ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
1d ago
Although not about the election and focusing on the nonprofit administerial/management classes, there was a lot of discussion around woke movements destroying nonprofits capabilities back in 2022. E.g. https://ryangrim.substack.com/p/elephant-in-the-zoom. People here at least probably wouldn't object to them being considered quasi-political/Democratic.
As for the Democratic Party apparatus itself, I don't think it's ever had a full reckoning, but I also don't think it ever was dominated by true believers in the same way media/academia/nonprofits were/are. Instead, its failings were more conventional: domination by a gerontocracy and a risk-averse leadership whose main qualification was never rocking the boat. That's how you end up with a comic scenario of Kamala Harris whining that it's Biden's fault because he stayed on well past the sell by date and because no one in his administration was willing to do anything about it.
ThenElection
3d ago
Isn't Bluesky federated? Can't people just leave and migrate their account to a different host if they don't like one's "no celebrating assassinations" rule?
ThenElection
4d ago
Kash is referring to the Valhalla of the Marvel pantheon, not the Norse pantheon, so it's a solid established part of our civic religion.
ThenElection
4d ago
(Tongue in cheek) Throwing this out there as a proposal: it's a double false flag, a lefty pretending to be a righty pretending to be a lefty. All the hints that he's a right-wing 4chan kid are so explicit that no one earnestly trying to cover his tracks would be so obvious.
ThenElection
4d ago
When Fairchild started, it had pretty much no customers. But, in the early 1960s Minuteman and NASA provided massive contracts, to the point where the federal government was purchasing 95%+ of all integrated circuits from it (which is to say, 95%+ of all ICs manufactured in the world).
By the late 60s, the market was much more diverse for Fairchild and the Fairchildren (majority of revenue non-government), but that initial contract was what allowed Fairchild to drive down the cost curve enough for commercial applications to be feasible.
ThenElection
4d ago
Silicon Valley has much deeper roots than FAANG. The semiconductor industry had the national security complex as a primary investor and a primary customer.
This seeded the regional expertise ecosystem--VC, academia, local talent--that enabled companies further up the value chain to develop and succeed.
ThenElection
4d ago
People overstate the cost of living aspect. Most costs, except for real estate, are a rounding error compared to the generous compensation. And even real estate just means you do have to plan and save a couple years for it like everyone else in the US; two people in tech can easily afford a detached single family home in a nice neighborhood in San Francisco. And when you hit whatever number you're aiming for, you can retire decades early.
That's all with minimal risk and a reasonable work life balance.
ThenElection
5d ago
It's about a hierarchy and order of abstractions, as opposed to a hierarchy and order of individuals. "The experts" is itself an abstraction. Any individual expert can be bad and wrong; even a majority of individual experts can be bad and wrong. But, taken as an abstraction, the experts are always right.
ThenElection
5d ago
Civilization is a delicate thing. It's not the natural state of man, and when lost it needs to be rebuilt. And you're as likely as not to end up in the abyss as you are to successfully rebuild.
It's not something to give up lightly.
ThenElection
5d ago
Politicians gonna politic. I know what's in Newsom's soul--a gaping abyss--but if he at least pivots to mouthing the right words, I'm happy.
ThenElection
5d ago
Basically every politician is denouncing violence.
What strikes me about Newsom is that he's kicking the hornets nest here. He's going on Bluesky and writing a more extended commentary on Kirk that is positive. There's an intentionality to it: he (or his intern) isn't simply duplicating the same Tweet across platforms.
I'm speculating that this is part of a broader strategy of making the nastier parts of the Left hate him. Instead of going hard left all the time, he wants to take a center track, with his bonafides fortified by the most distasteful parts of the Democratic coalition hating him. (Who knows if it will work, but there's a certain logic to it.)
But it's also good in itself: telling people that Kirk was not the devil incarnate and was a human being with real virtues seems like it's a first step in ratcheting down the place the country finds itself.
ThenElection
6d ago
Gavin Newsom had a full podcast episode with Kirk earlier this year, and on Twitter he had this to say:
The attack on Charlie Kirk is disgusting, vile, and reprehensible. In the United States of America, we must reject political violence in EVERY form.
Banal. But, interestingly, on Bluesky he went much further:
We should all feel a deep sense of grief and outrage at the terrible violence that took place in Utah today. Charlie Kirk’s murder is sick and reprehensible, and our thoughts are with his family, children, and loved ones. I knew Charlie, and I admired his passion and commitment to debate. His senseless murder is a reminder of how important it is for all of us, across the political spectrum, to foster genuine discourse on issues that deeply affect us all without resorting to political violence. The best way to honor Charlie's memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse. In a democracy, ideas are tested through words and good-faith debate — never through violence. Honest disagreement makes us stronger; violence only drives us further apart and corrodes the values at the heart of this nation.
This did not, shall we say, make the Bluesky folks happy. But I do find it interesting that he's targeting Bluesky in particular with that message.
ThenElection
7d ago
Do you know any good books on this? I know about "peasant studies," but the peasant studies books I've read tend to be highly sociological/politicized.
ThenElection
10d ago
I am... Eclectic in my politics. I fear I'm a gigachud among most of my friends, and left-leaning for the Motte.
Over the past one or two years, I've been a bit more willing to express my opinions. When I do, the responses are far more balanced than my fears. Some of the things I've heard would make the median Mottezan blanche.
I'd encourage being open; you might be surprised. Particularly if you have a diverse friend group.
Along with the other things people have mentioned, I would bring up COVID and the lockdowns as critical. In many ways, it was directing the tools of wokeness--social media, news media, government bureaucrats, the Science--to solve a novel social problem. This led to people experiencing its downsides in a very visceral way, and that led to a loss of authority and respect. (Those same institutions didn't help their cause much when they switched on a dime from "COVID is a critical public health issue that responding to is worth devastating the economy" to "well BLM protests are about an even more critical public health issue, but COVID is still the second most critical issue.")
There are other material issues the response introduced as well--the spike in crime, the surge in inflation--which might have shifted people from identitarian concerns to bread and butter issues.
This created a diffuse, durable shift in opinion, and over the course of a few years new structures emerged to represent them.
ThenElection
12d ago
Boltzmann pocket universes, where a fluctuation contains observers that maintain coherency over timescales of hours, still in most models are much more prevalent than real observers.
That's to say nothing of instantaneous Boltzmann brains that fluctuate into existence believing they've had a coherent history of experiences.
ThenElection
12d ago
Boltzmann observers with a invisible dragon in their garage are exponentially more likely to exist than real observers.
I'm not sure what my takeaway should be from that, except that I don't like Boltzmann brains.
ThenElection
12d ago
Is intentionality and ability to act necessary for consciousness?
Suppose you have someone with locked-in syndrome. They have no (or extremely limited) ability to effect any kind of change in the outside world; perhaps they can blink or move their eyes, but let's say that they're taped over or removed. At the least, they have less ability to interact with the world than an LLM. Are they no longer conscious? I don't think so, so current ability to act isn't necessary for consciousness.
Intentionality is a bit trickier, but I'm not sure someone who's had locked-in syndrome for a decade has any remnant of intentionality; lack of opportunities to exercise intentionality leads it to wither. I still grant that unfortunate individual consciousness.
It may be necessary for action and intentionality to have at some point existed for consciousness to exist, though; I'm not sure a being that spent its entire existence in those conditions would be conscious.
ThenElection
14d ago
The 2000 election process was a disaster, but the Supreme Court did hand Bush the Presidency, although in some senses it was already in Bush's hand.
To recap: the result was razor thin, and an automatic machine recount made it even thinner, with Bush in the lead by 300 or so votes. Florida law provides for manual recounts, but with differing legal standards across counties. Gore's team asked for a narrow recount across four counties that it believed would get them to a win (though, not known at the time, it would have given Bush the win); the Florida Supreme Court ordered a broader statewide recount of all undervotes (that, not known at the time, would have given Gore the win, by a couple dozen votes). To my mind, the fairest recount would have been a statewide recount of all undervotes and overvotes, which would have given Bush the win. But the process, such as it was, was headed toward something that would have given Gore the win, though that wasn't known at the time.
A critical issue, though, was the differing standards between different counties. The SCOTUS came in, stayed the recount decision, and then ruled 5-4 that there wasn't enough time to create a fair, uniform standard, and because of that the recount had to be halted entirely, giving the election to Bush.
ThenElection
17d ago
I tried reading this twice, could not understand any of it, and gave myself a precautionary FAST test.
ThenElection
19d ago
I feel like the $82M is pretty much rage bait/marketing bait. It's best considered more like a lottery ticket, except instead of $2 it costs you your dignity and thousands of hours of work to have even a remote chance of earning even a hundredth as much. Women are as much victims of this scheme as the audience of men are.
ThenElection
19d ago
One creator (read: one single internet girl) has certified gross earnings in 2024 of $82 million. This puts her at the same level as...
Within five years, virtually all of that money will be going to companies building AI models, generating AI videos, and scripting AI interactions. They will also be monetizing sexual desire much more efficiently: instead of having an LLM or Filipino contractor write formulaic responses as they do now, they will use push messages, track interaction history, include advertising, and write personalities customized to the consumer. There may be a split market, one marketed as AI-driven and dominated by AI, and the other marketed as AI-free and dominated by AI.
ThenElection
20d ago
They're not mutually exclusive options, either. Chavvy white underclass girls doing chavvy things in a park, molesty migrant approaches them because they're chavvy and he's molesty, and he bites off more than he can chew.
ThenElection
21d ago
I don't see the Intel buy as motivated by revenge politics. It seems more motivated by Trump's desire to be seen doing things: do a lot of random, high profile things, and select those that work out as proof of your leadership (those that don't, of course, fail because of the wreckers).
Maybe the revenge narrative makes sense, but not a revenge against Trump's most visible enemies, but the layers of bureaucrats and experts whose main function tends to be saying you can't do things and then acting to make it harder and more expensive to do things.
(All that said, in this case the naysayers are entirely correct, and Trump should be picking his things to do more judiciously.)
Good ole Anglo-Saxon words over Latinisms.
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