domain:astralcodexten.com
FtttG
7m ago
This hasn't been my experience coming from a low-trust society, where everyone quickly learns to keep their hand on their wallet, and grow extra eyes all around their head.
And in this society, if a stranger approached you, introduced themselves as an entrepreneur, and offered to let you in on the ground floor of their operation for a small loan of million dollars, would you consider taking them up on the offer? Of course not - you'd assume they were a scam artist trying to rip you off. The only place someone would take them up on the offer is in an environment in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy, which in turn means the only place a scam artist would attempt it is in an environment in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy: in other words, fraud is impossible in a low-trust society.
Did this happen, by any chance, because there was very little fraud in Montreal in years prior, and people were much less cautious with their money because their priors about trustworthiness were outdated? Did they start being more cautious about fraud specifically after it turned out that the expected cost of preempting fraud is lower than the expected cost of falling victim to it?
Of course, and the book catalogues many examples of boom-bust cycles of the type you're describing. A high-trust society (or subculture, or community) is founded -> scam artists get wind of this and exploit it for all the alpha it's worth -> after a few successful frauds, people start getting a lot more cautious and risk-averse -> realising that it's no longer a high-trust society, the scam artists depart for greener pastures. None of this even seems counterintuitive to me, it just seems like basic economics.
philosoraptor
22m ago
It doesn't sound a thing like him.
TIRM
37m ago
"I drew myself as the cool smirking Chad and you as the chinless soyjack."
I have no reason to think these people are unusually shitty looking or generally dysgenic, as though their wicked thoughts degraded their bodies. They might have that dumb Richard Spencer haircut.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
37m ago
Fraud is only possible in a society in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy
This hasn't been my experience coming from a low-trust society, where everyone quickly learns to keep their hand on their wallet, and grow extra eyes all around their head.
Montreal was for years known as the scam capital of the world, specifically because the number of trusting investors eager to invest in promising new startups made it catnip for scam artists.
Did this happen, by any chance, because there was very little fraud in Montreal in years prior, and people were much less cautious with their money because their priors about trustworthiness were outdated? Did they start being more cautious about fraud specifically after it turned out that the expected cost of preempting fraud is lower than the expected cost of falling victim to it?
The book is not counter-intuitive. It's wrong. At best it's doing the old gimmick of phrasing something true in a deliberately counter-intuitive way, to make it's reader feel smart, but the way you're describing it, it sounds just plain wrong.
TIRM
44m ago
Orwoll structured the community as a Private Membership Association (PMA), which limits land sales exclusively to pre-approved members
Like the original now-outlawed racial covenants.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/3607
Nor shall anything in this subchapter prohibit a private club not in fact open to the public, which as an incident to its primary purpose or purposes provides lodgings which it owns or operates for other than a commercial purpose, from limiting the rental or occupancy of such lodgings to its members or from giving preference to its members.
This housing is incidental to the purpose of this private group or is it the primary point? I'm not a lawyer but I suspect a judge may see through their clever ruse. This sounds suspiciously like a racial covenant by a different name.
No, and the book quite lucidly explains why this counterintuitive assertion is actually true. Fraud is only possible in a society in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy. Montreal was for years known as the scam capital of the world, specifically because the number of trusting investors eager to invest in promising new startups made it catnip for scam artists. By contrast, in a society where nobody trusts anyone else, people are famously unwilling to lend me out their money, which results in low rates of fraud but also sluggish economic development.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
56m ago
Immersing yourself in the media is not switching your brain off though. I would like to think my post history proves that critical analysis of media is one of my primary passions, I am not trying to shit on it - by prioritise I didn't mean to imply they were exclusive.
What I took @wingdingspringking to mean by truly enjoy media, particularly with their comments about struggling with it as they age, is immerse yourself so fully that you forget you exist outside of the media. That is a transcendent experience when it happens, and maybe this is just wingding and me (or maybe just me?) but once you have done it, critical analysis just doesn't compare.
Usually when I find media like that I obsess over it, and then I analyse it endlessly.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
I disagree. I think the book presents a convincing case that, impossible utopias excepted, a world with no fraud would be worse than a world with some amount of fraud. Some amount of fraud is the price you pay for living in a high-trust society (and all the economic and social benefits that entails); a few iatrogenic deaths is the price you pay for a national healthcare system; a few murders is the price you pay for living in a free society etc.
I think this is backwards. No one pays with fraud or murder to create a higj-trust / free society. A high-trust / free society comes about when the amount of fraud and deaths is so low, they're not worth bothering with to preempt.
crushedoranges
1hr ago
The flooding happened quite late at night, when everyone was asleep: probably the first notice that anything was amiss was water intruding through the entrance and flooding the floor.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=NpG9cJTPf7I&ab_channel=KSAT12
This man survived by swimming out and standing on an electric meter box on a telephone pole - that's how high the water got. If I had to guess, the majority of these casualties happened because the girls panicked without an adult around: and in the dark and lacking the strength to swim, drowned. My intuition is that you're much better off climbing up to the roof with something that can float: remaining in the dwelling you are in for as long as possible rather than searching for higher ground on foot. (Unless it is immediately obvious, of course.) If your dwelling is knocked over by the floodwater you probably didn't have a high chance of finding high ground in time, in any case.
FtttG
1hr ago
Well, the reason for why "not zero" is due to inescapable facts about the human condition, so describing this situation as "optimal" seems entirely apt to me.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
I thought bartender or stand-up was being interpreted as 'poor'. Like how sometimes people say self-employed when they mean unemployed. Or how women are plus-size, curvy, big-boned rather than fat.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
1hr ago
For better or worse, Turkey is no longer "cheap" but equivalent to Paris. When the last wave of inflation was mid course (early 2022), you could rent a well-located flat in Istanbul for 200 usd. A favorite restaurant of mine went from 17 to 53 lira by May 2022. Later, leaving Ankara in 2024, coffees were approaching 200 lira, while the exchange rate had only gone from 30 to 38 lira : usd.
Various monuments and attractions went from free to charging 50 euro entrance fees (like the Hagia Sophia).
I did get a comprehensive medical scan for about 30 usd, even running on a treadmill with things taped to me and testing blood. I think they're less scams and more so trivial/brass tax if you're going to do a (serious) cosmetic surgery. Beyond that, I have no idea about medical tourism costs at different points; my partner did that in Iran. A friend was considering some sort of knee operation for about 2000 euro, though.
TIRM
1hr ago
Back in college some engineering students thought that would be better. Shave a year off of college and skip the mandatory liberal arts classes. I'm not sure how enriched I really was taking intro courses in anthropology and gender studies. I might have been better off taking more technical classes or graduating sooner. But that's admitting college is a training program for professional tech workers. Some people really don't like that thought.
SkoomaDentist
2hr ago
For me effective suspension of disbelief comes down to whether or not the there's internal consistency. It's not about how outlandish or even stupid-on-its-face the impossible element is, it's whether or not the story acts as though it believes in that impossible element. As soon as the story stops believing its own impossibility, then how am I supposed to believe in it?
I keep being amazed by how few authors grasp this. A story should be internally consistent and stick to how things work in the real world except where explicitly noted in the text, as clearly (and largely unambiguously) established in the genre conventions or where the differences are gradually hinted at and revealed.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2hr ago
Ask nicely or bribe a friend who has a decent phone or camera. Unless you want to pay for a professional photographer.
(Girls have it so easy. Women be taking photos of each other.)
TheDemonRazgriz
2hr ago
Maybe it’s a relatively small issue, but I have been immensely disappointed in the Trump II admin’s handling of the TikTok ban (which is to say, stonewalling it seemingly at all costs).
For one, the bill has remarkably plain text which they are openly violating. I’m open to hearing examples if people here think I’m wrong about this, but I think this is qualitatively different from most of the “Imperial Presidency” actions taken by Bush and Obama (and Trump I, and Biden). To my knowledge those situations generally relied on Congress abdicating its authority to the President or to the executive branch. For example all of the 21st century’s military escapades and undeclared wars, often described as being in defiance of Congressional authority, are actually operating with explicit approval in the form of the post-9/11 AUMF. Congress could repeal it at any time and reclaim its war-making authority, it simply chooses not to. Much the same for all the myriad powers now granted to federal agencies. In this case the executive is quite nakedly saying “this law has been passed, but we don’t like it, so we won’t enforce it.” This is not a power the branch is supposed to have.
Second is the way in which this came about. Trump had campaigned as a China hawk and, iirc, publicly supported the bill until an 11th-hour turnaround which was conveniently timed after an influx of campaign funds tied to Chinese business interests. This is, at best, not a good look.
And finally I just disagree with the substance. TikTok should be banned in the US, or at least sold to US owners. All the innate problems with algorithmic social media feeds, which are frankly bad enough on their own, are massively amplified when the company which owns and operates the algorithm is beholden to an explicitly hostile foreign power. There’s already pretty incontrovertible evidence that TikTok is tuned to mildly promote divisive content and to mildly suppress content critical of China (e.g. higher rates of Palestinian-related content but lower rates of Uyghur-related content versus similar social media apps, among others). The algorithm could trivially be tuned further in the event that Chinese-US relations deteriorate further, or just if the company’s state handlers want to. I don’t see a reason why we should need to accept that risk.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2hr ago
I would presume the Masgrave option would be able to activate LTSC without issue. Look it up, since I can't share a link here.
Looks like you linked to it! I've used them before, worked out fine.
sockpuppet2
2hr ago
If your logic is based solely on income, including race is very confusing.
sockpuppet2
2hr ago
At some point, the cost of increased marginal fraud avoidance exceeds the cost of the marginal fraud. Acknowledging this dynamic in any given domain is important. However, the rhetorical statement "The optimal amount of [bad thing] is not zero" is silent on the reason for why "not zero," failing the rhetorical goal of delivering concise, memorable, and clear insight.
Contrast "Motorsport can't be safe enough:" The double meaning of an endless pursuit of risk reduction and the impossibility of completely eliminating risk is a related concept, but the nuance behind the rhetoric is much more memorable and transferable between domains.
sockpuppet2
2hr ago
Vladeck elaborates on the difference between lack of enforcement and dispensation and why dispensation is a major problem.
ArmedTooHeavily
2hr ago
See my response to a different commentator here, I misunderstood.
Contractor, by Bradley Buckmaster.
Cybernetically modified child shock trooper was abandoned by his government after the war, took to a life of nihilism and mercenary work, and now well into his fifties he takes a job that has him uncover the hidden history of the war that made him.
It's alright. Buckmaster hs a fairly unique style that's fun to read, and is almost completely unapologetical about the violence and the decidedly un-modern morality or lack thereof that fills his books. His world-building is fairly light, but his descriptions of combat and the technologies involved are probably the absolute best I've ever read (for what little I, an eternal civilian, know). At the same time the novel sometimes feels a little self-indulgent; and when you've read his other books, Brigador and Brigador Killers: Pilgrim, you notice a lot of re-cycled patterns. He describes the Contractor series as a writing exercise, so I suppose it must be forgiven. Then again, he subverts the expectations he sets up often enough to surprise this humble reader. It feels more predictable than it is, sometimes.
I'm not quite done with it, having a few chapters to go yet. It's fairly short overall. It's currently free on Kindle.
Recommended if you like boots-on-the-ground military sci-fi.
Skulldrinker
3hr ago
The person in question is kinda dumb in addition to being a leftist.
faceh
3hr ago
I still would avoid obvious icky hobbies on a dating profile. Anime has a very strong association with porn, child porn, and childishness.
This take is so heavily out of date I'm wondering if it was frozen in about 2011 and just recently thawed out and revived.
Anime fans aren't relegated to 4chan these days.
One of the most popular series on Netflix in 2022 was an anime series tied into the Cyberpunk:2077 universe.
Netflix has been producing a TON of original anime series themselves. They literally revived a series from 2001 to help fill out their roster.
Which should tell you they're finding viewership for this stuff, and not just among loli enthusiasts.
Now, you might be correct as to how the older generations view anime, but there's probably a similar number of female weebs as male weebs about in the younger gens. Now, if you're looking for someone who is NOT a weeb, then yeah, maybe exclude it.
Can't we assume that if he divorced her then perhaps she was a bad wife and a mother who deserved even less than she got
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