durdenhobbes
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User ID: 1307
durdenhobbes
8d ago
I predict that AI music will never make a significant impact in pop culture. There are millions of decent songs already written every year; the bottleneck has always been distribution. There are simply not enough hours in the day for any single person to listen to even .1 percent of what is produced, and thus they'll listen to whatever is most available that falls within their range of taste. For the bigger pop stars, it's not that their music is any better than the milions of unknowns, it's that they got promoted enough by the industry to gain critical mass. There's also the shared experience factor/marketable personalities/songs seemingly sound better once you've heard them enough times.
durdenhobbes
1mo ago
That's a good point, honestly. I should probably be a little more deliberate with how I address the "T"s. I'm oftentimes more live and let live than my values would otherwise dictate.
durdenhobbes
1mo ago
I'm focusing solely on the pronouns discussion, about which I'm pretty ambivalent (although I understand the slippery slope argument). The hypotheticals you mentioned would have me going to war for my daughters (my fertility is above replacement level).
durdenhobbes
1mo ago
My position is "this whole thing is stupid and way too much energy and ink has been spilled on it". Personally, I refer to people the way they present, but am extremely fatigued by the trans movement in general.
durdenhobbes
1mo ago
I was thinking back to 5 years ago, when Covid was still mostly (in the U.S., at least) considered a China problem. I remember seeing videos all over Reddit of people dropping dead in the streets, apartment complexes being weld-locked shut, etc.
Obviously this doesn't reflect the U.S.-lived version of the pandemic, but I never heard anything more about these videos. Were they ever officially debunked as Chinese propaganda, or even addressed at all?
durdenhobbes
1mo ago
I think that there are trillions of natural phenomena in the universe, and a very finite set of words to describe them. Oftentimes we're forced to use imprecise language as a result, because human language is limited. Ultimately they're just words, and we should stop giving quite so many fucks.
durdenhobbes
1mo ago
Weirdly, I just saw it mentioned on Reddit, 15 seconds before I opened this tab. Guess I'll go research that now, too.
durdenhobbes
2mo ago
Not entirely relevant to your post, but the thing that strikes me the most about the hubbub surrounding USAID is the fact that I'd never even heard of it before (or if I had, it was in a passing enough fashion that it never registered). I consider myself reasonably well-educated, and was at least once considered smart and well-read. I spend an inordinate amount of time reading about politics and culture war issues online, and yet here is this entity that evidently has a massive impact on American interests both at home and abroad, and I'd never given it a single thought prior to this week.
It just makes me wonder how many such power centers like this might be out there.
durdenhobbes
2mo ago
There is theoretically a breaking point, yes, where the match fixing becomes so undeniable that public sentiment shifts and the major sports leagues fall out of favor. I suspect the leagues would simply try to spin it as "we're sports entertainment!" à la wrestling. After all, the WWE sells out stadiums around the world and just got a $5B contract with Netflix.
durdenhobbes
2mo ago
I apply the same structure to "conspiracy theory" evaluation as a prosecutor would to a criminal case: means, motive, and opportunity. The NBA is a multi-billion dollar global enterprise, the value of which rests on delivering a compelling product to as wide an audience as possible. It's a cartel of privately-held organizations operating in lockstep under a commissioner whose job is to maximize the value of the league as a whole. It wouldn't be terribly difficult for a small handful of high-level NBA executives (whether they be corporate office or individual team owners) to work together in the interest of profit maximization at the expense of competitive fairness. Things like this trade, the Lakers-Kings '03 match fixing, Donaghy, etc., all point to what appears to be obvious collusion.
durdenhobbes
2mo ago
side effect of absolutely shredding American international standing.
I'm not being obtuse when I ask: what value, exactly, does American international standing have?
durdenhobbes
2mo ago
I mean, fine. Forget the statistical stuff, and just focus on the top paragraph that I wrote regarding the lived election night experience. You don't agree that it was all pretty fuckin' weird?
durdenhobbes
2mo ago
It's not "evidence", exactly, but having stayed up all night on Election Night 2024, I was getting text messages from my Biden-supporting friends and family members basically throwing in the towel and saying congratulations. Then at midnight or so, when all the major swing states stopped counting because poll workers "needed to sleep", I thought it really strange that all these states in different time zones decided that at the same time. Then when the 4am ballot dumps came in (what happened to sleep?), and I saw every predictor index go from 95%+ Trump to Biden, I was forever convinced that it was a rigged election.
Too many inexplicable abnormalities. There were some significant statistical anomalies that came out later to confirm my suspicions, but they seem to have mostly been scrubbed from the internet.
durdenhobbes
2mo ago
I mean, a majority plurality of voters cast their ballots for Trump 11 weeks ago. It seems like he's got a pretty good sized pool of people to draw from.
durdenhobbes
2mo ago
I can assure you they don't come cheap.
In the paradigm most of us have become accustomed to, this is true. It appears that we're entering a new reality, where AI is likely to make obsolete millions (if not hundreds of millions) of jobs globally. For all the handwringing about bullshit jobs, a great number of people may soon find they preferred having to act busy versus having nothing to do at all.
durdenhobbes
2mo ago
"Kayfabe" is a great way to describe the whole bureaucratic rot; it applies to a good deal of corporate jobs as well.
durdenhobbes
2mo ago
If losing the competent people means also losing the people who are smart enough to maintain the deep state apparatus as the true power center of DC, then this would be a feature, not a bug.
durdenhobbes
2mo ago
That's just it: I don't know who my probable allies are (or if they exist), and finding/mobilizing them will be part of my initially-unilateral effort. Meanwhile I have to live somewhere and send my kids to a school district today.
durdenhobbes
2mo ago
I've never worked in government, but I've witnessed how bloat and apathy have rendered many workers borderline-useless in the private sector—where the profit motive demands efficiency. So I have to suppose that bloat is off the scales where no such motive exists.
durdenhobbes
2mo ago
The grass, in this instance, doesn't grow nearly as quickly as my children do, and I'm not going to gamble their early education on the hope that I can unilaterally drag an underperforming school district out of the mire.
durdenhobbes
2mo ago
Even with the context that he said "my heart goes out to you" emphatically right before he motioned from his heart to the crowd?
durdenhobbes
2mo ago
75-80% non-fiction on whatever topic is of interest at the moment, and the remainder whatever classic/modern classic fiction I may have missed in my first 3.5 decades of reading.
durdenhobbes
2mo ago
I was a voracious reader as a child (best friends with the school librarian-type of nerd), and remained so through my early twenties. At some point in my mid-twenties, though, I consciously considered that I did not typically retain much beyond a nugget or three of wisdom from any given book. For the time invested, I felt like I could learn more about a broader number of topics by simply reading a well-curated selection of articles. Maybe it was my attention span being eroded by social media and technological overload, and this was my attempt to justify it to myself, but I do still largely believe it to be accurate.
I still read a handful of books each year, but I rarely come away feeling that it was a markedly better use of time than reading articles and journals (or even just reading The Motte). About the only major advantage I can identify is that book reading is decidedly higher-status.
durdenhobbes
4mo ago
Feels like a poison-the-well tactic, no pun intended.
Having been unable to contain my inner thoughts and having had my career and social standing indeed torpedoed, I too can't help but feel a large dose of schadenfreude toward the cathedral these days. I hope that with a true swing of the pendulum, more of these silenced voices can join an open dialogue to help rebuild a high-trust society from the ashes of the torn country we have today.
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