2rafa
1d ago
That’s insane when the leaks from like 5+ years ago that correctly named Jason and Lucia said they would be dual protagonists.
2rafa
1d ago
Starfield’s writing is no worse than that of Skyrim, Oblivion, or Fallout 3/4. Morrowind also had bad quest writing but was elevated by the the weird fiction aspects, some good worldbuilding, and narrative constraints imposed by a tight deadline that mercifully limited quest text volume.
2rafa
1d ago
Your comment reminded me that Dick Fuld, infamous boss of Lehman Brothers for the fifteen years before it collapsed, had a very harsh policy against adultery for senior executives. He fired the bank’s president for it (along with several others over the years) and warned every executive that any extramarital affair was an immediately fireable offense. He also policed their behavior around their wives. Apparently he even told the wives, on their annual executive family retreat, that if they came to him with an affair, he’d fire their husbands but make sure they were looked after.
I read a good post a long time ago about how the main effect of the 70s serial killer wave culturally was not only (as is widely noted) to make way for a lower trust society in general - teenagers don’t hitchhike much anymore, etc - but specifically to make way for the end of a society (the Protestant European America, Canada, Britain, and much of the rest of Northwestern Europe of, say, 1890 to 1965) in which sociopathic behavior was uniquely easy to get away with compared to almost any other time and place in human history. You can see this even in period crime novels, at which one sometimes guffaws at the preposterousness of the trusting behavior shown by e.g. victims, but which was in fact seemingly accurate for the time.
Countries like Japan and Spain are relatively high trust, although less so than say Denmark, but they’re high trust in a completely different way to the kind of ‘sitting duck’ societies that the NW Euro Protestants had constructed in places like England and Minnesota by the 1950s. There’s still an inherent sense of friend and family and tribe and the stranger. As you point out for Catholic Ireland (and the same is true in Islamic countries as in North Africa), the same social stipulations worked or work on a much more ‘objective’ level that at least attempted to guard against the possibility of lying.
2rafa
1d ago
The marker was clearly an ideological zealot and should be removed from teaching duties on that basis. It was a poor essay, but you give that a 10/25, not a 0.
2rafa
1d ago
The topic is interesting enough, but you’ve been here long enough that it didn’t feel like the man’s usual writing.
2rafa
1d ago
Yeah they’re not committed to aggressively stamping out Cantonese, if anything I think over the last decade there has been more of a vaguely nationalist drive to preserve Chinese culture including regional languages in a way that, in fifty years, might actually lead to the kind of thing you see in parts of Europe with declining regional languages. But for now Hong Kong is fine to keep using it.
2rafa
2d ago
I agree with you that using LLM output directly in an answer should be banned, if not as a rule (not least because it’s impossible) then by mutual gentle(wo)man’s agreement of the regular commentariat.
2rafa
2d ago
Hong Kong seems to be doing better now, it’s fully politically pacified and the conclusion of the Jimmy Lai case marks the end of a big chapter in the city’s history. There were a lot of IPOs over the last year, it’s again the preferred listing location for a lot of regional / Sinosphere companies. The big quant shops are expanding their presence. A lot of bankers and lawyers are back from Singapore, which can never really replace what Hong Kong offers (and which has worse weather for much of the years, Hong Kong you can go walk on the peak in the morning in October and not feel like you’re hiking through a rainforest).
I’ve long considered moving there, although it would have to be for the right package and job, and I would want to at least try to learn Cantonese (mainly for my own amusement) which is notoriously difficult.
2rafa
2d ago
Polymarket only has limited CFTC approval for some contracts in the US (officially) right now, it’s Kalshi that has much more freedom and they’ve signalled they’re fine with.
2rafa
3d ago
And people BET ON IT. This is like betting on the outcome of a TV show. How are gambling commissions allowing that to happen?
Gambling commissions are fine with Kalshi bets on who Taylor Swift will invite to her wedding, bets on who Trump will pick as Fed chair and so on, where obviously at least some people will have material non-public information before the wider market.
2rafa
5d ago
It’s more that, and I get that you imply this, both the Amish and Haredim (the latter are more dysfunctional) are kind of quirky minorities who exist within the envelope or the umbrella of the wider, modern, largely secular societies they inhabit. In Israel where they’re only 10-15% of the population they are already causing a lot of problems, refusing to fight despite the country being surrounded on almost all sides by a billion Muslims who would, if their own governments let them, gladly give everything to destroy them, and the leading haredi politicians go on TV to say that young haredi men can’t be conscripted because they do as much for Israel by praying as the soldiers do by fighting (seriously, this is the current line). It’s not sustainable. The Amish are less parasitic, but again if they got to 15%++ of the population there would be more concerns about assimilation, participation in wider society, demands for a renegotiation of their social security exemption etc would be more common.
More obviously, if the Haredim were the overwhelming majority in Israel, Israel would either be destroyed or the Haredim would have to radically change their culture. This is the clearest point in favor of your argument.
It’s interesting that even in Western far right antisemitic circles (eg groypers) they are much more focused on things like Jews in finance, (where there is overrepresentation, sure, but far from dominance) or media (where one could make more of an argument, although it’s certainly no longer the situation it was in the 1990s) than on AI.
Every single major Western AI foundation model company (except xAI, if you want to include it) is owned or run by Jews. OpenAI has Sam Altman, Meta has Zuckerberg, Google is still ultimately controlled by Sergey and Larry, and Anthropic is run by the Amodei siblings, who are also Jewish. Generative AI itself is not an entirely Jewish invention, although Jews were highly overrepresented in its development and in the development of many of the computing innovations that preceded it.
2rafa
6d ago
I must say that the whole "look at the parents to gauge their offspring" is wise, and something I learned from bitter experience. A girl from a well-adjusted, caring family? There's cause for hope.
That is the most important thing. When I was maybe 14, my friend’s mother, scion of the single most politically important dynasty in a small Latin American nation of little note, told me that when marrying, you marry a family more than a man or a woman. The advice has stuck with me since, and it was correct.
2rafa
6d ago
Like you I’m a neurotic, which is unfortunate in this particular aspect of life, in which neuroticism can so easily ruin everything.
I needed a framework to take risks (otherwise I would take none), which ended up being instrumental to my own happiness. It was something like this (unlike you, I never write anything about my personal life, no journals or diaries, but I had it in my head):
- Are they not a (known) cheater, known to be very promiscuous or otherwise have signs, explicitly or implicitly, of a wandering eye?
- Are their parents happily married (the happily is almost as important as the married)? You can usually get the answer to this very quickly because people enjoy psychologizing their own parents, even on an early date
- Do they want to settle down and are they looking for something permanent, now?
- Are they a liar? You can figure this out quickly, it’s just a matter of not deluding yourself about the implications.
If the answer is yes to all, and you like all the other stuff, then you owe it to yourself to pursue it, even if it seems hard or unlikely or you have doubts (which a neurotic always does).
2rafa
6d ago
There is reason to believe that Internet activism is significantly less effective at mobilizing actual people.
An extremely good and rarely made point. The proportion of Muslims radicalized at Western mosques (eg the one in Berlin connected to a number of the 9/11 attackers) in 1998 was perhaps not vastly higher than the proportion radicalized today online (although the latter is a much larger absolute number), but the propensity to commit a real life terror attack seems much much lower in the latter group.
There is still Islamist terrorist violence done by men who have been fully radicalized online, of course, but when you look at the total number out of the tens of millions of Muslim men (at least) fed extremist, violent anti-Western, antisemitic and so on propaganda on social media it’s a very very low proportion who actually leave the house and do this.
Modern online leftism, which lacks the physical real world presence that conservative Islam (or any major religion) still obviously has is even more telling. Millions of people cheering that guy Luigi, wishing violent deaths on capitalists, insurance executives, arms firm executives, finance people, and yet (thankfully!) copycats seem thin on the ground.
2rafa
7d ago
The left wing attacks that we’ve seen recently, using a broad definition (the Kirk and United Healthcare assassinations for example) have been mostly lone wolf attacks
2rafa
7d ago
Not necessarily, my argument is that a given radical leftist is probably less likely to pursue violence today than in the 1970s, for the reasons I outlined.
2rafa
7d ago
LAPD Robbery Homicide are notorious fame hounds, probably literally the single most famous police division in America, my understanding is they attract a certain kind of cop (the kind who wants to appear on documentaries and maybe have a lucrative sideline in or second career commenting on the news or writing detective thrillers, which many of them go on to do) who might well call up People and tell them what’s happening in the investigation. That plus the sister probably told them too, which is enough for an editor and legal counsel to make a publishing decision knowing that you have both a police source and the surviving family on board.
2rafa
7d ago
I don’t think so. One of the features of days of rage style terror (also the basque, ira, raf etc) campaigns in the 1970s, and with anarchist / leftist violence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was that people actually regularly got away with attacks in a way that they don’t today. Surveillance is much higher, all these discords are being AI monitored, cars can be easily tracked, mountains of cell phone and transaction data can be filtered with analysis performed with minimal human involvement. In 1977, before ubiquitous CCTV, before ANPR, before everyone carrying around a tracking device, before DNA analysis that means that if they find anything you possibly touched they can pull your second cousin on 23-and-me and find you etc, it was much harder to find terrorists without a confession, a mole, or a fuck-up.
The islamists get around this because they’re one and done, radicalized online, mostly lone or duo/trio attacks, and because most importantly they want to and expect to die and go to Jannah. An islamist who stabs people outside a synagogue doesn’t expect to go on doing this until victory; he will view the defeat of the yahud and crusaders only from heaven. Leftists want to build their utopia on earth and actually want to live in it.
2rafa
7d ago
I think there are a lot of inconvenient logistics and highly conflicting motivations to consider around this among elected representatives, government bureaucrats, private sector businesses (which are not just their owners but everyone else making decisions), random rich people (many of whom are reliant on consumption by the ‘99%’ for the entire value of their holdings). Mass unemployment due to AI might be only a year or two away, at what point does Elon pull the trigger? But wait - he makes cars and satellites - who controls the kill bot fleet? Armin Papperger? The DoD? There are a lot of coordination mechanics that I think make a “kill the poor” scenario unlikely, not least because the merely moderately rich would know they were next.
In general, I think the oft-made argument that welfare was implemented so that the there wasn’t a communist revolution is at best largely inaccurate.
2rafa
7d ago
Graeber was a sloppy academic and Debt is broadly terrible and ignores a lot of good economic history. Nevertheless, the “bullshit job” concept has outlived him, and arguably in places like this now means something a little different to what he meant (which was more about caaapitalism, maan) which is why I was careful to imply that in my post.
I would pay $2000 for an iPhone 17 Pro Mini.
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