greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
User ID: 68
There was some positive feedback in the news article I read. I found it a bit surprising just how much the rural/urban divide has grown. I've often lived between the two areas with my schools often having kids living in high density housing along with kids raising barn animals. My parents preferred living rurally, but still had to live close to cities to find jobs.
I posit the greatest post-war cultural divide in America is along educational attainment, not race or ethnicity or even politics. College-educated Americans and everyone else may as well be distinct species for all practical purposes. They live in different neighborhoods, hold different values, their children attend different schools, etc. This is could be related to the so-called 30 point IQ communications gap, but also cultural capital and literal capital. Charles Murray has written a lot about this.
Had a shower thought today about how some people (like Joe Rogan) thought Covid would bring us closer together as we worked to solve and fight a collective problems.
I cannot recall anyone ever believing this. From the onset of the virus it had a dividing effect as policy was split almost perfectly along political lines.
I'd predict that a widespread solar flare that knocked out communication networks would probably leave us all a little happier than Covid.
I would depend on the initial message or response. 911 was an exception in that it had the effect of bringing people together of opposing ideological lines, but the over-politization of Covid policy had the opposite effect. Had the left not immediately defaulted to masks and lockdowns and was so unyielding or unwilling to compromise, maybe it would not have been as polarizing. This shows the importance of the initial message after a catastrophe. Bush and others were smart to jump on a message of unification right after 911 instead of "you must comply".
OTOH, a pandemic is multiplicative and sensitive to initial values, hence the need for a swift and rapid initial response, but this also makes people want to push back, too, at the imposition, especially when social distancing and masks may not work as well as initially advertised.
The alt-right lost in the sense it has been subsumed overtaken by the trad/norm-core right and aesthetic on twitter, especially since 2022. The alt-right became associated with low status behaviors and mannerisms, like LARPing or the archetypical basement-dwelling keyboard warrior, and subsequently fell out of favor. Few things convey low status like neck-bearded neo Nazis bulging out of their uniforms out of breath as they plod down the street (even if this hardly describes every alt-righter, being associated with it hurt the brand badly). It also did not help that its members kept being arrested and its online communities, social media accounts, and payment processing accounts shut down, making it hard to raise funds or coordinate.
Elon's Twitter buyout and restructuring in 2022-2023 made the alt-right less relevant too, as everything became viewed through a woke vs. anti-woke lens. But the alt-right does not as readily fit within the woke vs. anti-woke paradigm, being that it also has intellectual roots in critical theory (e.g. Frankfurt School), fusionism, accelerationism, Durkheim theory and the like. The most popular accounts on post-Elon Twitter are more interested in owning the libs and posting viral clips of societal decay, like shoplifting footage or Apple store looting, than deep intellectual discussion or critique of society.
The norm-core right combines anti-woke and far-right trad values with 'normie' aspects of socialization, hence 'norm-core'. Whereas alt-right sought to subvert or exclude itself from mainstream society, the norm-core reconciles the contradiction between holding anti-woke views but ingratiating oneself and even thriving in a mainstream woke society, like good-paying careers, attentiveness to physical appearance (hence the importance of lifting and gym), civic participation (elections are very important) and family.
The norm-core right also tend to care much more about activism and political participation, in opposite of the alt-right that relies on memetic warfare like anonymous shit posting accounts on 4chan or twitter. The norm-core tend to use real names online and embrace civic participation and the democratic process, like voting for local elections and participation in school boards and meetings. Christianity is also very important, with a 'white pill' message of revival or hope, as opposed to the nihilism, secularism, or paganism of the alt-right. This also contributed to the norm-core being higher status.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
7mo ago
Because "three-dimensional characters" are key, and I'm too autistic to get into another person's head well enough to write believable human beings
writing advice is useless, so do not worry about things like character development and the like. no one who writes a great story originally set out to check those boxes of what constitutes good writing, and following such advice will not make a story any good.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
7mo ago
Main point is that the houses were not that much cheaper relative to now, and the interests rates were murderous. Enjoy!
I agree 100% with this. Shameless link plug: The Myth of Wealthy Boomers (why they are not much ‘better off’ compared to later generations)
The boomers were not as exceptionally lucky or fortuitous as commonly assumed. Like any generation, there is a lot of variance or variability in terms of SES, as we're talking large populations of people . Despite having 50+ years of post-war prosperity and a supposed head start, still, many boomers live in poverty or don't have enough for retirement.
True, homes were a lot cheaper in the '80s and '70s, but interest rates were much higher, mortgages more expensive and shorter duration, and much lower inflation-adjusted salaries. No 6-figure white collar jobs for boomers back then. Adjusted for inflation, a competitive boomer job may have paid the equivalent of of 60-80k today, not $300k + comp.
Moreover, home ownership rates are unchanged over the past 60 years, at around 60-65%.
How is it a glitch having access to new medicines? Expensive drugs but more drugs is better than options only being limited to Tylenol or Asprin, which is what you'd get if there was no profit incentive. No one pays out of pocket for life saving drugs anyway. I am perfectly fine with the makers of Ozempic and Mounjaro making billions if it means reducing obesity and making people's lives better. Americans have high expectations for healthcare; they want some cutting-edge drug that costs tens of thousands of dollars a month to add maybe a few months of life for terminal cancer. Much of healthcare is for end of life spending.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
8mo ago
Domestic brands are not thriving, but not doing that badly either . I think the post-2013 era big, luxury trucks and SUVs, which have high markups and became especially popular post-Covid, saved them from certain demise in the early to mid 2000s. Japanese brands cannot compete on size.
This isn't true. The stock prices of the Big 3 have limped along. GM, once the 2nd most valuable U.S. company, now has a market cap only 2% the size of NVIDIA. And, if the Big 3 haven't gone bankrupt again, it's only by jettisoning high-paid union labor. Michigan, once a well-off state, now ranks 39 out of 50 in household income, falling well behind former hick states like Texas and North Carolina.
A lot of this can be explained by valuation, which is not the same as earnings. Tech companies tend to trade at higher valuations/multiples compared to auto.
The big news this weekend was that Trump had a rally and said that, should he not be elected, the U.S. auto industry would be overrun with cheap Chinese imports. He used the word "bloodbath".
This is smart rhetoric by Trump to help win those swing voters , like Michigan. Similar to wall and other promises, not much will come of it should he win though.
Trump to his credit does not flip flop too much on abortion. He has never been pro-life, and will not cave to this issue despite pressure from religious organizations. Trump is right to ignore this issue and focus on immigration and the economy, as is Richard Hanania that abortion hardliners turn off moderates.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
8mo ago
People on twitter shit on woke American universities and lowered academic standards in the humanities, and rightfully so, but other countries have different but possibly even worse problems too-like massive amounts of academic fraud that goes unpunished or ignored. This includes plagiarism, auto-generated papers, and citation rings. Same for STEM, which is not immune to this trend of dilution seen elsewhere. I have evidence of citation rings on the arXiv computer science categories, in which there there seems to be very little value or research being produced--just authors citing each other's weak papers and collaborating in the production of said papers to pad CVs. This way more common in the computer science section compared to those 'soft' humanities, in which it can still be reasonably assumed that the putative authors still write their own papers without needing 10+ co-authors for a 10 page paper with 50 citations. It is ridiculous.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
8mo ago
compared to being in jail for rest of your life? that is probably worse for your kids
you only know those who get caught, i guess. Not uncommonly the feds will take over mixers or dark markets to see the money flow. The govt. is very dogged though.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
8mo ago
Monero is fine if your adversary is not that determined or does not have much resources. The feds however have demonstrated some capability at tracing Monero. Criminals do this and they are still caught. They use all sorts of strategies, like you describe, of mixing through Monero, other chains, back to Monero, etc. Of course, we only hear about the guys who get caught. It may be possible there is some way to do it.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-men-charged-operating-25m-cryptocurrency-ponzi-scheme
Saffron and Mazzotta also allegedly conspired to obstruct official proceedings by concealing assets, concealing or destroying evidence, and falsifying records. The defendants also allegedly conspired to conceal the source and location of victims’ cryptocurrency investments through various means, including using methods known as “blockchain hopping” and through services known as “mixers” or “tumblers” that are designed to prevent cryptocurrency tracing.
A sufficiently determined adversary can trace the origin of coins passed through tumblers. Also, tumbers can 'dirty' crypto by mixing them with fraudulent coins, making them blacklisted in the processes by merchants who refuse to accept tumbled coins.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
8mo ago
There is evidence federal agencies have reconstructed Monero transactions. Monero is better but still has holes. https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-seizure-record-doj-crypto-tracing-monero/
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
8mo ago
sorry, i meant to post this in culture war. I originally made a brief post and then i kept adding to it and hit submit before realizing i had posted it in the Friday thread.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
8mo ago
It can be traced. the only fresh bitcoin is coins direct from miner or major exchange.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
8mo ago
this is what an NFT accomplishes . it is why it has been accused of being used for money laundering.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
8mo ago
But the way that modern KYC / transaction analysis tools have advanced makes it much more difficult to hide the spending of this money than ever before.
exactly. gold arguably would be better
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
8mo ago
oh hey I bought a hard drive on ebay with an old wallet on it so I put it in my coinbase account...the options are endless,
nope. the blockchain can reveal where it came from
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
8mo ago
Standards of living overseas are not that bad. A low per-capita GDP is negated to some extent by greater purchasing power in dollars, so your ill-gotten gains go very far. Those countries have electricity, internet access, plumbing, cars, public transport, airport, etc. It's not like Somalia or something.
Most of the people that were recruited as double agents in the 50s and 60s, certainly in higher-IQ positions, really believed. They believed they were serving global revolution, serving a superior system, and that the sooner the USSR outcompeted the West and the West had its revolution, the better. Many genuinely believed the above would happen in their lifetime, very soon even, such that even if they were discovered and as such either imprisoned or forced to officially defect and flee, they would return home before long.
nowadays high-IQ tech-focused people have better career options than espionage or working for federal agencies. Second, the Cold War is long over. Third, the technology has gotten way better at detecting espionage. Everything is traced. Canary drops are major problem. The biggest concern is not govt. agents leaking stuff, but instead tech or defense company employees doing the leaking.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
8mo ago
Intelligence is like opsec: you only have to be wrong once and the enemy only has to be right once. You can get everything right but overlook a key detail. A case could be made that 911 and the Iraq War were failures: in the former missing the threat of Bin Laden (an NBA player, of all people, warned of the threat of Bin Laden in 1996) or failing to stop the hijackers, and regarding Iraq, a garbage-in-garbage-out problem.
US intelligence publicly told everyone that Russia was about to invade Ukraine weeks before it happened
Given that they got Iraq and 911 wrong, this does not prove competence, rather that they are hit and miss.
Of course, as you point out, successful intelligence by definition being covert does not leave any footprint, whereas intelligence failures are public owing to the consequences of said failure.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
8mo ago
Who else finds the stupidpol people or position to be inconsistent? The premise sounds good in theory: disaffected leftists and Marxists who believe that identify politics distracts from workers' issues and protects corporations. Fair enough. But I have found that in the comments it's constant shit-tests and questioning the motives or loyalty of others, either as not being insufficiently Marxist or , being a covert liberal, etc.
Or, second, if you accidently slaughter one of their sacred cows, even if it's otherwise consistent with the idpol or pro-workers position. For example, I argue that climate change is a distraction from workers' issues, but this steps on the feet of leftists who believe climate change is equally important or a crisis. So which is it? If liberal elites use climate change as a pretext for power, all while the cost or responsibility of fixing climate change is placed on non-elites (elites will not be living in pods or having to reduce their footprint in any meaningful sense), much like identity politics, then is not consistent to oppose the climate change narrative too?
They come off overall as disagreeable argumentative people. It's like they want to be mad at someone or something, and no one can ever be good enough or live up to some unobtainable ideal of being correctly anti-identity politics. They have become the very thing they oppose. The experience is like walking on egg shells . It's like this with other political niches too, not to only pick on them.
Regarding climate change, I am agnostic on the issue, but I don't think the left is being intellectually honest. It's a fallacious argument, specifically, the argumentum ad ignorantiam, in that any deviation of 'normal' weather or temperatures can be interpreted as evidence of climate change, which makes it impossible to ever falsify it. The burden of proof is shifted to skeptics to disprove climate change, which is impossible to do if anything can be summoned as evidence of climate change. It used to be called global warming; when that failed to stick, it was rebranded as climate change.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
8mo ago
That seems like too much blood
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
8mo ago
So many links. There is a lot of stuff that can happen. Yet I don't think the worst fears have come anywhere close to happening. Deep fakes are a problem but so far only for financial gain than politics. Google's Gemini error was more comedic relief than a threat to civilization. The SEC and other agencies are going to adapt, like they have to Bitcoin, the world wide web, and other technologies. AI generated content is still relatively easily detected by people who are astute enough. But this may change as the technology improves. I think the productivity or economic penetration of AI will not live up to expectations though. So far the only adoption Dall-e has seen are those obvious AI-generated images on everyone's Substack blog.
@ HlynkaCG would sometimes drop in with snarky replies to my posts and it was annoying not being able to return fire in kind. Rhetoric is a part of arguing. Being limited to dialectic is like fighting with one hand behind one's back. His time had long come to face the consequences of his incessant rule-skirting. He had gotten so many exceptions.
One suggestion is to form a tribunal of sorts of 5 or so top Motte users. This group would convene every month to award or remove strikes assigned to users based on conduct for the preceding month. The voters would anonymous and contain comments or feedback about what rules were broken and how to improve. If someone accumulates 5 or so strikes they are banned. Anyone can view how many strikes they have. For example, if someone has 4/5 strikes that would be an indication of a need to improve.
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