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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2602 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 16, 2025

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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I have suspected for a while that the appeals process for death row prisoners has been greatly drawn out. I told a lawyer acquaintance about this one day when he ranted about the death penalty for a while, but he confessed that he has no knowledge of its being lengthened or not.

Well, I finally have a piece of evidence: John Brown commenced his deadly raid on October 16, 1859. He was convicted on November 2, 1859, after a week of deliberation. He was hanged on December 2, 1859. Not even two full months of a prison stay.

So now my question is: when did this change? If it took a long time to make death row appeals take decades, what were the critical points in the fight?

The Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. I’d start there.

On your advice, I poked around on the death penalty wikipedia page and found something I've been wondering about for a while: volunteers for the death penalty! I wondered if it was possible, never knew it had actually already been done by multiple people.

Something curious about that, too, though: the first execution after the reinstatement was Gary Gilmore, and it was a year after he was convicted. But the other examples on that volunteer page take close to a decade to get executed, if they ever get executed at all. That's for people that have waived their right to appeal and are just trying to get a speedy execution. My new thinking is that the legal system is like some old processor that used to be speedy but is now limping from decades of use. Of course, lawyers figuring out the best ways to game the system probably also contribute to death row appeals processes taking forever.

Why aren't novels' word counts common knowledge?

Go on IMDb, look up the pilot episode of an obscure American sitcom which was cancelled after one season, and you will find its duration in minutes (a single, objective measure of how long it will take to consume that piece of media). Go on Wikipedia, look up Blade Runner and it will list the various durations of all the various theatrically released cuts, directors' cuts and so on. Any album noteworthy enough to have its own Wikipedia page will have its duration listed in minutes and seconds, broken down by individual track duration (including the duration of various special/bonus editions). If it isn't notable enough to be on Wikipedia, it will be on Rate Your Music.

Meanwhile, if you want to find out how long it will take you to read a book, Wikipedia might tell you the page count, which is next to useless given how many variables contribute to it: font, font size, page size, margin width and height, formatting decisions (a novel which uses numerous paragraph breaks will take up more pages than a novel of the same word count which uses them sparingly; putting a page break before the start of a new chapter can easily add ten pages to a novel's length; because of its bizarre formatting, House of Leaves's word count is probably 25-40% shorter than its massive page count would imply). Various editions of the same unabridged novel with the exact same wording can have enormous variation in how many pages they take up (e.g. this edition of Moby-Dick is 768 pages, while this one is 608). Last night I Googled "Finnegan's Wake word count", one of the most widely discussed novels of the twentieth century, and the first result was one of these automated websites which calculates an estimate of the word count based on the page count (under the rule of thumb that 1 page = 250 words).

I'm not asking for anyone to laboriously go through the process of counting each word by hand. Finnegan's Wake can be purchased as an ebook, which means its contents have been digitised. If you want to find out the word count, all you have to do is open the text file/EPUB file/AZW file and check. Presumably somewhere in the region of 99% of all novels composed in this century were composed using a word processor, meaning the word counts were known (or at least trivially knowable) to the author, publisher, typesetter etc. well in advance of publication.

Before you book to see a film in the cinema, you'd want to know how long it is so you can plan your day accordingly, so cinemas always include this information (although not, annoyingly, the duration of ads and trailers prior to the movie - state Congress to the rescue!). No one would accept a vague ambiguous proxy for the duration of a film like "there are 1,300 cuts in this film" or "there are 30 scenes in this film" - how long is a "scene"? By the same token, before you start reading a book, you generally want to have some kind of idea of how long it will take you to read it. The publisher has access to an objective measure of the book's length (its word count) but refuses to make this information public, instead relying on a vague proxy for its length which is prone to error and can prove enormously misleading. Why is this?

The physical media of film made their runtimes readily available, and purchasers had a vested interest in learning that information since they were scheduling showings or programming.

Neither really held for books prior to the word processor. Well, maybe for pay-by-the-word magazine authors.

Well, maybe for pay-by-the-word magazine authors.

And publishers of serialised novels.

I was actually thinking of pulp magazines. But yeah, there was definitely some demand for word counts.

I suppose I don’t actually know what the common pricing models were for whole novels in the 1800s and 1900s.

Because we are talking about books. It is very easy to judge a book's length by its physical size.

I outlined at length various reasons why the physical size of a book might be misleading.

Yes, different books of similar size can take different levels of time/effort to read. But even so, extreme outliers are rare. Thus the metric is good enough for common use, thus there's no popular support pushing to have a different metric.

Also, even if we did use a different metric there are going to be outliers. You mentioned House Of Leaves, but that book took me longer to read than books with an equivalent word count. The footnotes are slower going, and the parts of the book where the text is in odd directions take longer because you have to physically turn the book. So if moving to a new metric will still have outliers, why bother?

But even so, extreme outliers are rare.

What are you basing this assertion on?

So if moving to a new metric will still have outliers, why bother?

It irritates me that we insist on using a proxy for the real metric when the real metric is so trivially accessible. To return to the example in the original post: the film's duration is an objective metric for how long it lasts. Some ninety-minute films are a chore to sit through, some films are three-and-a-half hours long but subjectively feel like half that; but at all events, the objective length of the film is a trivial metric to determine. But wouldn't we find it weird if cinemas, distributors, Blu-Ray manufacturers etc. refused to use this metric, and instead were fixated on referring to how many "scenes" or "cuts" a movie has? I mean, sure, either of these is a good enough metric if you assume that a typical movie has X many scenes or X many cuts, but both of these have obvious weaknesses that the metric they're proxies for doesn't have (e.g. there's at least one movie which is nearly two hours long and could be said to only have three scenes total; there are many ninety-minute movies which have far more scenes than some two-hour movies; some movies are ninety or even one hundred and forty minutes long and feature zero cuts), and in any case the objective, unambiguous metric that these are serving as proxies for isn't remotely difficult to determine, so why do you insist on using the proxy metrics anyway?

What are you basing this assertion on?

Extensive personal experience.

It irritates me that we insist on using a proxy for the real metric when the real metric is so trivially accessible.

But that's exactly my point: your proposed metric is a proxy too! What you seem to want to measure is "how long will it take to read this book". But even for the same reader, two different books with the same word count can have a different time-to-read. Which brings us right back to: we already have a widely accepted proxy, and it is accurate enough that almost nobody cares about the margin of error. So what advantage do we gain from switching to a different proxy measurement? None that I can see, and we incur all the disadvantages that normally come from switching measurements. Doesn't seem very worth it to me.

What you seem to want to measure is "how long will it take to read this book"

No - what I want is to know how long the book is. Knowing the word count would answer my question exactly, because the length of a book is its word count, in the same way that the duration of a film is how many minutes it takes up (not how many scenes, not how long it feels - just how many minutes). Knowing the word count wouldn't answer the question of how long I can expect it would take me to read it (in the same way that some ninety-minute films can "feel" longer than some films which are two hours long or more), but it would answer the question of how long it is, which is exactly what I want to know. The word count and the page count are both proxy metrics for "how long would the average reader take to read this book"; the page count is an imprecise proxy metric for "how long is this book", which is the word count.

Why word count and not syllable count?

Word count, syllable count and character count would all be equally valid objective metrics for the length of a book, in the sense of how much content it contains. I used word count because it's a standard metric used in numerous contexts (including, obviously, publishing).

*mora count (taking into account differences in syllable length)

In that case, then I still don't see your objection. The page count is in fact an exact metric for how long the book is, just as word count is. It doesn't matter how the size of the type face, or how it's laid out, a given volume is by definition N pages long. You might prefer the metric of word length, but it seems like most others prefer the metric of number of pages. So we aren't going to be switching any time soon.

The page count is not an exact metric for how long a book is (i.e. how much content it contains), for the simple reason that the same book can have multiple editions with drastically varying page counts. As outlined in the original post.

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They don't do this because the information isn't readily available and there's no call for it. It may be easy to find run times for movies and music, but few people pay much attention to these, the only real exception being if a movie is unusually long. Consumers generally don't need down-to-the-minute information about how long things take; if I'm book shopping, forget even page counts, how thick the book is is usually a close enough approximation. Publishers know this, too, so they will often make the kind of formatting decisions you mentioned above with that in mind, whether to add extra bulk to a slim volume or condense a longer work down so it doesn't look too intimidating.

But suppose they did start publishing word counts. What of it? If a book says that it contains 100,000 words it means absolutely nothing to me the way it does if an albums says it's 38 minutes long. I vaguely remember learning in 9th grade that a novel was anything longer than 60,000 words, but I couldn't tell you how long most novels actually are. And I couldn't translate this into how long it will take to read because I have no idea how fast I read, other than that I read faster than most people, though even then I'm sure there's variation based on how tired I am, how engaged I am with the material, etc.

Complicating this even further is the fact that people rarely read an entire book in one sitting. In judging how "long" a book will take to read I'm usually thinking more in terms of days or weeks than in hours or minutes. If a movie is listed at two hours I can say easily that if I start watching it at 8 pm I'll finish watching it at 10 and plan my evening accordingly. If a book says it's 90,000 words then I have to divide that by my average reading speed to get the total time in minutes, then divide that by 60 to get hours and an approximation of minutes, then figure out how much time per day I anticipate having to dedicate to reading, and only then can I figure out how long it will take to finish it. Most people aren't doing this calculation.

And word count isn't as cut and dried as running time. For most fiction, there isn't much superfluous text, but in nonfiction this gets sticky, since a lot of the material included isn't really intended to be "read", per se. Do you include the preface and foreward? Probably. The acknowledgements? Most people skip these but the author wants you to read them. Appendixes? Depends on what's in them; is it supplementary text or a collection of facts and figures? Call that a maybe. Footnotes? Depends on whether they're explanatory or bibliographic, though many are a combination of both. The index? Almost certainly not. We can quibble over where to draw the line, but the word count the publisher is using includes all of the above, because they have to print all of it regardless. And then there's the variation on how different software programs count words. So the same book could have a huge variation depending on whether they're using the count from the manuscript as submitted in Word (the stingiest program) or the InDesign count for the entire published text, that counts every numeral in the index as a separate word. This could be solved by industry standardization, by why develop such a standard when there's simply no call for it?

They don't do this because the information isn't readily available

I think I did a good job in my post outlining the fact that the information is readily available. Certainly for any novel which has been digitised, which is essentially every book which has been published this century (including reprints of older books).

few people pay much attention to these

I disagree. Netflix has a specific category called ninety minute movies. The topic of the "ideal" length for a movie recurs quite often in film discussions (e.g., e.g.).

Most people aren't doing this calculation.

Sure, but there's no reason they couldn't be. How Long to Beat? has tens of thousands of users logging how long it took them to complete a particular video game. This is helpful, because a large "wisdom of crowds" effect gives you a better idea of how long a game will take you to finish than the marketing hype which will make true-but-misleading claims like "50 hours of gameplay". Unlike books, there's no single objective answer to the question "how long is this video game?"; like books, there's enormous variability from person to person in how long it takes one to get from the start to the end. Why couldn't there be a website called How Long to Read? (or better yet, some extra fields in Goodreads) which lists the objective word count of a book (optionally excluding references, appendices etc. for non-fiction, much like How Long to Beat? segregates "main story" playthroughs from "completionist" playthroughs), along with user records of how long it took them to finish the book? I think this would be a fascinating and useful resource. Imagine if you're trying to plan for your holiday, so you pack one massive doorstopper which you expect to last you the full two weeks - and it's so absorbing you breeze through the whole thing in three days, leaving you with nothing to read for the rest of your holiday. If you knew in advance that most people breeze through the book in a few hours in spite of its intimidating length, you could have planned accordingly and brought one or more additional books.

Page counts make historic sense in publishing, especially when you consider that coupled with font size and relatively standard conventions for line spacing etc most publishers could probably estimate it quite easily. When typewriters became (essentially) computers and could start producing word counts the profession itself didn’t change overnight. In the early computer era when everything was memory limited rough estimates were fine. Teachers were fine with “3 pages handwritten / in font size 12” level specificity. Word counts weren’t relevant for the most part until NLP.

As a professional translator, it always throws me off when I remember that pretty much every other wordcel field prefers page counts to word counts for some reason and I always have to specifically ask the word count when the (non-agency client) says something like "I have a will with 10 pages to translate, when could you handle it?".

Partially on the recommendation of an Ukrainian friend I've started drinking clear spirits and lightly spiced spirits straight, like whiskey. Its pretty nice and works well if you feel like whiskey is too heavy, like after a big meal.

People kind of already do this during traditional Swedish holidays of christmas, easter and midsummer (and Valborg), but thats usually more like doing shots during a sitdown dinner.

What do you mean by ‘lightly spiced spirits’? I’m genuinely curious. Do you mean something like southern comfort, with sugar mixed into the whiskey for old women to drink?

I mean clear spirits spiced with things like Anise, Wormwood, Angelica, Sea Buckthorn, Caraway, Fennel, Coriander, Rowan and juniper berries.

I'm not sure what the equivalent would be in America, in Sweden it's called 'Snaps' but the English translation of 'Schnapps' isn't very good since that's a broader category of drinks.

Interesting. Are hard, clear fruit spirits (usually double-distilled straight off the fruit mash and not treated or mixed after) also called Snaps in Sweden?

Anyway, I can warmly recommend drinking those after dinner, neat, as well. I like plum best, but Williams Christ (a type of pear) is a well-deserved classic, too.

They can be but that isn't typical modern usage. These days it usually refers to spiced clear grain/potato alcohol, which is pretty much the Danish meaning of the word, for which the EU market protected word is akvavit (not to be confused with 'eau de vie', even if that is the etymological root of the word).

Aquavit / Eau de Vie?

I know what you’re talking about but yeah there’s not a good term for it in English.

Lightly spiced spirits sounds like gin.

Gin is like a subcategory of what he’s referring to.

It is a lot like Gin but it doesn't have to be flavoured with juniper berries. On that note, gin is very good drunk straight.

My current favourite is Hernö.

So liqueur then?

Aren't liqueurs almost universally (heavily) sweetened?

Yes. ‘Unsweetened flavored hard liquor’ is not a thing that exists in the U.S. market outside of niche things with their own special names(chartreuse, absinthe, flavored vodka, gin, etc). You can buy whiskey with no flavoring or you can buy whiskey with tons of sugar in it.

So, after a really bad sinusitis, I've gotten antibiotics for the first time I think ever. At least I can't remember getting any. I've always been quite wary of most medication and doctor visits, and I've been healthy enough to do anything I want.

It felt amazing. On the second day of the antibiotics course I already felt as well as I normally do. But only a few days later, after my nose healed fully and I also was done with the antibiotics itself, it's like I'm a new person. We have a toddler so I get little sleep, but I feel very awake anyway. I normally have significant motivational issues, but now I get things done, and if my wife tries talking me into just going outside to meet with people instead, I tell her I'll get it done ASAP anyway and join up later. My skin is normally very unclean, but I haven't had a single pimple the last two weeks. My nose normally felt moderately clogged pretty much all the time (which I though was unavoidable due to a birth defect), but now it's been completely free.

I strongly suspect now that I've been having a chronic sinusitis - maybe even more generally some kind of bacterial infection - that I didn't notice bc it has been so long, pretty much all my adult life if not longer. I feel borderline manic.

My wife also noticed that I just seem significantly more present, fast & active and told me I need to schedule a meeting with my GP to make sure I don't fall back, which I did. But we're in germany and this isn't acute, so the next open date is in October.

I'll still go anyway, but since we have some doctors here I thought it might make sense to ask here what are my options for things I can do proactively to not get a sinusitis again in the first place. My nose malformation birth defect is real, and I know from MRI that I have absolutely giant sinuses, so I probably have some susceptibility to it. From what I can gather long-term antibiotics are a bad idea, and I'm quite hopeful that it's not necessary anyway. At the moment I'm trying a few things:

  1. Vitamins / Mineral Supplements every day. Probably not super effective, but also pretty much no downsides if dosed moderately.

  2. direct nose cleaning with spray every evening before going to sleep, mostly salt water based but also tried some essential oil based ones. Seems to work well, but also some noticeable irritation up to minor bleeding if I overdo it so I've gotten a bit more careful.

  3. Ultrared light every few evenings. Just generally warms up the face and is pleasant, but doesn't really feel very effective (but also probably little side-effects)

  4. menthol and similar sugar-free drops. Not sure how much they really do, but they feel good.

I generally have had a bad experience with antihistamine- and corticosteroid-based nasal sprays, and they're a bad idea to take long-term anyway. I'm also playing with the idea of getting Lumina Probiotic despite having never struggled with cavities (but I probably won't). I also want to do some sports again to keep healthy, but I'm quite time-constrained due to our small kids at the moment. But I do get some decent amount of activity thanks to them already, so it's not that bad.

If anybody has any recommendations, please tell me. In the worst case I have some weird susceptibility to bacteria that isn't actually nose-specific, in which case I'm at a loss on what to do. Obviously in the best case, I've gotten rid of it for good and am just worrying unnecessarily. But the difference is big enough that it feels worthwhile to think about.

Do not use tap water if you are. It must be sterile water.

If you don't mind my asking, what sort of birth defect? I ask because I was born with a cleft lip (possibly palate? unsure tbh) which was treated quickly after I was born, but I've got the "dad cough" and I apparently snore like a lawnmower. "Moderately clogged all the time" sounds familiar enough for me to wonder if I should get my nose looked at.

Yeah, I also had some kind of cleft lip (not palate AFAIK) and my nose is visibly crooked, a bit like a boxer's nose. It also had malformed airways inside so that I basically couldn't breath through the nose at all at birth. As I was told by my parents, both were fixed in one surgery, but some difficulties remained. For example, I can't play most wind instruments that require one to shape the lip a certain way (which actually was good for me, since it meant that instead of having to play trumpet I got the saxophone when I joined a big band as a kid). I also can't speak a regular "r", just the rolling "r", etc.

I'll probably get it re-checked as the other posters recommended. It's likely that everything that could be done has been done, but it's been 30 years so there's also a good chance that there's some new possibilities.

You should do as well imo. Checking costs nothing (or at least, comparatively little) and lip/mouth birth defects are often associated with nose birth defects AFAIK.

direct nose cleaning with spray every evening before going to sleep, mostly salt water based but also tried some essential oil based ones. Seems to work well, but also some noticeable irritation up to minor bleeding if I overdo it so I've gotten a bit more careful.

Hold up, what sprays exactly are you using? I have a bad history of sinus infection and headaches(and large sinuses), and once I discovered saline sprays, it was as if I stumbled across a magical elixir that cured all my ills.

I can't imagine such things ever causing irritation or minor bleeding. If anything, they're rather soothing. Maybe I'm just being a bit paranoid, but if I had minor bleeding from using a saline spray I'd be consulting a doctor to make sure there isn't something very wrong with me.

Edit before posting: Ah, re-reading had me stumble across you noting a nose malformation birth defect. Sorry boss, that's probably what's causing it.

Use a neti pot regularly

Look up on Youtube exercises you can do to clear your sinuses (they really work) and do these regularly

Ask your GP about surgery.

I had this experience too! Sinus infections like clockwork every spring, awful green mucus, and a sense of head pressure that I never recognized until it was gone. And it wouldn't go away on its own.

Eventually I saw an ENT specialist who said something like "wow your turbinates are obstructing drainage, so whenever you get a cold, it triggers a sinus infection." No, I'm not sure how the pathology works. But the solution was a minor surgery to deflate two of those turbinates.

Point is, it's probably worth talking to a specialist.

I should have mentioned it in the OP, but I already had surgery as a newborn to open up my nose airways as much as possible, so probably there's nothing further that can be done. I'll get it checked anyway in case there's some new development, though, so thank's for the recommendation.

Most sinusitis cases are viral (I tend to get it when a cold takes hold in my sinuses) so antibiotics aren't a general solution. (A chronic bacterial sinusitis that doesn't get cleared until you finally get it tested during a flare-up, determine it's bacterial, and take antibiotics is pefectly plausible though). If the next sinus infection you get is viral (and it probably will be) you are stuck with strong decongestants (you need something more than phenylephrine, which is a fine placebo when all you need is a placebo, but apparently nothing more than that) and old wives' remedies.

The old wives in the UK recommend steam inhalation, which helps a bit for me. (You can just put a towel over a jug of boiling water and stick your nose under it, but steam inhalers of various levels of complexity exist. You can also put a drop of menthol or similar in the water).

A lot of my friends swear by salt water nasal spray, which appears to work for you, and might work well enough for a future viral sinusitis.

The good news is that if your next sinusitis is viral it will be less serious and should clear up on its own after a couple of weeks, and if it is bacterial you are aware of the possibility and will be able to get antibiotics sooner.

You're correct that most sinusitis is viral and I should have been clearer with my language - I suspect, and want to avoid, chronic bacterial sinusitis in particular. Yeah, steam inhalation is something I also had on my mind since my mom swears by it, though it's annoying enough that I don't really want to do it very often.

My understanding was that people who were susceptible to sinusitis were susceptible to both types, but that viral was much more common. (I had bacterial sinusitis once as a child, but I have viral sinusitis about twice a year)

Is Germany "a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct genocide"?

Okay, more seriously (and less "bare link" phrased, Jeopardy-style, in the form of a question), does anyone else see things like this as part of an overall "strategy" by the left that strongly parallels the behaviors in recent years of "woke Hollywood" and game studios? That is, use identity politics as a tool to paint critics and opponents as bigots ('you don't hate our all-female reboot because it's a soulless cash grab with lousy writing and acting, you're just a sexist', 'you didn't vote for Kamala only because you hate blacks and/or women,' etc). "Schrödinger's critics": your opposition is just a few unimportant bigots who don't represent the audience/electorate and don't really matter; but when your movie/game/candidate flops, it's because of the immense power those same opponents have over the viewers/players/voters. The problem is that too many people are listening to fringe voices (whether that's YouTube movie critics, video game reviewers on Twitch, or 'purveyors of right wing misinformation' like Fox News and x.com), instead of professional, establishment movie critics/game journalists/political commentators; and we need to figure out how to mute those fringe voices. Taking your established fanbase/demographics for granted, and excoriate them if their support starts to wane ('how can you call yourself a Tolkien fan and not watch Rings of Power?' 'Sure, the Democrat party's policies do nothing for you, but you have to vote blue no matter who anyway' [a position I've seen left-wing YouTubers state in response to the election]).

In short, that you, the filmmaker/game studio/Democratic party, don't answer to your audience/voters, the audience/voters answer to you. You do not have to earn their dollars/votes, you are entitled to them, and if they aren't buying what you're selling, then they're wrong, and the strategy is to lecture them on what horrible bigots they are until they start watching your movie/playing your game/voting Democrat. And calling anyone who disagrees with you a fascist. (That "Unfortunately, this decision affects the wrong people" bit is wild coming from those making the decision in question — as if they have no agency over this decision, but it is instead somehow just a natural consequence somehow emerging automatically.) As Jim put it: "Doing an audit of federal government expenditures is the death of democracy, and doing a customer survey is openly fascist."

Even shorter: it's treating that Simpsons bit with Principal Skinner that's become a meme — "Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong." — as a marketing/campaign strategy.

There’s a difference between strategy and reflex. I think what you’re seeing from Hollywood is the latter. Mass media hasn’t yet come to terms with the fact that it’s Balkanizing.

Producers want to be culturally relevant. Audiences want to feel like they’re witnessing the next big thing. Both are measuring success by the moviegoing culture of their childhoods. Neither has adapted to the realities of modern movie distribution, which has made movies much more accessible but also softened their cultural impact.

The easiest way for producers to defend their egos (and budgets) is cherry-picking. Conveniently, technology has also increased the accessibility of reviews, diluting the influence of movie critics. As it turns out, it’s much easier to discredit Internet randos than critics with skin in the game. “Racism” is occasionally a convenient way to gerrymander a line around the loudest critics of a film.

Audiences buy in whenever it is in their own interest. The obvious examples are all-female reboots and 80s nostalgia grabs, but I’ll add another genre: the Christian drama. It doesn’t matter if Fireproof is critically panned; it fills a market niche. They’ve got their own awards and their own box-office success.

Hollywood doesn’t want to play to that model because it spent so long as the cultural touchstone. Hence, racism.

Replying primarily because @MadMonzer was kind enough to report himself and this comment for being CW, and likely better suited for posting in the CWR thread. I presume that's where it was meant to go, but if this is, in your honest opinion, a small-scale question, then don't let me keep you haha. But I do think you meant the main thread.

For what it’s worth, SQS does explicitly allow Culture War topics. It’s just a relaxation of the effort rules.

So there’s nothing wrong with this post, but also, it would totally qualify as a good CW top-level.

I haven't seen a mod-hatted reply to my own for so long that it gave me a fright, visions of a bloody-coup and counter-coup as we ban each other left right and center till Zorba gets annoyed and stops paying the AWS bill.

I tried to get naraburns to ban me once for a gag, but it didn’t seem to take.

Stop it, you two, they'll think the mods have a sense of humor.

The problem is that the sequence of mouth noises "freeze peach" has acquired a secondary meaning - when very online people - on either side of the US culture war - hear the noises, they don't point to the concepts traditionally associated with "free speech" (i.e. the ability to say what you want without fear of punishment by people more powerful than you), they point to the anti-establishment wing of the Red side of the US culture war.

More speech is banned on Musk's Twitter than Dorsey's Twitter. (Trivially, because most Twitter censorship is done by non-US governments, and DorseyTwitter consistently resisted foreign censors to the best of its ability whereas Musk rolls over if he finds the government in question friendly.) Musk bans people who annoy him whimsically, most often nominally based on an incredibly-broad "doxxing" policy which covers almost any dissemination of accurate information about an identifiable individual and is selectively enforced. Elon Musk has also threatened, and boasted about his limited success in, lawfare-to-the-death against his critics to punish publication of accurate information about the way he runs X that he considers biased or misleading - this is the least speech-that-is-free thing you can do as a private citizen, but it is very freeze peach because punishing people for calling out anti-establishment-right speakers makes it easier for the anti-establishment right to speak. So when Musk talks about being a "free speech absolutist" despite having multiple outstanding SLAPPs in the federal courts, calling for the reversal of Sullivan, tweeting threats of prosecution against his critics etc, the very online right hear "freeze peach absolutely," agree, and cheer, the very online left hear "freeze peach absolutely," agree, and boo, the few remaining principled liberals hear a censorious asshat claiming to support free speech and try to call out the hypocrisy, and the darkly cynical raise eyebrows and say "this is your brain on ketamine."

If you treat Vance as talking about speech-that-is-free to a European audience, then his comments were mostly false if taken literally, directionally correct but exaggerated if taken seriously-but-not-literally, and bizarre if treated as an attempt to achieve some kind of political goal of US foreign policy*. Everyone in Europe who is sufficiently interested in politics to pay attention to a speech by the US VP already understands the free speech situation in Europe better than Vance does, so the only people who didn't respond by thinking "what a tool" are the ones who live in an anti-establishment right-wing social media filter bubble. Even people like me who think that Europe does have a free speech problem can see that a tendentious intervention by a senior official of an increasingly hostile (based both on the rest of the speech and on Trump admin policy towards the EU) foreign government is going to be counterproductive.

If you treat Vance as talking about freeze peach to the global-but-mostly-American audience of partisans in the US culture war, then everything makes sense including Margaret Brennan's response. It's megaphone diplomacy of a type that often backfires, but that's the way Trump has rolled since before 2016 and it's what his domestic supporters expect. Trump's America does want to see more freeze peach in Europe, whether or not this is actually in the US national interest. Freeze peach (in the sense of differential tolerance of right-wing speech that tests the boundaries of permissible rhetoric vs actual incitement) was one of the tools the Nazis used to take power in Germany, although not the most important.

I was initially concerned by this story because most of the coverage I saw didn't make clear who said the dumb stuff about Germany, and I assumed from the attention the whole thing was getting that it was a German official. That would be worrying. But it is some MSM pretty face with no reason to matter beyond her parents being able to afford out-of-State fees at UVA. Vance talks like a right-wing blowhard when a Bush-era Republican would at least try to be diplomatic. Margaret Brennan's response makes clear she is as dumb as Rachael Maddow. Bear shits in woods. The Pope coming out as Catholic would be more newsworthy.

* Notably, the reaction to Vance's speech has increased the chances of European leaders effectively sabotaging Trump's policy of appeasing Putin in Ukraine from none to slim.

Sometimes I feel like living in a different universe.

First, Dorsey twitter absolutely worked together with many agencies in many countries far above what is was required to do, shown trivially by the fact that Musk Twitter refuses to do so and is nevertheless existing. This was shown in the twitter files, but they are hardly necessary; Here in Germany, our local Blockwarte voluntarily complain about nothing but how much better they could "work together with" Dorsey Twitter to combat "misinformation" than with Musk Twitter. This also goes for the UK. Even beyond western countries, where Musk Twitter is far more resistant to censorship efforts and which have far more resources to staff liaison bureaucrats and as such are a much greater threat to open discourse, Dorsey Twitter was also more than happy to go along with censorship in non-western countries as long as it fit with their left-leaning preconceptions, such as in Brazil or South Africa.

Second, the moderation staff of Dorsey Twitter not only was much, much larger and could handle much greater throughput, but pretty much everyone is primarily complaining about who is allowed to continue posting, and voluntarily leaves due to it, as opposed to being banned. I've seen a lot of people and institutes around me make a big show about posting how they're leaving X and going to bluesky. Not a single one of them was banned, and almost none of them complained about any person ban or topics ban whatsoever, either. It's always about how now that this or that category of person is unbanned, they can't in good conscience stay there. At most they point at some nebulous alleged algorithmic boosting which they have no evidence for but are sure has to exist (and which, ironically, provably existed under Dorsey Twitter, it was just going another way). I don't think it's a coincidence that X discourse has moved closer to the notorious chan-style discourse.

Third, the kind of topics that could get you banned on Dorsey Twitter was incredibly broad, and frequently included taking even milquetoast center right opinions ("there are only two genders") or very basic common-sense observations ("the covid vaccine, just like many other vaccines, has a heightened likelihood of complications for people with autoimmune diseases and as such may not be worth it especially for young people with an autoimmune disease"). People went to other places since they either already were banned or felt they would get banned if they openly discussed the topics they care about.

I'm certainly not happy about how trigger-happy Musk is about criticism of himself or how he runs his company, but in practice it's not only an incredibly limited topic, it also would have gotten you banned on Dorsey Twitter as well, even labelling it similarly as "misinformation" or "conspiracy theories". On doxxing I'm also more split, since this was weaponized pretty hard on Dorsey Twitter.

Also on the Vance talk, I'm an academic who has lived his entire life in Europe (mostly Germany and a few years UK), and I think he's just objectively correct about his statements, not just directionally but also literally, so there's that I guess. It was very moving to see that if we want to have a course-correction, we will have some allies in foreign governments that will help us and stand by us. That's a fairly straightforward foreign policy strategy. The norm-breaking criticism is also pretty hilarious to me, since visiting american democratic politicians love talking about right-wing dangers in Europe which is totally OK, but once it's american republican politicians talking about left-wing dangers it's suddenly a dangerous break with norms.

More speech is banned on Musk's Twitter than Dorsey's Twitter. (Trivially, because most Twitter censorship is done by foreign governments, and DorseyTwitter consistently resisted to the best of its ability whereas Musk rolls over if he finds the government in question friendly.)

I'm not prepared to concede either part if that argument in nothing but your word. DorseyTwitter banned something like half of the accounts I followed, most of which are either American or Anglo, so I don't believe it's due to foreign goverents, nor do I believe that there are more bans than we used to have.

What are the easiest ways to get a sinecure, without special connections or credentials?

I'm assuming you're saying without special unique credentials, not without any credentials or ordinary education.

The answer is to work for government or other very large organizations and be willing to work below your true talent level. If you're a lawyer with a hypothetical true talent level of $400k/yr, and you're willing to take a secure job making $130k/yr that only requires half as much effort, those jobs are available. Ditto engineers, etc at different price points.

Pucker up and start kissing some asses!

There's a thing where large hierarchical organizations may have "clans". One or more lower-level workers are loyal to a higher-level patron. They back all of their patron's plays, let them take credit for everything good, deflect blame for anything bad, rat on any other subordinates who aren't with the program, etc. In return, the patron promotes his loyalists with him, gives them plum assignments, protects them from poor reviews and layoffs etc, if only so they can keep on backing him. Pick somebody who seems like they might be such a patron and start kissing some ass.

Just be clear all around, you're looking for somebody prepared to promote for loyalty, not competence. Don't ever display enough independent competence that you're at risk of being promoted without your patron. Swallow your pride and your ego. You're not gonna be buddies with your co-workers either, you need to be selling them out at any opportunity. And obviously, get away from any potential patron who fails to hold up their side of the bargain. With a little bit of luck and skill, you can eventually rise pretty high like this without ever being particularly competent or qualified at anything.

Buy the not so special connections via donation-more than 1000 USD to cause X can often mean you get invited to the local party for the big donors. Probably more like 10,000 at national level or rich city level or 100,000 at international level,

I'm assuming you mean special credentials that are especially hard or unusual to get.

This only works in America. I'm retyping this, quite drunk, as an adaptation of "How can a normie get into the 1%"? cultivate great credit/low debt, if right age right fitness right temperament- join military as officer (get a degree from wgu if you don't have one), after 90 days active duty use the VA home loan ($0 down, or more for better rate) to get a 4 unit multiplex, you have to live in 1 unit as primary residence for a year (unless deployed elsewhere, then you can rent that unit out early). After that 1 year you can refinance and hypothetically reuse the VA home loan, though this will depend on your current debt-to-income ratio. If reliably making income from tenants, shouldn't be a problem to do round 2 and round 3 isn't impossible. After 4 years active duty, try to go for irr or reserve over guard. Then get a Commercial Driver's License to drive 18 wheel trucks, possibly a security clearance, and get a small business administration loan to buy an 18 wheeler yourself to become an Over The Road Owner-Operator. As an Owner Operator, your actual take home pay will be substantially less than your listed income- it's not atypical for a 400-500k income Owner Operator to take home more like 150-200. But this takes us back to VA home loans and debt-to-income ratios, where the math they're doing doesn't actually take this into account. And also that some of the shittiest parts of trucking are sleeping in the truck cab or a seedy motel. You could strategically buy places such that you would rarely be that far from one. If you found an insane spouse who agreed with this way of doing things, you could easily have around 40-60 residential units together after 12 years, with a fair number of them having mortgages paid off. If you started process at 18, comfy retirement at 30, or just keep going a bit, and retire to very low cost of living country while returns stack up.

I have no idea if this is plausible but it was very fun to read. Well done, you earned those drinks.

So, what are you reading?

Still on The End of Faith, Menace of the Herd and Non-Computable You.

I just caught up with Thresholder , by Alexander Wales.

TL;DR, it's a cross-over isekai/Highlander kinda deal, where characters from across a multiverse are invited to cross through portals and find themselves in a new world. There's another one, and in true Highlander fashion, there can only be one. Once defeated, or victorious, a portal opens up to let the winner through, and if the loser is incapacitated but alive, they get one for themselves.

The MC starts off in media res, as knock-off Iron Man. Good AI assistant, but a suit that's far less powerful. He started off in 2022 Earth, went to Earth 2 that's about 20 years more advanced, where he picked up a genius inventor girlfriend and said suit. He rapidly loses said girlfriend at the hands of another Thresholder, and then continues journeying through worlds in an effort to find a way to resurrect her.

I'd say it's a 7.5/10 fic. Nowhere near as good as Worth The Candle or Metropolitan Man, but a decent enough progression fantasy and a way to kill the time.

Any thoughts on "Shadows of the Limelight"? I loved "Worth the Candle" and "Metropolitan Man" (and "The Randi Prize", and "Instruments of Destruction"), but I couldn't get in to SotL and I still wonder if I just gave up too soon and didn't make it to the good part.

It definitely gets better than it is in the beginning, and I'd say is worth the read, but not a particularly good story.

I enjoyed it, but this was long enough ago that I can’t remember most of the plot beats. I don’t believe there was an obvious inflection point aside from the finale.

Contrast something like Worm, where I can comfortably say “push through the first arc!” Or “If you got to Leviathan and weren’t sold, it’s not for you.”

That's exactly the sort of contrast I was thinking of. I personally liked Worm from the start, but I had to tell my kids "wait until chapter 5 before we decide whether to finish reading this or not" about Mother of Learning.

Are there really people who need to read like 25% of Worm before they're hooked? That would finally be something to tie with Babylon 5 as the world champion of Most Difficult Fiction To Recommend. "Just spend 15 hours or so on this so you don't miss important backstory, and then, THEN it really gets good! Unless it's just not to your taste after all, in which case I'll be out of town for a while; I can come back when you're no longer enraged."

Couldn’t say. In a rare exercise of self-awareness, I never actually told a doubter to stick with it through Arc 8. But if someone had read that far and then asked if it were going to get better, I’d confidently tell them no.

Worm had me from the beginning. It was also my gateway from Potter fanfic to a broader world of rationalfic, and then the LessWrong and Scott spheres. So I guess I was pretty invested.

I do think it had the Tvtropes page that said something like, “for those skeptical of high school fiction, it quickly moves on to the far more pleasant setting of a bombed-out city.”

Haven't read it, and don't think I've heard of it before! I had to Google it to confirm it was another work by Wales.

Aw, well, thanks; glad I checked anyway.

Though ... instead of asking a long-shot question on my own behalf, I probably should have asked an obvious one on my son's behalf: what age would you say "Thresholder" is appropriate for? My kids loved HPMOR and he's currently re-reading "Mother of Learning", so I'd like to be able to find other long /r/rational -style work I could recommend for him, but my own next two favorites would be WtC and Worm and both get too frequently explicit about the horror/gore/trauma/etc. sides of their stories. The only warning I see on "Thresholder" is for profanity, and if even that's really excessive (or if his little sister wants in) I could probably read out loud to do a little light censorship on the fly.

I am personally not fond of age-gating literature at all, being of the opinion that if you can read and understand something, it's for you.

But that doesn't mean I don't understand what you mean haha. Thresholder has some adult content, but anything graphic happens off-screen. That's a necessity to be hosted on Royal Road, I think (without being age-gated, but it's been a while since I checked). You might see the MC looking longingly at a lady's buxom curves, have them described, but you're not getting a blow-for-blow of what follows, just a fade to black or acknowledgement. Someone might pop a boner, but no loving description of the veins or girth involved.

I would imagine most people wouldn't object to 13 year olds reading that. If you're reading it out loud, you'd be doing a decent amount of censoring for younger age groups. There's graphic violence, but nothing that would upset a psychologically normal red-blooded young lad.

I do want to thank you for introducing your kids to rationalist or rat-adjacent fiction, though that might spoil them with high standards when it comes to mainstream slop.

Thanks for this! That sounds like something I could let the 12yo read to himself, or at least something that I could read to him and the 10yo.

if you can read and understand something, it's for you.

I consider this to be a goal of fiction but not a tautology. One of my favorite books is "Citizen of the Galaxy", a book aimed at 10-12 year olds where one of the side characters is obviously (to adults) a brothel owner-operator but where the evidence to that effect would go over little kids' heads. I also have the greatest of respect for whoever wrote the line "If I had a black light, this place would look like a Jackson Pollock painting" in "Guardians of the Galaxy". And even for less clever writers, "there's a scene change and everybody who should know what happened off-screen can probably figure it out" often isn't too hard to set up.

But my kids all started reading at age 2 or 3, and started reading long-form stuff like Harry Potter at 5 or 6, and precocious intellect runs in my family in a way that precocious maturity ... does not. My kids are much more mature than I was at their ages, but even though they'd survive darker/grosser/etc. well enough, they still have their preferences. They all thought HPMOR was good enough to be worth its most upsetting scene, but they clearly thought there was a scale there with weight on both sides.

That's a necessity to be hosted on Royal Road, I think (without being age-gated, but it's been a while since I checked)

There are at least some adult content works on Royal Road that do not have any serious age-gating: Blue Core is an example (cw: painfully straight tentacles-on-woman, imo mid-but-complete work). They do have warnings that are moderately well-enforced, but I would not give a pre-teen random access to the site.

Montaillou is an absolute chore to get through. Dying to finish it so I can move on to something more interesting.

Started Generation F by Winston Smith, from the short-lived era of blog-turned-book behind-the-scenes public sector exposés. It's partly "if only you knew how bad things really are" but so far it's been let down by its shallow analysis. For example the author questions why the number of supported housing units expanded so rapidly under New Labour? Answer: Because "it became easier for parents to offload their children into State care". Leaving aside how that puts the cart before the horse it also begs the question of how New Labour and more importantly their backers and supporters benefitted from this change, and this coming immediately after a brief accounting of his workplace's state-funded running costs.

The characters are very two dimensional too, boiling down to little more than interchangeable pastiches standing for male resident, female resident, coworker, and lower/middle/upper management.

On the plus side it's not shy about critiquing the poor/negative outcomes of the system the author finds himself working under.

I'm finished up Different Seasons, four novellas by Stephen King. TL;DR: I very much enjoyed it.

King has a utilitarian style. So much of what I read is really not that. When you're so clear with your communication, there's less room for evoking emotion. He is still able to do that. Breaking the fourth wall a bit, the fact that he can when putting out so much content is undeniably impressive. This is the last time I'll connect the work with his politics, but it's just sad that he created art of this caliber just a handful of years ago, and now he's essentially an NPC.

The first Novella is essentially the Shawshank redemption. There's nothing crazy about the book, even "the twist", but it's a satisfying read that stays largely positive. I've heard critiques on this board that King focuses on the reality of prison with a bit of a sadists eye and would respectfully disagree. It's just well done.

The next is "Apt Pupil". Light psychological horror. One thing I really respected about this was that there was a focus on details and continuity.

Then there was "The Body" which turned into "Stand by Me". There are frankly dozens of important sections, but the one that stuck with me the most was when the boys were discussing precisely why they were taking the journey to see the body described in the title. It reminded me distinctly of how we would walk through the woods as kids, following the creek for hours with air rifles in hand and chips in backpack to make it to a spot minutes away by car. Some things deserve to be hard.

Last but certainly not least was "The Breathing Method" which was purposefully evocative of Lovecraft which I have always enjoyed.

All in all, a diverse set of stories with enough highs and lows to make it an even-keeled read. I very much enjoyed it.

Now starting in on "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", "Conversations with Friends", and "Incurable Graphomania"

Different Seasons is one of King's best. If someone asked me which Stephen King book they should start with to get an idea of his style, I would recommend this one or Misery.

Did you read the Dark Tower series? I'm considering it

I have read the Dark Tower series. The first four books of the Dark Tower are awesome. Book 4, Wizard and Glass is actually my favorite Stephen King book. After book 4 though, things really fell off a cliff. SK was seriously injured in a car collision in 1999 and it feels like him coming face to face with his own mortality caused him to race to finish the series. He pushed out books 5, 6, and 7 in the span of like three years after it took him 20 years to release the first 4.

I'll never not recommend Stephen King, regardless of the book, but I'm not the biggest fan of how The Dark Tower ended up. The good news is that you can plow through those books in a couple months or less.

Which did you prefer, the movie of Shawshank Redemption or the novella?

I think the Novella. Books have an advantage by default for me though it should be said

Continuing working my way through (rereading) Ian M. Banks.

I have a growing thought that the Culture series would have been (even) better if about the last two chapters of most books had been cut out or reworked to leave things more ambiguous. Many of the books have an epilogue or two that outright states 'yep, this was a deliberate intervention & the Culture knew all along'.

Agreed. To the point where you should probably spoiler-tag that last sentence. The catch is that those epilogues have completely different valence depending on the book.

So far, I’ve read Phlebas and Windward, Player, and Use. I’ve got copies of a couple later ones, and I’m consciously avoiding Excession.

My working theory is that the novels can be divided by whether Banks was using the Culture as a stand-in for American imperialism or American hegemony. The epilogues in “imperialism” books are awkward because it’s not like they were hiding their message. The ones in “hegemony” books work a little better, since they at least try to function as a twist. All in all, though, I have to agree that the epilogues don’t usually add much.

Finished Matthew Bracken's new book, Doomsday Reef. It was a fun read IMO, but surprisingly weak on story structure. His other 2 Dan Kilmer books go along with the standard 3-act story structure, where there's a "main" story and all of the subsidiary action is revealed later on to play a part in shaping how the "main" action plays out. This book was more like a bunch of stuff just happens as his improvised band of merry sailors travels the world, and it's all interesting, but doesn't really connect together into a broader plot. It also seems to attempt to push a little harder into the background of exactly how the whole world fell apart in this alternate timeline, which just doesn't really make any sense to me. Seems like he's sticking with the trucks, trains, boats, etc just stopped coming, nobody's even going to try to explain why or account for the fact that this just doesn't ever happen in the real world, and even if the US goes completely crazy for some reason, why would China, Russia etc do so too? Oh well, no sense over-analyzing things I guess.

Still reading Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles.

House by Tracy Kidder. Yes, This Inevitable Ruin: Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 7 delivered the goods, just as previous installments did IMO.

What do you guys make of the Elon - Ashley St. Claire babymama drama?

For context, Ashley St. Claire is a conservative Twitter personality who announced on Valentine's Day that Elon Musk has fathered a child with her. This was followed-up with a vaguely threatening statement from Ashley's lawyer. There are screenshots going around that suggest a less-than-cordial relationship between Ashley and Elon, though I can't verify these. There are also potential inconsistencies.

I'd never heard of her before but she's pretty hot.

If this is true, we should retire St. Claire's jersey in the E-Thot hall of fame.

How much better can you do than retire from "totally conservative woman commenter" schtick to baby mama of world's richest man? You may not like what it looks like, but we may be witnessing the GOAT.

Put simply, I think Elon Musk is an Antichrist. I'm not a religious man, but nothing seems to me to sum him up so neatly as the concept of an Antichrist. He has offered visions of salvation in the form of environmentalism, extraterrestrial travel, pro-natalism, and now DOGE. He is the richest man in the world and commands the world's largest microphone, using it to shape global opinion and change governments around the world. His relationship with the truth is flexible, to put it lightly.

If Antichrists are real, would they have many children via IVF with women like Grimes and Ashley St. Claire? Would he name them things like Exa Dark Sideræl and Techno Mechanicus? Absolutely.

I understand a wealthy man having a mistress or two besides his wife, and having children with all of them. I can understand having a harem of women who have his kids. I can get a man who wants children regardless of his interest in their mothers.

But of Elon’s thirteen children, possibly only one was conceived naturally. He takes no interest in the rest besides paying bills. Uh, what gives? I mean there’s an interesting point about IVF and family bonding to be made but WTF? He doesn’t have an array of beautiful women and if babies happen they happen. He doesn’t take much interest in the rearing of his deliberate children, which you’d expect to be the case if he just wanted kids. Is this just some weird autistic compulsion?

I guess I can understand wanting to have kids, and I can understand wanting to have sex. I can’t understand going out of your way to father children when you don’t want either.

I understand. It's tedious to raise children, and it makes no difference anyway.

And I'm not a natalist because I want to spread my genes either.

No, it's the Gift of Life. The more, the merrier.

As a parent, I don't get it. At all. It's not, in fact, tedious to raise children--or if it is to you, that's all right, but it isn't to everyone, and certainly isn't to me. There are really no people I'd rather be around than my own sons. Men who can just walk away from their kids, to me, aren't real men. They're something like man-boys, and I don't have any particular respect for them.

Call it a personal preference. Young parents look an act like zombies. All of feminism represents people who did not like it. But some find it fulfilling, for sure. And if they can use their hobby to give more humans the gift of life, so much the better.

I‘m not sure what I‘m supposed to do with a claim of unmanlyness. If I call a man unmanly, for being a coward, for example, I‘m referring to a shared understanding of what a man should be ; accusing him, in effect, of failing to act according to his own ideals. You and I share no such understanding on the topic of parenting.

Note I didn't intend to call you unmanly. I'm talking about dads who don't dad, who don't give a rat's ass about their own children.

I think everyone being confused in this thread is strange. I don't act on the urges that Musk and Cannon do but I have the same ones. I think my genes are awesome, and the world would end up better with more people having them in the world.

The rules of society are my primary reasons for not sowing my wild oats. After becoming a parent, there's some FOMO. But that's it.

"I don't deny myself to women, Mandrake. But I do deny them my essence."

Maybe its easier to uphold a pre-partum financial agreement if there's no sex and no 'relationship' that would otherwise let these women gold dig beyond what is allocated in the contract.

Much easier if you don’t have a kid, no? Like why is he having these kids if he has no interest in them or their mothers.

I think he genuinely wants to spread his genetics Genghis Kahn style. Ok maybe not quite Kahn style, but you get what I mean.

I'm surprised he hasn't opened a sperm bank and rolled out mass production. Must be legal issues or that he can't choose the genes of the mothers.

I'm confused by the confusion. He thinks his genes are superior and wants to spread them, and he has the means to avoid having to raise them personally.

But he doesn’t seem to want kids at all. He’s not just hiring a nanny. He doesn’t seem to have custody agreements where he gets the kid for just long enough to be the perpetual cool parent, except for his kid with grimes. The only thing is that the kids exist.

I can understand a rich guy simply paying child support to his nubile concubines and otherwise taking no interest in his offspring. I can understand creating kids because he wants them. But he doesn’t seem to.

Did Genghis Khan want any of these things? Of course not - he just wanted to spread his seed.

Genghis khan presumably enjoyed having sex with these many, many women.

Yes, but I assume he also wanted numerous offspring.

No, there is a difference. Most men who want this also want to have some influence over the way their sons are raised, how they are educated, what they believe. They want an army, a legacy, a legion of sons who look up to them and who follow them and who carry on their essence in ways that are substantially but not solely genetic. Elon doesn’t really do any of this, these kids are going to grow up to be the generic lib children of their prostitute mothers. That is less usual.

Thank you, this is what I’m getting at- when my aunt’s husband divorced her after selling a patent, he was more than happy to use money as a substitute for doing any of the actual work involved in parenting. But he was very very particular about how other people did the work, he wanted to see report cards, decide on schools, residence, etc.

This is the sort of thing that would be far more typical of Musk.

He doesn't want to be a parent. He wants to be a sire. What you've described is in line with this. It may well be unusual or alien but it isn't confusing and lines up with his stated preferences, so yeah my vote is "autistic compulsion".

"Thirteen kids from 4 different women - he really is african american" is the best joke I have heard so far.

anyway - worth it only for the replies to this tweet.

https://x.com/KonstantinKisin/status/1891140045546905637

One of my country prominent liberal politicians called the Ukraine army the best in Europe. Deadly serious and with a straight face. In a fit in a response to the USA actions lately.

Do you think there is any merit in that or early symptoms of USA derangement syndrome?

Most European armies have been shaped by their NATO membership: Poland has 1000 tanks (and plans to upgrade to 2000) because it sits on the frontline, but it has inadequate air defenses, air force and long-range weaponry, since it expects other countries behind it to provide that. The only country that has really been preparing for a one-on-one war is probably Finland, but their plans are purely defensive in nature: mobilizing all men, hiding in the taiga and bleeding Russia dry.

Could Ukraine, if it so wished, defeat Poland in a surprise attack if Poland left NATO? Probably not, since it doesn't have enough armor for a breakthrough. Could it defeat Poland in a sustained offensive? Again, probably not, but neither could Poland defeat Ukraine.

Drones are an important defensive weapon, but (a) they aren't exactly rocket science and most countries will have enough of them soon and (b) they don't solve the new stalemate the way tanks and infiltration tactics solved in in 1918. Without some new fancy anti-drone AA that can clear the skies long enough to reestablish the fog of war and allow armor to cross the no man's land it's a competition of mobilization efforts.

Could someone like the UK skip this whole footslogging business and degrade the opponent with air force and ship-launched missiles? Well, there's a reason why Russia uses its air force to drop guided glide bombs and Ukraine uses its air force to hunt down cruise missiles: both armies have sufficient AA to make achieving air superiority hard. Not impossible, and the UK is probably better at using its aerial assets, but it's going to be hard to hunt down every Buk and Tor and donated Patriot and secret airfield.

I think the fancy anti-drone AA tech already exists in the form of EMP weapons.

I have not encountered any EMP weapons that do not cause significant collateral damage against all unhardened electronics in the area around the weapon. (If there have been any recent developments in this area I'd love to hear about them.)

If your response to a $100 quadcopter is to destroy $5k in security cameras, have you really come out ahead?

It means that one side has to withdraw all its unhardened electronics from the area before deploying the EMP weapon, obviously.

You're going to withdraw all your unhardened electronics from the area in the 30 seconds before the quadcopter flies over in your direction?

You can of course try to ensure that you have no unhardened electronics around beforehand - but now that essentially means 'no unhardened electronics near the battlefield' - and unhardened electronics are useful. Not to mention fairly ubiquitous in civilian installations.

Makes you wonder why there are no EMP guns in every platoon and on every tank already, knocking drones out of the sky left and right. Anyway, there are optical wire-guided drones already that have a Faraday cage protecting their electronics.

We already had those, they were called TOW Missiles!

More seriously, I get the impression we are working on plenty of counter-UAS weapons. Military procurement is just slow.

A single TOW missile costs $100000, if I remember correctly. How much does a suicide drone cost? $1000? $5000?

A TOW needs to explode a tank. If you need to explode a temu special, you can probably cut some corners.

What do drones explode, then? Even the cheapest ones that simply drop ordnance basically perform a top attack like the best AT missile. FPV drones fly into the weakest point of the tank's armor.

For the optical, wire-guided kind, probably more than $5K, but much less than the TOW.

For the bargain versions deployed in Ukraine? Maybe even less.

It sure looks like mid-21st century is mostly about small expendable drones and defending against them. (The Turkisk Bayraktar was effective early on, but you can put >1000 grenades on Home Depot quadcopters for the price of a Bayraktar, and not that many of them are flying any more). Ukraine and Russia have orders of magnitude more experience with this type of war than anyone else, and Ukraine are better at it than Russia.

So the claim that Ukraine currently have the best army in Europe, or even the world, seems plausible, and it will remain that way until the other Great Powers adapt their doctrine, training and equipment to reflect the new reality of drone-primary warfare.

I think that might be true, but is more of a story about how terrible the rest of Europe is than how awesome the Ukraine Army is.

I would expect at least some units are these days excellent at things like holding off a large-scale offensive with a hodgepodge of improvised equipment and donated castoffs. They might now be among the best in the world at modern drone warfare.

On the other hand, they still seem terrible at putting together a solid combined-arms offensive of the type that would be necessary to actually drive the Russians out of their country.

Combat experience counts for a lot, and they certainly aren't lacking for equipment either. A few dozen Ukrainian military advisors on the ground in Syria with knowledge of modern drone warfare were sufficient to turn the tide of that conflict decisively against the Assad regime. The French have done a lot of counterinsurgency work in Africa and I might trust them more with operations requiring precision, but if I were fighting a high-intensity war I'd want guys on my side who know how. Perhaps you were implying that Russia's army is clearly superior and the best in Europe, and certainly in a numerical sense they are, but I don't know about man for man.

The army specifically? Doesn't strike me as particularly absurd. Their army is the largest in Europe (apart from Russia of course), has lots of great equipment thanks to Western aid, and most importantly, is battle-hardened.

Discounting Russia, it's definitely the largest (googling provides 800k-900k troops vs closer to 200k each for France, Germany, Poland, Italy) and surely has the most combat veterans. Via aid, it's got a hodge-podge of tech and equipment but some of that stuff is advanced and high quality. Morale may be all over the place, but they've held on far far longer and better than most expected.
Given the length of time for training, the larger and richer other European countries could raise better militaries given a few years to build up, but they aren't there right now in Feb 2025.

Do you think that Russia and USA are natural allies for the 21st century and that the upcoming Riyadh talks are a first step of it?

G. Friedman, The Next 100 Years (for no particular reason other than I just finished it)

...puts it more like natural enemies, for about as long as he thinks Russia will be a major factor in international politics. Which won't be very long in his opinion. From that point on, it just won't matter much for the US. At no point in the next century does he predict Russia being particularly friendly with the US, not even as an ally against a common enemy.

No…why would they be? I think a security relationship is basically a non-starter, and outside of that, Russia doesn’t really have anything to offer us.

They have absolutely no geopolitical conflicts. The current way of thinking is mostly a relic of the cold war. Especially since the US is getting ahead of Europe and Europe now is like the German confederacy too strong to be easily conquered, but too disorganized to be a threat to anyone. And the US will probably start to view it as a liability soon. China with Russia and Kazakhstan (as my geography teacher called it - a gem of natural resources) is invulnerable. Trade embargoes just doesn't work.

The first cold war was won by the sino soviet split, another Russio-Chinese split could solve the second.

Benefits - better control and exploitation of the soon to be thawed arctic, denial of arctic to the Chinese and encircling of China.

Why do we care about opposing the Chinese, again? They care much less about the West than Russia does, and have a far lesser history of hostility towards us.

I think it's difficult to reason about things like this. AI, for example, is so disruptive that any predictions post 2030 feel impossible.

When it comes to predictions, I think simple methods are best. And therefore, no, the US and Russia are unlikely to be allies in the future because they have not been allies in the past.

... what are you working on?

I find it kind of hard to work on software projects for fun knowing AGI will make it significantly easier to work on if I wait a year before starting. In fact this might always be true.

Labor done in 2025 will be so much less leveraged than labor done in 2026, and so on.

That's quitter talk. Do it for the craft, do it to skill up, do it to impress your friends, anything - but talking yourself out of having fun because the end result may possibly be dredgeable out of the electronic collective unconscious is stupid. I've talked myself out of working on side projects before because someone's already done it, and I was still wrong to do so! Don't do nothing now because you'll (presumably) be able to do it better in the future, you're skipping the important steps of practicing and fucking up, also known as having fun and learning!

Anyway I'm working on my attention span. I haven't given myself time to touch most of my side projects recently because IRL, but I did take some time to set up custom firmware on my friend's 3DS. I'm also trying to work through FUTO's guide to setting up a self-hosted home cloud.

This reminds me of the wait calculation from speculations about interstellar travel. If you leave Earth too early, your technology is too slow, and future faster travellers have already colonized your destination planet by the time you arrive. So you wait... But calculating the best time to leave has so many uncertainties that you end up never leaving, and humanity dies on Earth, never traveling to the stars despite having the technical ability to do so.

Trying to finish several of my half-written (or less) political/philosophical essays (like "Society Is Not a Van Der Waals Gas," "You Are Not Avalokiteśvara," and "Darwinism Is Not a Creation Myth"), which are increasingly looking to turn into potential chapters in a hypothetical book.

Looking for beta readers?

Looking for beta readers?

Not presently, but thanks for offering. And if I do, I'll keep you in mind.

Working on a software synth, and I have the opposite feeling. I made a half-baked one on my own in 2024, but in 2025 my labor is so much more efficient that I can make a vastly superior product that will actually realize my original vision. In 2026, I'll be able to do something more ambitious.

Still chipping away at my novel which I started as part of last year's NaNoWriMo competition, as documented here. Knocked out a thousand words in the last hour.

An album I finished last year was released three weeks ago.

Released how? On what platform? How do we find it?

I find it kind of hard to work on software projects for fun knowing AGI will make it significantly easier to work on if I wait a year before starting. In fact this might always be true.

This strikes me somewhat like saying "I don't want to work on learning to play an instrument because music recordings will make it a lot easier to have music in my home". That's true if all you care about is the end result. But if you were going to do this for fun to begin with, presumably you were going to do it because you enjoy the craft. So why wait for different tools? The enjoyment of the craft will be just as much today as it is a year from now.

I agree whole-heartedly with @MathWizard .

I write my own novel(s) for two reasons, one being that I want to establish, for reasons not much more noble than "I was considered a good writer back when that was a rare commodity", the other being that since there's very little of the very niche genre of fiction I enjoy, I might as well write my own.

Some authors view the rise of AI writing with fear and panic. I don't, both because I never relied on it for an income (and of course I'm worried about my own job going away) and I read far more than I write.

My default existence is boredom and ennui, desperate trawling and doomscrolling for literature (or any text) that assuages that thirst. There are never enough of the novels I enjoy, the authors I admire never seem to churn out novels faster than I can read them. Some of them, like Banks, are churlish enough to die instead of keeping on writing indefinitely.

Thus, even if I lose a small amount of utility from my writing becoming obsolete, I gain a great deal more from just having a near endless buffet of good writing to read.

Some would deny that AI can ever do that. Those people are idiots.

I think current LLMs are about 70% of the way to replacing me as an author, assuming they're given an excerpt of text I've written and then told to go wild with it. It's only a matter of years before the matter is settled. A year, if I'm being both highly optimistic and pessimistic.

So it goes for most people. For those who aren't making music as a career and who don't reflexively hate AI made music, the endlessly availability of fresh new music in the genres they like is amazing. While surgeons wouldn't be happy about being replaced, someone who got their appendix removed cheaper and safer would be happy about it. At any rate, it's coming for us whether we like it or not.

I'm assaulted daily by anti-ai takes that sap my will to live, but one in particular sticks in my mind. It went something like comparing generative tools to a child throwing his toy box into a ceiling fan, because the end result is the same as him playing with them. If taken as anything other than babbling of a motivated partisan, that metaphor would reveal how little the poster thinks of his readers, and of himself as well. His writing might only have value for the fun he has while producing it, and nothing else. But that's not normal.

Obviously if one really cares about the output and not the craft itself, then it's different. But I don't feel like that is the central example of "I'm writing software for fun". But yes, if that's you (and @MathWizard), you might decide to hold off based on your personal evaluation of how quickly we will have AI tools available to do that for you.

I would say I'm not convinced that will be soon. Right now AI generated content sucks ass. I'm not reflexively against it (though you might not believe me), but it just is bad and not worth my time even if I want to Consoom (TM). And that's just talking about creative endeavors (not my area of expertise), where I can only really judge the output from a layman's perspective. If we are talking about programming (which is my area of expertise), AI is laughably bad. It's so bad at writing code that it's a drain on productivity, because you have to check everything it does to make sure it is correct. LLMs are a really neat party trick, but right now that's all they are. They still can't actually do anything useful.

Could it get better? Sure. But people have been saying "it's gonna get better in a year or two" for years now, and it still isn't there. At this point, there's not evidence to suggest that AI is going to be able to do these tasks competently within the next 5 years or so. That doesn't mean it can't happen, but I think that people predicting AI to do all these wonderful things (meaning no personal disrespect to you) are getting caught up in hype without any substance behind it at this time.

In my case, the goal is the end product. I want a videogame with every single feature I want in a game and none of the features I don't want, and whenever I run out of content I can make more content. The software project is "for fun", in that the game is for fun and tailored to me specifically, I don't think it will ever be commercially viable, but 70% of the fun is (or would be if I ever get anywhere) the game itself, 25% is being able to think about game design features and add and tweak things, 5% is the actual coding line by line. If I could tell an AI what features I want and have it keep adding them cohesively and coherently on a global level without hallucinating or forgetting details from months ago, I would easily drop the 5% line by line coding part.

Instead I keep getting bored and losing motivation because I get too ambitious and it takes too long to do what I want to do before I get to enjoy it in a playable state.

I see an opportunity to replace certain human labor at my workplace with humanoid robots. For background, I am an equipment engineer at a Fortune 100 manufacturing company and think my job is somewhat low-risk of getting automated soon.

Pros:

  • Good for my career at the company
  • Improves my skillset in case I ever want to switch jobs. I predict humanoid robots will become much more common as more companies adopt them and their skills widen and improve.

Cons:

  • I am putting people out of a job. This would likely substitute for people instead of complement them. The company recently laid off 100s of employees and soon thereafter announced using a robot dog for some of their tasks. Is this just a form of natural selection?
  • Can look bad on me if the robot isn’t as good as promised. There are ways to temper expectations that I plan to do during my pitch to management.

What are The Motte’s opinions on this in regards to:

  • My career development
  • The moral implications of putting low-skilled people out of work
  • Anything else

You're going to have to link me those robot dogs being used for anything practical. I haven't seen any use for them other than toys yet. What could they do that a cartbot couldn't do better?

It’s on our company’s intranet, but IIRC (I’m away from my work computer for the next week) they attached sensors for detecting abnormal conditions with temperature, pressure, etc on various systems.

While I’m sure the headline sensationalizes their results (and the dog just looks cool), the point is not the medium, but the fact that the robot is doing something.

That's actually really cool. I always figured it'd be cheaper to have networked sensors everywhere, but maybe a pipe-climbing trouble-checking robot would be more cost effective in some situations

You can start by thinking about how you might be able to complement the existing workers. Is there a way that the machines could be made useful for them, instead of replacing them? Is there other work, other bottlenecked parts of the process that might be able to use more labour? I know you said no, but perhaps with a little more ingenuity you'll see something.

Also, for my own personal satisfaction, could you indicate what humanoids you're interested in? I'm on record as being very down on humanoids for maintenance/controllability reasons, is there something new I've missed?

I grossly misspoke in my original post: I think complementation would happen first, then eventually substitution. I am unsure of exact timelines here and venture to say 10+ years with low confidence. My immediate “moral concern” is that the complementation benefits would be enough to justify firing workers sooner because now everyone is X times as productive.

I haven’t done substantial research, but the Figure AI robots seem promising. And while I suspect their press releases are overhyping their results (much like BD’s Atlas hasn’t been widely implemented to my knowledge despite being introduced many years ago), they have actual production units in factories doing simple work, which is a plus in my mind. Open to any more thoughts you have!

The year is 2050. Everything useful has been automated, so people are employed in doing useless things. First it was, to no one's surprise, lawyers. But the public first really became aware in 2035. Tesla had just released diaper-changing robots, and a coalition of nursing home and daycare workers arrived at the Michigan state capital. They gave hours of spurious testimony as to the need for a human to do it, and the legislature voted to keep high mandatory ratios of care staff. The idea soon spread; lots of people are employed in sitting around to meet staffing minima at fully automated workplaces. There's also people whose jobs are to add the human touch; waiters, customer service call takers, etc. But a plurality of people sit in a room doing, theoretically, nothing.

Mental health issues skyrocket. Obviously, people don't literally do nothing even if they're being paid for it, but they don't do anything productive either. At the shittiest jobs drug use is rampant, slightly higher up the ladder people gossip, gamble, play video games on the clock- the same things they do off the clock, except sober. There are 'doctors' and 'engineers' who are forbidden from doing any medical or engineering work- supposedly, they watch the robot doing it, but in practice they argue about politics online, watch sports, buy cheap junk from automated factories with a cafeteria full of 'workers' playing poker and giving each other terrible advice. All of these people are self-medicating, or in therapy, or something.

Of course, for those who can't stand being paid to do nothing, they can work customer service- people will just scream at the robot until they have a person to scream at instead, after all- or sponge off of welfare. In well functioning countries there's now a UBI paid partly in kind(eg, allotments of staple foods), but in the US there's simply an expansion of existing welfare programs. All it takes to get on section 8 is a willingness to live in it now; there's vast tenement highrises with open cockfighting in the hallways. More responsible citizens can simply turn in a tax return and get a credit that's enough to live on for the year, at least in flyover, but only in a lump sum payment- those bad at budgeting need to go back to section eight and foodstamps. And of course, citizens who are quiet, clean, but not good with their money can get disability. On the whole, the latter two groups are much happier than those with fake jobs; many find alternative sources of meaning in hobbies, friends, communities- and for the majority, they can at least get baked and play videogames openly, without lying about it.

By the way, I really, truly (unfortunately) think this is the way mass automation is going to go.

You don’t think this is significant rose colored glasses? Responsible citizens having a means of separating themselves from the crackheads isn’t how welfare works in the real world.

Are you running a business, or a charity?

My perspective is that your "career development" is mostly illusory. If automating part of your process results in a better product or cheaper manufacturing, perhaps you will get a bonus? Certainly you will get a resume point. Perhaps it will get you a promotion? A raise? You don't seem to think it will result in you, too, being replaced by a machine, at least not immediately, so in terms of self interest it seems like an obvious choice.

As for the moral implications of making low-skilled people unemployed, like... if you don't do it, eventually someone else will, except you will get none of the benefits while still suffering all the possible downsides. There may be public policy arguments about this that matter from a moral or legal perspective, but unless it is your job to make or enforce public policy, then you don't really have a seat at that table.

In the medium-term future (two or three centuries at most), I think that we either get widespread universal basic income, or we get rampant Luddism. Authoritarian governments and relatively culturally homogeneous nations seem likely to weather that transition better than pluralistic democracies, as identitarian competition for resources and handouts ramps up toward infinity. You will contribute to this process no matter what you choose to do in your current role; the best you can do is what is best for yourself, as that is what you have the most control over and the greatest understanding of.

As for the moral implications of making low-skilled people unemployed, like... if you don't do it, eventually someone else will, except you will get none of the benefits while still suffering all the possible downsides.

This is the argument people have used to rationalize all manner of immoral things since time immemorial. It doesn't really hold water, though. If something is immoral, then it doesn't matter that someone else will do the same thing. Morality is about your conduct, not what others do.

As it happens, I don't think that automating jobs is immoral. But I think that if one does, the "someone else will do it" argument doesn't fly.

That's not the work I intended that phrase to do. It was more of a factual observation about the extent to which outcomes are actually (not) within OP's control, which was the overall point of my post.

Specifically, "ought" implies "can." Ensuring that some people are employed might be the right thing to do; say for the purposes of argument that it is in this case. If in such a case it's not really up to you that those people will stay employed, it can't really be a moral requirement that you keep them employed. The claim "if you don't do it, eventually someone else will" is not a justification for any particular course of action, but an empirical claim about the extent to which a certain outcome is likely (not) within OP's control.

I have high-ish (75%) confidence I would get a nice raise and promotion and low-ish confidence (20%) potential opportunity to lead this initiative across the company if it went well, so not entirely illusory, but I see your point—I’m a firm believer that large companies rarely proportionally reward their workers.

I agree that someone else will do it, but it just sits slightly at odds with me. “Git gud” is a motto I live by and expect others too (to a certain extent), but it’s a bit more difficult when said others are standing right in front of me chatting about their families they support on the salary that could (will eventually?) be taken away by these robots.

My asking here was more of a “please explain why and tell me what I’m wanting to do is good” along with a catch-all option for extra thoughts.

My conviction is that in the future, much shorter term than your medium, countries that embrace automation to a fuller extent will utterly dominate and destroy those that don't. Will it be authoritarian or democratic ones? I can see it go either way. Democratic unions blocking even automatic parking gates at the docks, versus an autocrat saying that a robot-staffed megafactory for making drones is being built, and those who protest will be the first to experience its products. Or a democratically-minded government allowing unlimited productivity explosion if the owners are forced to dole out a pittance of the gains as universal basic income, versus a paternalistic dictator protecting his people from unemployment.

In the medium term, I think that the concept of a government will lose its meaning. The division will be between those individuals who control a force capable of credibly threatening other individuals controlling a trillion drones, and those who don't.

The moral implications of putting low-skilled people out of work

You can't hold back economic forces on your own. If a job is automatable, it will eventually be automated. in any case, automation is just a means to make human workers more productive. Which is what economic growth is, fundamentally.

In the long term, the way to make poor people richer is by increasing worker productivity in the countries those poor people live in, and therefore GDP per capita. Poor people in rich countries are wealthier than average people in poor countries because the rich countries have higher worker productivity, which benefits the poorest workers through cost disease and cheaper goods/services.

I honestly think you have a moral duty to automate those jobs. The benefits will outweigh the costs, even if said benefits are diffuse and the costs are concentrated.

To partially copy from another reply: I agree that someone else will do it, but it just sits slightly at odds with me. “Git gud” is a motto I live by and expect others too (to a certain extent), but it’s a bit more difficult when said others are standing right in front of me chatting about their families they support on the salary that could (will eventually?) be taken away by these robots.

I also resonate with cheaper production results in everyone being richer, and if everyone asked these questions before doing anything we would be wayyyyy less rich than we are now.

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