2rafa
12hr ago
There is no such thing as ring fenced private capital in a crisis. VCs are backed by private equity backed by family offices backed by stakes in public companies intrinsically tied to the public bond market. You can’t stop contagion. Banks are a central leveraged financing source behind the current private credit boom as the recent MFS collapse here in the UK showed. Big private equity and credit players like Apollo bought insurers and then funnelled 20%+ of net assets into private credit, if AI reveals those SaaS companies to be largely worthless and they can’t fund their obligations that’s another major systemic problem because that leads to asset fire sales and a repricing of the entire credit market, which is catastrophic. Some Silicon Valley VC yoloing a few million on seed rounds isn’t systemic but that’s a tiny fraction of private capital.
I’m fond of the argument that the 2018 correction represented the ‘natural’ end of both the post-2009 asset pricing boom and the broader (and obviously intrinsically related) credit cycle. That would be a relatively standard timeline for that kind of thing.
The response from the Fed (under Trump) but also other central banks was to supercharge the asset pricing bubble, cut or reverse planned hikes aggressively, and reinflate the bubble. Then came Covid and infinite money printing, which accelerated the real inflation that had been avoided through most of the QE era by falling prices for some goods that offset service price increases, plus slowing velocity of money and finally some rate hikes when they became impossible to avoid.
So we’ve been in a weird liminal era for almost a decade now, and it isn’t really clear how it’s going to end. I don’t think it’s viable for the American government to allow markets to experience a prolonged correction. A short, sharp, quickly-recovered-from 30% drop? Sure. But any longer, or any deeper, and big public sector retirement funds, 401ks and so on suffer to a degree no politician can survive. Thats different to previous generations in many ways. At the same time, you can arguably only fight gravity for so long.
2rafa
1d ago
No nothing specific. Just Cummings’ many throwaway comments on his blog, in interviews and on panels on his handling of the ‘Boriswave’ and his abrogation of any responsibility therefore.
2rafa
1d ago
People are getting generous PIP for ‘severe anxiety’, something that a single generous psychiatrist (is it time for @self_made_human to do the British would-be-NEETs of TheMotte a favor?) can diagnose you with.
2rafa
1d ago
I really think Cummings is probably the single best example of a midwit and a midwit magnet there is. Shirking responsibility is one thing, it’s hard to ‘hate’ Boris for the Boriswave because really he’s clearly never thought much about anything and likely signed off on it without thinking. A terrible leader and vacuous jester of a person who cheated on every woman who ever loved him? Sure. But there was no pretense of anything else. Cummings painted himself as an intellectual and then pretends he was bamboozled at the consequences of his actions and words and every bad thing was just someone betraying him or not listening correctly.
2rafa
1d ago
It is a stretch but it’s also a stretch when people like Farage and Cummings claim they have no responsibility for the broad character of the debate, especially in the latter case.
2rafa
1d ago
Yeah but even there you had Farage implying that multiple times through the campaign, so calling it a total bait and switch is questionable.
The bigger example is Boris’ 2019 election victory and subsequent Boriswave.
2rafa
1d ago
It’s not so clear cut. Yes, voters often vote against mass immigration but not always. The votes for Hollande and Macron in France were for center-left candidates who had at most the mildest dislike (if at all) of mass immigration. In England, the Labour Party destroyed the Conservatives in the election campaigns of 2001 and 2004, in which the top Tory message (in both cases) was about stopping Labour’s mass immigration experiment. Carney won in Canada recently.
The electoral record shows that the public is occasionally betrayed, yes, but it also has not consistently voted against mass immigration for 30+ years as some in the right say. Even since 2015 the most anti immigration candidates haven’t consistently won.
2rafa
1d ago
Even being homeless with zero ‘gibs’ (and there will never be zero) in Western Europe is better than being an average person in a true hellhole country. This guy was from Sudan. That is one of the worst places in the world to live, either in the desperately poor and violent south or in Sudan proper which is undergoing an extraordinarily brutal civil war in which countless people have been killed.
Even if you rely on handouts and charity, you get more in a rich place than a poor one, that’s why beggars (and trick or treaters) classically go to wealthier and more trafficked neighborhoods. Better to starve on the streets of Belfast than Sudan. At least in the former you are less likely to be gang raped and tortured before dying, and someone will probably take pity on you. These people are never ever ever going home voluntarily.
2rafa
1d ago
These institutions can broadly withstand most socialist-type left wing movements and most caudillo type right wing movements that will both be within the expanded universe overton window that’s currently being created. True remigration isn’t in that window.
I believe Kulak once predicted that the flashpoint for organized European resistance would happen in Northern Ireland.
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 a kind of Muslim leftist social democracy 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.
2rafa
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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.
Alas I didn’t participate in this
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