seem to be only what, ten thousand wizards in all of Britain, and they all go to school together, so asking for someone’s last name probably returns a value you have heard before.
2rafa
5d ago
A lot of men do like ‘straight’ (or pure) romance. There are male fans of the Linklater ‘Before’ movies, there are plenty of men who watch heavily romance based anime or play games where romance is a central feature, for example.
2rafa
5d ago
My understanding is that the big drug makers have extremely strict contracts with distributors that prohibit any down-the-line use in capital punishment in any circumstances and have extremely damaging financial penalties for anyone in the distribution chain who, knowingly or unknowingly, is involved in facilitating their use for this purpose.
In addition most of the major manufacturers are European or based in other countries that ban the export of any drugs used in capital punishment. Lastly, while India and China might be import options, the courts banned them as unapproved after a few states tried to use Indian drugs in lethal injections in the early 2010s.
Lastly, if a - say - ‘based’ right wing manufacturer were to set up shop in the US and was FDA approved, they would be liable for legal action by any Christa Pike types which, in America’s litigation culture and given that many lawyers and well funded interests are strongly opposed to the death penalty, means that a single botched execution would probably bankrupt such a venture, and in lethal injections failures are not uncommon.
2rafa
5d ago
I have to say that it was a disappointment when I found out that movie silencers are all fake and that guns are actually still really loud with them attached.
2rafa
6d ago
In most of these cases I think the bitterness is usually from people whose parents have chosen not to be ungenerous but not to indefinitely fund their kids’ delusions, so there is a big difference between a child getting an average $70k a year white collar job (certainly not enough to buy a decent house in much of the US today) and a child in their mid-30s still begging for $4000 a month to rent in Williamsburg and doing essentially nothing / DJing / failsonning. Intelligent upper middle class parents, especially those who have worked hard, are usually much more sympathetic to the former than the ‘failed to launch’ from what I’ve seen. The kid who works but who doesn’t have access to maybe the same kind of housing as the parents did at that age is often supported.
2rafa
6d ago
I agree that this is a common demographic and a revolutionary one, but also your two doctor parents can usually make a pretty generous contribution to a house, for example.
2rafa
6d ago
Horse breeding was and is controlled by humans. The dial was simply turned down as demand fell over 50+ years between around 1900 and 1950. Working horse lifespans are maybe 20 years. The human equivalent would, at worst, be something like a one child policy for successive generations and/or cratering birthrates which we already have.
2rafa
6d ago
Yes I am at about the same number. 20-30, ‘all in’, which includes non-extinction-but-still-definitely-the-extinction-of-me scenarios.
And if someone said would you take 70% odds of living forever in unfathomably abundant utopia in exchange for, say, a 30% chance of dying in the next decade, I can’t say for sure I’d say yes, but I’d think about it.
I don’t know, it just feels kind of like we’re in a car and we’re heading for an opening drawbridge bascule bridge and half the people are cheering and expect we’ll make it and half the people are terrified we’ll fall and are begging the driver to slow down, except that it’s too late to slow down and even if we wanted to the driver doesn’t.
We are a species of desperate risk takers and gamblers, not all of us but enough of us to decide our destiny. The exact same thing that led our ancestors to cross continents on foot over generations, to walk across the world, to set out into vast oceans on flimsy rafts and find new lands, that leads people today to put it all on red or gamble their college fund on stratospherically far out of the money semiconductor options, to cheat on exams and to jump off skyscrapers with parachutes - this is why AI is unstoppable, and this is why Yud and Scott and anyone crying about p(doom) will fail.
Not because they are wrong, but because to act on their warnings would go against our very nature. We cannot do it. It is ‘full steam ahead and hope it works out fine’; we have boarded the raft.
2rafa
7d ago
I’m not generally a fan of reading the tea leaves of suicide notes but I think it’s best to interpret these - even if we literally accept their reasons for suicide as true (and I think generally this is the case when intelligent people kill themselves, that is to say that their stated reasons are usually their actual reasons even if they are bad reasons) - as borne of fear rather than existential crisis, and that fear is ultimately tied to material circumstances. There is a lot society can and will need to do, if it survives, to repair our sense of meaning as it’s redirected away from work.
2rafa
7d ago
I think we’ll invent a new entertainment form of ‘challenge math’ or something where the idea is you try to figure out a proof you haven’t been exposed to competitively even if AI has the answer, and it’ll be like a game. Either way, I really don’t think this is reason to end it.
We bought our apartment. Two months ago, the building manager half-jokingly mentioned the owners (who I’ve only met twice, in passing, as they own one other unit which they stay in for maybe three or four days a year) we’re thinking of selling and might be willing to accept a ‘good price’ for a quick sale.
Here’s my justification to myself for buying in cash now:
In dollar terms, property in ‘prime central London’, especially apartments above £1.5m, is down about 50% since 2015. Even in nominal sterling terms they’re down about 20% in the last two years in Westminster, on average, once you actually negotiate. Meanwhile, my rent was double what it was just a few years ago, because an acceptable 2% rental yield in 2017 now has to be 5% or 6% I guess. Most of the people who live around here either have extremely high incomes or are idle rich, which means rent increases can be extremely high and arbitrary, often just to see what a landlord can get away with.
Possible cope:
I had posted a few months ago about liquidating a substantial proportion of what I had in US equities; no crash yet although I still feel pretty good about it. After everything was set aside, I had a number, divided it by a number, and took one of the segments and made that my offer. It was seemingly begrudgingly accepted after some weeks of trying to negotiate upward, but I held firm. Rich people didn’t have a problem with parking their money in London property as long as it held value (not necessarily increased in it, but held), but I think recent declines, inflation, and high treasury and gilt yields mean it’s now a terrible investment unless you actually need somewhere to live. A similar apartment sold for ~30% more than I paid three years ago.
Cope:
Old building so not affected by quality / cladding / whatever issues from recent decades, renovated and retrofitted in the last fifteen years, good management, and I already live there and have had no issues in the last few years. Everything works. I don’t have to move. I feel pretty good about it. While I am very pessimistic on the future of the UK, there’s nowhere I would rather live for now. In addition, I still have maybe 40% nw in the US, and while I’m paid in pounds, my business generates essentially no money from any kind of domestic market, all my clients and almost all of their / our mutual clients are substantially abroad and our fees are in dollars, so I think in the event of any catastrophic sterling devaluation or crisis (increasingly likely) I could negotiate a relatively proportional increase provided the business itself was still doing okay.
Paging @Corvos, @BurdensomeCount and any other Londoners here.
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