aiislove
12d ago
The degree to which this is the case in East Asia is like, at least 5 times more than in the west. Any random food court in Thailand has probably 12 to 20 highly specialized food places that are all cheap and fresh, you're lucky if a random mall in the US has 8 food establishments in business, let alone cheap and fresh ones... Your average major mall in Thailand probably has 30-40 businesses just for food, not even counting the special booths that usually pop up for limited events that expand the count by another 20 or more. Truly blew my mind the first time I was in Thailand
aiislove
12d ago
I love Cajun food. I used to have a Cajun stepdad, he sucked but his cooking was the best. Thai people remind me so much of Cajuns.
Standard Japanese portion sizes are smaller than Western portions, typically, but it's very easy to add extra rice, extra noodles, extra fried chicken, extra broth, extra eggs, extra whatever you want, at every restaurant.........
aiislove
12d ago
Yes, actually that was a point I wanted to make and forgot about. The cost of labor is so high in rich countries that the quality of life for the middle class and the rich are degraded. The luxury of having freshly prepared food made with complicated processes that are ubiquitous in Thailand- affordable even to the people who make this food themselves!- is lacking in today's rich countries.
You put it a bit more uncharitably, I don't think there's anything wrong with people being able to afford to live cheaply if they want. In America we prop this lifestyle up with welfare schemes- why is that more dignified?
aiislove
12d ago
I don't have a strong position on this so random thoughts:
- Japan makes you walk. I regularly travel between countries and when I look at my health app on my phone I can see exactly when I arrive and leave Japan because the steps taken in Japan are significantly higher than any other country I spend time in. The cities are set up such that you must walk far and wide. Train stations are large and mazelike. (This may not apply if you have a car in Japan- I have never driven in Asia.)
- Japan is the most difficult country I've visited to eat healthy in. Fresh fruits and vegetables are very expensive. (Yes there's cheap fruit/veggie stores but you have to seek them out.) It is the hardest country to find roasted meats without added fats in. Cuts of meat that are popular are very fatty. If you like seafood you will have a much easier time eating healthy (though you'll still be dodging breading and mayo.) I have struggled with my weight my whole life, the endless bowls of pasta and sandos and uber processed snacks everywhere are hard for me to resist.
- Asian food in general tends to be less calorically dense than western foods, and spiciness has a mild laxative effect that reduces calories slightly as well. I think these two are slightly less applicable to Japanese food vs. Chinese or Thai cuisines, but the effect is still there if you're comparing rice to baguette or more calorically dense western foods.
- I believe there's a social effect on people's sizes as well. I had a black friend in America who is overweight, lose quite a bit of weight, and then she said she felt like people could beat her up. She's since gained weight back. I don't really blame her. Being around bigger people does make me want to be a bigger person, while being around smaller people in Asia makes me feel like I don't need to eat as much. People in america in the 50s and 60s were much smaller as well, the fattening of america was a sort of arms race, and why I don't think ozempic is going to be as influential as people believe- some people want extra weight to throw around in their lives. In some places you don't need it.
aiislove
12d ago
I haven't heard that before but that makes sense. I've noticed poorer countries will often have nice, clean airports to give a good impression as well.
aiislove
12d ago
the nations you profess are clearly superior
I'm not really making a value judgment on the superiority of any nation really, just trying to point out how things are counterintuitive to common assumptions among most people from rich countries and how things I've noticed have changed my perception
Congrats, you've discovered that the housing market is very dysfunctional[...]
Great, my post was meant to be pointing at dysfunction, so I guess you got my point...
aiislove
12d ago
I am a digital nomad, so I guess the line between whether I'm a tourist or not is sort of blurred, but I feel like my Thai friends born and raised in Thailand are happier and more content with their lives than my American friends born and raised in America, so I don't think it's totally the tourism effect. Thai people also seem to have a greater satisfaction with their hard work, have more to show for it- my partner is Thai and he can afford a car and a motorbike, an apartment in Bangkok, trips out of town several times a month, and so on, meanwhile my friends in the midwest well into their 30s are still living with family members or barely scraping by and have much more pessimistic outlooks on things
aiislove
12d ago
I have spent the past 5 months traveling between the US Midwest, California, Japan and Thailand. I believe the economies of the US and Japan (along with the bulk of the other “rich” countries) are very dysfunctional compared even to poor countries like Thailand.
I. Food and Services
Food in Thailand is extremely delicious, healthy, and very cheap. I am sure the average Thai person eats a healthier diet than the average Japanese. Japanese food is extremely dated in nutrition and food trends. It is so to such a degree that I suspect it’s a sort of fashion or cliquish refusal to update rather than a lack of knowledge or interest. (South Korea next door has a very modern and nutritious food culture- eating healthy is significantly easier there than in Japan.) Thai foods feature a great variety of vegetables, fruits, meats and seafoods. Before I visited Thailand, I imagined that maybe they would be behind on trends or stuck in the past, since they are poor, but the opposite is true. You can find the trendiest foods in Bangkok- anything from the latest Korean baked craze, to Dubai chocolate bars and parfaits and ice cream cones, to Burmese tea leaf salad. They have it, and you can have it delivered within an hour for pennies.
Why is Thailand so trendy compared to Japan or the US? Basically, it is too expensive to take risks in rich countries. Thailand is a poor country but their economy feels incredibly healthy. Their money converts to pennies outside the country, but inside money trades hands so easily that anything feels possible. Food delivery and rideshares are so cheap because housing is so affordable that they can afford to live on such little money. Cab rides in rich countries are very expensive, because we have to pay for insurance, the pensions of drivers, and so on.
The quality of hotels has declined drastically in the US. I typically stay at mid-range hotels and rarely do I find that maid service is provided more often than once every three days. Hotels that charge $20 a night in Thailand provide maid service every single day. Why can’t Americans afford to pay someone to clean a room?
Airbnbs in Japan, fraught with regulation, are so bad. The apartments are old and cramped and dark and expensive. I am currently paying about $50 a night for an old build in a random part of a random city, and while the host is very kind, talkative, and helpful, it is also twice as expensive as the luxury airbnb I stayed at in Bangkok a month ago with a chic pool, gym, library, and dirt cheap food within walking distance. By the way, airbnbs and hotels in the midwest are incredibly expensive lately- why is it cheaper to stay in a room in a literal castle in Europe than a crappy hotel room that smells like weed in Ohio?
II. Airline Flight
I hate the cramped cheap seats on long flights. This time I flew from California to Japan and upgraded to a full-flat seat on Zipair, a low cost Japanese airline owned by JAL (Japan Airlines.) This 11 hour flight cost me $1515. I am not really going to complain, because it was great to have the extra room and I managed to sleep a bit. But the amenities on Zipair are shockingly meager. I asked for water early in the flight and she told me I had to order a bottle from the in flight service on my phone which they didn’t make available for another hour or so. There was no food provided, your only option was to order a few packaged snacks like Pringles from your phone.
A month later I flew Tokyo to Bangkok on Thai Airways. This 7 hour flight cost me only $301. I sat in the cheap seats in the back, but it was an empty enough flight that I had an entire row to myself. They provided multiple delicious meals and snacks throughout the flight. It felt significantly less cheap than the Zipair experience.
By the way, I am concerned that the cost of international airline flight is far too cheap. The first time I traveled internationally was when I was in middle school around 2001. I believe my round trip flight between the US and London was about $1200 at that time. The inflation calculator I just checked said that’s the equivalent of $2190 today. I just checked google flights and the same round trip costs only around $491 today. The incredibly cheap barrier to entry of international flights seems like an obvious problem leading to more illegal immigration and erosion of local culture than I’ve ever seen anyone point out before.
III. Conclusion
You may be thinking- ok, this guy is rich in Thailand and poor in the US, of course he is going to have a merrier view of the Thai economy. But when I look at charts like this I am in the 95th percentile of wealth for my age, in the US. I am frugal with my money, yes, but I would like to be able to afford a life on par with or better than that of my father at the same age, and I’m not sure I can.
————
I have to add a caveat. Whenever I am in Thailand I can never quite shake the feeling I’m about to get sick or get in some terrible accident. I don’t feel unsafe: people are very kind, and it’s not the same kind of fear that I feel in, say, the ghettoes of the US, which are truly scary. But buildings in Thailand don’t seem up to code, food safety is sometimes lacking (at least enough to fuel a constant anxiety in me) and my experience with the health care system (after passing out in a northern Thai hospital a few years ago) makes me know I must acknowledge the downsides to the “healthy economy” I admire in Thailand and be somewhat grateful for the safety standards and tradeoffs we make in rich countries. But I can only imagine that as the rest of the world catches up, the decline of the post WWII rich economies will continue to progress.
aiislove
3mo ago
moral outlook
Actually I find this to be the most universal piece of the puzzle beyond any more objective measurements. For example half the world drives on the right and half the world drives on the left, but the moral fundamentals beneath which side of the road you personally decide to drive on are universal regardless. You choose depending on whether you want to safely reach your destination or create chaos and accidents around you. The moral goals and is-ought problem leads to the same or similar results whether you choose to drive on the right in america or the left in the uk. That is a simple example for illustration's sake but I believe that most problems follow this pattern as well. Treating people kindly and with love and trust is always the solution to any is-ought problem in any culture I've been to because it absolves yourself of the guilt of having acted unkindly or unlovingly and if someone interprets it incorrectly it is not because your underlying intentions were wrong. Maybe this is too much of a consequentialist view that collapses morality into the mind of the actor too far but again we arrive at the uniqueness of the self's actions apart from any others, which would potentially be overcome in an artificial universal consolidated worldview.
Other than that I agree with everything you said and relate to your experiences as well. I agree that we each individually have an inability to fully describe the capital-T Truth but a general AI with infinite knowledge and sources of data interpreted outside the frame of an individual would either be a step toward a new integrated model of understanding or perhaps just the false appearance of such.
aiislove
3mo ago
I agree with you with regards to just LLMs, but I was imagining more of a general AI in the future which would be fed infinite streams of data in every language and place on earth that would lead to some singularity or consolidation of worldviews and perspectives impossible to individual humans.
aiislove
3mo ago
Of course which reinforces my strongly held belief in linguistic determinism. Languages reflect reality only to the extent that they can describe it and their description of reality is likewise shaped/reinforced by the language it's parsed in.
On the other hand I'm imagining a general AI that could be fed infinite realtime data from infinite cameras, microphones and news sources from all over the world, it would inevitably start to bleed its understanding outside of the frame of one context and synthesize all of its input feeds into some universalist perspective that would be outside the realm of understanding of any one person who brings their own specific context to any information (as universalist as they may attempt to be or imagine themselves to be.)
The Blind Men and an Elephant
The parable of the blind men and an elephant is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and imagine what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the animal's body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the animal based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people's limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true. [from wikipedia.]
As someone who travels between cultures frequently, I find myself thinking a lot about this parable. Everywhere I go, different people in different places have developed different views and interpretations of the world, but the underlying fundamentals of reality remain unaffected by mere human perception and interpretation. In other words, the elephant remains the same regardless of the spot we’re poking at, rubbing against or cutting into.
I find myself reorienting what I experience and perceive from the viewpoint of my background and upbringing, shaped to some degree by my current context. When I meet new people, I compare them to people I was raised around, my friends and family back home. When I try new foods I orient them in relation to foods I was raised with and are most used to. When I experience new weather patterns I compare them to the climate of my birth. Inextricably I am linked to the time and place of my upbringing.
I was raised in a chaotic home environment between divorced parents. My mother was very strict and had many rules, while my father was very lax and enforced very few rules. My mother raised me in the Protestant church while I attended Catholic school for two years, then I was switched to public school in third grade. The inconsistency between Protestant, Catholic and secular worldviews left me very disenchanted by competing narratives and viewpoints that each assert their own contradicting universal realities which I remain suspicious of today.
General artificial intelligence could be capable of synthesizing the perspectives and contexts of every place and time into one universal viewpoint. Mapping out the elephant of the world with more objectivity seems more plausible than ever before. The self assuredness of modernity and the arrogance of postmodernity (Fukuyama’s end of history, for example) are likely to be dwarfed by the self assurance of any newly synthesized panopticon of awareness that an AGI could run on.
But would an AGI be capable of synthesizing every view of the elephant into one accurate rendering of reality at all, or would it merely be able to switch from one perspective to another? The Japanese conception of reality works well enough in the Japanese context, and my basic understanding or exposure to it is amusing enough to me as an outsider, but start poking at it a bit and the construction begins to fall apart. We westerners are just as bound by the false or skewed construction of the Western viewpoint, which is difficult for us to perceive the limits and contradictions of.
I wonder if the AGI will be a Tower of Babel of sorts that could give the illusion of unity and progress but that ends up dividing us further than ever before.
Actually, the thought of a universal synthesized view of the world is what is most frightening to me because it is so utterly foreign to anything we’ve ever come up with ourselves. Either we will discover things we never wanted to know about ourselves and the universe, or we will fail to discover those things and create an even more dystopian world that further reinforces the skewed, convenient beliefs that I believe we already build our societies on.
——
Many people on the right believe that right wing thinking is fundamentally the position of believing in the power to change things: The power to make different decisions, free will, and so on. But in my years of reading right wing thought, the concept that feels the most fundamentally grounding in right wing theory is the idea that nature remains constant. That is, that the elephant remains the elephant regardless of our interpretation. This is the most reassuring concept to me in right wing thinking: that I don’t need to make the Sisyphean effort to rewire my reaction to things outside my control, that I can just accept them as immutable forces of nature and move on with my life. I also think this is a more loving, understanding view of the fundamentals of reality compared with the left’s struggle to undermine them.
The joke is that the real punishment is that he has to be with a partner who has loved and will love a man other than himself. Men are extremely jealous, we can cope when we see someone with our partner who is clearly more deserving than we are, but we don’t like it.
You are also making the very female mistake of imagining that men with higher status have higher self esteem than men with lower status. This is probably broadly true for women but is very inaccurate for men. Male self esteem correlates almost entirely on how much sex he’s getting and how gratifying the sex is to his ego. Money doesn’t matter, buying prostitution doesn’t boost the ego, having a partner who respects him does. Having a hot wife he can imagine is actually devoted to him is the best thing he can have in terms of self esteem. I’d be so much happier poor with one moderately attractive partner I feel trust and respect from than being rich with someone I know is sleeping around with other men.
Edit:
men (gay and straight, which make me think this is even deeper than just sexuality) love sluts
No we don’t (as a gay man.) We do like other men who are mature and able to be comfortable with a lot of other men and respectful toward them. Nobody really likes the depraved bottom who is a slut for his own gratification. We don’t respect bottoms who immediately drop to their knees in front of any man. Even when you get head from a man who you do respect you will have your opinion diminished slightly toward him, just as you have your opinion toward yourself slightly diminished if you perform a bottom act with even a man you respect.
aiislove
3mo ago
I've had this conversation before here, I do not agree with you, look at NFL stats, blacks have more fast twitch muscle, whites are less prone to acts of violence, violent crime and aggressive behavior. In the real world.
aiislove
3mo ago
Thank you for the explanation. My comment wasn't intended to troll anyone or start a flame war, I was describing my sincerely held beliefs. To the extent that they are annoying beliefs, they annoy me too. I'd prefer to believe something else. I imagine other people feel this way too. The downstream effects of other people preferring to believe something else are people getting their bikes kicked out from under them by slightly more aggressive and violent groups of people. The least I can do is point at what I see as the objective ugliness of the situation.
aiislove
3mo ago
White people imagining themselves as physically the same as black people is leading to ridiculous situations like this. Asians don’t have this problem they just avoid living around black people. Seems to fundamentally stem from the arrogance of the white mentality and a reticence to admit to weakness even in the face of mountains of evidence of weakness. Black people assaulting whites is hideous because of the power imbalance and white people lack the humility to admit this to themselves, or to people who are willing to exploit this arrogance to their advantage.
aiislove
4mo ago
Why are there no direct flights from Alaska to Asia? There are tons of airports in Alaska (lots of places are only reachable by plane from what I understand) and a lot of people who live in Alaska are there from maritime or military/Navy connections and they're part of the Pacific rim where lots of US military bases are. There are tons of flights between Japan and Hawaii, and Alaska and Hawaii, but none from Alaska to Japan. You can fly from Fairbanks to Frankfurt Germany. There are flights to various places in Canada from Alaska and seasonally, to Reykjavik. But not to Russia, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, China, or Mongolia. Wikipedia says that 6% of Alaskans are Asian (as of 2020, a number that has increased steadily since 1970.) It seems like there should be enough demand for at least one route between Alaska and Asia.
Great reply. This is why the “groomer” discourse* is so wild to me. Modern parents precisely are NOT grooming their children. I imagine that much of tribal and traditional child rearing involves educating children and adolescents into how courting/mating/reproduction operate, and it is at the exact moment that straight parents fail to teach this to their children that they choose to project their failures onto nearby drag queens or trans people. If you don’t do it yourself they’re going to pick it up off the street. Are the parents not possibly creating sexual minorities (which are to some degree sexual dysfunction in my opinion) in their children through the lack of education surrounding courtship ritual?
If you are disturbed to imagine parents providing sexual or courting education (which is a response I might expect from this post) I don’t really disagree with you but it also reinforces my point. I don’t really know how to create an environment more conducive to courtship today but the clinical answer of high school sex ed isn’t very sexy and doesn’t seem to be working.
*Groomer discourse referring to straight people calling trans and/or homosexuals “groomers”
aiislove
4mo ago
nerds
jocks
Everyone needs to go watch a Studio Ghibli movie right now. We should aspire to be well rounded people who aren’t specialized weirdos. People in other countries understand this. Why do Americans want to flatten their identities into one weird thing? Someone thinks they’re a nerd so now they’re absolved of the responsibility of being attractive or the expectation that they can hold a conversation. Someone else believes they’re a jock so now they don’t have to suffer the irritation of being corrected by pedantic relatives or be expected to work at a computer all day. It’s so exhausting and reductive. Why aren’t we supporting everyone to be a well rounded person who is as capable as anyone else at all the various parts of life we’re going to have to deal with? It’s really sad to see people waste away their potential in identities pushed onto them by family and schoolmates at an early age.
aiislove
4mo ago
I'm considering selling a bunch of stock tomorrow. The tariffs appear to be real and not going away super soon. Tensions tend to build and reach a fever pitch in the summer and judging by the Karmelo Anthony/Shiloh Hendrix stuff and Trump in the White House I'm expecting this summer to be a mess. My intuition is telling me things are only going down from here. Markets in Asia have already opened way down for Monday. Sell in May sounds like a great idea.
Will definitely dump my share of Amazon. Apple got an exemption from tariffs and I'm sure they make enough of their revenue from non-hardware that I'm thinking of staying with Apple and the rest of the tech companies. Kind of tempted to just dump everything else honestly because I have such a sour outlook on the economy in the short term but I'm also up so much that I don't want to pay a ton in taxes. I might hedge my bets and sell half or less of whatever I'm worried about and then try and buy once markets have crashed. I planned to keep 10% of my portfolio in cash (earning interest) but my 10% has shrunk as the rest of the portfolio has grown around it so I could always use a bit more cash.
I guess my small-scale question is how bad of an idea would it be to liquidate everything I own tomorrow?
aiislove
4mo ago
Thanks to whoever nominated my post as an AAQC! I appreciate it.
Do all posts that get recommended by anyone get approved as an AAQC or are they selected by mods or something?
aiislove
4mo ago
Thanks for the kind words! Ah, Central Festival, I went there a few times- I stayed closer to some of the other malls but made the trip out to that one once in a while. Super fun. Small world!
I read your post about India when you posted it yesterday. I have very little knowledge of the country but the situation sounds pretty dire from your post. If I read correctly, it looks like the right wing Hindu party announced a census. Does this not benefit the right wing Hindu upper caste? If not, why did they agree to do a census? I think that you're opposed to the census because it will be used by the lower castes to demand reparations or better treatment from the right? (Sorry if I'm way off base with anything here)
Though I know very little about India, I do work in ecommerce and lots of people are eying India as an alternative manufacturing base post China tariff apocalypse, is this something that people in India are aware of? Would you see this as a benefit to your country, bringing in jobs and money, or not really because they are low paying jobs with long hours? (In my mind, the manufacturing is what built China from dirt poor to where they are today so I don't see it as a negative but feel free to tell me I'm wrong)
China
I didn't mention China in my original post at all because I haven't been there. But I believe they've grown massively in the past 2 or 3 decades. I imagine people feel great about themselves and their prospects. I'd love to have someone make an effortpost (or even a short post) about the way China would fit in with my analysis of things.
Plenty of small towns are employed by one or two giant factories or industries, these people are at gods mercy if the owner packs up shop and leaves.
This is pretty true. The fates of entire cities in Ohio, Kentucky, Eastern PA etc definitely operate this way
I was in Chiang Mai, and it seemed dead
So fascinated by this take! I found it super exciting and not dead at all. Then again I grew up in the midwestern rust belt so my standard for dead has to be way lower than someone from India.
Yeah, I went to Chiang Mai and Pattaya and it's the same way, we took a boat to a random island in the gulf and there were dozens of food vendors in the port, a beach on the coast we went to had endless food stalls. The density and variety of food options are staggering, you can't walk down a street without some woman cooking the best basil pork or whatever you've ever tried
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