2rafa
9hr 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
12hr 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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.
Are we all going to work fake jobs?
Thoughts on Semi Automated Luxury Earth Social Democracy
I
Imagine you are appointed the colonial governor of a faraway land. Your own country has a small population but is technologically advanced and largely automated. The land you are taking over has a vast population but little development. The natives neither love nor hate you, they are ambivalent. At trivial cost, you establish a largely automated domestic economy using your advanced technology; food production, infrastructure, consumer goods, all are now produced and distributed locally at negligible marginal cost, by machine. The native cut (determined by your own democracy’s moral value system, which has also determined that you have a duty to look after the locals and facilitate to some extent their self actualization) of some colonial extractive resource mining easily covers the imports required. Self driving cars are maintained by automated workshops, houses are built in prefab factories and assembled by humanoid drones maintained in automated warehouses, that kind of thing.
You find yourself faced, now, with the choice of how to distribute the food, water, houses, clothes, electronic goods and so on that your society produces. Complete abundance is, after all, impossible even with advanced automation; you are still constrained by space, electricity, material resources. Some inequality is probably inevitable, too, even if it can be reduced; someone is going to live in the house with the nice view, although you could probably turn it into a ‘people’s timeshare’ where every family gets a day every ten years, or something like that. And a ‘basic income’ is feasible. You can hand out resource credits or dollars and give everyone the same amount, a socialism without labor.
But do you want to?
II
A central reason for capitalism’s success is its relatively positive alignment of incentives (phrased in a variety of ways). The provision of useful and in-demand goods and services begets the provider status and resources, which alongside a robust market economy drives innovation blah blah blah. The point is that, generally speaking, a large amount of prosocial behavior is implicitly incentivized by a capitalist system. You want money for a vacation, or your kids’ college, or to retire, so you want a good job, so you work hard, so you pay attention in class, so you don’t assault a police officer or commit a crime that will go on your record.
None of these are perfect, but broadly they work. It’s why “bail reform” (eliminating cash bail), so beloved of the left, quickly became a disaster: it turns out that the ability to raise a few thousand dollars at short notice is strongly predictive of someone who is less likely to commit crimes while on bail.
III
Those of us who regularly travel the far reaches of the third world will be familiar with the distinct form of overstaffing common everywhere from Belize to Bali. You will walk into, for example, a convenience store, a bodega, in Thailand and there will be 7 people working there. African restaurants are perhaps the most iconic example, a few customers a day and yet twenty members of staff, some uniformed.
It’s tempting to see this through the lens of that Dalrymple narration, but it’s not purely an east- (or south-) of-Hajnal-line thing. The Philippine store owner runs a profitable business (grocery margins are much higher in the third world, for a variety of reasons) and that has an extraordinary, universal tendency to result in expanding employment, regardless of necessity. The same thing is true in America, just replace 7/11 with Google. Google increased headcount by 20x during a period in which its core product responsible for almost all profitability remained search ads. Most of the new hires were not working on search. The company grew because it made more money, more than because ‘it’ wanted to do more things. Managers built up their fiefs. The point is that job creation has always been divorced from economic efficiency, even without state incentives.
IV
If you read about how white collar work was conducted before modern computers, the extraordinary amount of paperwork, the millions of clerks and secretaries, the vacuum systems to move papers around a building, the memos and the people who circulated them, the manual research that took so many hours to do what takes seconds today seems extraordinary. Then consider how many more women are in the labor market than shortly after the baby boom. Consider the relative decline in manufacturing employment. Consider that many of the sectors with the largest growth in employment have been precisely those - like law and finance and insurance and healthcare administration - that have seen previously unbelievable efficiency gains because of even basic software like spreadsheets and databases and email. Think about the internet, which people correctly predicted in the 1990s would destroy huge numbers of jobs, reduce opportunities for arbitrage, kill large sectors funded by paper advertising, etc. It did all of those things and yet employment remained steady.
Economists will tell you that technological unemployment always creates new jobs. Productivity rises, goods become cheaper, people can buy more, demand creates larger markets, drives demand, drives new employment. I think they are right about the consequence but wrong, as of late, about the process.
V
I have a conspiracy theory, one shared in part by the late David Graeber. Starting in the late 1970s, rich world governments - often without anyone even really explicitly acknowledging what is going on - began deliberately creating tens of millions of private and public sector jobs, both directly through specific lending and indirectly through regulation and other government activity. This, in combination with the inevitable tendency of profitable private enterprise to overemploy, and a certain residual aversion to leisure in some cultures, has preserved, arguably unnaturally, full employment.
Lower birth rates mean a greater proportion of the public are old and not working. Mass college attendance means many people start working at full time at 21 or 22, rather than 16 or 17. College loans and regulations, including title ix created reams of bullshit jobs in the universities. Social security, medicare, medicaid, endless charity donations by the state and the rich, homeless outreach, awareness, infinity startups funded by ZIRP money, regulations that have tripled compliance, KYC and regulatory employment in finance since 2009, environmental legislation that mandates hiring people to write reports and fill forms, to sign off on emissions statements. The legal, consulting, accounting and professional services sectors where a combination of circular outsourcing and demand created by regulation have seen employment skyrocket despite tasks that took an accountant in 1960 days taking minutes now.
There is often a supply of jobs when the demand is in many cases employment rather than its product.
VI
Was this wrong?
I remember realizing as a child that pretty much everyone who worked at the DMV (at least in New York) was an overweight black woman. Some would say the DMV itself is a jobs creation program for these women, many of whom support children. Is this a bad thing? It may be better that someone works than that they don’t, even if that employment is unnecessary, maybe even if it is mildly inconvenient. If anything, one of the central achievements of Protestant modernity was a work ethic that saw labor not necessarily as an end but as a means of accomplishing more than just production.
There are three categories of medium-term AGI scenario:
-
Extinction (whether fully autonomously or at human direction; “fifty rich guys starve everyone else” also falls into this category btw)
-
Abundance (of the heaven on earth, all material limits quickly fall away, it’ll happen faster than you possibly expect) AGI 2027 school, each of us can have our own solar system, The Culture, whatever
-
A system in which scarce resources and goods continue to be divided among humans even though non-negligible amounts of human labor is no longer materially necessary for the production of goods and most services, and in which prosocial behavior continues to have a substantial impact on society’s wider quality of life.
The first two scenarios are mostly uninteresting in their grand scale and absolute finality. The third is in my opinion more likely, but definitely more interesting. Mass unemployment is destabilizing, which is bad for owners of capital. Muahahaha evil aside, the rich lack the coordination to somehow blanket eliminate the poor and abolish democracy at exactly the moment the robots take everyone’s job, these things aren’t so neat, not to mention much of their own net worth would be caught up in a near total economic and debt crisis caused by falling demand and mass deflation.
It makes sense, in this scenario, to pursue a more aggressive version of the program that has been ongoing now for many decades. To manufacture employment. To have people do, perhaps ever more overtly, ever more ridiculously, what everyone knows is unnecessary. New Jersey has banned pumping your own gas since 1929. You can ban self-driving cars. You can require that companies of x revenue employ y human auditors for z hours, that a human radiologist has to review each x ray for y minutes before it’s allowed to inform any medical decision or be handed over to a patient. This is just the overt stuff. You can pay millions of people to be the even less useful AI-monitoring equivalents of night time security guards at a non-target; once in a hundred of their lifetimes, something unusual might happen. The rest of the time they get played to sit and play Switch. And that still might be better, and smarter than not doing it.
If the only line you can’t cross is something that sends you to jail, will you behave the same? Will most people? The threat of a lost job, of lost opportunity, the reward of a financially successful life, all these things drive a lot of prosocial behavior. It may be better to simulate them than to do without them entirely.
2rafa
2d ago
“Wouldn’t it be funny if we got a picture of you guys hugging?” “Yeah, I’m seven glasses of wine down, why not”.
2rafa
2d ago
For example, the pattern of jewish overrepresentation in certain jobs and the majority getting mad at it is found broadly in space and time, which cant be explained by Ashkenazi selection in the middle ages.
Arab Jews have the same relative advantage in the Middle East that European Jews did in European lands. 95 IQ in a land of 84s is as much an advantage as 112 is in a land of 100s.
For a contemporary example, see the Lebanese who dominate commercial life in large parts of West Africa. In much of the West (outside of America which got the most elite Maronites), these are not hugely impressive immigrants - in Australia many are considered a underclass! - but in West Africa they are a market dominant minority, sometimes to a scarcely believable extent in places like Liberia, but to a great extent even in the larger nations.
Sephardic Jewry’s outperformance in European lands (where the differential was less) was more contingent. They did well enough for a time under the Arabs as a middle man minority, and restrictions on usury meant many adopted roles in finance / lending too, and therefore were early to the shipping and capital markets boom in the mercantile age in Amsterdam, but the advantage was less than it was in either Ashkenazi or Mizrachi lands.
In a way, that arguably led to less antisemitism, which while certainly prevalent in the inquisition etc, was probably still substantially less violent than the Jewish experience during the crusades in Western and Central Europe or in Eastern Europe later in the millennium, or the Jewish experience in Persia, which alternated between semi-tolerance and what European Jewish visitors in the 17th and 18th centuries often considered the worst persecution they had encountered.
2rafa
2d ago
I don’t think you’re the villain, but like many men you have a prurient interest in a ‘fallen woman’ (whether she is or isn’t, or what that means, is less important than that you think she is one) and both your interaction with her and more substantially this story serve that. In the end, that’s probably your most TLP-like trait of all.
2rafa
2d ago
I thought this was fun. The writing did wander, and I think you somewhat self-consciously allow the AI a little too much of a free hand with the editing pass (your writing was better before it, really). But it was good, and I was entertained throughout.
As regards the story, there’s plenty unsaid that you’re not yet ready to admit to yourself, especially around your offer. But you know that.
2rafa
2d ago
No, but in 2016 when woke started, most executives in American companies (probably at least at 70% of them) were white men.
I agree with @FiveHourMarathon below. The reality is that many of the prime drivers of racial and gender affirmative action were old, largely white, men in positions of economic and in some cases political power in many of these institutions. There was some pressure around board seats or gender reporting, particularly in parts of Europe. But the majority was not forced.
There are two motives here, both obvious.
To a smart old man, a young, highly ambitious man is competition in a way a young, even highly ambitious woman is not. The woman probably won’t make it to the top; even today, when big law new hires are gender equal and have had many women for a long time, 75% of new partners are men. In finance, probably 75% of new managing directors this year are men, too, (apparently 73% at Goldman), more at some places. Race is an additional variable; because of longstanding stereotypes eg. about how personable Asian applicants are, or implicit beliefs in other details, Mr Editor in Chief might not see James Wong or James Chukwu as as much competition as James Williams or James Goldstein (and make no mistake, in publishing/media/film/arts, a lot of the ‘white men’ shut out over the past decade who would previously have found a place in the business were Jewish). The boss may well be wrong. But his belief is there nevertheless. Creative businesses are those in which youth is often prioritized; a senior director in advertising has seen 28 year old guys replace 55 year olds because they have better ideas, are younger, hotter, and cheaper, before.
The second motive is sex. Well, not necessarily sex, but men enjoy and have always enjoyed the company of pretty younger women. In 1975 you had to deal with the sweaty young men who worked for you because that was who the firm hired. In 2020 you could become ‘executive mentor’ to a bunch of pretty, 28-32 year old Asian, Indian and white women under the guise of “equity and inclusion” and be praised for it. What’s more, none of them had the chutzpah to book coffee with the head of division and pitch that they can do your job for half the pay.
An underhanded competition between old men in power and younger versions of themselves isn’t the only story of the woke era, but it is one of them.
2rafa
3d ago
By the mid 1930s it had transitioned into a party of government and so serious people of all sexual persuasions wanted to climb to the top. It’s like if you suddenly put the Catholic Church or Church of England in charge of all politics the proportion of gay priests would fall quite rapidly.
2rafa
4d ago
The SA which was by far the most classically fascist ideologically was pretty gay. Once a totalitarian party cements itself fully in the governance of the nation anyone ambitious joins, so the fact that few leading German political figures in terms of power in that era were actually gay is true but irrelevant.
The process in the UK would be very different and there would be an investigation during a suspension and then likely a tribunal. The defendant could make the very reasonable case that this was a joke about 24 hour hackathons being sweaty and that no offense to Indians was plausibly implied, nor was this in any way a malicious or specifically targeted communication, and might well win. Unless they were contractually prohibited from any comment on social media (and even then it’s very unclear that that kind of thing would be enforceable in most cases) they would have an OK case.
2rafa
4d ago
There are reasonable pros and cons. The reason Americans are paid more than the French (size of the economy, labor pool, lower taxes, more natural resources, bigger domestic market, more capital, better entrepreneurial culture, despite the origin of that word) isn’t primarily due to labor laws. The Scandinavian countries have very restrictive labor laws and low unemployment, for example, while other countries have high unemployment even with loose laws.
2rafa
4d ago
Men on the far right are disproportionately gay and men on the far left are disproportionately (heterosexual) sexual predators. This has always been true. The Nazis and Italian fascists were pretty gay, the 1968ers rioted at the Sorbonne over getting access to the girls’ dorms overnight. Why? Because straight pervs go where the women are (the left), and gay ones fetishize masculinity, maleness, and in particular often sexually fixate on male ‘brotherhood’ in the army, navy, male organizations, which fascist groups usually are.
2rafa
5d ago
The of return is an application rather than an entitlement, it's subject to the whims of the Israeli state and can be denied for many reasons at the relatively arbitrary whim of the state. Israel doesn't consider non-Israeli Jews to be, legally, citizens. In that case it's closer to 'ancestry visas' for e.g., great grandchildren in countries that support them, like Portugal, England and others. Italian hereditary citizenship (until earlier this year) was automatic for subsequent generations, you applied for recognition of citizenship, not for citizenship or a visa itself.
2rafa
6d ago
The impact and influence of hyper-online nationalist Chinese netizens is often very much overstated. The reasons are multifaceted but are essentially that most western “China watchers” are (by very nature of their own demographic - mostly white young men in the Anglosphere - their education and academic interests, their experience in China proper, and their literal profession and their clientele) mostly interested in Chinese views on geopolitics. The reality is that most Chinese have few to no prominent views of geopolitics beyond the bland centrally taught views of the wider society in which they live, they are almost uniquely parochial even when compared to Americans.
So these guys hyperfocus on a relatively small minority of very online young Chinese men who have very strong opinions on what Chinese foreign policy should be and who have strong views on things like the Ukraine War, Israel Gaza, American foreign policy in South America, immigration to Europe and other stuff that people discuss all the time on X.com. Thus even serious professional China analysts often post about the views of “Chinese netizens” as if someone in China was writing about, say, groyper views those of all “American people”, uncritically.
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.
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