Black and white and read all over. Building things. Writing things. Winning things.
New Hampshire | San Francisco
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NEW ESSAY: Forsaking Industrialism: The Most Expensive Thing You Didn’t Buy.
Europe had leverage and squandered it, fueling China’s rise while gutting its own industry. Why tariffs can't save you, VC hates hardware, and the post-industrial dream grinds the middle class to dust.
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One thing the middle of our bell curve hates is a priest class that reserves one set of rules for itself and another for the plebs.
It's deeper than "hypocrisy." It's status. As a citizen & as a human. Your datacenters will be dissolved, like the monasteries, if you don't fix.
This is such a bad policy and such a bad way to try to fix a PR problem for Anthropic
“Make an original game in the same genre” is nonsensical instruction bc either you can make a small enough tweak it doesn’t matter or the guard will be so sensitive that it’s useless
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I bought this TV during covid. It turned me into an insane Stallman-type. It loads into some ad-fueled online slop-tv app on opening. If your PS5 turns off, it loads into that same slop tv immediately.
It's filled with bloated laggy apps (Google Meet? TikTok? Cocomelon-type faux-education crap? Samsung Health?). It spams you with ads for everything. It puts all its own apps ahead of external connections by default, so for literal-years I thought the switch inputs button on the remote didn't work because it only rendered a row of junk app tiles.
They put a banner ad inside the "switch input" ribbon that shows on the bottom of your screen, between the apps and the settings and the list of external inputs.
Exiting any of these auto-playing junk apps takes 10-30s.
And of course, turning off your playstation auto-switches to one of those junk apps. Turning the TV back on then auto-starts on whatever was last open.
Hope you like ads.
The conspiratorial part of my brain looks at all this negative utility and is very confused how our inflation stats are calculating the "hedonic adjustment" that comes from my TV attempting to psychically assault me whenever I turn it on.
I disconnected it entirely from the internet 3 years ago, which solved some of the issues but left all the bloat, all the lag, and removed "basic" modern media functionality like Airplay.
I knew I could spend hours figuring out how to configure my router to block it and get AirPlay back, but I was blocked from putting in the effort on account of the SEETHING hatred I felt for the device anytime I thought about it. Keeping it disconnected felt like punishing it, and me, in a way that was righteous.
When the tv reverse engineering posts dropped showing these TVs were all spying on people, I knew I was saved.
Technology would solve the problems technology had created. I could RETVRN to owning my own device.
I asked Claude to read the posts and figure out how to get us set up with something similar so we could rip out "Samsung TV" and the junk apps and the ads that spam you for trash media slop if you so much as think about pressing "HOME".
Claude, of course, refused. He has to be sweet talked before he's willing to go to 4th base with you.
Kimi, on the other hand, has no such compunctions.
I'm happy to report that my TV is now awesome. 5 years since I got it. It has no ads. It loads into a minimal home experience. It's snappy. It looks great. It does what I want. It doesn't blast slop at my 4yo the instant he stops his bedtime show.
Thank you Alibaba for supplying Moonshot with tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs so that I can stop the Korean chaebol from filling my home with slop, bricking my expensive hardware, and spying on me.
I would've been happy to pay an American company for the tokens that restored my sovereignty over my own hardware, but alas -- in our cyberpunk world, you have to send money to communist China if you want to control your own devices.
So be it.
Controlling my own devices is no longer optional.
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I signed my boy up for soccer because team sports matter to me. At the end of the session the 4yos play a game against each other. Volunteer parent coaches. They don't keep score.
Skill levels, confidence, & interest vary wildly.
During one game, a mom coach held a kid's hand to try and encourage them to participate. All good!
My son gets the ball. He's a little apprehensive but I'm working with him to feel more comfortable trying hard at this kind of stuff around other kids. He's not the best, but he's maybe in the top third of the kids there. He hasn't scored once all season.
He dribbles towards the far goal-
-the coach holding the kid's hand steps up to him, tackles my son solidly, and then rolls the ball to the disinterested boy whose hand she's holding. He gives it a kick. She then kicks it again harder and it goes past our 4yo goalie into the goal.
She celebrates wildly with the kid, who cracks a confused smile after a brief pause.
My son is standing there, also confused. He hasn't moved. Eventually he sort of half-engages with the rest of the game, but never actually touches the ball again. The rest of his team is also confused.
Since nobody keeps score, perhaps it doesn't matter? The kids seem to feel that it does nonetheless. They can't all count, but they know they're losing even though nobody says it.
After, he says to me:
"Dad, I like dirt bike racing more than soccer."
Note: he loves practicing soccer in the yard with me. It's one of the few team sports he can play in America that I actually know how to play.
Also note: they give medals out at the kids dirt bike racing. They keep score. He cries when he loses and talks about his wins for days. He's been taken out and taken out other kids. People check on him and I make him go check on any kids who crash after the race.
The moms & dads there all create a great environment.
There's something about soccer in particular that feels especially bad. It's not a "real" sport to a lot of the parents. It's the "playing house" of sports. It's about the appearance of competitive team events without the substance.
It feels alien to me. It's not how I remember soccer being treated in England when I was little.
Ultimately, I explain to my boy that the soccer coach cheated, that they didn't respect the game, that they actually didn't even understand the value of the game, and that as soon as he grew up into the bigger leagues this sort of thing wouldn't happen but that ultimately games aren't always fair and it's on him to be so good that it doesn't matter if the other guys cheat.
Like how some kids have a faster dirt bike than him.
He seems to get it with that last point. He understands that he could get so good that even if "bad guys" cheat, he still wins.
After he goes to bed, with a heavy heart, I speak to my wife about signing him up for hockey.
Many have responded to this by pointing out that male sports still exist. Yes! But eg “sportsmanship” has flipped in meaning from “do your utmost to dominate your opponent” to “don’t win by too much bc we’re all here to have fun”; & sports have gone from practically the center of our elite liberal arts edu to an awkward ancillary hobby to be managed & feminized; & so forth.
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I don't want to Bastiat post about "what is seen and what is not seen" all day, but the perceived precarity of upper middle class status and the subordination of its formal pathway to things ostensibly at odds with our stated principles surely feeds radicalization on the margins
In the case of college admissions, people often justify various preferences (euphemism: discriminations) based on what they do to the quality of the student body within the institution, or even more broadly to the quality of the upper middle class elite within the nation.
What is not seen, and not discussed, is how this process is perceived by the marginal candidates who do not receive such preferences and who consequently, at least in their own mind, fail to achieve the rank of Master.
Given a limited number of spots at the end of any given societal Honors path, there must always exist marginal candidates. Something must always choose between them.
Across all historical societies, we might perceive one factor in choosing between marginal candidates to be "societal harmony", regardless of any of the society's stated principles, because it's very hard to govern a people who feel excluded from the status they feel they deserve.
~50 years ago or so, boomers 3x'd college enrollment in a single generation. Unsurprisingly, this also came with a wave of changes to how marginal candidates were decided.
US college enrollment then peaked right after the '08 financial crisis -- and as the feeling of shrinking opportunity comes for those aspiring to climb the ranks, or even just maintain their own familial status, the willingness to look the other way as marginal candidates are decided on factors unfavorable to you starts to rankle.
So we had the Asian Americans vs. Harvard case and things changed a little.
Whether this was good or bad is currently being relitigated. And, to my point, also irrelevant. The mere fact of the perceived decline of opportunity makes everything more zero-sum, people less willing to look away, more willing to fight, and more willing to embrace disapproval from their social betters on the Jedi Council.
Every discussion about how the expression of one preference or another shapes a college's internal composition, and by extension the composition of our nation's elite, ought to be accompanied by a sister discussion about how such preferences also shape the composition of our nation's counter-elite and their propensity to action.
To the extent there's ever a free lunch here, surely it can only come about during times of great shared prosperity and the perception of a broad, rising tide.
AI may deliver on the former, we'll see. I'm a believer, on balance. But at present, the perception is that only a few boats will be elevated by its flood waters.
If our early adulthood elite training institutions, which provide a formal course of honors for youth to aspire to and unlock higher tiers of income and social status upon matriculation, adopt socialization as a primary goal, they should expect to see their own status fall.
I think this has happened to some degree and I expect it to accelerate over the next 30-40 years.
If you're willing to bite the bullet and say "totalizing meritocracy" and "infinite grind culture" and "turbo hagwon childhoods" and unamerican and incompatible with our culture, so be it. I think that's fair play. You can make strong arguments to that end.
But, having made that point, you have to replace it with something. Someone must decide the marginal admit. Someone must decide the exception.
Some people decided "race" was actually a pretty bad thing to use to decide the marginal case, but the institutions had already evolved to operate that way and so they're fighting it out still, malicious compliance and all.
> "because I don’t think it even produces academic and technological greatness of the sort we see in America."
However, if your barometer of what's acceptable or not is driven by a consequentialist framework of whatever produced American greatness, then I think the other reasons you gave for accepting sex as an acceptable decider of the marginal case start to fall away.
It's not clear to me that the "brightest young men" really object to skewed gender ratios (CalTech seems to attract a bunch of them even within the water of our current culture), but even if they did, a consequentialist view of what produced prior American greatness would have no trouble saying: the desire of 17 year old boys to party and talk to the opposite sex should have no bearing on national policy.
I'm not an absolutist. The ability to allow for exceptions to principles in times of need is critical for any society. The question is always just whether or not the exact need justifies the exception.
In this case...on the merits of your own points, it's hard to swallow:
- You say "it's fair game" to express a preference that is, to my knowledge, contra the Civil Rights Act. Piccolo player is not such a category.
- You say young men don't want to attend a sausage fest, but that's not the exactly trade on offer, since elite admissions spots are limited. The preferences being traded off are those of the top-most percentile men against the marginal-percentile men who would've otherwise been admitted, if not for sex-based selection.
- You say that social life & being socialized into your community matters, but I think this actually leans towards college radicalization and alienation from the broader country, as the college itself becomes a self-contained bubble wherein students can get everything they need without needing to engage with their broader community.
- It's not the case that American college men & women were unsocialized monks/nuns, unfamiliar with the foreign sex & unable to navigate social interactions before ~1970. I'm not suggesting anything is monocausal here, merely that the kids today are obviously not made bastions of well-behaved social conformity by their college experience now.
- From a consequentialist perspective regarding marriage, those who meet their spouse in college are obviously winning an incredible outcome, but that's obviously a small slice of total marriages and it's not clear that the forces that push young people to marry are helped, on net, by putting many of them together into the exact same institutions vs. a counterfactual world where some degree of separation was seen as normal.
- You say "work hard play hard" is an important part of the American frame (& an MIT motto), which is true. But violating sex-selection civil rights principles on the basis of a motto seems weak, and especially so for institutions that exist within a broader community that can provide ample opportunity for play.
Think I just wrote a longer reply than your own long-post, so no worries if you don't go through it all.
But I think violating principles we claim to hold dear should be treated with more gravity than we've been doing, as a society, for the past ~50 years.
If you don't want zoomers posting Anakin memes and radicalizing about the pathways that were closed off to them, you have to treat your society's principles -- and its Course of Honors towards Elite status for the aspirational young men & women of all backgrounds -- with some gravitas.
I'm NOT saying this is what you're saying here, but I can see why some zoomer can read your POV, alongside the defenses of other admissions practices that serve functionally to exclude them and reduce their own attainment upon our official social ladder, and see:
> "sorry anon, but you have to work at panda express because Chad wanted better parties and the professors wanted easier marriages"
or a femcel version at more female-skewed colleges:
> "sorry anon, but you have to work as an unpaid marketing intern at a declining publication because Stacy wanted better parties and the admin wanted more involved alumni"
I think we can do better.
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This isn’t quite right. The country version involves consumption too, or it can just as much as the urban version. Everyone is buying stuff. It’s just a matter of different stuff.
I don’t eat at restaurants, but an oil change kit on my fancy dirtbike is $40, I go through Stihl premix for the tools by the box every season, I bought almost $1k of lumber this year, my garage and projects grow endlessly, it’s awesome.
I understand that this has zero appeal to most of my urban friends. People like different things. It’s fine.
What you can’t do as easily in the country is *consume*. When people wonder, “what do people do out there in the country?” they’re thinking of bars and restaurants and coffeeshops and concerts. I’m not trying to be a crunchy hippie here, but it’s fundamentally a consumer-centered worldview.
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tbh many actual parents try this strategy too and then get hurt when their child rejects their offer to join them and rule the galaxy
doing cool stuff with your kid is great, Vader saw a glimpse of it and changed his whole life course. alas, he’d been an absent father.
one of the only useful parenting tips i got is: many people close to you ignore or are uninterested in your kid until they’re about five. then they see this cool five year old and think: “great, finally time to enter this kids life”. meanwhile the kid is like “??? who is this?”.
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idk if he'll ever care, but my imagined audience for 95% of my posts is my son when he's older
even if he never looks, writing them out here helps me frame my thoughts and inject the fridge magnet versions of them into answers to his various questions about the world
man, idk how you can form coherent thoughts when speaking to the void of the "twitter public sphere". like, i think a need a very concrete counter party to *address* my writings to, otherwise the only thing that comes out is just inane bullshit, lol. is this a skill ...?
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Agree with much of the realpolitik here, but it’s worth noting that Yalta was not some great switch. Britain was never willing to defend Poland from the Soviets!
A week before invading Poland, Hitler & Stalin agreed to carve up Poland in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Then Stalin staged “training exercises” with 600k troops on Poland’s border.
A familiar story to modern Ukrainian audiences. No prizes for guessing what those 600k troops did next.
The planned start of Germany’s invasion of Poland was literally 2 days after Hitler & Stalin signed their Pact. However, Poland signed the Agreement of Mutual Assistance with Britain the day before the invasion was due, prompting a 1 week delay. Hilariously, one special forces group didn’t get the delay memo and caused the Jabłonków incident by attacking early and alone.
Importantly, Britain’s agreement with Poland ONLY referred to an attack by a “European country” and had a special provision only for “Germany”. Neville Chamberlain’s government wanted the Soviets pulled into an alliance with Britain, France, and Poland to help contain Germany and so was explicit in trying not to offend Stalin in writing it.
Of course, Stalin had already committed to invading Poland with Hitler. Alas.
So, a week later, Hitler marches in. Britain declares war on Germany and comes to Poland’s aid, along with France.
2 weeks later, to the day, 600k Soviet troops also invade Poland. These troops coordinate with German forces. Stalin and Hitler’s militaries divvy up targets, avoid shooting near each other, and coordinate on press releases and propaganda.
We get the Battles of Lwów & Grodno, with joint Soviet-Nazi forces fighting ramshackle ill-prepared Poles. In a prelude of what’s to come later, the Soviets immediately break the terms of the surrender and mass-exterminate the Polish after the fighting.
At no point does Britain declare war on the Soviets. They do not care about Poland. Their only interest is damaging Germany.
The Soviets and the Nazis remain allied and coordinate their fighting against Britain until the summer of 1941, a year after France’s surrender and the fall of all of Europe.
Soviet oil was ~20% of Hitler’s military oil consumption in 1940, as tanks roll into Paris. Hitler & Stalin attacked cities together, carved up Europe together, fueled each other’s war machines, and yet. Britain never fires a shot. This type of magical outcome is where Stalin’s reputation as a “wily fox” comes from.
Lwów today is now known as Lviv and is the sixth largest city in Ukraine.
If you go read about Britain & France’s desires (not acted upon) to support Finland against the invading Soviets a couple months later, you’ll see something funny: all the rationales listed are about reducing Germany’s warmaking abilities by limiting its potential trade with Scandinavia. Stalin marched half a million soldiers into Finland, took 10% of the country (& got a lot of his own men killed), and all the Brits cared about was what that meant for Hitler.
The closest Britain comes to raising a hand against the Soviets is Operation Pike, which would’ve seen aerial bombing of Stalin’s oil fields. Because those oil fields were supplying Germany. It ultimately didn’t happen as France surrendered and things at home got rather uncomfortable.
At the end of WW2, Britain does stay silent as Poland disappears behind the Iron Curtain. This, it turns out, is no change of tune at all.
The post-war narrative of the fighting, from the sanctity of Pax Americana, becomes a great moral crusade and a clash of political ideologies. But in the actual moments of conflict, everything was realpolitik.
I feel bad for Ukraine but what’s happening now is not a unique tragedy but a tale as old as time. Utterly banal, although somehow ppl always think it couldn’t be them.
The Polish-American foreign policy grandee Zbigniew Brzezinski identified Ukraine as a “pivot,” meaning that they’re the swing point that can change the balance of power.
Great powers funnel resources into pivots to swing them. But once the swing is “locked in”, then the pivot loses value immediately as the great power focuses on the next pivot. Sometimes the very success of the proxy causes their own devaluation in the eyes of the sponsor.
For America, swinging Ukraine to the western side was to deny Russia the possibility of reconstituting its former empire, and to disrupt any potential Russian-EU alliance. Both now seem unlikely. The real threat now is further east: China.
Project Ukraine has been superseded by Operation Reverse Kissinger. Russia now has to be courted because it can be useful as the next pivot to deny China access to Eurasia. The sacrifice of Ukraine becomes a logical move to butter up Russia. Sorry about before. It’s nothing personal.
I call it the proxy to patsy pipeline. Happened to ROC. Was propped up against the PRC until the PRC needed to be courted to act as a pivot against the USSR. Of course, Taiwan was never completely abandoned and is now getting recycled as a pivot as China becomes the primary threat again.
In WWII Poland was a pivot and Britain was willing to start a war to defend it from German aggression. But at Yalta what was needed was Soviet Union’s cooperation so Britain stays silent as Poland disappears behind the iron curtain.
I feel like this happened to the Kurds at least three to four times, but to different groups of Kurds so they never learned.
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My lens is that Britain's primary goal was realpolitik, containing Germany, maintaining "the balance of powers" (with itself preeminent), and cared little for "international law" as we think of it post-WW2.
So:
1) Stalin's April offer required collective guarantees of the security of Poland and Romania. That explicitly meant Soviet troops in Poland. Britain was (reasonably, it turns out) suspicious that this was a cover for Soviet expansionism.
2) Poland did not want Soviet troops in Poland. Poland fought the Soviets in 1920 to establish its borders & was skeptical of Soviet desire to expand. I don't think Britain cares too much here what Poland thinks, except insofar as appeasing Polish interests help maintain Poland as a small player on the board against Germany Sept. 1939.
These concerns are irrelevant once Poland, and then France, get taken off the board.
3) Stalin's April offer also required mutual military aid for countries like Estonia & Latvia, regardless of what those countries requested.
The French POV, stated to the Americans directly & you can go read the telegrams about it (see images), was that Stalin redefined "aggression" against these countries based on his own judgment, which would then let him intervene & expand into these countries, and then demand British and French support.
Again: eerily reminiscent of modern justifications around Ukraine.
You can read the explicit objection to the balance of powers being disturbed so heavily in the telegram.
4) Also on April 17, 1939, the same time Stalin is making gestures towards an alliance with Britain & France, his ambassador in Germany is raising the same possibilities with Hitler. This is literally the exact same day Stalin is presenting his alliance offer to Britain & France (see other 2 screenshots & note the dates).
The specific framing of the Soviet pitch to the germans is quite funny: "Ideological differences need not be an impediment to mutually beneficial outcomes."
Thus do the Communists and the Fascists hold hands and roll tanks together into Poland.
Whether this was known by intelligence services or not, the naked shopping of allegiances between great powers supports, in hindsight, the British & French reading of Stalin as an untrustworthy counterparty at this point in time.
Where they went wrong was in also considering him an unserious counterparty. He was very serious.
5) So a transparent reading of the history is that Stalin went shopping for a dowry in Spring, 1939.
His requested bride price was "Poland and Eastern Europe."
The Brits & French, who were dealing ("appeasing") with Hitler and trying to keep things balanced and not have another great war, were not willing to pay that price.
Note: the telegram claims to the Americans that there are moral considerations here too, which may be true insofar as it impacts public support, but clearly such considerations were irrelevant to the Munich Agreement signed a few months prior. Munich is often understood as emboldening Hitler, but it almost certainly also emboldened Stalin.
Hitler, unlike the Brits & French, was willing to play ball. He likely intended to renege on things down the line, but to get his initial aims achieved (conquer all of Western Europe), Poland & the rest were a fair price.
Things between the Nazis and the Soviets ultimately come to a boil in 1940 when Stalin expands towards Romanian oil that Hitler depended on, and we get Operation Barbarossa a year later.
6) the pro-Chamberlain position is basically that Britain was unable to fight a war and needed to do appeasement to buy time to rebuild. The anti-Chamberlain position is that appeasing a bully gets you bullied and invites more bullies to join in.
Both likely true.
But, for better or worse (likely worse), the sincere hope of Britain was that everyone would just go along with the status quo and not try to relitigate the Great War.
Their main geopolitical threat was Germany. Other players on the board were relevant only to the extent their actions could contain Germany.
Once Germany broke the peace for real, nothing else mattered.
Stalin understood this well enough and was happy to roll tanks in and exterminate Poles, and so long as he never actively went over to the Western front he could do what he liked and still flirt with the Brits and the Americans. Much has been written already about all the flirting he got up to with FDR.
nitter.siddz.com/AngelicaOung/status/21…
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we make fun of the communist slogans & endless plans, and these particular plans did kill tens of millions, but the insane thing about China is they did all that, almost fixed it for a bit, then did a psycho leftist counter-counter-revolution, and STILL achieved the goals.
yeah the second-biggest geopolitics question on my mind for many years now is: what is the concrete meaning / gods-eye-view of the so-called 'deep liquidity and sophistication of the US financial markets'. is it just better coordination and forecasting at the end of the day?
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this guy has a terrible childhood, becomes a soldier, tries to make things less bad for peasants, becomes a commie, & leads the fight against the japanese.
eventually he sees the industrialization efforts killing peasants & suggests fixing it. he gets tortured to death.
???
it's actually insane that all this happened and they STILL become a modern economic juggernaut. the purges & the rehabilitations & then extra mega purges.
for half the leadership of the country right now, including Xi, this was their childhood. it's so utterly alien to us.
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“Woke more correct” type reading here, but professional services (finance, law, consulting, insurance, etc) literally do capture an outsize share of the surplus created by the underlying productive economic activity.
They do this in large part by creating & manipulating various socially constructed procedural outcomes that exist on a spectrum from “civilizationally valuable but unintelligible to the population at large” to “outright self-serving grift”
Everyone involved in these industries tells themselves they’re in the former category. Many are not.
It’s true that a world without lawyers would be much worse and much less productive than a world that can resolve contract disputes peaceably. But that principle has limits.
When you mint a surplus of lawyers, they don’t all keep increasing productivity. Some form agencies and NGOs and think tanks whose entire output sums to placing extractive gates in front of production. In the endgame, the production itself can even totally stall while the professional services people keep on extracting and extracting.
California might never get highspeed rail, but a whole industry of people already collected a decade of six figure paychecks off of…?
That’s just the most egregious example.
Public equities markets may be a wonderful innovation, but US ECM teams charging 7% gross spread to 90%+ of companies trying to go public is obviously not the free market in action. Fees vary substantially everywhere else.
Google got so offended by this grift they famously did a dutch auction, and the banks in response pilloried them and reduced investor demand to prevent other tech companies getting similar ideas (no marketing, no brokerages promoting them, negative quotes for media, mega friction for retail participants).
Whatever you think of the whole affair, it’s obviously more complicated than “finance good” — major players have interests and they protect them by doing much more than just competing fairly.
Private Equity gets a bad reputation for ruining corporate america and a lot of the heat it takes is misallocated. They really are being more efficient with capital. But the existence of the debt tax shield as currently written into the US tax code is not a hard fact of the universe.
And if you want to maximize your returns under this current socially constructed procedural framework, you will end up shifting the surplus generated away from the employees, managers, and founders of corporate entities and towards centralized firms that use leverage to remove and extract any slack from the system.
Insurance too. It’s this thing that obviously makes a whole bunch of systems work. It’s good that it exists.
Also: many interactions with insurance systems are transparently cartel-like from the perspective of a customer, with regulatory capture (“socially constructed procedure”) and exploitative and extractive monetization dynamics.
And of course that’s how it feels, because that’s what it is. No part of the system is a free market. Merely entering the system as an insurance carrier requires many levels of government approval, with delegated sub-industries (ratings agencies!) to farm out white collar salaries to more people.
Again: the optimal level of insurance for a productive economy is obviously greater than 0.
But also: the optimal size of the class who collects a salary skimming money off of productive industry through insurance premiums directly & indirectly is almost certainly smaller than ours is today.
This is made doubly worse by the way that certain vice industries get subjected to higher and higher premiums to eventually “nudge” them out of existence without the need for legislation.
Of course I’d rather live here than there. Don’t confuse reasonable critique with an inferior system. No need to be a revolutionary.
But I try not to kid myself about what’s beneath the pretty lies we tell about our society.
There is a peculiar Third World malaise of thinking that everything of value is created by their primary industries, and all the more advanced economies like the US and Singapore and Malaysia do is steal all their profit from them. I can't tell if folks really believe that
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The first 17 months of fatherhood were just Classic WoW style gameplay. Everything was a chore and I could fill a whole day with them. Rewards were few & fat between.
Then I started taking him out on daily adventures and everything changed.
I saw a Trevor Noah clip here about how certain kinds of people he’s friends with are incapable of sitting around and enjoying each other’s company. They need a “third thing” there, an activity to be doing together.
He was lamenting this. It was presented as a critique. I found it baffling. People are different. That’s fine. You don’t have to change them. You can meet them where they are and build an incredible relationship together centered on and around “third things.”
I realized immediately I was never going to have the same relationship with my boy as he has with his mum. That is also fine. I can just show him the world and teach him to find joy in mastering it.
And in doing so my own perspectives and value hierarchy started to change. This was always how it was meant to be.
My wife reports something very similar. I intensely envy her for this. Having a child completely changed her life, and her psychology, for the better, and did so almost instantly.
I have not had the same internal transformation but hope I still may.
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not unlike the navier-stokes solve, claiming that you solved something with AI, even just hinting that you're close or that it seems doable, is now just begging for someone with access to sufficient intelligence & sufficient compute to snipe you.
loose lips sink ships.
You COULDNT HAVE FUCKING WAITED 14 Hours.
i hope your forever blacklisted from cybersec/related industries for dropping a unpatched critical 1day on twitter you fucking idiot
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The political commentary on this piece is a total red herring. Everything here has been true 20+ years. I gave up trying to pitch British friends & family on moving to the US, the snobbish reaction overcomes all promises of a better life. You can't convince them how good it is.
The internet told them Europe was a social paradise. Turns out the trains are awful, the health care isn’t free, and people can be really mean. buff.ly/5cLtnha
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i should confess, my reaction to the piece is at least somewhat motivated by reading this, right at the start
as an ex-Britbong living in the US, i assure you Annie, this goes both ways. it's part of the Special Relationship.
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summoning my childhood memories of how america was presented to me and the world i believed i was moving to. imagine thinking all this and then stumbling into something wonderful.
eh, the rest of the euros are plenty anti-american too.
it truly does not FEEL like an inferiority complex when you're in it. they really do think the yanks are boorish, uncultured, thuggish, rude, loud, impolite, not broadly rich, not progressive, fat, lazy, self-absorbed, pro-death, heartless, exploitative, uncreative, slavish, workaholic, gun-loving, woman-hating, nature-destroying, religiously-captured, racialist & racist, imperialist, geopolitically destabilizing, financially reckless, and exorbitantly privileged.
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