Glassnoser
5d ago
One or the other of us might move, and also, it's just interesting to know what the dating scene is like in different countries.
Glassnoser
7d ago
As a white man who's used OkCupid's passport feature to match with people around the world, I've noticed it's really easy to get matches in certain parts of the world. Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines, is incredibly easy. The vast majority of my likes are from there. It feels like I could date the entire country if I wanted to. The next is South America, particularly Brazil. It's easy to match with very beautiful women there. The last is East Africa.
Locally, I've noticed I tend to do well Indian women and Latinas, and to a lesser extent, Middle Eastern women.
Glassnoser
7d ago
What's frustrating about Indians is their ubiquity combined with poor English skills. Tech forums are full of Indians answering questions with broken English that is painful to read and decipher. Call centres are staffed with Indians, many of whom mumble with thick accents and bad grammar.
Glassnoser
7d ago
There is a reason why people kept this place heterogeneous for thousands of years.
What reason is that?
Glassnoser
7d ago
Honda Odysseys? The mini-van? Here, they're known for driving Honda Civics.
I haven't really noticed it online, but I have noticed it in person. I live in a city that has received an enormous number of immigrants in a very short period of time, and they seem to be overwhelmingly from India, although some are from Africa and the Ukraine. This is a Canadian city that has not had much immigration since confederation. It used to be very white, with a small black population, a small indigenous population, and a very small population from elsewhere. The few Indian people we had tended to be very highly educated.
Very little changed here for a long time but it's now undergoing a rapid transformation. The population is booming, high rises are going up everywhere, rents are rapidly outgrowing incomes, and traffic congestion is getting really bad. People are blaming the immigrants, and Indians, with their dark complexions and jet black hair, really stand out. It seems like half the population dowtown is Indian now.
The other really visible change is that seemingly most low-skilled customer-facing jobs are now done by Indians. Almost every grocery store employee, Uber Eats driver, security guard, fast food restaurant worker, and call centre worker is Indian.
They're not really causing any serious problems, but there's beginning to be a bit of a backlash. People blame them for the high rents, and there is a belief that they're taking jobs better suited for teenagers when what we really need are doctors and tradesmen. This a very left-wing city with a strong norm against racism and I personally never witnessed much racism until recently, but a minority of people are starting to feel comfortable saying negative things about them and saying they should go back to India.
Much of this racism comes from Indians themselves though. They often don't like Indians from certain parts of India or from certain castes. Many think we're letting in too many or the wrong kinds. There seems to be a lot of conflict between different groups.
Glassnoser
8d ago
With the economy running at full employment, I think the effect on the economy would actually be positive.
Glassnoser
8d ago
As someone who has had two bosses before, I know it can be a complete disaster, especially when they have very different personalities and priorities.
Glassnoser
8d ago
How does this work when the budget is set by Congress and many of these jobs are required by regulations that Congress would have to repeal? Is there just going to be a massive surplus and a government that doesn't enforce the law? What happens when things like permits that are required by law to do certain things aren't issued because the remaining staff can't keep up with the demand?
It seems to me that the first step should be changing the law so that the government isn't needed to do most of the things it currently does.
Glassnoser
8d ago
Absolutely. He has very wrinkly and loose skin that makes it impossible for him to be confused for someone in his 30s. I actually didn't know his age and guessed he was 45.
Glassnoser
8d ago
Couldn't the vast majority of the work be done on rats? It shouldn't take that long to figure out what works if progress is in fact being made.
Glassnoser
8d ago
He looks exactly his age to me. His skin just looks a little funny, like he exfoliated or something.
Glassnoser
8d ago
They have health problems resulting from inbreeding. I don't think they have a problem with hostile values being smuggled in. They practise rumspringa.
Glassnoser
9d ago
Really? I assumed that they would.
Glassnoser
9d ago
Moving isn't easy though and it's actually hard for people to figure out that things are better in a different place. Comparisons are hard and people have ties to their current communities. So it probably does help people in that community. It would take a long time for things to reach equilibrium again.
Glassnoser
9d ago
I think immortality is achievable and worth working on, but Kurzweil seems to have some unrealistic beliefs about our current progress. In one of his books, he made the tenuous argument that technology is always accelerating just because technology is used to develop technology, so as technology improves technological progress accelerates. That's the entire basis for his extrapolating all kinds of progress curves out in ways that aren't supported by anything else (other than a few empirical examples like Moore's law, which has slowed down and physically must end soon). He seems to be forcing his beliefs about the current progress on longevity onto these progress curves, despite evidence that the rate of progress is less than it is.
What he is not doing is hoping for a discrete jump in the rate of technological progress due to an artificiaal intelligence break through. He is saying that when we reach longevity escape velocity, it will be because the trend that we are currently seeing will have continued to that point. I think an honest assessment would say that the current trend is not good and something needs to change for us to reach our goal.
Glassnoser
9d ago
That just means most of the benefit goes to the local property owners. It's still a net benefit to the community, which could be redistributed if necessary.
Glassnoser
9d ago
All this means is the benefit is spread around to other people. The people who move benefit and the property owners benefit.
Glassnoser
9d ago
Yes, but the same thing is true of anything you do to make a city better. It will make people move there and push up rents such that only property owners benefit. The benefit to renters is diffused across the entire country.
Glassnoser
9d ago
This relates to how economists measure inflation. As technology advances and as people's consumption habits change, economists need to be able to compare the value of different goods across different baskets of goods. I don't know exactly how they do this, but they do have some ways of dealing with the problem he describes. I'd be interested to know how well they do so.
In theory, if you had the perfect measure of the price level, the fact the government bans apartments under 10,000 square feet and you're forced to buy e-textbooks that have no value other than as a means of acquiring an education, would be accounted for with an appropriate increase in the price level, and real incomes, reflecting that reality, would still be easily comparable to worlds that didn't have these problems. The productivity improvements of that society would only count as productivity improvements if people really were better off despite these limitations.
Glassnoser
9d ago
The issue with poverty he has is not that one has to work to avoid it but that one has to give up some luxury despite working full time because it isn't available to everyone.
Glassnoser
9d ago
I wrote a comment expressing some confusion about what point you're trying to make. Then I deleted it and read Yudkowsky's Tweet and things are much clearer. I only say that to point that your comment is very confusing out of context and I don't think you've done a good job of summarizing his argument.
His actual argument is that modern society is lacking in something poor people in the past had in abundance and therefore, despite the 100-fold increase in material wealth, some modern people are still quite poor in a way ancient people would recognize because they're lacking something they had in abundance. He specifically mentions people having to grovel and smile all day at work.
What I think this gets wrong is that people do have the power to avoid those jobs. If you don't like faking a smile at a customer, you can work in a warehouse or on a construction site. If you don't like having a boss, you can freelance in many different fields. You can work as a taxi driver. You can find a nicer boss.
These jobs are also not that different than how people lived in the past. Most people didn't live on their own farms, working for themselves. They usually worked on a farm owned by someone else, or they worked as a servant. Some people even worked in towns and dealt with customers.
So we can observe how people trade off these things and see how much they value them. And it turns out that most people put up with a lot of stuff that seems awful so that they can live in bigger houses and own nicer cars. Not everyone does this. Lots of people value their freedom enough to work low-paying jobs that offer flexibility.
As for your argument that NIMBYism prevents more poverty, I don't agree. When given the choice, people tend to move to really big densely populated cities. They have a choice, so if their quality of life were worse in the city, they wouldn't move there. Yes, some things are worse there. We are not yet so rich that you don't have to make your life worse in some way that poor people in the past didn't have to deal with, but it's still an overall increase in the quality of life, despite the traffic congestion and annoying people.
Consider that you can at any time go join an Amish community and live like you're in the 18th century, but with a few conveniences of the modern world. But almost no one chooses to do this.
Glassnoser
9d ago
Traffic congestion is caused by a lack of congestion pricing. It's a choice, not a necessary feature of any particular urban layout.
Glassnoser
9d ago
Ray Kurzweil was on Joe Rogan's podcast recently. He seems completely deluded about life extension. I think he said we're at 20% of the longevity escape velocity, which means life expectancy is increasing by about ten weeks every year, so that you're really only 42 weeks closer to death every year. He says this is accelerating such that we will reach longevity escape velocity in about ten years I think. This strikes me as ridiculously optimistic and timed so that he is just young enough to be able to benefit from this.
The guy is not doing well, judging by his appearance. Joe Rogan asked him his age and I was expecting to hear an answer that started with a 9 and was shocked when he said he was in his seventies. Judging by videos from just a few years ago, he has started to age really fast. His body was slumped over and he talked very slowly. The interview was painful to listen to. He's taking something like 60 pills a day to stay young and it doesn't seem to be helping.
I've heard Punjabis are wealthy because they own a lot of farmland.
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