Mewis
11mo ago
I think this needs to be said for the sake of those living in the US bubble - the American electoral cycle is very, very unusual. Unusually long and unusually structured. Note that in the past month, both the UK and France have held national elections, had full campaigns, and are now ready to vote. The months and months and months of campaigning and rallying and debating and convening are just not necessary to anything. And I tell you that four months is actually plenty of time for the Democrats to pick a candidate and sell them to the American population, that having the Democrats actually discuss who might be a good President will work better for them than just expecting everyone to get in line for Biden because his turn isn't over yet.
An open convention isn't chaos. It's exciting. It's drama. It's the antithesis of the top down process that gave us Hillary and Biden. It's the antithesis of the control mentality that tried to hide Biden's incapacity until it was too late.
Mewis
10mo ago
https://scholars-stage.org/why-chinese-culture-has-not-conquered-us-all/
You are absolutely wrong here. China has hit it big with Wukong, and also saw success with Genshin Impact. But there are fundamental reasons why these successes are isolated in the big picture. All of these other games you mentioned are designed are Western or Japanese developers.
The first issue here is a lack of cultural exchange, or a lack of equivalent cultural exchange. China writes the code for the newest Call of Duty, but it is obviously impossible that China could have developed Call of Duty, or League of Legends, or Final Fantasy, or any other modern video game touchstone. For that matter, it's totally implausible that they could write a Harry Potter, film an Alien, or produce The Sopranos. This is because the CCP explicitly seeks to reduce foreign cultural influence. But China cannot just adapt JttW and RotTK forever. If they want to make cultural exports, that has to be based on a broader and deeper cultural dialogue than is currently allowed. Final Fantasy could not have existed without Dungeons and Dragons. Anime could not have existed without Disney. K pop could not have existed without Michael Jackson.
On to the second issue - the CCP and their economic management of China. After all, k pop and Nintendo were originally developed for a domestic audience. Why can't China build up a robust video game industry behind the Great Wall and then seek to export? Well, the CCP doesn't really want to. It doesn't want young Chinese men to get soft and fat playing video games. It wants them to look like this, and who can blame them?
https://images.app.goo.gl/iT46jnqmyMuf64TY9
In some ways, this is a mess of contradictions. China wants us to consume and influence its cultural products, but not to consume ours. Its not even sure if it wants to consume its own cultural products, insofar as it interferes with its other goals. If a Chinese product was ever too successful domestically, it's easy to imagine the CCP swooping down on it, just as it has done before. This to say nothing of the way that China regulates its own culture with an increasingly heavy hand.
This is also why Japan and Korea are different. They have robust domestic consumption and cultural exchange with the rest of the west.
Mewis
9mo ago
Honestly, these histrionics about Altman being some gay supervillain make me like him more, not less. Being crazy and ambitious is a prerequisite to doing great things. And the notion that because he's gay, he doesn't care about anything is ridiculous. If only he could be as pro human as Joseph Stalin (two children), Robert Mugabe (four children) or Genghis Khan (innumerable children)?
Mewis
11mo ago
Yes, the whole Biden/Harris thing reminds me of the bit in 1984 where Oceania goes from being at war with Eastasia to being at war with Eurasia in the middle of a speech, and everyone just turns on a dime (even as Winston and his colleagues at Minitrue have to go into crunch to rewrite their entire history.)
Mewis
11mo ago
Google and Reddit killed forums. Now, all Google search gives you is clickbait slop, quora, Reddit, wikipedia and shopping.
Mewis
11mo ago
The real political effect of assassinations is so subject to context and specifics that it's hard to say. Culture is also relevant - in Japan, assassination of politicians rarely results in a martyr effect - if anything, public opinion often ends up turning in favour of the cause of the assassin.
(I suspect that if anything, the supposed martyrdom effect is just a cultural strategy to discourage assassination. When politicians rally behind an assassination victim, they're contributing to a political norm that protects their own behinds.)
Mewis
10mo ago
If there are people making huge profits, they're not running grocery stores, which as a rule operate on unbelievably thin margins and run losses on some products. Remember - store brands are cheaper than name brands, not the other way around.
Mewis
11mo ago
Well, the best argument is that this will be over soon. Left-liberals will go back to using their disproportionate control over institutions and offices to push their politics. So there is a limit to what left-liberals can get away with, but then, it's pretty generous. So this is totally pointless. Maybe you get a few idiots cancelled, but that's it.
Cancel culture from the left is a manifestation of power, not it's source. Even sixty years ago, employers can, and did, fire people for being pinkos, for being homos, for getting divorced, for having interracial relationships. This didn't maintain those societal taboos, or prevent them from being eroded. And cancel culture from the left hasn't snuffed out conservative beliefs either.
Mewis
9mo ago
It's nonsense, anyway - if Kamala was told the questions in advance, she didn't do anything with that information, all she did was give weird scripted answers that barely engaged with the subject while Trump exploded.
Mewis
9mo ago
I honestly don't see what's not plain about my post. There are plenty of examples of straight men with children who have done abominable things, and I have given some of them.
Mewis
1yr ago
They are quickly able to learn to consume bottom denominator slop - I don't think they'll learn how to operate machinery or conduct statistical analysis by osmosis.
Mewis
1yr ago
I think that kind of stuff seeps through eventually. The pre-internet generation is still alive, and mostly in charge - that won't last forever.
Mewis
1yr ago
Other way around, surely?
The fact is, nobody is actually sitting down and crunching the numbers on utils. When it comes to actually making decisions in the real world and not in thought experiments, everyone resorts to the same expedients and heuristics - usually, some combination of virtue ethics and deontology. Don't commit murders, don't be dishonest.
Mewis
9mo ago
I've finished a four day hike through beautiful Abel Tasman here in New Zealand. This was my first time camping outside probably for over 20 years so it was a bit of trial and error but I am interested in doing more. Some thoughts -
The Walk
The route I took ended up being close on 70km. Abel Tasman has very well maintained paths but just about every beach has a big headland separating it from the next, and while none of them are that high you still end up spending nearly half your time going uphill. By the end I was very glad to be done walking, I had blisters on my feet. The second day was the hardest - I tried to cross the Torrent Bay Estuary in the rain with shoes on, and got them wet, and then had to walk eight hours, by far the longest day. Crossing the Arawoa Inlet was less pleasant - with no shoes the water is very cold and the inlet is covered with sharp, tiny shells, but I had company to share my misery with, which makes a great difference.
The Fauna
At this time of year the park was very empty. I probably saw more weka than humans, and when you see so few people you're genuinely happy to talk to them. The weka are cute, but mostly just pests that hang around hoping you'll drop a piece of food. There are seals at Separation point, lazing around on the rocks. The beaches also have sandflies, which give me horrible swelling. My insect repellent didn't seem to bother them, but I was given a tip - 50/50 Dettol and baby oil. Would that actually work?
The Weather
It is still early spring and so far a pretty cold spring on South Island. Temperatures were a damp 3 degrees at night and going up to 15 in the afternoon, but it still feels very warm going up hills and in the sunshine. Only a light rain on the second morning. Around Whariwharangi the wind is much stronger than elsewhere, since it comes off Golden Bay. I never felt cold past the early mornings, while wearing affordable polyester base layers. My cheap raincoat from my old job and over trousers kept me dry through the rain, but it wasn't much of a test.
The Accommodation
I wanted to try camping, which was my choice - but it was saddening to walk past some very comfy looking huts and pitch my tent. My tent is very easy to set up, but more difficult to sleep in. I am tall enough to brush one end with my toes and the other with my head, and I only had a thin foam mat to sleep on, so slept poorly, though the sleeping bag I got for a song was very warm.
The Food
I elected not to pack a gas cooker and just eat cold dry foods. Cheese, crackers, nuts, chocolate were the menu. I also filled a container with a mix of milk and protein powder and made milk along the way. I had some caffeine and electrolyte powders to have in the morning. I was quite happy with how little I felt hungry. Taps are common in the park, but according to some health and safety regulation, you are officially instructed not to drink from them. I did, and the water was clear and without taste, and suffered no harm.
The Pack
With my tent and mat strapped to the back of my pack and 65l of space, I'd hoped to have plenty of room. Unfortunately my dirt cheap bedroll took up a vast amount of that space, forcing me to squash nearly everything down the sides.
The Lessons
I think I definitely need some kind of inflatable mat, and maybe a more compact bedroll. This would free up space for a book and travel chess set. Everything else I think I'm happy with. I will definitely take more advantage of huts in the future - perhaps one per walk.
Mewis
11mo ago
It's not that monumentally consequential in a healthy political party. Part of the Democrat Party's problem is this weird desire to keep passing the Presidency to anointed successors instead of actually allowing any kind of party democracy to occur. That's how they got Clinton in 16, Biden in 20 and now look stuck with Harris in 24. But it really doesn't have to be this way, and it wasn't so long ago that it was quite normal to hand the Vice Presidency to an empty suit like Spiro Agnew or Dan Quayle.
Mewis
2yr ago
If all states adopt values antithetical to your own, I think it's a reasonable response to abandon loyalty to nation-states and instead prioritize other loyalties - and if the Chinese give you enough money to set your family up in comfort and style, you might choose them over the nation that discarded you.
Mewis
1yr ago
I remember reading some accounts that Bill Clinton had an uncanny level of personal charisma that people who hadn't met him just didn't get. I think it's probably a more general quality of today's rigorously competitive political world. Maybe that's why politicians so often come off as incompetent or fake, that they're selected so strongly for personal charisma it leaves no room for other qualities.
Mewis
1yr ago
It's my own impression that the fiercest advocates for generous asylum policies or even open borders aren't deontologists (who generally have a lot of respect for rules around borders and citizenship), but utilitarians (who are willing to compromise because they value the utility of asylum seekers over maintaining strong borders). It's also my own impression that utilitarians are more vulnerable to charisma and arguments - theoretically a utilitarian is capable of endorsing any behavior if they're persuaded of it's utility, whereas it's much harder to argue a deontologist into bending his own rules.
Mewis
9mo ago
It's not really that much of a twist to me that no college education men continue to break for Trump even in the context of a union.
As for the town halls, I don't know how much to credit them. Town halls and "popular assemblies" are easy to pack and direct, and I assume union leadership would have directed them towards Biden.
Mewis
1yr ago
One thing that stuck out to me in Dune was the chasteness. The Harkonnens are sex weirdo pederasts in the books, an element that is totally excised in the movies, even though they're delightfully weird in other ways.
Mewis
1yr ago
PEPFAR is estimated to have saved over twenty million lives, if that's worth anything to you.
Mewis
11mo ago
I don't think it was normal, even two weeks ago, to actually call for Trump to be assassinated, and yeah, you might have faced consequences for it (or not, depending on how your boss feels). That's why this celebration of victory is premature, nothing has really changed. Many individuals on the left have overreached and gotten burned, but nobody is going to get fired merely for supporting Biden, let alone for being gay or black or trans. The rules, written and unwritten, about what you can or can't say at work, are still written or unwritten and enforced or unenforced by the same fat liberal white women.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-i-dont-buy-538s-new-election
FiveThirtyEight versus 538
Nate Silver, public statistician, has launched a broadside against the forecasting blog he originally set up, which continues to produce modelling that indicates a incredible dead heat between Biden and Trump. What gives?
What it really comes down to is how unusual this election is turning out, and how forecasting is not keeping up with reality. On paper, Biden is secure - he's an incumbent President in an America that is peaceful and prosperous. These indicators have been long championed as the surest omens of victory. But nothing lasts forever. As Silver points out, those advantages count for less and less nowadays. And they assume that the candidates are otherwise mentally competent to run an effective campaign. If Biden still retains the faculties to run the country, he's not demonstrating them.
There of course, is a limit to models. We cannot predict exactly how Biden's incapacity might affect the election, or a horse switch to Harris, because events like this have never occurred before in modern electoral history. But it's at the point where these models now interfere with normal political judgement. Biden backers use the 538 model as a palliative, even as Biden slips further in the polls. As a result they are sleepwalking into picking a candidate who himself seems to be sleepwalking.
Nate Silver's own model does give Biden a fighting chance, especially when fundamentals are emphasized over polling. But he himself admits that the model is probably useless by this point, and that polling is a better indicator of Biden's weakness. Silver also has reason to say "I told you so" - he has beaten the Biden is too old drum for years now, and gotten plenty of flak from his own team over it.
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