2rafa
14hr ago
It’s mostly that low time preference and intelligence are both correlated with each other and almost certainly linked to neuroticism. Affluent PMC women may rarely get abortions, but they probably worry about possibly needing one more than those who actually get them at higher rates.
2rafa
14hr ago
As @Amadan says, Korea’s demographic decline seems more likely to mirror those of every other advanced nation (including countries like Saudi Arabia that are much more socially conservative, even if they’re slowly liberalizing) than be something unique because of this “4B” phenomenon. In fact polling shows that many South Koreans, male and female alike, still want more children than they have, just like Americans.
That international correspondents saddled with the Seoul beat (Samsung, Kpop, Squid Game, DPRK, plastic surgery get boring to write about after a while) would write about this is one thing, that anyone else takes it seriously is quite another.
2rafa
20hr ago
Gaetz seems like a POS. RFK is a philanderer who fried his brain, but did some good and doesn’t seem particularly malevolent.
2rafa
1d ago
Republicans have consistently failed to secure the border. It ties to two fundamental issues. The first is that the American public is susceptible to media messaging about tough enforcement and the second is that the pull factor is eternal until birthright citizenship is ended.
2rafa
1d ago
More generally, 1997-1999 was a really weird period where the US economy was booming, America was undisputed global hegemon, and unemployment was very low. In this environment of them mid-late 90s a weird post-Nirvana alt scene evolved that was weirdly self destructive, nihilistic and generally full of rebels without a cause.
2rafa
1d ago
They’re protected from liability because the US legal system is this complete bullshit thing where 1% of users complaining about a thing can bankrupt a company.
2rafa
1d ago
Quite possible, I live in one of the nice but not elite areas of zone 2.
Are we talking like Islington / Maida Vale / Clapham tier, here?
Yeah, it’s interesting, natives are highly concentrated in the outer suburbs, the richest are strongly concentrated in Chelsea / Fulham / the immediate vicinity of The Surprise, with another large group slightly north around Holland Park / Notting Hill, and to some extent in Hampstead and leafier parts of North London (along with Jews and Indians).
Here in Mayfair there are almost no natives, it is predominantly Arabs, some Russians, Africans and Chinese (although the latter prefer Nine Elms / Battersea Power Station / South Bank Apartment buildings), and moderately large contingents of wealthy Americans, Italians and French (although in general French and Scandinavians prefer Marylebone), mostly young (men) who work in hedge funds or PE nearby. Marylebone also seems to have a lot of rich Aussies along with many Americans and a few Brits here and there, mostly older.
2rafa
1d ago
If a general wins a war, does that mean every decision he made was the best one? By the way, I don’t think this has a clear answer.
2rafa
1d ago
Whereabouts do you live? You’re probably correct but I wonder if it’s balanced out by large numbers of female NHS etc workers now that Filipinos and Poles are being joined by both Nigerians and Indians in larger numbers.
2rafa
2d ago
They know this already, Ukraine has always (well…) been a nuclear threshold state.
2rafa
2d ago
Yeah they’re gonna run in 2028 on “man isn’t all this culture war shit about abortion and god and deporting random Mexicans kind of lame and cringe and try hard? Why not just, like, be chill, live and let live maaan”…and it’s going to work. The public has a short memory.
2rafa
2d ago
UK left under Starmer already dropped the extreme pro-trans position before the election. Keir Starmer literally said he wanted to protect female-only spaces and that he would make sure “gender ideology” wasn’t taught in schools.
In general, positions adopted over the past 10 years in relation to trans issues and bail reform can be dropped pretty quickly. Positions that are 50+ years old on immigration (etc) are much harder to deal with and reverse.
2rafa
2d ago
As an aside, in the post-SFFA world, the number of students interested in the Federalist Society doubled at my law school
What happened was that the mainstream and legal press published a bunch of snarky articles saying that the Federalist society was easy mode because 80%+ of students are libs, so when it comes to clerking for federal judges FedSoc membership + clerking for conservative justices was much easier than trying to be Kagan or Sotomayor’s clerk (or their circuit peers). This was not even false, really.
The consequence was that a bunch of striving students, including many Indians and Chinese but of course also ambitious whites, who had no connection to conservatism and don’t really care about ideology, are now joining fedsocs for the career boost.
2rafa
2d ago
I work with many competent British-born Indians on a regular basis and find them friendly, hardworking, trustworthy and generally good coworkers. I think accusations of particular nepotism are unwarranted.
Increasingly I think every tribe is clearly nepotistic. Tribe, not race. White British or white Americans nepotistic aren’t nepotistic on an ethnic-group-wide level because if you’re in-group nepotistic at 70% of the population then nepotism isn’t really a filter at all. Go to Hong Kong or Singapore, though, and you’ll certainly find networks where Englishmen and so on will network and hire each other no differently to Indians in San Francisco or Chinese in London.
Indeed anyone in finance in London will have encountered, for example, the terrifyingly effective Italian and Turkish nepotistic networks, not to mention the ex (British military) officers corps network, which is of course almost 100% comprised of upper and upper-middle class native men. These things are everywhere. The only reason why some (ahem) are more effective than others is because their baseline intelligence is higher.
2rafa
2d ago
How imbalanced are the demographics of recent Indian immigrants to the UK? The statistics are presumably available.
2rafa
3d ago
It’s more likely to be Pakistanis and Arabs who are frequently racist toward Indians online. So much of this more vulgar racist posting on boards and in social media comments is perpetuated on all sides by non-Westerns.
2rafa
3d ago
Many born Hindus do accept Hare Krishnas as Hindu iirc, it’s more that western observers see it as kind of a new age cult because of the audience it attracted in the 1960s (and still does today to some extent). But ISKCON is descended from some 15th century strand of “real Hinduism” via Krishnaism, part of the Vaishnavist collection of Hindu denominations.
2rafa
3d ago
Much of Fukuyama’s work laid the foundations for ideological analysis performed by the “alt” left and right today. His most famous work (which is pretty much the famous “nothing ever happens” meme) was prescient in countless ways. He’s a smart guy, and he hasn’t been more wrong than most people, here or elsewhere.
2rafa
3d ago
As some smarter people have said, Trump is not an entirely unserious person, but has only one earnestly held political belief, which is a fondness for tariffs and an obsession with the balance of trade. This is his one issue, not immigration or gun rights or taxation or the size of the federal government or free speech or anything else. He has cared about it for fifty years and it is as sincere an ideological stance as that of any other ‘conviction-based’ politician.
Anything that isn’t tariffs is something Trump is malleable on. He may have feelings or be drawn in one direction or another but it’s more vague and he can be (often easily) persuaded. As for why he picked Rubio, Trump is easily flattered, and while the warm embrace of a loyal ally is nice, the pledging of an erstwhile enemy to one’s banner is a much better feeling. In this, Trump is a smarter leader than he lets on; nobody is truly loyal, but someone who can convert an enemy to a friend and make him feel truly accepted is rarer than it seems.
2rafa
4d ago
2rafa
4d ago
As others have said, this is only an issue in dense old-world cities where a high percentage of the population use public transport already. In these cities I imagine SDCs will be taxed, banned or discouraged as necessary to avoid extreme congestion. In the US it’s irrelevant outside of Manhattan because everyone already drives everywhere.
The VC scene has been shady and two-faced forever. Graham is bad, so are the rest of them. Johnson has an extreme axe to grind and is a fabulist of hilarious proportions, but like you say he’s never entirely wrong. He’s basically an extremely autistic compulsive liar with a huge axe to grind.
The impression people have of Indian politics is that BJP is some hyper-casteist political party that wants to impose Hindu and caste supremacy on the world
I think it’s more that there’s a clear delineation between caste supremacy and Hindu nationalism. The latter can’t be too casteist because most Hindus are of either middling caste or casteless. For the same reason a British nativist might be hard-pressed making the argument that the aristocracy should be put back in charge of everything after the revolution.
I used to see Peter Thiel as someone who embodied values I admire but the information about him from Charles completely breaks that for me.
The boyfriend died shortly after he showed up unannounced at Thiel and his husband’s Christmas party and apparently made a big scene. (Classic case of a mistress with unwarranted confidence). Was he killed? Hard to say, but probably not. Thiel stayed out of this election to hedge his bet, he still needed all those contracts for Palantir etc if Harris won, and Vance is his guy so he doesn’t need to suck up to the Trump campaign.
Bunch of UFO unsolved mysteries science fiction fans grew up and joined the DoD / MIC / Congress, and now they’re powerful enough to commission and staff these “investigations” where they get to sperg over found footage and can demand to be taken on tours of Area 51 outbuildings to forage for aliens in long unopened refrigerators.
There is nothing more to it.
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