ThenElection
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User ID: 622
One of the most pressing macro-economic questions of the trade war is 'who in the world is supposed to absorb the Chinese exports no longer going to the US?'
Chinese manufacturers will have to find some country, somewhere, that has a GDP roughly comparable to the USA, a growing middle class of hundreds of millions of people, and room to shift from savings to consumption.
The effects you highlight are real and interesting, but the country that will absorb most of the displaced exports is China itself. And that is going to be difficult and straining, even destabilizing.
ThenElection
5d ago
The fish tank was tucked away in a small room, which was hidden behind some furniture or something.
ThenElection
7d ago
In Harris's defense, she was just saying populist stuff that she had no real commitment to and would never actually implement.
Though, to be fair, I thought the same of the tariffs...
ThenElection
7d ago
"People in power" here being "people who have a 401k and buy things."
I actually liked the show. Good acting (particularly by the incel kid--his first time acting iiuc) and well-shot. I am quite the sucker for the one-shot, apparently. It's a beautiful reflection of the neuroses of our society.
The issue: it's entirely fictional and doesn't represent anything real. Which is entirely fine as fiction, but a lot of viewers are having trouble distinguishing fiction from reality. One MP called it a documentary.
For reference, open up Homicide in England and Wales: year ending March 2024 and Appendix Tables.
You might notice lots of things, but some (mostly obvious) things I'd highlight:
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Men in aggregate are murdered more than women.
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The rate of homicide has been trending down for all age groups. This is driven by a decreasing rate of homicide for women, while the male rate has remained stable.
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There is zero Tate effect, stating the Tate effect as a statistic showing murders of a female victim increasing during his influencer period. This also holds even when looking at particular age groups. More accurately, there's a negative Tate effect if anything: guess he's mostly helping women. He loves the free marketing, regardless.
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Children are murdered at a much lower rate than adults. To ground everything that follows, one to two dozen girls are killed per year in England and Wales, and two to four dozen boys.
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Under sixteens, when they are murdered, are mostly murdered by parents and step parents. Look at Worksheet 16 of the Appendix tables. Of homicides where there's a known suspect, the vast majority of suspects for girls are one of the parents. Boys are also most likely to be murdered by a parent, but they have more distribution throughout the other categories.
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Look at Table 34 of the Appendix tables in the victim under 16 section, which breaks out homicides by the sexes of the victim and suspect. Woman kills girl is the smallest category. Following that are man kills girl and woman kills boy, which are about equal. Man kills boy is the largest category. (Considering point 5, "man" and "woman" should be read as "father" and "mother.)
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Maybe it's in the 16-24 age group we should be looking? But even there, there's no evidence of a Tate effect. Murder rates do increase, but driven almost entirely by boy victims rather than girl victims (Worksheet 4). The largest category of suspect for female victims in aggregate is the partner or spouse: the "acquaintance" or "stranger" categories that incel killings would fall under are barely represented (Table 34).
I want to revisit my point 6. A boy is at least one order of magnitude more likely to be murdered by his mother than a girl by an incel (though both happen extraordinarily rarely). Should we make a TV show about it? Hold hearings in government about it? Order that all expectant mothers need to attend a mandatory class on how they need to purge themselves of misandry and not murder their sons?
true crime shows usually feature karens and highly intelligent men as the killers. This is because their crimes are shocking and unexpected
This is kind of @Sloot bait, but that's not the reason. True crime shows feature Karens because Karens are a self-insert for the viewer, and they feature the men they do because etc.
Agreed. What's nice is that this benchmark is now in a sweet spot. If models consistently hover around the floor or ceiling, there's no signal for whether your model is improving. Once it gets into the middle area, though, model quality can be measured and compared easily, and progress proceeds quickly. I expect this benchmark to be saturated early 2026 at the latest.
ThenElection
7d ago
This might just be a measure of partisanship, though. Two years ago, would the results be different?
Relevant update: the authors of the paper, which didn't include Gemini 2.5, just added its results to MathArena.
@self_made_human may be interested in this, since he was trying to evaluate 2.5 himself.
Tldr is the top line number is a step improvement over all existing models, but it's mostly from being able to complete the first problem. You can click on the first result cell to see its responses and the grader's scoring rubric. Some hypothetical higher risk of contamination since it's newer.
ThenElection
8d ago
The DA at the time was Gascon, who's usually described as "would be the most lenient DA of San Francisco of all time, if not for his successor Boudin."
If I recall correctly, after a wellness check by police (who knocked on the door, didn't get an answer, and decided, well, I guess that means he's fine), the vagrants got spooked and used the victim's credit card to hire a professional cleaning company (named, appropriately enough, Aftermath Services) to fix up the mess. This destroyed most of the evidence, though not the dismembered body in a fish tank.
I suspect there are also aspects of the circumstances which would complicate the case. Why would someone let a homeless vagrant live in his house with him? Absolutely everyone, even (or especially, really) in San Francisco, knows this is a really bad idea. But, to add some color, Brian Egg was a single man who worked as a bartender at a gay bar. My speculation is that this was actually an exchange of sexual favors for housing. In this type of situation, with no witnesses or material evidence, it'd be easy enough for the vagrant to claim the homicide was in self-defense against a rapist. And who knows, might even be true; even if so, the killing, dismembering, covering up, and other crimes would be enough for me to convict.
But that makes this an absolute stinker of a case. It would be salacious, the public would project whatever their own opinions are onto it, and the jury would get confused about what they're supposed to be considering. Better to just dump the case in a fishtank and hope no one notices.
ThenElection
9d ago
Vancouver homeless have nothing on San Francisco homeless. A&W halberd? I'll raise you a McDonald's raccoon corpse. Hand separation by machete? Have a do-gooder who invited a homeless man into his home for shelter and ended up dismembered in a fish tank. And we exalt them enough that we don't even punish them:
SFPD officers responded and gave the [raccoon carcass man] a mental health evaluation and determined he did not need to be detained.
And:
Police found a body without a head or hands in a large fish tank. They arrested Lance Silva and another transient, Robert McCaffrey, living in the house. Both were charged with ID theft, financial crimes, and homicide. Through DNA, the mutilated body was identified as that of Brian Egg. An autopsy concluded he was murdered and died from blunt trauma... Lance Silva and his friend were released.
The question of why things are the way they are is a good one, and I think it just comes down to costs. It is expensive to impose costs on the homeless: you have to get involved physically with them to impose any kind of penalty. If things go awry (which they inevitably will), you end up with either a dead police officer (costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars) or a dead homeless guy (costing the city millions of dollars). And, when arrested, they are just an endless pit you throw cash into. Put them in prison, and you're talking a process and punishment that itself costs hundreds of thousands. Letting them wreak havoc on the local populace has its own costs, but those are diffuse and don't immediately harm the government budget: it's a tragedy of the commons.
The non-homeless, though, are cash cows who are easily... cowed. So the city focuses a disproportionate amount of its law enforcement capabilities on them, and it's self sustaining. Sure, SF might shrug at someone being murdered and dismembered, but that's because they have to focus on much more serious issues like a businessman spraying down a homeless woman with a hose, which gets everyone from the NAACP to the New York Times weighing in.
ThenElection
13d ago
The geofencing is something I have some ambiguity on. Is it primarily legal/regulatory, or is it because Waymo requires extensive pre-data to function? I.e. if you dropped a Waymo on a Montana back road, would it be able to drive and navigate as well as a human driver in the same situation?
It seems like a bit of an unfair standard to hold it against Waymo capabilities if the issue is primarily legal/regulatory.
ThenElection
14d ago
My point was different than you interpret: I was responding to the idea that people of means have access to special networks of information. Money gives optionality, which is an undisputed good, but it doesn't give special access to information about how to prepare for AI.
ThenElection
14d ago
The idea that people with lots of resources are better positioned to find ways to prepare is off. It's not like advisors at the family office have any particular insight into AI. They have been selected for basic competency and controlled risk management, not predicting radical step changes in the world. If they fail to predict ruin from AI, they'll have lots of good company; if they stick their neck out on AI predictions and fail, they'll face much worse consequences. At most, they'll say "this AI thing seems important, let's reallocate your portfolio to include more IBM."
With potential AGI, no one has a solid understanding of what will happen. In those situations, mainstream opinion sources default to status quo bias, which is about the worst thing to do. Weird randos on obscure Internet forums at least offer the potential for some variance.
ThenElection
14d ago
We don't know. But it's not guaranteed they will, and what determines whether Democrats will are how powerful trans activists are when Democrats win, not past actions or politicians' stated values at one moment.
A downside of this framework is that power is opaque, and the clearest way to seeing whether trans groups are powerful is whether they can cause Democratic politicians to send trans people to women's sports and prisons. Beyond that, we have to read tea leaves: how does media treat trans issues? Do tech platforms give them full censorship rights?
ThenElection
14d ago
The incentives they experience and respond to. You might have two different people and, at a particular moment of time, they respond the same way to the incentives they face. But if the landscape of incentives change, their actions might diverge.
E.g. if your mental model of Gavin Newsom involves him being deeply ideological on trans issues, then you wouldn't have been able to predict he'd switch to moderating his positions when his party was faced with a broad electoral loss (and wanting to prepare himself for a national run).
And, on the other side, until Trump came most Republican politicians would have condemned broad tariffs and been pro-war. But change the political landscape, and they change their positions.
ThenElection
14d ago
I'm using the app, have plus, and haven't run into any refusals yet. So far all of my images have been of friends, me and my wife, or political/cultural figures, nothing violent or sexual. I upload the photo, and ask "Can you make this photo in the style of a Ghibli animation frame?"
Still seems to be working.
ThenElection
14d ago
Well, there's Gavin Newsom's post-election switch to opposing trans athletes in women's sports.
You can take a kind of functionalist position and say that Democratic politicians are what they do, and so in 2020 they were radical trans ideologues. Sure. But it doesn't give much insight into how they will respond to changing circumstances. Democratic electeds don't have deeply held principles (no more than Republicans do): they react to incentives, around easily understood things like power, money, and status.
The extremists driving the unpopular trans positions, on the other hand, are not going to suddenly abandon their views once they start costing them power, money, and status. (And the broader Democratic base will shift to supporting whatever Democratic leadership and media tells them to.)
When people hear that Comrade Bob was accused of sexual misconduct, they immediately think of Harvey Weinstein and Father Jim, panic, and do whatever they can to avoid accusations of conducting their own cover-up.
That reminds me of something I was reading last week. There was a student athlete at Stanford who committed suicide, which is sad and terrible. The reason? She was due for a disciplinary hearing: bad Stanford, I guess. News articles then went into what happened, and they usually framed it as she was facing the hearing because she spilled a cup of coffee on someone.
Hmm. Digging deeper, she had thrown a hot cup of coffee onto another student's face. Okay, this is getting juicy. Maybe he deserved it? What did he do? Well, the news articles breathlessly reported he had been accused of sexually assaulting someone.
Finally, I find out the root cause: he had kissed one of her team members without consent.
These are all obvious questions to ask, and the actual story is pretty straightforward, a series of banal student hijinks that ended in tragedy. But the sheer unwillingness for any news articles to simply tell the story is a result of the dynamics you mention. No one wants to be the bad guy and say "well actually, Stanford didn't brutally murder an innocent girl to help cover up a rapist's crimes," because if you do, you're all of a sudden part of the rape cult, opening you to attack and hurting your career advancement.
ThenElection
14d ago
OAI definitely won the day in the popular vote. And, at least for now, they seem to have taken off most of the guardrails: https://x.com/paul_hundred/status/1904933164256002086
Does it matter? In terms of trajectories, this is about expected, so I'm not updating much from the image gen release. Google actually got to this approach first, albeit with an inferior version that was badly marketed and had a mediocre rollout (history repeats itself, first as a tragedy, the millionth time as a farce).
What is mildly important is Gemini 2.5. It's not out of line with the expected trajectory, but it gives lie to claims about "hitting a wall." It trades blows with Anthropic, OAI, and DeepSeek, and even surpasses them--for the time being, at least--but does so much more cheaply than Claude or ChatGPT. My main takeaways are that progress continues and that Google's structural advantages are finally making Gemini a plausible leader of Western LLMs.
ThenElection
16d ago
Baijiu is the devil. Although I agree it's a sweeter drink, the description I'd go with is more gasoline than anything else. One thing I found interesting when I first drank it was that the premier producer of it is a public state owned enterprise (Kweichow Moutai) with a market cap of around $300B USD, roughly comparable with Coca-Cola.
My own first extended trip to China involved me quitting my job and flying out to China to be with a now ex-girlfriend, planning to use the country as a base to travel around for some unspecified amount of time. But three days after my flight landed, there was some kind of flu that was going around, the entire country was entirely shut down, and I ended up staying with her family for a couple months. This was an interesting experience, to say the least. Surreptitiously smuggled produce from the countryside; needing my passport to enter the local Carrefour; teams of hundreds of men spraying down the sidewalks with disinfectant daily; lots of high stakes MJ.
The family itself was... unique, though all very welcoming. It was large; she had five siblings, as the first five children were all daughters. This confused me when she first told me about it--what about the one child policy? But, there are ways around that, as it turns out. The family was extraordinarily well off by any standards (net worth in the nine figures USD). Her father was an impressive character: in his teens and early twenties, he had sold turnips out of a cart and had nothing to his name. Eventually, he started a business with two partners in construction in a small third tier city (population just a couple million), which ended up extremely successful after a decade or two of economic boom times. His partners then betrayed him, removing him from the business and dispossessing him of most of his assets. Somehow, a year later the government investigated them for corruption and restored his ownership of the company, which was a great windfall for him. Them, not so much: when I asked what happened to them, one is still ostensibly in prison, and the other died a couple months after arrest, under unclear circumstances. My ex was reticent when it came to explaining the exact mechanics of how all this happened, so I didn't press too much on this topic.
Her youngest, the brother, was very kind, and constantly wanted to drink baijiu. Having never graduated high school, his only accomplishment for his two decades was an extraordinary sneaker collection. He had an entire room filled up with hundreds of pairs of brand new luxury sneakers. Beyond that, he had a newborn child, who lived apart from him with his wife. At the time, they were separated, but the families were working to reunite them. This involved lots of negotiations: his wife wanted a larger stipend from his family (they were only paying the wife's family ~$15k USD/month, which they felt was rather stingy and should be doubled) and an upgraded condo. (These stipends, unfortunately, were not available to the daughters' partners.)
What a place and time.
ThenElection
17d ago
For what it's worth, NYU isn't claiming the data are fabricated, instead so far focusing on the illegality of the action.
Though I suppose they have a team of lawyers advising them very closely to say the minimum necessary.
It's more than that; it's almost a requirement, especially for men who want a family in a HCOL blue city. A male educator dedicating his career to helping marginalized youth, no matter his ideological bona fides and other good qualities, is going to have a much harder time finding a wife than even an entirely apolitical and unexceptional corporate guy.
It's widely understood that corporate jobs are just jobs, and you can't be blamed for getting yours. One of the most rabidly woke people I know on social media is a (Asian, female, bisexual) lawyer whose day job is quite literally union busting.
(I don't care about the actual choice of career, just the hypocrisy.)
ThenElection
20d ago
(Warning to the reader: this turned into an extended rant.)
The issue with homeless shelters is quite simple: other homeless people. They are unsafe and chaotic. You can add rules to make this slightly better--no drugs, no alcohol, no pets--but that makes the homeless you most want out of the libraries and off the streets even less willing to go to a shelter.
So that leaves individual housing and apartments. But they can't be temporary: if they are, what happens when the beneficiary runs out of time? Do you kick them out, making them homeless again? So you indefinitely let them stay. A one bedroom in my city runs around $2500 a month, at the very low end. That's $36k/year for each person housed, which in isolation is still better than $100k/year. But the population housed would be constantly growing. And it's assuming no additional costs: you might reduce emergency room visits from once per week to once per month, but it's still a cost. And what happens when the tenant destroys substantial parts of the property? During COVID, vacant hotels were used by my city to house the homeless, and one hosting a couple hundred suffered $20M in damages over two years. $20M here, $20M there, and soon you're talking about real money.
All these funds are coming from taxpayers that are themselves having to spend a significant part, and often a majority, of their income to pay for rent or mortgage. It's the number one reason people leave my city.
And yes, our housing policy is shit, significantly contributing to the issue. But in a world where activism to improve our housing policy has failed for over a decade, I have to assume that it'll be at least a decade before anything improves on that front. Does that mean I should just forego crazy luxuries like clean and safe libraries, parks, sidewalks, and transit for the next decade? Why shouldn't I just move, taking the 60k I pay every year to the city along with me, when there are plenty of places that do manage to have public spaces at a small fraction of the cost? Plenty of people are doing exactly that already, which has driven massive deficits in the city budget. And then how are we going to pay for even more homeless services? Shutting down schools? Libraries? Parks?
ThenElection
20d ago
My city spends almost six figures per homeless person. The exact accounting is difficult, because of a combination of understandable (what philosophically counts as spending on the homeless?), bureaucratic (how do you get figures on the costs of emergency room visits?), and sheer graft (nonprofits that mysteriously siphon away lots of money with no services rendered evident), but it's a lot. Despite that, the homeless problem is as bad as ever, and many of the libraries are as a result entirely unusable to the public.
So, suppose it is true that so long as spending isn't, say, a quarter million per year per homeless, libraries will remain unusable. Voters are left with a set of unenviable choices: spend a quarter million per year on the homeless and finally get clean safe libraries; let libraries remain ersatz day shelters for the homeless that happen to be decorated with shelves of books; or stop funding public libraries. The first option isn't practicable, and the second is just stupid. So the third option ends up being the one that actually happens.
Are either particularly likely to become arms factories?
My guess is that an Amazon warehouse is marginally more likely to, since the building itself would be larger, be better logistically, and have up-to-date infrastructure. But neither would have much ability to transfer either their machinery or skilled labor to arms production.
I guess the shoe factory could easily transition to making combat boots.
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