sohois
7d ago
I think negative sentiment towards Indians can be narrowed down to one dominant factor: the English language.
Indians are, what, 1 in 6 people on the planet? In the past this number didn't mean much as the vast majority rarely leave their home country, but the internet and outsourcing means you have a much greater chance to encounter Indians. The thing is, India's cultural issues and level of social niceties are no worse than any other developing nation. China has many of the same problems, with a vast underclass of people that have awful hygiene and manners, a massive scam industry, nepotism and dishonesty, and even the "incel" characteristics that are ascribed to indians can be found in many Chinese men.
But people will very rarely encounter Chinese people because they don't speak English. There are no Chinese call centres, and while there are plenty of English language Chinese scammers you are still much more likely to get a call from an Indian. And on the internet, the Chinese are essentially banned from many of the most popular Western sites, while Indians will likely soon become the majority on places like facebook, reddit, youtube, and tiktok. The majority of the time an average Westerner is encountering someone from China will be Chinese tourists, and they have a godawful reputation.
sohois
7d ago
Nothing speculated on by 4chan users is a "known phenomenon". It's just pattern matching and confirmation bias.
sohois
16d ago
How many RPGs were even published in the 90s? Particularly if you're excluding Japanese games where the localization decisions would play a huge role in perception of writing quality.
sohois
20d ago
I've had posts appear in the "Highlights from the comments..." threads under a username in the past. Not seen any bias towards real names, the bigger issue is that it's likely too late for a comment to get noticed amongst thousands of others
sohois
21d ago
Given Scott's endorsement in 2016, I'm not at all surprised he's not changed his mind this time around.
In 2016, you could argue for "high variance". There were plenty of supporters who believed that Trump would bring his business acumen to bear to sweep away inefficiency and to make deals, or that he would successfully take on the establishment and "drain the swamp". There was a positive case to make for him.
But this didn't happen. In his 4 years, Trump was a pretty generic Republican, average to below-average in most respects. He failed to achieve most of his policy goals and was not a dealmaker or businessman in office. Perhaps the only area you might praise his achievements was in foreign policy, but even those successes look very short lived. Then right at the end, he veered towards the down part of the high variance argument.
It seems like now the overwhelming arguments for Trump are all "He's not Harris" or "He's not the democrats". For Scott whose policy positions are probably closer to the democrats, this is not going to be particularly convincing, as he lays out.
sohois
22d ago
Make your point reasonably clear and plain. Try to assume other people are doing the same.
What does this mean? Are you suggesting that Israel Jews have engineered fertility crises in every country except their own? You're not supposed to put words in posters mouths but such a vague assertion forces people to speculate.
If this is what you mean, why would Israel Jews do this? What do they have to gain from plummeting the birth rate of, say, South Korea? How would they engineer a plummeting birth rate in South Korea?
sohois
25d ago
I wouldn't recommend Buster Scruggs as your first film from the Coen brothers, it's a collection of short stories that I suspect was made largely to satisfy Netflix's insatiable lust for content. Not that it's a bad collection, just not what I would recommend if you wanted to get introduced to the directors. I would heavily recommend starting with Fargo
sohois
1mo ago
I expect any Biden supporters could create a list of negatives about Trump just as large as your Biden list.
And indeed, a huge swathe of Democrats did proclaim everything was rigged when Trump beat Hilary. A subject that was much mocked by posters on the right of the spectrum.
sohois
1mo ago
Who knows? But any explanation needs to account for why both candidates saw a massive increase in their vote numbers. Biden wasn't the only candidate who got more votes than Obama ever did.
sohois
1mo ago
Trump went from 63 million votes to 72 million votes. How do you explain an average first term producing that amount of extra votes, unless there was a general increase in voting turnout for 2020?
sohois
1mo ago
I dismissed a terrible line of logic. I didn't comment on the other points. This place is for rational discussion, and the argument that a poster thinks a candidate is bad therefore it is impossible that they attracted votes is just not at the standard of the motte.
Even Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote. Why would it remotely be a surprise that a far less divisive candidate attracts more votes, after a mediocre term for Trump that had the misfortune to end with a pandemic?
sohois
1mo ago
Do you seriously expect me to believe that the candidate that I hate could be successful? How is that possible when I hate him so much?
sohois
1mo ago
Yeah, the only reason they had the challenge system was the recognition that human line judges would make mistakes. There's no point getting an electronic system to review itself
sohois
1mo ago
Your calculations need to account for working age population. Of that 7.2 million figure, how many will be too old or too young?
I think the bigger issue is: Does the world know that this sudden IQ transformation has occurred in Liberia? If not, how are hedgies and AI firms going to discover all this talent? I'd imagine only a small amount of the country even has the computer and networking capabilities to begin working remotely for overseas firms.
sohois
1mo ago
Because the West is a culture of engineers, and we should play to our strengths
But renewable generation also requires engineering effort, why is that not playing to strengths? Fully solving issues related to storage, grid connection, forecasting, etc. will require plenty of engineering skill.
Manufacturing of renewables is not my area of expertise so I can't comment on your second paragraph. Although the domestic security issue is presumably not going to apply equally to every Western nation.
sohois
1mo ago
Most nations have some nuclear in their generation mix and will continue to have nuclear for the foreseeable future, but I'm not sure anywhere in the West outside of France will have a significant percentage covered by it. Peaking plants will probably continue to be gas or hydro as nuclear is not suited for this purpose. But ultimately as with renewable generation, the investment in battery technology mean that storage plants and DERs are simply better placed in terms of cost/benefit again.
sohois
1mo ago
Skibboleth alluded to this point below: the time to build nuclear was 30-40 years ago when the cost/benefit made sense. In the intervening decades, money has poured into solar, wind, and more niche renewables, such that they are now well ahead in terms of marginal cost per unit of energy, even taking into account the intermittency downsides.
There's probably a ton of room for research into fission to produce similar advances, but the question you have to ask now is why? Renewables are already there. Other than an aesthetic preference for major engineering projects or a desire to poke greens in the eye, the only benefit is just to cover intermittency, but there are plenty of alternatives for that as well
sohois
1mo ago
This is by far the simplest explanation for me. A director and screenwriting team that don't really know what they're doing.
sohois
1mo ago
The overdose death rate increased by 2,400% between 1980 and 2020
When prohibition was in full effect across the united states?
This just suggests that prohibition or no prohibition is largely drowned out by other factors in terms of the harms inflicted by drugs
sohois
1mo ago
The whole case seems like a Toxoplasma of Rage classic. A scumbag whose guilt for the murder is near certain, but at the same time procedural errors in convictions get guilty people off all the time, or at least delayed. It's a surprise that the anti-death penalty people lost on this one as they rarely seem to take such high profile defeats. But for me the big question is why this awful, guilty murderer has been made a cause celebre. Sure, I just referenced toxoplasma of rage, but that only explains public attention. Why did the innocence project and other anti-death penalty campaigners choose this case to focus on? It's clearly going to be a disaster if anyone pays the slightest bit of attention!
sohois
1mo ago
Forums definitely wouldn't work if you carried on with motte-style megathreads, you'd have to create a new topic for each culture war item.
Which is basically what DSL does, and I find it perfectly readable. You do lose the accessibility that megathreads have, hence why so many people stay here and don't go to DSL, a lot of more niche topics would never get any attention with individual posts.
It's interesting you bring up Slack and Elements, as they are basically the next stage in internet discussion - which is Discord. As reddit cannibalized forums, so discord is cannibalizing reddit. And yet, I think if you polled older internet users who had experienced all three, you would get majority agreement that forums > reddits > discord. Nonetheless, the internet inexorably moves towards the latter.
sohois
1mo ago
Reddit threading only works for 1-1 conversations. As soon as you add in a couple of responders, you're either having multiple separate convos or just ignoring a lot of responses.
Whenever I write a top level post here, I'm usually responding to two, maybe three people and leaving the rest unanswered, because there's no way to keep up with 20 different responses. Each response is isolated, likely ignoring the content of other people's replies and failing to generate any kind of group discussion. It's one of the big annoyances of reading the Motte, you often have an interesting OP, 50 replies, and then perhaps 1 or 2 more in-depth conversations as everyone is replying to one person and not to each other.
Contrast with a forum thread, as soon as a top level post is made you have a group conversation ongoing, with people engaging with multiple other responses and a lot more depth.
Reddit threading is good for Q&A style discussion, and it works a lot better for "megathreads" like this one, but in most cases a forum is simply superior
There are two issues here:
first, ERCOT is perhaps the most liberal energy market in the world. Gov assistance can help to reduce barriers to nuclear investment, but it's still going to come down to largely private companies making the choices to build or not to build. However, as the below response says, Texas already has ideal conditions for more fossil fuels or more renewables. Unless the funding assistance is massive, it's hard to see much interest in new nuclear.
The one exception would be interest in co-location with a data centre. I can see Musk, with Tesla now in Texas, publicizing a carbon-neutral AI centre using nuclear power next door. But such deals are unlikely to transform the generation landscape of the state unless every data centre in the US moves to Texas.
Second, ERCOT's liberal attitudes led it to separate almost entirely from the rest of the US. There are almost no interconnections with other states, just a few tiny ones with SPP and Mexico. A lot of the red states surrounding Texas are still regulated, with vertical utilities that follow federal rules and/or have their own ISOs. So even if they succeeded, it won't necessarily provide a path for other states to follow.
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