domain:nfinf.substack.com
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
3m ago
Yeah, but you'd make a lot of money doing so which might not be so good for Elon's tax bill. At least with journalism the write-off is nigh-guaranteed.
jeroboam
6m ago
Yeah that’s kinda what I was getting at. Elon has joked about buying MSNBC but he should save his $$$ and buy some game publishers instead. For a couple billion you could flip the political polarity of the games market which reaches hundreds of millions of people.
jeroboam
10m ago
Dude I don’t know. I assume none of these games have explicitly anti-woke themes. Correct me if I’m wrong.
KulakRevolt
10m ago
Yes, which means I gave "NOT a civil war" MORE than 50%, which given there were mutliple assassniation attempts on the lead candidate one of which came an inch from killing him, that sounds right or even conservative .
In reply to the "then" please read the introduction to my immediate previous piece on the topic and civil war preparedness.
The predictions for which I give probabilities are the predictions.... The long elaborate descriptions of scenarios to be prepared for NECESSARILY CANNOT BE, because everytime you describe something additional happening the overall likelihood of all of it happening lowers.
I described about 20 different possible dynamics and scenarios in that piece as preparedness exercise. NECESSARILY the value and detail of a scenario for planning and preparedness is ANTI-CORRELATED with its overall total likelihood since each additional piece of information or dynamic, which is valuable for preparedness, is another thing that may or may not happen.
In short I give probability predictions in keeping with the norms of Less-Wrong rationalism because that is valuable for declaring your priors, then I give the elaborate scenario planning, because that is how militaries and serious organizations wargame.
Specifically the mass rioting if Trump won, I expect that would have 100% happened if he had won the electoral college but lost the popular vote (which strikes me as a vastly more likely scenario than what happened given his track record) then there would have been a cause to argue Trump's win was a result of systemic white supremacy and the American system favouring white rural voters over urban voters... which could have been ginned up by media like the summer of Floyd... Trump's total electoral victory was very unlikely given available information (most odds had him 40-45% to lose and presumably another 20-30 to only win closely)
His incredibly decisive victory (contrary to his previous 2 elections) was an surprising factor... though there's still a fair amount that can go wrong between here and inauguration, or in his first year... not least 2 very unstable wars right now.
SerialStateLineXer
11m ago
Note that all of those but Slay the Spire come out of Japan.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
15m ago
He was planning to shift away from ad revenue and towards a subscription scheme before he closed the purchase.
Templexious
23m ago
Do you consider Slay the Spire to be woke? Elden Ring? Bloodborne? Mario? Pokemon? The Persona series?
Where is the line drawn?
anti_dan
24m ago
That is simply an example. But before I would consider wokeness to be in decline I'd like to see good hard data on real world results. Decline in trans prescriptions would be an interesting one; several prestigious colleges admitting 0-1 blacks in their freshman (or 1L law school) classes; several other tech companies following the Musk Model and firing 80% of the employees (the retained being overwhelmingly male and white+asian). Maybe you can think of some more, but those are ones off the top of the head.
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
33m ago
There was some murmuring of Elon, who is the #1 global Diablo 4 player, starting some publisher for gaming.
Gaming studios seem to need ESG dollars which come with strings attached like requiring narrative review by DEI SweetBabyInc-like consultants.
Ubisoft and others are on a run with bomb-after-bomb releases underperforming massively. Real financial losses.
It may just be a matter of time has the market adjusts post-election.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
33m ago
The Substance was fantastic and definitely had a lot to say, and that came out just this year.
KulakRevolt
37m ago
Check out "Democracy the God That Failed" by Hoppe, "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War" by Buchanan, and "Freedom Betrayed" by former President Herbert Hoover. Those are the good high level back to the source ones...
Also Jewish History, Jewish Religion by Israel Shahak (it's short... Pete Quinones did a podcast Audio version also)
and
200 Years together by Alexander Solzenhitzen
Those are the hot ones right now related to current events.
KulakRevolt
42m ago
1 Million people dead, in a conflict involving the US, overlapping with a 3 month window is "literally every possibility"
I mean I agree the US is a violent unstable regime, but I don't think it's quite at the point of INEVITABILITY that it will always be involved in a mass die off.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
56m ago
What exactly do you charge them with? To be clear, while Gaetz threw the word "extortion" around, there is no extortion in this case. Extortion is when someone threatens to inflict harm unless they are paid.
I believe what OP is alleging/implying is that Greenberg may have made a false allegation against Gaetz in order to save his own skin (offer to point the finger at a juicy target of a Congressman to lessen his own sentence). The implicatiom is that tbe FBI knows that this is a weak or bogus allegation, but proceed with the investigation anyway, or at least conclude as a result of the investigation that it ks bogus.
McGee, who is contected to both the Federal Prosecutor's Office and the CIA, attempts to use this knowledge to blackmail the senior Gaetz (through Alford) to get money to rescue Levinson in exchange for using his connections to get the case dropped against the junior Gaetz.
I think most people would agree that "we will drop a bogus/weak case against you in exchange for money" amounts to extortion. Rephrased, it can be "give me money and I'll won't charge you". Even with a legitimate crime being prosecuted it can still amount to extortion, as it's clearly an attempt to violate the defendant's due process rights.
Especially in the case of a high profile figure like a Congressman, there doesn't even have to be a a charge or conviction, the mere reporting that a Congressman js being investigated can be extremely damaging, which is what happened here.
jeroboam
57m ago
It's better than ever and people who say otherwise are showing sure signs of um.. EDS, or is it MDS?
Let's remind ourselves that there is no amount of real world success that can dissuade the true believers. There are still people in 2024 who think that Venezuela is either 1) thriving or 2) only failing because of US sanctions.
The Communists have still not admitted defeat, and think that the communism would work just great if it were only tried, man. On a similar note, the anti-Muskites still think that everything Musk has achieved is just luck and, furthermore, that they personally could have done better. It's all the worst sort of cope.
Twitter never needed those grifters and it's better without them. Almost all companies which employ laptop workers are in a similar state.
jeroboam
1hr ago
As an old, I don't really play video games. But it's weird to me that the video game industry is so woke considering that the user base is so anti-woke. Why aren't there anti-woke game publishers?
Proposed answer: Political selection of devs.
Video games companies need developers who are competent, willing to work for low wages, and willing to tolerate long working hours. This is a tough sell. Competent devs in the US can easily earn 200-500k with cushy working conditions. Why get paid less than half as much and be subjected to semiannual death marches?
As a result of this rotten bargain, the men who choose this field will tend to be young, not have families, and be fixated on video games. Frankly, this is going to select for autists. To the extent that autism and MtF trans are correlated, I would expect that video game developers are trans at a rate at least far above the norm. This might explain a lot of the soy-type politics espoused by major game studios.
There's clearly a market opportunity for non-woke game publishers. But could they get devs? Conservative men tend to work in the field that pays them the best, allowing them to support their family. They aren't out there making children's toys.
Does this explanation make sense? Or is this just a $20 bill sitting on the sidewalk?
Esseintes
Que sçay-je?
1hr ago
Best I can do is some /lit/ charts. Sadly the wiki they were originally on got nuked a few months back but you can dig around in the mega for stuff. Schizo but a starting point, at least.
roche
1hr ago
It's to point out you don't get good at anything working on a single project for 10 years.
I recall stories of high school boys in the 80's cranking out Commodore 64 programs and mailing them into magazines or publishers who'd compensate them based on sales. This is a more effective gauge of raw talent than anything we have now, and a number of famous devs got their start this way. It's a combination of extremely low barrier to entry (One C64), quick turn-around (One month to make a game), and most importantly, minor consequences for failure. And of course modern gaming is the exact opposite of all that. We're not selecting for talent anymore, because whoever gets hired is just some shmuck for years given little chance to test their potential. Go look at what Miyamoto or whatever was doing a couple years in. Those guys were steering the ship.
Felagund
1hr ago
Rov_Scam
1hr ago
I'm not sure what exactly you're getting at here. You make a few points, however, that I need to address:
David McGee and Bob Kent are uncharged. As far as I know, they weren't even seriously investigated beyond being questioned.
What exactly do you charge them with? To be clear, while Gaetz threw the word "extortion" around, there is no extortion in this case. Extortion is when someone threatens to inflict harm unless they are paid. When the threat is to inform the authorities of criminal activity or otherwise make sensitive information public we call it blackmail, but it's still extortion, and the underlying principle is the same. There is nothing in the record suggesting that either Alford, Kent, or McGee ever threatened to do anything to either Gaetz if Don didn't come up with the money.
Alford was convicted of wire fraud. The essence of the charge is that he made false statements in order to get Don Gaetz's money. To wit, he claimed that he had contacts in the Biden administration who could secure a pardon for Matt when, in fact, he had no such contacts. Kent never made any such claims; he claimed to know someone who did, namely Alford, but unless you can prove that he had specific knowledge that Alford was lying there's no case against him for fraud. McGee's participation was minimal; when Don Gaetz brought up the pardon scheme he said that he didn't know anything about it. Alford, meanwhile, repeatedly told elaborate stories about how people owed him favors and he could get anything he wanted if they were able to bring Levinson back.
Here's the thing, though: The Feds only had jurisdiction over Alford because he made fraudulent statements via text message. If he had simply texted Don Gaetz that he wanted to meet and made the statements in person, there wouldn't be anything here other than a state level fraud charge. The Gaetz case was ultimately dropped due to evidentiary issues involving the credibility of witnesses, but there is still strong evidence of two things. First, Gaetz had surrounded himself with people who had no apparent moral compass, and, second, he was buying prostitutes off of a known sex trafficker. Whatever else has been said about him may or may not be true, but the probability of it being true is higher than it is for almost anyone else who would be considered for his position. The allegations are at least plausible enough that, in the eyes of the public, it disqualifies him from being the nation's top law enforcement officer.
Getting back to your contention that this was some kind of setup, I don't know how deep you think this goes or what it was supposed to accomplish. Gaetz's actions date to several years prior to the investigation, including those supported by documentary evidence. Are you suggesting that they were setting him up in 2017? Furthermore, if you have that evidence (or fake that evidence), then what was their goal? If the goal is to destroy Matt Gaetz's public career, just charge him and move on. What's the purpose of the hare-brained fraud scheme? Or is it your contention that the Federal Government was in such dire need of somewhere between 5 and 25 million dollars that they resorted to phonying up an investigation into a congressman so they could use a twice-convicted con man and two confederates to bilk the money out of him? Neither scenario makes sense.
jeroboam
1hr ago
Fun fact. The first Youtube video is 19 seconds long and is basically a dick joke.
It has been watched 341 million times and will celebrate its 20th anniversary in 2025.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
And I did not predict "as well as" I predicted a major conflict INVOLVING the US would continue, start, or conclude in that period
Well, you gave an actual civil war almost 50% likelihood:
Civil War or “Troubles” is still slightly below a 50% likelihood
Then:
After [the election] either Trump wins, in which case they are incentivized to reverse entirely and wield all those new migrants and existing problem ethnicities to riot and act as shock Troops against Trump supporters. That way House Democrats and Regime Republicans can try to prevent a Trump confirmation, Something they have openly discussed and plan to do.
And in the event of a Trump or Vance election mass rioting will begin, in American cities, and probably widespread rape and murder by the millions of violent foreign migrants imported and strategically shipped across the country to strategic regions and municipalities.
(There’s probably no way to prevent that even if the Regime cared to, the people they imported are from countries where rioting, and killing people in riots is simply not the hard distinction Americans perceive it to be, you’d have a hard time explaining to many Haitian and central American illegals why looting and burning shops would be fine but killing the shop owners and raping their wives and daughters wouldn’t be)
roche
1hr ago
I'm gonna pull an idea out of my ass, and you tell me if you agree: People at the extremes of intelligence are more honest.
Dumb people are of course candid, but it's actually hard to think of a brilliant person who didn't generally speak their mind, or who paid much heed to the rules of social convention. And you see lots of bright people with pronounced moral standards they're unwilling to compromise on. Really, what drives me insane about the 'net nowadays is (among many things) people are no longer very honest. Because this used to be a land of extremes, whereas now all the normies! from real life have made it their nest and imported the superficiality of IRL socializing. So you can no longer trust that someone means what they say.
Thanks! I kept making that mistake for some reason and I fixed it.
I don't know of any connection between Greenberg and McGee or Kent. I don't know how McGee or Kent became aware of the DOJ investigation, but they were the people implicated in the blackmail scheme to get Don Gaetz to give them $25,000,000 to allegedly rescue the declared dead Bob Levinson. Stephen Alford was the person who allegedly initially contacted Don Gaetz to make the blackmail offer and directed him to David McGee. There is no reason to think McGee would need to be working on a secret investigation to become aware of it from his previous job, he could have simply been told by someone else.
The implication I'm making is that Greenberg's behavior looks like a honeypot operation: he was recruiting underage women, giving them fraudulent real FL ids he has access to because of his "public service," he's paying them with money no one is quite sure where it all came from, and he's paying these girls to have sex with rich and politically connected people in central Florida which he appeared to instigate friendships with. Joel Greenberg can't help himself but be a ridiculous criminal who is sloppy and gets caught.
The FBI could leak details to the NYT about an investigation they at the very least became aware of when Don Gaetz showed up at a local FBI office and told them he was being blackmailed even if we're going to pretend the FBI and DOJ don't work hand-in-glove. I'm not implying the FBI is the one who made the leak. There are all sorts of narratives one could string together with known facts and they would be supported. What's interesting is no one seems particularly interested in all these loose threads; there is a startling lack of interest in tying any of them up and instead they want to use it to attack and smear Matt Gaetz. The "loose threads" are Stephen Alford and Joel Greenberg who are both going to prison on plea deals.
I'm not trying to make any particular argument, really. I just find the whole story to be interesting and thought others may as well.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
I've said it before, Gaetz has exonerated himself from being a criminal, he hasn't exonerated himself from being a sleazebag. The person in this story whose nocence of an actual crime is easiest to prove is in jail, and these kinds of investigations take forever.
The biggest scandal here appears to be sugar daddy websites allowing women under 18 to make profiles.
Why aren't there antiwoke Game devs?
Because riot games was forced to pay 100 million for gender discrimination when it hired people on the basis of whether or not they even played riots games.
Anti Discrimination law MANDATES that you continually hire hostile sexual and ethnic minorities who largely resent the cre audience, and then increasingly pander to those employees, lest they file suit for workplace discrimination.
This is why indy games don't have this problem and are still creative, sexual, violent, disturbing, male-coded, etc.
As your games company employs more people the more DEI people you're forced to hire and shove into every function you can fit them... This is why hollywood and videogame writers rooms are so woke... There's maybe 0.1% gender-queer black people who can code or 3d model at the level of the pros in the coding employment base... but you can shove anyone in a writer role, have them throw out horrible ideas, and then have some poor intern turn that into dialogue.
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