MaiqTheTrue's profile

MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 12m ago

It’s not “accountability” in some nebulous sense. It’s accountability to having done the right process regardless of what happens. And this does skew things away from actually getting things done because there’s always a chance that doing something will result in a bad outcome that could be prevented by doing the processes. So in order to avoid the consequences of being wrong and held to account for a potential failure, you do processes to cover your own ass and who cares if the project gets done at all. It’s a question of the incentives being put in place such that you avoid actual accountability by abusing the accountability system such that you protect yourself from accountability by doing and creating lots of processes and not actually getting things done.

The solution, to my mind is to shift accountability to the results of the project. If you can’t get the job done, you’re accountable for that, and if you can’t do the project right you’re accountable for that. If the project is building a road, the accountability should not be in filling out forms to authorize the road, or quadruple checking that the processes are followed to the letter. Instead shift accountability to the correct, safe, and timely building of the road.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 28m ago

I think the “better fencers” theory makes the most sense. Swordsmanship was the job of a class of people, and you’d to some degree just pick things up from being around swordsmen training. The other thing is that you wouldn’t necessarily want to create a book for your school that gives everything away, as rivals can use that to train countermeasures against your school of fencing.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 1d ago

Black block was wild back in the day as well.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 1d ago

Except that there have been moves away from the petrodollar as global currency. Saudi Arabia nearly dropped the Petrodollar, and the Russian sphere from what I gather has already switched to the Ruble. China wants to make the Renbei the reserve currency. If (and I think it’s a when ) the world stops using petrodollars, not only will the debt and trade deficit matter a lot, but given the number of dollars in circulation globally, we’re talking about Zimbabwean levels of inflation.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 1d ago

It’s one of many reasons that I’ve long since stopped paying any attention to that stuff. The LARP is funny in a sort of Disney movie way — overacted sanctimonious and generally silly to people with a working understanding of OPSEC and grey man. I watched what the Hong Kongers were doing to protest the Chinese government’s takeover. They were serious, came prepared for teargas, took precautions to not out themselves or their comrades, hid their faces to avoid being identified, paid for things in cash.

Even those in government are pretty stupid as far as actually getting things done. Nobody who really wants to obstruct an authoritarian regime is going to hold a press conference announcing it. If Trump does declare martial law in some form, doing that doesn’t prevent him from sending in ICE in the least, it just signs your death warrant or maybe if you’re lucky you just get fired. Either way, it’s ineffective, but near term good for campaign contributions.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 2d ago

I’d hardly call it martyrdom the way most dissidents on the left are doing it. They just have no sense of seriousness. It’s like a game. They are not organized or even trying to organize. They have very little sense of strategy (one woman legitimately thinks that getting into the face of an ICE agent with a gun on her hip and filming while aggressively asking questions is going to end well. Obviously it won’t as the gun alone is reason to act in self defense, which at best means they’re going to aggressively arrest you, but they could just shoot and probably get away with it.) they fear martial law but also are giving money via credit cards and direct payments— both of which give the full name and are easily obtained via the database of the company or their bank. They also can’t keep their mouths shut on Facebook. I’m talking people using their full name Facebook accounts, tagging fellow protesters in their posts, taking pictures at the event and posting them from the event with their personal cellphone.

I just can’t take these people seriously. They’re almost going out of their way to be easy for any real authoritarian government to round up, by being obvious about their identity.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 2d ago

In defense of some of this, I think they’re meant less as a stand alone list and more of a “add these books to supplement the standard Woke books list that almost everyone gets through high school” list. And the job of the list is to simply correct for just how far left, multicultural and woke the usual readings are. And that is done by curating a book list that specifically includes things left off of those more woke lists. They’re corrective lenses to fix the gaps of literary history, and as such they don’t need the more progressive, liberal, or multicultural voices included because the stuff most kids read or are otherwise exposed to.

For an exhaustive list, sure, I think I’d balance things out more. I want kids exposed to as many views as possible. It builds character to have to understand ideas and perspectives you don’t agree with. But if 99% of the standard curriculum is Woke leaning and multicultural, you don’t correct it with a perfectly balanced curriculum that includes more woke multicultural stuff, you correct it by introducing conservative books.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 2d ago

I think the “rot” goes back much farther than people think. The biggest difference between modern society and much more ancient ones is that we have lost the idea of purpose, or to be more precise a purpose other than selfish hedonism. Why are we here, and what is our society actually supposed to accomplish and how every person fits into that great plan for society. Most traditional societies have that, usually connected to religion. You fit into the world created by God or the gods to do something either great or small to bring about whatever the will of the universe. Sometimes it’s secular, bringing about freedom for everyone, civilizing a frontier, colonizing a place (even mars). But it’s something all of society is striving for. We have “money and bitches” more or less. That’s the grand narrative— you exist as an atomized human in a society and your job is to get what you can for yourself and to have fun in any way you choose. Anyone getting in the way of your hedonistic desires or your wealth is bad.

This is no way to build anything. A society of atomized humans is not a society, just like a herd of cats — it’s not a cohesive unit coordinating to do things, it’s a bunch of cats who happen to be in the same place at the same time. And they cannot possibly trust any other cat to not steal their Fancy Feast, or not scratch them, or to let them use the scratching post. A herd of atomized humans is the same. You don’t form a community, you just exist around each other. And as such you don’t expect that anyone will not try to take advantage of you, or let you have things you need, or just simply leave you alone if need be.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 3d ago

I think that the decline of blue collar work has caused or at least exacerbated many of our social problems. The reason that jobs you can get right out of college suck for a lot of people (tech is at the moment, an exception) is the absolute glut of college graduates. But why? Why did 80% of Americans decide that they needed to spend $60,000 to get a degree? What other options are there? So off we go to college and unless you are super talented, you don’t get much for it except the loan you’re paying off. Why is there so much homelessness? The good paying jobs aren’t there. Blacks in Detroit can’t get jobs at ford anymore, so they deal drugs and form gangs. Basically our economy only works if you’re one of the elite who can manage to get a STEM degree, do all of the unpaid internships and build a good GitHub. The rest will probably struggle to reach such milestones as “paying for rent and groceries on one paycheck without 6 roommates”.

Whether tariffs will fix it, I don’t know. But the economy is hollowed out and importing more workers when those at home can’t afford food and rent, so why not try it?

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 4d ago

In bang for buck, I think you could do much the same thing with less cost and less lost opportunities (another cost of college is that you’re keeping your 18-24 year old young adults out of the workforce, which not only means they aren’t earning money for the company, but it effectively means that they don’t start households until later on and thus aren’t buying things and are behind on saving for a house and for eventually having kids), by having the high school diplomas do the same thing. If you’re not reading and doin* maths on grade level, you shouldn’t graduate high school and the reason that college became the “well at least he can read” degree is that high school diplomas stopped being that.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 4d ago

They’re a net negative at present because most companies are tooled for a free-trade environment. They generally outsource the labor needed to produce goods by building factories overseas or importing goods or inputs. Depending on what happens, 5 years from now it might not be a problem at all.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 4d ago

I mean he’s not exactly wrong which is why I’m much less enamored with the idea that final authority should rest with the people and that the legitimacy or rulership should rest on the people.

It creates a lot of really strange results simply because it rests on a flimsy idea. The basic idea is that somehow the sum of several million people who don’t understand a system voting on how to run the system somehow results in a well run system. Or the sum of ignorance is knowledge. This doesn’t work. 300 people who know jack all about city planning simply cannot accidentally figure out how to time traffic lights. 300 million people who can’t even find Ukraine on a map cannot possibly be making a good decision on whether to conduct a war there, how to conduct it, or when to end it. No other place on earth do we do this. Parents generally do not get their four year olds approval on dinner because they’d choose ice cream. Children are not trusted with the family budget. Soldiers are not asked to approve of war strategy. Workers are not given the right to vote on the direction the company will take in the next year. And on it goes — when we need a system that just works, we put competent people in charge and let them run the thing. Except government where anyone over 18 can choose the general direction of almost every function of government by choosing leaders to do as they promised when asking for their votes.

And as Hanania rightly points out, modern democratic governments are highly tuned to avoiding the realities they exist in. Whether or not a policy is a good idea doesn’t matter. What matters is that the public supports it. Giveaway programs of various types are always popular — leading to a famous warning from Alexis de Tocqueville that democracy would only last until people discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public coffers. And so we have. Welfare, student loans guaranteed by the government, a big push for universal healthcare (provided by the government) etc. it doesn’t matter if these things work — it can easily be shown that government guarantees of student loans has ruined not only education (dumbing down college to the point where anyone who graduated high school can go, and lowering standards until literally anyone can pass), but job markets (as lots of jobs that require no higher order skills now require 4-year degrees as a minimum). This is just one reality avoided — we don’t have infinite money, and even if we did, handing out money tends to distort markets and create more problems than it solves. You can add in things like social liberalism where every form of deviant behavior is tolerated if not celebrated. Don’t kink shame adult babies, porn actresses, furries, or drag queens, and don’t keep them away from kids, even if their fetish is only plausibly not pedophilia. And again, a lot of this turns out to be bad for society. But it gets votes, so who cares.

But beyond that, it’s the perfect engine for avoiding responsibility. Who is responsible for the decisions in a democracy? The people. They voted for the guy who did the thing. He was only doing what the people wanted. So 300 million of us are responsible for the results of the tariffs. Or the negotiations with Russia. Or the bombing of the Houthis. Or whatever happens with Iran. Or anything else that happens. It’s even better for elected representatives when it goes through a parliament or congress. They can do nothing, collect a paycheck and come back for reelection and blame everything on those other guys for messing it all up. If you send us back we’ll fix it. And if it doesn’t work or doesn’t pass, blame the other guys and run again. At no point is anyone In government accountable for the results of the votes he casts or tge decisions he made. The people voted for it!

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 5d ago

I’m not impressed with the defense. Every single person cited as evidence that she shouldn’t be deported has at least some interest in her staying, either for professional reasons or personal reasons. It’s like saying that “my mother says im a nice person” — you’d have to be extraordinarily naive to take as gospel the words of such people, especially when other neutral parties are silent. If the Jewish Student Union were standing up for her, that would be evidence. Her friends? Her coworkers? Her defense lawyer? It’s not impressive.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 5d ago

It doesn’t make you uninformed, it does quite often make you misinformed. Yes, if you read NYT, you’ll know there’s a recession, you’ll know the unemployment rates, stock prices, and so on. But it will be misleadingly contextualized to appear that the recession is All Trump’s fault. And they’ll use their think piece section to push the idea that “is this the end of the Trump Era?”, “Will the Trump-cession cost Republicans control of Congress?” But when Biden was in charge, the NYT would cover the inflation and people not affording groceries as if it just happens like that sometimes. It’s the typical thing where they’re looking to the business cycle, Covid, the Republican Party holding up stimulus checks, bird flu, and everything else even if it’s nonsense. Conversely, economic booms are always caused by the Democrats’ economic policy — even when that democrat hasn’t been in power for years and most of the policies have been curtailed or reversed. The Trump boom, boys and girls, was really the Obama boom, at least according to the NYT.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 5d ago

To me, a big thing that gaming companies got wrong is that they essentially started chasing graphics over gameplay. This wasn’t obvious at the time, because graphics are a very obvious selling point when graphics capacity is growing fast. But it seems a dead end especially once you get to high levels of graphics that are photo realistic. Except this takes the place of doing other things: gameplay itself, storytelling, characters. There were a lot of games in the late 2000s that were beautiful to look at and so boring to play that it just wasn’t fun. This is something that Nintendo has always got right — they focused first and foremost on whether or not the player was having fun.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 5d ago

Not very impressed. I mean ever person listed has at least some vested interest in her staying in country. It’s not even neutral people say in the newspaper office saying that she wasn’t that political except to write this one thing, or someone at the protest talking about her being polite to Jews or something. It’s all her lawyer, her friends, and her colleagues— people who benefit if she stays.

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