domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com?page=5?page=0?page=0?page=0
Templexious
12m ago
Social media is an interesting case-study in "This is a thing everyone knows is bad, its structures are bad, and yet we do it anyway". A perfect example of a coordination problem, where due to competing interests no one actually exits the game, because there's just too much social consequence to exiting.
While most readers of my comment would assume I ascribe the detachment from reality that X is to Elon, it's not entirely true. Having watched Twitter's degradation from the early days, it was a blue-coded firehose of shit that went from being able to traverse in a sensible way to randomly interspersing bullshit regardless of how recent it is, to get you to click and spend more time on it.
So yeah, your ability to stay away from Twitter/X is to be lauded, and I make no excuse for my own bad social media habits, even if they amount mostly to browsing various hobby groups.
MotteAnon12345
13m ago
The Gen IV designs that don't rely on water as the heat carrier/moderator (I think molten salt or liquid sodium based ones) operate at ~700C so are quite suitable for process heat. Of course, good luck getting the NRC to approve any of them.
Here
14m ago
Random theories about this election I’ve seen discussed so far:
We have left-wing musings that the failure to reach low-propensity voters comes from a “lack” of a left-wing media ecosystem, which makes me scratch my head somewhat, given the disproportionate skew of media to the left. There doesn’t appear to be any introspection or soul-searching here. The issue might not be a lack of left-wing media, but a lack of trust in that media; becoming more online creates a healthy level of skepticism about what we consume, especially as AI becomes more prevalent.
Some pundits are decrying the existence of right-wing echo chambers as corrupting our young men while fleeing to Bluesky and Threads so they don’t have to interact with conservatives. Bluesky “block lists” of conservative voices appeared almost overnight, to overcome the lack of algorithmic protections.
And, of course, everyone’s bringing up their favorite culture war issues as the “reason” why Trump won, but I don’t think it’s that simple. It’s not that factory workers in the rustbelt are transphobic, it’s that factory workers in the rustbelt are tired of someone’s pronouns being given more attention than their grocery bills. Abortion received a ton of support on referendums while their states still went to Trump; is it because we made having children a “women’s issue” instead of an economic one? Telling women they should lie to their husbands who they voted for isn’t a great way to win over men who already feel scorned by today’s society.
I also don’t understand how the party who claim to be championing women and minorities is also the party fighting so hard for mail-in ballots. Secret ballots are a feature of the system, not a bug. Filling out the ballot at your kitchen table makes it really hard to hide it from your husband, or your employer. The weird creepy ads about “people can look up your voting record and won’t date you if you don’t” also don’t help with this, especially when several of these ads didn’t clarify that while whether you voted is public, who you voted for is not. The social stigma of voting Trump is still high, as people get uninvited from Thanksgiving with their own families for leaning conservative.
In the meantime, my guilty pleasure is watching liberal election-denier conspiracy theories. arr “SomethingIsWrong2024” displays a shockingly bad grasp of data analysis, because “all my neighbors had Kamala signs!!” and the like. I feel like I’m in an alternate reality when I see things stated “Vance was a bad pick, no one was excited about him” because I remember the enthusiasm for having someone young and capable on the ticket. Maybe I’m just stuck in my own echo chamber, and don’t realize it; I should do my own introspection.
Here
15m ago
I remember the Obama era narratives of the “Coalition of the Ascendent.” If demographics were truly destiny, Republicans wouldn’t touch the Presidency again. Obama’s “resounding” 2012 victory prompted the infamous Republican “Autopsy.”
This narrative ignores the numbers, though. 2012 wasn’t a triumph for Democrats, but a warning – while the Republican candidate had gained just under 1 million more votes than the 2008 Republican candidate, the Democrat had lost a little over 3.5 million voters. While Hillary Clinton eked out a plurality of the popular vote,* this trend continued in 2016: the Republican candidate gained about 2 million more votes than in 2012, while the Democratic candidate lost ~60k votes. A minor number, to be sure, but a trend nonetheless. 2012 wasn’t a victory lap, but instead a demonstration that the “Obama coalition” was a mirage, a flash in the pan – a demonstration that we all missed at the time.
As the 2024 election is mulled over by pundits to see what, exactly, went wrong, I wonder if we are missing similar “warning signs” in trends. The Bernie-Bro-turned-Trump-supporter pipeline a la Joe Rogan could be symptomatic of voters aligning more along an axis of “insiders vs. outsiders” instead of policy preferences, education, age, or race; while there are correlations with each of those things to an “insiders vs. outsiders” axis, none of them are definitive. Are we similarly looking at the 2024 election the wrong way, especially as we make judgment calls while several million votes have yet to be counted?
Some of the most prominent Republicans right now identified as Democrat-aligned during the Obama era (Trump, Vance, Elon, Tulsi; I’d throw RFK in there too but I’m not sure that he views himself as a Republican). Republicans are winning over tech bros and unions, and bleeding college-educated voters. There’s talk about this just being a Trump thing, it’ll go away. It was a big anti-incumbency year, worldwide. The elite will reclaim their rightful place as the only right, correct, egalitarian way forward. Etc.
*Talking heads bicker about how Trump “only” receiving a plurality of the popular vote decreases his significance, even while clinging to Clinton “winning” the popular vote in 2016 despite also receiving a plurality, and not a majority. The semantics are amusing from a culture war perspective – the war on language continues – but ultimately meaningless.
Bleep
16m ago
It's hard to know since all of this stuff is leaked/rumored as we don't have the full report. My understanding is the rumor is Gaetz was with Greenberg when he was making some fraudulent IDs with the implication being Gaetz knew what was going on, but the specific period we're talking about is in 2017 when the girl was still 17 and I believe this rumored instance was after that. I believe I've heard Gaetz refer to someone going to prison for 11 years (which would refer to Greenberg), but I don't think he's ever said a name.
Given the frothing-at-the-mouth behavior of the DOJ going after anyone connected to Trump, I suspect Gaetz has pretty iron-clad defenses in the court of public opinion and real court, especially when the case would have to be brought in Florida instead of Washington DC or the SDNY.
As a former client told me: if you're going to do shady shit, never in writing and always in cash.
MotteAnon12345
17m ago
Honestly, I haven't been keeping track. Judging from Trump's first presidency, he's big on talk and short on action so I just haven't bothered. Bureaucracies tend to be permanent barring jarring events so my prior is that nothing will be done.
No offense, but is this some sort of intra-elite career path feud? Like the management consultants who are mad that software engineers make too much money now?
(Yes, I'm aware that management consultants are striving fakers, and sofware engineers are the white collar equivalent of plumbers, but you know what I mean)
Felagund
25m ago
What life advice do you have?
(Yes, this is a very generic question. Make it as narrow or broad as you like. It does not at all need to be tailored to me.)
As far as I know, there was no blackmail element from Joel Greenberg himself.
There was other nonconnected blackmailers, though: a former prosecutor for the northern district of Florida by the name of David McGee and a former Intelligence officer for the military named Bob Kent got together and likely attempted to blackmail Gaetz's father. The scheme was Don Gaetz would give $25,000,000 to McGee and who would allegedly use this money to attempt a rescue operation on a long-lost CIA contractor named Bob Levinson and in exchange the two would use their contacts in the Biden admin to get a presidential pardon for Matt Gaetz's "looming" federal sex trafficking charges (which up to that point were secret). Don Gaetz immediately went to the local FBI and they got him to wear a wire to meet with David McGee. Luckily for the Gaetz family, Don refused to do anything without a written letter from the FBI detailing the purpose of the meeting, their agreement, and their cooperation.
Once the Gaetz family had that letter and went to the meeting with David McGee, shortly afterwards someone leaked the entire sex trafficking investigation to the NYT which led to Matt Gaetz giving one of the most bizarre television interviews ever. I also remember this causing a bit of a fallout with other politicians commenting, but I also don't remember who that was.
It looks like your links don't list Bob Levinson as a CIA contractor, but I believe his ties to the CIA (and maybe others) were leaked to the press in ~2013 in an attempt to pressure the Obama admin to get him back.
Felagund
26m ago
If you know people well enough that you think that you've found something that fits what they like, and that they would buy, but they don't know about, that's good too. But that can be tricky to do.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
27m ago
I don't personally know anyone in the US who would care.
Bleep
28m ago
over 30-35
for the record, this wasn't meant to be a personal dig at you because I didn't know you fit this description (or even if you do, but given the mod response I suspect it's at least close); it was meant to be a dig at the middle-aged+ women commentariat who regularly make such comments on the internet
TIRM
28m ago
I've never known a city dwelling woman to carry any means of protection.
I know plenty, counting pepperspray. Are you not an American?
Jiro
28m ago
I don't see the inherent justification for a parent to know about something which may or may not lead to a medical decision down the line, even if it's somewhat likely to.
We can't run the world on 100% certainty. By your reasoning, the school shouldn't report the child doing any dangerous things that didn't have a 100% chance of harming the child.
Dean
33m ago
I've never known a city dwelling woman to carry any means of protection.
How many women have you known the contents of the purse of when they walk around at night?
EdgeCityRed
34m ago
The trans fantasy - and this part is true for both AGP and HSTS - is to be a 95th percentile hotness woman. The rest of womanhood or womenfolk don’t concern them or factor into it at all.
I can see the appeal of transitioning to become male (if the button-push scenario were real versus hormones and surgery); menstruation is a horrid, annoying hassle at best, pregnancy and childbirth can have severe deleterious effects on the body, and men don't have to be very concerned about aging, because their eye wrinkles and gray hair are viewed as distinguished and not extinguished by society. Men who go overboard with botox and surgery come off kind of sad. Wearing makeup and cute outfits are the FUN part of being female.
But if I were to transition, I wouldn't look like George Clooney; I have female hips, testosterone can cause baldness, and I'm 95th-percentile female tall, but as a man, I'd be average. It's shallow of me, maybe, but I don't see a point to doing it without a serious gender dysphoria element if you're not going to pass easily and end up hot.
faceh
47m ago
Yep.
There was a local eye doctor with big dreams when I first moved to this area 9 years back who now owns like 6 different offices in two different counties. Actually, I just checked, now its 7 in three counties. Could quite possibly be pulling in 8 digits annually.
Entrepreneurial spirit in the medical field can be rewarded heavily, and because it is gated so heavily, you generally have a built-in advantage for reaping those rewards if you have business savvy.
Of course, entrepreneurs from outside the medical field are absolutely SALIVATING to piece up the medical industry any way they can, and it all seems to trend towards consolidation, where big, established players will eventually come in to compete with you.
Most doctors I've known are happy enough to just build up a big book of patients then sell off their practice.
2rafa
51m ago
It doesn't matter because unless they're so incompetent they actually kill people (and even then...) they have job security for life. In other jobs that have great job security like working for the federal government it's widely understood that this comes with a salary penalty. I don't care that doctors can't easily make millions, it's completely irrelevant, what they can do is make a 95th+ percentile income guaranteed for a 30-year career; no other profession in America has that.
cjet79
1hr ago
Artillery is highly effective for medium and small demolishers. When I tried to kill a large one with artillery I got my position overrun. That health Regen is insane. I think the big ones need quality nukes.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
Being a physician opens the pathway to starting your own practice, which can easily lead to a 7 figure annual income.
Not anymore. Regulatory requirements have pretty much forced doctors into "health systems" where they may nominally have their own practice but they're basically employees.
cjet79
1hr ago
Vulcanus will always be somewhat limited with launch capacity. The gravity is higher on the planet, so more rocket parts are needed (4x if I remember right). Then two of the launch components require oil products, which you have to get through coal liquefaction. And you'll be amazed at how much coal you can go through for liquefaction.
Templexious
1hr ago
The Instagram algorithm and general Zucksphere of platforms don't really appeal. The ideal platform is one which enables and promotes complexity. Either by promoting thinkers and posters of complexity or simply bruteforcing complexity by making the feed truly ideologically-diverse.
An intractable problem, but I'd at the very least like to avoid platforms that cave to foreign interests
jeroboam
1hr ago
We can't necessarily trust the BLS statistics to give us an accurate picture of wages in certain professions (notably waiting tables, bartending, some trades, and doctors).
While your average salaried internal medicine doc at the local hospital might only pull down 200k, that's barely scratching the surface of what a doctor can make.
Being a physician opens the pathway to starting your own practice, which can easily lead to a 7 figure annual income. Presumably, this does not get reported as wages to the BLS.
Tophattingson
1hr ago
Muslims are definitely not fargroup in the UK yet this pattern still holds.
You are in Pittsburgh, right?
It’s different in NYC in that my social circle is much more lawyer heavy. With that said, a lot of them don’t look down on other professions as much complain about the lawyer profession.
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