2rafa
13hr 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
15hr 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
15hr 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
1d 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
1d 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
3d 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
3d ago
I think the last time I looked at the satellite view I was in school, bored in IT class.
2rafa
3d 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
3d 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
5d 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.
2rafa
6d ago
Milei would gladly extradite a Kim Dotcom type for Trump and the Peronists / leftists would kick Thiel out without any American pressure.
2rafa
6d ago
What does it mean for Thiel to move to Argentina? This is the kind of rich international person who travels for much of the year anyway. It’s not the same as someone who works a regular job moving to another country. Maybe he spends 100 days a year there, probably fewer.
The only compensation their parents could receive directly would come in the form of reimbursements for e.g. travel expenses, acting classes, music classes etc. Many film studios are understandably reluctant about paying children their acting fees directly, fearing that they might squander their earnings; on the other hand, there have been enough cases of parents financially exploiting their children (and the child consequently ending up empty-handed when they come of age) that I'm not convinced paying a child's fees into a bank account to which their parents have access is a viable solution.
This is an oft-repeated but probably untrue way of describing the motivation of most ambitious parents of child stars. Sure, a lot of them - the Jacksons, the Biebers, whatever - live large off their kids. But that doesn’t mean that drove their ambitions in the first place. If you’ve ever watched the kind of lowbrow reality shows that capture a much earlier stage of the process, stuff like Dance Moms, or shows about boy basketball and football players with ambitious fathers, they often spend huge amounts of money with very little return on their kids, push them beyond reason. In many sports and activities (think a lot of niche sports, or spelling bees, ballet, equestrian stuff, various other competitions) these parents know they’re almost guaranteed never to make a financial return.
“They’re using their kids to get rich” is a bad framework for this. Even if some are gamblers, Vegas odds are better, and most are smart enough to know it. I think the actual motivation is often either living through their children, a chance at another life, with better choices, and a strong whip hand ‘directing’ the child to strive for greatness, or it’s a form of competition with other parents. Adulthood offers fewer avenues for the kind of simple victory that a competition in youth does. You can play in an over-40s league in tennis or whatever, but that’s going to be full of ex-semi-pros who’ve been playing since they were 4. You can try to get rich - the primary marker of status in adult American life - but that’s both difficult and, for almost everyone, an interminably slow process. You can can try to get hot, but that’s hard and gets harder as time goes on. Or you can make something of your kid, and reap the rewards in smugness.
I think if you ask the average parent of a child actor “if you could live your whole life over again, would you do it?”, every single one would say yes (even caveated so you can’t become a bitcoin nvidia trillionaire president astronaut). Whereas in the general population many people would still say yes, but not 100%.
2rafa
6d ago
It’s a slog in the best way. It’s a slog in the way that Rockstar clearly thought very carefully about the fact that you have to suffer through a 30 second animation when looting someone in Red Dead 2 is. Its deliberate. You really do feel like you’re far, far underground, at least 5 or 6 loading screens away from civilization. The old CRPGs had more of that.
Sure, and I mean there are degrees of Singlish. By Singlish accent I mean more “fluent English” (as in your former example), with few loanwords, but a very pronounced accent. It’s not about grammar. You have as I was saying above that type of very well educated upper middle (or indeed upper) class English person who speaks fluent French with the most hideous pronunciation because they simply don’t care to put on a French accent when speaking French.
PMC Brits whose native tongue is a strong regional working class dialect (is there another kind? I guess the posh Edinburgh accent still sounds a little Scottish) probably used to hide it, although less often now (they don’t in government or media, I suspect some still do in finance and corporate law). Still I respect them for having accomplished something far more impressive than being just another upper middle class striver.
It’s too easy to fall into the trap of wanting to see “all the content” and get the “best possible ending”. But it’s also because of a cycle in which most players will look up guides, pick the best choices, and then developers cater to that.
You can play Mass Effect in a kind of freewheeling way, and it’s a lot of fun because the renegade choices are (unlike the ‘pure evil’ in a lot of RPGs) actually often efficient and believable, moreso than the good ones. But in the end it also means (especially if you mix paragon and renegade in ME2 and therefore fail a bunch of mandatory checks) that half the main characters die and get replaced with no-name nobodies in the third game, which robs the narrative of much of its flavor.
A good RPG has a good creative writing prompt, and something like Skyrim or Avowed or Outer Worlds or Pillars is just very broad. There are always going to be those people who find themselves playing Geralt, monster slayer, and who still make every choice as if he were them, woken up in the body of this man one morning. And there are always going to be people who can take a (near) fully blank slate, like a classic MMO or an Elder Scrolls game and invent an elaborate 300 page backstory and moral code and adhere to it flawlessly. But I think there’s a big middle ground that is served by a protagonist whose already-existing story you take over for a time, and the voice helps with that, helps tell you “this isn’t you”.
The mechanics help with that, but players hate it. If you give a better outcome for playing stealthily for example, like Dishonored, most players will be mad and play through it anyway even if they have less fun, because they want the good ending, it’s a ‘win condition’. I would prefer a game where being awful helped you win in the end. Fable 3 came close but the property system was too easily manipulated.
2rafa
7d ago
The French have the thing where there is zero effort at accent, even among French who are absolutely fluent in grammatically perfect English. To be fair, there is a certain kind of Englishman who is exactly the same in French.
Singapore is grating especially because, if you watch old clips, the Chinese elite spoke with a much more English inflection / style until about 40 years ago; Singlish is a relatively recent invention.
I dislike the “international school” accent that wealthy Europeans have speaking English. They think it makes them far superior to their poorer countrymen who speak with more identifiable accents but I disagree - it melds aspects of standard American with a kind of almost Dutch twang. Give me a Tcherman any day. It’s an uncanny valley American. There are a few who cross it and are completely stealth Europeans who sound fully American, but far fewer pass than think they do.
There is a certain charm to Indians when they use bizarre words or antiquated expressions. As far as native accents go, Australians have an annoying attitude tied to their strenuously feigned nonchalance but the accent can be entertaining. The New Zealand accent has a nice melancholy to it. I dislike the Upper Midwest accent for reasons I struggle to describe, but it just has a kind of Winnie the Pooh fakeness to it. I love all the accents of the British Isles (although some, like Birmingham/Midlands, make me laugh because it seems almost comically depressed, a kind of eeyore accent if we’re continuing that analogy). The deep Toronto / Tronno accent is annoying.
The thesis re fixed income which I think is more reasonable is that governments will use 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.
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