MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
22hr ago
fallen short of the glory of wokeness
I don't think this is an argument about wokeness. This is mostly an argument about strongman vs institutional leadership. You can be a anti-immigration conservative without being a wannabee corrupt dictator - see for example Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Riikka Purra in Finland, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, or 45% of Swiss voters. All these people get called fascists, accurately in the case of Meloni (her party is the institutional successor of Mussolini's Fascist Party), but I haven't heard any of them called mafia dons.
If AI was being developed in Meloni's Italy, I don't know whether Anthropic would attract the banhammer, but I suspect the decision would be based on the actual national security threat and not the kowtowing skills of the CEO or the hair colour of the spokeschick, and I know that whether or not this was the case Meloni would be making a real effort to make it look like it was. Seconding @BurdensomeCount, the same will continue to apply in London whether we have Burnham or Farage as PM.
Fairly obviously, you can also be a wannabee corrupt dictator (or even a successful corrupt dictator, like communists) without being a right-populist. But for whatever reason this hasn't happened in my lifetime in the main Western democracies on a larger scale than a big-city political machine.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I think people who make non-specific complaints about the opposite sex into memes are (mostly unintentionally):
- Encouraging people in so-so marriages to see the negatives in their current situation
- Warning off unmarried people against marriage
and therefore making the world a worse place for the sake of a cheap joke that isn't even funny. I wish they would stop.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Yes, but the anonymous sources with access to the Iranian side and the anonymous sources with access to the US side disagree on what the deal says.
This is exactly what I would expect to see if the deal was going to fall apart at the last moment, or if what we actually have is an incredibly thin deal - probably a 60-day ceasefire and opening of the Straits of Hormuz with essentially everything else TBD.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
These comments are especially rich given that, following the Euro 2020(/1) Final in which England lost to Italy on penalties because every black English player who attempted a penalty kick missed while every white player who attempted a penalty kick scored,
To anyone familiar with the history of the England team, criticising a team which reached a major tournament final for going out on penalties is either performative fan grousing or idiocy. Southgate's team did well to make a World Cup semi-final and a Euro final. Going out on penalties after a great run is what the best English teams are supposed to do. (Admittedly against Germany or Portugal and not Italy). The fans are just doing their job by grousing about the men who missed spot-kicks. Southgate especially knows this - he has a special place in this story after his Euro 1996 miss.
Part of the idiocy of English fandom is that we consistently think we can win the World Cup, and then feel hard-done-by when we don't. This time England do have a chance based on rankings, betting odds etc. and anything less than a semi-final slot will be a legitimate disappointment, but ex ante at the time Southgate was appointed anyone who suggested that a World Cup semi-final and two European finals would be a bad haul would have been laughed at. The criticism of Southgate for playing dull, negative football is fair, although I think England are in the place of old-school Italy (we aren't good enough to expect wins and beauty, and the fans prefer wins) than old-school Brazil (for whom winning the World Cup while playing ugly football would be a disappointing result). So is the criticism for turning Euro 2024 into a slog given our piss-easy draw. (The only difficult match was the semi against the Dutch).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Senior estate agents are "hired gun negotiators". (The junior agents who arrange viewings and such like are their minions/apprentices).
M&A bankers are arguably doing the same work with businesses instead of real estate. Again, you are a minion/apprentice until you make MD level when you become a hired gun negotiator.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
I remember a video of London-based NY Giants fans singing "You can shove your fucking cheese up your arse" (to the tune of "She'll be coming round the mountain when she comes") before the London Giants-Packers game in 2022 that went viral because this was both more offensive and far more creative than the US norm. It is pretty mild by English football standards.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
rugby hooliganism
I would say rugby (at least Union - I don't know enough about League culture because the game isn't really played in southern England) hooliganism is the exception rather than the rule in the UK. I spent several years in Richmond in south-west London. Despite football (in the form of Ted Lasso) putting Richmond on the map, it is very much rugby territory - the "tailgate"-equivalent for England Rugby games happens in Richmond with fans arriving by tube, drinking for a couple of hours, and then taking the shuttle busses run by the (one professional and one semi-professional) local rugby clubs to Twickenham stadium. And being around 10,000 drunk rugby fans feels completely safe.
UK 'football factory' style clubs
I think "English" is correct here. Scotland has a tradition of football hooliganism, but it explicitly sectarian and associated with the Glasgow rivalry between (Irish Catholic) Celtic and (Scottish Protestant) Rangers, rather than the violence-for-violence's-sake of English hooliganism.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
If they get out of the group stage, it will be for the first time in their history.
They probably will, which just shows that the 48-team format is diluting the standard of the competition.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
English fans traditionally riot after a loss rather than a win - the American hooligan practice of burning your own city after a win is particularly strange to us. But win or lose, I hope someone in the English ultras is talking to their Canadian counterparts about plans to party in DC like it's 1812.
For whatever reason, Scottish travelling football fans are happy drunks rather than mean drunks. If Scotland win the world cup, there will be a giant fan love-in which will provide convenient distraction while the corrupt US and FIFA officials who made it happen make arrangements with Satan to open the Donald Trump Infernal Ski and Snowboard Park.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
(Steve Wozniak is one obvious exception: it was Jobs who had the non-technical talent in spades)
There is a fairly common pattern (Jobs-Wozniak may be the ur-example) of a pair of cofounders where one is the "founder type" and the other is top technical talent. My read of Valley culture is that given the chance they will (as mostly happened in the case of Apple) try to retcon the pair as solo founder and employee number one.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
I think both sides of the culture war agree that the Valley did try to do this, but with Indians instead of Europeans. They disagree on whether or not it succeeded, and whether or not it would be a good thing if it did.
It's been a very long time since Andressen was checking in code. It is obvious from reading e.g. Paul Graham's essays that VCs and successful founders see themselves as a different kind of person to top technical talent (tl;dr - Altman said that James Bond was fundable but Q would not be) - and the things that Paul Graham is saying are conventional wisdom in the valley. My impression is that both founders/VCs and top technical talent see the gap between top technical talent and mid-tier technical talent as so large that the average FAANG Senior is closer to QA and HR than to themselves.
My take is that Andressen is one of the main people pushing the theory (which I think originated with Musk) that FAANG were roughly 2x overstaffed and that this was a bad thing because they were outbidding startups for talent. I remember him tweeting "Nature heals itself" in response to a post about tech layoffs and coming to the conclusion that he resented his (indirect via portfolio companies) employees.
I will admit to also disliking Andressen because a16z seems to be disproportionately likely to invest in ethically dubious startups like crypto scams, Adam Neumann's Flow and the AI "cheating" app Cluely.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
In the UK, because too many of them are Polish.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
The right-wing misanthropic VCs, the no-longer-needed codemonkeys, or the plumbers? Tossing any of the three is a plausible sentiment for at least one Motteposter to hold.
But if, as I suspect, you mean why can't we throw Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen off a cliff, the answer is that Musk is too valuable to the work of society given that he can build space rockets 1-2 orders of magnitude cheaper than anyone else. Andreessen, on the other hand...
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
The sentencing remarks said (emphasis mine):
The murder did not involve taking a knife to the scene with the purpose to use it to commit an offence or to have it available to do so. It is possible that you had a good legal reason for having the dagger when you met Henry although, considering the jury’s verdict, that reason must have come to an end after you removed it from its sheath.
In other words, the Court didn't rule on the legal question of whether the big knife was legal to carry*, it ruled on the factual question of what Digwa's motivations were in carrying it. If Digwa's motivation for carrying the knife in the first place was to use it as a weapon, the starting point is a life sentence with a 25 year minimum. If his motivation for carrying the knife was something else, then the starting point is a life sentence with a 15 year minimum. The judge ruled that Digwa's motivation was religious. The same analysis would apply if a pastry chef murdered someone with a breadknife - the non-murderous reason for having the knife reduces the presumed level of premeditation.
* Digwa was also convicted of illegally carrying a knife, but on the technicality that whether or not the knife was legal originally, it became illegal when used for an illegal purpose.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
Plenty of serial killers go to ordinary prison despite having traits that the vast majority of people would label as indicative of being mentally unwell.
I think this is now a disagreement about the meaning of the word "psycho". I think it implies, or ought to imply, a level of fucked-in-the-head-ness comparable to a serious diagnosable mental illness. The average violent criminal is somewhat fucked-in-the-head, but not that much, and Digwa appears to be in the same boat. I'm happy to agree to disagree on whether this reflects common usage.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
Satyr, not satire. The words are widely and incorrectly believed to be related, but in fact "satyr" comes from the Greek word for a mythological creature that would fit just fine into modern furry porn* and "satire" comes from the Latin word for a fruit salad.
* Human body, horse ears and tail, unrealistically huge dick
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
This is precisely why the focus is on billionaires. The left-wing claim that "there is no just consumption under capitalism" does too much: it breeds either neuroticism or Hasan Piker-style hypocrisy where you justify buying $10,000 watch as if it's the same thing as needing to buy a house or consuming unethically sourced products from some company with monopoly power.
The latter is the whole point. "There is no ethical consumption under capitalism" is a way of saying "Don't sweat the ethical implications of your day job in HR at Evilcorp, latte habit, and collection of Apple products - the thing that matters is the work you do to overthrow the system."
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
This is the wrong set of numbers. Amazon's net book value is about $400 billion. The extra $2.3 trillion is the market's estimate of the PV of future profits - it is value that can only be realised by selling parts of the company to outside investors, and would be invisible if Amazon was a co-op. Total profit to date is a better metric of what could plausibly have been exploited out of workers, and is somewhat less than $2 trillion. And most of that comes from AWS, so it doesn't come from exploiting the warehouse workers.
If Amazon had been a Mondragon-style co-op, the money available for distribution to workers (including Bezos) would not have included that $2.3 trillion - it would be latent value that would ultimately accrue to future workers when the promised profits were realised. If corporate Amazon has never paid a dividend (it hasn't) or bought back more shares than it issued to fund acquisitions and employee share options (they haven't - shares out increases over time), then it hasn't put cash directly into Bezos' pocket (Bezos' billionaire lifestyle is funded by selling rights to the $2.3 trillion of future profits) and the hypothetical Mondazon could not have distributed more money to workers than it in fact did while still investing in growth like Amazon did.
One of the problems maintaining co-ops which don't have an explicit social mission (such as professional partnerships) or which have de facto lost their social mission and become ordinary commercial businesses (like the UK's building societies) is that turning a co-op into a stockmarket-listed company, or selling it to an existing listed company, allows the current generation of members to monetize that value.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
The people who coined the expression "every billionaire is a policy failure" were claiming that a business which generates enough profit (above a normal return on the actual tangible capital put into it by investors) to make the founder a billionaire is presumptively exploiting market power in an anticompetitive way. For example, in this model Zuckerberg is a billionaire because he has gained enough market power that he can force you to look at adverts in order to communicate with your own friends.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
Said takes issue with the framing of Hezbollah as a "terrorist, militant Shi'a group backed by Iran," and says that they are better understood as guerrillas whose purpose was to resist the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
At the time Said was writing, this was straightforwardly correct. (Israel are in belligerent occupation of southern Lebanon from 1982-2000, and Hezbollah was founded to resist that occupation). The morality of what Hezbollah is doing changes after 2000 when it is no longer resisting an ongoing occupation (although the legal status doesn't - they can continue prosecuting their justified war against Israel until a peace treaty is signed and the only legal objection to what they are doing is that they are attacking civilian targets) - and the fact that they did what they did after 2000 allows us to retrospectively reassess their motives from the earlier period.
It doesn't help that many things which have lost some trust with me are cited: Chomsky, United Nations, Amnesty International, etc.
Amnesty was trustworthy up until shortly after the end of the Cold War, and it doesn't become obvious that they have gone full woke until after Said died in 2003. So I wouldn't hold reliance on Amnesty that against him.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
At least in China they have the message discipline to tell people that AI is going to be used to improve people's quality of life, but all SF can do is jerk off about the AI-induced permanent underclass happening any month now and how dangerous AI is is going to be;
I have a snarky Freudian theory that the rise of the tech right and a lot of SV comms missteps have the same root cause - that the founder/VC elite are failing to contain their white-hot rage at having to pay upper-middle class salaries (and extend the respect the upper class traditionally extends to the upper-middle class) to mere codemonkeys who lack upper-middle class social graces.
In this model, the "permanent generational underclass" meme is founders, VCs, and people who see themselves as future founders and VCs expressing glee at the codemonkeys losing undeserved social status. From the point of view of someone who can afford a family-sized house in the Bay Area, nurses, plumbers etc. are already part of the underclass.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
The finance bros who are any good at it tend to prefer a low-drama 8 to a high-drama 11. The only person I worked with who actually dated eastern European models was more of an upjumped computer programmer than an actual finance bro.
The English traditional elite produces a lot of not-too-smart daughters who fit the bill re. looks and drama potential and know that they are at risk of downward mobility if they don't marry money. A lot of my colleagues dated hot primary school teachers. There is some overlap between these groups.
Right now, the most valuable piece of Chinese military tech is the supply chain for the Russian/Iranian combat drones which fucked up America's shit. The percentage of Chinese (as opposed to Russian) content in the bits of the Iranian military that succeeded seems to me to be higher than in the parts that failed (notably the air defences). Sanctions mean that Iran have been assembling most of their own weapons out of easy-to-smuggle components, so this isn't a simple test of Chinese or Russian tech against the American equivalent.
If the future of warfare is putting weapons on Temu drones, the Chinese are in a very good place. And the Iran war is evidence in favour of the this thesis.
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