magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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27d ago
I don't think he's going to become dictator. I think he wouldn't turn it down. I don't think he has a plan to become dictator, because that would be too much planning.
To add on to this for @SlowBoy's benefit: lots of people would take kingship if it were offered. I would, if I were immortal and had some method of avoiding the incentive traps.
Most of them never try to take over a country.
magic9mushroom
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28d ago
I know what you're thinking of, but the Matthew/Luke passages aren't the only lists of random irrelevant people. The Old Testament has plenty of excessive detail (there's a reason people cite Leviticus and Deuteronomy but more rarely Numbers; Numbers is called that because it's almost an accounting ledger).
magic9mushroom
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29d ago
Utilitarianism doesn't work when you're playing an intelligent opponent.
The better formulation is "utilitarianism doesn't work if you're an idiot, because then you can't properly calculate utility". Second-order effects like this are supposed to be included in utilitarian calculations; the fact that a lot of people are too stupid to do this doesn't make the theory wrong, just a bad fit for them.
magic9mushroom
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30d ago
· Edited 30d ago
The only way, the only way to convince the Democrats that wokeness is Not Okay is to rub their noses in it like a dog. Smack them on the snout with a rolled up newspaper and proclaim "BAD!" in a thunderous shout. In a perfect world this would never have been required. In a better world they would have learned the lesson in 2016. We do not live in those worlds, we live in this one, and in this one they are still on the woke train. So I will vote for the man whose re-election constitutes the philosophical equivalent of smacking the Democratic Party on the nose with a rolled up newspaper before grinding it into the stain on the carpet.
They did learn a lesson from 2016; Biden the 2020 candidate was considerably more moderate. The problem is that Biden the 2021-2024 President, or rather his administration, wasn't moderate at all, because apparently the lesson they learned was "fake being moderate on the campaign trail and then exploit it once in power".
I think your only hope on this path is that the Democratic machine politicians are pragmatic enough to be willing to appeal to the centre and far-sighted enough to realise that tricking them is not a long-term solution and powerful enough to force the SJer groundswell into line; I'm not rating that very highly.
I think the ultimate way to deal with this has to include shattering all of SJ's walled gardens, so that they get to start seeing rightists first-hand as people, and so that their Authority foundation stops locking onto HR ladies and similar types. This, admittedly, does require power, and lots of it.
magic9mushroom
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30d ago
Part of the issue I have with Trump is that if he goes senile or has a stroke, but does not clinically die, he's unlikely to 25A himself and it's not immediately obvious that Vance and his cabinet would dare to invoke 25A section 4 given their voter base's immense personal loyalty to Trump (cf. "Hang Mike Pence").
Of course, this mostly matters to me because my P(WWIII) is high; outside of that scenario, it's not as big a deal.
magic9mushroom
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30d ago
Failed my duty as eldest sibling to continue the family line (and my younger brothers certainly aren't going to do it).
I assume this means acquired infertility. There's research going on about making sperm out of stem cells, and that should circumvent all forms of infertility (except being dead).
magic9mushroom
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30d ago
- Elon Musk doesn't actually own a majority stake in Tesla.
- My understanding is that Tesla and SpaceX owe a significant chunk of their value to Elon Musk's leadership, which means one can't just steal them out from under him without causing much of that value to disintegrate.
- As @Corvos noted, at the governmental scale money is less relevant than power, and there's power in Twitter (which is, of course, why Musk bought it in the first place). There is particularly power in Twitter to make or break a full set of the big platforms for censorship purposes - in other words, if one supports or opposes SJ (though in the latter case, one presumably would be cheering Musk; as Zvi put it, "Musk spent $44 billion dollars so the rest of us didn’t have to. That’s pretty sweet").
magic9mushroom
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30d ago
· Edited 30d ago
First one seems pretty unlikely*; what's the lizardman's constant for Manifold?
The second one... well, the obvious motivation for somebody (not necessarily the USA) to arrest him would be "to get enough leverage on him to get him to sell/give Twitter to someone more pliable" (this being akin to rubber-hose cryptanalysis or the Pierre-sur-Haute fiasco, and lawfare without custody being insufficient to the task due to his fuck-you money), although that would be such a huge heel move that I couldn't even begin to guess at the repercussions.
*The problem is that to resolve positive, the SCOTUS has to rule him disqualified, and that means they have to pack the court in less than three months (because this SCOTUS won't do that unless he commits obvious treason, which he has no reason to do as President-elect, and if Trump takes office the court can't be packed against him).
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Would you mind giving me confidence levels on your predictions of:
- Trump won't be declared the winner;
- If Trump is declared the winner, he'll not take office;
- If Harris takes office, Elon Musk will be arrested in the next year?
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
His nominal net worth was less in early 2024 than it was when he bought Twitter; it's somewhat more now, but it's still nothing compared to the ridiculous rate at which it grew before that.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
The literal Fair Game notice was/is a Scientology term; L. Ron Hubbard would declare someone "fair game", and this meant "use any and all means to ruin this person" (frivolous lawsuits, slander, illegal spying and leaking to tabloids, framing for crimes...).
There seems to be something akin to a Fair Game notice (though presumably not with that exact name) in place against Elon Musk following his purchase of Twitter (and gutting of its censorship bureau); loads of different federal agencies have done things to screw over unrelated Musk businesses (the one I recall off the top of my head is the FCC retracting the rural-Internet grant to Starlink, on the basis that it hadn't met the target yet, despite the target not being due for another couple of years; there's a dissent from that order which lists a bunch of others, though I don't know all the details, as well as noting that Biden was fairly open about this). My understanding is that this is half of the reason Musk's star has been waning recently (the other half being that Twitter isn't his sort of business and it's distracting him).
As noted, due to Twitter being among other things a news service, this is in direct opposition to freedom of the press (as well as impartial justice). You can plausibly argue that this is significantly worse than Watergate due to the sheer scale of the corrupt operation (the Sedition Act was still worse, but that was 225 years ago). But, uh, this seems to have not been a huge scandal, which has disturbing implications about the USA.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
I mean, of the Trump-voters here, I'd say probably about 30-40% are also living in Trump-world (which totally explains their intentions to vote for him), and the rest are so shit-scared of Kamala Harris that they think Trump's still the lesser evil*.
(I'm not a Trump-voter or a Harris-voter, because I'm not American. I'm grudgingly hoping Harris wins, but my main concern is totally orthogonal to any "normal" politics concerns; I'm concerned about WWIII and Trump's advanced age, although I'd far prefer Vance to Harris as leader of the free world.)
*If I had to point to a single thing as "if it were anyone but Trump opposing her this would be a slam-dunk", I'd point to the Fair Game notice on Elon Musk in retaliation for his uncensoring of Twitter. This is an ongoing attempt to censor the press for direct partisan advantage by use of government force - the sort of thing that can easily spiral into one-party state via media control - and it happened under Biden who's known to be more moderate than Harris. Frankly, I'm deeply disturbed by the extent to which this hasn't been a massive scandal.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
I think the steelman basically looks like "Trump was living in Trump-world where there is massive fraud, and in Trump-world his actions were justified because the alternative amounted to the end of democracy, so it wasn't unvirtuous for him to try it though it was correct for him to get slapped down".
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Just been prescribed (dilute) nitroglycerine cream for haemorrhoids, and it sure does hit like a truck. Pounding headache within a minute of sticking it up there, although thankfully it ebbs fast.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
IQ selection is one of the less-dangerous possibilities in this field, except insofar as it potentiates any mistakes made WRT personality. Selecting for Dark Triad (intentionally or not) and/or selecting against Asperger's seem like the most obvious traps; they've mentioned they won't let people directly do the former (which, well, good) but the article's unclear on the latter.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
This might include, for example, a pre-event propaganda campaign providing initial narrative buildup or international legitimization for the immeninent actions, particularly propaganda emphasizing the historical nature of rectifying the century of humiliation.
They've been doing that for decades, including to Western media with extortion via access to the Chinese market and diplomatically via bribing the countries that recognise the ROC to switch. Certainly, this hence isn't something that was in my court for "they're about to do it now" (and I didn't claim it as such), but I don't think it's in your court either as a sign that will be there but wasn't. It's a sign that is always there (well, I suppose it'll stop being there when they go for it and either win or get "you are not allowed to keep insisting that Taiwan isn't a country" rammed down their throats the way the Opium Wars ended with "you are not allowed to keep insisting that Western nations are barbarians begging for your scraps" rammed down their throats, but at that point this discussion will be moot), and I'm not sure what good it would do them to increase the amount of it that is going out right before an invasion.
Now, that aside: most of the things you mention are things I didn't check because I don't know how to/have access to check them, which means I couldn't take them into account before making my decision of whether to warn. If you had mentioned them to me at the start of this conversation rather than literally 100% of your first two posts' reasoning being (significantly-although-not-wholly-inaccurate) bulverism of my mental state and absurdity heuristic, I would probably have retracted immediately. And, if you either teach me how to find out such things, or agree to tell me such things if I get worried again, I can take them into account before deciding whether to issue warnings in future (though it will likely be some time before that happens)!
You chose to treat me as a drooling insane child rather than a reasonable person not in possession of all the facts. This was not only immensely rude, it was useless; we just went around in circles for six posts until you actually started saying something meaningful. What the fuck was the point of all that?
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
How would you go about getting more people to live rurally?
(I mean, the answer is going to boil down to "incentives", but I'm asking which incentives you would think most cost-effective, since you think this one isn't.)
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
By "the government's actual goals", do you just mean what they asked for, or are we talking bigger-picture like "get more people to live rurally"?
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
I don't want tax dollars given to Starlink, or anyone else, to subsidize rural broadband.
To clarify: is this because you want rural people to not have broadband (e.g. because you want to keep SJ away from them), or because you don't think this is something the government should be meddling in (e.g. because you think this is basically pork)?
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Uh, uranium's an actinide (and thus lithophile), the thing I just said is highly concentrated in Earth's crust (see e.g. here for Sol System vs. here for Earth's crust; note that this somewhat understates the effect because both are normed to silicon being 10^6 and silicon is mildly concentrated in the crust compared to undifferentiated rocky bodies/epically concentrated in Earth as a whole compared to icy bodies). Sorry if that wasn't clear.
The yellow region in the second graph is the highly-siderophilic elements (plus tellurium), which are strongly depleted in the crust, and indeed osmium's one of them.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
One thing about Mars I particularly want to preserve is the possibility of checking for lithopanspermia. There are a limited number of locations in Sol system capable of checking that hypothesis.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Obtaining rare earths in a place where the toxic lakes the size of Delaware don’t matter would certainly be a benefit for the environment. If we can stop being retarded about building nuclear uranium supplies might be worth it too.
I will point out here that lithophile elements are literally the worst things to get from space as far as relative difficulty of mining them goes. Atmophiles are found in much-greater quantity in the outer system. Siderophiles (which include literal gold) are far more accessible on asteroids because on Earth they sank into the core. But lithophiles (which include rare earths and actinides) are strongly concentrated in the crusts of planets; Earth is a great place to find them, only matched by other rocky, differentiated bodies (which have notable gravity wells and frequently atmospheres greatly increasing the expense of sending stuff back).
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
The world does not function as you think it does,
You seem to have been correct about this incident.
Is there some reason I should go with the hypothesis "Dean knows what the CPC is up to better than I do" rather than the hypothesis "Dean is a Rock Cultist who was right this time"? I'm open to persuasion of the former, but there are lots of Rock Cultists, including many smug Rock Cultists.
My model of the PLA drills around Taiwan is that one of them is not going to be a drill, and the rest are both practice runs and decoys to make people think the real one is another drill and thus gain tactical advantage. To guess which ones might be real, I look at various indications regarding their chances of success and consider whether enough of them point in the direction of "this is the best shot they'll get for a while". March/April/October is one sign, since those are the best months for amphibious operations (though they do have other options). Unusual/temporary weakness in US leadership is another. Unusual/temporary weakness in Western militaries is another. Mood in Taiwan is another, as I certainly accept that the PRC would rather take Taiwan peacefully, though this one's basically stuck in the "on" position at this point since it's now been years since the crash of unificationist sentiment to lizardman following the Hong Kong fiasco (i.e. they have had time to plan and prepare to follow "non-peaceful means" now that the "possibilities for a peaceful re-unification [are] completely exhausted"; quotes are from the PRC's Anti-Secession Law).
The 2024 US election cycle was predictable as a shitshow since 2021, so I predicted well in advance that October 2024 would be a solid time to invade. Biden going senile (and not seeking re-election) and the West re-arming due to Ukraine also create the potential of a temporary vulnerability. So I considered it plausible that this might be the real one; this is the best chance they have for a while (until 2027 or so, unless something goes very wrong in the USA, but even if it does that won't be predictable so to be as good a shot it'd have to be very bad). I knew that they might not do it, and I made that quite clear.
Vague mockery is not going to convince me. You have to be able to spot and explain a problem in the above argument if you are going to convince me that we didn't just get lucky.
Oh. I didn't consider that because it sounded potentially fixable and thus not an already-determined failure.
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