BahRamYou
14hr ago
I can't help but feel like there's a certain similarity to that, and how most European elections work. With all your different political parties, and weird cutoffs/bonuses, and backroom deal-making to make a coalition...
BahRamYou
14hr ago
Surprisingly (or not) Israel doesn’t have only haters, their betting odds improved massively, they actually have a chance to win the contest!
How does the voting work? Are their brackets and eliminations, or is it just one giant vote and winner-takes-all? Being "polarizing" can work when you're just one choice out of many, and the haters weren't going to vote for you anyway, and they're split between many other options, but it attracts a small number of hardcore fans.
BahRamYou
1d ago
The thing about being a bachelor is- it's not really a stable situation. My happiness comes and goes. Sometimes I get a girlfriend or enjoy casual dating, sometimes it's just an endless hell of being ghosted/ignored like @Skulldrinker. Sometimes I can have fun with friends, sometimes they ignore me to go focus on their families (and are not shy to tell me that they consider their families infinitely me valuable than a mere friend). Friends just come and go. Nobody wants to watch TV with me or play video games with me, kids these days do that by themselves at home streaming because that's so much more convenient. But you can hire someone from epal.gg to do those things with you that's, uh... sorta like having a gamer girl gf.
BahRamYou
1d ago
Yeah it's a weird double-mission in the modern era. I guess it made more sense in the wild west days, when they were more like frontier super-policemen.
BahRamYou
1d ago
They're also quite good at their original mission: investigating and stamping out counterfeit money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfeit_United_States_currency
an estimated $70 million in counterfeit bills are in circulation, or approximately 1 note in counterfeits for every 10,000 in genuine currency, with an upper bound of $200 million counterfeit, or 1 counterfeit per 4,000 genuine notes
BahRamYou
3d ago
300m long is more than three football fields! That is an absurd amount of space for anyone in a city, where we fight over parking spaces that are about 3 meters long. The one @ToaKraka linked sounds better, but 75m is still way too much space for most people. You also need enough space in the sky for othem to fly without running into someone else, which can happen at any angle in three dimensions. It could work for a select few, but... we already have that, with private planes and helicopters.
Besides, if we're going this route, why not bring back zeppelins? The Empire State Building was designed with a spire so zeppelins could dock on top, as were several other buildings of the time.
BahRamYou
4d ago
As Kulak is fond of saying, the reason we don't have flying cars isn't that they haven't been invented, it's that they've been made illegal. They were commonly flown (and shot down) by teenagers in the 1910s.
what do you mean by this? A homemade airplane isn't the same as a flying car. I guess it could work if you live in a very rural, but the problem with airplanes is that you need a long runway both to takeoff and land, plus clear airspace. That makes them impractical for anyone living in a city. A flying car could theoretically fit in your garage, take off/land vertically, and fly carefully enough to avoid collisions in the sky.
BahRamYou
5d ago
Yeah. And sane as you, i submitted at the last minute. Probably could hace done better with more tine, but its hard to tell how much time i should sink into this pointless online mental masturbation.
BahRamYou
6d ago
most couples aren't all that happy about a woman who's just at home by herself or spending her husband's money with her friends 8 hrs a day. That was the issue in the 50s -- taking nicer and nicer jello casseroles and sewing unusually pretty aprons is not any more fulfilling than even quite a dull job, and husbands are not impressed by their wives chilling with their friends all day while they're at work. And then their kids grow up enough to take care of themselves, so what are they going to do?
That's true, but you could also say the same about working a job. Most jobs, even well-paying ones, just aren't that interesting as far as self-actualization and giving meaning to your life. It's an existential struggle that we all face, in this modern age of atheism and material abundance. If she's chilling with her friends, at least that might provide some real community and social circle, compared to the career woman late at night, too tired to do anything except order takeout and watch TV.
BahRamYou
6d ago
This is all well and good. I find myself continually amazed at how good normies are at unconsciously separating reality from social reality and smoothly living by them both without acknowledging the contradictions.
It really is necessary, when we live in a society that puts so many contradictory constraints on us. I think that's why "autistic" and "creepy" have taken off so hard as insults lately- it labels a certain person who can't just "let it be," but consciously questions those unwritten social rules, which makes everyone else uncomfortable because it highlights the contradictions.
And things change in response. Like, maybe it was fine in the past to get an ".Mrs degree," as long as it wasn't made too explicit. But once you go around explicitly talking about it and make everyone aware of what's happening, they have to change their behavior to regain some plausible deniability.
BahRamYou
7d ago
Japan
It appears as though the value of the Yen is currently in free fall. I can't say I know enough economics to explain the causes or potential implications of this, but it seems concerning nonetheless.
Noahpinion had a good (paywalled) article about this: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/is-japan-having-a-currency-crisis
The gist of it was that they're stuck in a hard spot. Nobody wants Japanese bonds because their interest rates are so low. And they can't raise interest rates because they have so much government debt and also a fragile employment situation. Still, "freefall" is an exaggeration. It's low but not that low. They have options, including if necessary, currency controls (forbidding people from selling the currency).
My contraversial opinion is they could solve this through immigration. There are a lot of weebs/retirees/weirdos who would want to move and live in Japan, but can't get a visa. Just let us buy a golden visa and go buy one of the abandoned houses there.
BahRamYou
7d ago
I'm curious, has Google or any other company ever tried recruiting directly from Africa? It seems like there are some talented people in Africa, like Igbo Nigerians, who might be overlooked by the US.
Yeah... I wonder where all this will go. I once knew a psychiatrist who said they deliberately change up the lingo once the plebs starts catching on to it, but I think this become futile in the Internet age.
To me it feels like an arms race. Or a uh... unarmed combat training race? It's like martial arts- maybe 50 years ago there were a lot of martial arts that could plausibly be considered competitive, but now everyone has zeroed in on this one true style of MMA that's the most deadly. Except that MMA people are usually good at leaving it in the arena, whereas therapy talk is weaponized to win arguments everywhere all the time. It's like if you were horsing around with your friends, maybe shove someone in a playful way, and suddenly they're hitting you with an arm bar to choke you out.
To some extent I get it. Like, if a therapist is going to act as a counselor, especially a couples counselor, it makes sense for them to be at a higher level of emotional awareness and conversational skill than their clients. But their clients start to use those same skills, and use them in every day life, and then the therapist has to come up with new stuff to stay on top. And it never ends.
To be less charitable: I think in the past it made sense for women to be better at this stuff than men. They needed to be very emotionally/socially astute to survive in a brutal world where they were weaker than their male husband. But now the world is a much less savage place, and they're using those skills to not just survive but to manipulate men into doing whatever they want. And sometimes men start defending themselves, or even organizing and learning those same kinds of emotional debate skills through "therapy talk," so it freaks out the feminists and they have to up the ante by even more weaponized therapy talk.
To sum up: therapy sucks and psychologists are all conmen
BahRamYou
8d ago
Some of that, plus "mestizo" just kinda sounds bad in modern-day English. It's like (that scene)[https://youtube.com/watch?v=3HHRfuLVfls] from archer: "well what's the word for it? you freaked out when I said quadroon!"
BahRamYou
8d ago
That's true, it's technically an older term than Hispanic or Latino. Still, it feels more... uh, PC? As in, the only people I hear using it these days are extremely woke people. Plus like you said, it technically only covers Mexican-Americans. And it's just confusing- as a kid I thought it meant someone from Chicago.
BahRamYou
8d ago
Yeah... that does seem to be pretty much what I had in mind. Just need to add in the ability for a user to post and have the bots all interact with it and like it.
https://myshell.ai/ also seems to be working on this space.
BahRamYou
9d ago
So someone can be both hispanic and white, or hispanic and black, or even hispanic and Asian American Pacific Islander!
So? You can also be white, black, and Asian all at once. They're not mutually exclusive categories.
BahRamYou
9d ago
I don't know how to take over an existent social media site. They uh, tend to have defenses against that sort of thing.
In theory we could create an infinite number of new social media sites, and present each one as if it was real and legit. Each one just has to lure in one sucker. Sort of like shitcoins in the crypto space.
BahRamYou
9d ago
I had a crazy idea recently. What if we took LLM AI and, uh, scaled it up? Make a social media platform where you are the star of the show. Just you, or maybe you plus a handful of friends, plus hundreds, thousands, or millions of AI chatbots who all adore you and want to worship you as a celebrity. Finally, every single person on Earth can be the most popular person on the planet!
BahRamYou
9d ago
Interesting. Was that just for skilled jobs, or for everything? And why couldn't they just get employees from other Eastern Bloc countries- was it the language barrier, or was travel for work just forbidden?
There is no “true” set of races that “falls out naturally” from genetic or cultural data, but the US government’s system was especially fake and embarrassing. they declared Hispanics to be an “ethnicity” that you could have along with a different race.
I've heard stuff like this before, that Hispanic is a nonsense category. But I actually think it makes sense, at least as far as anything makes sense in the US legal/cultural system of race.
First, just to state the obvious: this wasn't ever intended to be a rigorous, comprehensive, scientific system. It's just a quick and dirty way to classify people, in a way that any average person on the street can see and more-or-less agree on. You don't want to make up dozens of separate specific categories because that quickly spirals into confusion.
Second, look at the history. Hispanics, in the US, come mostly from Latin America (not from Spain!). And Latin America was colonized long before the US, and much more brutally. One of the very first things Columbus did was to immediately start taking slaves! And on the other side, explorers such as Magellan's expedition were, um, not exactly celibate:
The crew also found they could purchase sexual favours from the local women. Historian Ian Cameron described the crew's time in Rio as "a saturnalia of feasting and lovemaking"
This quickly led to a situation where Latin America was a mix of white conquistadors, indigenous slaves, black slaves imported from Africa, and mixed-race offspring who had grown up there. Pretty soon the Spanish realized they needed some sort of classification system for who was going to be a slave, who was trustworthy enough to rule, and who was somewhere in-between. Eventually they came up with a rather byzantine system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mestizo#Mestizo_as_a_colonial-era_category
- Español (fem. española), i.e. Spaniard – person of Spanish ancestry; a blanket term, subdivided into Peninsulares and Criollos
- Peninsular – a person of Spanish descent born in Spain who later settled in the Americas;
- Criollo (fem. criolla) – a person of Spanish descent born in the Americas;
- Castizo (fem. castiza) – a person with primarily Spanish and some American Indian ancestry born into a mixed family.
- Mestizo (fem. mestiza) – a person of extended mixed Spanish and American Indian ancestry;
- Indio (fem. india) – a person of pure American Indian ancestry;
- Pardo (fem. parda) – a person of mixed Spanish, Amerindian and African ancestry; sometimes a polite term for a black person;
- Mulato (fem. mulata) – a person of mixed Spanish and African ancestry;
- Zambo – a person of mixed African and American Indian ancestry;
- Negro (fem. negra) – a person of African descent, primarily former enslaved Africans and their descendants.
Which made sense for their situation, but stops making sense once you abolish slavery and royal titles and all these people start to intermix with each other. So after a few hundred years of that, you end up with modern day Hispanic people. Some are mostly white, some are mostly black, some are mostly indigenous, but a lot of them are a roughly even mix of all three, to the point where it's an obvious group of its own. You still can't exactly call it a race- it's a mix of other races, and it's hard to tell where exactly is the border between Hispanics and one of the other races. But you can't just say "mixed-race" either, for something that's been so thoroughly mixed for hundreds of years. So they made up a new word, "ethnicity", and called it a day.
Of course all this is awkward to talk about in polite society, and most Americans don't really know the history of Latin America. In Mexico they call it La Raza which makes a lot more sense, but that sounds bad in English and the term hasn't made it here yet. So they decided to classify it on language, "are you from a Spanish-speaking area?" That's... weird, since it includes white people from Spain and excludes people from Brazil or Belize. But it works well enough for the US, where most Latin-American immigrants are from Spanish-speaking areas.
It's certainly not a perfect term, and I think we're moving towards changing it with weird postmodern terms like LatinX or Chicano, but it's good enough for 99% of situations to get the idea across. It's actually a lot less confusing than African (eliding the difference between North, West-sub-Saharan, and East-Sub-Saharan African) or Asian (it's a big continent lol) or white (are Arabs white?). It's also (like all racial data in the US) mostly self-reported. But I challenge you- find a person who self reports as "Hispanic," ask the average person to draw a sketch or select a picture, and see how well it matches. Most of the time, it's pretty close.
BahRamYou
9d ago
but where do us high-IQ aimless NEETs go to post? can I sue Blind for discrimination?
BahRamYou
9d ago
Are we allowed to do anything alone or do we need adult supervision at all times no matter what?
I'm sure some of that is just "what decade did you grow up in" but yeah, 2000s had some great advantages for the artistic potential of video games:
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