DirtyWaterHotDog
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User ID: 625
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
convinced that the fertility problem is 100% economic in nature
Same here. Societal shifts around 'status' or 'what we value' are necessary, but they will never gain traction unless the economic incentives align as well. Economics is about money, Money is about labor, Labor is about time.
Korea spent $200b trying to increase its birthrate. Hungary spends 5% of GDP
These statistics are misleading, because it doesn't measure what qualitative changes it seeks to drive.
Can women return to the workforce in high-status roles after being out of the market for 5-10 years ? Can they take long maternity breaks without being fired ? Do the fathers gets long paternity breaks to contribute to housework ? Can they afford to add another room to their house without breaking the bank ? Is it possible for the kids to set your kids up for strong economic outcomes without dooming them to a horrible rat race ?
This is just motherhood. But you have to see economic incentives for long term romantic partnerships too. Can you stay in the same city longterm without affecting career prospects ? Do you have time for dating in your 20s, or is there immense pressure to be in the office instead ?
No amount of money is going to make up for misaligned incentives on these primary questions.
The trads complain about changing values which disincentivize motherhood. Free-market capitalists talk about bad economic incentives. Both have a point. But, the latter is lot easier to fix than the former. To top it off, capitalists have economic power, while trads are bleeding social power like a slit aorta. So, pretty large difference in agency as well.
Ofc, govts pick the worst of both worlds by spending money on bad economic outcomes and accommodating some real crazies who keep moving the value system further away from the metaphorical God's light.
P.S: Alongside economics, building environment and infrastructure also plays a huge role here. That's a topic for another day.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
My regional home cuisine is very legume rich. I can recommend a few options. Legumes are only high effort because they need soaking & sporuting. Other than that, they are very easy to cook.
- Kala Chana (black chickpeas) is very simple to cook.
- Matki (moth beans) are similar and my personal favorite
- Masoor Dal This is a classic first-recipe for a lot of India when they leave home. Shit easy
- Lentils also make for great flatbreads
They may look daunting if you've never cooked Indian food, but it is genuinely super-easy once you have done it a couple of times. All of these are lazy 10 minute recipes. You just need to do 2 minutes of work the night before.
If you've never had these in a home-made style, then try out the ones you get at trader joe's. It's a good representation of what you can expect.
Generally, talk to people with celiac. They incorporate lentils into a lot of their meals.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
I have made a genuine attempt to love Chinese creative works. For one, they have outdone themselves on cuisine. Traditional, fusion and contemporary Chinese cuisine are all outstanding. 3 of my roommates are Chinese from the mainland (I'm not racist, I have a black friend), and my favorite recent individual (like many rationalists) is an ethnic Chinese man. (Lee Kuan Yew). Yes, I am Indian, but I don't really care about China-India tensions as much as your typical Indian on twitter.
I have tried. But, I've struggled to find much depth to contemporary Chinese music, Chinese movies, Chinese comics or Chinese computer games.
...written in China, by Chinese, and presumably utterly foreign to any putative Indian readers
Fair. I stretched my point there. It is still derivative of their own history, but Wukong is their big win, and deserves to be acknowledged as such.
...and yet the only American entertainment that I have consumed for the past few years is the culture war.
This has to do with a mix of wokeism, covid, the writer's strike and netflix-isms. Matt Damon talks about the death of original mid-budget films. It is more so economics than the death of art.
Now, the best stuff has moved to streaming platforms, getting broken into mini-series with low budgets, that make moderate profits instead of becoming block busters. No wonder horror and intimate character studies are flourishing. Midnight Mass, Pig, Marriage story, etc. are all innovative, gripping masterpieces of the last 4 years. Some of my favorite albums (mainstream and indie) have been produced over these years (Tesseract, Silk Sonic, Black Crown Initiate, Kendrick). Western games are admittedly in a slump but the early 2010s set the bar too damn high (Dota2, CSGO, Skyrim, GPT5,.....) and the studios are still at the tail end of the 'milking it' phrase. Hell, I dislike the wokes as much as anyone on TheMotte, but that guy ' Ta Nehisi Coates' writes a damn good book. I disagreed with everything in it, and I still couldn't put it down.
Yes, the big mainstream of American Media is in the middle of a self-fellating death spiral, but 2024 seems to be a year of 'coming back to senses'. American Entertainment is so incredibly productive, that even when popular media is failing, the lower tiers are still producing hits after hits. You need to look under the covers.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
Atari
Huh, I never knew. Always thought it was Japanese.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
Fully agreed on Hongkong.
In the Mood for Love
Ayy, we've all seen the every frame a painting video. I joke, but I want to sit down to appreciate Wong Kar-wai's greatest hits.
wuxia
It's odd. The best wuxia novels come from South Korea but use Chinese myths. I recently rea 'Peerless Dad' and it is legitimately good. But, all Korean. Same for Chinese history. The Qin unification story has been told a million time, but Kingdom (Japanese Manga) has somehow turned out to be the most effective.
I think it's more about living in liminal zones
That's a cool take. By definition, what makes them interesting (the thick atmosphere, the lack of belonging, the feeling of transition) is what makes them unstable and temporary.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
Look the woke-scolds have their problems, but just being woke doesn't disqualify you from creating great art. If anything, great artists are notorious for associating themselves with questionable movements through the ages.
Take some of the best western games of the last decade - Borderlands 2 or the God of War reboots. They were written by a famously woke cuck. The games were still great. Larian studios of divinity original sin and Baldurs Gate 3 fame allow characters in their games to date and fuck any gender, race, creature you like.
The things that makes woke-scolds bad at games is the 'scolds' part. HR ladies of any kind, make horrible games. Just being woke......well, it's a mental affliction. But, mental afflictions tend to be positively associated with good art.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
League's core game was pretty much entirely copied from Dota, which had been around for few years at that point. The core development team for Riot Games was 100% western too.
There is nothing Chinese about League.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
Elden Ring was literally written by G.R.R Martin. The Souls Games (which Elden Ring is the spiritual conclusion to) clearly take inspiration from Berserk, which itself is heavily inspired by western works.
It is the least Japanese game there is.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
It's more so East Asia than China. Japan through behemoths like Nintendo & Sony have dominated gaming since day 1. Korea has always had a strong E-sports and Mmorpg offering as far back as the mid-2000s.
For its size, China hasn't produced any recent creative works of note. 3 body problem is the only one I can think of. That's 1 international & critical success in my lifetime. Chinese manhua sucks. Their music sucks. Their games are serviceable at best. They haven't produced novels and art of note. And their movies, most of all, suck major balls. Freemium games, gambling simulators and perfect recreations of Mozart don't count. We all know the Chinese can copy better than any known people on earth.
Clearly it isn't a racial problem, because HongKong has shown itself to be capable of amazing art, especially movies. Chinese-Americans also seem to be doing decently in the contemporary art scene. But mainland china is a creative desert. I won't bury the lede, Communism kills creativity. USSR faced the same issue, which led to the surprising popularity of Bollywood in nations that were behind the iron curtain.
That beings us to Wukong, the one exception. It's right there in the name. Sun Wukong draws entirely from 'Journey to the West', a Buddhist epic. It is book with religious significance. It almost feels on the nose, but Wukong is one of India's only enduring cultural influences on China, and it shows.
So what has led China, and East Asia generally, to make better entertainment than America and Europe for Western audiences?
Part of me is offended by this question. America makes amazing entertainment, year over year. They are in a little slump with gaming, but that's about it. What you're noticing, is a slow return to a balance. Not everything is American anymore. America shares the top with England, Korea, India & Japan for top tier entertainment. East Asia is 1.5 billion people. Many of whom are in 1st world nations that are past the lowest tier of Maslow's pyramid. They have rich original cultures and aren't derivative of western myth or philosophy. Why won't they produce great art with global reach ? Ofc they do. China's historic underperformance here is the more confusing statistic. The rest of East Asia doing well is honestly, pretty expected.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
Learning Figma to get demo prototypes for my startup ready. Was going to do hackathons next 2 weekends, but accelerators have their deadlines this week. So they gotta wait. Trying out framer as well, because my backend/ml ass doesn't have time to learn front end rn.
If someone knows how to make video prototypes in Figma, then please send me some resources. I'd appreciate it.
Happy to see 'uv' is now a full-on 'cargo for python'. I'm near certain I'll be setting up our backend with uv exclusively.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
Student visas (F1) are the dominant way for top professionals to arrive in the US. After school, you get 3 years extension to work in the US, in after which you're expected to get another visa or leave.
I am assuming that the individual studied in the US, got a job for 3 years, and saved up enough in that time for this $100k downpayment,
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
In my experience, immigrants move from low-risk-guaranteed-income streams to riskier ventures once they get a Green Card. If a new green card holder is expected to pay $40k every year, it restores the golden handcuffs. This means they may pivot by moving cities, changing professions or trying to start a business. This may involve a serous amount of income insecurity.
A $40k fee adds fresh insecurity, that defeats the purpose of a green card. If a Green card can be revoked anytime, it is not a green card. It is a visa.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
I propose a flat rate of $100,000 per green card. Why wouldn't this work?
That is....cheap. Even Portugal asks $300k for a golden visa.
I like something like $300k over-a-period-of-time ~= $100k down-payment + 10% extra annual tax based on your income for 5 years. The person can either naturalize at the 5 year point or keep the green-card without the extra tax. The $100k keeps the entry bar high enough, that anyone who gets it is likely to be conscientious. At the same time, it is low enough that anyone who is highly motivated can save that much over the 20s, to make the move before they're 30.
Personally, I would consider it.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
Every time I see these posts, I'm tempted to go revive my dead food blog meant for lazy men who refuse to cook.
My suggestions:
- Parfait - Greek yogurt (plain), blueberries and very small amount of unsweetened cereal/granola.
- Baked chicken drumsticks - Literally get some chicken drumsticks with bone and skin on. dap them with paper towels. Put some salt and pepper. Pop them in an oven.
- not fried rice - rice with veggies. boil washed rice with lots of pre-diced veggies (peas, carrots, green beans and corn set) for 15 minutes. Pop an omlette on top. Some lao-gan-ma. Bam. Done.
- Chili beans. Get the canned chili beans. Add the pre-diced veggies and some spice mix. Add onions if you're feeling good. serve over rice.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
The one place where it helps to be a 'colored' immigrant.
The typical person peddling DEI/Woke bullshit is White or a 2nd generation ABC/ABCD . I can pull my 'lived experience from 3rd world country' card and shut them down. Doesn't even have to true. I just say it happened, and they have to believe it. LOL. Fight fire with fire, I guess.
Other immigrants are either annoyed with the DEI types or intellectually humble enough to engage honestly, rather than coming in guns blazing. So we get along.
DirtyWaterHotDog
3mo ago
Back when I was a Fresh-off-the-boat immigrant, I did a 'crime detection' machine learning project. The unique part was that I mixed race with wider demographics (census info) & proximity to institutions (schools, banks,etc.).
I don't want to share the full report for anonymity reasons, but old naive me found a bunch of interesting statistical co-relations.
My favorite insight: Race does not help predict crime.
statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. - Aaron Levenstein
I am being half truthful ofc. The more accurate takeaway is : "Race is not needed when predicting crime, as long as you have other spicy features."
The spiciest - 'Female household with no husband'. It was by far the most predictive demographic feature for crime. The black crime problem is a fatherlessness problem. Not too surprising for the the average mottezian. But for a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant, I genuinely could not make sense of this finding. Nice to see my 8 year old study corroborate my 2024 intuition.
The more boring, but no less important feature was - 'Participation in labor force'. Nothing surprising here. Less jobs = More crime. More crime = Less jobs.
Second spiciest - Race can be completely discarded if you're accounting for local geography. Yes, black people commit more crime. But they seem to commit all their crimes in specific places. Crime occurs near nightclubs and schools. High density places have more crime, yes, but it is trivial to triage the hotspots down to the specific block. As much as random inspections in certain neighborhoods is a liberal meme, hot spot based inspections are objectively less racist.
Takeaways:
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Joblessness and fatherlessness problems are the main cultural problems contributing to crime. You don't need an average IQ workforce to do well on either. Both are endemic in urban black communities. But, pair a bunch of Appalachian whites with these 2 problems and crime will still go up.
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Crime is a hyper-local phenomenon. Crime can be largely addressed through stringent policing of the hotspots. My guess is that crime-as-a-lifestyle, like any social phenomenon is memetic and relies on social contagion. Dispersed criminals might find other spots to base their operations out of, but it is hard to scale if hotspots are stamped out. It also means that police don't need proportionally higher resources to curb crime. Most of the city can do just fine with the amount of policing it has.
DirtyWaterHotDog
3mo ago
It's the kind of thing that makes a forum feel like a community.
Informative but has real heart. Visceral, but no shock value.
I feared that the original community has taken too many Ls. There were a lot of platform migrations and splinter groups. I still feel worry, but posts like these keep me optimistic.
DirtyWaterHotDog
3mo ago
More anecdotal experience : I have lived across the North East corridor and west coast tech cities and your speculation sounds right.
- The court house or city center always seem to be the most affected by homelessness.
- Covid has made things much much worse. Cities with innate spirit and industry have bounced back (NYC, Boston). But, a ton of cities with less 'organic' downtowns are struggling. I am in SF now, and even it's booming economy cant revive their post-covid dead downtown.
- Baltimore is not the north east. Baltimore is not like anywhere else. The city has no comparison. It is a shithole like no other. I'd rather run a gas station by the Brooklyn projects, than be in Baltimore.
If this is GP's first experience with urban living, I'd recommend giving it another shot. Literally everywhere is better. NYC is 100x better than the news makes it look. Boston is America's best imitation of a nice European city. SF's homeless are easily avoided, and the rest of the city is like living in paradise, if you can afford it. Seattle, well, I don't have nice things to say about Seattle. Sorry.
DirtyWaterHotDog
3mo ago
Yeah, more men bend over for their wives than vice versa.
Anecdotally, the typical republican woman hates abortion than the men. So, the chance of them voting blue is nil. On the other hand, democrat voting men have no such single-issue hatred for the republicans.
DirtyWaterHotDog
3mo ago
Bangladesh will end-up with a nominally democratic govt. controlled by the army.
Sheikh Hasina did not leave because the protests went too far. She left because she wouldn't commit proper genocide (no matter what many many like to believe) and she lost the army's support. Now that the army is 'stabilizing the situation', they are free to wield heavier weapons than Hasina ever could.
Bangladesh will have a Tsunami of Hindu refugees moving into India. India will likely welcome them. But that's about it.
As horrible as the idol-destroying protesters are, I don't think they're going to devolve into ISIS. No Assad-like chemical warfare, no secondary players like Hezbollah or Kurds, and no ISIS.
DirtyWaterHotDog
3mo ago
Multiple bad incentives aligning is what's happening.
India was critical to the independence of Bangladesh, and both countries have generally had an amiable relationship. India has been a big proponent of turning Bangladesh into a somewhat secular nation. It is still 92% Muslim, with 8% Hindus.
Bad incentives:
- Muslims have always oppressed Hindu minorities. So, the tensions have precedent. Using one against the other is Muslim politics 101.
- Hasina is seen as the secular leader, so anti Sheikh Hasina riots have turned into anti-hindu riots.
- Hasina is seen to be a close to India, so protestors are turning anti India. India has a major illegal-immigration problem from Bangladesh, so Indian public rhetoric is slightly anti-Bangladeshi right now, which has fanned the flames. Anti-India riots have turned into anti-hindu riots.
- As Hasina pushed her opposition into a corner, they relied on the far-right (practically violent Islamists) for new rhetoric. Bangladesh has undergone massive Islamization (as has Pakistan & Maldives), and they genuinely want to destroy temples and beat up Hindus.
- India is a non-retaliating big-brother of a terribly run subcontinent. So when leaders in Bangladesh/Nepal/Pakistan/Maldives fuck up, they love to point fingers towards India to move blame away from themselves. Free lunch.
This is coupled with some really odd global incentives which empowers the anti-hindu lynch mob:
- India insists on being non-aligned. So CIA wants to find other means to counter balance China. Keeping the neighborhood unstable is to their benefit. Bringing down Hasina is so they can establish control in the chaos.
- Ivy league students are stupid & uninformed. Hasina was running an authoritarian pseudo-democracy. She was still the most democratic and liberal choice by a country mile. Ivy league kids don't care, they started opposing her.
- Indian muslims & left work together with global orgs to attack Modi's BJP from the outside. So Left-Muslim nexus is strong. Left doesn't want to bring light to hindus being persecuted by muslims because it ruins the narrative.
- Hasina's reaction led to 100s of dead students. Global ivy-league kids had friends their age who died. So anti-Hasina and pro-islamist sentiment was purchased by west wholesale.
Truth is, Hindus are 2nd only to Jews in being lynched & exiled from every historic homeland. From Malaysia (whose Hindus ended up forming Singapore) to Afghanistan (which may be my family's ancestral home....20% chance), majority Islam has shown itself to be incompatible with Hinduism. There might be a bunch of incentives this time around, but this is a movie we Hindus have seen before.
DirtyWaterHotDog
3mo ago
a 'TheMotte' moment if I've ever seen one.
DirtyWaterHotDog
3mo ago
Society actively maintains a heavy dose of smoke-and-mirrors around the beauty-value-fertility tradeoff. It might not be deliberate, and more an emergent property of our civilization. But, the degree of obfuscation is mind-boggling.
Childbirth transforms a woman's body, yet before-after images are nigh impossible to find. Vaginal tearing is the norm (9/10) during childbirth and never mentioned. The impact of breast feeding on a woman's permanent beauty/perceived value is never part of the breast-feeding conversation. Childbirth comes at a heavy cost, despite what you believe, this cost is hidden away in a box.
Note: maternal mortality has cratered in the last few decades, but our civilization evolved in an era where child-birth was indeed a woman's 9-11 / Vietnam. She signed up for a 9 month deployment, and god only knows if she'd come back unscathed or at all.
We can't speak the truth, because truth leaks from both sides. DINK couples & spinsters help maintain the peace out of politeness, and married-couples reciprocate. Once the 'shaming is okay' pandoras box is open, we have no clue how the spinsters will respond.
All societies operate under polite fictions. It may seem redundant, but they're lindy. Abolish them with great caution.
My 2050-2100 prediction:
Embryo selection, Crispr and mechanical wombs will be figured out.
Fertility will recover. The tech will spread like wild-wire, becoming the prominent form of childbirth. Once the negative risk of childbirth is eliminated, the spinster-shaming will begin at earnest.
In the process, we will lose our humanity. A woman's brain changes after pregnancy. Mothers have been the gatekeepers of all humanity since time eternal. Once women stop undergoing pregnancy, a new type of motherhood will emerge, and with it, a new type of humanity.
"Motherhood will be dead. Long live motherhood."
DirtyWaterHotDog
3mo ago
I saw the recorded videos, and they sounded amazing. I got goosebumps.
This one is Kamala's to lose.
The biggest sign was how quickly the Trump assassination story died down. The second Biden stepped down, he overwhelmed the media cycle and wiped the slate clean on both sides. Ofc, getting the support of everyone other than the crazies really helps. Every institution (left and right) is aligned on putting her in power. Look at Trump's new twitter, it has fully morphed into the caricature that Hillary claimed it was in 2016. (https://x.com/realDonaldTrump).
Kamala has picked a golden retriever of a VP candidate and has managed to be in public life for decades without expressing a substantial opinion. This is useful. It allows a vibes based campaign to flourish. If you have said nothing, they can't attack you. One big scandal from Kamala or Tim can potentially turn the tides, but so far she's been doing well.
Trump camp seems clueless too. Kamala is happy to fight in the dirt with Trump, because she too can have a full debate without saying anything substantial. So much energy was expended painting Hillary, Biden and Obama as evil, that Trump doesn't have much novel angles of attack. On top of that, JD Vance is clearly a terrible VP candidate (as much as us Rationalist types might agree with him). Kamala has avoided the obvious landmines too. She has steered clear of supporting Palestine and immediately stopped talking about the new capital-gains-tax before it could turn scandalous. She was a harsh prosecutor, so the crime angle doesn't work. Kamala has lucked into a pretty defensible position, because she is an uninspiring candidate for democratic primaries. But, her track record is pretty centrist for the generals.
All that being said, the electoral college is surely going to make this one a lot closer than it actually is. (ofc a lot can change between now and nov)
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