BahRamYou
1d ago
It seems like it would be trivially easy to either edit your ID pic to change "F" to "M", or borrow a friend's ID for that pic.
BahRamYou
1d ago
So i've never quite understood how this app works. how do they verify that the users are women? And how do they stop people from just spamming bad reviews all over the place? Putting aside all the ethical and legal issues, i can't believe it ever worked at all.
BahRamYou
1d ago
The thing about language learning, especially a non-European language like Japanese, is that it's a never-ending process. It's not like you hit some threshold and suddenly understand everything effortlesslly. It's a continuous grind to learn new words, new grammer, and improve on the basics. You can get by in any country with English, hand gestures, and phone translation, but it's not very comfortable. It's one thing to be able to do simple things like order food in a restaurant or follow transit directions. It's a whole other level to do the things that I want to do when I'm actually living somewhere- take a class, read a book, or keep up with people's jokes. Hardest thing of all is being in a group conversation and trying to understand what multiple people are saying, while also thinking of stuff to say myself. Even if I'm fast enough for the conversation, I might just not know the thing they're talking about, like if they're referencing some random local celebrity.
On the plus side, being an obvious foreigner who speaks English does have some advantages. You'll naturally meet more curious, intellectual type people who want to practice English and learn about other countries, as well as other foreigners travelling. And if you're like me and you tend to over-intellectualize everything, speaking in a foreign language can force you to just be blunt and spit it out in plain, simple words- because that's all I have!
BahRamYou
2d ago
Only up to a point. Some regulations represent a dire risk to their industry. Coincidentally, Matt Ygelesias wrote [this[(https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-forgotten-politics-of-big-tobacco) today about the history of tobacco regulation, and what a political struggle it was to rain them in. It succeeded eventually mostly because people just got annoyed by second-hand smoke, rather than any sort of principles health message. But Clinton and his coalition were never in danger of being unseated in primary challenges by big tobacco. His vice president Al Gore even came from an old tobacco growing family and was a senator from Tenessee where they still grow lots of tobacco, but he could still openly campaign against the tobacco industry.
BahRamYou
3d ago
Yes, they can do it. But none of them did except AIPAC. And now it's this one fringe lobby group for crypto, mostly funded just by Marc Andresson. Meanwhile Big Oil, Big Tobacco, and Big Pharma get regulated to death despite their massive lobbying efforts, because apparently their lobbyists just... all suck at their jobs? How else are we supposed to explain this?
BahRamYou
3d ago
I don't have any clear answers on whether I recommend it, I'm still deciding on that for myself. But I'll give you my thoughts.
The obvious best is getting a way cheaper cost of living. With my middle class American salary, I feel rich in a lot of foreign countries. Like 1/2, 1/4, or even less than what it would be in the US, depending on what you're willing to tolerate. I also really enjoy being able to get away from some of the stuff that's always bugged me about the US- suburban sprawl, health insurance, red-blue politics, enshittified apps for everything, and lack of good nightlife. Those are just my own preferences, but nice thing about digital nomading is you can kind of pick and choose what lifestyle and culture you want. Of course, every place has its downsides, and you start to see those more once your there.
Worst thing is that I can never stay for as long as I want, because of visa issues. Plus being an obvious foreigner with no permanent ties to the community, it makes you feel like weird and adds a lot of hastle to even simple things, like getting mail delivered. It's hard to stick to a regular diet or exercise plan or join clubs. I'm hoping to figure out a way to stay more permanently, but a lot of countries don't have good visa options for that, or only for older people.
Country-wise it depends a lot on which city and neighborhood you're in, but I really enjoyed my time in Mexico, Taiwan, and Japan. All 3 managed to hit the sweet spot for me of feeling comfortable enough to relax, significantly cheaper than the US, and interesting enough to find fun things to do as a random foreign single guy. It also helped a lot being able to speak some Spanish and Japanese. I did not enjoy my time in Southeast Asia where I couldn't understand anything at all, and I thought Western Europe just felt too similar to America to be worth the hassle.
BahRamYou
3d ago
That's the real question, isn't it? why is AIPAC so effective? if it's just a matter of get lots of individual donors to donate money on specific issues, then it should be possible to copy that approach. But if they're using blackmail or some other shady tactics, that might explain why no one else can get the same results.
BahRamYou
3d ago
I read that post and I thought "this is nuclear-grade culture war fodder."
In his analysis, money in politics was an underused weapon- either going to groups that don't really need it (generic voting ads), or just not enough of it (very low hard-money contributions to reps in competitive elections). The one exception is AIPAC, which has apparently minmaxed the system to wield massive power for decades. Everyone knows this, every politician is afraid of AIPAC, every political strategist admires their success, but no one has managed to copy it. Not the tobacco industry, not big oil, not any other foreign country- the Israeli lobbyists are just in a league of their own when it comes to buying influence in washington. And they don't even spend that much.
If that's true (and many comments raise questions about how true any of this is)... how do you not feel incensed? It's almost literally "Jews run the government," a least on the specific issues that they care about. And maybe now apparently some tech-billionares are starting to copy that strategy, so we'll have a few of them running it to. But definitely nothing like a respresentative democracy. We count even counter them by using the same tactics because... I don't know, apparently everyone else is just too stupid and disorganized to pull off anything similar.
I think Scott wrote it just thinking it's interesting that the total money in politics is still so low. But... iti's hard not to read and that and think "something here is corrupt and fishy as hell."
BahRamYou
4d ago
For me (someone who has been living alone as a digital nomad for several years now), my system is:
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wallot with most of my stuff in my front pocket. it's quite thick and doesn't come out easily, I think it would be pretty easy to tell if someone was pickpocketing it. That's never happened.
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backup old phone in my backpack. I did once lose my main phone and that was a huge pain. Luckily I could still use the old phone to connect to all my online accounts, but losing my US sim card and associated phone number was a huge pain.
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Passport in its own separate shoulder bag that I wear under my shirt.
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Documents in my suitcase like bank info, insurance info, an old driver's liscense, etc. I've never really had to use any of this but it's there if I need it. If you're just flying domestically in the US they're surpisingly permissive on what counts as ID, you can get home with almost government-issued paper that has your name on it.
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Some small amount of physical cash, either in the suitcase or the backpack.
Basically you can't plan for everything, but as long as you're flexible and have some redundancy you'll be OK. You can also just stop and ask random people. If you don't look completely crazy you can find someone to help. I got locked out of my hotel room once and the staff let me back in, no questions asked. People on the street will give you directions if you ask them nicely. Police are not very helpful in my experience, mostly they just help you file insurance claims. The embassy is supposed to be good at helping stranded citizens get home, although I've fortunately never had to resort to that.
BahRamYou
6d ago
State and local income taxes are structured in similar progressive style. What about sales tax?
Most state and local income taxes are much flatter, specifically to avoid the sort of problems that you're talking about here. For example, in Maine (not a red state), the top tax bracket is anything over $58,000. Sales tax is a little more complicated, but usually poor people pay a higher share of their income on it, because not everything is exempt and most people aren't carefully strategizing to avoid paying sales tax.
BahRamYou
8d ago
Thanks for actually taking the time to actually think about the idea and run numbers for it, unlike @venqq who seemed to have wildly misunderstood it and then personally insulted me for no reason.
II will point out though, the numbers your using are based on the simplest type of cubesat, which is pretty much the worst possible case for solar power or radiation. small and compact, designed to fit into the unused capacity of larger launches, and usually not intended to last very long.
On more professional satellites, solar panels are long, thin, wide ones like what you see on the ISS, which makes over 100 KW of power. And all of that, plus the crew's body heat, gets radiated away. It's hype, it's not buzzwords, it's very real. It's 1970s science that I thought everyone was aware of by now.
Most things are hard in space, but solar panels really aren't. There's a reason those have been standard on all satellites since the very early days, even back in the 1960s when solar panels were far less efficient. They get something like 10x the solar intensity you'd get on the surface of the earth, and available almost all the time (only like 20% in Earth's shadow, and can be zero if you launch in a polar orbit)
Obviously the big stumbling block is the launch cost. These ideas all depend on having SpaceX, or something similar from China, massively bring down the cost from the current $50000/kg to something more like $500 or less. But yes, obviously there's the big "if" Starship or something similar really works.
But if it does... starting from you restimate of 5700 years... 100x decrease in launch cost, and 10x increase in power from simple optimizations to the design, it pays for itself in 5.7 years. Not bad.
BahRamYou
8d ago
That's only a problem for the hot fleshy meatbags on the ISS. For a computer, adding some long radiators works great in space. And China is already doing this
BahRamYou
9d ago
But like... is that actually a good thing? Obviously from the point of view of a corporation, being able to reduce the number of employees they need is great. Huge cost savings, even if it's just 1%. And a lot of them could potentially cut a lot more, like the ones who rely on big call centers.
But for the global economy, what happens? I know the traditional answer is that those workers then go find something other job and our overall productivity increases. But it's far from clear to me what a million laid-off call center employees are supposed to do instead. Work in the factories? Those were closed/offshored decades ago. Learn to code? Silicon valley isn't exactly yearning to hire one million junior programmers with no experience these days. In fact, they're also hoping to lay off programmers and make it up with AI instead.
It seems like a lot of areas will jsut end up with significantly higher unemployment from this.
BahRamYou
9d ago
But not if we launch them into orbit ! (I can no longer tell if this is crazy bubble talk or the next logical step after starlink)
BahRamYou
12d ago
There have been many instances of palestinian settlements in the west bank being demolished and the people being evicted: https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/06/1164971
BahRamYou
12d ago
I think they'll eventually succeed at taking over the West Bank. In part because they want it (it's good land and it's right there for the taking, not to mention the religious motivation to control jeruselum), and in part because they've found a way to successfully "salami slice" it, taking little bits at a time. The rest of the world expresses outrage and indignation but does nothing, and the Palestinian authority can't fight back. There seems to be no shortage of Israeli's volunteering to move in there, and not just soldiers but normal middle-class families. This might take multiple generations, but it'll happen.
I do not think they'll take over the Gaza strip that way, because the situation is totally different. Nobody really wants it, because it's an ultra-dense ghett of bomb-blasted buildings and unexploded ordnance. The people living there are highly motivated to fight back, and there's a ton of world attention that would make a huge outcry if Israel tried to adjust the borders even slightly. There's also no holy city there, no natural resources, limited water... it's not a place any sane person would want to live.
BahRamYou
12d ago
Would you agree that, even if in general CEO pay is not a major expense on their companies, there are particular cases where it could be, and Musk at Tesla is one of those examples? And it's interesting that he wa able to get it past the board and all sorts of normal shareholder protections, to the point where it required a court ruling to stop it. It's not some perfect elegant self-maintaining system.
BahRamYou
12d ago
you can just choose not to invest in companies that you think overpay their executives.
Well, I can't, because I'm not a finance genius who has devoted my life to picking stocks. My money is mostly in simple index funds, because (a) that's what everyone assured me was the smart thing to do and (b) those are simple and convenient for me to use as a regular person. My company 401k plan never offered me a "basically the S&P 500, but avoid stocks that overpay their executives" fund. Most other normal stockholders are in the same situation as me. I don't even get a chance to vote on proxy votes, since my share votes are handled by the index fund managers. And even when I did own individual stocks in the past, and I got a proxy vote as a regular stock holder, my vote was so small (a few shares out of billions at a blue chip company) that it didn't seem worthwhile to even mail it in. I had less power to influence them as a stockholder than I do to influence the US government as a voter, and that's a pretty low bar.
And most other players can't do this sort of thing either. Rich people might have their money tied up in stock for the company they worked for. Finance managers have to convince the rich people they work for that they're doing a safe, normal strategy. Hedge funds have to follow rules that mitigate risk for their institution. And most people just aren't interested in this sort of thing.
Ok, in principle there's room for some young Warren Buffet type to make his name by finding these companies, shorting them, and outperforming the market. But only to the extent that their excess compensation takes away from every other factor going on, and his efforts to short the stock would be countered by everyone else shovelling money into it. As long as the executives keep it below a few percent, it would be hard to notice.
But think about how far this has gone. It's no longer "the executives deserve this much money because it's what's best for the company." It's "they can pocket hundreds of millions without hurting the company in a way that anyone steps in to stop them." You could make the same argument for how a retail cashier could get away with stealing money out of the till, or how a middle manager could get away with embezzling from the accounting department, but for them it's illegal and there are protections in place to stop that sort of thing.
All of this to say- the market is not some omniscient, perfect entity. It's mostly efficient, but there are still plenty of efficiencies. I think there's a tendency among shape-rotator type people to assume that it's perfectly efficient because that makes for a much more elegant argument, but the reality is a lot more messy.
Also this:
It's the shareholders who are getting cheated here, not the general public or the employees
I would argue that the executives, especially the CEOs, are being disengenuous here. They're not just some shmuck working behind the scenes, they act as the public face of the company, for both its employees and the general public. Their personal life reflects on the company just like a politician's personal life reflects on his country. When the CEO tries to make himself seem like a moral paragon when he's obviously just there to grab as much cash out of the company as he can get away with, that's going to demoralize every single employee and tank their performance far beyond the actual cash impact of his salary.
BahRamYou
13d ago
I grew up in a town that used to be a streetcar surburb 100 years ago. Looking at those old photos, it's almost like looking at a steampunk fantasy. All the streets that I know as sort of grungy, run-dow stripmalls, are full of very dapper gentlemen and their elegant female companions. They must have had to walk a bit to get there, but that's no problem since they were all (apparently) quite thin and fit. They don't seem to have any concern at at all for crime.
I would dismiss this as just some historical quirk, except that I've also experienced the same thing in real life- in Japan. Pretty much the same thing- low crime, low stress, low car ownership areas with mass transit, high trust, and lots of people walking in fancy fashions. They have other problems too of course (getting groceries every day with no car in a declining economy is no joke), but they still manage to make it work.
Conversely, I've experienced the opposite, living in a somewhat wealthy neighborhood in Mexico. There, razor-wire fences and private security guards are the norm. Plenty of cars and material comforts, but absolutely no social trust.
I feel like (economic wealth) and (social wealth) are almost two independant variables, with very little relationship to each other. In the US, we've gained the former at the expense of the latter. It didn't have to be this way.
BahRamYou
14d ago
I think your response actually supports my point. In theory "we" the stockholders could cut their CEO's pay, or "we" as voters could pass a law limiting all CEO pay. But in practice, no one is organized enough to actually be able to do anything about it. The CEOs get their pay not because some perfectly efficient market is finding the correct value for them, but because they have more political power where it counts.
Why do you think the board is any less incentivized to cut staffing costs than managers? They're the ones applying that pressure!
It's a bit different though. The pressure to cut expenses comes from the top down. But there's no one above the board of directors who can hold them accountable- they're already at the top! Many of them serve on multiple boards at once, and rotate in and out of CEO or other C-level jobs at other companies, so they have a strong "class interest" in pushing up CEO pay in general. They might get some bad press or worker grumbling about unfairness, but there's no one that can actually fire them for setting the CEO pay too high. In theory I guess the general stockholders could all come together to do it, but they're so disorganized that it never happens. The only practical way to force them out is for some corporate raider to do a hostile takeover, and even then there's golden parachute clauses designed in part to preevent that sort of thing.
also worth noting that the ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay has massively increased over the last few decades. So it may well just continue to increase until they're taking home some large fraction of the company's total revenue as their personal salary. Or maybe the CEO ends up with all of the company's stock (making it harder and harder for regular shareholders to oppose them) and they become a private company, like SpaceX already is.
edit: most of the starbucks board members are current or former CEOs of other companies. They directly benefit from raising CEO pay, since that sets a higher baseline for themselves to justify their own pay. This isn't some abstract "class consciousness thing," there's a very small group of CEOs and board members who are tightly connected.
Stanislav Petrov
I wonder if he was awarded 1% of all the USSR's money as a reward for his services? That should be fair, right? Or did he not get anything at all? Our intuitions for what's fair really fail at this kind of scale. (edit: he was not rewarded. it was seen as an embarassment for the entire Soviet system and was quietly swept under the rug)
BahRamYou
15d ago
i mean, i'm happy to take my salary in the form of corporate stock if that would 10x my compensation... but regular employees don't seem to get that option.
BahRamYou
15d ago
Then you should also consider that part of his high pay is also in keeping expenses low, so there is in fact an antagonistic relationship there. If starbucks was forced to use all of their profits to pay employee salaries, the board would probably expect to pay the CEO a lot less.
This feels like a Pascal's Mugging type of argument though. Or more specifically the petersburg paradox
Is there any specific reason to pay the CEO $95 million? It's not like there's a standard market rate for CEOs. It varies wildly and depends heavily on the subjective opinions of the board members. Why not go out and find another CEO for $200 million? A $200 million CEO should be even better than a mere $100 million one, right? Starbucks makes about $36 billion in annual revenue right now, so even $200 million is (like you said) a drop in the bucket. A mere 0.5%. If the new, better CEO can increase performance even 1%, he's worth it.
But then you can play the game again, and again, and again. There's no upper limit for CEO pay! Where does it stop? Their stock is kind of struggling right now- would a $10 billion CEO lead them to greatness? Or should they just cut costs and try to remain in their nice, small, profitable niche? Most sane people would say they should just stick to selling coffee, but you could do the math and imagine that even a 1% chance of becoming the next hot tech stock is worth gambling the entire company on.
Starbucks is admittedly a weak example for this. They have a lot of part time hourly employees, and they all get health benefits, so their biggest expense by far is already employee compensation. It just doesn't go as much to salaries.
For a different extreme, look at Tesla. 125,000 employees right now. Market cap 1.3 trillion. Elon Musk right now earns about 8$ billion a year under current conditions, but it goes up by 1% of Teslas total market cap for each additional trillion in their market cap. If he hits just the easiest goals, he gets $36 billion a year. If it goes up to 8 trillion, he clears an eye watering $878 billion in 10 years, almost $90 billion a year. (yes that's in stock, not cash, if that makes a difference)
Doing the same math as you, that could be ($90 billion)/(125,000 employees) = $720,000 per employee, per year. Is that still just a trivial cost? I dont' think so. In that case he's being given a large chunk of the company as his compensation. (And that's just the CEO, non including any of the other executives who also get paid a lot)
You could argue that in that situation he deserves it since the stock went up so much. But like... how do you know? How does anyone know? If some Tesla employee delivers full self driving while the government decides to tax gas cars and promote EVs, does Elon really deserve that much credit? Surely there should be some limit where we decide that a CEO is just too expensive, but there doesn't seem to be any mechanism in corporate America to limit it. Meanwhile, managers are very much incentavized to cut expenses, which heavily includes limiting employee salaries. There isn't any mechanism in the corporate structure to say "OK our stock didn't grow much. But on the plus side, we were able to consistently raise salaries for all our employees every year."
in history they sometimes talk about "the great man model," where history is heavily shaped by a few exceptional individuals. They mostly bring it up to disparage it, saying how history is far more complicated than just what people like Caesar and Alexander did. They'd be laughed out of the room if they tried to give all credit for an entire country to just one person. But apparently corporate leadership still believes in this line of thinking- they value the CEO far more than anything else. I can't help but worry that our largest corporations are under the control of middlebrow business majors who vastly oversimplify everything.
Very interesting article! Thanks for sharing.
I think his conclusion at the end of the article is pretty reasonable- people who get obsessed with porn are not that different from people who get obsessed with any other sort of internet content. If you spend 6 hours watching tik tok or K-dramas or twitch streams, you'll also end up feeling physically drained and kind of gross.
But then it sounds like the people he talked to are not just passively consuming the content, they're actually producing it, by putting a lot of effort into editing and curating it. And they're a community, actively talking to each other, encouraging (?) each other, or competing for status. Pushing each other to new extremes. This might be the only community these peop have, since most people are disgusted by this stuff, and their lifestyle doesn't lead to making friends easily.
It often seems that any kind of hetero mens' sexuality is taboo in polite society. LGBT people can have their pride displays, women can "own their sexuality" as a form of feminism, and everyone encourages. But when men talk about theirs, it's considered gross or threatening.
And like... it is. I get it. i really don't want to hear other guys talk about their sex fantasies, even if it's the same as mine.
But maybe that's something we can all get used to. Spend enough time on places like 4chan or certain discords and you do get used to it, even in its most extreme forms. Maybe there's room in polite society to allow men to express their sexuality a bit more, but still restrained. A middle ground, so that we can express ourselves without resorting to these unlimited anything-goes online spaces of depravity.
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