RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
No bio...
User ID: 2051
People who played Elden Ring on release were already 11 years late to the party. I like it, but it's de-facto Dark Souls IV. Not just mechanically, even many specific weapons and specific characters (welcome back, dear old friend Patches).
Triple A sucks because they ironically make too much money, so they can afford to hire way too many people. Add modern culture with its low hierarchies & trigger-happy hypersensitivity and you have a recipe for disaster. It's way too many cooks, and each cook is especially confident about the stuff they don't like, so everything ends up extremely bland, bloated or both.
Japanese culture doesn't really have these particularities. I strongly recommend Kojima's games as well.
Other good news is that the indie scene is also stronger than ever. The modding scene, likewise. So it's quite easy to avoid the triple A slob, though some issues extend beyond it (for example, even indie devs lean significantly more woke than average).
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
5mo ago
I'm reporting on how it's perceived by the establishment politicians, and they're usually pretty clear that high turnout = good. Likewise, the establishment media will usually report negatively about record low turnouts and positively vice versa (unless the wrong parties are being voted for, but OP takes care not to do that).
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
5mo ago
Yes, I understand you correctly. I've had the discussion on not voting vs false/unmarked voting vs protest voting a bunch of times by now. Whether you keep it blank or do whatever else that results in your vote not counting, it will at best just not end up being noticed at all. The voter turnout is high, the good parties are being voted for, everything is fine. At worst, if people look at statistics on unmarked/wrong ballots they'll just conclude you're to dumb to fill out the ballot appropriately. I've seen that literal reaction in action "oh did you know that like 10% of ballots end up not being counted because they're unmarked or so? That seems high." "Yeah some people can't even vote lol".
Imo the correct course of action is either not voting (after all, if you're disillusioned about something, you would usually not continue engaging in it) or protest vote.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
5mo ago
Generally, very low voter turnout is considered a signal that people become disillusioned and that a change of course is needed.
Marking you ballot in any way except the accepted one on the other hand is usually considered a simple mistake and counted as such. So currently the message you are sending the politicians, as seen from their pov, is that you're happy with the system as-is, but you just failed to follow very simple and easy to understand instructions.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
5mo ago
On the biological level, paternal age is just weakly associated with birth defects. You have something like a 1.3-1.5x increase of autism spectrum disorder (note, this includes high-functioning individuals!) for older dads (>40), which is already somewhat cherry-picked since there is plenty of disorders not associated with paternal age. For comparison, the risk of major chromosomal disorders such as Down Syndrome are roughly around 10x for age 40, 40x for age 45, and 150x for age 50 (not to mention that becoming pregnant at all becomes more difficult, and no you should never rely on IVF). And if your child gets one of these, it's pretty much guaranteed to be somewhere between low or non-functioning.
But I'll still strongly advice for you to start with it ASAP. Having young kids is absolutely exhausting, and vice versa it's lots of fun being physically active with them once they reach an age where they can engage in typical outdoors hobbies. Both you and your kids will be much happier if you're younger.
In addition, most women want a husband who is slightly older than them, but not by too much. This is especially relevant for you if you're as autistic as the base level mottizen. Sure women love the older gentleman stereotype, but as a default you shouldn't be overly confident to fit the bill. If we assume that you want to have 3 kids, spaced decently apart (ca 3 years) with a low risk of major disorders (<35 maternal age), your partner should ideally be ~29 when you're starting to have kids. If you want to have some time to get to know her, this is more like 25 when you start dating. This is already a slightly awkwardly high age difference with your current age. You're probably not be able to pull off the ideal case anyway, but no reason to make it unnecessarily hard for yourself.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
5mo ago
Yeah, have fun being (at best!) dropped into the wilderness bc your caretaker AI hit some economic difficulties. Humans already have a very strong in-built anthropomorphising bias and will often waste incredible money on pets, but this is a function of their affluence. If times get hard, they have no trouble getting rid of and/or mistreating them. In theory we might be able to design AIs who love us so desperately that they won't do it, but this is not the path we are currently going. And even then you'll have the problem that rogue AIs unburdened by humans might outcompete the good ones anyway. Either way it just seems like a stupid bet to take.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
5mo ago
AFAIK contemporary research has trouble actually showing advantages for the worst students, while there seem to be moderate negative effects for the best students. I have the impression that in a "strong" society, you can improve some of the worst performing groups by giving them help and good examples to follow while simultaneously harshly punishing, up to kicking out, troublemakers. On the other hand, if the troublemakers are not punished, they can drag down everyone so much that it overwhelms any advantage of exemplary behaviour or help from better students. But in the current climate this is not really investigable, so the research base is pretty bad, and the researchers are also far too biased to be trustworthy. There is also the "issue" that the current level of segregation isn't actually hard to overcome for a competent immigrant parent (in fact, highly educated immigrants basically end up in good schools by default without any effort, at least here), so the number of students that would improve in a better school is pretty low. Even low-education high-conscientiousness immigrants will leave bad schools quite fast.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
5mo ago
Unfortunately, IQ is still not supported by any company AFAIK. You can get general health embryo selection to avoid the worst disabilities and reduce the chance of some common diseases, and this will almost surely indirectly benefit general competence as well. But tbh IVF sucks pretty hard, and the tech is still in its infancy. Genomic Prediction/Lifeview afaik has not fundamentally improved its testing since 2022 or so, in fact probably couldn't even if it wanted to at this point unless they do a major reorientation. Orchid I have less info about, but from what I can gather it's at least still improving. Very hard to tell which is better in practice at this point, though I lean towards GP since their publications were generally more technical/in depth. But sometime in the next few years Orchid will probably overtake them.
My usual recommendation is to definitely do embryo selection if you do IVF anyway, definitely do it if you know you're in some kind of high risk group, but if you're neither it depends a lot on how well your wife handles IVF. You can also sequence yourself and your wife beforehand to see what your risk profile is to begin with.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
5mo ago
Tbh I don't see either 1. or 3. as remotely realistic. You say "RandomRanger's concerns are moot because no efficient rival can appear to outcompete neo-primitives", I say "Obviously any neo-primitive will be outcompeted by non-primitives". Hydrocarbon certainly makes industrial civilisation easier, but there is absolutely no proof whatsoever that it was strictly necessary, and even less that we require it now that we have already developed so far. Even worse, RandomRanger's point is about farmers, not industrial civilisation, so hunter-gatherers were already outcompeted long before hydrocarbons were relevant. There is just no going back.
Wall-E is also an intrinsically unstable system. The beings profiting from this system (humans) have no power, the beings who have all the power (AI overlords or such) do not profit from it. No matter how many safeguards we set up, a single mistake and we're done.
For better or worse, some sort of transhumanism seems to me like the only way forward.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
5mo ago
First, remember that activism is essentially about telling people what to do, and spoiler alert, they usually already know why they do what they do. In 90% of cases, the activist simply lacks the in-depth understanding of a matter, and in 9% of cases you tell them something they already are trying to do, without helping them achieve the desired state. Tbh, 1% is probably even an overestimate of "good" activism.
On the positive side, there's a few avenues for you; The easiest and simplest is to involve yourself in local nonprofits/charity/social groups that fit with your ideals. You will probably still have to put up with some inefficiencies and value-disagreement, but the advantage of locality is that the differences are in plain sight, so you can quickly update and choose accordingly. For global charity, it can take years to realize just how far their behaviour is from your ideals.
The next, higher risk and higher payoff, would be to work in a field that is intrinsically about helping people/improving the world, such as medicine, police, applied research, ... you will still have plenty of disagreements, but if you go up far enough you generally get a reasonably long leash to do what you want, with some caveats.
The highest risk option, but also the most realistic way to actually change the world, is starting a company on something you believe in. You might be surprised, but from my experience most start-up founders are what you term "disheartened idealists". People always imagine some hardcore capitalist cutthroat, but those are actually better served by staying in a big company and climb the corporate ladder, or in the government. The modal start-up founder has already successfully worked in a field for a while, got frustrated with the way things are done, possibly tried to change the system from within but realized it's a fool's errand, and then vouched to show everyone that it can be done better.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
5mo ago
Oh, that's easy: As long as you have an okay baseline of fitness, it's the absolute perfect casual social sport. If you're a beginner, you can go for easy routes and get help from the more experienced (and vice versa if you're experienced). If you're competitive, you choose hard route and repeatedly do it in a rotation with a similarly competitive friend. If you're a talker, you just do a minimum amount of climbing and otherwise watch the others and talk with the ones currently on a break. If you're a nerd, you choose a weird-looking route and theorize on how it ought to be done. And the best part, all these people can go together simultaneously without being in each others way.
Now compare soccer. I like it as well, but it generally goes best with a fixed group of friends on a similar level of fitness, experience and inclination. It's better for closer bonding, but for a casual round it happens too easy that somebody feels like they aren't fitting in.
Disclaimer: There are enough far-left women that they can be counted as "normie" in a certain sense, but I don't think it's the kind of women the OP wants to know about. Also, I dislike & avoid them too much, so it would just read like a dunking. For the female version, I'll give an amalgation of my wife, her sister, their friends & some mothers we're friends with:
A portrait of a female normie blue triber
- Works in a predictable, OK paying, probably administrative or middle-management position with a decent work-life balance (somewhere around 75% part-time or so)
- Always been an A or high B student in school, studied precisely what she wanted but that is not necessarily connected to her current work (if sucessful she moved too far up into management, if not she might have ended up in something else entirely)
- Will quickly and easily learn whatever tools are considered appropriate for her job, fast & reliable worker, but would never develop a new tool herself
- Has a husband who is further right than her, but not TOO much; He may at most vote center right, be vaguely into some of the more plausible political conspiracy theories, or in the worst case shudder libertarian
- Used to be much further left, but mellowed out sometime when she became a parent
- Still agrees with the far-left on some policies though, her values didn't chmight be surprisingly cautious of racism/misogynism/rape claims but would never challenge them publicly
- Spiritual but not religious, will still go to family-focused social events organized by the church
- Involved in vaguely pro-social volunteer work, if church-related mostly some inoffensive modernist reform style one
- Thinks most adult hobbies, in particular the male-coded ones, are a childish waste of time
- watches TV in the evening because her husband likes it, but by herself prefers reading
- Favorite authors: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen and Irvin D. Yalom
- Spends free time in the afternoon meeting old friends in a coffee shop, otherwise spends free time in the evening reading pedagogy guides
- Signs her kids up for a rotation of afternoon hobbies "for their own benefit", but is then worried that she is putting too much pressure on them
- High social intelligence, much more critical than she publicly lets on
- Thinks everyone should be free to live their love whatever way they like, but would feel deeply insulted if their partner started talking about polyamory
- Absolutely thinks abortion should be available, but very conflicted about the appropriate month limit
- Used to think primarily women are being discriminated against, now thinks primarily families are being discriminated against
- Might even agree that men are currently on-net discriminated against, but definitely thinks you're being a wuss for complaining about it
- Very careful to keep her lefty street cred
- Personally knows rich people and knows how much they sometimes spend on unnecessary shit, so is not very receptive to claims that we can't afford this or that social program
- But also very self-conscious about being more pragmatic than the far-left however, so quite receptive to claims that something is mismanaged, abused or wasted
- Thinks she is not elitist, but would never date anyone without a university degree (but obviously only because they would have nothing in common!)
Normie is in the eye of the beholder, but here an amalgation of my male friends and coworkers:
A portrait of a male normie blue triber
-
works in a highly credentialed field, probably went to university
-
But it's "something useful" (as judged by himself)
-
Could earn more, but took a pay cut to work somewhere he believes in
-
Has a gf who is much further left than him, and studied something that he normally has a low opinion of (but she's different, obviously)
-
(mostly) vegetarian when cooking for himself, but might eat meat when going out
-
Is really into some solo sport like rock climbing or long distance running which he does with a group of friend, is well in shape
-
Strongly disagrees with the far left on most practical policies, but believes them often when they scream Nazi/Misogynist/etc
-
Very conscientious, agreeable & reliable
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Materialist Atheist, but it's important for him not being an ass about it
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every immigrant he knows well is also credentialed and similarly conscientious, so he has a strongly positive opinion about them
-
Thinks we need to do something about immigration, but in practice is against all policies except cracking down on proven criminals or more support for integration
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Thinks BG3 is the pinnacle of gaming
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Goes on lots of vacations, all over the world; He really likes talking about the three months he spent backpacking through India
-
Really liked GoT, Dark, House of Cards, Inception ...
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Plays board games once a week with the same group of friends
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Thinks he is not elitist, but will always default to expert opinion (and doesn't see any contradiction here)
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Used to be against it, but is now in favor of nuclear energy
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Has at most 2 kids, shares obligations 50/50 with the wife on the first kid but not the second
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Felt insulted by the bear question and thinks women who answered bear are stupid and/or crazy
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Often struggles with the concept of some people just not giving a shit
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Isn't blank-slatist, but thinks that group differences are vaguely problematic
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Knows that women and men are different, but thinks that the differences are overstated and still substantially influenced by culture
I can do the same for a modal normie female blue triber if you're interested, she is quite different.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
5mo ago
I have to admit, I don't quite get the apple test. I don't even need to close my eyes, I can imagine a perfect image of an apple with open eyes. I can rotate it, look at little imperfections in detail, cut it open, do whatever. The same goes for just about anything that can be imagined. But it happens on a secondary plane to my normal eyesight, a third eye so to speak. If I close my eyes, I see nothing more than I do with open eyes. I would personally say I have excellent 3d imagination, but going by the test literally would lead to the conclusion that I have aphantasia?
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
5mo ago
Why does it need to be a start-up? Start-ups have an inherently high failure even for highly competent people. You really need to have a good safety net.
Otherwise I agree, you need to get out. Nobody can stand such treatment very long.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
5mo ago
Yes, it's not just "to some extent", it's a giant effect. It's all about the fundamentals, baby. One of the things even strategy video games are teaching you is that by far the worst thing you can have is a dependant, i.e. a person that produces nothing but eats resources. For a toy example, imagine that you have 100 people each producing 1 unit of [resources], and using up 0.6 of [resources] (which is already quite optimistic). So you generate a surplus of 40 with a full pop, which can be invested profitably (often according to an exponential growth function, which means that looking only at the original surplus is vastly underestimating the differences). With 10% dependants, it's 90-60=30, so a 25% loss of surplus. With 20% dependants, it's 80-60=20, a whopping 50% loss. Yes you can often get a few extra % with some smart organising, but you can't really overcome even just modest differences in the fundamentals.
This is the same for companies. An employee that doesn't produce anything not only eats up pay, they also takes up office space, HR resources. In reality, an employee often just creates a modest surplus above their pay, so even being slightly less productive will put the employee into the negative unless the pay gets substantially slashed. Which is the reason why firing the least productive employees should be the first thing every company does once it gets into the red. There is good reasons why we try to make jobs as safe as possible, but we shouldn't kid ourselves, it costs us big bucks.
Which leads us to countries. Both children and pensioners are about as pure examples of dependants as is possible irl. But unlike pensioners, children are actually a de-facto investment into the future; In fact arguably the most important one, since they directly control the ratio of productive vs dependant in the near future. People like to talk about how if we just had invested our retirement money better we wouldn't have problems, but this is again ignoring the fundamentals. For another toy examples, if people had no children but would invest their money sensibly, everyone would still be fucked once retirement hits, because whom to even give the money? It's worthless numbers on a screen at that point, with nobody actually producing anything. You can trivially extend this to low TFR and conclude that no matter how sensibly it would have been invested, it gets mostly eaten up by inflation, since what actually matters is the number of working people available who provide for the pensioners.
Yes there are alternative strategies to sustainable TFR, but they need to be done thoughtfully, and well. Investing into high-quality immigration is one; For example, one of my wife's former roommates is a thai nurse who was taught german already in thailand, in a school partially financed by germany, with a direct preparation for getting accredited as a nurse in germany. If they didn't put in the work at the school, they failed, and wouldn't go to germany. This is how you do it, and she correspondingly was a model immigrant. It's cheaper than having children yourself, but it's still a substantial amount of money you need to invest, and has some added extra risks. It's also inherently symbiotic/parasitary, as it requires other countries with spare TFR. This idea of just letting everybody in, and then just hoping it will go fine not only doesn't provide the necessary workers, it actually puts extra stress on the system as we have more dependants now, not less. The average MENA immigrant in germany is substantially net-negative.
We produced a giant surplus for a while, but we used it mostly for early retirements, going on lots of vacations, and an education system that is both unusually long and inefficient. Maybe we get bailed out by AIs in some fashion, but I don't like blindly hoping for a tech that isn't quite there yet. And the most likely trajectory I'm seeing there, though not apocalyptic, doesn't really seem particularly appealing.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
5mo ago
Quiet quitting/just not giving a shit is imo much more common & relevant. If you make your boss look like a fool, it is trivial for him to make it fall back on you. But if everyone tries to do slightly less than everyone else, bc doing more is plainly not rewarded, then you enter a race to the bottom that deteriorates everything.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
6mo ago
Depends quite a bit on the particulars, but in general terms no. As I wrote:
Many of the more extreme options will probably result in some levels of emigration, but that's still very different than forcibly removing people of which a decent percentage would likely have been willing to adjust.
As long as you give people the option to adjust, the requirements are clearly aimed toward creating a sustainable state with citizens that hold a shared identity and they are reasonably attainable for the great majority of people, them leaving out of their own accord is not meaningfully "ethnic cleansing" in my view. The change can obviously still be bad in many other ways, though.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
6mo ago
While the theory about how medieval executions drove a certain kind of evolution is cute and somewhat plausible, I consider it far from proven. If you asked me numbers, I'd say 20% to be true in broad terms, 40% to be true directionally but too weak pressure to be notable, and 40% to be just wrong. There is also the problem that executions have been a mainstay of cultures everywhere. As I remember, the relevant paper was OK in terms of "this is a theory, and it somewhat fits with some available evidence" but bad in terms of "this theory is actually significantly better than competing theories".
Much more plausible to me is simply that the cradle of humanity from which most non-africans descend was a pretty strong bottleneck with, among other things, multiple neurology-related mutational sweeps. Secondly the civilisational band of europe - middle east - asia has exerted pro-civilisation pressure over literal millenia, and from the available evidence the centre of highest development has changed multiple times. The problem with arabs really isn't biology, the moment they bother to assimilate they're pretty good citizens. That argument applies much more to (sub-saharan) africans, which still are a pretty small minority here.
In addition, I happen to be a pretty strong proponent of genetic engineering anyway.
I really don't get why people go straight to ethnic cleansing. It's a political non-starter for one unless we're on the brink of collapse, and there is several steps in-between here and there that are much more reasonable. Every single larger european country used to be multiple regions & ethnicities that didn't really identify as one, and there are quite a few accidents of history which would have led to a very different structure; Burgundy as an independent entity, or a much larger (or smaller, or integrated) Austria, or a mostly-unified Scandinavia, and so on. That the current shape feels so "solid" was the result of a deliberate process of propaganda and suppression of minority identities. The only reason why we nowadays can be so laizze-faire with european minority identification is precisely because of this process. My mom didn't speak high german for example, only low german, but was bullied in school even by the teachers until she could speak "proper" german. My parents only taught high german to me. And this obviously was toward the far end, both in time and in tameness, of the process.
There is so much we can change; We can tie welfare to much more stringent requirements, enforce a common language, or for a more extreme option we can require extensive civil/military service with explicit statements of loyalty. And there's even some "positive" actions still lacking; For example, I personally know an arabic guy who fell into alcoholism bc he was literally not allowed to work for multiple years due to his legal status, and he wasn't willing to engage in illegal work (in itself a laudable quality, even if it arguably was wrong in this case!). Many of the more extreme options will probably result in some levels of emigration, but that's still very different than forcibly removing people of which a decent percentage would likely have been willing to adjust.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
6mo ago
It's imo very clearly about affluence and not having better things to do. here in europe there are plenty of poor white (mostly eastern german/european) women who don't give a shit, while affluent black or middle-eastern women get into the same stuff as the white.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
6mo ago
FWIW, I actually apply this moreso to the protesters, in particular Foster, than to Perry. Even if they technically stay within the realms of the law, they're just asking for something to happen. I mostly read Armed's first paragraph, thinking he would be talking about Foster, and skipped straight to the comment, not noticing that in the second paragraph he calls out Perry in particular.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
6mo ago
There is a saying for cyclists here, which is widely applicable and succinctly describes what you're talking about: "Saying 'but I had the right of way' does not help after you got run over".
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
6mo ago
That's the thing, if anything a successful assassination would make it more likely for the next russian leader to use a nuke, and a failed assassination would make it more likely for Putin to use a nuke. On the other hand reserving these tactics for extreme situations makes them less likely.
First season was fine, but the writing was already on the wall by the end of it. Didn't even bother with the second season and don't have the impression I missed anything.
Kripke is also just not a good writer for anything but short episodic monster-of-the-week style shows with black/white morality - see Supernatural. Almost all the overarching storylines were awful and contrived. He can do some decent character work, but it's always obvious whether a character is supposed to be good or evil. And there as well he had a massive problem with dragging things out by ending every season by putting everyone back to starting positions.
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