quiet_NaN
16hr ago
The phrasing originally used by @sodiummuffin was:
cryptocurrency companies were at serious risk of the government banning or heavily restricting key features of their business
I think that a total 'crypto' ban, i.e. making bitcoin as illegal for Americans to own as cocaine is, was always unlikely. But if you are a crypto company, you are vulnerable to far lesser government interference.
As an analogy, suppose your industry is in the business of selling ammonium nitrate to private customers over the counter. Some of you customers may use it as fertilizer in their gardens, others may use it to make stuff go boom. Business is great with both groups. Sure, sometimes a factory goes boom, but other companies will pop up to satisfy the market demand.
To destroy your industry, the government does not have to outright ban NH4NO3. They can simply step in and pass regulations. Suddenly, "able to figure out how to run Haber-Bosch" is no longer sufficient qualification for manufacturing it. Instead, there are safety standard, certifications, audits, et cetera. And the same goes for selling: you are suddenly required to check that your customers are certified and have a legitimate use. While the regulations might technically allow someone to get certified and buy 100g of AN to fertilize his front yard, the process is designed with bigtime farmers in mind, and nobody is going to bother spending thousands of dollars for that. In fact, anyone buying small quantities of the stuff is a big red flag.
So while AN is technically legal but regulated, your business of cheaply manufacturing it and selling it in hardware stores to the public is suddenly no longer viable.
(The analogy is not perfect, AN is much more intrinsically useful than cryptocurrencies are, and personally I am a lot more willing to have my government prevent my neighbor from mixing ANFO than I am with them preventing her from buying drugs on the darknet.)
In its hayday, the crypto currency industry was a total wild west. Straightforward scams, pyramid schemes, whatever FTX was, the NFT craze. The end uses are to hide assets from the government and to conduct transactions which the government does not want you to conduct. (I think that there is a point to be made that the latter use is at times actually rather pro-social, allowing people to work around de-banking and donating to wikileaks. But good luck convincing your government of that!) Then there is the fact that there is a big traditional financial industry, which has a ton of regulations and decades of experience lobbying politicians to ensure regulatory capture, which were likely less than keen to compete with unregulated crypto bros. They would probably have preferred regulations to the effect that US residents can only buy crypto assets from their home bank.
So in short, the threat that most crypto businesses in the US would be regulated out of existence seemed very real to me.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I would argue that free trade made the US the economic superpower it is today. Of course, there is such a thing as being a victim of your own success. To bring back low-margin manufacturing, one would need to crash the US dollar. If the dollar is low, US products will be cheap on the world market, while Americans will have a hard time paying for international alternatives. However, this would not be in the best interests of the US.
While some people care about the US manufacturing physical goods, very few want to work in manufacturing. The fraction of Americans who are envious of the job and life quality of an Indian working in plastics manufacturing is basically zero.
I think protectionism makes sense for supply chains which are of strategic importance. But that only covers a small fraction of products. Raising tariffs on USB cables until people will start to manufacture them domestically will not help your economy.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Well, from browsing through his WP page, it seems that he is sorta libertarian-conservative. As he is not the at the head of a nation state, it is hard to judge how committed to free trade he is. I think that it is very possible that he really believes that free trade is a good Schelling point to strive for, even if he does not have a picture of Reagan in his bedroom.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Trump did the same with Zelensky in the past where he also misread the situation. Zelensky was in weak position and came literally to beg for money - but he could not help himself and overplayed his hand. So he got fucked and in turn he fucked his nation - he apparently did not realize that he needs to change his behavior under new administration. Last time Zelensky behaved much better, he even brought suit.
I think that the US has sound strategic reasons to supply Ukraine, and that these are orthogonal to how much Zelenskyy is willing to grovel before Trump's throne. I do not think Zelenskyy disrespected Trump in a way that would have harmed him. I can not imagine an opinion piece by the (very pro-Ukraine) liberal media about how Trump was letting Zelenskyy walk all over him by tolerating him wearing his trademark army fatigues.
A typical rational actor does not like to grovel. Making the other party grovel will lower their utility function, so in turn their more tangible demands will be higher. If one buys a house only if the seller is willing to give a blowjob as part of the deal, it seems very likely that one will severely overpay for the house.
Again, there is an optimal amount of aid the US should be willing to give to Ukraine for strategic reasons, and likely other amounts will be less effective.
Now one can still criticize Trump for his style, but it seems to be working. He was able to negotiate peace between India and Pakistan, he managed peace between Israel and Hamas, he managed peace between Armenia–Azerbaijan, he presides over cooling of tensions between Cambodia and Thailand and he even turned Modi and Xi Jinping against Putin with his latest oil embargo. It is not as if he is just a buffoon without results.
I do not think India and Pakistan were that keen on a big nuclear war. The US (which is kinda allied to both) probably helped, but I think this is something which the Biden administration would have done just as well.
Regarding Hamas, his strategy was basically to give Nethanyahu the card blanche. This (questionable) victory is Bibi's, not his.
I remain skeptical if Trump really manages to get China and India to forgo cheap Russian fossil fuels. In general, with Trump, the winning move seems to tell him "yes", and continue as you did. Chances are he will either have another good phone call with Putin or a bad phone call with Zelenskyy and go back to not caring about Russian oil exports.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
This is a negotiation- the corporate arm of the people of Ontario being one of the interested parties. The fact that those people still see fit to go out of its way to shitpost is actually relevant; I wouldn't want to do business with them either.
I would not characterize the ad as 'shitposting'. Also, the relative strength of both parties will likely be reflected in how the gains from a deal are distributed among them. If the US is in a stronger position, it also has more to lose on not making a deal.
Of course, it could be that a trade deal is so insignificant that it is simply not worth the president's time. If it was a negotiation between the US and Madagascar, saying "screw you, try again in a year" at the slightest offense might be acceptable. But with Canada, not having a trade deal is leaving quite a bit of money on the table, I imagine.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Larry Ellison said that a vast AIfueled video surveillance system would ensure quote citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on. This comment is a perfect encapsulation of the delusional fantasy pushed by so many in Silicon Valley. That the surveillance state will be used for good. The narrative is seductive. If we could just see everything in 4K, disputes over what really happened would collapse, the thinking goes.
This is likely a hostile summary. I think that there is a steelman to be made on how video evidence can help establish a consensus. Think stuff like killings by the police. There will always be scissor cases, but if there is video evidence of a suspect pulling a gun or raising his hands in the air, then both sides of the culture war are somewhat more likely to agree on what really happened compared to when they just have to rely on eyewitness testimony.
Of course, video evidence will not always show the full context of an interaction, but it is generally better than nothing to find out what happened. And with gen-AI, video evidence will probably become less trustworthy. AI-generated videos can already fool members of the public (such as me), in the future they might also fool a forensic expert. At that point, you need to rely on a chain of custody, and in CW contexts, you generally can not trust the other side not to tamper with the evidence. Half the police departments would probably happily edit body cam footage if it lets them avoid a few weeks of BLM riots, and half the SJ people would happily use AI to "improve" their videos to drive home the point of racial injustice.
Or it could be that Ellison was really voicing a pro-panopticon sentiment, where video analysis AI will punish every tiny infraction anyone commits a la Demolition Man. I think such a society will slide into totalitarianism, because dissent begins in private.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
So, the Ontario Reagan ad thing.
As the governor of Ontario, Doug Ford (Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario) produced a 1-minute ad in favor of free trade ad targeted at US residents, with some high-profile airings during some sports events. The ad consists of spliced together sentences of a 1987 Reagan address.
The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation claims that "the ad misrepresented Reagans address". The reaction of Trump was to suspend trade negotiations with the Carney (Liberal Party) government of Canada:
The Ronald Reagan Foundation has just announced that Canada has fraudulently used an advertisement, which is FAKE, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about Tariffs. The ad was for $75,000,000. They only did this to interfere with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, and other courts. TARIFFS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A. Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT
I watched the original they linked, and I honestly can not see what their problem is. In the original 5 minute version, there was also a message of "we have introduced duties on semiconductors from Japan because their companies were not competing fairly, but we do not want a general trade war". But having watched both the ad and the address, I agree with the fact-checkers that Reagan was not quoted out of context. The ad agency basically took a five minute speech, of which at least three minutes were a spirited defense of free trade as the foundation of prosperity and condensed it into a one minute defense of free trade.
I understand how the ad would annoy Trump. Reagan is a time-honored hero of his party, and his voiced ideals are in stark contrast to Trump's policies. The message "this man is stepping way out of line of the tradition of his political ancestors" certainly seems a good way to persuade traditional conservative demographics to reconsider Trump.
But for all his annoyance, I think Ontario is basically well within it's rights to use ads to affect US trade policy. Even without Citizens United, the US would be the last country in the Americas to have any standing to object to foreigners interfering, especially if the interference is only attack ads and not coups.
And as far as attack ads go, it is incredibly tame. A clear policy message without any ad hominem jabs or name-calling.
This makes Trump's reaction utterly bizarre to me. Diplomacy sometimes means negotiating with people who would love to murder you and dance on your grave, never mind seeing you voted out of office. Then there is the fact that Canada is not an absolute monarchy, and their federal government does not control its provinces. Assuming that PM Carney has control over Ford would be like assuming that Trump has control over Newsom. If you are willing to walk away from negotiations because of that, then either you were not seriously negotiating before or you emotions are making you irrational.
Even if the ad was paid for by Carney, Trump's reaction would not be appropriate for an adult. It seems that he is mentally sorting people into two buckets, the ones who support him and are loyal to him, and the ones who are opposed to him. This is basically the world view of a toddler. Reality is more complex. Of course Canada would love nothing more than the US electing Democrat majorities in the mid-term and them killing Trump's tariffs. Presumably, Trump in turn would love for Canadians to elect a MAGA fan who is willing to bend over backwards and give Trump all the concessions instead of retaliating. But in the likely event that neither side get what they want, it still makes sense to negotiate.
To me, it seems pretty clear that a mass media campaign like this is directed at the electorate. In Trump's mind, it is meant to influence the SCOTUS. This makes me question his world model even more. What is the proposed mechanism of action? A SC justice is watching a sports event on TV, sees the Reagan free trade ad, gets the message 'tariffs bad' into his head, then decides a case which hinges on what powers Congress can delegate to the president purely based on if he likes how the president has used these disputed powers. It seems that Trump is a victim of the typical mind fallacy here -- just because he could persuaded by a TV ad to make unprincipled changes to his policy to get some desired object-level outcome, he assumes that the minds of justices work the same way. At the risk of likewise typical-minding, I think that he is wrong. Perhaps, some judges are partisan hacks who will rule for or against Trump on general principle. But my model of the median SC judge is someone who cares about the long term policy outcomes and making consistent rulings, rather than someone starting by writing "therefore, Trump's tariffs are legal/illegal" at the bottom of the page according to their leanings and then filling the space above with some legal argument. (Which is kinda what Roe v Wade did.)
In short, if Ontario wanted to influence the SCOTUS, TV ads seem like the worst way to go about it. I would recommend they pay high profile legal scholars to publish in academic journals. Or more cynically, invite some justices to an all-expenses-paid retreat.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I think that what is "productive" is obviously a value judgement. Someone whose contribution to the economy is to lower the market price for contract killings is obviously not what most people have in mind when they think of a productive member of society. One way to model this is to say that murder has very high externalities which the compensation structure fails to address.
Of course, while most people might agree on some cases like the contract killer not being considered productive and a physician curing some debilitating illness being productive, the quantification of the externalities of lot of different occupations is in the eye of the beholder. What for might be an innocent way to improve people's life might for someone else exemplify everything that is wrong with society. Sesame street, recreational fentanyl use, warhammer, cigarettes, cosmetic surgery, prostitution, fast cars, organized religion, alcohol, daycare for kids, social media, electric lights, abortions, candy, veggie burgers, beef burgers, small arms, pornography, cosmetic products, video games, AI capabilities, warfare capabilities, caffeine, assisted suicide, rap music, are all things where some people will disagree about the externalities.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I find it quite hard to make out in that picture, even increasing the brightness did not help much. From the shape, it could be an SS Totenkopf. Or a similar design.
My priors for finding a SS skull as a design in a seedy tattoo parlor in Croatia are actually not all that low. They did have a puppet government allied with the Nazis, after all, and at least a few of them were likely proud to fight the Serbs and Soviets.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Also, the prosecution becomes involved with cases much earlier than a PD, at least that is my understanding from watching The Wire.
By the time the case actually goes to trial, the prosecution already has established what they believe to be a winnable case.
On the other hand, technological evidence will probably make the DAs job much easier in many cases. If a guy is caught committing a felony on video, I could imagine that the prosecution may actually have less of a workload than the PD. Watch the video, notice it will convince a jury, charge him. On the other hand, the PD will still have to talk with the defendant a few times, try to persuade him to take a deal and so on.
At the end of the day, the PD are funded through taxpayer money, so they owe the public an account of how they spend their time. How many hours did they spend on which case. Did they go after likely leads, or go on every wild goose chase their client set them on? These are facts which could be established from statistics.
There is a lot of a difference between "no PD can meet the accused because they are overworked" and "actually they were busy trying to investigate if Elvis was alive and had committed the crime because that is what their client suggested". From the outside, it is hard to say which one it is.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Sure, most of the work a defense attorney might face will involve protecting the rights of someone who's just a victim of circumstances, like Decarlos Brown.
Are we talking about the same person? Or does my sarcasm detector need new batteries? From WP:
Surveillance footage shows Zarutska sitting in front of Brown, who was already seated on the train. Four minutes after Zarutska boarded, Brown pulled a pocketknife from his hoodie and stabbed Zarutska three times from behind, including at least once in the neck.
Is the woke left actually arguing that he is innocent?
My take from ymeskhout is that most clients of public defenders are guilty as sin, but the job of their counsel is to make sure that they get their due process (and pragmatically, negotiate a plea deal). And to be sure, I agree that that they are a key component of the legal system.
Basically, I think that any defense attorney who lives under the assumption that all of her clients are innocent and that any of them getting convicted is a miscarriage of justice will have a very miserable life.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
"The United States should recognize Palestine as a country" is close to non-partisan, with only 53% of Republicans opposed and 58% and 59% agreement from "Other" and "All adults," respectively.
That is not remotely what non-partisan means. Non-partisan statements are stuff like "the US should have a military", "the US should have a market-based economy", "raping kids should be illegal". Close-to-non-partisan statements would be "minorities and women should have the franchise". Basically, stuff with which perhaps twice the Lizardmen constant would disagree. 59% is not closely that. You might as well call stricter gun laws a non-partisan issue as 56% support them.
Also, it is not clear to me what the purpose of recognizing a state is. First and foremost, states exist through the ability to use coercion, force. This is completely orthogonal to any concept of legitimacy. Even if I believe that the Matriarchal Commune of Afghanistan is the legitimate, that does not matter one bit if the Taliban hold Afghanistan and nobody contests them for it.
At the end of the day, in international politics, you have to deal with the facts on the ground, even if you do not like them. The test if a subgroup in a state is a state or not is actually very simple: Can they, through persuasion or force of arms defend their claims to territory? Of course, not every entity which meets this threshold will be internationally recognized, sometimes they will just be seen as a rebel group.
Israel will not suffer any Palestinian entity to have weapons which could effectively oppose them, which is quite reasonable given the history of the conflict. No other country which could oppose Israel is willing to have their soldiers die trying to defend the West Bank from the IDF.
The more appropriate way to react to Nethanyahu's aggression is to stop giving him military aid and sanction him.
Also, all of that is moot because the US will be the last country to recognize Palestine except for Israel. For most of your 59% who want recognition, that is not their most important issue. By contrast, there is a lobby group for which support for Israel is the main reason for existence. A candidate might gain a bit of approval by being anti-Bibi, but once the attack ads come in, that will flip around completely.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Related 2014 SSC: Does Class Warefare Have A Free-Rider Problem?. There Scott argues that there is a collective action problem among the rich fighting for their common interests, e.g. low taxes.
Even today, the money which influences politics is mostly spent by individual private individuals or by companies held privately. (With the META PAC being a notable exception).
Also, I think that while "we are spending a few hundred million dollars of company funds on Trump to get on his good side and get juicy US gov contracts" is probably a solid business decision (even if it is not what Adam Smith had in mind), spelling out how that is profitable at the stockholder's meeting is likely to get the CEO in legal trouble. So the straightforward buying of influence is more of a strategy among tech billionaires and middle eastern autocrats than for publicly traded companies.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
I am not saying that "predominantly female SJ employees take over a company, establish a woke regime of terror where lunch conversations about video games are banned" never happens.
But I do not think that this is the inevitable consequence of letting women enter the workforce.
Generally, I think that there is some optimal fraction of costs dedicated to workplace culture. In the zeroth approximation, that fraction is zero, because employees should just get their job done. But in higher orders, one would consider that the productivity of employees is a function of workspace culture, so there are gains to be had by investing in workplace culture (e.g. have a HR department to intervene on alleged assaults, make sure that employees are willing to talk to each other, etc).
Naturally, the gains of having a great workplace culture are finite: you can't solve P=NP by taking a few grad students and placing them in an extremely motivating environment.
Another consideration might be if things get more extreme in bullshit jobs than in non-bullshit jobs. After all, if the main purpose of your job is to be another person of the payroll of your department so that your head of department can maintain their political power against other departments, nobody will care much if you waste time playing stupid status games. If your job is actually contributing to the bottom line, then finding grievances to whine about will not improve your KPIs. Obviously one limit to that is anti-discrimination law which the company might run afoul of.
Still, managers who genuinely takes the concern of their employee about others talking about video games during lunch seriously, rather than mentally earmarking her as "going out of her way to find things to be offended by, downsize at earliest opportunity" are already not aligned to the corporate bottom line.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
the presence of women in the professional workspace immediately makes the environment feel more hostile for men, in the sense that they now have to navigate the minefield of HR rules and avoid offending the most easily offended demographics on earth
Okay, I may be a minority here, but I can tell you that this is not reaction to women in the workplace at all.
If I am in a conversation with some other guys at work and a female colleague enters the room, I that does not make me feel hostility. No, "oh, now I have to watch my mouth, no more sexual innuendo, no more discussion of how fuckable common acquaintances are, no more innocent showing of nudes of my sex partners."
Because I do not engage in this kind of talk even when I am in an all-male setting. Not even when I hang out with my friends, actually. Now, perhaps I simply give off vibes which tell other men that I do not want to discuss tits with them during work hours, and every other man is suffering in silence every time I or a woman enter the room, but I think that is unlikely.
Regarding HR minefields, at least here in Europe the minefield seems easily navigable even for a spectrum-dweller like myself. Don't ask women for sexual favors at work, avoid touching your colleagues without their consent, don't send unsolicited dick pics.
Now I am sure that there are some women who would be offended by my workplace behavior ("he called that connector 'female' instead of 'socket-type', and he has not renamed his dev branch from master to main yet"), but thankfully, I have not encountered any at work yet.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
The field that frightens me most is the law. All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female. The rule of law is not just about writing rules down. It means following them even when they yield an outcome that tug at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.
This rhymes with the old "women can't do science because their uterus makes them fundamentally irrational", which has not aged very well.
A (perhaps weak-man) view of a feminism view of international relations would be "for more than two thousand years, politics in Europe were mostly decided by men (->true). As a consequence (->debatable), most state capacity was spent on murdering other humans in wars (->true). As women got more involved in politics, Europe become a lot more peaceful (->the correlation exists). Therefore, it is essential to limit the influence of men in politics lest they use their influence to follow their instinct for murder (->disagree)."
It is not that either view is completely without a point. On average, women are probably likelier to make decisions based on 'feminine' emotions, and men are probably more likely to accept violence as an appropriate solution to a problem.
But even in single-sex organizations, cultures can be very different. An all-male 19th century chess club will have a very different culture from a band of mongol raiders or a squad of SS officers or the retinue of a medieval lord or an all-male fire department or some rapists sharing roofie ingredients or some RPGlers.
Woke culture in the legal profession has obviously not been good for the rule of the law. (Nor has MAGA culture, btw.) But I am very skeptical of the claim that an gender imbalance will naturally cause a culture to flip.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
Charitably, what @venqq wanted to say was not that radiative cooling is impossible, only that it is very expensive. The JWST has a budget of just shy of 10G$. It's solar panels can deliver 2kW.
Obviously, this is a bit unfair. Nobody is suggesting that we should park computational satellites at L2, the single point near Earth where they get the least sun. And most of the money was probably not spent on either the solar panels or radiating heat enough to keep digital electronics comfortable.
As another data point, consider a cubesat. These are common cheap satellites launched in bulk into low orbits. Launch costs for 1U (10x10x10cm^3) are only 100k$.
Per WP, the electrical power available on a cube is about 10W. From that, it seems feasible to run a Raspberry Pi 4 (which draws about 6W under load).
Sure, the initial investment is higher, but once we are in orbit, we do not have to pay for power, nor rent for the space occupied by our solar panels. Let us calculate how long we need to break even.
At a generous 10W, the Pi will require 88kWh/year of electricity. Assuming 0.2$ per kWh, that amounts to some 17.5$ per year. So our orbital Pi would need to run for some 5700 years to be cost effective.
Obviously it will not. In a decade, it will be technologically obsolete (with no way to upgrade it), and radiation damage and atmospheric drag will do the rest. Drawing any power at in the half of the orbit where you are in Earth's shadow will put a lot of wear on your batteries over the years.
Now obviously, you can do better. If you build a billion dollar satellite constellation for computation, I can imagine you will get 10 times as much usable power for your buck. But the problem is that you would have to be better by a factor of 2000 (so your ROI is around 2-3 years) before orbital computation would be economic.
My TL;DR is that in space, things that are utterly trivial on Earth are hard and expensive. You go to space if there are specific benefits for your application (such as with the JWST or TV transmitters) which are worth the pain. If there are no good reasons to put something in orbit, it is generally much more economic to do stuff dirtside.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
I think that the reason AI companies are not turning a profit is that their investors prefer them to burn through money in the hopes that they are the first to build the ASI which will wipe out humanity. Google changed internet search burning through investor cash long before they had a business model.
I think that LLMs will change the world more than Microsoft Office has, easily. I am less certain about it being more transformative than the integrated circuit, though.
I mean, you can claim that solving IMO problems is a specific task with zero wider applications, just like outperforming humans at chess. Personally, I think the former generalizes to at least some economically useful activity.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
I am not sure that if you want to select for e.g. the genetic component of intelligence, ethnicity would do a better job than IQ.
My belief is that the quantity which should (!) be unproblematic to discriminate on is also the one which is closer to what we actually care about.
Of course, once we have excellent genetic models to determine which genes actually causally affect intelligence (as opposed to being merely correlated with it), states might want to use that for immigrant selection instead (if the goal is to raise the long term sanity waterline of the population).
But given that government discrimination based on genetic scores is a third rail politically, I would avoid it before such a time. The only reason it is useful for embryo testing is that measuring the intelligence of any embryo directly will always yield a value of zero, which makes the current IQ a terrible proxy.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
Once you accept some level of HBD, the next discussion is finding the policy implications, usually in the context of how to make effective and humane public policy in an HBD world.
I do not think that this is especially hard. Meritocracy performs well both in worlds where HBD is highly relevant and in worlds where it is irrelevant. There is no reason to select for Ashkenazi ethnicity as a proxy for academic performance when you can just select for academic performance directly instead.
On the flip side, "have a progressive tax system which lessens the burden of people whose economic output is not highly valued, so that they still can live a decent life" is basic compassion, and utilitarianism (the marginal dollar helps the poor man a lot more than the rich man). I am very capable of feeling the pain of those who work in minimum wage jobs without first inquiring to their ethnic distribution and then deciding if they deserve my pity or not.
I will grant you that things might become more icky once a state decides to maximize the number of smart babies. But even there you would not directly select for ethnicity. Instead you might use IVF to create embryos from the gametes of humans with family histories of high education attainment, and then pay surrogates to turn them into babies and have them adopted by couples. Or just CRISPR the heck out of any embryos.
At the end of the day, the gaussians overlap, substantially. There are no large gaps as there are in the intelligence between dogs and humans, which is the reason why we do not allow dogs to even attempt to gain a driving license. Anyone who is arguing for a similar level of discrimination among ethnicities is simply using HBD as an excuse to be a racist.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
Personally, I was mostly HBD-pilled by Scott Alexander, who once hosted the ancestor of the motte. It helps that I had read a lot of other stuff from him, which convinced me that he was a kind and thoughtful person, not some Nazi looking for an excuse to enslave the Untermenschen.
Basically, Ashkenazi performance in science is very hard to explain without group differences in intelligence. The alternatives are either silly ("Reading the Torah as a kid outperforms any science education known to man.") or very silly conspiracies ("The Jews have controlled academia since the early 20th century, and favored their own kind (but not the Sephardics, for some reason). Their shadow organization probably murdered the gentile scientists who had written the four Nobel-worthy papers in 1905 and had Einstein publish them instead, despite him not even having a post-doc job.")
Of course, I also try hard not to over-update on HBD. For individuals, I will update much more on education attainment and similar metrics than on ethnicity. I do not even have a coherent model about what the racial bonuses to INT are. Mostly, I think that HBD is a rock under which humanity might have well avoided to look, if not for the SJ insistence that unequal outcomes are always indicative of systemic racism.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
And the swastika flag, being nonobvious, was probably planted there to discredit Taylor.
I have seen zero evidence for that. I mean, sure, perhaps some Democratic staffer was willing to trespass in the office and hang the print there, picking a spot where it would be seen by the zoom camera, and made it exactly so non-obvious that the poor innocent staffer who got screenshotted with the flag in the background did not notice it.
But my priors are that the sort of people who share edgy gas chamber 'jokes' (scare quotes because they were not particularly funny beyond simply being edgy, imho) also seem like the sort of people who would print out edgy enhanced US flags. They simply fucked up by having them in the view of the camera.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
Free trade fundamentalism, open borders migration
Depending how much Trump chickens out of his favorite policies, this may actually be enough to win the elections.
In the past, the US has profited immensely both from free trade and from attracting the best and the brightest people of the world to their universities.
Trump's zero-sum mentality (roughly: "If we don't fuck over our trade partners, we are the ones getting fucked over") towards trade and the general xenophobia of the his administration both harm the US in this regard. Investment is kinda risky if you do not know if Trump will put immense tariffs on your raw materials. And if I wanted to study abroad, I would think twice before going to the US, which very much makes it clear that they do not want me to stay there. Canada, the UK, or China also have decent universities, and at least the first two are much less likely to cancel my visa over political views expressed online. And while a few professors might be DEI hires, their governments are not waging a war on the university system to get them to DEI-hire 50% Trumpists.
The lack of international students will only be felt in 10-15 years, but I think the tariffs are already felt. If the AI bubble bursts by 2028, and it becomes apparent that the Stargate money went down the drain, that will likely spell a recession.
In such an environment, the Democrats only will have to say "our economic policies are mainstream, like under Clinton, Obama, GWB", and that will be enough to attract voters.
Voting based on the positions on transgenders in bathrooms is something you can only afford to do if both parties have sane economic policies, after all.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
A lot of people with dark humor have been victims of the things that they joke about, by the way. I find it quite distasteful when people who haven't experienced such things accuse them of being insensitive, which is often what happens. Too much morality is performative, and I find this whole situation to be another instance of people point fingers at others in order to feel morally superior and score virtue signaling points, or at the very least it's a reaction prompted by fear (rather than goodwill, taste, actual concern, etc)
Agreed. There is this joke about a holocaust survivor dying, going to heaven and telling God a holocaust joke. God tells him that this is Not Funny. He replies, "well, I guess you just had to be there."
I admit that I was thinking of USB-A to USB-B cables, which are supposed to be completely passive.
Also, I think that that level of paranoia is going to be prohibitively expensive if you want to protect the US public at large from supply chain attacks.
The compromise would be to have a process to manufacture USB cables in the US using vetted companies which employ vetted citizens for 100$ apiece to supply the needs of the NSA and the Pentagon (where BYOD is presumably forbidden), and let the rest of the US buy 5$ cables from China and risk supply chain attacks which spy on their printer communication.
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