Corvos
1mo ago
No argument with either of those. I grew up with my grandparents' childrens' books, which probably shaped my outlook on many things.
(Side-point but while I agree with you on travel, I find the endless dick-measuring tiresome. "You travelled across rural India on a rickshaw? Well I was a missionary to an island off Surinam where they killed white people on sight!" and so on. I rather prefer the tourist hotspots. At least everyone knows where they stand and nobody with a brain things they're going to receive anything more than a tan.)
The biggest problem with current care homes isn't loneliness, listlessness or malaise. It's that the care home has almost no incentive to care about the wellbeing of its residents, especially those without vigorous younger relatives to advocate for them, and therefore generally ends up mistreating them for convenience.
The residents aren't paying, or if they are, it's usually their legal guardian using the funds on their behalf (people active enough to manage their own banking are generally active enough not to go into a home). The residents don't have the physical vitality to cause problems if nobody gets round to feeding them for a few hours. The residents can't leave.
One of my relatives was put into a rehab clinic for physical recovery after an injury at the age of 90+. When we went to visit him, we discovered him shivering in a frigid room. He hadn't been fed for a day, because nobody had got round to it. And if we hadn't visited, who would have known?
There are many, many ways for a rather overstretched institution to abuse people for profit or convenience without causing them enough damage for outsiders to notice, especially if they're frail and expected to die soon anyway. Presumably these places are inspected, but there are lots of ways to get vulnerable people to smile for the inspectors when you have them at your mercy for the rest of the time. It doesn't even require active malice, just neglect.
People are naturally concerned that the position of the non-robot-owners in a world where robots do all the jobs (and enforce public order) will be comparable.
Corvos
2mo ago
But books, unlike TV and film, were being written by people 1/2/300 years ago. You can read those people in their own words (sometimes translated). That is the difference.
Reminds me of a funny personal story:
When I was prepping for a factory visit in Japan, my Japanese colleague who was doing the paperwork asked for everyone's blood type. I was surprised that BigName Corp were so superstitious, and said so.
She gave me a look and said, "They need to know what blood to give you if you have an industrial accident."
One can over-egg the cultural differences.
Corvos
2mo ago
Fascinating, thank you for engaging! The last drones I saw sounded like a hive of bees at 200m out. I hadn't even considered cancelling out the noise - I imagine it's harder to do that at the source rather than at the end-point (the listener's ears) but it's very cool that they do it with stealth copters.
Really? That's fascinating - what did they speak? French?
I'm reminded again that my knowledge of most non-Western-European history is woeful. Do you know any books that you might recommend?
Corvos
2mo ago
The noise is pretty distinctive, though. I bet you could cook up something if you had the time and money. A few sensors around the tank for triangulating the source of the buzzing, and four shotguns on a mounted swivel placed around the tank. When the defences are turned on, they auto-target and fire a wide blast of pellets towards the sound.
Obviously, making that safe and viable for actual day-to-day work would be harder but I think that there are things you can do.
On the one hand, there is a faction of people who are doctrinaire Marxists, who consider themselves to be committed adherents to the cause and who are constantly overhauling their propaganda in pursuit of the same goal they've always hand - the formation of a permanent communist society. Sometimes this means playing the poor against the rich, sometimes the blacks against the whites, etc. I won't argue with that, I think it's true.
But in addition to that group, I think that anyone who thinks even slightly about society realises at some point that you have to start talking about groups and group interests. And it was Marx who formulated the great original theory of group interests. In that way I think Marx is to societal organisation what Nietzsche is to moral philosophy - he dominates the topic such that anyone who approaches that topic finds themselves discussing it in his terms. So feminists want to talk about the different and sometimes conflicting interests of men and women, and they cast around for suitable language to think about the problem in, and Marx's class conflict ideas come readily to hand. Likewise disabled people who want to talk about the deaf vs. the hearing find themselves thinking in terms of class and oppression. Or trans people talking about themselves in the language of gay liberation, despite the obvious conflicts - that language was in the water.
I've noted before that when the modern-day dissident right want to talk about the cultural dominance of the left, they often do so in leftist terms, talking about narratives and simulacra and manufacturing consent. Same thing. Those formulations come easily to mind because the left happened to be talking about them first. When I want to talk about nationalism and belonging, I end up with things like 'blood and soil' because that's the first place the mind goes and it's a good phrase.
I think if you're not careful, or if you're committed to the formalism that academia forces on you, this causes you to tangle up your original thoughts with previous movements. For example if you're an early feminist and you want to make waves, and you're already thinking in somewhat Marxist terms for the reasons given above, you're probably going to publish your articles in Marxist journals. They already exist, and they have a good readership, and your ideas are pretty compatible with the stuff they already want to take about. And this association keeps strengthening, and it becomes very difficult to find feminists who aren't Marxists, or so heavily associated with Marxists that it's hard to tell them apart. If you liked, perhaps you could think of this as 'directed' and 'grassroots' or something.
On a separate note, I heard somewhere that late stage capitalism referred to capitalism that has moved on from building things in factories to an economy that trades primarily in ideas and financial derivates. No idea if that's true or not.
Corvos
2mo ago
It's preferable they find "binders full of women" than you saying what Vance said.
Genuinely not sure about that. "I will do what I have to do, because this is important," may play quite well even among floating voters. It signifies strength and commitment (dishonesty, but pointed in a good direction). The "binders full of women" thing just came across as kind of sad, even for people who knew it had been misquoted. "I have binders full of people I want to promote to positions they weren't able to obtain under their own power" isn't exactly heartening.
Corvos
2mo ago
Presumably a combination of:
- First generation immigrants have foreign citizenship and can be deported or have their visa revoked, requiring them to be on best behaviour.
- First generation immigrants are selected to some extent, their children revert to the mean.
Corvos
2mo ago
The problem with playing exclusively the man and not the ball is that you only discredit Trump and not any of the things he wants to do. If you beat Trump by effectively saying that tariffs, immigration control, free speech etc. are great then people will expect you to implement those things in office. So you’ve won the battle but lost the war.
Ideally, you want to discredit your enemy and his ideas at the same time:
‘Orange Man’s ideas must be stupid, listen to him ramble on!’ And simultaneously, ‘only an idiot could think that cutting off free trade will improve the economy’.
Corvos
2mo ago
First past the post is easily legible and, until the recent drop in voting plus new parties, made sure that the prime minister had been voted for by a near-majority of people.
Corvos
2mo ago
Right. That’s why Thatcher allowed people in social housing to buy their house cheaply. It worked for about 40 years, but created a housing bubble that I think has now undermined the effect.
Corvos
2mo ago
Say rather that free speech is a necessary precondition. The hippies and revolutionaries of the 60s, and before them the socialists and the communists of the 20s, demanded free speech to spread their memes. Then, being less foolish than the conservatives they supplanted, they started shutting it down to prevent right wingers from formenting discontent in the same way.
Corvos
2mo ago
As I have accidentally made clear, neither am I! It came up a lot in the context of Prince Harry and Meghan Merkle trying to make a new life and career for themselves in LA, and being tentatively accepted at first before being shunned, so what I know is from the reporting on that.
Re: producers, I understand their role varies a lot depending on the producer and the film: sometimes the producer is the driving force behind the funding, the choice of director, the script, etc. and sometimes they're a glorified bookkeeper. But again, I'm not really a film guy.
Sorry about that, I made a mea culpa above.
My understanding is that people like Clooney and Oprah are the movers and shakers of Hollywood - the ones who decide who gets access and who introduce people to each other at parties. Grandees, in short. I would care about their opinions in the same way that I would care about the opinions of George Osborne / Tony Blair / Obama over some up-and-comer. They’re the ones who decide who ups-and-comes and who ups-and-downs.
It’s interesting, in that it seems we aren’t at 2018 levels of fervour, but most of those names look like crotchety outsiders or no-name bloggers to me: GRR Martin is a British author with no real Hollywood connections and although QT has always loved Hollywood I got the impression he was an auteur who never really fitted in. And also, reading the article, QT didn’t criticise anything, he just said that 3 was perfect and he doesn’t want to see 4 even if it’s good because he liked how 3 ended.
If I were taking a bellwether of Hollywood opinion I would look at people like George Clooney, Oprah, Matt Damon, Di Caprio. Or perhaps they would be the last stones to roll?
EDIT: I am completely wrong about GRR Martin. I thought I’d heard somewhere that he was a Brit basing his books on the War of the Roses. Authors who are unhappy with how Hollywood handled their works are ten-a-penny and always have been.
In Tokyo, the majority can’t afford parking spaces in the centre. It’s perfectly liveable, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t help feeling that the path dependency is strong. American cities are mostly built for cars, other cities mostly had cars retrofitted. You can’t turn those cities into Tokyo any more than you can turn Tokyo into, say, Detroit (IANAA). You’d have to blow up the whole thing and start from scratch. Unless you’re making a new city, deciding which mode of transport you’d prefer in a context-independent sense seems rather beside the point.
Corvos
2mo ago
All those Never kissed a Tory T-shirts take on a wholly different meaning. Poor guy.
Corvos
2mo ago
I’ve heard that ‘kick him in the nuts’ is very bad advice because they aren’t vital (unlike eyes, say) and the pain is basically washed away by adrenaline and just makes him angrier. Works against a dweeb who’s being pushy, but not against somebody accosting you in an alley.
Not sure if I'm agreeing or disagreeing, but consider that writing something out is not the equivalent of having it in your working memory. Although human language is very rich, if we consider writing out a problem to be the equivalent of forcing some million-parameter vector in latent space into a sentence of unicode text, then there's likely to be a huge loss of information/nuance that we can't perceive consciously. It may be that the ability to hold slightly large/more concepts in your mind is responsible for the spontaneous causal associations you describe.
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