BahRamYou
3d ago
I agree with all of this. I would add that, in my experience, Korea is not very good at advertising its more interesting places to foreign places. It just sort of shunts us all to the same basic places ("here, look at some kimchi being made. Here, rent a hanbok and walk around an empty palace ground"), while you have to really do research and plan a bus trip to the countryside to see the more interesting places.
That said, there are some fascinating neighborhoods in Seoul. Not really "historic," but you can really see how some places were just build up crazy fast in the 80s and 90s, with some incredibly weird (and sometimes dangerous) choices of how to fit them in to the hilly terrain.
BahRamYou
4d ago
I'm not against Trump, I consider myself neutral. But it's just an objective fact that he churns through people around him quite quickly. I've never before heard of a president where his own vice president publicly came out against him, for example.
Steve Sailer once said that this kind of constant churn is common in a certain type of hard-charging, 80s, NYC business guy. I think that's a fair description for Trump.
BahRamYou
5d ago
my guess is that RFK Jr won't last very long. Remember Scaramucci? Trump likes to reward people for loyalty, and HHS is a decent prize, but RFK Jr has too big an ego to play subserviant to Trump for long.
I don't think there's a real answer to this kind of question. moral norms are developed gradually, in society, from repeated interactions. This kind of crazy, one-off event just doesn't have any standard at all.
But to try and give a real answer, I think it depends on the specifics. If you just went up to the bartender, and they had a charger available normally for customers to use (i've seen bars do this), then I wouldn't feel like I owe them much. Maybe $100 or something. If I was running around to random tablees, disturbing all the customers who are just there to eat, and someone just happened to have a charger in their pocket, I think I would owe them a lot. Like, $100,000 to the charger person and $10,000 to everyone else maybe.
BahRamYou
14d ago
yeah, those are parliamentary systems where the party (mostly) selects the candidate and voters simply vote for the party. very different system. But it is somewhat analogous to how American politics works in "safe" seats, like Harris's California senate seat, where you simply have to win inside the local party political machine and then they'll guarantee you a victory.
BahRamYou
15d ago
I actually don't think running women was the problem. plenty of women have won positions at all other levels. It's just that the way the DNC does it is to bypass primaries and put in a woman who might do well in closed-door insider politics, but is bad at public speaking in a normal election.
BahRamYou
15d ago
you know that's actually fair, i admit that calling it horse medicine was some low-effort snark on my part.
I still say that Trump has mostly run on a very heterodox approach to healthcare though. you can't say he's "pro-vaccine" when he's promising to put RFK in charge of health. But, who knows, it's always hard to tell what Trump will actually do.
BahRamYou
15d ago
i've literally never heard him mention it, even though (IMO) it was one of the best things to come out of his time in office.
Also he was famously in favour of taking horse medicine, and backing RFK who's entire campaign is antivax.
BahRamYou
16d ago
I'm not surprised that Rogan, specifically, endorsed Trump. He has somewhat Trumpish views, especially on vaxines and covid. He had a nice, friendly chat with Trump, while Kamala refused to go on his show (at least in his preferred format). And he's a bro who likes combat sports, and Trump was an old wrestling fan (yeah not the same, but uh... adjacent?).
Still notable because so few celebrities have publicly endorsed Trump. Until now he had um... Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan? Basically just a handful of washed-ups who have given up on having an active career. celebrities are overwhelmingly democratic. Like, it's hard for Republicans to play any pop song at their rallies because the musicians all sue them. But maybe that monopoly is starting to break.
BahRamYou
16d ago
"has"? it was halted in 1973, unless you think the government is simply lying about everything and doing it secretly with no evidence.
BahRamYou
19d ago
This cements my thought that the “Vance is weird” campaign is a fully enclosed propaganda ecosystem, as in, it isn’t exaggerating some aspect of Vance (eg “Trump lies”), it is just totally made up.
Sometimes he has moments where it seems like he is thinking something complex (as you'd expect from a VC who went to Yale) but deliberately dumbing himself down to make himself look relatable. Mostly he pulls it off, but sometimes it's too forced and awkward, whicih can come across "weird."
BahRamYou
20d ago
But doesnt that require you to have some special insight about elections? I agree with nate silver, this election is too close to call and i have no idea what will happen. I certainly wouldn't want to wager millions of dollars on it. If you have some special insight, you could probably becone a celebrity forecaster like nate silver and make more that way.
BahRamYou
20d ago
that's impressive. are you actively trading crypto, or just HODLing it? It seems hard to make large amounts on prediction markets, no matter how good you are, because they're just too thinly traded and have too much of a spread/withdrawal fees.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Im pretty sure that if i said that, they'd instantly guess that im voting republican (or some weird libertaruan 3rd party)
BahRamYou
1mo ago
yeah. funnily enough, this scenario has kinda happened to me in real life. I'm not planning to vote because (a) don't live in a swing state and (b) don't have a strong preference either way. But when I say that to single ladies they hate it. they demand that I vote. I wonder what would happen if I was like "ok, i'll go vote for trump then..." maybe they would like that better?
BahRamYou
1mo ago
One thing that helps Trump is that he's lazy. He just wouldnl't bother to experiment with weird ads like that, and wouldn't hire the sort of campaign mananagers that would either.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
The very best recent results for Mark Robinson have him down by ten points after the Nude Africa, "I'm a black Nazi," "I write erotica about my sister in law pissing on me" scandal.
...Say what?
Man, one of the things I hate about American presidential politics is how it sucks up so much attention that lose track of other, more interesting political stories. This is the first time I'm hearing about this! He sounds like uncle ruckus
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I think that as an "outsider" candidate (yes he was president, but he's still very much outside normal political machinery), Trump benefited a lot from recent anti-incumbent trends. Covid, inflation, war, and general unhappiness has led to a lot of countries voting against their incumbents, which goes against normal trends where incumbents normally have an advantage. I doubt that will still be true in 2028, and even if it does the Republicans can probably find someone else by then who can harness it better than the guy who's been doing the same political schtick for 10+ years.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I feel like Brazil has some odd similarities to the US that go underrated. Both are very large nations, by far the largest (in population) in our respective continents. Both rather spread out, with large chunks of wilderness. And we are both former slave-owning, plantation socities, which imported huge amounts of slaves and had a weird legal code for hundreds of years regarding race. That kind of thing leaves an impact. I feel like Brazilian politics are more similar to the US than Canada is.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
You need to think about this more deeply, not just reduce it to a single number like a highschool physics problem.
Why are small tactical nukes banned by treaty, while large strategic nukes are allowed? Why is a 1kT nuke more dangerous than a megaton? Because the smaller ones would get used. At least with the larger ones, we have a chance at achieving a balance of terror and never using them. But it's a dangerous, slippery slope to start messing around with the bottom edge of that scale. And like you mentioned "ground-penetrating rather than an airburst" so it's a lot more dangerous than a nuke of the same yield would be.
Think about this from the Russian perspective.
"Marshall, we have a big problem."
"What is it, comrade?"
"Radar shows a huge incoming wave of American missiles coming from outer space! They'll arrive in 10 minutes!"
"What!? Are they nuking us?"
"There's no way to tell! It looks like ICBMs! But they Americans say it's just a conventional weapon."
"Where are they headed?"
"It appears to be targeting all of our underground missile silos."
"Fuck. That's a first strike. ... How long do we have remaining?"
"Five minutes."
"fuck fuck fuck. um. launch."
BahRamYou
1mo ago
It's hard to say. I was skeptical that falcon rockets would work, but they did, and now Space-X is totally dominating the market for unmanned satellites. Starship could potentially increase that, but how far can it go? At a certain point, just don't see the use case in being able to lift vast chunks of mass into orbit with current technology. Maybe increase the growth of Starlink, but they're already doing that.
I'm deeply skeptical that they'll ever go to mars, at least not for more than just sending a few rovers. I'm... concerned that the real use case for this is military, particularly something like the rods from god which are dangerously close to being a tactical nuke.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
But he did all of that in the 80's. He did basically nothing during his time as president. I mean, he did annoy the hell out of libs on social media. But he didn't actually build anything.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Man, screw you. This started with you posting something you had just read and apparently you've devoted a huge chunk of your life to reading this nonsense. I admitted in good faith that it was hard to understand, as I think any normal person would, and you just look down on me with this obvious snobbishness. That's exactly the same feeling I get from Mercuse and all of his ilk. Go enjoy immersing yourself in Freudian pseudoscience, I'm sure that will get you a tenured humanities position.
I've unironically done this. prostitutes tend to be very open-minded people who are also good at keeping secrets. downside is they can't really give you any meaningful advice, but i don't think that's really the point of therapy.
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