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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2329 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 4, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Is there a good analysis somewhere of the modal ideology/thought process of people by their voting patterns in the last three presidential elections? As in people who voted:

Obama-Clinton-Trump

Obama-Trump-Trump

Obama-Trump-Biden

Romney-Clinton-Trump

Romney-Clinton-Biden

Romney-Trump-Biden

I've found some articles about Obama-Trump voters or Romney-Clinton voters between 2012 to 2016, but couldn't get much that extends the analysis to 2020. Are these groups just too small or internally ideologically heterogeneous to say anything substantive? Who and where are these people?

Anyone have thoughts on the Olympics Last Supper controversy?

After admitting they were satirizing da Vinci's masterpiece, they chenged their defense and said the tableaux was a reference to some obscure painting (itself inspired by TLS). The pro-opening ceremony faction received the system update, and went from arguing that Christianity is fair game, to mocking the ignorant morons for their supposed ignorance of art history. Very 1984.

Edit: Vatican's denunciation.

Iran lodged a formal diplomatic complaint over it with France.

Edit: Vatican's denunciation.

What's the Catholic equivalent of a fatwa?

Papal bulls?

Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.

Excommunication.

Doesn't really work on someone who's not a practicing Catholic.

The Secret History of the Catholic Church that you won't learn in school is that, as mean as we can be to non-Catholics, our most vicious attacks are reserved for other Catholics.

Would you pay one-time $5 fee to be able to post on a forum you like to read?

What if it was $5/year?

I prefer a one-time fee, but that depends on the forum. The great thing about paywalls is it filters out most low-quality and low-tier posters.

One time, probably. Annually, probably not.

Yes and maybe. I like to avoid stacking up subscription costs. I'd pay up to a $20 one time fee though.

Would you pay one-time $5 fee to be able to post on a forum you like to read?

I did, on MetaFilter. Twice. The one-time fee served to keep some of the riff-raff out. It also gave users a feeling that they had a piece of ownership in the forum, which would inflame the dramatic 100+ reply threads on MetaTalk when unpopular mod decisions would be handed out.

What if it was $5/year?

Probably not, maybe if it were here. It's hard for me to justify the benefit to my wellbeing of finding more reasons to sit in front of a screen instead of doing anything else.

Yeah, definitely. Depending on the forum, I'd probably pay a lot more than that if I had to.

I paid for SomethingAwful back in the day, one-time fee. I might do it again but it better not turn into SA.

Not annually though, that requires keeping some method of billing active.

My twitter is doom and gloom about the financial markets. Anyone have idea what is going on? And realistic evaluation how bad it is?

This is just how equity markets are. Sometimes they drop 10% for no apparent reason. It’s part of the risk premium.

The Chinese, Korean and Taiwanese markets all crashed overnight, the Dow and Nasdaq are all down, although seem to be recovering a bit from the opening bell. I think everyone is pricing in a war in the Middle East. Bitcoin is getting heemed.

I think it has more to do with the unemployment rate, I mean oil is staying relatively calm. Edit just read down thread about the carry trade that had been going on.

What I heard: The Japanese can no longer do "carry trades" where they got very cheap loans in Yen in Japan and could invest a lot of money in US currency + markets/other markets.

There's also fears of a US recession. Unemployment is up. Warren Buffett sold a ton of stock and is holding massive amounts of cash right now.

Crypto is crashing really hard. This might be partially because the funds buying them consider them their most risky assets and thus dump them at the first sign of trouble. Small savers who need liquidity might also sell their crypto sooner than anything else. Gold seems to be the safe port of choice still, not BTC or the like.

What I heard: The Japanese can no longer do "carry trades" where they got very cheap loans in Yen in Japan and could invest a lot of money in US currency + markets/other markets.

Yes. This is the proximate reason the market crashed.

For the last couple of years you could borrow money in Yen at 1% and buy risk assets (Nasdaq, Bitcoin, Japanese equities). This worked great because interest was minimal, the risk assets all went up, and the price of Yen crashed too. It was a win, win, win.

This trade unwound in a big way last week as the Yen increased in value by 10% vs. the dollar forcing margin calls.

Of course, the bigger backdrop is all-time high overvaluations in many risk assets as the world economy (especially China) enters a recession.

Weirdly, tensions in the Middle East barely register. The price of oil is actually down bigly the last few weeks. This seems short-sighted as Iranian energy assets could come into play in the event of a hot conflict.

Is there video upscale software which learns from its input? E.g. there a footage where interveaned close up face shots and group shots, the upscaler might learn from face shots to improve group shots. For single images there are fractal upscalers which I think can do that, but for videos? (I guess it is possible to feed composed frames to single-image upscaler, but probably not worth in practice).

Not that I'm aware of. There are things like "Topaz Video AI" that does AI enhancement and are trained on a large dataset. They work well enough that trying to add to the training on a small dataset isn't seen as worth the effort.

Being trained on barely related large dataset can be bad; e.g. most neural networks cannot draw realistic image of Van Gogh or Venus of Milo because large number of samples images in Van Gogh style and pictures of people with arms LoRA does wonders.

What’s going on in the UK? Foreigner born in UK stabbed three British children, then protests/violence is about all I know. Is the violence actually big or is it being hyped?

My local TV station was on full damage control/max gaslighting. They focused on the riots themselves and the cause for them was an offhanded remark by the talking head, mentioned only ONCE, saying the murder by the immigrant was "racist fake news on twitter", while saying this an image of Tommy Robinson's twitter account was on the screen.

I don't know what these people think they'll achieve, with such obvious brazen lies. They've again reached firey but mostly peaceful levels of blatant obvious lies. I think it will backfire even more spectacularly.

No, it works, at least on big groups of people. My Conservative-voting family think that it was, and I quote, "bored football fans" who "deserve to be put away forever and ever". There are still lots of people who get their news entirely from mainstream radio and TV.

Did you educate them on reality?

How? They have beliefs slightly to the right of the BBC. At this point, the gap between our worldviews is so large that anything I say comes out as alien and incomprehensible to them; if anything our conversations push them further into their own hermetically sealed worldview. If I attempt to say anything honest about politics, it's drowned out by loud wails that their son has been brainwashed by Russian misinformation and Andrew Tate. I've never even seen Andrew Tate.

@2rafa put it best:

It reminds me of real life conversations I’ve had with white English people, intelligent, center-right conservative types, about groups, identity, mass immigration, genetics, civilization, and they just shut down. I don’t mean that they shut down the debate, they’re usually polite enough and I wouldn’t discuss ‘edgy’ things with people I didn’t trust anyway, but they shut down internally. They display the exact pigheaded stubbornness that the Seattle video interviewees do, the strange combination of [post] Christian guilt complex and superiority complex and absolute, ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ type emphasis on propriety above policy. [...] Some (politically involved people, one a former MP) will even admit the current levels of immigration are a catastrophe, but then suggest in the same breath that what happens will happen, and that above all the focus should be on preventing the far right from making too much hay of the situation and “destabilizing” things. What can you do with such people?

I come back to that quote often. It's true. And it drives me to absolute despair.

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Thought maybe a bit more coordination would be a good idea than wild looting.

The system is built to notice and disrupt coordination.

I'm not sure I have ever seen English-speaking white people looting like this. It's quite disturbing to watch actually.

That’s still the most hilariously polite looting I think I’ve ever seen. The only way it could be even more British would be if they were queuing.

Real talk, what is the deal with the British queueing meme? I don't find that British people queue than Americans. On the chewb it's often total chaos, I've seen better queueing on American metro systems. Paging @2rafa

I know it’s been a self-deprecating joke among Brits for a while, though I don’t know for how long. What drove it home for me was watching video interviews (that I unfortunately can’t find now) of a bunch of English pensioners during the 2009 financial crisis. They were calmly lining up to withdraw money from the bank, even though they all expressed concern that the bank was going to run out of money before it got to their turn. It was quite the contrast to the chaotic scenes occurring in other countries around that time.

they're looting a Lush store? That's hilarious.

ShockedTucker.jpg

There was a discussion going in in last week's CW thread, if you haven't seen it.

What is this kind of thinking called? The gist is "what my opponent should want (which is what I want) according to this value he says he holds rather than what he really wants." I also think of this as the "good republican" as written by aaron sorkin where his republicans that you like are only republican in ways he can agree with or at least understand and the opinions he hates are reserved to bad/stupid characters.

Examples (sorry if these aren't the best, but I think I show the logical twist):

"Democrats should be opposed to abortion because they think everyone has equal value in our society, even the unwanted and unaffordable children of the poor. (Alternately Rawlings Veil)".

"Republicans should support lots of immigration to push down labor costs so they can make more money."

I found myself drifting into this mode of thinking earlier in the gaza war ("Qatar should declare themselves opposed to terrorism and seize the bank accounts of the Hamas leaders because hey free billions and goodwill as the continued reasonable center of the middle east") and I was wondering whether there was a name for it.

In my neighborhood, there's a large park that's full of hobo encampments. They leave garbage everywhere and occasionally harass people. I go to other parks in more-affluent neighborhoods and don't see hobo tents. But my neighborhood is full of black and puerto-rican people, and abuts the local danger-haired queer communist neighborhood, so of course they scream and whine that enforcing the no-camping rule would be mean and fascist, inflicting hobo camps on poor People of Color.

The much shittier park in the black-er neighborhood on the far side of mine, safely far away from Logan Square, is also hobo-tent-free.

Only where there's a confluence of poor people and virtue-signalling do I have to deal with needles and hobo-trash and damaged grass from long-standing tents.

Rawlings

John K. Rawlings, award-winning author of Harry Potter and the Veil of Ignorance.

Nah he makes a baseball glove for when you don't know what position you'll be playing until you get to the field.

Hidden premise maybe. In both cases one assumes: In the democrat example you assume they believe a fetus counts as a person (this is the crux of the argument for a reason among some.) In the republican argument you assume the motivation for money is the only and ultimate motivator for republicans.

Yet both of these seem different than the good republican example you gave of Sorkin's writing.

So, what are you reading?

Still on The Mysterious William Shakespeare and This Star of England. I wonder if the distinction between orthodox and unorthodox is really between “objective” and “subjective” theories of art.

The orthodox (some of them?) tell us that Shakespeare was apparently an objective artist whose works stand on their own. He was a workaday man who wrote plays for profit and there is no hidden significance to be interpreted. The unorthodox would have us believe that the author’s life and the people he knew strongly influenced the works, to the point where the works themselves can help fill in a missing biography. He was a man who didn’t care about money and whose sensitive nature is visible in the works.

I find the orthodox position (if this is an accurate representation of it- it may be dated) baffling. I cannot believe that Hamlet is devoid of subjective intent. In fairness to the orthodox, the attempt to reduce Shakespeare to a force of nature seems in part a backlash to their own excesses in the past, where scholars painted fanciful biographies for the man from Strafrord. I’ll have to delve into some of their works soon.

I'm most of the way through Seeing like a State. The book is undoubtedly fascinating, although I found it has more information about indigenous African agricultural practices than I care for. I wish more focus had been put upon the state's and intelligentsia's response to failures of central planning. It is mentioned that in many cases the authorities tended to quietly accept the necessary on-ground deviations to make the centrally planned systems work. Some self-reflection from central planners would have been a welcome addition. Furthermore it seems like the received wisdom now is that when you're planning anything you make sure to consult with stakeholders, so one wonders how we reached this point.

The pivot to Kamala is looking to be among the greatest political manuvers of the last century. Trump's lead is now entirely gone. Are there any generally applicable lessons here? It seems plausible that primaries are counterproductive, but other than an idiosyncraticly unpopular incumbant stepping aside, I don't know how else to reliably replicate the magic.

Following polls too closely can drive you crazy. There are broad effects unrelated to the news cycle.

In this case, Republicans always poll poorly in August. A big chunk of the R base is outside camping or barbecuing and ignoring calls from pollsters.

Nate Silver was right yet again. The most generally applicable is probably simple - trust the polls. If people tell you that they don't like either of two options, then giving them a third option will improve your odds. Kamala somewhat outperforms her old polling, but the writing has been on the wall for some time that almost any replacement for Biden will improve the D's odds.

Theres an inverse monty hall problem here somehow and I want a smart person to provide the calculus of why switching after the donkey is revealed works here but not in the game.

I’m not sure there’s any lesson to take here other than don’t let openly senile people run for president?

Yeah it was a great move, but was very clearly the obvious one for a very long time, in the same way that telling an ugly fat guy to go to the gym and lose some weight is a great move if his goal is to attract women.

Are there any generally applicable lessons here?

People only care about the most recent interesting things to happen, and completely forget about the second to most recent thing. But that's nothing new.

And I was laughed at for saying that the second most recent Thing was a nothing burger.

was a nothing burger

It became nothing burger the second it was revealed the shooter didn't have a political motivation.

I mean, people always knew this, but they didn't intuitively grasp the implications. The new electoral meta might be waiting until a favorable pseudo-event happens and then literally hiding in a bunker until the election.

I kinda felt that's why that guy waited until days before the election to leak the "grab em by the pussy" footage. But Trump ended up winning anyway.

Give it time. We still have time for Chicago to be an historic disaster, for Kamala to do something foolish, for Netanyahu to do something disgusting leading to terrible Biden admin press, for Ukraine to collapse, for the stock market to crash, for like six more Boeing planes to crash.

After the shooting, I thought Trump had it in a walk. He's since managed to make it interesting. But that should be a reminder that anything can happen.

And, gee, the stock market is not looking great this morning.

Does anyone know of a good tool or method that could be used to archive all the pages of a given Substack?

I know this is paranoid, but there are some that I'd like to save locally, in case the site is taken down or something.

Best: https://github.com/alexferrari88/sbstck-dl

Can even pass your login cookies for paywalled articles.

Collect the substack's archive page for all post links. You can do this by going to the archive page, and scrolling to the bottom so all the posts can load. When you have the list, visit each link and download the page using SingleFile or, my favorite, Save Page WE.

The standard recommendation for website archiving is wget (with the options for recursive and archival downloading enabled). I don't know whether it works on Substack's Javascript-heavy archive pages, but you can just manually scroll down to load the entire archive page, then download that manually and tell wget to download everything linked from the downloaded page.

Alternatively, you can use SingleFile to download individual pages manually.

I know this is paranoid

It's not. (and the blog owners itself are more likely to delete it than entire site goes down)

You can fetch Substack content via RSS, and have a reader automatically store all content locally, or on an server. I'm doing something like this myself, but I'm more focused on Twitter.

For Substack one issue is subscriber only posts, because the public feed only gives you previews, but maybe it's just a question of passing your credentials in the request headers. Never bothered trying it out, but I can give it a go, if you're interested.

LLMs are great at writing scripts for this kind of thing. Untested, but see e.g. https://g.co/gemini/share/3ce27fe9318f

Something like readwise? Any tool that grabs pages and stores them with all of the junk stripped out might work for you.

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