dr_analog
razorboy
No bio...
User ID: 583
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
Ha. Amusingly, I had a friend who was consistently betting against Tesla on short-term puts but he forgot to renew them at some point this last go-around and that was right before the recent huge collapse happened.
Still too hard to bet against Elon.
I guess I consider the odds that your online communications will be intercepted and used against you are much, much more unlikely than your house burning down or being in a car accident.
I think this is because in the back of my mind I don't expect to receive at any time a call that we must start pitching molotov cocktails at the courts and then escape the state's retribution, whereas I suspect deep down a lot of people harbor that feeling. Or some other fanciful counter-cultural notion. And in that case I will regret not having swung everything over to Signal several years prior.
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
Sure, but there's a >99.999% chance the people worried about this don't do anything edgy or counter-culture enough for the FBI to look twice at.
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
I don't have an opinion on AI yet, but then again I don't understand why people are acting like OpenAI == Elon Musk
I think his early investment in OpenAI shows vision even if he did leave them for dead for not bending their knee to him.
Also, because FSD is amazing? It's pretty reliable! I mean it needs to be, like, 4-5 orders of magnitude more reliable and it's unclear if they can achieve that with their current tech stack but it's still one of the most remarkable AI achievements ever to have a car that can drive itself for an entire day, using only cameras, in any arbitrary environment and maybe only kill one pedestrian. I would absolutely say they're well positioned to capture a portion of an AI market.
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
I agree, many billion and trillion dollar empires are built on companies finding the cost of migration unbearable.
Microsoft probably should've sold Office for $1 for the entire 1990s.
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
I know how trolling works. I just have a hard time imagining teenagers using n-word today is all.
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
Hasn't China developed reusable rocket tech? ( despite not owning a single emerald mine!)
Not that I would expect the CCP to be awesome with allocating capital, but if you assume they're not completely incompetent then it would blow up the theory that SpaceX can't possibly gain economic advantage from it.
The coolest thing he's done recently is fire most of Twitter's staff, but we all kind of knew that most people weren't doing anything real at these companies, he just proved it
He helped other tech companies learn as well. Facebook, Google, and friends announced big layoffs after this display. A true visionary.
I mean they chickened out and only did 10-20% instead of 75%, but still.
I remember in the late 90s and early 00s, reading many a diatribe about how Microsoft was done. They then went on to grow by 10x and are almost hip again.
I'm not sure what changed all that much. They were just well positioned to tax computer industry growth and it grew massively. Hardly anyone can point to a brilliant innovation at Microsoft during this period.
To me, being a futurist brand guy that's well positioned to capture value in the growth of the transition to EVs, development of space, and AI is a pretty fantastic position. And unlike Microsoft, Elon still has big bets to make.
Speaking of which, have you made any bets?
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
One of my complaints about privacy and digital hygiene obsession that's so in vogue with early middle aged white people is that they all appear to believe that they're subversives, potential enemies of the state, and that they best adopt Signal for e2e messaging privacy, and use VPNs to avoid tracking, and limit their socials, etc.
There are other reasons to care about digital hygiene, but the most anodyne people worrying that the FBI is maintaining a dossier about them is probably an effect of five decades of media obsession with counter-culture and rebellion.
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
They are, at the minimum, exciting new brand development opportunities.
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
In my mind, right-wing is the true counterculture.
Can you say more about why you think that?
I was too young to see it happen but I've heard it from a lot of people.
My sources would be me ex-post facto searching for links that confirm gossip that I've heard. I think that would be a waste of your time tbh and I'll just say what I know.
Giuliani famously started rigorously enforcing cabaret laws in NYC, shutting dance clubs down.
There were similar pressures in Chicago though I think not Detroit.
(and if you were a techno producer-DJ living in NYC in the 90s you would probably prefer to move to Berlin than Detroit)
I also dated an older woman who was a record artist (like, a person that illustrates vinyl records) who said all of her techno clients moved to Berlin during this period.
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
Yes it had just been preppies up until the underground party. But nevermind that link is fake. So far just preppies?
Ugh. Looks like I have been duped. It was too good to check.
Part of the reason I was susceptible to this is because I was at a techno party in a junkyard in Berlin a few years ago and someone passed a bottle of Jagerneister to me and I asked what this big iron cross on bottle was supposed to mean. The guy who handed the bottle to me got up and screamed "it means I am Adolf Hitler!" and everyone nearby laughed and said HEIL HITLER!
Confused, but not sure what else to do, I took a drink and we moved on.
Anyway, the idea that there might be a Nazi-for-the-lulz-at-the-minimum undercurrent in German youth was seeded in me then.
There's clearly an urge to troll.
That all said, my bad.
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
It was cracked down on in the US in the late 90s due to adjacency with organized crime. Techno producers had to just up and move away from NYC to Berlin to continue their work. I'm not really sure what it was like in the 90s in Germany vs now, but it seems like it's all over the place in Berlin today.
EDIT: my club HOR linked turned out to be fake. How embarrassing. This protest movement probably does not have hipster appeal.
In Germany, it's illegal to sing songs that can be considered hate speech or aligned with Nazi ideology.
Several days ago, at a beach club in Northern Germany, a video went viral of a bunch of drunken Germans singing along to dance music track with lyrics that say "Germans for Germany, Foreigners Out" https://youtube.com/watch?v=xZZztdyd0PQ
Authorities have announced criminal investigations in response, though this does not appear to be silencing the hipster youth of Germany from enjoying the song. More recently, this popped up in an "underground" techno broadcast at Club HÖR https://x.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1794390427388588274
Is this an actual hipster event? Yes. They have their origins in illegal parties being done in basements or warehouses where everyone is hurrying to get their dance on before the authorities shut it down. Though they're much more popular now, they have kept the subversive raw industrial space motif.
Isn't this scene aligned with gay and otherwise leftist social mores? Yes. Typically, German techno is LGBTQ-coded and events can feature anything-goes public displays of sexual activity.
Are they just dropping the track because its beat is sick? Absolutely not. The song was originally produced by an incredibly cheesy Italian producer-DJ as a club anthem. In the hipster spaces this is as cringe as it comes. You would have to kill yourself if you dropped this as a place like HÖR. Perhaps the sickening cheesiness of the song is having its sign flipped because the insipid romancey lyrics were replaced with illegal German nationalism?
Hot anti-immigration thoughtcrime breaking out into the subversive mainstream but still fashioning-itself-as-underground techno scene in Germany is an unexpected development, though it did not come without foreshadowing. The "far right" Alternative for Deutschland party (AfD), is apparently now the most popular party among 14-29 year olds.
via Google Translate:
According to a study, adolescents and young adults are more dissatisfied and are turning more towards the AfD than in previous comparative studies. 22 percent of the 14- to 29-year-olds surveyed would vote for the AfD if there were a federal election now. That is more than twice as many as two years ago, according to a representative survey presented on Tuesday for the study "Youth in Germany 2024". In 2022, nine percent voted for the AfD, compared to twelve percent last year.
For most of its life, the AfD party was previously associated with square, middle-aged, clearly uncool xenophobes.
The parallels between this and the alt-right in the US around the early Trump era are noticeable. It appeared that the youth of America was so tired of cringe progressivism that their parents were into that the alt-right acted as a kind of new punk, though in the US the alt-right evaporated fairly quickly after Trump was elected.
In Germany in 2024, aligning with nationalism may be analogous to a kind of new punk that will definitely freak out your parents and set you apart from the older lamer generations. Can this translate into a revolution? As above, being the most popular party among young people in Germany doesn't say much because young people are not the biggest voting bloc, and unlike in the US there are many more political parties.
Still, this is probably going to stump historians of techno for years to come. (Or not! Since my hipster club link is fake. The other one with the preppies is probably real though)
My kid's school district is hosting a Pride parade. They put out a call for counter-protestors because the local Christian group is picketing it complaining about abortion being murder or something.
For some reason I find this all so absurd. Not the Christians I don't care about that, though apparently some kids are traumatized by "the hate" (that some people think abortion = murder) being expressed is an added facet. No, more like the... unbelievable cringeness of a school district doing a Pride parade?
When I was in school I pretty much considered it
- prison, and
- the people operating this prison were the last people I looked to for approval or insight
The freaks aren't the lesbian bi queer gay or trans (or straight) kids. The freaks are the people who run the place. It is a category error to read anything more into it. I can't imagine anyone feeling down on their lifestyle or sexuality because school disapproves. Like worrying about what ants of you naked.
I consider this the only healthy attitude for navigating school.
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
Well, if they fail in Ukraine because the West pours in more support and repels them it's not exactly guaranteed that they would stop at the borders of Ukraine 2013 is it? What's to stop them from continuing their march into Belgorod or the rest of Russia? Russia's elites can just sit around and say "eh probably not going to happen" but are they 100% certain?
His rationale is that Russia is paranoid about being invaded by land and they sense the future of their state power is waning and this is their last chance to really build some buffer states. He says it's not really sane because the odds of the West invading Russia are nil but not exactly a guarantee that this can never happen in the future. I don't know how much I believe it but... it explains invading Ukraine better than anything else? Especially if they thought conquering Ukraine would be easy.
The colourful "Ukrainians as cannon fodder" detail seems to go even further in that direction ("...and by the way, if any Ukrainian readers think that you should just stop fighting and make an arrangement with Russia because better red than dead, let it be known that the Russians will kill you anyway"). As of right now, even RFERL does not seem to go beyond the claim that people in already-captured territories are incentivised to enlist voluntarily. An implicit claim that they are pretending and the mask will come off once/if we let them win is basically unfalsifiable.
I simply meant that a pro-tracted war with Ukraine would bleed Russia dry if they didn't succeed. But if they do succeed they could add an entire nation to its balance sheet. A successful conquest of Ukraine makes them more dangerous in a lot of ways.
Well, yes, I'm not saying this war was good, but if Russia was hell-bent on capturing Ukraine anyway, making it as incredibly high cost yet still as drawn out and miserable as possible without giving them any rousing good story for using nukes is a good, relatively safe card to play.
Peter Zeihan, a global strategist, argues that Russia's victory in Ukraine may lead them to march on Poland and threaten nukes there if we don't acquiesce. I don't quite understand why we would but that's not a great escalation if they feel emboldened from winning in Ukraine and using Ukrainian territory and resources and people as cannon fodder. Again, this would have happened either way I guess.
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
Well, as bad as this is for Ukraine, I think the best outcome for the world is for Russia to be stuck in a frustrating, endless simmering war in Ukraine that's just a black hole for resources that they neither win nor lose that falls out of the news.
I believe the US knows handing Russia a resounding defeat means they're at risk of launching nukes so they go down in a blaze of glory. But if it's just an endless frozen super boring conflict? The heroic "last stand" time never arrives.
All I'm saying is the CEO of the company that developed and deployed FSD has an obvious edge in AI and is well positioned to capitalize on it.
More options
Context Copy link