William Meng

@EasternSteppe @orthonormalist Even Japan during WWII, which had insanely high casualty tolerance, tried very hard to avoid getting every son in a single household killed. Kamikaze pilots were almost never recruited from eldest sons, who were seen as being responsible for taking care of their parents

@orthonormalist They’re culturally not going to be as hesitant about casualties regardless. There’s a lot of only children in the Russian and Ukrainian ranks

I think a lot about the incentives around China's 4-2-1 family shape and that 80% of enlisted and 70% of officers are only children

@EasternSteppe @orthonormalist Confucian cultures tend to flip drastically on their casualty tolerance as birth rate drops. At 3+ kids they have very high casualty tolerance, but at 1 they have almost no tolerance, since lineage extinction is far more religiously devastating for Confucianism than others

English would make the most sense, since it’s an analytic language and therefore easiest for non-native speakers to learn. Non-analytic lingua francas are unsustainable for non-native and non-elite learners. Which was why Latin became a priest class language by the Middle Ages and French was the language of diplomacy but not trade (which was English)

@woke8yearold Adopt English, Latin or German and run with it. This is the future of Europe that wishes to thrive.

Most languages have no reason to exist and should die off. This includes most languages in Europe

@QuasLacrimas @WrappedInThFlag There are plenty of people fluent in both Mandarin and English, which are as far apart linguistically as it gets. Meanwhile, Tibetan is literally a part of the Sino-Tibetan language family

@WrappedInThFlag It's possible to be multi-fluent in multiple closely related languages. Not in Turkic+Mandarin or Tibetan+Mandarin

A person can only have one main language. No one who goes to school from pre-K through 12th grade learning history, literature, science, and mathematics in one language is truly fluent in another. The document indeed says Mandarin will be the primary vehicle of instruction and testing, as all the English language news stories reported. The MSM seem to have gotten the story exactly correct.

I’d argue that Silicon Valley is one of the only places in America where that aristocratic model of elite selection still exists To train an elite to possess both strategic thinking and execution, you need to give them independent command while young, since any system where you have to “rise thru the ranks” tend to select solely for execution and filter out independent strategic thinking Where else in America, other than SV, are 22 yr olds regularly given millions of dollars to go manage on their own, instead of needing to spend a decade in the junior ranks?

How would Andrew Jackson fare in the Palo Alto system? The Founders had what we might see as a more “aristocratic” way of choosing the next crop of ambitious bright young men - it was much more relational and interpersonal. An eminent man would notice a younger one, and bring him up in the world. Note that this didn’t mean only men in the same circles - Hamilton was brought in from nothing because of demonstrated brilliance at a variety of practical tasks. But perhaps this kind of system is simply impossible in a polity the size of the modern United States, and of course it requires first that you have a current elite worth a damn.

I have a longer essay on the detriments of the Palo Alto/Silicon Valley ethos coming out soon in @firstthingsmag but there was something I didn’t have room for that I want to expand on here (so forgive me for length). There is this whole cliched set of lies about SV, startup culture, etc: that essentially SV is a bunch of brilliant, out-of-the-box thinking guys in garages making their millions on risk and great ideas. This is completely opposite of what the Palo Alto system actually creates.

@RodKalec @Though_The_Fog @Devon_Eriksen_ But that’s literally what happens. A rich guy doesn’t spend 100% of his wealth consuming luxuries. He takes a small portion for his own consumption and invests the rest of his wealth in companies led by other competent leaders

@Though_The_Fog @Devon_Eriksen_ I agree that the great leader should be allowed to coast after his success. The thing is that he should only take the resources he needs to coast and let a motivated fresh leader take his place. Its not about owing or not owing, its about us achieving the most we can as a society

This is a common capitalist-vs-socialist argument: who is actually providing the majority value, the investors and owners, or the line workers? When the question is asked this way, it becomes impossible to objectively answer. Because "value" is a subjective quality. It means "thing you give a fuck about". To what this argument really boils down to is one group saying "I care more about line work", and another saying "I care more about investment dollars", which is like arguing about whether or not horsies are pretty. But if you can't answer a question, what you do is rephrase it properly. So, instead of "who creates the value", let us ask instead, "Who is the bottleneck?" In other words, what is the scarcest component that prevents more value from being created? It is workers? Or investors? Let's look at SpaceX. SpaceX makes reusable rocket boosters. It is the only entity in the entire known universe that does so. It also, relatedly, provides the majority of Earth's transfer-to-orbit capability. In doing so, it employs 5,563 engineers, and one Elon Musk. So, who is the bottleneck? Who is harder to get? Well, there are lots of groups of 5,563 engineers in the world, but there is only one Elon Musk. And there is only one company making reusable rocket boosters. That seems pretty telling. But someone on the socialist side of the argument might point out that Elon Musk provided $90 million dollars to found SpaceX. And there are lots of people with that much money in the world, but only one company making... Well, you get the picture. But this argument is incomplete. It only shows that Elon Musk isn't the critical component if and only if $90 million is the only value Elon Musk provides. Which, of course, is baloney. The value Elon Musk provides is technical leadership. He selected the team. He organized the team. He provided the team with its mission. And he leads the team in that mission. That's the unique, irreplaceable component. Elon Musk is the only person who has thus far had the power to build and lead a team to do this. The significance of him owning the $90 million dollars is only that it had to come from somewhere, and, since it came from him, he had the power to control the company. The rare component isn't labor OR capital. It's leadership. This is why capitalism is better than socialism every time. If the workers own the means of production, how do get inspired, game-changing leadership? You can't have 5,563 leaders. You have to have one. Or at most a handful. What do you do? Elect them? When has that ever worked in the past? A guy with $90 million to throw at a project might not be a great leader. There's nothing about having $90M that guarantees technical leadership ability. Hell, Kim Kardashian could easily scrape together $90M to start a rocket company. And it would fail, hard and immediately. But the thing about a guy with $90M is that while he's not guaranteed to be a great technical leader, there's a chance that he is. Because at least he's competent or well-connected enough to have $90M. And he believed in what he's doing enough to lay down that bet. Lots of companies, started under capitalist principles, by rich investors, fail because those investors couldn't provide the right leadership. This is not a bug of capitalism. It's a feature. Those companies are supposed to fail. Capitalism punishes poor leadership, and rewards good leadership. Doesn't always work that way when there's a government to put its thumb on the scales, but that's what capitalism does. Theoretically, the owner-workers of a socialist company could elect a good leader, but there's two problems with this. Number one, they've almost never managed this in practice. Number two, they still need $90M. Where are they going to get it? A guy with $90M isn't going to throw it into an enterprise controlled by the workers. He expects to own what he pays for, and ownership is meaningless without control. And sure, the socialist state can fund the company, but then the state expects to control the company, and now your technical leadership is a bunch of bureaucrats. Good luck with that one. So, no capitalism doesn't guarantee good leadership, or success. It's a toss-up. But it's the only system that possibly can. Everything else is a guaranteed loser. So, no, billionaires are 100%, full stop, not the reason you are poor. In fact, if more of us were doing better, there would be more billionaires.

Lol as someone who actually went to Tsinghua affiliated middle school, yeah agreed that prep schools in tier 2 American cities are the way to go. Far less competition, far more chill, and far better humanities education. One can always get the technical skills in college, but intuitions around history and culture need to be started young and leads to far better wisdom in adulthood

It's still cheaper than getting into a good high school in Beijing Rui Ma. My neighbors in Beijing bought a closet for nearly $1 million USD so their daughter can go to Tsinghua-affiliated high school... so she could one day get a shot at getting into Tsinghua. Surely it's cheaper to do that in Palo Alto and enroll at Stanford. Which is what I recommended to them, or even something a lot cheaper in any Tier-2 city in the US, but they said "but how do we even start doing that. We don't even know where to start." So what you are seeing is a tiny percentage of the total.

Just read a piece about Chinese “study moms” uprooting their entire lives to move to Palo Alto (or other Silicon Valley suburb with a "top public school") so their kids can “climb the ivy,” and honestly I cannot roll my eyes back far enough. Parents give up their careers, entire lives, taking care of their own parents, to land in these hyper-competitive school districts they can barely afford because the entire meaning of their existence is which college their 17-year-old gets into. Nothing else matters, just the logo on the sweatshirt. I am sympathetic to a degree. Chinese K–12 is suffocating. It is for sure one of the main reasons I would never live there full-time. But it most definitely feels like people flee the gaokao just to throw their kids into a slightly different exam cult here. Same anxiety, different packaging. Instead of homework until midnight 28 days out of the month, it’s “research internships” and 14 AP classes and whatever Palo Alto elites and wannabes thinks passes for “standing out.” What is sad is how little homework some parents do on what it’s actually like to be an American teenager — the teen depression numbers alone should give anyone pause — yet they still make Ivy admissions the entire family mission. That’s so much pressure for such a strangely small goal. Especially when the Ivies are basically artificially scarce brands whose long-term value is highly uncertain in the age of AI. And the whole “kids can follow their passion here” narrative is retarded. Sure, you don't have to grind away at just homework sets like you do in China. But turning a passion into an actual income is still brutally hard cuz hello we live in a capitalist economy. Just because your kid can do jazz band doesn’t mean the system will support them being a musician when rent is $4,000 a month. Immigrating for your kid and giving up your high powered job to be a part-time counter girl at Bloomingdale's is not a huge act of love. It is retarded. When will perfectly good middle income families stop narrowing their entire life narrative into “please let this sacrifice be redeemed by an Ivy acceptance?" (I think most of these families fail though because they don't seem to have done any work to understand legacies, donors, and same-school competition, and I'm ... not sad about that.)

@lightman_83 @antonosika YC still has a 5% hit rate for >$1B valuations in the past 10 years, which is pretty insane for a pre-seed fund

> be non-technical > build a product with lovable and get users > get into YC

Fair Capital allocation is pretty non-trivial, and scaling returns linearly with fund size is pretty hard/near impossible But even a $3B valuation would still be a fund-returning win for a pre-seed investment, and B2B SaaS is can hit the $1-10B range pretty well even if it can't hit $100B as much as consumer

That wouldn’t be a problem under higher fertility conditions, since multiple children (and their grandchildren) can share the burden. If an old couple has 3-4 children and 10+ adult grandchildren, it would be much easier to have both the surplus manpower and finances to handle care duties If a family can’t assemble enough extended kin compared to immigrants despite having lived in this country for generations, that’s a culture issue

@CigSmokingMill @FistedFoucault It is hard to do when you require 2 working adults to pay for their own home. Minorities get around this by chain migrating more relatives who don't work and/or generous government welfare.

Something has changed over the course of the past 15-20 years. It seems like more and more older people are being moved into full-day care where the costs pretty much destroy whatever wealth they managed to accumulate over the course of their lives. No inheritance unless rich.

@lightman_83 @antonosika The more recent wins are definitely more B2B, so there’s less household name recognition

Easy, just let insurance companies fund it, then the safety incentives are aligned

@zerovx @beffjezos Effective accelerationism =/= effective altruism Marc Andreessen specifically attacked effective altruists as a bunch of redistributionists in disguise

@beffjezos what's the goal? isn't pushing American tech just as much a psyop as suggesting that "we must win against China" the ethos is acceleration. we must accelerate the timeline. and may the best man win, i guess.

Feels coordinated. Psyop afoot.

Because Tech Right and MAGA are fundamentally 2 different blocs with different interests This is a 3 sided contest: Left vs Tech Right vs MAGA When they assumed the Left was completely defeated, Tech Right and MAGA went to war with each other To maintain coalition unity, the Left needs to be a credible (but beatable) opposition

Kamala’s drop-off with Indian Americans, Hindus in particular, was screaming opportunity for the GOP to court a fresh wave of high-achieving immigrants who who value opportunity and family over identity politics and actually buy into the American Dream. Instead, GOP let the groyper crowd hijack the party and leadership’s shrug at the toxicity shows they’ve chosen a small, energized base over a larger, diverse one. Consequently, those crucial moderate voters are now being compelled to either support the Democratic Politburo or abstain entirely. Question is, you gonna fight for inclusivity, or just let the groypers hijack the whole show?

A very loud group on the Right said, “Indians go home,” and so many of them did—to the Democratic Party.

@Richywest @DudeMetaX @MarioNawfal Sympathy without boundaries becomes weakness Empathy without boundaries becomes omniscient, and you can choose to be empathetic without being sympathetic

@DudeMetaX @MarioNawfal Empathy without boundaries becomes weakness.

🚨 WHEN FEELINGS KILL COMMON SENSE Being nice isn’t bad... until it breaks your country. Some people care so much about everyone’s feelings, they forget about facts, safety, and their own neighbors. This is called suicidal empathy. Basically, being so compassionate it turns self-destructive. Sounds wild, but it’s real. Gad Saad says we’re overloaded with emotion, treating every stranger like family, even criminals or enemies, because it feels good. But feelings aren’t policies, and this kind of kindness is backfiring hard. Take U.S. borders: in 2023, a record 2.5 million illegal crossings swamped the system. It’s not just overcrowding. Over 15,000 non-citizens were arrested for serious crimes in one year. Fentanyl smuggling? Also up. And guess what? Those costs hit taxpayers: $150 billion a year, enough to help veterans or disaster victims. But sure, let's keep pretending open borders are just "nice." Then there's the “defund the police” mess. Meant to help communities, it led to fewer arrests and way more murders. A 70% jump in Minneapolis alone. The people hurt most? The same communities it claimed to protect. Bonus chaos: in the UK, people got arrested for tweets. That’s where feelings-over-facts leads. DEI programs? Started with good intentions. Now they’re breaking schools and jobs. A Forbes study said they mostly help rich elites, not everyday people. Harvard’s diversity policies even lowered team performance by 12%. In companies, DEI training actually made bias worse. All because we’re scared to say, “Let’s hire the best person.” It gets worse. All this empathy-for-everyone has made people stop trusting each other... down 20% since 2000. This isn’t about being heartless. It’s about using your brain with your heart. It's called “reasoned empathy,” where compassion meets common sense. Help people, yes... but stop lighting your own house on fire to keep others warm. Source: @GadSaad, @elonmusk, Gonsalves, G, Kiskin K, Heritage, RAND, NYP, @Grok Imagine

@OzarkKid @MarioNawfal Empathy is morally neutral, it doesn’t imply compassion. It just means simulating their mental state With the knowledge from that mental simulation, you can choose to help them, persuade them, sell to them, or destroy them, depending on your interests

I would argue that empathy is rarely good. Sympathy and actionable compassion are good if the action is taken with wisdom. But most empathy is emotional plagiarism. Feel your own feelings and be compassionate through generosity based on the joy it gives you to care for individual humans. Compassion cannot be delivered through governmental systems in a sustainable and meaningful way.

It baffles my mind how leftwing the average Asian in America is, since I literally can’t relate to how they think despite being one of them It’s a failure of Asian parenthood to be unable to instill the Confucian virtues of duty, lineage, and hierarchy into one’s children Public schools or immigration are no excuse for parental failure I went to a fairly liberal private school in an immigrant family and yet I became even more conservative than my parents

This is more commonplace than people realize. Asian immigrants are largely conservative, but their children become extremely leftwing because of the: >language barrier between parents and children >overemphasis on higher education captured by leftwing ideologues >desire to fit into the perceived cultural hegemony >astroturfed boba lib celebs who become the face and spokespeople of the Asian-American community. Asian parents' primary concern is academic achievement and economic status so much to the point that they will forego passing down their values to their children and then are pikachu shocked.png when they come back gay race communists. They assume if their children have decent grades or are making decent money that they are fine, totally unaware of the kind of content they're consuming and how they are being radicalized. This isn't said enough, but immigration is actually a huge contributing factor to tearing families apart, distancing them from each other literally but also relationally.

@KyleTibbitts We won’t get Mamdanis running cities everywhere cuz housing shortage is a regional - not national - issue Plenty of cheap houses in the South and Midwest

New success metric for the country: drive the median homebuyer age down as aggressively as possible. This directly impacts fertility rates and wealth creation for the next generation — and if you don’t, you’ll get Mamdanis running cities everywhere.