TIRM
5hr ago
I don't know how your friend's tastes lie, but, are all the local women insufferably progressive or mostly just the white ones and the ones who went to American universities for undergrad? Try Mexicans and Asians. Some are as woke as any college educated white woman. Mostly from going to college in America if my personal experience is correct. But many are not. The other guys at his FAANG company will accept and understand that his girlfriend or wife isn't white.
TIRM
8hr ago
Gay representation in media is illegal in China.
-
Films with gay characters are banned and don't play in Chinese theaters.
-
Phone app games can't have characters with ambiguous genders, or effeminate men or anyone gay.
-
China has illegal gay romance stories published on websites. This is hypothetically illegal but the laws weren't enforced. Then they were. The women who write these gay romances were arrested and held in prison for long periods of time awaiting trial.
Us Americans are culture waring about trans women in combat sports. China is on a completely different level.
Their leaders are billionaires. They're whatever form of communism is rule by billionaires.
They are nationalists in the way I wish Americans were. We have a tragic deficit of nationalism. It might be terminal.
I once saw a homeless beggar in China. Two Chinese cops were standing in front of him and very kindly asking him to go away. My main complaint about American urban decay is forbidden in China. They have the will to ban it and enforce the ban.
It is hard to shoehorn everything into a simple left-right dichotomy. They like abortion and dislike economic liberalism. They aren't "right wing" in that sense. They are culturally conservative in a way some Americans would consider far right. If Republicans endorsed a fraction of Chinese state policy, it would be loudly denounced as far-right extremism.
TIRM
1d ago
I dispute this is a genuine suicide attempt if she leaped out of a second story window. There's a threshold for success in this situation and a 2nd story jump is nowhere close enough.
In my youth I worked with a guy who said ladders are dangerous so he aways instead jumped off of 1st story roofs. I think that is a bit silly but he never hurt himself doing the equivalent of a 2nd story jump a few times a day. My lifetime rate of observing 2nd story jumps resulting in death is 0%. And I (sadly?) have a decent sampling to state this statistical claim. When we criticized that guy we told him he would eventually break a bone doing that. We didn't tell him that he would die. Those are the stakes for this short a fall.
TIRM
1d ago
Singapore has a functioning modern economy. They can buy food. The poorest people on earth with desertifying land cannot.
TIRM
1d ago
I have no respect at all for the SPLC. "designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a hate group" just means they aren't sufficiently progressive. Which this Malthusian born over a century ago certainly wasn't.
Based on my memories of reading his writings: he was very concerned about the fact that parts of Africa are desertifying. Those localities' ability to grow food is decreasing over time. So it is an enormous act of cruelty to dump food on them. That lets their population grow yet further past their decreasing food supply. That's endless escalating starvation and dependence. And if the aid ever stops it is mass starvation on the scale of the worst communist policies. He's concerned for their welfare so he cautions against poorly thought out aid programs.
I wasn't aware of his private letters. That's disappointing. Oh well. I would also like an English speaking majority in the US. I'm sure the SPLC would smear that popular and valid view as "hate". Using their non-standard understanding of that term.
Garrett Hardin wrote a lot about this. Dumping food and medicine on 3rd world countries increases the number people dependent on aid to survive. Perversely increasing deprivation and suffering long term.
Googling him now I see Wikipedia lists him as a white nationalist. I read a bunch of his writings and never encountered that. Either I somehow missed his spicy works or a Wikipedia editor is character assassinating some dead academic.
TIRM
1d ago
A slightly wiser utilitarian would know that reputations matters and not on a case by case basis decide to deceive everyone.
My problem with some critiques of utilitarianism is that they assert utilitarians have to be very short sighted to the point of obvious self-harm. I don't suppose that's actually the case.
TIRM
1d ago
the surrogate takes on full financial responsibility for the child
Long ago I read about a case of DIY sperm donation from a guy who knew two lesbians for them to have children, with a contract stating the man held no financial responsibility. Later he gets hit with child support. The laws regarding child support cannot be negated by a private contract. This guy practically wrote down "laws don't apply to me" and signed it with a couple lesbians.
Users on Reddit generally agree that informal home donations carry severe legal risks because private contracts often fail to override state welfare recovery laws without medical oversight.
Uh, thanks Google search AI. I was hoping for the opinions of Reddit regarding this. Other more relevant search results showed state governments going after some hapless guy for child support.
Anyways, this could work but we'd need a legal framework allowing it.
TIRM
2d ago
She harmed herself and tried to commit suicide after
Kind of. I don't have stats on the survival rate of falling out of a 2nd story window, but it must be very high. If anything her spinal injury is an unusually bad outcome for such a short fall.
TIRM
3d ago
Back in college a class went over how jurors act based on race, sex and age. Prosecutors and defense use these stats to make informed decisions of who they want on a jury. Long story short older black men like to vote to convict and support executing the guilty. At least relatively more than some other demographics. Young white women just the opposite. This is based on my memories of very outdated statistics. Anyways, yes to your point.
TIRM
4d ago
For some reason Reddit made hiding history as an option. Cynically that lets bots run rampant as you can't just check and see if they are spamming about something. And Reddit admins are fine with that.
TIRM
4d ago
That's fair. I lived in Shanghai for a bit. Also visited other major Chinese cities on other trips. They have none of the issues I have with American cities. The Chinese have opted out of American-style urban blight.
I still don't want to live in a Shanghai style mega-city. But my complaints would be orthogonal to my issues with American cities.
TIRM
4d ago
we had to convince ourselves that we loved living in the suburbs
I think suburb dwellers honestly like living in suburbs. I certainly do.
TIRM
5d ago
A shooter repeatedly shot at Trump including grazing Trump's ear. Trump is far past 10%.
American presidents have an 18% fatality rate. So Trump is in good company.
TIRM
5d ago
Very tangentially: I can't strongly enough recommend The Outlaws by Ernst von Salomon. He was a teenager in Weimar Germany and it was an unmitigated disaster. Nearly getting murdered by communists. Thinking maybe he should join them. Then ultimately death-squadding them and denying responsibility for the killing of Rosa Luxemburg.
Back on topic, and to be very fair to the cops: They commonly see "disappeared teenagers" turn out to be kids spending a couple days with their boyfriends. Then yet another parent says their daughter disappeared. Why would they think death by torture rather than yet another kid who will be back in a few days?
Many left-wing nerds are, in fact, technically proficient
I've been on this for a while. Sneers against "tech bros" from the left abound in some places. My American big tech coworkers are far out of step with the wider American population in how progressive they are. Tech bros are a thing and they overwhelmingly vote D. Based on large group chat and in person dunks on Trump, I've determined how my coworkers tend to vote. I think I've said it here before, but there are engineering teams I work with in which trans women outnumber natal women. If I ever feel like looking at pride flags, I'll walk a lap through the building. Pronouns in bios, etc.
There's exceptions. Generally older white guys. Somehow concentrated in EMI mitigation and mechanical engineering. Not to generalize too much from the sample of people I've personally worked with.
why do regular codemonkeys feel the need to defend them
The tech industry is the goose that lays golden eggs. Both for the wider American economy and for me personally. Of course some people want to kill it. Lena Khan and her ilk just don't like how big the major tech companies are. How rich the founders get from their stock. How they are wealthy, but not in a way that can be punitively taxed.
I don't want the golden goose to be killed to satisfy progressives' sense of economic fairness or general dislike of big business. If that makes me seem like a defender of tech billionaires, so be it.
TIRM
14d ago
"what would you do if Dario made a decision to send Anthropic's value to $0?"
Having never seen this before and pretending I'm on the spot in an interview: say you want to make AGI and think modern LLM research will at least inform such important work if not maybe directly make it. Stay mission-focused and at least role play as a kool-aid drinker who is there for the AI. The compensation is just a very comfortable side benefit.
Act like a Google interviewer asked "but what if they took away the Google cafeterias". I like the cafeterias. I rather hope they stay about the same. But if somehow they go away forever, too bad. I'm here to work. I'll somehow figure out lunch as a small side distraction from the reason I'm here.
I've known Chinese people to do this since they lack gendered pronouns. "He", "she" and "it" are one word. In the 20th century they created written gendered versions of these; inspired by gendered Western languages. But spoken is "tā" for everything.
Countless times I've been listening to someone live translate their Chinese language thoughts to English and veer between "he" and "she" even though there is only one subject in the story.
But maybe this is instead radical gender fluidity or the rare post-partum sex change. Or someone wrote down a single incorrect word
TIRM
15d ago
I'm aware of feminists doing the "his story" bit for decades. They're wrong of course but they enjoy reciting it.
TIRM
17d ago
That document was an internal RCMP risk estimation for the near future. It was obtained using the Canadian equivalent of the freedom of information act. They heavily censored it before releasing it resulting in those blanked out sections. They left in one relevant part:
In the words of Emanuel Macron, we are about to see "the end of abundance." Economic forecasts for the next five years and beyond are bleak. It is always unclear exactly how economies will perform, but this period of recession will likely have a negative impact on the social and political world as well.
POPULAR RESENTMENT The coming period of recession will also accelerate the decline in living standards that the younger generations have already witnessed compared to earlier generations. For example, many Canadians under 35 are unlikely ever to be able to buy a place to live. The fallout from this decline in living standards will be exacerbated by the fact that the difference between the extremes of wealth is greater now in developed countries than it has been at any time in several generations.
EROSION OF TRUST
This is a direct result of Canadian federal policy. For every three Canadians, import one immigrant. But don't build a new housing unit for every three existing units, so the number of units per resident decreases over time and the costs increase.
The young are screwed in Canada. To the point it is a law enforcement cause for concern regarding social stability.
I don't want my country made similar to their's by them swinging every presidential election in their direction. I get their natural resources are valuable. Their economy already is an extension of ours with something like 80% of their trade being with us and 90% of their population being within 100 miles of the border. There's much to be attracted to for a closer economic relationship. I'm not objecting to their lumber and car parts. But the rot in their politics would be a fatal disease.
TIRM
17d ago
And the classic issue of news headlines when a Republican does something bad are "Republican Does Bad Thing". When a Democrat does it the headlines are "Republicans Outraged at Democrat". As though the emotional state of Republicans is the most relevant fact regarding bad behavior by Democrats.
TIRM
18d ago
Very well. May Canada and the US never join. That's a nightmare scenario. Quibbling over the number of Senators would be the least of our problems in that existential crisis.
In a hypothetical US-Canadian union, Canada has shown itself to be incapable of independent self governance and needs to be kept away from influencing American federal politics. Some moderate amount of local control would be tolerated but absolutely no say in Federal matters. Otherwise they would drag us down to their level.
What insanity could cause Americans to chain themselves to that anchor? Canada is a sad lesson in the possible governmental failure modes America could suffer from. The wounds were self-inflicted through poor governance. I'm a father; I can't force that bleak Canadian future onto my kids. They can't be allowed to harm American politics like this.
The truly baffling thing here is Canadians thinking they are somehow privileged and above Puerto Ricans. Puerto Ricans have been US citizens for over a century. Canadians have been (understandably) oppositional to Americans since 1812. I get it, but they are truly last in line for getting electoral votes. I'd grant the Philippines statehood and Senators before Canada.
I don't know if it is true, but supposedly gay Germans are very disproportionately supporters of AfD. The point being Western culture is fine with them being gay. Some other cultures not so much.
Alice Weidel is cringing thinking about what would happen to her and her domestic partner if Islamists ruled Europe. She wants her gay family to thrive. She's of course portrayed as a crazed right winger and a nazi for doing so.
More options
Context Copy link