2rafa
maybe it will all turn out fine
User ID: 841
2rafa
2hr ago
Clearly this is still a very lucrative business. The threat for shipping firms isn’t really losing the value of a ship, though, it’s that lead time on new tankers is limited, production has been very low since oil prices cratered in 2014, and everybody who still makes them (mainly the Chinese) is at max capacity with no slack for years. Since anybody who has them is printing money right now, there’s also no incentive to sell or lease them to other firms except at prices / rates that negate much of the Hormuz profiteering bonus. So it is still a real gamble - whether or not you have insurance.
The point is that the truth of the claim is far, far narrower than what is suggested.
It’s like a motte and bailey where the motte is “a core foreign policy goal of the CIA was to fracture support for Stalinism in Western European communist student and bohemian art circles, so they funded abstract contemporary art that made the socialist realism promoted as state art in the USSR seem dated, illiberal and boring to this small, niche group of leftists who already hated the United States, capitalism, the wars in Korea and later Vietnam etc” and the bailey is “the CIA deliberately promoted the replacing of traditional classical American styles of art with degenerate, abstract and ugly contemporary art to fracture American society and make us all gay abortionists”.
Actually, none of the art was for ‘fucking with the Soviets’, it was all for shaping the opinion of socialist-adjacent groups, students, professors, artists, hippies, cultural commentators, literary journal contributors and so on in the American sphere who slowly turned against the Soviet Union in the decades leading up to 1990, which was a far greater priority.
2rafa
6hr ago
Data for black women is skewed by obesity rates.
Most groups have similar male and female obesity rates, that is to say white women are similarly obese to white men, Asian women are similarly obese to Asian men, etc. There is variation but it is minor.
Black women have obesity rates roughly 2x those of black men. Black men are less obese than men of most other racial groups; black women are more obese than women of other groups.
This is the primary cause, by far, of some of these unusual dynamics, even more than things like college attendance. For example, it explains why black men date out more than black women.
The ‘They/Them’ thing is a very inside baseball SNL style ‘joke’ about the 2024 ‘Kamala is for They/Them. Trump is for you’ ad. I’m sure Cenk found it very funny but no swing voter remembers or cares, and it’s stuffed in a little awkwardly.
I guess this might work on some Michigan Arabs, who are clearly the primary audience.
2rafa
17hr ago
Sam Kriss is an interesting but very uneven writer, fond of overlong fictive anecdotes, an obsession with poorly interpreted myth, and - most egregiously - an unwillingness to ever actually argue in favor of anything because an argument you can grasp is one you can criticize. Ideologically, he is an empty pop-philosopher, an inverted Pinker who reifies the kind of reheated 1990s WTO protest Naomi Klein democratic socialism that has no real answers, or even useful questions, about the world we actually live in. If he is defined by anything it is a fear of ever engaging earnestly with the arguments of the political right, and if he is the best Substack has to offer, there are a dozen regulars here who write better both in terms of technical ability (for example conciseness) and content. I won’t name them.
I don’t think this community has earnestly discussed IQ much in years (if it does today, it’s usually only tangentially, for example in relation to the Arday-Cofnas case), it’s a relatively boring and played out topic. I do think this community selects for people who dislike performative vulgarity, value functioning and well-ordered societies, and are probably a little cynical about some of the social changes that have occurred in recent decades, sure. Anti-social and socially unpopular? I’m not so sure, I’d guess that while we have some losers and recluses, we don’t have more than the rest of the internet proportionally, and I would similarly guess that we have many quite normal people with relatively normal social and professional lives, community lives, families and children etc.
2rafa
17hr ago
TPO was often obstinate and annoying but, again, he was an interesting writer and original thinker who has clearly had a lot of success on other social media since his departure from this board.
2rafa
2d ago
10 Year Anniversary Celebration (it was actually earlier this year, but we can still call it the ten year I guess) would be fun.
2rafa
2d ago
His AI opinions have not always been on point lol. That is literally impossible given his AI opinions have oscillated between almost every possible opinion on AI and the AI race over the last 4-5 years.
I don’t begrudge people who leave - someone once suggested Kulak was making like $25,000 a year from his Substack which seems crazy me, but good for him - but I have a fundamental difference of opinion with them in that (a) I’m not going to pay for some random Redditor’s political opinions, even if I agree with them and (b) when you start making money - even if it’s just a side hustle - the incentives change in a way that usually makes your writing worse, your reasoning more motivated, etc. It’s like paid mods, I don’t have an issue with them in principle, but I understand why people in the community see them as a cultural problem.
I also don’t understand who is actually paying all these people. I have money, but the idea of spending $300 a month to read a bunch of Motte-or-worse comments seems…bad? I guess people will say they subscribe to newspapers but the good papers actually do original journalism, reporting, have good sources etc and even the opinion columns are usually people who were actually accomplished in their fields, are still well connected, and so can present some analysis and credibility I can’t find on Reddit (or most of Substack).
2rafa
2d ago
Yeah, we had the user viewpoint series a few years ago, but this would be slightly different - do it!
2rafa
2d ago
Most attractive 24 year old women in Miami aren’t dating fifty year old men, or close to it. There is a larger sugar baby / p4p scene in Miami than any other major city in the US adjusted for the population, but it’s still quite limited. I think it’s more likely the circles you’re in. I know a few women with much older parters, but they tend to be average looking women who get out of a long relationship at, say, 32, don’t like the prospects their age, and settle for a much older man with kids already who funds a nice and relaxing rest of their life. A hot 24 year old, in general, knows that a silver fox today is the man whose ass you’re wiping in twenty years, when you’re still in your forties.
2rafa
2d ago
I agree more than disagree, but it was a process with many stops and starts. It began in earnest in the 1880s and 1890s, reached its zenith in the decade after the first world war in certain subcultures of young urban women, then went stagnant (and partially reversed, depending on the exact place and metric) for a while through the late 1950s, then was reignited by the sexual revolution and its immediate precursors and finally - for the first time - filtered out into pretty much the entirety of western society by the late 1970s, which is when the sexual revolution actually reached most normal people.
This poster (Anglology / @Echetus / “James Lachrymose” [pen name]) is quite interesting.
He had a short lived podcast interviewing other obscure largely British right wing anons for a time, which was occasionally interesting. The strange thing is his accent. Despite portraying himself as English, he had a slight Eastern European twang, clearly resident in England but didn’t grow up there. It wasn’t a wealthy international school accent either, nor was it a BAP style fake in-joke. I’d be curious to know of his background; he writes occasionally for the mid[wit]brow British right wing magazine / failson collective that is The Critic.
2rafa
3d ago
I’ve met countless East Asian women who work in back office or clerical / admin jobs, as paralegals, in other low tier white collar jobs.
2rafa
3d ago
There is no strong Jewish identity outside Zionism other than in actual Haredi Judaism, which is mostly apathetic on this question but which really has nothing to do with the political left and sees the entire secular world, Jewish and gentile, as corrupt and degenerate.
Most liberal American Jews will and are abandoning Zionism. They are doing it perhaps slower than the left would like, but faster than one might have anticipated given half these people literally went on birthright. In the end it’s a relatively small price to pay, because Western Jews never sacrificed or lost anything for supporting Israel. There was never any cost to it, it’s on the other side of the world from America, and America is too racially, religiously and culturally diverse for extreme, violent antisemitism to become likely as state policy.
What, an unholy alliance of hotep black nationalists, 74% indigenous Mexican Catholics, Arabs, trans leftists and racist Irish and Italian Ellis Island people are going to commit some kind of inquisition against Jewish-Americans for supporting Israel? That seems about the least stable political coalition of all time and one that probably wouldn’t agree on anything except that one issue. Antisemitism is rising, and will probably continue to from the nadir of the 1990s (although I don’t think we’re close to mid-century levels yet, let alone something that would imply actual physical risk), but there are a lot of other kinds of medium sized ethnic animosity in America.
My guess is that two thirds of American Jews, already secularizing fast, will abandon any remaining Zionist aspect of their identities and remain generic progressive libs. The remaining third will be split into the fast growing Haredi populations which with the exception of Chabad might swear neutrality in the even of any serious state anti-Israel sentiment, but probably will just stay out of it, and the Modern Orthodox / Religious Zionist / maybe some more right wing conservative Jews, who will remain Zionist, and who will increasingly just come to be seen as the ‘Israeli diaspora’.
2rafa
3d ago
Third worldism was largely invented by merging ideas held by Indian nationalists, later Maoists, Fanon, indigenous rights activists in erstwhile Western European colonies and so on together in opposition, primarily, to both the ‘West’ and Soviet communism which was seen as too imperial and, eventually as the racial angle developed, essentially a white empire ruling over an ethnically diverse working class. The contribution of Jews to third worldism is and was substantially less than their contribution to ur-Marxism, to anarchism, or indeed to Leninism / state communist ideas.
2rafa
6d ago
Yeah and it's probably why the story isn't going to be finished. The polite thing to do would be to share the description with the fans or let somebody else finish the story.
2rafa
6d ago
I don’t think it was my fault. I just said it was racist. English was never that user’s problem, he clearly spoke it fluently and wrote it well (long before AI writing), and that insult was solely prompted by the knowledge that he was Indian. Hlynka couldn’t even insult him to his ‘face’, but had to use that particularly cowardly passive aggressive bait line; and he knew exactly what he was saying. My definition of racism here, which I have always understood to be bannable, is directly insulting another user, without evidence, solely on the basis of their (purported) race, rather than on the basis of their argument.
For what it’s worth, you can go back to the thread and read what I said. Beyond that, I don’t recall having any contact with the mods at all on this (or any other similar) matter, and I wasn’t the only person saying that he crossed the line in that thread.
I criticized Hlynka for that comment and some similar ones about @self_made_human, clearly it was the kind of vulgar racism that was beneath both him and this community in general. I agree with @Amadan that it’s a difficult question. Maybe we should have let him stay but asked that he consider a sincere apology. That doesn’t really make sense on a big subreddit, but in a community of less than a hundred regulars it might. Maybe the line should just have been a bit more firm - like all his posts go in the ‘user review’ queue before being approved and three other users have to check the ‘neutral’ or above box before they’re released without a ‘deserves a ban’. Maybe mods should have more latitude, for some problem users, to just delete rule breaking posts, and record them instead in some kind of log.
I’m not saying any of these is the solution. There are probably better ideas. But what @bro said is also true. The central mod principle is no heat without light. Even as Dase was being rude, he was still responding to the argument and making a case, it wasn’t just an insult or kulaks calling everyone he doesn’t like a racial slur forever.
2rafa
7d ago
I’d let @RandomRanger decide. Obviously it was a direct insult, but it didn’t use slurs and had a certain creative charm to it. Harassment isn’t a single argument or even a number of them that end up in the trading of insults. I don’t know if Dase has been as rude to me but he certainly has been rude, I can’t say I’ve ever been offended (the only thing I really don’t like it when people do is not reply to my long and thoughtful replies to them, but that is also a sin I commit far too often, so I cannot judge).
I would say to me, Dase and the erstwhile Hlynka existed within the ecosystem of the shared community which we (and Ranger) inhabit. There is room for cranks, even rude ones, there, in part because people know and can avoid them if they want to (and the block feature works well for this), and because they have contributed before.
Dase is a fragmented and often very wrong thinker. He flip flops on China every other week from bullish to bearish and back again, he was wrong about the Ukraine war, about much around Trump, about a bunch of other stuff. (I am not claiming my own predictions are better). He gets very mad when you criticize his ideas. Ban him for a week, if he’s rude ban him again. If he starts posting stuff like the above under random RandomRanger comments, then permaban him, but that is quite different from a heated argument. Few of us, I think, and certainly not me, can say they’ve never resorted to personal insults here before.
I really hate the way The Diplomat is written. I don’t really know how to describe it, but if I did I’d have to call it something like ‘midwit core’. It feels like Scandal, which imagined itself as a political thriller but which was actually about the super hot protagonist secretly being the most powerful person in the world and hypercompetent and hot and every gorgeous guy wanted her for her brains AND beauty. Okay, yeah I remember Wattpad too. Scandal would also randomly drop in obscure references to domestic or international politics in one liners to make the show seem smarter than it was.
There is just the sense in The Diplomat, too, that the writer is so smug for occasionally throwing in a line of obscure Wikipedia or Whitehall or Foreign Policy or intelligence circle / tradecraft stuff or Britishisms she doesn’t really understand and thinking that this has lent this ridiculous thriller a certain realism. For example, the writer’s grasp of the British class system, Westminster intrigue, the makeup of the Conservative and Labour parties, what the right and the left want, is so warped, it’s like the foreign correspondent for the New York Times in London spent six hours editing the script. It’s not about ‘realism’ - the average American political thriller that features the UK is entirely unobjectionable even in its ridiculousness because it doesn’t pretend to understand domestic politics. The Diplomat will throw in references to niche recent historical events (not like Brexit), specific newspapers or conferences, an Oxford college, a minor public school, a members club, a medium sized financial institution, later US politics too, but in a way that like an LLM would when it’s being overly niche in an unrealistic way, with no background, with no deep cultural understanding of anything (“give me a random deep cut reference that only someone in the New England upper middle class would understand. Make no mistakes”). I note that the creator and writer worked on later seasons of the West Wing, when it got much worse for this, because even when Sorkin is at his worst (which is often) his dialogue, while unrealistic and ultra-liberal, has a certain weight on background that The Diplomat just lacks.
I also find the show’s politics particularly grating. It’s not that it’s like a final vestige of Hillary Clinton era ‘neoliberalism’ or whatever we’re calling it now. I literally liked The Newsroom, I’m clearly not politically picky with my television. I think it’s that this is a prestige drama that sees itself very firmly as imparting a Very Specific Message That is Very Important, when actually it’s a poorly plotted (loosely) “political” thriller where the villains are perennially either venal Biden staffer types who just want power or some loose constellation of bumbling evil ‘far right’. The irony is that I think the main villain is actually an attempt by the writers to cast a Hillary Clinton type as bad, her paranoia damning the world if our heroic and very similar Powerful Woman doesn’t stop her, retroactively excusing 2016 in an “it wasn’t the ideas or the type of person, just the wrong person” kind of a way.
Keri Russell is good. She was always good and the problems with this show are 99% a bad script. Her husband’s character is probably the best in the show.
2rafa
8d ago
Fleabag is a very good example. I find that many men seem to kind of hate Fleabag (the character, if not the show) though. Which is not to say that the character is meant to be particularly likeable, obviously she mistreats people around her all the time, but she is fundamentally sympathetic in the sense that she is acting out and has a terrible relationship with women because of the early death of her mother, she is earnest in her own way, she isn’t a caricature of a horrible person. I wonder if it’s because Fleabag is kind of the story of one of those evil BPD cheating whores some men online like to complain about, except told from her perspective instead of just his.
I agree, but at the same time different kinds of people exist and I think a small community interested in the discussion of controversial things is going to have to draw the line somewhere. I have no disagreement with the rules or moderation broadly. I think the moderators do an excellent job and I pretty much agree with them on everything.
However, I think that temp bans solve issues with some problematic regulars in a way that is repeatable without resorting to permanent banning. For example, we are all here to participate in a conversation. If a topic is very busy because it is interesting or because something big is happening, a three day ban is essentially a permanent exclusion from that conversation. You cannot reply to your interlocutors, cannot defend your arguments, cannot make that interesting point you just thought of. It’s also embarrassing although I agree that some people have no shame.
It is unclear to me what a permanent ban of someone who has been a valued and interesting (in the sense that they have started and participated in lengthy conversations that have involved most or all of us, have added valuable information to those, have shared interesting or underrepresented views, have challenged some arguments in a smart way that might have gone unchallenged - and Dase and Hlynka both did all of these at times) member of this community accomplishes. If they are actively harassing another regular of greater, similar or at least comparable quality, then it is a simple choice - at some point the community will need to pick one or the other and it is only fair that it be the guilty party. But if they’re just being rude or getting very angry about something and have started to be nasty with the insults in the replies, banning them for a few days or a week seems better.
By the way, I don’t remember but I think I was actually in favor of banning Hlynka at the time. If I was, my mind has changed.
I don’t think open model competition will necessarily stay minor forever. It’s also perhaps more lucrative for surviving independent or semi-independent datacenter operators. Frontier models will be key to things like cybersecurity, its much less clear that running accounts payable for a construction company or handling automated help chat for a video game publisher or writing a mean review of a hotel you just visited on TripAdvisor based on your voice note requires them, and it’s mundane tasks like these that will be the majority of inference tasks if not tokens in relatively short order, if they aren’t already. Even for relatively powerful agentic stacks, it’s my understanding that a lot of consumer and enterprise tools now use cheap open models to triage and then call agents that might themselves call, where deemed necessary, frontier models. Most customers increasingly won’t notice the difference. I also think the position of the datacenter operators is getting increasingly dire and the market seems to agree. Coreweave and Oracle debt with spreads of 400-600+ bps to the treasury curve is ominous, even new issues at like 9% interest, but even if these vendors / providers survive, the margin to pay the coupon has to come from somewhere and with both GPUs and energy completely commoditized, that side of the business essentially relies on compute demand for inference as not only a bottleneck, but one that will experience zero slack as a result of falling token costs, open models and so on.
To believe in the data center narrative (and you have to even if you don’t own Coreweave or Oracle because every other big tech and frontier lab is guaranteeing a lot of that debt one way or another) you have to believe that if, say, inference and training becomes 50% more efficient overnight, that slack is going to be immediately taken up by new demand without any price pressure or panic.
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