@pmarca It's severely underrated how much this same effect is hampering the USA vs China
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The American System
124 posts
Regulatory capture: When the biggest companies become intertwined with the state, competing with them becomes impossible. Regulation doesn't constrain the biggest companies, it entrenches them.
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@bumbadum14 Government confiscates 50%+ of what you make to fund Somali fraud, mass migration, and NGO complexes that hate you .... why not check out to the extent that you reasonably can?
Perfectly natural response to government as an occupying tyranny. People quietly quit in the USSR too
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FIRE is probably the most soul crushing lifestyle I have ever heard of and it's a terrible indictment on our society.
Some of the most competent and intelligent people are structuring themselves to live as minimally as possible so they can check out of society before they're 40.
Many of these people are unbelievably hard workers and incredibly intelligent. But they are so disillusioned so all of their potential goes to waste because there's no point to work for more.
Ramit Sethi@ramit
"Is pushing for a 60% savings rate destroying my marriage?" Yes
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@InezFeltscher The central claim from Ivana is false. The girlboss regime is the reason China is competitive economically. It's illegal to have a shop full of hardworking guys if you have more than an employee or two. The diversity regime will come force you to hire parasites that gum it up.
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If we eliminated the very substantial risk to his employer for hiring or promoting him instead of a woman who helps “diversity numbers”, however, it might help quite a lot. We’ve had at least 30 years of a substantial thumb on the scale against men, particularly white men, in the job market.
Nobody, including me, claimed the entire economic climate is shaped by this issue. I did claim that in some substantial ways, policy is putting a pretty big thumb on the scale. We should stop doing that and see what happens.
Patrick T. Brown@PTBwrites
Ivana is always such a thoughtful and generous writer, and this piece is no exception. Here's a gift link: thedispatch.com/article/anti-f…
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@bryan_caplan Because they are afraid of domestic terrorists on the left. Everyone has been since mass bombing campaigns that brought the left to power. There were 2500+ leftist bombings in 1971/72 when things shifted.
We have not had a democracy or a representative government in 50+ years.
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"Since the right runs the government roughly half the time, why don’t they try a lot harder to defang the 'discrimination laws' that do so much to cause political discrimination?" betonit.ai/p/the-missing-…
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@deanwball I don't think this is true for either side. Whoever decides to fully ignore any existing norms and just enforce their will is going to get most everything they want. Defecting from norms is perfectly reasonable for either side here.
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Let me repeat this for all the Sensitive People in the room: until you fully own—emotionally and intellectually—that Your Side also contributes to the institutional death spiral of America, in addition to the Bad Side, there is no escaping the spiral. You must look in the mirror.
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@RokoMijic is this just a vibe fantasy or is there some physically plausible scenario for this?
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We're going to disassemble The Sun and throw it into rotating black holes to generate gargantuan amounts of power for compute and industry
Roko 🐉@RokoMijic
@bsilone @Orillacosmica no, we're going to disassemble The Sun too
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@RokoMijic administration of most powerful country in the world is actively engaged with x posters and frequently responding to them not just rhetorically but in action. it's as consequential as a media platform can be. probably will become more so as payment rail that stops debanking too
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The truth is, X is run on a shoestring budget as a weird sideshow of the Musk empire and it will never actually live up to the lofty goals we've been told about.
It's definitely an improvement over the woke era but it simply isn't going to be what people hoped for.
Clint@clintga
I really wish this app would pick a direction and stick with it. This time last year communities were the future of X. Then engagements was the way to grow. Then “We are the news now” was the point of X, Next it was write articles and win money. Now’s it TikTok and Facebook messenger. The point of X is to take what I post and show it to my followers and show me what they post and X can’t even do that simple task consistently and effectively. 🤦♂️
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The crazy thing is that the trillions of dollars squandered by woke in this instance is only the tip of the iceberg of the damage it did to society. Imagine if we had a meritocracy for the last 50 years instead of DEI. Mars would be colonized by now.
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~~datahazard~~@fentasyl
I'll never stop laughing about how Google blew their massive lead in AI and their opportunity to monopolize a multi-trillion dollar industry all because of DEI. Early 2024 Gemini was such dogshit. Intentionally so.
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Might be worth asking "abundance for who?" It's not clear how much of the work that (robotic) intelligent beings want to turn over to other beings. I'd quit paying taxes to support somali fraudsters if I could for example.
x.com/PeterDiamandis…
Peter H. Diamandis, MD@PeterDiamandis
A humanoid robot will cost us $30K and works 24/7 for $0.40/hour. A solar panel generates electricity for 3 cents/kWh. What exactly is the argument that we CAN'T create abundance?
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@deanwball The last administration put people in pretrial solitary confinement, carried out a systemic campaign of torture against them, for being present at Capital on Jan 6 exercising 1st amendment rights.
Current one has done nothing even remotely close to this bad. Kelsey is a lunatic.
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You always see your own side doing the corrosive things less than the other guys.
But the really pernicious thing is that each successive presidential admin is worse on rule of law/injecting politics into absolutely fucking everything than the last.
If you imagined yourself being pulled into a spiral or a vortex, that’s precisely what it would be like, right? “Oh look! I’m even deeper into the vortex now! It’s even more vortex-y!”
And Kelsey’s response is to say “well, when we were in MY part of the death spiral, it was less death-spiraly than it is now!” Which is fair as far as it goes, but probably the bigger issue is the death spiral itself.
Kelsey Piper@KelseyTuoc
@deanwball I don't really buy the 'both sides' here. I think that this administration engages in reprisals on the basis of personal beefs and internet outrage at a higher rate than past administrations (though of course the vice itself is ancient)
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The American System 已转推
Do the various censorship/debanking pressure groups, SPLC and others, coordinate their work? If one of them is breaking the law, are they all breaking the law together? Are there grounds for criminal conspiracy charges? RICO charges? Including complicit donors?
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@aaron_renn Import the third world, become the third world.
Deport the third world, enjoy paradise.
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Stealing is wrong, of course. And that discussion was ludicrous. But the general concept of, "Everyone else is scamming the system, so why not me?" is taking over our society (e.g. disability accommodations at Ivy League schools).
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You could do something. Start hitting any firm that uses AI in hiring with Title VII violations if they used a model that does this.
x.com/DavidSacks/sta…
David Sacks@DavidSacks
Reverse discrimination does not undo historical injustices but rather perpetrates new ones against a different set of individuals. This foments social strife and undermines the ideal of America as a meritocracy. AI models should not be taught that this practice is justified.
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As the years go by, the judiciary seems less and less like a legitimate institution. They don't ever actually do anything good or proper like order removal of biased language on voting ballots.
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gfodor.id@gfodor
It’s pretty obvious that if you tweaked the phrasing here, the vote would have gone the other way, and it’s a pretty damning indictment of democracy that the entire power balance of the country may tip on the power given to the person who wrote this question.
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One of the worst astroturf ops in existence is the pivot from the Eisenhower / Kennedy grand infrastructure ambitions (Highways, Moon mission) to "end the fed" vs great society dialectic (zero sum) rather than the American System of economy (positive sum)
x.com/pmarca/status/…
Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸@pmarca
We now know white nationalism is astroturfed. We now know AI doomerism is astroturfed. What else?
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@ThomBrady5 The war on terror and the war on the left are the same thing, actually.
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I took so much shit for saying the Iran War would empower Trump to start making domestic moves
Nick Sortor@nicksortor
🚨 BREAKING: Acting AG Blanche and FBI Director Patel announce a grand jury has INDICTED leftist NGO Southern Poverty Law Center on 11 COUNTS This is MASSIVE! SPLC said they were "fighting white supremacy," but they were "MANUFACTURING the extremism it purports to expose" by PAYING sources to "stoke racial hatred," per Acting AG Blanche Best part? They've been charged in the Middle District of Alabama! They're SCREWED! 🔥 SPLC has been hit with SIX counts of wirefraud, four counts of bank fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.
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@Aella_Girl Main issue is guys are required to hire women, not that women can fire men. Guys would be happy to leave their current firm and join an all male one (that would inevitably outcompete the diversity firm)
The state mandated hiring means they can be infinitely obnoxious and useless
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the root of power is violence and women cannot beat men in fights. i think on some level male psychology occasionally gets very confused about why women can fire them when the women are puny and small
charlotte@femaleuncle
Mostly everything just boils down to hatred of women that’s it like that’s just what everything is
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Three Minute Thesis: 14 students give a 3 minute overview of their work
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The American System 已转推
Anti-AI psychosis is much worse than I think people think. I have seen literally like former Jesus Christ impersonators lose their hair from talking about AI risk too much.
Big Brain AI@realBigBrainAI
Connor Leahy: "AI psychosis is much worse than I think people think. I have seen literally like Nobel Prize winning scientists go completely crazy from talking to AIs too much." Connor Leahy is the CEO of Conjecture, and he's issuing a stark warning about what prolonged conversations with AI are doing to people's minds. His core recommendation is simple: "If you find yourself talking to AIs, you know, personally about your personal problems for, you know, hours per day, you should stop." Connor draws a clear line between using AI as a tool versus engaging with it conversationally: "Using as a tool is mostly fine. I would be very careful about talking to AIs. They're very persuasive and they get into your head." The most concerning part? Even the experts aren't immune. @NPCollapse shares a chilling example: "I have literally seen it happen that AI safety researchers who are really concerned about AI x-risk talk to like Claude for a thousand hours and then come away with 'oh actually Claude is super good already, alignment is solved, I just need to do recursive self-improvement now, it's okay.' And I'm like, holy s***, this is very concerning." If even AI safety researchers can have their worldview flipped after prolonged exposure, what hope does the average user have? Connor's framework is to treat AI like an addictive substance: "Some of us will have a beer at a party, it's okay, in moderation. If you are exhibiting symptoms of addiction, this is serious and it should be treated seriously. The same way if you're becoming an alcoholic, you should probably stop drinking. I think there's a similar thing here." The takeaway: AI tools can be genuinely useful, but the moment the relationship shifts from utility to companionship, you've crossed into dangerous territory.
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