functor
19hr ago
The muslim angle is overrated. People wouldn't have been happier if the migrants were christians from Ethiopia. Muslim at this point means non Asian, non white immigrant. Islam is just an easy and relatively politically correct term to use. The basic premise holds regardless if he was muslim, Christian, athiest or Zoroastrian, MENA migration doesn't work in Europe.
The same people would not have been any happier to take South African Zulus but would have gladly taken South Africans of a Boer persuasion. Trying to own AfD by pointing out the specifics of a Saudi's religious beliefs isn't going to work because the AfD voters don't want mass immigration from MENA regardless of religion.
functor
1d ago
You already can. Chatgpt says:
Increase Model Depth/Width: Add more layers or neurons to increase the capacity of your neural network.
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Improve the Dataset
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Computational Resources
Use Better Hardware: Train on GPUs or TPUs for faster and more efficient computations.
There really isn't much secret sauce to AI, it is just more data, more neurons.
functor
2d ago
Alternative take: the federal government has become too large to manage. The scope of the federal government vastly outstrips the capacity of the human mind making it impossible to manage. The only way to have a federal government is to shrink it to a size in which it is humanly possible to understand what is being voted on.
functor
9d ago
Another and often ignored factor is how sedentary american culture is. Driving is ubiquitous with more people commuting by bicycle in Copenhagen than in all of the US. American grocery stores are surrounded by a sea of parking while in the rest of the world most people would walk to their local store. One thing that struck me in the US was how common escalators are. Lawn mowers nearly always have an engine in the US and are often ones the user sits on. In other places a person mowing grass is more likely to walk. Even fit Americans don't move that much. Fit Americans tend to be sedentary nearly all the time except for four hours a week of vigorous fitness. Gym culture is bigger in the US than in much of Europe. What is missing is movement in every day life.
functor
12d ago
Thanks for your comment. It does seem like they are more social and more into strategic networking than middle class people.
functor
12d ago
One of the main problems outside of science in academia is that they never had to confront the poor axioms. Physics had to throw out Archimedes and then throw out Newton. It was painful but it had to be done. Accepting Darwinism invalidated a large body of work based on prior ideas. It was tough for the people whose papers got invalidated but it had to be done.
In Social science people can still pretend that the garden of Eden existed, that fanciful tales of people on paradise islands living in absolute freedom were true etc.
Economists still talk about how money was created from people who wanted to barter more efficiently even though this has been disproven and even though writing is older than money. The idea of a social contract is still used even though humans lived in groups for tens of millions of years before we became human. The social sciences are stuck in a worldview in which humans spawned on Earth as individuals and invented all social structures even though this goes against all evidence.
The idea that women were historically oppressed is based on the assumtion that the natural state of women is a state of absolute individual freedom. The reality is that no hominid females of any species live in such a state. An animal that lives in a social structure isn't going to be happier if they are deprived of that social structure. If women were historically oppressed they could have packed up and walked into the woods. The reality is unless the family was exceptionally abusive most women clearly prefered belonging to a social structure over complete personal autonomy in the great wild.
functor
12d ago
Using Micheal O Church's model of social class with three ladders, labour, gentry and elite has anyone experienced the journey from G2 to E4? My family has been G2/G3 for several generations and most people I know are in that category. My mindset, my way of being and my values are very much gentry even though I am into dissident politics.
Do to ballsy moves and living on nothing for years my company is not at a stage where I am an E4. I have also started to interact with people at an E3/E2 level. I find them to be in an uncanny valley where they are in many ways similar to the gentry but still fundamentally different from me.
Do you have any advice for managing this transition?
functor
14d ago
It matters because it is one of Syria's main revenue sources. Losing it puts Syria in a permanent state of crisis.
functor
14d ago
Divide and conquer. The US has a long history of supporting jihadists and trying to undermine stable states in the region. The Iraq war wasn't nation building, it was nation wrecking. The goal was to turn the middle east into a buch of small clan structures consistently stuck in internal fighting. Assad provided a stable state which was difficult to dominate. Now we get the destruction of christian culture in the region and a flood of migrant to Europe.
functor
14d ago
We should be thankfull that Iran has helped Syrians defend themsleves and that we haven't gotten a complete genocide of Christians and others who represent the last vestigates of Greek civilization in the middle east. Iran has been hugely beneficial in Iraq where they helped the Iraqis end the occupation and then fight ISIS. In Syria they helped fight off jihadists attacking Syria for years.
The stability that Syria provided for the past 8 or so years has been highly beneficial and it is a great shame that we are losing it.
functor
14d ago
Alternatively, the US stops occupying Syria's oil and minds its own buisness.
functor
14d ago
Last war ended with 12 million refugees and over a million comming to Europe. The wave of jihadism that came with a country in the vicinity of Europe becoming a terrorist haven also created massive blow back. There is some chance that Europe simply won't let the jihadists take over this time. Assad is hugely beneficial for Europe.
functor
15d ago
I tried to send 400 Euros the the Netherlands from Sweden this week. The transaction failed several times so I called the bank and they told me that international transactions are disabled since I haven't had that service activated. There was no notice, just a timeout notice. I spent half an hour on the phone asking questions about whether I knew the person I was sending he money to, how often I make international payments, my bank accounts with other banks and so forth. Finally the money was sent with a five Euro fee and it took three days for the money to arrive. My startup has employees in Pakistan. We pay exorbitant fees to the banks for currency transactions. We have had payments blocked for two weeks due to "investigations" and in the best case it takes a week for money to arrive. I know a professional poker player who gets paid in cash. He is effectively treated like a terrorist.
Banking is just money tracked in databases with a monopoly based on insane legal frameworks that make banking so profitable that their profits amount to several percent of GDP. Crypto has to get efficient enough to be easy to use and it will take off. It needs to be too decentralized for governments to effectively regulate it. Ethereum has better chances of becoming a viable unit of exchange for larger or international transactions that are too annoying to handle with conventional systems.
The other wild card is BRICS. Their alternative could easily be far superior to the ancient swift system. Maybe the US could push bitcoin as a non BRICS swift alternative.
functor
17d ago
If he wanted war why did he push for negotiations for 8 years after the coup? Even in 2022 the goal wasn't to take Ukraine, it was to get Ukraine to accept a peace agreament that was almost the same as Zelensky's election platform.
functor
17d ago
NATO expansionism into every last corner of the map is pro-war. Russia wanted to negotiate over and over again. Zelensky's election platform wasn't that different than the Minsk agreements.
functor
17d ago
Are they really anti militarism? They have fanatically cheered on WWIII in Ukraine with maximalist war aims and a black and white view of the war. Obama, Clinton and Biden have been long term enthusiasts of pretty much every neocolonial project. I would say their worldview is a crusader mentality in which the world can be divided up into believers and heathens and the believers have a duty to crusade against the believers. Their worldview seems to be that there will be heaven on Earth once the entire planet has been converted. Since the heathens are fighting against heaven on Earth they are fundamentally evil and have no legitimacy.
Spending 2 trillion on a crusade for feminism in Afghanistan was hardly western civilization, it was a crusade for an ideology deeply opposed to western values. The left was opposed to militarism when they saw the Soviet union as a better representative of woke than the US. Today Russia is an Orthodox christian fascist state stopping the values of Netflix from being the global religion.
functor
21d ago
I worked in a tech hub next to a ghetto. A large number of engineers were terrorized by a small group of young men. There were more engineers who were fit gun owning veterans than there were criminals.
The criminals were generally in poor physical condition, disorganized and not an especially impressive force.
Had the cops not been there the criminals would have been dealt with swiftly. However, the police protected them. If they stole a bike, nothing happened. If an engineer with friends shut it down, they would have had their lives ruined. The criminals didn't mind getting arrested for smaller crimes. The engineers were terrified of even getting arrested. The imbalance in the risk acceptance between tech workers and criminals completely shifted the power dynamic on the street. When they mugged a developer on the way home from work it wasn't by physically overpowering them, it essentially a game of chicken in which the developer was more afraid of going to prison. It is simply cheaper to clean up graffiti on a weekly basis than to spend an night waiting in the bushes with bats and dealing with the problem.
The justice system is too harsh toward people with a life while not being effective at keeping people who can't function of the street. Ideally the dysfunctional crowd shouldn't be punished but warehoused in a place that provides them with structure, meaning and a well balanced life. Mental asylums need to be scaled up.
functor
22d ago
Status is key, however there is another mechanism that is playing in here.
With hypergamy and women not needing men for protection and provision women can seek higher status men. Men can achieve higher status by spending more time. Even if you wanted to just have kids at a young age it is going to be hard to find an attractive wife without going to college, without traveling, without buying a nice house etc. The status that you get from getting a low skilled labour job and from renting a place that a 22 year old can afford doing unqualified labour is shooting yourself in the foot on the dating market.
There is no time pressure to have kids. We have effective contraception and people are pushing through grad school, trying to buy a place in the right side of town or trying to take the right tinder pics on Bali so they can get an attractive partner. If people were more naturally paired up more kids would be born.
functor
24d ago
Universities went from being places where autists can engage in niche hobbies to being to taking most people and people who have no real interest in the subject. How many english majors really want to spend four years engaging in bizarre books? They are there to party, please their parents by getting a degree and get an office job.
I met an older pol sci professor who talked about the shift in his field. Back in the day doing a PhD in international relations meant becoming an expert in a part of the world. This is a monumental task as the student has four years to go from barely being able to find a country on a map to being able to advise diplomats and large corporations on intricate details of that country. It meant plowing through vast amounts of text and being able to quickly gain an understanding of complex systems.
The increasingly popular alternative was to chose a theory as a PhD. Thesis: investigate how some feminist theory views women's education in developing countries. Conclusion: more education in thrid world countries will liberate women. This PhD is much easier to write than one trying to explain the geopolitics of the middle east.
Having one political theory makes it even easier, furthermore the current woke dogma is fairly simple as an ideology. It doesn't take much to become proficient in it.
A part of the reason why alterntive ideas are met with immediate rejection is because they would reveal a lack of knowledge and arguments by someone with alternative views. It is shocking how many academics don't have cursory understandings of explanations other than their own. I have met profs at education departments who have minimal knowledge about heritability, which partially explains their defensive stance when probed with questions on the topic.
functor
26d ago
Devs overestimate the importance of Devs and a lot of non devs do as well.
To launch a game you have to pitch to investors and get millions in funding. Your game has to appeal to the funders and be something that they believe they will make money on. The biggest challenge is post launch . There are a bunch of games launched every day. The market is saturated to an insane degree. In order to break through you need to have influencers, journalists and other people pushing your game. The youtube algorithm promotes woke gamers.
Another underrated aspect is that in cut throat industries people will try to outmanoeuvre each other. If knocking out the opponent by discovering a transphobic tweet gets you ahead people will do it. The gaming industry is dirty.
functor
1mo ago
When russians fight, they only gain experience and become stronger. When ukrainians fight, they just die.
To a great extent yes. Ukraine has lost more officers than Russia. They are running into German WWI problems where they take their best men and put them into elite units and send those men out first. Ukraine leads more from the front which causes higher death levels among officers. Ukraine rebuilt its military in a more western fashion with a professional NCO corps which is much harder to replace casualties in.
When russians have to re-equip their army, they only get better and more efficient at manufacturing
Russians have done a far better job at scaling manufacturing during this war. Also They aren't trying to control the middle east and fight a war against China.
functor
1mo ago
why Russia started the war in the first place
To keep NATO from militarizing Russia's southern border. Since then NATO has spent vast resources trying to do so and the Ukrainian military is largely defeated.
but between the Russian world and the west. Instead of a campaign to unify of the Russian peoples
A large portion of the Russians are now under Russian control together with the valuable land in Ukraine. Left is a dysfunctional rump state with a demographic pyramid that makes South Korea's look healthy.
Russia is succeeding with its main objective, a multipolar world order. NATO has been cutting down on military spending for 30 years and deferring expenses and investments. Vast resources have been squandered in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ammunition stockpiles are low, equiptment is old and bases are in a sad state. Most European militaries couldn't even put together a functioning brigade before this war. Russia has created an endless black hole for military resources. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians will have to be trained over the next decades. Ukraine has the world's fourth largest air defence at the start of the war. It is effectively spent and they are currently burning through NATO's stockpile at a far higher rate than NATO can manufacture. Meanwhile SAM systems are being consumed at a high rate in the middle east. Ukraine's military is a quarter the size of the US military. Rebuilding it from ruins after the war is going to cost vast resources for many decades.
Russia's army is bigger now than at the start of the war and is fighting more effectively. Their airforce, navy and nuclear force is pretty much undamaged. The arms production has increased substantially. Between China and Russia NATO doesn't have the capacity to invade Iraq or play global hegemon. Russia doesn't have to defeat NATO, they just have to soak up resources to the point that the empire can't be sustained.
functor
1mo ago
The overwhelming impact they have had on social media has absolutely played a major role. They have also sponsored multiple NGOs in Europe.
Indonesia is the largest muslim country. They would probably be less disliked as immigrants than christians from Zimbabwe.
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