MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
No bio...
User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
21hr ago
I think we're going to see the end of suburbia as currently understood as a result of widespread availability of self-driving cars. The built form of suburbia is dominated by parking, and self-driving cars mostly remove the need for car parking near destinations - either your robotaxi drives off and finds another fare, or your privately owned robocar valet parks itself somewhere where the marginal cost of a parking space is negligible.
Assuming that cities can charge enough for road space that we avoid permanent gridlock, city life gets better with affordable taxis and the no-longer needed car parks either turned into human parks or built on. And actual rural living gets better if you don't need to drive yourself on minor roads in the dark. But I don't see who will want to live in the kind of place with a massive sunk investment in what is basically sheds on the edge of parking lots.
Marx identified a number of very real problems with the capitalism of his day, and a lot of his work was about explaining why they would be politically impossible to fix within a broadly capitalist framework. The classical economists identified a number of the same problems a century earlier, but was optimistic that they could be fixed eventually. (The most obvious case is that Smith thought that an competent government would be able to enforce antitrust laws, whereas Marx thought that a coalition of business-owners would be able to cartelize politics as well as the economy).
The problems were, in fact, solved within a broadly capitalist framework. The system of capitalism we actually have, and which works wonderfully, includes things like antitrust, macroeconomic stabilisation, social insurance, subsidised homeownership, and health and safety regulation. (Also environmental regulation, which is a problem Marx and Smith missed). There is some question about which of these things are net-beneficial, and whether we can get by with less of them, but the suggestion that we should adopt devil-take-the-hindmost greedhead libertarianism in full is outside the Overton window for good reasons.
The spectre of communism that Marx warned the ruling class about was very real, and it was defeated by actually-existing liberal democracy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
21hr ago
I won't go into detail on which I find the most likely, strongest factor, but it's hard not to notice that they are all fundamentally cultural and, in fact, down to personal choices. You actually can simply choose to forego solitary entertainment and spend more time with family & friends. You can just stay religious. You can just avoid education and choose a job that is easy to combine with a family. As the kids say (well, if you have them), you can just DO things.
You personally having four kids won't stop your kids growing up in a society with an unsustainable dependency ratio, or (if this scenario turns out to be relevant) a society that has too small a population to defend itself against outsiders.
Nor am I compelled by the pronatalists to do anything in any way, at least so far.
The pro-life movement in the US claims to be motivated partly by pronatalism, and is definitely in the business of coercing people on behalf of their unborn children. (The MoreBirths X account claims it hasn't worked, but this came as a surprise to almost everyone). I have seen sprawl zoning promoted as pronatalist policy, which is also coercive about how you use your own property.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
22hr ago
I don't think childcare was something specifically on the radar at the time (as opposed to poverty in general)
Socialising the cost of childrearing doesn't imply government-provided childcare. (I consider government pensions to be part of the process of socialising the cost of supporting the elderly). After WW2, when we were not a gerontocracy, a number of countries partially socialised the cost of childrearing by introducing non-means-tested cash payments to mothers of children. These have mostly withered on the vine in favour of payments to the elderly or more targetted subsidies for bastards and babymamas who were otherwise at risk of extreme poverty.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
22hr ago
But the essential problem with the ‘it’s true in wokespeak’ is that the wokespeak term doesn’t have a definition. There’s a (hilarious)movie about it. The sentence ‘can I bum a fag’ has different meanings in American and British English- the key word being meaning, one of those meanings being rather unfortunate to express to outlaw bikers. But the alternate meaning is also well defined, and while outlaw bikers might not let you borrow a cig they would understand the concept. In contrast the wokespeak sentence ‘Caitlin Jenner is a woman’ doesn’t express a concept, as far as anyone can tell- it means as much as my 14 month old saying… no one’s quite sure.
The wokespeak term doesn't have a definition in the sense of a necessary and sufficient condition for being a "woman", expressed in terms of simpler concepts to avoid circularity. But it has an established usage which allows you to understand the core cases of "woman" and "not-woman", and Caitlin Jenner is within the core meaning of "woman" in wokespeak. This is completely normal for language - even the English meaning of "woman" doesn't have a scientific definition that matches the duck types in all the (vanishingly rare) corner cases. "Is Caster Semenya a woman?" would still be a confusing question if the whole trans silliness had never happened. [Of course, the wokespeak meaning is poorly specified, so there are orders of magnitude more corner cases].
The goal of transactivists is thought reform via changing the meaning of common words.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
23hr ago
In practice, liking it up the butt. Kathoey-hijra type MtFs are not entitled and pornsick men, they are gay men who are sufficiently effeminate that the social role of "woman" is more accessible than the social role of "conventionally gay guy". In practice they don't seem to cause the problems that AGPs do.
You are using "tall" in a non-standard way in that sentence, meaning it evaluates to "not even wrong" rather than "true" or "false".
Transactivists are using the word "woman" in a way which is non-standard to the rest of us, but standard in their filter bubble. The word string "Caitlyn Jenner is a woman" has different meanings in English and Wokespeak, in the same way that the word string "I'm going to bum a fag" has different meanings in British English and American English*. Both meanings are clear, and the English meaning evaluates as "false" while the Wokespeak meaning evaluates as "true". Caitlyn Jenner being a woman in the Wokespeak meaning of the word is a true fact about the world (regardless of whether you like the use of the word "woman" to refer to it) in the same way that whales being feesh is.
I happen to think that the English meaning is more useful than the Wokespeak meaning, because (among other things) it allows you to talk about reproductive medicine using words that 100IQ patients can understand.
* One of my university friends was kicked out of a biker bar in rural Michigan for this. Both possible meanings turned out to be false, although the fool had intended for the British one to be true. Apparently outlaw bikers don't commit more crimes than necessary, so if you leave politely when asked, you don't actually get beaten up.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
23hr ago
This only really affects second mortgages - a foreclosing first mortgage holder will normally set the upset price equal to the outstanding balance plus fees. If nobody bids enough at the auction to make the lender whole, then they will take back the property and sell it the usual way as REO* (which normally gets a better price than an auction because you can sell to normie buyers). In fact, this is what almost always happens, because properties with enough equity to cover the fees and expenses of a foreclosure don't normally end up in foreclosure.
The situation is different when there is a second mortgage and the property is valuable enough that a sale will pay the first but not the second. In this situation the second mortgage holder may bid above the upset price, win the auction, and sell the REO themselves. (They are able to do this because they are in effect paying themselves - anything the first mortgage holder collects at auction above the upset price goes to the second mortgage holder anyway). But if someone exercises a "Jersey first refusal" to buy the property at the upset price set by the first mortgage holder, the second mortgage holder gets wiped out.
Easy mortgage availability subsidizes demand
That would be easy first mortgage availability. Using a second mortgage on a purchase was one of the shady practices that were mostly banned after the 2008 crisis. Most second mortgages are used when the homeowner wants to cash in equity (for any of multiple good or bad reasons) without refinancing the first mortgage (either because they have a fixed rate which is now below market, or because their credit has deteriorated so they couldn't get a prime refi - this second case is the classic use case for subprime).
My guess is that this is intended as a straightforward taking from subprime second mortgage lenders to benefit sympathetic-to-Democrats financially irresponsible homeowners.
* Real Estate Owned
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Towns never handled conflicting land uses with common law nuisance - explicit regulation of land use inside the city walls is as old as self-governing towns. And the most problematic rural nuisance in the US (straying livestock) was regulated by explicit statutory codes which varied by state (open range vs closed range) because applying common law nuisance led to unsatisfactory results.
Common law nuisance works better than nothing as a default where there is no codified solution in place, but people replace it with governmental codified solutions (environmental regulations, zoning etc.) or privatised codified solutions (condo/co-op/HOA rules, restrictive covenants, long leases instead of freeholds) at the first opportunity.
Coase's theorem tells us that something like the common law rule allows market participants to cut deals and achieve efficient outcomes (and, in particular, may do better and will not do worse than a Pigouvian tax on the nuisance) if:
- It is clear upfront what the rights are in the absence of a deal
- There are sufficiently few people involved that it is reasonably possible to do a deal (i.e. there is no tragedy of the anticommons)
The second condition almost never holds in the context of urban land use, and both courts and legislatures can see this, so you end up either with command-and-control regulation or Pigouvian taxes. In the urban context you can model a municipally-imposed and collected Pigouvian tax as a Coaseian bargain between the polluter and the community as a whole.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Universal eldercare is an even harder problem, but every advanced country claims they are going to solve it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Anyone making money off being visibly jacked and isn't subject to a drug testing regime is roided, especially if they say they are not.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Your goals moves from military victory to creating a total feeling of helplessness. Take the tactics pimps use to break the girls and scale them to country size.
The first tactic pimps use is target selection, not breaking girls - to a first approximation you can only profitably turn out a girl who was broken to begin with. If the mullahocracy was that kind of girl, I doubt they would have lasted as long as they did.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Yes. We socialised the obligation to care for aging parents - and did so almost completely, whereas we only socialised a small part of the obligation to raise your own children. (Interesting question - why?) With hindsight, this was a mistake.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Which is unsurprising if he is showing off his success on Youtube. The first approximation is that everyone you see on TV is being paid to be there, and the vast majority of them are in some sense professionals. (Back in the elder days of broadcast TV, the most notorious example was that the vast majority of contestants on game shows that were not as intellectually hardcore as Mastermind, Jeopardy or Millionaire were out-of-work actors). Big-budget pro Youtubers count as TV here.
If I wanted to create pro-quality footage of me successfully picking up girls, I would hire actresses to pretend to be picked up. The alternative involves spitting game while being followed around by a cameraman, which would make even normie chicks who were willing to be picked up for NSA sex run away.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Step I. Consume More Art By Women
I have seen several thoroughly red-pilled guys offer the same advice. Chicklit, romance, and by-women-for-women erotica (which is a majority of textual erotica because men don't read while wanking) all provide a view of what women actually want which is a lot less filtered than you are going to find in explicit dating advice.
Admittedly a substantial fraction of it is "a man who is unreasonably rich, powerful or physically attractive expresses genuine interest in the girl next door" which is non-actionable to men reading it for research.
Was the progressive claim really that misogynists find it impossible to get laid?
I'd say it was the converse - that most men who can't get laid can't get laid because they are misogynist. Not even feminists are sufficiently disconnected from reality not to notice that some misogynists are getting laid.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I think the US is going to "lose" this war, because ultimately Trump is better off losing than winning. The consequences of a US victory are either a US-led occupation of Iran, or a Houthis-on-the-Hormuz failed state under circumstances where it is obviously Trump's fault. Both of these are worse, in US domestic political terms, than declaring victory and going home (even if the declaration of victory is non-credible outside the MAGA filter bubble). If Trump's economic team were competent enough to impose export controls on US crude oil in a way which limited the impact on pump prices, then making Iran Iran's neighbours' problem is the obviously correct America First policy.
Iran, even with nukes and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, is a threat to America's no-longer-needed proxies in the Middle East, not to America.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
GPT-2 cost about $40k of compute to train in 2018. Naively applying Moore's law, that much compute would have cost about 400 times as much in 2005, so someone would have needed to be willing to drop $16 million on a hunch. (What actually happened is that the first deep learning models were used on narrower problems so you could get a higher performance on less training).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
There are many cases of American martyrs whose stories are just completely made up, like Matthew Shepherd who died from a meth-related incident.
I think made-up martyr stories are a lot older than that...
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
I'm fully on board with this - I wouldn't accept a small risk of attracting police attention for a fun online hobby either. But that remains a reasonable decision on the part of Zorba even if the risk is very small indeed.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
Prince William's and Princess Katherine's security cost £1.4 million a year back in back in 2010 (the breakdown of Royal security isn't public, but that number leaked), which would be £2.2 million adjusting for inflation. Other full-time working royals who are not the Sovereign probably get something similar. The cost of providing security details to nine living ex-PMs is £13 million pa in direct costs and £24 million pa including a contribution to police overhead. So a cabinet minister/ex-PM/mid-level royal tier security operation costs about £2 million a year. The leader of the official opposition (currently Kemi Badenoch) gets this level of taxpayer-funded protection as a matter of course. Other opposition politicians only get taxpayer-funded security details if there is intelligence of a specific, individualised threat - and "People like to throw milkshakes at me when I go out in public" doesn't qualify.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
Modern German military medals look sufficiently similar to the Iron Cross that I am not sure you could tell them apart in the context of a tattoo. Fundamentally, it is a German-coded symbol of martial virtue, and is mildly suspect for the same good reasons that German militarism has been ever since 1945.
In an Anglosphere context, the Iron Cross is a symbol of anti-establishment-coded martial virtue and is used by people like outlaw biker gangs before being adopted by Motorhead and then spreading around heavy metal culture.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
I think this is part of a wider pattern. In a world where political violence is not, in fact, acceptable (very much including the one we live in), a ghoulish but rational response to your own ally being assassinated is "Excellent - this is a huge pile of free political capital. Let's celebrate." Letting on in public that this is how you feel means you lose the free political capital you were hoping to celebrate. Erika Kirk's behaviour makes perfect sense if she is rushing to capitalise on the political capital of her husband's death while it is still fresh, which she was. And she wasn't the only Republican who very visibly saw the assassination of Kirk as more of an opportunity than a tragedy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
Horst Wessel was killed by members of an organised Communist paramilitary. That is an easy martyrdom story (although Christianity doesn't count soldiers who die due to enemy action as martyrs, so by the Christian rules he wasn't one).
The Republicans failed to make the martyrdom thing work because they didn't convince anyone outside their own filter bubble that Kirk was a victim of organised left-wing political violence. It isn't clear to me whether this is because he obviously wasn't, or if it is because they overreached in the aftermath of his death by trying to claim that school librarians and HR ladies shitposting was political violence.
The O2 in London was called the North Greenwich Arena for the duration of the 2012 Olympics because O2 didn't pony up for Olympic sponsorship. So the IOC, as usual, are engaged in the same forms of obnoxious greed as FIFA.
More options
Context Copy link