TIRM
30m ago
Both parties keep doing this. Running bizarre looney candidates in critical races. There's hundreds of millions of Americans and these are the ones all political focus is put on for key elections?
TIRM
43m ago
Irvine California? Asians don't count as diversity. The whole point of BIPOC is to exclude Asians and "white and Hispanic" people.
TIRM
57m ago
For one example, as of now in 2026 the climate alarmism was finally admitted to be made up or whatever.
Not everyone has heard this happy news and some are still panicked about climate change. Such as most young Americans according to some polling.
TIRM
1hr ago
divide that actually matters is rich vs poor
Then call me the General Secretary because I've been on this since I was a teenager. That's not always completely true. But it is generally fairly true.
TIRM
1d ago
A practice run for the Chinese hackers who've already infiltrated much of American infrastructure.
I watched the Cyberpunk Netfix show and it had a bit about needing to pay a subscription to use your own washing machine. As shown by it locking up on a child when full of his wet school clothes. And the resulting cost of living ends up high enough that a regular non-corpo working mom can barely afford to live. They don't explicitly say the prices were algorithmially determined to be exactly what you can bear, but I'll assume something like that is happening in the setting. That's quite a cynical "late stage capitalism" take; as appropriate for cyberpunk.
But back in real life they are actually pushing to make something like that sci-fi dystopia real. We're just missing the cool cyber mods and true AI. We get to keep the appliances that lock up and the most banal forms of electronic surveillance.
I think the federal government does not want more Ruby Ridge and Waco style debacles. It's a PR disaster when they burn down the home of defiant people*. Some gun control advocates like to use feds death-squadding or bombing people who don't comply with gun laws as a trump card. Something about fighter jets being used to enforce compliance in a way an AR15 can't stop. They act like it is a mic drop debate ender to point out the feds have armored vehicles and fighter jets. But the fantasy of feds burning and bombing their political opponents is just not going to happen in the modern era. A century ago a little bit of that could happen but the feds are just softer now. Photos of federal agents standing over charred ruins mixed with dead children will prevent this†. Not that they have any moral issues with murdering their fellow Americans, but the terrible PR would harm their supporters in elections and they can't stand that.
*Branch Davidians actually burned down their own compound. But it looked like the feds did it and FBI agents perjured themselves denying that they used incendiary tear gas canisters.
† Like all those photos from Waco.
TIRM
4d ago
"Pokémon descriptions make no sense." -> "Yes, pokedex entries are made by a 10 or 11 year old child. This is how they perceive the world."
TIRM
4d ago
The Weasley family is pure-blood, but they are
... silly Irish stereotypes. "My father told me all the Weasleys Irish have red hair, freckles, and more children than they can afford."
TIRM
6d ago
The basilisk is infinite negative consequences for some people in particular. Yudkowsky most of all. I don't take this at seriously, but he does and had multiple online meltdowns over it. In his mind he's being credibly threatened with hell in a way his atheism won't protect from. And he fears for his child's future due to the ruin this will bring. Quite a tough spot to be in.
only if the PRC refused to come to an agreement or cheated on the agreement
That's nuclear war with one extra step. They're already pretty mad about America restricting their ability to get more compute and also bypassing the restrictions. They both won't agree and would cheat even if they somehow did.
That agreement would not include China because they refuse to cooperate on this matter. They're already denouncing America trying to lock in a permanent advantage. If somehow impossibly they signed it, they'd violate it anyways. Then we can go to plan B: nuclear warfare because they cheated.
And worse yet Yudkowsky's example was Russia refusing to abide the agreement. Russia is quite oppositional and has by far the world's largest nuclear arsenal. Yudkowsky made sure to choose the most extreme example and hard commit to the upcoming nuclear war because of a hypothetical Russian data center.
In real life there are international agreements. A few European countries sign an agreement to not use cluster bombs. They don't have any and would have no use for them even if they did. The US and Israel don't sign the agreement. So we have cluster bombs and are not bound in any way to refrain from using them. This is of course denounced as "violating international law". I'm looking forward to China and Russia "violating international law" as understood by EU technocrats and Yudkowsky's proposals. They'll do it and then we can move past any mistaken understanding that we can international treaty our way out of this problem.
TIRM
6d ago
Pros: No more politicians.
Cons: You've been mentally merged with all other people and the machine intelligence.
TIRM
6d ago
You just have to believe that AI is an existential risk and now that's more important than charity.
The most delicious of moral treats. With infinite negative consequences you can justify anything. Like Yudkowsky's proposal to bomb foreign data centers even if it certainly leads to nuclear warfare. Anchoring your justification on infinity makes any action permissible.
TIRM
8d ago
Good standard, but even in this case not good enough. She wished she didn't do it weeks later after rumors circulated around campus and she was disinvited from the Halloween party.
TIRM
8d ago
I read an article describing aid recipients being asked where they think the aid comes from. They had no idea. I'm growing increasingly skeptical of of our precious soft power and the ruinous consequences for losing it.
TIRM
9d ago
Supposedly Nigerian email scams make sure to purposefully have terrible grammar and spelling and implausible claims. They don't want to waste their time on people with moderate or high amounts of skepticism. Someone so dumb and trusting that they'd reply to such an obvious scam is their target.
TIRM
9d ago
you cannot force me to affirm your pronouns
That's the worst part. He called them by their preferred pronouns. But that's not nearly enough when caught up on the leading edge of the culture war.
TIRM
9d ago
It is quite the situation that they, despite their enormous fiscal resources, won't or can't hire a normie spokesperson who both states their points and doesn't scare the other normies.
There are literal "knife missile" companies that lack this self-inflicted problem. We might be making better technologies, but a few unpleasant contrarians are both pushing it forward and simultaneously running anti-PR campaigns on their own companies.
the character and substance of socialists if I say they just want free stuff
I have suffered the tragic misfortune of in person honest discussions with such people. They just want free stuff.
"Yeah, but actually economic calculation problem and pricing signals and seizing the wealth of the rich would both hard crash the economy and not pay for that much social spending." They don't care and especially don't care to listen to economic arguments against their views.
I don't want to be this reductive and oversimplified. But they are, so, in what more sophisticated sense should I understand them.
TIRM
10d ago
I'd say just the opposite. A critique so shallow it makes you dismiss the entire argument.
Not to be too poisoned by reddit, but, I've seen this plenty and it is the anti-steelman. Perfectly dodging the actual beliefs of the opponent and instead trying to hold them to a silly simplified misunderstanding of their views.
Trying to assign views to unwilling opponents. That'll never work of course. But it lets some people pretend their opponent are hypocrites. Just ignore what they actually say and think despite their objections.
TIRM
10d ago
John 8:11. Technically an adultress rather than a prostitute. The point indeed being to go forth, and sin no more.
Agreed. They could hardly sink lower in this regard.
Only mainstream respected journalists from major media outlets are a more debased group with less respect for truth.
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