2rafa
6hr ago
Religion is very relevant, especially in Malaysia, but the Chinese are still endogamous in Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines despite substantial non-Muslim, non-Chinese populations in each of them.
2rafa
10hr ago
As I understand it Thailand forcibly assimilated the Chinese so now everyone pretends not to notice that all the rich are Chinese (although some assimilation did occur, a lot of intermarriage etc, certainly much moreso than with affluent overseas Chinese anywhere else in SEA).
They are only just starting to promote tourism again with the recent visa free travel deals. Luxury hotels that cater to tourists rather than business travellers (like the Amans) are still pretty empty in the mainland in my very recent experience. The English proficiency of hotel staff even at top international chains also varies much more than elsewhere in East Asia, yes including Japan (this may be true even if the average Chinese person speaks more English than the average Japanese, I couldn’t comment); there is always someone relatively fluent, but many staff aren’t. I don’t expect this but it obviously makes it harder for international tourists, whereas you can navigate as an American with no real experience in Asia in Tokyo with almost no problems. In Beijing and Shanghai having local coworkers around felt if not necessary then very useful.
China is also in that place where tourists looking for cheap beach vacations will naturally go to Thailand / Vietnam / etc over China. As a big, increasingly expensive and seasonal (in the sense that a lot of key cultural sites are in places that get [very] cold in the winter and [very] hot in the summer) destination, places like Beijing seem more like Moscow or St Petersburg before the war in terms of rich world tourism, in that they are going to attract primarily (upper) middle class, relatively well travelled people who want a glimpse into another culture rather than to go for a bucket list item, for food, because it’s cheap or for status (all the above have driven the recent Japanese tourism boom for example), which is a small proportion of the total.
2rafa
10hr ago
you just make a tiered society
This is, of course, what economic stratification already does. The question is how you do that when people are no longer differentiated by economic contribution.
2rafa
22hr ago
Why? Even in such a society, the behavior of fellow people is important to us. We don’t want violent addicts on the subway, we don’t want ugly people covered in tattoos, we don’t want people who are antisocial, rude, vulgar, loud etc to the point of damaging their community or the broader social fabric. We want to minimize scammers, cheaters and criminals.
Putting everyone on UBI doesn’t solve any of these problems alone.
2rafa
1d ago
The mistake is in assuming this won’t happen anyway. The system already ruins your life, shuts you out of flying, having a bank account, shames every would-be employer for hiring you etc if you have a disapproved-of opinion, and in most of the West you can even go to proson for it, where you are likely to be the victim of ethnic or religiously motivated gangs if you’ve said anything or done anything to offend or hurt them before your incarceration. During Covid there was even plenty of chatter about prioritizing “higher risk” Black and Brown patients over white people.
You have - by the way - stumbled across a more general reality of the welfare system or entire modern state (discussed elsewhere in this thread): the system already exists to extract money and dignity from you and give it to others; you cannot destroy it, only redirect some of that extraction and humiliation toward others and some of the loot towards yourself.
2rafa
1d ago
Given that with mass automation due to A(G)I, many more of us (possibly all of us) may be living off of a form of welfare before long, it’s time to have what has long been a taboo discussion, namely that government should enforce standards of behavior on welfare recipients.
To me it’s not really a question of generosity. If recipients didn’t use hard drugs, dressed well, behaved decently, were polite and generally didn’t disturb anyone else, I would even be in favor of more generous welfare in certain cases. But welfare for slobs, addicts, the obese, antisocial people, and groups with a track record of poor interaction with mainstream society should be curtailed to the point of making life very difficult.
In general, the greatest failure of liberal universalism is that it does not adequately distinguish between categories of citizen by social contribution. It did originally (eg almost every 19th century democracy initially limited the vote to landowners or taxpayers) but these restrictions fell - long before even female suffrage in most cases. Welfare initially was often led designed to promote prosocial behavior in the underclass, but again, much of this fell by the wayside.
Idea: Tiered welfare, including food stamps. Very low, third-world-beans-and-rice level baseline. Take a drug test every x period and come back clean, get 25% more money. Have kids? If they all attend school 97% of school days and are on time 90% of the time, get 25% more money. Kid scores in the top 20% of his grade on a standardized test? 50% more money. Kid is arrested? 30% reduction in money (or down to baseline, whichever is higher) for 2 years, rolling reset every time a child is arrested. Your ‘welfare tier’ also determines your tier of social housing, more recently renovated apartment in a better location etc. Every year of full time tax paying employment prior to going on welfare also increases your welfare. Local beat cops can also allocate a pool of welfare to ‘trusted’ informants, making snitching higher status.
2rafa
2d ago
I would say that the decline is classically dated to begin in 1873 with the start of the long agricultural recession, during which the American economy rapidly overtook the British within a period of perhaps fifteen years after the Civil War. The height of the empire in terms of landmass was in the mid-1920s, yes, but this has a lot to do with the outcome of WW1 in erstwhile Ottoman lands, the distribution of some German colonies and US isolationism than it does imperial expansion; America had been wealthier per capita for 30 years and more populous for 50 years by then.
2rafa
2d ago
The rules of engagement coupled with casualty tolerance in Afghanistan prevented any long term victory.
Different interests latch onto different causes but they are all obviously connected. The occupation failed because Wester troops were garrisoned in bases while the Taliban controlled much of the countryside essentially uninterrupted for the period. Many ‘soldiers’ never left base and most who did did so very infrequently for largely choreographed ‘patrols’ that anyone could avoid if they wanted to. Why? Because troops were terrified of IEDs and ambush attacks, which in turn led to a paranoia that was only reinforced by rare trips out of base (psychologically this creates a fortress mindset in a soldier in which every trip outside base is an expedition into a hostile land). This tied into the broader situation that, because the US DoD and (even moreso) European armies had extremely low casualty tolerance to a degree unheard of in almost any historical or other current conflict, fighting a guerrilla enemy that stationed soldiers in houses and villages and schools was essentially impossible.
There were two possible ways out of this situation.
The coalition could have swallowed much higher casualty rates and stationed soldiers and support personnel in town and villages, forced a larger degree of cultural transformation / imperialism on particularly rural natives, and used a form of summary justice (ie simply executing anyone suspected of assisting the Taliban in any capacity and the entire immediate family or tribe, which would involve plenty of false positives, but that’s wartime) to make cooperation with the enemy much less attractive while making cooperating with the occupying forces much more attractive (since it would no longer be about making a deal with the guys in the military base 10 miles away while you deal with the enemy sympathizers in your village alone).
Or, the coalition could have taken the Israeli approach in Gaza which, while likely still higher in terms of casualty rate than the recent Afghan War (depending on how you calculate it), still involved a relatively low tolerance for soldier deaths on the Israeli side. That would preclude a total victory (Hamas still exists and has many soldiers after all) but - by dropping insane volumes of ordinance on any cultural, communal, religious, social, healthcare, educational and other institutions that might possibly house enemy fighters - you can demoralize a population and slowly reduce both the absolute number of and relative quality of enemy fighters (as more experienced soldiers are killed) even in a high fertility population. This plan would have involved probably the deaths of 5% or so of the civilian population as a direct consequence of the coalition campaign but would, coupled with the targeted killing of all major religious and cultural figures, the reinstatement of the King (not doing this was one of the great failures of the war) and a ban on Afghan civilian government for at least 15 years after the invasion, have had a higher chance of success than the plan that was pursued.
In general views on transsexuals before the 2010s were either similar to or more tolerant than those on gay men. The extreme example for the latter case is obviously the Iranian situation but I think a lot of mainstream American media in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s was also broadly sympathetic to people we would today call transwomen. Even many examples of the ‘trans panic’ thing often framed the transwoman sympathetically if present-day politically incorrectly, like Chandler’s dad in Friends.
2rafa
3d ago
It seems better to model it like a normal distribution where the vast majority of people are in the 3.5 to 6.5 range. Your way seems to lead to a lot of ambiguity between what counts as an 8 or a 9 or a 10, for example, because they’re all equally common.
Shy male nerds at 17-22 certainly wish that a hot girl with little or no sexual experience would fall into their lap, have sex with and marry them (in that order) and then never look at another man again.
But this is because (1) of male sexual jealousy and fear of performance inadequacy, (2) fear of rejection and (3) male mate guarding instinct, all of which are significant in sexually inexperienced young men. Men also know that having a child with a woman kills her value to other men on the marriage market, which means she is more likely to stick with them (another man she dates as a single mother will likely be much lower value on several or all axes), which makes having children as soon as possible with this hypothetical hot girl who is into you more attractive so she doesn’t leave you.
The evidence consistently shows that young men below their mid-20s (later for late-blooming men) who are attractive, have charisma and know how to talk to women prefer to play the field rather than settle down with their first attractive girlfriend, even though thee are plenty of women their age who would be happy to do so. There are certainly clear exceptions, but not the majority. Most hot, charismatic men I know who did settle down at say 22 monogamously partied and slept around heavily in high school and college (women do this too). Women vary, but I think the average beautiful and charismatic 22 year old woman would be more willing to get married to the right man than the average beautiful and charismatic 22 year old man would be willing to get married to the right woman.
2rafa
4d ago
especially 9s and 10s
I suppose everyone has their own definition, but assuming a “10” is at least 99.9th percentile for fit, healthy people your age (so probably 99.99th percentile overall; one in ten thousand men or women) I think seducing many 10s would be quite impressive.
2rafa
5d ago
There was a lot of discussion of the case in the UK press and by opinion columnists, feminists prone to sharing infographics on social media certainly shared infographics about this case. The present Queen commented on it. Beyond that stories from non-Anglo countries are never going to be as prominent in the anglophone press for obvious reasons, but I think it received extensive coverage.
I agree, this is largely my thinking. Death by AGI is likely to be quick, whether it’s by killbots or disease. The really bad stuff (like some kind of bioengineered torture plague terrorism or evil AI) are very bad but I’m not sure they’re worse or more likely that the worst ‘present day’ ways to die.
2rafa
8d ago
The trans thing was politically useful because it showcased the most extreme, least defensible positions on the progressive side (like that even biological sex was fake) during peak woke that had very low mainstream public approval. In a way, it was similar to eg factions on the academic far-left being sympathetic to extreme sexual deviancy in the late 1970s, which was also useful for the right at the time leading into the comparative backlash in the 1980s.
Today it feels like we’re no longer even close to that level. Yes, progressive wine moms and aunts are still very pro-trans, that’s true. But even the NYT is now no longer as zealous about the topic as it once was, and the whole right is in agreement. It feels like this chapter of the culture war is largely closed, albeit without a total victory on either side.
2rafa
8d ago
There was really a coalescing of many different online communities that had previously been largely (not entirely but largely) independent around that 2013-2017 period. Ron Paul libertarians, hardcore gamers and gaming content creators, neoreactionaries, Stormfront types, aspects of the Tea Party movement, the remnants of the Pick up Artist and MRA movements, these were all previously largely independent and had their own forums. If there was overlap, it was at the individual level (someone liking both PUA stuff and video games), not at the communal level.
Slowly, this became a Very Online Coalition that was at first tentatively and later solidly behind the ‘right wing’ side of the nascent online culture war.
2rafa
9d ago
It’s the ‘option’ of 24/7, I don’t think most people who wouldn’t today put their kid up for adoption would take it. But yes, even things like travelling as a couple while leaving your young kids at home with extended family or friends (which were normal in my grandparents’ day) are now looked down upon.
As others have said, low fertility is fundamentally about the desire for a comfortable life (charitable) or hedonism (uncharitable). I think the latter is often uncharitable because I don’t think DINKs mostly want to party and do drugs and eat 17 course three star tasting menus in all their free time in the way the natalist caricature often suggests, I think they mostly just want a quiet, peaceful life that doesn’t involve waking up throughout the night, spending all weekend ferrying kids to and from various activities and babysitting for years.
That desire can be overridden by material or extreme ideological (as in the religious examples) circumstance. But ‘extreme’ is important. Moderately conservative Jews, Christians and Muslims who believe the same things their 7 tfr ancestors did 100 years ago have far fewer children today.
@4bpp is essentially correct. Give every DINK a taxpayer-funded nanny to look after the kids, handle the night nurse stuff for the first 3 years, then take them to school and home, to stuff on the weekend, pay for camp in the summer, and most would happily have children. This was - by the way - the norm for middle class and above households until about a century ago. Mothers of a certain class in 1926 were not spending dozens of hours a week looking after their children, and even working class moms pooled resources.
I expect children but I couldn’t do it on a normal income, not because kids themselves are expensive but because I don’t believe in a form of atomized, isolated, high investment nuclear family parenting that leaves the two parents (mostly the mother it has to be said) as slaves to their own children until they graduate college.
It used to be that parenting was much more low investment (both in terms of money and time and emotional involvement). Some older women in the local community would look after your kids for a pittance if you ever wanted them to, you saw them for an hour a day, certainly you weren’t expected to devote every minute of your free time to them.
The motherhood narrative post-1950 of kids becoming your life and central to every waking minute of your day (and into which men are, post-1990s, also increasingly indoctrinated) just isn’t compelling, presently or historically, to a lot of people. This has (and this is a conservative mistake) nothing to do with women working or not working. An upper class mother in 1890 who saw her children every day before dinner wasn’t working long hours at a merchant bank, but she still had various things she did every day that mostly did not involve constantly looking after her kids.
If you want more women to have more children, the best way is to lower socially expected levels of parental investment, especially in terms of time, and build institutions that essentially let you drop off your child whenever you want and pick them up whenever you want. Free, 24/7 daycare for everyone under 16.
2rafa
10d ago
I remember the sheer glee they had about factory workers, coal miners and truck drivers being driven out of business by automation and illegal immigration. Fuck ‘em. I hope they enjoy their brave new world.
There was limited glee (which is not to say there was none before the screenshots come out). Mostly the worst one could say is that they didn’t care much, but they’re hardly the only people guilty of not caring when bad things happen to other people.
2rafa
10d ago
People with down’s are often quite charming to speak to, infectiously optimistic and with surprisingly complex inner lives. I would find looking after a family member with the condition difficult, but not because of the conversation.
2rafa
11d ago
Eh? I'm very confident that's wrong. Normies might not appreciate the impact of ChatGPT and co to the same degree, but I strongly doubt that they literally believed that there was human-level AI in 2021. AGI was science fiction for damn good reason, it didn't exist, and very, very few people expected we'd see it or even precursors in the 2020s. Jarvis was scifi, and nobody believed that something like Siri was in the same weight-class.
You have to remember that plenty of normal people (not bottom of the barrel) believe things like “the government has the cure to all cancer but doesn’t release it so that drug companies make money”, which is rather more farfetched than GPT4 existing in 2007.
In a way, AI is harder on nerds than it is on anyone else.
At a closed-door meeting in Princeton, leading researchers said agentic AI tools now handle up to 90% of their intellectual workload—forcing a reckoning over who, or what, drives scientific discovery.
It is interesting to see, now that it is ingrained into the personal and professional lives of vast numbers of ‘normal’ people, how mundanely it slots into the daily existence of the average person. I don’t mean that critically, I mean that the average person (especially globally but probably also in the rich world) probably already believed there were ‘computers’ who were ‘smarter than them’. ChatGPT isn’t so different from, say, Jarvis in Iron Man (or countless other AIs in fiction), and the median 90-100IQ person may even have believed in 2007 that technology like that actually existed “for rich people” or at least didn’t seem much more advanced than what they had.
Most people do not seek or find intellectual satisfaction in their work. Intellectual achievement is not central to their identity. This is true even for many people with decent-IQ white collar jobs. They may be concerned (like many of us) with things like technological unemployment, but the fact that an AI might do everything intellectually that they can faster and better doesn’t cause them much consternation. A tool that builds their website from a prompt is a tool, like a microwave or a computer. To a lot of users of LLMs, the lines between human and AI aren’t really blurring together so much as irrelevant; the things most people seek from others, like physical intimacy, family and children, good food and mirth, are not intellectual.
This is much more emotionally healthy than the nerd’s response. A version of the Princeton story is now increasingly common on ‘intellectual’ forums and in spaces online as more and more intelligent people realize the social and cultural implications of mass automation that go beyond the coming economic challenge. Someone whose identity is built around being a member of their local community, a religious organization, a small sports team, their spouse and children, a small group of friends with whom they go drinking a couple of times a month, a calendar of festivals and birthdays, will fare much better than someone who has spent a lifetime cultivating an identity built around an intellect that is no longer useful to anyone, least of all themselves.
I was thinking recently that I’m proud of what I’ve done in my short career, but that smart-ish people in their mid/late twenties to perhaps mid/late forties are in the worst position with regards to the impact of AI on our personal identities. Those much older than us have lived and experienced full careers at a time when their work was useful and important, when they had value. Those much younger will either never work or, if they’re say 20 or 22 now, work for only a handful of years before AI can do all intellectual labor - and have in any case already had three years of LLMs for their own career funeral planning. But in this age range, baited to complete the long, painful, tiresome and often menial slog that characterizes the first decade of a white collar career, we have the double humiliation of never getting further than that and of having wasted so much of our lives preparing for this future that isn’t going to happen.
In the end tourism is a choice. Bhutan still has a $100-200 per person per night tourist tax to discourage budget tourism and it works for them.
When people in places like Barcelona, Venice, Tokyo etc complain about tourism without stuff like this they are making an active choice to keep the money flowing at the expense of crowdedness etc.
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