ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
14hr ago
The first time I ever enjoyed Shakespeare was in a tavern that served food and booze while putting on the performance. Can't recommend highly enough (no tomatoes thrown, alas).
ThenElection
16hr ago
Hoofprints in the snow might not tell you something is a horse. But then you see a tuft of shoulder-high fur caught in the brush, then a stirrup, and then, hey, it's Brunellus.
I suppose the broadness of the term "postmodernism" is one of its weaknesses, but reasons I'd argue for it:
- It's a meta story: the story itself is framed as being a lost manuscript.
- It's a pastiche: high literature, philosophy, theology meets genre detective fiction
- Intertextuality: abundant references to an expansive group of external texts
- Thematically, it's all about no one overarching institution or system (even rationality and empiricism) having a monopoly on truth.
- A major element is signs: we don't have direct access to the thing in itself, only references to the thing. Hence, the name of the rose, not the rose.
Keeping a notebook while reading Gravity's Rainbow is not how you should be reading it; you'll inevitably be bogged down. The jazz analogy is right, but perhaps not how you mean it: it's a kaleidoscope, and the fractured lack of a coherent narrative is itself what you're supposed to get out of it. It's an experience, not a textbook.
I'd also not overly index on Gravity's Rainbow as postmodern literature, just as it wouldn't make sense to overly index on Finnegan's Wake as modernist literature. You could just as well choose Pale Fire or the Name of the Rose as exemplars of postmodernism, and those are excellent and have a highly readable narrative.
As to their value, I enjoyed those two exemplars immensely; if they bring value to your life, then they have value. Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest have the unfortunate status of being i-am-very-smart books, and if read as that, you're not going to have a good time or get any value out of them.
You are entirely correct that Cormac McCarthy is unsurpassed in 20th century literature, though.
This assumes that the Wuhan lab knew The Truth about what was going on. Another possibility: no one in any position of authority had a clue about the reality of the situation (not at all unique to China), they panicked and freaked out, and then one way or another dropped or pulled the database. Could even be a low level employee just covering their ass. Likely good for your expected longevity to preemptively do that, even (or perhaps especially) if you're unsure what the database contains. Getting rid of all evidence aligns the interests of the Chinese state with your own: they're more content to run with it than any alternative, and the benefits of exculpatory evidence would pretty much only go to high level Chinese officials, while evidence of blame would be used to string you up, quite literally.
On balance, I think a lab leak is more likely than not. But many people err on the side of ascribing more competence to Chinese institutions (to e.g. execute on a conspiracy) than actually exists: in some ways, it's comforting to think that institutional competence exists somewhere, even in a mortal enemy, because it gives hope that someone, somewhere knows what they're doing.
ThenElection
6d ago
Has it achieved any goals? At what cost?
I'd also score "we never really thought about what our goals are" as not achieving goals. Right now, the main goal seems to be an open Hormuz and stable markets... Which we had before the war started.
ThenElection
8d ago
Depends on how much "alignment" programs work out. If it's possible for the government to align AI and control it, you still end up running into public choice and Hayekian flavored failures of communism.
ThenElection
8d ago
How likely is it for AGI to lead to communism, if achieved through corporations? I can imagine governments deciding to nationalize it, or the achieving company to become a de facto communist government. But there are other outcomes possible, and $250M isn't going to shift the needle much on which outcome is most likely regardless.
I think if your terminal goal is communism (as opposed to personal security, widespread material prosperity, etc), you'd want to do a variation of this. Invest in AI, but target a broad portfolio of research programs that aren't currently in vogue and saturated in capital, betting on the possibility that current approaches aren't sufficient. They probably are, but if they are, you can't change their trajectory much; so you assume they aren't and try to get get there first.
ThenElection
12d ago
It probably depends, but I know a radiologist who just finished their fellowship with an offer for >$500k, not in the boondocks. Another friend (more mid career) is an allergist at $250k, but working only part time. It doesn't seem that implausible for someone to get into seven figures income, though I don't have a sense of how common that is. Maybe you need to start a private practice for that? Or are those well and truly dead?
ThenElection
14d ago
Warren Farrell would be a good example, but he is about a thousand miles away from the contemporary manosphere.
ThenElection
14d ago
guys like that were common 20 years ago, 50 years ago, and so on. Are they more common today? No, not really.
The misogynist basement dwelling rapist incel and the cock carousel riding woman are both myths. Not in the sense that there don't exist individuals who might qualify as those categories--sure, it's possible to find both. But their primary purpose isn't as labels meant to describe people you're likely to meet in physical reality, but to be symbolic avatars for people to project their deepest neuroses and fears onto.
The algorithm detects that people engage strongly with their neuroses and fears and so presents them more and more of the same. And so these virtual types end up displacing conceptions of the typical man and woman informed by interactions with real men and women.
ThenElection
15d ago
If you (or, more accurately, Trump) could convincingly guarantee a US victory as defined by either your total capitulation or stone age scenarios, those are outcomes I'd happily take, at least given the situation we are in now. But it's not all a given that those aims would be achievable or even plausible, even for an administration that had shown the ability to focus on something for more than a few weeks at a time without stepping on a rake.
There's reasonable ambiguity about how things are going to play out from this conflict, and I'm highly skeptical that either of your scenarios will come to pass. Most likely, the US will continue bombing for two or three months more, get bored, and move on without getting any resolution to the root issue, leading to bad foreseeable issues five or ten years from now. And that's kind of a best case scenario: significant ground troops, loss of a significant military asset, and even breaking out into a much broader, global war are also outside risks that still might present themselves.
ThenElection
15d ago
Even "don't do GOF research in a dense 10M+ megacity" would reduce the risk a lot.
ThenElection
19d ago
There is no solution. There is no proof-of-work or proof-of-humanity that is not severely error prone
It's difficult to get any of the leading foundation models to write a comment full of racial slurs. DeepSeek also refuses. (Grok is currently broken for me.)
Maybe that could be the future proof-of-humanity? Obviously it's nothing inherent in the architecture and there are workarounds, but I don't see those safeguards being removed anytime soon.
ThenElection
19d ago
Newsom has consistently underperformed a generic Democrat in California. Not nearly as bad as Kamala, but still trailing other Democrats.
The issue is that (recent) California politics rewards different traits than more partisan-competitive states. It is incredibly cutthroat and involves genuine skill, but it is much more cloak and dagger and focused on managing the groups and building alliances with other politicians. These have some carryover to national elections, but it would be much smarter for Democrats to select someone whose skill set involves winning competitive elections.
Then again, he's tall and has a good head of hair, and that may well be enough if the economy or the war go south.
ThenElection
20d ago
In the event of a hot war with China, no commercial shipping will be going through any region of the ocean close to China. This is extremely painful to China, but it's also very painful to all of the US and its allies--you can expect an immediate double digit percentage drop in GDP of Japan, South Korea, and the Phillipines (and Australia, likely to be more significant than SK and the Phillipines), and Taiwan is worse off than even China in that scenario. US and the rest of the world also will feel significant pain.
ThenElection
20d ago
I wonder if the Venezuela operation has expanded Chinese leadership's scope of imagination. Before people mused about the possibility of China doing something similar, but it seemed almost absurd fantasy. But the US has shown that it's possible, and an existence proof of an operation like that succeeding has a powerful draw to it. And, if they can pull it off, it solves a lot of problems with a protracted war against US forces.
ThenElection
20d ago
That's mapping modern distinctions to times where they didn't apply (or were at least much more fluid). Subjects weren't as rigidly bound to a prince (or a lineage) as citizens are to the modern nation state. A prince might be the ruler of Florence one year, and the ruler of Urbano the next, then the ruler of neither, then the ruler of Urbano again, each transition driven by an ever shifting array of forces. And, once subjugated, a previous enemy prince becomes a subject.
What is weird is that we are in an era of spectacular profits: the rate has risen significantly, not fallen, due to the Schumpeterian heroism of the tech industry. Okishio has won over Marx.
There's also a kind of schizoid relationship people have with the rate of profit. When people object to capitalism, their anger is usually at excess profits, not companies ruthlessly competing away each other's margins; whatever grumbles about airline leg room there are, it's not what's driving any political anti-capitalism. But if we take Marx seriously, exploding profits is, if not outright impossible, then at least a sign of capitalism's strength, with its end state moving proportionately further into the future.
ThenElection
26d ago
A second issue is when women enter a field it falls in stature. Men flee the field. Biology/Veterinary science are now viewed as female coded and have dropped hard in stature.
This might be mistaking cause and effect (or, more likely, it's a more complicated relationship). Equally plausible is that, when a job becomes less entrepreneurial, more stable, and more bureaucratic, it drops in stature and becomes more appealing to women. E.g. when vets were predominantly male, the job was typically a sole practitioner who traveled from farm to farm, essentially permanently on-call and dealing with inclement weather; messy, rough workspaces; and large, relatively dangerous animals. Nowadays, the job is typically in clinics (increasingly consolidated), with set hours, treating small companionate animals like dogs and cats, with a much heavier layer of accreditation.
In many places, starter single family homes run about $2M. You're not going to be able to afford that with a single half decent job.
You might say that's a choice to live in such an area, and sure, it is. But the idea that you can just get up and move from it to rural Iowa exacerbates other problems: the disintegration of the extended family, the decline of friends, etc.
It's also worth digging into what we mean by "most of the country." If you're weighting by acreage, I agree, most of the country can be lived in on a single half decent job. If you're weighting by population distribution (more appropriate IMO), that shifts the needed income much higher. There are still realistic places to move (e.g. in the Sunbelt), but for those you need a single decent job, not a single half-decent job. Weighting regions by GDP contribution (which has some arguments for it) shifts us solidly into the two income requirement.
Women and men have different modes of communication; it's not like women don't like to talk other women's ears off as well.
In broad strokes, men don't like to revisit past events to form narratives and emotional bonding around them; if they must be revisited, then it's for the goal of finding a solution to some unpleasantry, to be finished as quickly as possible. Women prefer the opposite. Not understanding this leads to conflict. Men offering unsolicited solutions to women who just want to do shared narrative forming, and women talking the ears off men about Karen at work while men do the interminable emotional labor of pretending to care. Neither is right or wrong, just differing gendered styles, and the solution is for both parties to realize this and meet in the middle.
ThenElection
29d ago
It seems the simplest explanation. Trump likes doing things. Bibi says, here's a thing. Trump says, great, let's do it! I can't see either of them needing much prodding to get on board.
The only reason someone would need more than that was if they bought the line that Trump was some Ron Paul-esque paleo isolationist. I don't think many people believe that now.
ThenElection
29d ago
I bet someone could make a compelling pitch deck. Run a market for an uncorrelated asset class. Sell products on it that aggregate risk. No one (except for you) needs to actually make money from it.
I've heard the quip than Don Quixote was the first postmodern novel.
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