Tess of the d'Urbervilles came out at the height of the British Raj, so it would presumably have been brought over to the region for the British colonizers to enjoy and they likely would have passed it on to the upper-class locals who were being educated at the colleges there, who would have in turn passed it on to the middle-class that was emerging at the time. Presumably this particular work ended up having staying power despite the independence of India - Dr. Oindrila Ghosh argues that this is in part because Hardy is a very sensationalist author and in part because his reflections on morality in rural settings on the brink of change resonates strongly with Hindi culture.
There was a post I read ages ago, maybe by the Last Psychiatrist, that was about women being allowed to take big roles, like president, senator, CEO, etc. after the power has shifted to where men are still in charge.
It was a strange yet compelling essay that I’m almost certain I’m misremembering and would like to make sure I have a correct memory of. I am wondering if it’s testable.
It contains the argument you mention, but is broader and (warning) darker. It could perhaps be described as ‘strange yet compelling’ in the sense that I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s somehow worth mulling over.
The two big poster children for artificial scarcity as a marketing tactic are: low-end Rolex watches and Hermes Birkin bags. Both products occupy a weird niche on the supply-demand curve where supply is kept deliberately lower than demand to stimulate more demand. This leads to all sorts of phenomena like how a Rolex dealer won't sell anyone one of their scarce allocations of Submariners or Daytonas until they've spent tens of thousands of dollars on other crap they don't really want. Rolex quite deliberately makes a whole bunch of less desirable watches on production lines that could quite easily be cranking out Daytonas and Submariners, just for this purpose.
What's interesting about both these products is that they cost roughly the same, about $10K. This seems to be some kind of sweet spot for wearable luxury goods, where they're very expensive for what they are, but cheap enough that any middle class person who really wants one can easily afford one. You can't pull this trick with a $1K watch or a $100K watch, but $10K is the sweet spot for wearable pseudo-Veblen goods.
> You can't pull this trick with a $1K watch or a $100K watch
I wonder why is that. My first guess would be that $1K is too cheap to impress most people, but with $100K it would make economical sense to make high-quality fakes?
Or maybe it's about plausibility. Like, I wouldn't spend $10K on a watch... but it is plausible that some other guy with 2x or 3x my income would. Such guy might seem similar to me at the first sight, but then you see the watch and go "oh, actually...". But if someone can spend $100K on a stupid watch, they probably have many other signals of wealth, so they actually don't need the watch to make you notice. (There may be other products that those people use to signal to each other the difference between "rich" and "2x as rich", but I wouldn't know those.)
EDIT: Ah, I see you mentioned "middle class". So I guess $10K is the right number for the middle class, and some other numbers may be right for some other groups.
The thing is that you can sell $100K watches, but I don't think you can hype them up with artificial scarcity. If you want a particular $100K watch you can just go and buy it, there's no jumping through hoops.
On the other hand there's definitely a high-value version of the artificial scarcity game for some supercars -- if you want one of the limited edition Ferraris or Porsches then you gotta buy several boring ones first to build up a reputation with your dealer.
In a couple months and a couple weeks, we will have chosen whether the Democrats or Republicans will pretend to run the Administrative State.
Instead of two cults of chuckleheads, we should only have one to suffer. I've grown a callus on my thumb from muting the boundless propaganda and lies on TV so often.
And the same thing at one level lower. I like when there's robust disagreement within a group. But when everyone in a group suddenly joins in lockstep behind one position, or when the opposition to a position is crushed and forced to abase themselves like Winston in 1984, then I have to tune them out. Because I know I'm being lied to, and there's no mechanism to correct it from inside.
The winner of the election is going to solve all of our problems. Inflation will be 2%, everyone will have jobs, the deficit will disappear, everyone will have clean energy, and we will colonize Mars. And everyone gets puppies.
Eh, I want a kitten not a puppy. I know the other guy is promising hyperinflation, mass unemployment, reckless spending, full embrace of global warming and promises to work towards turning the world into a nuclear wasteland, but I just don't really want a puppy.
Why is pop music so dominated by romance? You might that's a dumb question because it's such an important part of society but it doesn't dominate other entertainment to the same extent. The most popular movies are superheroes and action franchises. TV shows have stuff like House of the Dragon or Stranger Things. Romantic subplots are common but a lot of times they aren't the main focus. In fact, in movies purely romance movies are less common than they used to be. So what's going on?
Maybe you think it's just a feature in music but that probably isn't true. Folk music covers a wide variety of topics, like funny stories or morality tales. Religion is common too, especially in classical music. Now maybe it's just pop culture in particular but that still leaves the question of why.
One hypothesis: One is that audiences don't actually care about the lyrics, they just care about the music and expect a singer. Song writers just find it easier to write about romance.
Another: Pop music is short, only a few minutes, and it's easier for audiences to find romance lyrics compelling in that time then other subjects.
> In fact, in movies purely romance movies are less common than they used to be.
Here's a theory, sorry of an elaborating on your 2nd: romance is a useful ingredient to get people to like something. So longer and more complex pieces of art (books, movies, TV) face pressure to include it as a subplot, so that the art will appeal to a broader demographic. But more compact pieces of art (songs) don't usually have the space for more than one plot thread, so they get the greatest appeal from focusing on romance (and relationships and sex). (Very good artists can do multiple things at the same time inside a single song. Leonard Cohen comes to mind.)
An alternate theory, but not incompatible: life today focuses more on conformity and the lowest common denominator, rather than finding a niche and excelling. So songs are crafted to appeal to the broadest audience possible, which means that weirdness and eccentricity are sanded away, and so all that's left is a shiny smooth surface of romance: soft-focus Vaseline lens, shaved and plucked and manicured, with makeup hiding any features that would hint at personality. People pass around articles about "what do [50% of the world population like]" and use that as a template to reshape the core of whatever they're working on (art, self-identity), instead of using it sparingly as the thread of flavor connecting the courses of a fine meal.
I believe most modern literature is written by women, for women.
I don't have much knowledge about the evolution of the publishing industry, so I don't know the extent to which this trend is supply-driven (publishers increasingly prioritize female authors and readers) versus demand-driven (the rise of video games and alternative distractions siphoned off male readers more than female readers).
If I had to guess, I would guess that it's mostly demand-driven.
This is a really interesting point. I wonder if it's gender? Pop music feels much more female-dominated now and it's hard to think of a female equivalent of David Byrne although I'm sure such exists. Possibly also that rap and hip-hop have been top genres for a while and there's less "weird" in those.
Also big music labels could be just as risk-averse as movie producers and video game producers now.
Remember Laurie Anderson and her avant-guard shows? I don’t think she’s very active anymore but her shows were weird in the best sense. I caught one of her auditorium performances and it was fantastic. A lot of it was spoken performance art but there was some interesting music too.
I heard her being interviewed on a podcast talking about collaborating with Andy Kaufman when he was working on his intersex wrestler bit. She would sit in the audience and volunteer to wrestle when Kaufman challenged any woman in the audience to wrestle him.
That’s a good point. Is it more dominant now than it used to be? My assumption is yes for periods like the 70’s but I’m not sure. If that was true, then figuring out why would be difficult.
Or, perhaps, increasingly neurotic young audiences trained to find ordinary sex and romance off-putting. Admittedly this is a much bigger factor in genre media, but genre media is a much bigger part of the industry than it used to be.
If you had kept reading past the very first sentence before commenting, you would see my question is why does romance dominate pop music compared to other entertainment. Obviously it’s a fundamental desire. I don’t dispute that. But there aren’t that many romantic comedies.
If you go back to previous years, then you’ll see a wide variety of genres and the romance movie isn’t crowding the top. Like 20 years ago in 2004, you don’t see a romantic comedy in the top box office movies until number 15(50 first dates) and that was one of the more popular periods for the genre.
There aren't that many _right this second_, yes, but they were a huge genre not very long ago. I'd blame the change on an excessively hit-driven movie business relying on billion dollar blockbusters. So perhaps the answer to your question is that it's cheap to make a song.
We didn't manage to get a real-life vacancy chain; people were reluctant to appear on video and make their personal address public. I still think there's a video to be made there. So the video we did make is more general and has a section on vacancy chains. I'm really happy with how it turned out!
First off, congratulations on a very well produced video, I watched almost all of it.
Secondly, I regret the fact that things that ought to be essays that take two minutes to read are now videos that take ten minutes to watch, but I realise that this is not your fault, it's just the way the world is.
Thirdly, I think there's a lot of nuance that needs to be explored around vacancy chains and locality. If I build a luxury apartment building in a poor neighbourhood then it probably doesn't cause a vacancy chain in that neighbourhood, it probably brings causes it in a wealthier neighbourhood. Or in another city. Or in another country. Vacancy chains don't do anyone local any good unless they stay local.
And then there's the induced demand problem which you also didn't touch on. The more people you cram into Vancouver, the greater share of Canada's economy that Vancouver constitutes, and the more people want to move to Vancouver. The induced demand problem is especially pronounced when you have international immigration, because the presence of a significant community from Country X causes a whole lot more people from Country X to want to move there.
>If I build a luxury apartment building in a poor neighbourhood then it probably doesn't cause a vacancy chain in that neighbourhood
Why not? A rich person moves into the new building from a top decile neighborhood; someone from the 9th decile moves into *their* original unit; someone from the 8th decile ... , someone from the 2nd decile moves into *their* original unit, which frees up an apartment in a first decile neighborhood.
And also note the counterfactual: because development is a response to demand increases, if you don't build the new apartment, then the people who would have lived there still want to, and now they move in and renovate the existing homes. In other words, you get low-density gentrification.
Induced demand is a tricky issue. The idea is that we're in a positive feedback loop where more people -> more productivity -> higher wages -> more people. (It's not merely about a city's share of the national economy.) First, is it actually a problem? Higher productivity and wages are good, usually. Second, to break out of the loop, we'd have to block all new housing, even in the suburbs; people who commute downtown for work would still contribute to higher productivity. Third, even if we did block all new housing, it would take some time for the stream of newcomers to stop, and those people would outcompete locals for housing, forcing them to leave (given we're not building any more).
The history of early Christians coming to agree somewhat on the nature of God is pretty complicated. Karen Armstrong gives a pretty good description of the conflicting cosmologies that vied for orthodoxy in the first 100 pages of her “A History of God”.
You might want to take notes as you work through it.
If you are still confused a bit, this short clip from “Hail Caesar” should make things perrrfectly clear.
It also took me a while to locate a copy of George Harbin's The Hereditary Right of the Crown of England Asserted. Plenty of copies of books denouncing him. (Dude was arguing for the wrong side in the English Civil War, basically).
I went to Catholic school growing up and I was taught that they were the same God. If they were different, wouldn't that kind of ruin the whole "monotheist" label applied to Christianity as a whole?
It's not completely universal, there are some nontrinitarians floating around out there. Probably the biggest and most famous sects are the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons.
People argue that those sects aren't Christian, but that strikes me as a kind of tautology. If you say that trinitarianism is universal, then say that nontrinitarians are not Christian despite what they claim, then yeah, it's universal, but only because you're deliberately excluding the sects that don't believe in it.
of gnosticism, a competing belief system that has unknown origins but developed at the same time as Christianity. so it's not the same religion though its uses its terms.
generally the OT god is the demiurge, who is a flawed god who created physical reality while a hidden god created true spiritual reality and Jesus gave us the hidden knowledge to access it.
surprisingly the best example of it is incredibly popular; The Matrix is gnosticism in a nutshell, expressed in SF form. the only real world is outside the matrix, and its the red pill that lets us transcend the demiurge's reality to experience it. The third film is neo satisfying the demiurge through a christlike death.
no its pretty straight Gnosticism, which also has platonic roots. the christian aspects with the "secret knowledge trascends fake/illusionary reality into true reality."
the third film is neo
as gnostic christ down to a tee, with the demiurge made explicit.
its not 100 percent but its a very good illustration. the red pill is gnosis.
I enjoyed the recent book review of 'How the War was Won' on here, and it prompted me to buy and read the book. Having read it, it made me think about how its lessons might be applicable to future superpower conflicts, most importantly a future US-China war over Taiwan.
About ensmallening, I noticed many people around me prefer having girls to having boys (as babies). Not that they actively do something about it, just have a slight preference. I think it might be related, since if you want your child not to hurt anybody (physically, seriously) and be a decent respectable person then girls have a higher chance of being that. If you want your child to win a Nobel prize or be a billionaire, boys have a higher chance of doing that. We seem to prefer the former more.
I'm not sure if they're even thinking big picture like that or if they're just thinking that girls tend to be slightly calmer as kids.
Maybe this would have mattered less back in the day, but in a modern childrearing environment where we don't have 20 friends and family members nearby at all times to help pitch in, calmness is seen as a desirable trait.
Edit: Someone below said basically the exact same thing lol
Having interacted with lots of kids and lots of parents, it's because little-medium sized boys are energy vampires and are kinda shitty to be around on average. Screaming, yelling, fighting, etc. Once they get to 5th grade ish it becomes a lot easier to deal with; you can tell if you have someone high energy or a future candidate for prison and act accordingly.
Girls have other problems, but especially for first time parents or parents without a large support network, they are problems that require much less energy to solve.
People will say it's because you can't beat you kids anymore, and lol. I got the shit whipped out of me and I stopped caring as soon as I realized that my parents weren't gonna beat me so hard they'd cripple me.
Girls are easier for parents to handle for the very same reasons too. Less of a fight for parents.
Since spanking / hitting children has been banned, parents basically do not have an ultimate argument anymore. It is like: "I will scream until you buy me that thing." "Then I will remove your TV privileges and no birthday gifts." "Then I will just keep screaming." And then they win.
Kids win the blackmail contest these days because work-stressed parents just want silence, not screaming as blackmail. And our old ultimate argument "then you will get one on your face" is gone.
> Since spanking / hitting children has been banned, parents basically do not have an ultimate argument anymore. It is like: "I will scream until you buy me that thing." "Then I will remove your TV privileges and no birthday gifts." "Then I will just keep screaming." And then they win.
1. Most children aren't wired in such a way that physical violence is the only retaliation they care about. For example, for my daughter (5 years old), "if you keep screaming at me, I'll leave the room" is a pretty convincing argument, because she craves our attention. Often, this is sufficient to calm her down enough to actually talk about our dispute.
2. If you hit your children – even occasional, light spanking – you lose any credibility when you try to teach them how to resolve their conflicts without resorting to physical violence. In particular, conflicts with their annoying siblings who "totally started it".
> "2. If you hit your children – even occasional, light spanking – you lose any credibility when you try to teach them how to resolve their conflicts without resorting to physical violence. In particular, conflicts with their annoying siblings who "totally started it"."
Meh. This is by no means an absolute; plenty of people who were struck by their parents grow to be adults who don't *initiate* physical violence with other adults during conflicts.
Not to mention, there are a few circumstances where it is totally appropriate to *resolve* a conflict with physical violence or the threat of it.
If a kid is violent because of his parents, it's not because he was corporally punished by spanking. It's because he was outrageously abused. Your #2 is a myth. Kids know the difference between violent conflict and violent punishment from authority. And some boys really do only respect violence. I know that from experience.
2) perhaps it is lucky I had no siblings. At any rate, in my mind, "punishment from authority" and "violence between equals" were two totally different concept as a child. I did not think I have authority over children.
However our school had a lot of fights and yes they started as retaliation for insults. When we got bigger, we realized it is dangerous and thus turned polite.
I do not entirely support resolving all conflicts without violence, because if there is no credible threat of a knuckle sandwich, people will become incredibly impolite, disrespectful and verbally abusive. The culture of Budapest, Hungary is currently at this stage of development and it is bad. One journalist kept calling a very Christian journalist all kinds of gay, finally he gave him one slap and everybody sided with the slapped guy. Bad. That encourages such verbal behaviour.
The next thing that happens and it happened in e.g. American culture, that people notice this problem, and start heavily policing speech, which results in the well know walking on eggshells phenomenon.
Yeah, but I did not abandon my parents. When I turned into a bit bigger kid, I outgrew my selfishness, I understood what an absolutely shitty kid I was, and I admired their patience of every time explaining me 10 times why what I do is wrong and I just told them I don't give a shit, and then they turned to harder measures.
So it was just something temporary about my selfish phase.
How do you know? Is there, for example, evidence that parents who spanked their kids were less likely to be taken care of in their old age than parents who didn't, or any similar measure of a messed up relationship.
Too much violence can mess up a parent-child relationship. Some reasonable corporal punishment will not. It's an extremely useful tool for a lot of young boys that's being completely neglected because of effeteness and ignorant fear. Some boys need reminding of what the stakes actually are in the real world.
I've never encountered a girl to my knowledge who would be improved as a person with spanking(not that they don't exist), but there have been many, many, many boys in my professional experience.
When I think of the people who most characteristically like to break contact with their parents, it's twenty-somethings who lean left, spend a lot of time on TikTok, and overuse words like "toxicity".
These strike me as the kind of people least likely to have been smacked as children.
One of the worst things about getting old, so far, is the way that perfectly normal things become niche preferences and then disappear altogether because "nobody wants that thing any more". I'm not being deliberately old-fashioned, I'm not talking about dated fashion choices, I'm talking about things with actual practical advantages, like smartphones that are small enough to fit in your pocket, or wired headphones, or sedans, or full-sized spare tyres. Apparently "nobody" wants these things any more, but I want these things! They were normal just ten years ago and now they're getting hard or impossible to find.
It's not like I'm actually old yet, I'm in my early 40s. I'm earning (and spending) far more money than I ever have before. You'd think that my age group's preferences are the ones that vendors work hardest to satisfy, since we're the ones with all the money. But apparently not?
(Meanwhile, outdated stuff that's actually genuinely stupid and impractical, like record players, you can buy again.)
My dad still has a '98 Toyota with manual window cranks and door locks, although even 26 years ago that was non-standard and he had to specially order it from the dealer. Other bespoke features include having to exit the vehicle and manually toggle each individual wheel to enter 4-wheel drive.
"Customer Preference" generally cheaper prices. No one wants a small spare tire, but everyone wants a cheaper car. Unless you have surplus money to spend on status items, in which case a retro record player is a popular choice (sadly, no one seem to think of full sized spare tires as a status indicator). Generally speaking, "practical" doesn't equal "high status", quite the opposite.
So--two populations of customers: low to mid socio-economic who prefer cheap things, and upper socio-economic (or just young) who prefer wasteful status indicators.
Neither seem to want small cell phones, full sized spare tires, or manual transmissions.
I hope to have at least one more chance to drive a car with a manual transmission before I die.
I am generally excited about the transition to EVs, and the gradual growth of cars with self-driving capabilities, but both of these things will accelerate the disappearance of the stick, and it's already nearly gone due to customer preference.
My wife and I each have sedans with standard transmissions, plus an old Miata with a stick for summer touring on S curve rich, low traffic roads. Top down, one eye on the tach, down shifting into the corners, alert for the occasional deer or moose.
Good gawd, driving is so much more engaging and just plain fun with a standard.
New ones are definitely harder to come by now.
I go through a bit of initial confusion when I rent a car with an automatic transmission, clomping futilely with my left foot for the clutch pedal. Muscle memory.
I’ll hold off on an EV till the batteries improve enough to hold up well in -20 and below.
We also lost many devices with physical controls in favor of touchscreens or apps. Car consoles are probably the most visible example, at least here in the US. It takes an order of magnitude more focus to change the AC settings when you have to hit the right series of little icons on a screen, with no physical reference points, when you're going 60mph.
We also lost devices that are predictable. Now you might be getting notifications, which is annoying, but worse are updates. Features you've come to rely on can disappear overnight, with new, useless features taking their place, all without any action from you. (I had a pair of headphones pretty much burn out their batteri due to a faulty firmware update; Sony replaced them out of warranty but, still, quite a surprise!)
How about the web? Static sites are old fashioned. But they were fast and relied on common browser affordances. Now a site requires 1-2mib of assets, _compressed_, and so much compute that it chokes high end mobile devices or, on monstrous 24 core desktops, still takes >2s to load (or reach LCP), and boasts an interface that I guess is satisfying to designers but not actual users.
(I'm in my 30s and I agree v. strongly OPs view)
Edit: Oh yeah, Google search results. I guess no one cares that the top results are now ads or SEO garbage so that's what we get. I've reported to appending "reddit" to my queries to cut through the garbage, somewhat, and I'm trialing a new-ish search engine, Kagi, which requires you to pay a subscription but doesn't feature ads. Not sure how they deal with SEO, but it looks promising.
> Static sites are old fashioned. But they were fast and relied on common browser affordances. Now a site requires 1-2mib of assets, _compressed_, and so much compute that it chokes high end mobile devices or, on monstrous 24 core desktops, still takes >2s to load (or reach LCP), and boasts an interface that I guess is satisfying to designers but not actual users.
Ugh, I hate this so much. If you use uBlock or uMatrix or anything like that, it's maddening how something like 80% of sites won't even load unless you let them rape your computer with 20 different javascripts now. Any sites I've had done for me / my businesses over the years, I always try to do only HTML and CSS for just this reason, but that's increasingly in the far tail of being countertrend.
On the search thing, may I recommend SearXNG? Free, open source, aggregates from multiple sources with no ads, can use a browser extension or a URL. Since it's federated, there's several url's you can use - I personally use paulgo.io for most of my searches. I've been using it for a year or so, and am quite happy with it.
Im happy with the experience that uBlock and pi-hole give me, though I think I visit few sites that don't work in the way you describe. Maybe I've self-selected into substack/blogs/specialty sites (eg. outdoorgearlab).
Another interesting search engine is https://wiby.me/ which advertises itself as "the search engine for the classic web." It's designed to search only home pages, blogs, and other static content. As a result it's not really that useful but it's at least interesting.
"640k ought to be enough for anybody" actually had some basis in reality. I knew a guy who said, when they came out with a 64k mainframe computer in the 60s, that they didn't know what they were going to do with it.
Now it takes about 4.6k to run a "Hello World" program in C#.
If you're in the Apple ecosystem and can afford, get an iPhone mini 13! It's great, and has support for 3 more years. Around $300-400 on Backmarket depending on condition.
I'm 44, and totally agree; I want a phone small enough to fit in my pockets (and easily be held/typed on in my hands which are proportionate to being 5'2") and I love wired headphones. Hell, I use a gen 3 iPod when doing tasks whilst secretly listening to podcasts because I don't have to take it out of my pocket to pause and play; I can just feel the position of the clickwheel through the cloth!
I think hatchbacks are quite a bit more useful than traditional sedans, but that's a quibble.
If you're looking for earphones, they don't get much cheaper than this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/162207389285 . Shitty quality, but there's a lot of them to use / lose.
Yeah it's not actually tricky finding wired headphones, but they're either really cheap or really high end professional ones.
What you can't get is a pair of decent noise-cancelling headphones. Which is weird, because my number one use case for noise-cancelling headphones is when I'm on a plane, and the plane's IFE system is usually wired.
Also good luck finding a phone to plug your wired headphones into.
I use Sony headphones. They're wireless by default, but have a jack port, so you can connect them with jack-to-jack cable. Is this good enough for your needs?
In a letter to the weaponization of government committee yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg shed some light on the role of free speech and censorship at Facebook. The admissions aren't surprising to those who have been paying attention, especially in light of the Twitter files, but I think this letter is still noteworthy. You can read the actual letter here:
"In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree."
First off, this is direct confirmation that the Biden-Harris administration wanted to use Facebook as an end-run around the Constitution to censor people without running afoul of the 1st Amendment. You can debate whether and to what degree censorship is acceptable as a tool for enforcing social norms, but in the US the government is explicitly forbidden from censorship of speech. Even the limited exceptions to the 1st Amendment would not apply in the case of humor or satire.
A recent SCOTUS decision did in fact uphold this as legal in the case of Twitter, on the basis that the federal government must be able to advocate for its interests without that act itself being considered coercive. I find this rather dubious considering the power differential between the parties. Rather like a CEO pressuring an intern into sex, and "expressing a lot of frustration" if they don't agree.
Another important takeaway is that Facebook "demoted" the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the 2020 election. Here Zuckerberg says "the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation", so this was also done at the behest of the federal government, who just coincidentally happened to be lying about the whole Russian disinformation thing. This was a direct effort to influence an election by withholding relevant information from the public.
>A recent SCOTUS decision did in fact uphold this as legal in the case of Twitter, on the basis that the federal government must be able to advocate for its interests without that act itself being considered coercive.
I mean, that does seem like an issue. The CDC has an interest in getting timely and accurate information out during a pandemic, and doing that will involve going to news outlets and social media sites and saying "how can you help us distribute this information?" or "hey, there are going to be a lot of panicked people searching for information about COVID-19, it would be best for everyone's health if they saw actual professionals as the first result instead of people who will tell them that vaccines are the work of the devil and that they should drink bleach instead."
(And those companies might be interested in cooperating! Sure, they're generally amoral money-maximizers, but I imagine people working at those companies might feel a tiny bit guilty if they hear that their choice of what to signal-boost could literally get people killed.)
Like, if you say "no, even asking about it is too coercive," then you basically shut down any sort of cooperation with media outlets - the CDC can't do anything more than post on their Twitter account and hope that the "marketplace of ideas" operates faster than COVID can spread.
I wish Zuck had been more specific in his letter or provided examples. I can see a reasonable case where the CDC sends a letter to Facebook asking them to do certain things. Facebook can agree and say that seems reasonable, or tell them to pound sand without adverse consequences. But in the Twitter files for example, the FBI asking your company to censor certain information and expressing their disappointment if you don't follow through is entirely different. There's a reasonable expectation that the FBI can make your life miserable if you don't do what they want. Same thing with the Facebook letter and pressure from White House staff; pissing off the White House is very different from ignoring the CDC.
It would appear from Zuckerberg's reply that the Feds are "Boy who cried 'Wolf!'" here.
viz. Facebook are well aware that the Feds lied to them over the Hunter Biden laptop story, and as a result are never again going to believe similar claims from the government, without independent confirmation by a fact checker they trust/
I feel this is a classic case of the coverup being worse than the conspiracy....
Hunter BIden has a drug problem? Meh.
The US government is coercing Twitter and Facebook to supress the story, in violation of the First Amendment? Big deal.
(yeah, yeah, As well as the drug problem - which looks kind of confirmed at this point, there is the question of whether the Biden family were using the Ukraine war as an opportunity to extract personal bribes from the Ukrainian government,
Whether that[s true or not, we know for sure that Nancy Pelosi is investing in AI-related companies despite being in an position to influence regulation of those companies, which looks kind of corrupt,)
Hunter being a loser was hardly news by 2020. The much more damning part of the laptop was a) Exposing financial transactions between Hunter and foreign nationals with ties to both the Russian and Chinese governments, and b) Implicating Joe in the influence peddling. The laptop made it clear Joe at least had intimate knowledge of Hunter's business, if not outright involvement. Censoring this information was much more politically beneficial to the Biden family than stopping Hunter's image from being (even more) sullied.
> I find this rather dubious considering the power differential between the parties. Rather like a CEO pressuring an intern into sex, and "expressing a lot of frustration" if they don't agree.
Probably a good place to start would be at least banning overt retaliation, like the Disney case.
Disney entered into a contract with the state of Florida to incorporate a special commercial zone, and Florida later canceled that contract. There is an argument that Florida did so for malicious reasons to punish Disney for criticizing a legislative bill. However, this is quite different from the federal government pressuring social media companies to censor the exchange of information among private individuals.
Yeah, it is very different. Florida *actually* retaliated against speech, whereas the government at best had an implied threat to potentially do in the future what Florida actually did in real life.
Look at it this way. Florida had the right to cancel the special contract with Disney at any time for any reason, as long as the legislature voted to do so and the governor signed it. If DeSantis had said something about it giving unfair tax breaks, no one outside of Disney would have cared. The act itself was legal and proper. However, in the context of punishing Disney for their criticism of the Florida government, it is clearly a wrongful punishment of speech and has chilling effects.
In the other case, the federal government pressuring social media companies to censor private individuals could never have a legal and proper basis. That's why I think the two cases are categorically different, even though they both involve restricting free speech. Florida had the proper authority to cancel the Disney contract, but they did so for malicious reasons. The fedgov never had proper authority to censor, and they did so for malicious reasons.
The IRS has the right to audit your tax returns this year. Or next year, or the year after that. If the IRS first says that they are going to audit your taxes every year unless you shut up about something you are talking about that annoys them, and then actually does so, is your response, "the act itself was legal and proper"?
The act is not legal and proper if it is done for an illegal reason. Motives matter in law.
And frequently people violate this sort of law and get away with it because they can conceal their motives and the courts don't have telepathy. But the ones dumb enough to say "this is the illegal reason I'm doing the thing", we get to call them out as the crooks they are.
> The act is not legal and proper if it is done for an illegal reason.
I know, and I agree with this in my earlier comment. My argument is there exists a fundamental difference between a) actions with a legitimate basis but wrongful motive, and b) actions with no legitimate basis. In your example, a) is the IRS auditing you every year because they don't like you. Maybe b) is the IRS arbitrarily deciding to show up at your house and seize everything of value. I don't think either action is acceptable, in case that wasn't clear.
Before we hastily change the subject to something seen to be more friendly to the left, do you have any opinions on what the government was doing with regards to COVID content and the Hunter Biden laptop story?
How about this? You pick the one specific incident that you think is most clearly outrageous, and I'll research it and get back to you.
---
Edit: I checked the link in the OP, but it's no more specific than what they already quoted, which does not have any details or context (for example, it does not actually give any specific examples of what the government attempted to censor).
I'm not even saying this to shut you down or something. I'm trying to be helpful here. The first part of the letter certainly sounds like it *could* be bad. There's just no way to actually judge for ourselves since it's only a vague description.
I really don't think anything more is necessary, assuming that Zuck's letter accurately describes the situation and isnt leaving out significant details. He states that the government asked him to censor content including "humor and memes." There should be no conceivable situation where the government requests that "humor and menes" be censored; there is no need to litigate the details.
Similarly, the Hunter Biden laptop story was not a matter of national security; it was embarrassing information politically damaging to the party in power. Again assuming that national security isn't involved -- and we are talking about, like, troop movements in a war or something -- there should be no situation where the FBI is urging such things be censored. No need to litigate the details.
I'm curious if you disagree with these statements.
Why does Wikipedia list so many Indian adaptations of Tess of the d'Urbervilles? How did it become so popular there of all places?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tess_of_the_d%27Urbervilles
Tess of the d'Urbervilles came out at the height of the British Raj, so it would presumably have been brought over to the region for the British colonizers to enjoy and they likely would have passed it on to the upper-class locals who were being educated at the colleges there, who would have in turn passed it on to the middle-class that was emerging at the time. Presumably this particular work ended up having staying power despite the independence of India - Dr. Oindrila Ghosh argues that this is in part because Hardy is a very sensationalist author and in part because his reflections on morality in rural settings on the brink of change resonates strongly with Hindi culture.
There was a post I read ages ago, maybe by the Last Psychiatrist, that was about women being allowed to take big roles, like president, senator, CEO, etc. after the power has shifted to where men are still in charge.
It was a strange yet compelling essay that I’m almost certain I’m misremembering and would like to make sure I have a correct memory of. I am wondering if it’s testable.
I think you may be talking about ‘No Self-Respecting Woman Would Go Out Without Makeup’ https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/01/no_self-respecting_woman_would.html#more
It contains the argument you mention, but is broader and (warning) darker. It could perhaps be described as ‘strange yet compelling’ in the sense that I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s somehow worth mulling over.
Cheers!
If anyone here works at Columbia University Medical Center I need a favor and would really appreciate if you’d PM me or email
iz8162k23 at gmail.com
4 tblspoon vinegar a day might help with depression: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/16/14/2305
I've been thinking just drinking water is kinda boring anyway.
The two big poster children for artificial scarcity as a marketing tactic are: low-end Rolex watches and Hermes Birkin bags. Both products occupy a weird niche on the supply-demand curve where supply is kept deliberately lower than demand to stimulate more demand. This leads to all sorts of phenomena like how a Rolex dealer won't sell anyone one of their scarce allocations of Submariners or Daytonas until they've spent tens of thousands of dollars on other crap they don't really want. Rolex quite deliberately makes a whole bunch of less desirable watches on production lines that could quite easily be cranking out Daytonas and Submariners, just for this purpose.
What's interesting about both these products is that they cost roughly the same, about $10K. This seems to be some kind of sweet spot for wearable luxury goods, where they're very expensive for what they are, but cheap enough that any middle class person who really wants one can easily afford one. You can't pull this trick with a $1K watch or a $100K watch, but $10K is the sweet spot for wearable pseudo-Veblen goods.
> You can't pull this trick with a $1K watch or a $100K watch
I wonder why is that. My first guess would be that $1K is too cheap to impress most people, but with $100K it would make economical sense to make high-quality fakes?
Or maybe it's about plausibility. Like, I wouldn't spend $10K on a watch... but it is plausible that some other guy with 2x or 3x my income would. Such guy might seem similar to me at the first sight, but then you see the watch and go "oh, actually...". But if someone can spend $100K on a stupid watch, they probably have many other signals of wealth, so they actually don't need the watch to make you notice. (There may be other products that those people use to signal to each other the difference between "rich" and "2x as rich", but I wouldn't know those.)
EDIT: Ah, I see you mentioned "middle class". So I guess $10K is the right number for the middle class, and some other numbers may be right for some other groups.
The thing is that you can sell $100K watches, but I don't think you can hype them up with artificial scarcity. If you want a particular $100K watch you can just go and buy it, there's no jumping through hoops.
On the other hand there's definitely a high-value version of the artificial scarcity game for some supercars -- if you want one of the limited edition Ferraris or Porsches then you gotta buy several boring ones first to build up a reputation with your dealer.
The current market for the most in demand $100k watches requires you to spend ~$200k on 3 other less desirable watches first (see https://www.reddit.com/r/patekphilippe/comments/1f4fxfk/thin_nautilus_models_5712/) Wealth signaling is fractal and there is always someone willing to sell you another level!
It's Joy, Joy, Joy. I'm just soooo Joyful:
In a couple months and a couple weeks, we will have chosen whether the Democrats or Republicans will pretend to run the Administrative State.
Instead of two cults of chuckleheads, we should only have one to suffer. I've grown a callus on my thumb from muting the boundless propaganda and lies on TV so often.
Joy, Joy, Joy.
This reads like a parody.
I prefer having two groups of chuckleheads lying to me. If I must be lied to, it's easier to deal with if the liars aren't all telling the same lies.
And the same thing at one level lower. I like when there's robust disagreement within a group. But when everyone in a group suddenly joins in lockstep behind one position, or when the opposition to a position is crushed and forced to abase themselves like Winston in 1984, then I have to tune them out. Because I know I'm being lied to, and there's no mechanism to correct it from inside.
That's why I used to like reading The Daily Mail. I prefer the people lying to me to be bad at it.
The winner of the election is going to solve all of our problems. Inflation will be 2%, everyone will have jobs, the deficit will disappear, everyone will have clean energy, and we will colonize Mars. And everyone gets puppies.
And Oprah will buy everyone an electric car.
AI virtual puppies who will beg to serve us, and when we look deep into their gorgeous cute puppy eyes, we'll forget all the troubles of the world...
Eh, I want a kitten not a puppy. I know the other guy is promising hyperinflation, mass unemployment, reckless spending, full embrace of global warming and promises to work towards turning the world into a nuclear wasteland, but I just don't really want a puppy.
The puppies will be hypoallergenic, and also have jobs.
Why is pop music so dominated by romance? You might that's a dumb question because it's such an important part of society but it doesn't dominate other entertainment to the same extent. The most popular movies are superheroes and action franchises. TV shows have stuff like House of the Dragon or Stranger Things. Romantic subplots are common but a lot of times they aren't the main focus. In fact, in movies purely romance movies are less common than they used to be. So what's going on?
Maybe you think it's just a feature in music but that probably isn't true. Folk music covers a wide variety of topics, like funny stories or morality tales. Religion is common too, especially in classical music. Now maybe it's just pop culture in particular but that still leaves the question of why.
One hypothesis: One is that audiences don't actually care about the lyrics, they just care about the music and expect a singer. Song writers just find it easier to write about romance.
Another: Pop music is short, only a few minutes, and it's easier for audiences to find romance lyrics compelling in that time then other subjects.
Evopsych-ish explanation is that music is more basal and tied to mating (think songbirds) than storytelling, which evolved later.
Although that wouldn't *really* explain your point about folk music.
> In fact, in movies purely romance movies are less common than they used to be.
Here's a theory, sorry of an elaborating on your 2nd: romance is a useful ingredient to get people to like something. So longer and more complex pieces of art (books, movies, TV) face pressure to include it as a subplot, so that the art will appeal to a broader demographic. But more compact pieces of art (songs) don't usually have the space for more than one plot thread, so they get the greatest appeal from focusing on romance (and relationships and sex). (Very good artists can do multiple things at the same time inside a single song. Leonard Cohen comes to mind.)
An alternate theory, but not incompatible: life today focuses more on conformity and the lowest common denominator, rather than finding a niche and excelling. So songs are crafted to appeal to the broadest audience possible, which means that weirdness and eccentricity are sanded away, and so all that's left is a shiny smooth surface of romance: soft-focus Vaseline lens, shaved and plucked and manicured, with makeup hiding any features that would hint at personality. People pass around articles about "what do [50% of the world population like]" and use that as a template to reshape the core of whatever they're working on (art, self-identity), instead of using it sparingly as the thread of flavor connecting the courses of a fine meal.
Doesn't modern literature have the same problem?
Does it? I don’t read much modern literature.
I believe most modern literature is written by women, for women.
I don't have much knowledge about the evolution of the publishing industry, so I don't know the extent to which this trend is supply-driven (publishers increasingly prioritize female authors and readers) versus demand-driven (the rise of video games and alternative distractions siphoned off male readers more than female readers).
If I had to guess, I would guess that it's mostly demand-driven.
Pop music used to have a much bigger weird component, think of Talking Heads, B-52’s, KISS, etc. I’m not sure why or when it changed.
I don't know if music changed, or that I'm no longer plugged into a community that enjoys and celebrates the new weird stuff.
This is a really interesting point. I wonder if it's gender? Pop music feels much more female-dominated now and it's hard to think of a female equivalent of David Byrne although I'm sure such exists. Possibly also that rap and hip-hop have been top genres for a while and there's less "weird" in those.
Also big music labels could be just as risk-averse as movie producers and video game producers now.
Remember Laurie Anderson and her avant-guard shows? I don’t think she’s very active anymore but her shows were weird in the best sense. I caught one of her auditorium performances and it was fantastic. A lot of it was spoken performance art but there was some interesting music too.
I heard her being interviewed on a podcast talking about collaborating with Andy Kaufman when he was working on his intersex wrestler bit. She would sit in the audience and volunteer to wrestle when Kaufman challenged any woman in the audience to wrestle him.
There were some female comedians back in the Letterman era who had that weirdo energy. Maybe something about modern culture tramples on that.
Sandra Bernhard?
“Hey, Dave, how ‘bout those new sodomy laws? There goes our little trip.”
That's exactly who I was thinking of.
That’s a good point. Is it more dominant now than it used to be? My assumption is yes for periods like the 70’s but I’m not sure. If that was true, then figuring out why would be difficult.
So what you're saying is, you'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs.
I've been assuming the decline of romance storylines in movies was due to the rise of internet porn.
Or, perhaps, increasingly neurotic young audiences trained to find ordinary sex and romance off-putting. Admittedly this is a much bigger factor in genre media, but genre media is a much bigger part of the industry than it used to be.
Maybe people really, really like love, companionship, and sex? Like, it's one of the most fundamental things human beings want? It's not that deep.
If you had kept reading past the very first sentence before commenting, you would see my question is why does romance dominate pop music compared to other entertainment. Obviously it’s a fundamental desire. I don’t dispute that. But there aren’t that many romantic comedies.
I propose it is because music elicits a more direct emotional response than other media.
Also, sorry, yeah, I misread and shouldn't have gone for the quick dunk. Apologies.
Apology accepted
If you go back to previous years, then you’ll see a wide variety of genres and the romance movie isn’t crowding the top. Like 20 years ago in 2004, you don’t see a romantic comedy in the top box office movies until number 15(50 first dates) and that was one of the more popular periods for the genre.
There aren't that many _right this second_, yes, but they were a huge genre not very long ago. I'd blame the change on an excessively hit-driven movie business relying on billion dollar blockbusters. So perhaps the answer to your question is that it's cheap to make a song.
The romance film lives on by the literal hundreds on various Lifetime and Hallmark cable channels.
>So perhaps the answer to your question is that it's cheap to make a song.
Oh yeah. They're cheap, and they're short enough that romance doesn't wear out its welcome over 90 minutes.
Also very hard to fit a B plot into a song.
>Also very hard to fit a B plot into a song.
There’s probably something to this. Most sitcoms aren’t explicitly about romance but it’s generally the most common running sub plot.
A few years ago, I applied for an ACX Grant to make a pro-housing explainer video on vacancy chains.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-the-first-half
I got funding from ACX readers, and two years later, the video is out!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbQAr3K57WQ
We didn't manage to get a real-life vacancy chain; people were reluctant to appear on video and make their personal address public. I still think there's a video to be made there. So the video we did make is more general and has a section on vacancy chains. I'm really happy with how it turned out!
First off, congratulations on a very well produced video, I watched almost all of it.
Secondly, I regret the fact that things that ought to be essays that take two minutes to read are now videos that take ten minutes to watch, but I realise that this is not your fault, it's just the way the world is.
Thirdly, I think there's a lot of nuance that needs to be explored around vacancy chains and locality. If I build a luxury apartment building in a poor neighbourhood then it probably doesn't cause a vacancy chain in that neighbourhood, it probably brings causes it in a wealthier neighbourhood. Or in another city. Or in another country. Vacancy chains don't do anyone local any good unless they stay local.
And then there's the induced demand problem which you also didn't touch on. The more people you cram into Vancouver, the greater share of Canada's economy that Vancouver constitutes, and the more people want to move to Vancouver. The induced demand problem is especially pronounced when you have international immigration, because the presence of a significant community from Country X causes a whole lot more people from Country X to want to move there.
>If I build a luxury apartment building in a poor neighbourhood then it probably doesn't cause a vacancy chain in that neighbourhood
Why not? A rich person moves into the new building from a top decile neighborhood; someone from the 9th decile moves into *their* original unit; someone from the 8th decile ... , someone from the 2nd decile moves into *their* original unit, which frees up an apartment in a first decile neighborhood.
And also note the counterfactual: because development is a response to demand increases, if you don't build the new apartment, then the people who would have lived there still want to, and now they move in and renovate the existing homes. In other words, you get low-density gentrification.
Induced demand is a tricky issue. The idea is that we're in a positive feedback loop where more people -> more productivity -> higher wages -> more people. (It's not merely about a city's share of the national economy.) First, is it actually a problem? Higher productivity and wages are good, usually. Second, to break out of the loop, we'd have to block all new housing, even in the suburbs; people who commute downtown for work would still contribute to higher productivity. Third, even if we did block all new housing, it would take some time for the stream of newcomers to stop, and those people would outcompete locals for housing, forcing them to leave (given we're not building any more).
Is there a name for the notion that, in the context of the Bible, the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are two distinct gods?
The history of early Christians coming to agree somewhat on the nature of God is pretty complicated. Karen Armstrong gives a pretty good description of the conflicting cosmologies that vied for orthodoxy in the first 100 pages of her “A History of God”.
You might want to take notes as you work through it.
If you are still confused a bit, this short clip from “Hail Caesar” should make things perrrfectly clear.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KJEiDRi4Itc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcionism
Wikipedia's list of Christian heresies offers Marcionism.
Before looking it up, I was guessing it was going to be named after the first guy to get into serious trouble for suggesting it...
Thank you! This is *exactly* the kind of answer I was hoping to get.
Apparently, Marcion is among the illustrious ranks of people whose ideas only survive in a book denouncing them as a heretic.
It also took me a while to locate a copy of George Harbin's The Hereditary Right of the Crown of England Asserted. Plenty of copies of books denouncing him. (Dude was arguing for the wrong side in the English Civil War, basically).
I went to Catholic school growing up and I was taught that they were the same God. If they were different, wouldn't that kind of ruin the whole "monotheist" label applied to Christianity as a whole?
Catholicism flirts rather openly with polytheism with the pantheon of Saints.
Got a hopeless cause? Reach out to Jude, he handles that. Going on a trip? Don’t leave without talking to Christopher. Etc.
Not to mention the Trinity which is rather unfathomable to me.
Pretty sure the trinity is universal to Christianity, not Catholicism. Essential.
It's not completely universal, there are some nontrinitarians floating around out there. Probably the biggest and most famous sects are the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons.
People argue that those sects aren't Christian, but that strikes me as a kind of tautology. If you say that trinitarianism is universal, then say that nontrinitarians are not Christian despite what they claim, then yeah, it's universal, but only because you're deliberately excluding the sects that don't believe in it.
Yeah, fair enough. I know it stuck around in C of E. Catholic being the mother church.
essentially marcionism is a form
of gnosticism, a competing belief system that has unknown origins but developed at the same time as Christianity. so it's not the same religion though its uses its terms.
generally the OT god is the demiurge, who is a flawed god who created physical reality while a hidden god created true spiritual reality and Jesus gave us the hidden knowledge to access it.
surprisingly the best example of it is incredibly popular; The Matrix is gnosticism in a nutshell, expressed in SF form. the only real world is outside the matrix, and its the red pill that lets us transcend the demiurge's reality to experience it. The third film is neo satisfying the demiurge through a christlike death.
But The Matrix is recycling Plato's Republic there (parable of the cave etc).
Or maybe recycling Jean Baudrillard (Simulation and Simulacra) recycling Plato.
no its pretty straight Gnosticism, which also has platonic roots. the christian aspects with the "secret knowledge trascends fake/illusionary reality into true reality."
the third film is neo
as gnostic christ down to a tee, with the demiurge made explicit.
its not 100 percent but its a very good illustration. the red pill is gnosis.
made https://moarwrong.com/
Is the letters turning into paperclips supposed to be a metaphor for something?
https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
Presumably it's just a reference to the famous paperclips thought experiment.
I enjoyed the recent book review of 'How the War was Won' on here, and it prompted me to buy and read the book. Having read it, it made me think about how its lessons might be applicable to future superpower conflicts, most importantly a future US-China war over Taiwan.
I wrote up my thoughts on the lessons it holds for that conflict here: https://medium.com/@bobert93/america-retains-major-advantages-in-a-future-war-with-china-705bffa23459
About ensmallening, I noticed many people around me prefer having girls to having boys (as babies). Not that they actively do something about it, just have a slight preference. I think it might be related, since if you want your child not to hurt anybody (physically, seriously) and be a decent respectable person then girls have a higher chance of being that. If you want your child to win a Nobel prize or be a billionaire, boys have a higher chance of doing that. We seem to prefer the former more.
I'm not sure if they're even thinking big picture like that or if they're just thinking that girls tend to be slightly calmer as kids.
Maybe this would have mattered less back in the day, but in a modern childrearing environment where we don't have 20 friends and family members nearby at all times to help pitch in, calmness is seen as a desirable trait.
Edit: Someone below said basically the exact same thing lol
Having interacted with lots of kids and lots of parents, it's because little-medium sized boys are energy vampires and are kinda shitty to be around on average. Screaming, yelling, fighting, etc. Once they get to 5th grade ish it becomes a lot easier to deal with; you can tell if you have someone high energy or a future candidate for prison and act accordingly.
Girls have other problems, but especially for first time parents or parents without a large support network, they are problems that require much less energy to solve.
People will say it's because you can't beat you kids anymore, and lol. I got the shit whipped out of me and I stopped caring as soon as I realized that my parents weren't gonna beat me so hard they'd cripple me.
While it's a nice idea, I think the more realistic answer is that people have simply absorbed the mainstream culture's girls-good-boys-bad messaging.
Girls are easier for parents to handle for the very same reasons too. Less of a fight for parents.
Since spanking / hitting children has been banned, parents basically do not have an ultimate argument anymore. It is like: "I will scream until you buy me that thing." "Then I will remove your TV privileges and no birthday gifts." "Then I will just keep screaming." And then they win.
Kids win the blackmail contest these days because work-stressed parents just want silence, not screaming as blackmail. And our old ultimate argument "then you will get one on your face" is gone.
> Since spanking / hitting children has been banned, parents basically do not have an ultimate argument anymore. It is like: "I will scream until you buy me that thing." "Then I will remove your TV privileges and no birthday gifts." "Then I will just keep screaming." And then they win.
1. Most children aren't wired in such a way that physical violence is the only retaliation they care about. For example, for my daughter (5 years old), "if you keep screaming at me, I'll leave the room" is a pretty convincing argument, because she craves our attention. Often, this is sufficient to calm her down enough to actually talk about our dispute.
2. If you hit your children – even occasional, light spanking – you lose any credibility when you try to teach them how to resolve their conflicts without resorting to physical violence. In particular, conflicts with their annoying siblings who "totally started it".
> "2. If you hit your children – even occasional, light spanking – you lose any credibility when you try to teach them how to resolve their conflicts without resorting to physical violence. In particular, conflicts with their annoying siblings who "totally started it"."
Meh. This is by no means an absolute; plenty of people who were struck by their parents grow to be adults who don't *initiate* physical violence with other adults during conflicts.
Not to mention, there are a few circumstances where it is totally appropriate to *resolve* a conflict with physical violence or the threat of it.
If a kid is violent because of his parents, it's not because he was corporally punished by spanking. It's because he was outrageously abused. Your #2 is a myth. Kids know the difference between violent conflict and violent punishment from authority. And some boys really do only respect violence. I know that from experience.
2) perhaps it is lucky I had no siblings. At any rate, in my mind, "punishment from authority" and "violence between equals" were two totally different concept as a child. I did not think I have authority over children.
However our school had a lot of fights and yes they started as retaliation for insults. When we got bigger, we realized it is dangerous and thus turned polite.
I do not entirely support resolving all conflicts without violence, because if there is no credible threat of a knuckle sandwich, people will become incredibly impolite, disrespectful and verbally abusive. The culture of Budapest, Hungary is currently at this stage of development and it is bad. One journalist kept calling a very Christian journalist all kinds of gay, finally he gave him one slap and everybody sided with the slapped guy. Bad. That encourages such verbal behaviour.
The next thing that happens and it happened in e.g. American culture, that people notice this problem, and start heavily policing speech, which results in the well know walking on eggshells phenomenon.
Yeah, but I did not abandon my parents. When I turned into a bit bigger kid, I outgrew my selfishness, I understood what an absolutely shitty kid I was, and I admired their patience of every time explaining me 10 times why what I do is wrong and I just told them I don't give a shit, and then they turned to harder measures.
So it was just something temporary about my selfish phase.
How do you know? Is there, for example, evidence that parents who spanked their kids were less likely to be taken care of in their old age than parents who didn't, or any similar measure of a messed up relationship.
Too much violence can mess up a parent-child relationship. Some reasonable corporal punishment will not. It's an extremely useful tool for a lot of young boys that's being completely neglected because of effeteness and ignorant fear. Some boys need reminding of what the stakes actually are in the real world.
I've never encountered a girl to my knowledge who would be improved as a person with spanking(not that they don't exist), but there have been many, many, many boys in my professional experience.
> "my professional experience."
Looks like you're trying to stay anonymous, but do you mind sharing a vague, non-identifying description of your profession?
When I think of the people who most characteristically like to break contact with their parents, it's twenty-somethings who lean left, spend a lot of time on TikTok, and overuse words like "toxicity".
These strike me as the kind of people least likely to have been smacked as children.
Do they really via light spanking? I think that's nonsense.
One of the worst things about getting old, so far, is the way that perfectly normal things become niche preferences and then disappear altogether because "nobody wants that thing any more". I'm not being deliberately old-fashioned, I'm not talking about dated fashion choices, I'm talking about things with actual practical advantages, like smartphones that are small enough to fit in your pocket, or wired headphones, or sedans, or full-sized spare tyres. Apparently "nobody" wants these things any more, but I want these things! They were normal just ten years ago and now they're getting hard or impossible to find.
It's not like I'm actually old yet, I'm in my early 40s. I'm earning (and spending) far more money than I ever have before. You'd think that my age group's preferences are the ones that vendors work hardest to satisfy, since we're the ones with all the money. But apparently not?
(Meanwhile, outdated stuff that's actually genuinely stupid and impractical, like record players, you can buy again.)
The disappearance of the spare tire has more to do with mileage requirements than customer preference.
The iPhone SE is still being sold.
Wired headphones are terrible though. They tangle and snarl you up constantly. I never want to touch a pair ever again.
And I want a car that has windows you can hand crank up and down when the car isn't running.
My dad still has a '98 Toyota with manual window cranks and door locks, although even 26 years ago that was non-standard and he had to specially order it from the dealer. Other bespoke features include having to exit the vehicle and manually toggle each individual wheel to enter 4-wheel drive.
"Customer Preference" generally cheaper prices. No one wants a small spare tire, but everyone wants a cheaper car. Unless you have surplus money to spend on status items, in which case a retro record player is a popular choice (sadly, no one seem to think of full sized spare tires as a status indicator). Generally speaking, "practical" doesn't equal "high status", quite the opposite.
So--two populations of customers: low to mid socio-economic who prefer cheap things, and upper socio-economic (or just young) who prefer wasteful status indicators.
Neither seem to want small cell phones, full sized spare tires, or manual transmissions.
this is happening to physical media as a whole, sadly. good luck finding dvds of 75% of streaming series.
I hope to have at least one more chance to drive a car with a manual transmission before I die.
I am generally excited about the transition to EVs, and the gradual growth of cars with self-driving capabilities, but both of these things will accelerate the disappearance of the stick, and it's already nearly gone due to customer preference.
Thought of this after I made my first comment. Have you looked into renting a car with a standard transmission for a few days?
My wife and I each have sedans with standard transmissions, plus an old Miata with a stick for summer touring on S curve rich, low traffic roads. Top down, one eye on the tach, down shifting into the corners, alert for the occasional deer or moose.
Good gawd, driving is so much more engaging and just plain fun with a standard.
New ones are definitely harder to come by now.
I go through a bit of initial confusion when I rent a car with an automatic transmission, clomping futilely with my left foot for the clutch pedal. Muscle memory.
I’ll hold off on an EV till the batteries improve enough to hold up well in -20 and below.
We also lost many devices with physical controls in favor of touchscreens or apps. Car consoles are probably the most visible example, at least here in the US. It takes an order of magnitude more focus to change the AC settings when you have to hit the right series of little icons on a screen, with no physical reference points, when you're going 60mph.
We also lost devices that are predictable. Now you might be getting notifications, which is annoying, but worse are updates. Features you've come to rely on can disappear overnight, with new, useless features taking their place, all without any action from you. (I had a pair of headphones pretty much burn out their batteri due to a faulty firmware update; Sony replaced them out of warranty but, still, quite a surprise!)
How about the web? Static sites are old fashioned. But they were fast and relied on common browser affordances. Now a site requires 1-2mib of assets, _compressed_, and so much compute that it chokes high end mobile devices or, on monstrous 24 core desktops, still takes >2s to load (or reach LCP), and boasts an interface that I guess is satisfying to designers but not actual users.
(I'm in my 30s and I agree v. strongly OPs view)
Edit: Oh yeah, Google search results. I guess no one cares that the top results are now ads or SEO garbage so that's what we get. I've reported to appending "reddit" to my queries to cut through the garbage, somewhat, and I'm trialing a new-ish search engine, Kagi, which requires you to pay a subscription but doesn't feature ads. Not sure how they deal with SEO, but it looks promising.
> Static sites are old fashioned. But they were fast and relied on common browser affordances. Now a site requires 1-2mib of assets, _compressed_, and so much compute that it chokes high end mobile devices or, on monstrous 24 core desktops, still takes >2s to load (or reach LCP), and boasts an interface that I guess is satisfying to designers but not actual users.
Ugh, I hate this so much. If you use uBlock or uMatrix or anything like that, it's maddening how something like 80% of sites won't even load unless you let them rape your computer with 20 different javascripts now. Any sites I've had done for me / my businesses over the years, I always try to do only HTML and CSS for just this reason, but that's increasingly in the far tail of being countertrend.
On the search thing, may I recommend SearXNG? Free, open source, aggregates from multiple sources with no ads, can use a browser extension or a URL. Since it's federated, there's several url's you can use - I personally use paulgo.io for most of my searches. I've been using it for a year or so, and am quite happy with it.
Nice, I'll check it out.
Im happy with the experience that uBlock and pi-hole give me, though I think I visit few sites that don't work in the way you describe. Maybe I've self-selected into substack/blogs/specialty sites (eg. outdoorgearlab).
SearXNG, looks interesting. I'll give it a shot.
Another interesting search engine is https://wiby.me/ which advertises itself as "the search engine for the classic web." It's designed to search only home pages, blogs, and other static content. As a result it's not really that useful but it's at least interesting.
"640k ought to be enough for anybody" actually had some basis in reality. I knew a guy who said, when they came out with a 64k mainframe computer in the 60s, that they didn't know what they were going to do with it.
Now it takes about 4.6k to run a "Hello World" program in C#.
I want a smaller phone that fits in my pocket, and I'm 23. It's not about age.
If you're in the Apple ecosystem and can afford, get an iPhone mini 13! It's great, and has support for 3 more years. Around $300-400 on Backmarket depending on condition.
I have a Zenfone 9 currently, I'm pretty happy with it. Not the biggest fan of Apple except for work devices.
I'm 44, and totally agree; I want a phone small enough to fit in my pockets (and easily be held/typed on in my hands which are proportionate to being 5'2") and I love wired headphones. Hell, I use a gen 3 iPod when doing tasks whilst secretly listening to podcasts because I don't have to take it out of my pocket to pause and play; I can just feel the position of the clickwheel through the cloth!
I think hatchbacks are quite a bit more useful than traditional sedans, but that's a quibble.
If you're looking for earphones, they don't get much cheaper than this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/162207389285 . Shitty quality, but there's a lot of them to use / lose.
I hear you (being in a similar boat in a few respects), but I haven't had much trouble finding wired headphones
Yeah it's not actually tricky finding wired headphones, but they're either really cheap or really high end professional ones.
What you can't get is a pair of decent noise-cancelling headphones. Which is weird, because my number one use case for noise-cancelling headphones is when I'm on a plane, and the plane's IFE system is usually wired.
Also good luck finding a phone to plug your wired headphones into.
I use Sony headphones. They're wireless by default, but have a jack port, so you can connect them with jack-to-jack cable. Is this good enough for your needs?
I just looked up a random pair of headphones out of curiosity, and it seems like they're still selling wired headphones (https://www.bose.com/p/noise-cancelling-headphones/quietcomfort-acoustic-noise-cancelling-headphones/QC-HEADPHONEARN.html?dwvar_QC-HEADPHONEARN_color=SANDSTONE&quantity=1).
Finding a phone with a headphone jack is definitely a challenge nowadays though.
In a letter to the weaponization of government committee yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg shed some light on the role of free speech and censorship at Facebook. The admissions aren't surprising to those who have been paying attention, especially in light of the Twitter files, but I think this letter is still noteworthy. You can read the actual letter here:
https://x.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/1828201780544504064
"In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree."
First off, this is direct confirmation that the Biden-Harris administration wanted to use Facebook as an end-run around the Constitution to censor people without running afoul of the 1st Amendment. You can debate whether and to what degree censorship is acceptable as a tool for enforcing social norms, but in the US the government is explicitly forbidden from censorship of speech. Even the limited exceptions to the 1st Amendment would not apply in the case of humor or satire.
A recent SCOTUS decision did in fact uphold this as legal in the case of Twitter, on the basis that the federal government must be able to advocate for its interests without that act itself being considered coercive. I find this rather dubious considering the power differential between the parties. Rather like a CEO pressuring an intern into sex, and "expressing a lot of frustration" if they don't agree.
Another important takeaway is that Facebook "demoted" the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the 2020 election. Here Zuckerberg says "the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation", so this was also done at the behest of the federal government, who just coincidentally happened to be lying about the whole Russian disinformation thing. This was a direct effort to influence an election by withholding relevant information from the public.
>A recent SCOTUS decision did in fact uphold this as legal in the case of Twitter, on the basis that the federal government must be able to advocate for its interests without that act itself being considered coercive.
I mean, that does seem like an issue. The CDC has an interest in getting timely and accurate information out during a pandemic, and doing that will involve going to news outlets and social media sites and saying "how can you help us distribute this information?" or "hey, there are going to be a lot of panicked people searching for information about COVID-19, it would be best for everyone's health if they saw actual professionals as the first result instead of people who will tell them that vaccines are the work of the devil and that they should drink bleach instead."
(And those companies might be interested in cooperating! Sure, they're generally amoral money-maximizers, but I imagine people working at those companies might feel a tiny bit guilty if they hear that their choice of what to signal-boost could literally get people killed.)
Like, if you say "no, even asking about it is too coercive," then you basically shut down any sort of cooperation with media outlets - the CDC can't do anything more than post on their Twitter account and hope that the "marketplace of ideas" operates faster than COVID can spread.
I wish Zuck had been more specific in his letter or provided examples. I can see a reasonable case where the CDC sends a letter to Facebook asking them to do certain things. Facebook can agree and say that seems reasonable, or tell them to pound sand without adverse consequences. But in the Twitter files for example, the FBI asking your company to censor certain information and expressing their disappointment if you don't follow through is entirely different. There's a reasonable expectation that the FBI can make your life miserable if you don't do what they want. Same thing with the Facebook letter and pressure from White House staff; pissing off the White House is very different from ignoring the CDC.
Exactly. Without any specific information, the best we could say is "this sounds potentially bad".
Where the government is concerned, “potentially bad” means “will be bad”.
It would appear from Zuckerberg's reply that the Feds are "Boy who cried 'Wolf!'" here.
viz. Facebook are well aware that the Feds lied to them over the Hunter Biden laptop story, and as a result are never again going to believe similar claims from the government, without independent confirmation by a fact checker they trust/
I feel this is a classic case of the coverup being worse than the conspiracy....
Hunter BIden has a drug problem? Meh.
The US government is coercing Twitter and Facebook to supress the story, in violation of the First Amendment? Big deal.
(yeah, yeah, As well as the drug problem - which looks kind of confirmed at this point, there is the question of whether the Biden family were using the Ukraine war as an opportunity to extract personal bribes from the Ukrainian government,
Whether that[s true or not, we know for sure that Nancy Pelosi is investing in AI-related companies despite being in an position to influence regulation of those companies, which looks kind of corrupt,)
Hunter being a loser was hardly news by 2020. The much more damning part of the laptop was a) Exposing financial transactions between Hunter and foreign nationals with ties to both the Russian and Chinese governments, and b) Implicating Joe in the influence peddling. The laptop made it clear Joe at least had intimate knowledge of Hunter's business, if not outright involvement. Censoring this information was much more politically beneficial to the Biden family than stopping Hunter's image from being (even more) sullied.
> I find this rather dubious considering the power differential between the parties.
"That's a nice social media network you have there."
"We're friends, right?"
There will be no consequences, of course.
It is genuinely exasperating how mayfly-like people's memories are, except for very specific things activist journalists want punished.
> I find this rather dubious considering the power differential between the parties. Rather like a CEO pressuring an intern into sex, and "expressing a lot of frustration" if they don't agree.
Probably a good place to start would be at least banning overt retaliation, like the Disney case.
Disney entered into a contract with the state of Florida to incorporate a special commercial zone, and Florida later canceled that contract. There is an argument that Florida did so for malicious reasons to punish Disney for criticizing a legislative bill. However, this is quite different from the federal government pressuring social media companies to censor the exchange of information among private individuals.
Yeah, it is very different. Florida *actually* retaliated against speech, whereas the government at best had an implied threat to potentially do in the future what Florida actually did in real life.
Look at it this way. Florida had the right to cancel the special contract with Disney at any time for any reason, as long as the legislature voted to do so and the governor signed it. If DeSantis had said something about it giving unfair tax breaks, no one outside of Disney would have cared. The act itself was legal and proper. However, in the context of punishing Disney for their criticism of the Florida government, it is clearly a wrongful punishment of speech and has chilling effects.
In the other case, the federal government pressuring social media companies to censor private individuals could never have a legal and proper basis. That's why I think the two cases are categorically different, even though they both involve restricting free speech. Florida had the proper authority to cancel the Disney contract, but they did so for malicious reasons. The fedgov never had proper authority to censor, and they did so for malicious reasons.
The IRS has the right to audit your tax returns this year. Or next year, or the year after that. If the IRS first says that they are going to audit your taxes every year unless you shut up about something you are talking about that annoys them, and then actually does so, is your response, "the act itself was legal and proper"?
The act is not legal and proper if it is done for an illegal reason. Motives matter in law.
And frequently people violate this sort of law and get away with it because they can conceal their motives and the courts don't have telepathy. But the ones dumb enough to say "this is the illegal reason I'm doing the thing", we get to call them out as the crooks they are.
> The act is not legal and proper if it is done for an illegal reason.
I know, and I agree with this in my earlier comment. My argument is there exists a fundamental difference between a) actions with a legitimate basis but wrongful motive, and b) actions with no legitimate basis. In your example, a) is the IRS auditing you every year because they don't like you. Maybe b) is the IRS arbitrarily deciding to show up at your house and seize everything of value. I don't think either action is acceptable, in case that wasn't clear.
Before we hastily change the subject to something seen to be more friendly to the left, do you have any opinions on what the government was doing with regards to COVID content and the Hunter Biden laptop story?
I'd have to see the details and context behind a particular incident to make an informed judgement.
There are a bunch of details and context in the original post we're responding to.
How about this? You pick the one specific incident that you think is most clearly outrageous, and I'll research it and get back to you.
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Edit: I checked the link in the OP, but it's no more specific than what they already quoted, which does not have any details or context (for example, it does not actually give any specific examples of what the government attempted to censor).
I'm not even saying this to shut you down or something. I'm trying to be helpful here. The first part of the letter certainly sounds like it *could* be bad. There's just no way to actually judge for ourselves since it's only a vague description.
I really don't think anything more is necessary, assuming that Zuck's letter accurately describes the situation and isnt leaving out significant details. He states that the government asked him to censor content including "humor and memes." There should be no conceivable situation where the government requests that "humor and menes" be censored; there is no need to litigate the details.
Similarly, the Hunter Biden laptop story was not a matter of national security; it was embarrassing information politically damaging to the party in power. Again assuming that national security isn't involved -- and we are talking about, like, troop movements in a war or something -- there should be no situation where the FBI is urging such things be censored. No need to litigate the details.
I'm curious if you disagree with these statements.