veqq
16hr ago
I could go deeper and analyze some other potential axes
I would enjoy this, when you have time!
veqq
2d ago
This 2012 blog post by Steve Randy Waldman
Any suggestions of similar, still running blogs or communities?
veqq
5d ago
got denied entry to Canada
I was denied entry to Canada some years ago. The border guard filled out the opposite of the answers I gave, gave me a paper with them, ignored my protestations along with coworkers, then locked me in a room for 4 hours before denying me entry. There were 3 y/n questions on a paper, whether I knew anyone and I don't recall what else.
veqq
5d ago
wearing just a tutu,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_von_H%C3%BClsen-Haeseler
During a formal evening function, (General) von Hülsen-Haeseler appeared dressed in the pink tutu and rose wreath of a ballerina, dancing for (Kaiser Wilhelm II) and his assembled guests. ... the general bowed, collapsed and was pronounced dead after hasty medical attention
veqq
7d ago
Again, you need to read more 10-Ks. Much of the S&P 500, let alone S&P 600 or Russel 2000 are hilarious money holes. Big tech (besides Meta) are actually among the most efficient. It generally gets worse, the smaller the business (for obvious reasons) but it's shocking how much waste there is, everywhere.
veqq
8d ago
1/3rd of your budget wasted is a failing company
You need to read way more 10-Ks if you believe that
veqq
8d ago
For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading ... we hated it ...
The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do ... we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out
https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers/
veqq
8d ago
th" would be a separate letter altogether since it represents a unique sound. So just teach it as a sight word
You can just teach th, like ph and ch, has a special sound (actually 2, voiced and unvoiced). There's no need for something to be part of an official alphabet to teach its pattern. ough is the main blocker, today.
veqq
9d ago
I could swear having LGBTQ themes is now mandatory in children's publishing
I should be the change I want to see. Who would buy my half-written (in heroic couplets!) children's book about heroicism, exploration and science? I can put a fire under it.
veqq
9d ago
Christian rehab centers
Can anyone tell me about the Christian graft industry, how you get in etc.? In another life, I'd have love to be involved! (Not joking, seriously curious what life decisions would have gotten me there.)
veqq
9d ago
The first girl I ever kissed later did a PhD essentially proposing local government shouldn't be left to regulate things too complex to understand, like energy policy, rather federal or even supranational bodies should.(Our later friendship ended when I pushed for details and asked her opinions on natural counterpoints.) When regulatory capture happens to a national body, the whole thing collapses. When regulatory capture happens in a town, others can still thrive (and you can leave). At e.g. the US state (or European national) level, a few will have enough economy of scale to pass e.g. textbook reform which leads to smaller states following their lead, and e.g. publishers writing books targeting them. Churn happens when a state switches allegiance. Interesting stuff!
veqq
10d ago
Is the author under the impression there are ICE facilities with the capacity to hold millions of people just standing around empty?
Remember Jade Helm and the FEMA detention centers?
veqq
12d ago
Brilliant! This is just beyond the pale of stupidity.
I even think the described actions are probable and philosophically valid (but having many people assist with execution of the same office is a quite complicated and rather dehumanizes the office until the actual holder seems irrelevant.) There are plenty of historical analogues with idiot kings etc. Anyway, sliding all the way down the slope, unless Trump is flying the plane, deportations until the executive branch are illegal, yah enforcing murder's illegality is impossible because only the very, uh, lightning bolt which broke the stone on the 10 commandants, or the person who wrote e.g. §§ 1111 (calling murder unlawful) is eligible to detain or punish; but this person used a tool, a pen and we don't know whether someone else used this pen and was not... And can we just disregard all laws written by lobbyists?
Can someone steel man this?
veqq
13d ago
I don’t think conservatives have been in the cultural drivers seat since at least the 1970s
And what of the other 5 thousand years of human history?
you were not the subject of that comment
Ah, ok.
would doubt his ability to characterize, let alone speak for 'we' or 'the west,'
I read this as him coming to terms (at least starting to) with there not being a West qua actor with concrete goals etc. similar to whoever, a few weeks back, noted alt right thoughts about the deep state were all wrong, since it didn't resist Trump and just ...let itself and its consensus be dismantled. This is why, in my original comment, I mentioned Western traditionalists' growing support of China. Aschenbrenner et al. are case in point, self important little men plotting how to play the wrong game. I believe, in the past, OP simply feared Western actors might flip the board before we achieve the cosmicists' dream, but now believes the US lost the ability to stop it and only China still has the ability (by error).
view American geopolitical power as a means to an end
I sure see power as mere means (and believe OP does too). I like the spirit of this exchange, although I think it's built on a fundamentally unstable foundation (assumptions about what the author means instead of just asking him) and there are more constructive things than building it. What is your telos? What do you think the CCP's is (or at least Xi's)? Dito for any other relevant actors.
veqq
14d ago
because I think they will be able to get vital imports (food, oil) from Russia. Xi would have been foolish not to secure this in his meeting with Putin
Xi was perhaps foolish; China hasn't been willing to (publicly?) sign (further) long term deals (necessary to finance more pipelines) and instead enjoys limited flows from older contracts while with most Russian production capacity lacks a way to reach China. Further, they're reducing consumption due to new sanctions.
I have a pet theory that Chinese green hydrogen will cause a $80BOE ceiling on gas. N.b. heavy vehicles now consume over half of LNG in China. Now, it's just a theory and I am bullish on gas in the short term, but the financials on new projects are breathtaking.
@Magusoflight this, you see, is my "motive: trading commodities for a profit. As a long believer in some commodities supercycle to raise the next 2 billion people out of poverty, we're not seeing the same growth drivers but rather a decrease in Chinese construction aligned with long term government policy etc. I was rather shocked to realize that the CCP literally announces its policies in 5 year plans, which it actually does, enriching investors positioned to enable it. You jump to accusing me of "lying" instead of digging a bit deeper into something "well known". How do you know this? Do you agree with the same sources when they e.g. preached diversity, immigration etc.? It's particularly perplexing that @Dean claims my "economic narrative waves aside the property bubble" when I specifically wrote about it. Isn't OP's very point that we, the West, have lost, because we can't get our heads out of our asses, honestly look at the world and act? Hell, I'm not pushing the technological envelope and seeking transcendence either, I'm just seeking alpha in society's delusions.
@phailyoor I know the government takes passports in general (particularly for people working on financial infrastructure) but DeepSeekers have said in the last days that this is not happening. I asked OP if he has proof for it, because it would really solidify his narrative.
veqq
14d ago
as well as overreliance on external customers
Exports are less than 20% of Chinese GDP (and domestic GDP is lower because of accounting differences like imputed rent. In China, they use construction cost depreciated over the building's life, so rent is 2% to Chinese GDP, whereas almost 10% of US GDP is imputed rent; much of US GDP growth is just bureaucratically increasing what home owners pay themselves...Oh, and remember, as Trump says, China's artificially weakening its currency, which... decreases domestic GDP!) Japan and India rely more on exports than China. The US, EU and China are roughly equal in total volumes, although China's GDP is 2/3 of the US (or 4/3 if PPP).
China has a severely over-dimensioned property+construction sector and now also a severely over-dimensioned manufacturing base.
In 2015 the Chinese government already stopped emphasizing real estate and announced that it would cut incentives for constructing and investing in it. To stop the "disorderly expansion of capital", they purposefully deflated the bubble, e.g. legislating huge down payment requirements for housing loans, high transaction taxes etc. The expansion stopped a while ago and workers have been reallocated. (Didn't you read all those articles about China's real estate collapse?) (There was a popular narrative around ghost cities too, but they quickly filled up. China urbanized many hundreds of millions of people and still has 150 million to go.) (Freezing real estate, which holds the majority of household savings in China, lets them inject liquidity to specific industries without inflation.)
The industrial base is what you would call an asset. In the absence of trade unions, irksome regulations etc. a greater concentration of capital should reduce production prices (instead of raising them, as e.g. happened in the US) particularly as labor is often quite a modest part of the balance sheet in today's firms.
To paraphrase Rick Rule: "In the super market, when you see tuna half price, you happily stock up. But in the stock market, when your holdings are on sale, you freak out instead of buying more." China did load up on infrastructure. And now commodities are significantly higher than in the past decade, but they just pay their cheap loans off instead of building for 5x the cost.
The Information's claim that DeepSeek, a private Chinese AGI company owned by Liang Wenfeng, is implementing some very heavy-handed measures: «employees told not to travel, handing in passports; investors must be screened by provincial government; gov telling headhunters not to approach employees».
Is this actually happening and not just coping accusations from a dying empire? We've known for a long time they're ahead. But truly, where Liang last year spoke of Chinese industry seeing its place as only productizing, they see true innovation's around the corner.
American theory of victory
I don't believe it exists. The only articulations thither I've heard involve the Benedict option or deportations, but lack positivist goals. Hajnals of yore built cathedrals, today's don't even hope to build, let alone transcend. It's shameful what they've taken from themselves. This is the West's century of humiliation, but worse as the sell themselves to the youthful Chinese like African leaders to slavers. Many Western traditionalists, Christian nationalists etc. have told me they believe China'd be a better hegemon though, and welcome this. How insular. What of striving, Promethean urges? Does myopic Icarus now only build rocket emojis for his stocks?
How can we disagree? Seeing the new paradigm, my little mind just wonders how to amass and secure resources and continue my line, such middling human concerns. I even work finance instead of pushing the envelope. No wonder we've stagnated.
veqq
19d ago
without any coherent vision
You mean establishing a totalitarian state worshipping reason as a god (for a while) which forcibly conscripted much of the population (for the first time ever)?
fight off the whole of Europe
Historical demographics are quite different from today's. On the eve of WWI, Europe had 25% of the world's population. To copypaste an old comment of mine a bit later:
The idea that Napoleon’s odds were insurmountable in 1813-14 doesn’t add up numerically either. The demographics of Europe in the early 19th century were very different than they are today. The French Empire and its Italian, Swiss, and Dutch client states contained 56 million people. French-occupied Germany was another 20 million at least. The Russian Empire had 35 million people, Austria 23 million, Britain 10 million, Prussia 10 million, and Sweden 3 million. Britain had imperial possessions as well, but their governments were even more decentralized than in later periods and their people could not be effectively mobilized for war. So, we can see that the “inexhaustible allied hordes” are a myth. Altogether, the allies controlled 81 million people and the French 76 million. France also controlled what was then the richer part of Europe, and could more easily mobilize its population. Case in point, after the total loss of his army in Russia Napoleon had another one waiting for him in Germany already.
In 1800, metropolitan France had about 30 million people and Russia 25 million (including many Poles, just incorporated, who would support Napoleon.)
veqq
19d ago
There are many errors in the common retellings:
- in 1990 Ukraine's declaration of sovereignty rejected nuclear weapons
- in 1991 Ukraine signed away any rights to Soviet nuclear weapons
- in 1992 Ukraine signed Start I pledging no proliferation etc.
- Ukraine never had launch codes, command over the soldiers and equipment (the Russian and Ukrainian were still the same and working directly together under the CIS framework until perhaps 97) not that it had money to maintain it either
The Budapest Memorandum helped implement this, but contained no security guarantees just promises to vaguely help or not to attack.
American missionaries played a huge role in 19th century China's development (also returning railroad workers built cool houses and started many business back in China! Similar to Arab countries, where the Arabic literary revival was started by immigrants in the US while missionary schools educated the new elites and are still many of the most important unis today.) China's best uni was founded by the US, to prepare Chinese who'd received scholarships to the US. Sun Yat Sen tied his Christianity to his revolutionary modernism (he went to missionary unis too.)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Flohri_cartoon_about_the_Philippines_as_a_bridge_to_China.jpg
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