Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
One man's excessive laissez-faire in finance is another man's government strangling every other industry. But that was largely baked in by the time Thatcher came to power.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
This post appears to have been removed without a modhat comment explaining?
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
I would like to see a full clip of the first, not conveniently cut before he finishes speaking. The context of the argument appears to be that he is pushing back against the tiktoker for saying that every word of Leviticus must be taken completely literally. He's clearly using it as a gotcha against her quoting Leviticus - he opened the argument with "I mean, Satan's quoted scripture." For the second, he is saying that appointing unqualified and incompetent candidates because of diversity commitments implies that black women are not capable of doing the job, that this is the argument that progressives are implicitly making when they appoint a KBJ to the Supreme Court because Biden committed to picking a black woman.
Something you will find if you spend time on themotte is that it's a good idea to check the sources people show you for their claims and think critically about them.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Oh yeah, certainly, sector-specific deflation is usually good, because it means that real productivity/quality gains are happening. It's generalized deflation which kills the economy, I believe, because it kills the availability of credit and the velocity of the money supply. Even if there's an increase in general productivity, the effects on the financial system would be extremely dire. But I'm not sold on AI causing deflation - if anything, if AI creates a strong deflationary pressure, then it makes sense for the government to print money to pay for debt/entitlements.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
God I don't even want to think about what AI-induced deflation would do to the financial system. Luckily the AIs will all be hyper-optimized to get consumers to spend money instead of saving it.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
??? Before internet, maybe.
Finding high-quality, reliable information online was and remains difficult. That's one reason this place exists, to stress test the information people find online. As an academic I found literature reviews to be pretty grueling tasks even with Google Scholar and sci-hub at my disposal (something LLMs are actually getting pretty damn good at). Even finding the sort of weird and mixed-quality information that births crank theories had become quite a bit harder over the last decade, as search engines decided to promote "authoritative content" over giving the user what they're asking for for good or ill.
My gripe with crank theories of everything is basically similar to my gripe with a lot of rationalism, which has largely escaped crank status: there is an immense tradition of theory out there, and if you don't put in the years or decades required to study it you will at best be making new mistakes, but more likely making ones decades or centuries old. Plenty of great philosophers have said "everybody before me was wrong"; none of them arrived at that conclusion without exhaustive study of the tradition (yes, even Wittgenstein).
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Yes, when young Africans talk about this they often call it the "Black Tax". It makes the kind of low-level capital accumulation necessary for growing a black middle class almost impossible, outside of people willing to move to the city or to a different country and cut ties with their family - a very difficult and painful thing to do in any culture, but particularly in African cultures. On the other hand, it's good for Malthusian survival.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
My understanding of the current consensus on the Great Game is that neither the Russians or (sensible) Brits believed that the Russians could conquer India. Rather, they believed that Russian spies and then an expeditionary force could spark a massive uprising in India that would deny it to to Britain. Neither side was really aware of the immense logistical difficulties Russia would have faced in doing this, though, it was more an assumption that Russia would be able to overcome them at some not-so-distant point in the future.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Amusingly, Indian nationalists and Western post-colonialists like to point to a study that shows the Bengal famine was caused by the British, because it's the only Indian famine that doesn't correlate with the monsoon conditions which have caused famine in India since time immemorial. They then turn around and blame the British for all the previous famines, too.
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
In all my years on themotte, the most valuable lesson I've learned is that checking your interlocutor's sources is a superpower. Nobody else will do it, and there's a fair chance he hasn't.
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
Shades of the Judge. I agree almost entirely, but I'm compelled to point out that Isandlwana was essentially campaign-ending, in that the British had to completely withdraw from Zululand and plan a second, more competent invasion. Bad planning, sure, but it was also a perfect storm scenario for an African force to defeat European riflemen - a large part of the area the Zulus charged over was dead ground from the perspective of the British lines, and the British were undersupplied and had little space to fall back into. A Roman legion would have whipped the British there.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
I would not recommend buying new if possible. Go on Craigslist etc. and find a warehouse with lightly-used office furniture and you can get a high-end Herman Miller or whatever you want well within that budget. Offices offload barely-used expensive chairs all the time, particularly in volatile economic times.
Bartender_Venator
10d ago
As a regular US-UK flyer, I'll also point out that the supersonic premium on a night flight is not much of a premium unless you are doing a very quick-turnaround meeting. What makes NYC-London miserable is that it's not enough time for a decent night's sleep - I would rather fly LA-London, than NYC-London, personally, and would choose subsonic over supersonic just for the extra sleep.
Bartender_Venator
11d ago
Hey, you could be an invertebrate that gets eaten alive by its young or, conversely, an invertebrate that gets to eat the smaller male after mating! I think it's fair to say this book is arguing that, to evolution, nobody and nothing has any "worth" at all except insofar as they can effectively replicate their genes by successful reproduction (except possibly their caloric value to something higher up the food chain). You're anthropomorphizing a blind and utterly callous force of nature, and even anthropomorphizing it as assigning rather modern values to its objects.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
Weed might suppress the latter two but it definitely doesn't suppress neuroticism. Paranoia is a notable side effect of both smoking weed and the hangover from it.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
I would add two further points:
- Urges satisfied physically are more satisfying. Obviously actual sex is more satisfying than gooning, but casual gamblers will also tell you that playing cards is more satisfying than pressing buttons, and there's something much more satisfying about smoking a cigarette than sucking on a vape. The act is done, the ritual is complete, you can now go do the next thing in your day/night. Maybe even go to sleep, if you didn't do too many lines off that hooker.
- These low-friction processes are much more amenable to optimization for addiction and wallet/soul-draining. The term slot machine designers use is "gambling to extinction". And we've gotten very good at optimizing things for addiction. It's not just that it's low-friction, it's that you can add all kinds of dark patterns into the process itself to get users hooked and get them to spend more and more of their money. Slot machine addicts often report that on some level they're trying to gamble away all their money, because that means they can finally stop their session. Gooners are a bit more resistant to that because post-nut clarity will eventually hit, but this would be the dream monetization process for OnlyFans to develop.
Bartender_Venator
16d ago
Prostitution, for all its serious problems, is as lindy as it gets. Fairly analogous to how playing roulette at the casino is better for society than sports gambling on an app.
Bartender_Venator
16d ago
I can second KENKA. I believe that's also one of the two spots that Vibecampers/postrats have their meetups.
If you feel like Chinese food instead, there's loads in Chinatown but I like Spicy Village for something casual - David's Bar next door will let you take their food in if you want to have a drink and likely meet some folks (more generally, a good way to meet people in NYC is to pop through a bar that's so small everyone is in close proximity). The infamous Dimes Square is nearby, but there's nothing to actually see at the moment.
Since you've got a lot of time, definitely go see the Cloisters. It's a great neighbourhood, too, and will give you some topological variety and good cardio just walking around.
Bartender_Venator
17d ago
Scotland (well, urban progressive Scotland, not the Highlands) is the Canada of Britain - their modern identity is deeply wrapped up in not being their richer, more famous, comparatively more conservative neighbour. As such, Scottish nationalism has taken on a distinctively left-wing, almost third-worldist character. Devolution hasn't helped, in that it's given Scotland a sort of toy government where SNP politicians can play around knowing they'll be bailed out of any serious consequences for bad decisions by the British taxpayer.
Bartender_Venator
20d ago
Not terribly often, but sometimes. Just helped a friend move last weekend (though I did get some old books and a sweet radio that I will likely never use any more than he did). I've probably done bigger good deeds than this one but it sticks with me: I was staying at my aunt's place in a third-world country where she rents out flats. Some elderly regulars were visiting, and the man was in very poor health, clearly not going to be around to come back next year. One day I'm walking out of the vestibule as he's walking in, and he suddenly starts to collapse, I'm in arms reach to dart in and prop him up. He's a big, portly guy but I'm strong enough to hold him up, my brother gets in on the other side and we slowly walk him over to a stair where we can sit him down safely. At that age, in that poor health, and with the issues of the local hospitals, a bad fall would likely either have killed him or meant the end of his mobile life. There's also something particularly satisfying about being able to help somebody just by being there and being physically strong/quick, primal male stuff.
Bartender_Venator
23d ago
They're just chinos, not dress pants (sometimes available in wool iirc), but Epaulet's Wilhelm cut is designed for serious lifters. Even their regular cuts are extremely flattering and have a lot of thigh/seat space.
Bartender_Venator
23d ago
Tailoring is not the end of the world. If you can get one shirt tailored to the fit you want, you can take down the measurements and send them to Luxire or a similar overseas place for made-to-measure shirts around the same price point as State and Liberty (depending on fabric quality and sales, but I can promise you even their cheapest fabric will be better-looking than some kind of "stretch performance" thing).
Bartender_Venator
23d ago
The other advantage of disassembling a planet is that doing so also disassembles the gravity well.
Bartender_Venator
23d ago
There's a good Nick Land essay about this where he argues that space exploration is really about planetary disassembly by posthuman intelligences rather than domestead frontier LARPing.
Iirc he starts from the premise that spheres are an extremely inefficient shape to extract mineral resources from, compared to disassembling a planet into asteroids and having space drones mine them.
Lower upper/bohemian. A little hard to explain so I'll go into detail: "Fuck you" money, but not "money literally doesn't matter, just get another yacht" money. Went to a highly prestigious school with the children of nobility, senior government figures, oligarchs, etc., and then a top university. To give an impression of how I come off to regular people, I spent Thanksgiving with a middle-class American family last year, and after I left they said "it was like having a prince visiting" (I did help with the washing up, when they'd let me). But I'm not interested in climbing the status hierarchies of my class peers, would rather be where new, indie things are happening even if that means hanging out in grimy basements. Classic story of one generation achieves class status, the next generation makes money, and the third goes for culture.
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