BahRamYou
2mo ago
My flaky pet theory is that society and culture has simply become worse over the past few decades. Maybe it's social media, maybe it's phones, maybe it's the endless war on terror, I don't know. But something changed, and now everyone is angry, frustrated, distracted, and short-tempered. They're all looking for someone smaller and weaker to inflict violence on, and "the streets" are a place you can get away with it. So you've got guys in oversized pickups driving aggressively against the normal cars, who then attack the cyclists, who attack the pedestrians. And even pedestrians will harass people in wheelchairs or with canes.
Interestingly, I did not experience that in Japan. Even in the places with no cycling infrastructure, or even sidewalks, everyone is nice and respectful and shares the road. Drivers will actually make eye contact with you and let you pass, instead of trying to push you out of the way. You see a lot of women riding bikes with a small child in the back, no helmet, no fear, and it all just runs smoothly. It's amazing. (though admittedly kind of slow)
BahRamYou
2mo ago
a lot of the cycling discourse seems to vaccilate between "Bikes are Vehicles; I'm taking the lane if I damn well please" and "Bikes are Fragile -- motorists need to yield to them as though they were pedestrians".
But... both of those are true. There's more than one type of vehicle, you can't just force classify everything as "a car" or "not a car." Race cars, tanks, motorcycles, garbage trucks, school busses, scooters, skateboards, and bikes are all "vehicles" but they handle vastly differently and therefore have different rules. A bike is naturally faster than a perrson walking but slower and more vulnerable than a car, that's just how it is, it's pointless to get mad at them for not following some imaginary speed binary of "you must go either 3 MPH or 30, nothing in between."
BahRamYou
2mo ago
True, but that seems to mostly benefit us. It certainly benefits the elites anyway, even if some old factory workers lose their jobs. What are we supposed to do about it, invade China to get their manufacturing? "Free trade" is an ideal that both parties have been pushing very hard ever since WW2.
Have western elites ever been able to formulate a war plan?
I would argue that western, and especially American, elites have been "winning" everything ever since the end of WW2. We have the richest country the world has ever seen, which is also blessed with an enormous amount of land and natural resources. We also control a huge amount of the world's most valuable IP. We don't need to "win a war" like the Mongolians or the Romans did, where we invade some far-off land to take their resources. We already have everything we could possibly want right here at home. "Winning" just means maintaining the status quo, basically, and they've done an amazing job at that. Nobody really cares whether Russia or Ukraine controls the Donbas region, they just want to prevent a nuclear WW3.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
This. Its classic 1984 style "Newspeak." Putting people in a state of forcrd contradiction makes them confused and helpless.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
they were a "tiger" because they grew so quickly, not because they started out as some wealthy financial center. Their inflation-adjusted gdp per capita in 1980 was $4000. Which, ok, isn't as dire poverty as some nations, but certainly made it hard to find a middle-class job. Compare Japan which was at $19,000 in 1980.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
As someone currently living in S Korea, I don't agree. Or at least, it's not that simple.
Korea has had a low birth rate for a while now, since the 80s, but it's only recently that's crashed into "OMG", sub-1 levels. Something has happened more recently. And it's not the tiger moms. If anything, I think they've eased up a bit on the childhood hardcore test prep stuff. I see more kids and teens hanging around now in malls and arcades, goofing off, or going to "fun" schools for things like drawing and sports, while the old-school test-prep schools are kinda languishing.
If anything, it might be a generational trauma kind of thing. In the 80s and 90s, people really did feel like they needed to study hard-core to get into a good college to have any chance of a good life. Now the country is much less poor, and there are a lot more options, including "alternative" paths like k-pop singer or esports streamer for kids who are not conventionally good students but have other talents. But people still remember the miserable childhood they had, and feel like "having kids = misery."
"Just ask any couple why don't have kids," well, it's not that simple, because people don't always open up about their deep emotional issues, you know? They'll probably just say "the economy" because that's a nice safe excuse. Doesn't really explain why the birth rate always seems to go the opposite direction as the GDP.
Which Chinese novels did you like? Were they "real" novels, written by a professional author to be sold in bookstores, or just amateur webfiction? Because all I've ever seen coming out of mainland China is the latter. And I'm not a total snob, I do sometimes enjoy webfiction, but the all the Chinese stuff I've seen has just been garbage. Endless leveling up "cultivation" fantasies for boys, or "romance" about being raped by a billionaire for girls. I judge it as "it sucks" because I read it and that's my opinion, and I'm assuming that's what the other person also did. Perhaps there's some hidden gem that simply never caught fire or got translated or anything. But perhaps not. There's no "conservation of culture" law that guarantees that a large country must be able to produce great culture in proportion to its economy or whatever. If anything it seems to work the opposite, where the best art comes from the descendants of families that were once rich but lost everything in great tragedies.
I really think that part of the reason "3 body problem" went viral was that people were hungry to see something out of China, and this was the first time we'd ever seen a real fiction book from them. But it was... very mediocre, in my opinion, and it wasn't followed by anything else.
BahRamYou
3mo ago
It seems like India had a lot more cultural cache in the past, when lots of people were going there to learn about budhism, meditation, yoga and all sorts of new-age stuff. Like, it was a huge deal when the Beatles went there in the late 60s, lots of people copied them! But now we can just get that stuff from California, no need to go to India for it.
BahRamYou
3mo ago
Well, you started off with a really strong claim that "most of the commentary on Chinese culture is unironically racist in the old-fashioned sense of prejudice and ignorance." Now it seems like you're backing off of that and just saying it's the language barrier? Seems like a flimsy excuse, when we have millions of Chinese language speakers in the west, and live in an age where both professional translators and auto-translation are in abundance. I really think that if there was a lot of great art coming out of China these days, we'd hear about it.
If your main example is Genshin impact... I dunno man. Sure, there's a lot of kids these days addicted to it. But if you tell a regular person that you love Chinese culture because you're addicted to spending money on pictures of sexy anime girls in Genshin, they're going to look down on you. I realize culture is subjective, so I can't prove that it's bad but.. cmon. you know it's bad. We can do better.
I mean... tbh if you've never heard of Kazuo Ishiguro or Haruki murakami then yeah... I'll call you uncultured, at least as far as 20th century novels go. They're not exactly obscure writers, they both sold millions of books besides winning multiple literary awards (whereas 3 body problem only won the Hugo award, which I agree is meaningless now). But OK, they're a bit too "modern," how about Natsume Sōseki who wrote "I am a cat" in 1905, or Jun'ichirō Tanizaki who was shortlisted for the Nobel literature prize in 1964, or Kenzaburo Ōe who wrote famous works in the 60s and finally won the Nobel prize in 1994. Or many, many others, who are admittedly not well-known to the common man in the west, but anyone who's a professional artist in their area knows about them. Like, oh, Osama Tezuka for one, "the father of manga."
And uh even in video games... there's Donkey Kong (nintendo arcade game) in 1981. Or their game and watch system in 1980, Oo the light gun they made for the Magnevox Oddessy (the first home video game console) in 1971, or their love tester in 1969, or their disney-licensed playing cards before that.
And that's just gaming systems from one company. What about all the other stuff I mentioned? Sushi, Karate, ninjas, karaoke, sumo, geisha, pachinko, yakuza, haiku, onsen, kimono, manga... jira? All Japanese cultural exports. Even some of the stuff that should have been Chinese, like Chinese character calligraphy or Journey to the West or Romance of the Three Kingdoms or Go, were still mostly told to us via Japan.
In terms of raw money, it seems like you're mostly just looking at three things, right? Genshin is an anime-styled gambling app, it has no cultural significance whatsover. 3-body problem is a bog-standard sci-fi novel that only got popular because "it's an inroad to the Chinese market" and Netflix will greenlight anything, except they massively changed it to have black and female characters. Wukong, I don't know, I haven't played it, but it's brand new. For the most part, none of those have any cultural signifigance though. When I was a kid, watching "Ninja Turtles" and "Power Rangers" really made me interested in Japanese culture and I wanted to visit there. I can't imagine how playing Genshin impact or watching the 3 body problem makes anyone think "yeah I really want to go to China!!!" If anything, Dragonball or Ranma 1/2 show a better view of China.
edit: to be more clear, I claim that Japan had an amazing literary and artistic tradition long before they became a rich first-world country. China used to, back in the 19th century, but it all got destroyed by WW2 and the cultural revolution. They've since become a top-tier economy, rivaling the US, but they're still a long way behind in cultural output, way behind even much smaller countries. This is admittedly hard to measure, and shouldn't be measured by money, but I still think it's obviously true. I'd go so far as to say that mainland China today is still behind Taiwan or old Hong Kong in cultural exports.
BahRamYou
3mo ago
Probably at the time people said "it's no big deal, imagine taking 10 thousand dollars out at one time"
Not necessarily. At that time, people did a lot more big transactions in cash, so it was actually more common to withdraw a big chunk of cash. They even issued $10,000 bills to make it easier.
BahRamYou
3mo ago
I disagree. Japan was already exporting a lot of cultural influence in the 80s, arguably more than it is now. Every kid in America was obsessing over Ninja, Karate, ans samurai. Nintendo was an absolute craze. Nerds were trading unlicensed untranslated anime on vhs tapes, trying to figure out wtf it meant. Businessmen were showing off their money be eating at fancy sushi restaurants or benihana steakhouses, then getting drunk off sake and singing karaoke. There was even a hit song "im turning japanese."
On the more highbrow side, there were a lot of Japanese artists winning prestigious awards. yukio mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, kazuo ishiguro, andmany other less famous ones wrote great literature. Haruki murakami got a smash hit with Norwegian Wood. Film buffs loved Akira Kurasawa, whose samurai duels were a major influence on the light saber fights in star wars. Japanese jazz and classical musicians were also popular in their respective scenes.
If anything, that stuff should have been bigger. There just wasnt any real marketing in the US for anything foreign at that time. Even british stuff could be hard to find. There was no choice except American Hollywood movies and TV, for a regular person.
But now? Its easy to get international stuff from all over the world. People love it. But what does China have? A shitty, exploitive gambling app (Genshin impact)? One sci fi novel that i have no ideahow it became popular (three body problem)? Some incredibly jangoistic movies about killing americans (wolf warrior, The Battle at Lake Changjin) which went nowhere outside China? Some hacky web novels about "cultivation" and getting kidnapped by a billionaire?
The sad thing is that they used to do better. In the past, Chinese martial arts movies, food, buddhism, taoism, and sun tsu books were all popular. But almost all that stuff came out of Hong Kong. With the CCP takeover, and general crackdown on non-Beijing culture, their cultural output seems to have really stagnated. I think, if anything, people are hungry to see a Chinese pop culture product, but there's just nothing there.
BahRamYou
3mo ago
Well, it wouldn't have to be a regular margin loan. I'm sure the private equity industry could arrange something creative- maybe a credit default swap? But I admit I don't really know how that works when you're talking about billions of dollars, maybe there's a limit where it stops working. But for smaller amounts in the millions, it seems surprisingly easy to just take out loans without selling anything.
BahRamYou
3mo ago
I think most would choose to take margin loans instead, so they could raise the tax money without actually selling any stock.
BahRamYou
3mo ago
No but I feel like you're overthinking this. Nobody (well, hardly anyone) is going crazy over seeing a woman's hair or the idea of her breastfeeding. But when you see a woman wearing a super cut low tank top with a pushup bra and high-heeled pumps, and the absolute tightest pants she could possibly wriggle into... cmon. That's sexy. She isn't wearing that "just to be comfortable." She, or some fashion influencer, designed that outfit to sexually attract men. It's not "uncontrollably, painfully aroused and frustrated," It's more like a mild discomfort. It's just a feeling that never, ever goes away when you're surrounded by women like that at work and in daily life, constantly, and you're expected to not hit them with the dreaded "male gaze." Sometimes I feel paranoid that I might accidentally look in a way that makes someone feel sexually harassed. I feel like I need to get one of those eye trackers that some streamers use, to record my eye movement, in case I ever need proof that I wasn't ogling them.
BahRamYou
3mo ago
I'm not. But maybe we could try an experiment. Let's take a large sample of men from a conservative, old-fashioned society where porn and sexy clothes are strictly forbidden. Let's bring them into a modern western society where it's normal for women's bodies to be on display all the time. Since they've never watched porn, they should have no problem with it right? They should easily adjust to this new society and not even notice the wanton display of sexuality, since they didn't have porn to hijack their brains, so they'll just be pure and innocent and oohhhhh crap that experiment didn't work out very well.
BahRamYou
3mo ago
ironically, pretty much everything in civ punishes you for building an advanced civilization. The best way to win is to "deathstack" a lot of cheap, early game, chariots, and just nonstop war until you conquer everything. Almost every building is just "for fun, if you feel like it. it won't help you win the game."
BahRamYou
3mo ago
Alpha Centauri is awesome. But... it really isn't a a Civilization game. It felt more like a mod of Civ2, rather than a standalone game. It let you customize units how you want, customize the government, customize cities... really customize almost everything about the basic civ1/civ2 engine. But of course that let you push all the most imblanced things, and the AI couldn't keep up at all. It's not even single player, it's more like zero-player. Do whatever you want and see what happens.
That said, yes, awesome story. Very "90s" feel, where you could package an awesome sci-fi story into a video game. They should make a movie out of it!
BahRamYou
3mo ago
As a longtime civ fan, I feel like it's been devoured by the common pitfall of "gamers will optimize the fun out of everything." original civ was great because you were literally building a civilization from the ground up, and you could do anything you wanted. But then gamers figured out the "optimal" way to play (either spamming settlers or spamming chariots), and it lost all fun. They added new game mechanics, while still trying to keep the feel of the old, but there's just no way to keep that old magic of playing by yourself on a DOS machine, when you can watch a youtube tutorial from a pro gamer telling you exactly how to beat the game and why you suck if you can't grind your way to a high multiplayer rank.
BahRamYou
3mo ago
So while I too feel that there are greater problems in the world, I get why a lot of men would like sexiness to just go away and stop taunting them
That's pretty much how I feel. At least, in environments where it's frowned upon to flirt with women, like in the office, I really wish they would stop wearing sexy clothes. It's like a constant mental tax I have to pay, "don't look at her don't look at her don't look at her," and there's no way to complain about it without sounding like either a huge pervert or an overbearing puritan.
I feel like food is maybe the gender-switch version? As a guy, I like chocolate, but I can take it or leave it. I have no trouble just eating one chocolate and ignoring the rest. But there was a holiday party at my office, and some woman sent in a complaint to HR, crying that she just couldn't stop eating the chocolate, it was making it impossible for her to work and maintain her diet with all these scrumptious chocolate lying around in front of her all day. And I was thinking... woman, you have no idea...
BahRamYou
3mo ago
I wonder if we'll see a black market in "first time buyers" who get paid a commission to buy the house, then immediately turn around and sell it to the real buyer for its cost.
BahRamYou
3mo ago
It seems like the Anglosphere is trying to square that circle by (a) restricting supply in the high-income, liberal voting areas and (b) letting in a flood of immigrants to do cheap construction labor and build up new housing in low-income, conservative voting areas. We'll see how long that can last.
BahRamYou
3mo ago
I wouldn't consider the model agentic, but it seems meaningful that every other AI image generator specifically blocks this kind of stuff, whereas this one not only allows it, but seems to encourage it, with a sort of "wink wink, nudge nudge, there are no rules!" marketing. And in fact it still has rules, lots of them, it's just this one rule that it bypasses. So it seems like they intentionally built a tool that has "trademark violation" as its main use case. If nothing else, they're distributing images that violate trademark, since all those images come off of their web servers.
would you take a trade where the city builds a lot more freeways where you can drive 60+, in exchange for having to go 20 or less on all regular city streets? That seems like the obvious trade to me. Otherwise it's just really difficult to share a street with cars going 40, and it's really difficult for cars not to go at, what feels to them a slow speed.
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