From what I’ve heard, the KMT are weirdly the more moderate and pro peaceful cooperation and commerce with the rest of China party now despite their history, and the DPP are the fully US aligned extreme right party that’s more like the old KMT. AFAIK the KMT are still US-aligned nationalists like they always were, but they’re less warhawkish and just want the status quo to peacefully continue.

Oh it’s not just that, the normal numbers that they claim to be taking into account for their models are also made up because their models just don’t work in the first place. Like the basic tenets of their economic theory don’t actually work or apply to real world data so they have to heavily manipulate and massage the inputs just to get the “intuitively correct” output that reaffirms their beliefs.

It’s bullshit from the very beginning: it’s not just flawed and myopic it’s actively fraudulent and ideologically driven at its very core. Some of the high priests are in on the con, which is why the neoliberals tend to fall back on Keynesian-lite policies in times of crisis even while otherwise preaching austerity and kleptocracy as the saviors sent by the holy line, but most of its priests are true believers who can only perform the rites they were taught and say what their tenets demand they say while twisting themselves into knots trying to insist that their bullshit is in any way tied to reality.

4-people tweek the numbers to reaffirm the idea

This is also the step before the first. The entire foundation of neoliberal economics is literally built on “well, uh, the real numbers didn’t make the model work so I made up these fake numbers that made it look nice, at least. Don’t worry, they’re intuitively correct!” and pure vibes.

I’m just reflecting on the reality of our current existence, NASA spent a lot of money on rockets, It would have been the best possible outcome if NASA “offered things at the lowest possible cost”. But they didn’t, and our timeline missed the miracle where they did that.

NASA has always been used to funnel money to arms dealer companies who actually make rockets for them. Like it never had its own factories or production pipeline, it was always just big handouts to corporate MIC contractors who were further financially incentivized to delay and drive up costs even more since the contracts let them do that completely unchecked.

It was also kept pretty tangential to what the US military wanted: they wanted ICBMs, so NASA did rocket research for them; they wanted satellites, so NASA did satellite launch research for them; they wanted some nonsense contraption for “space commandos” to steal Soviet satellites with, so NASA had to incorporate that into the Space Shuttle program which was further gutted to the point of barely being functional at all.

My friends, sobbing: “Nooo, build a real house for once, don’t just burrow into the nearest hill like a rodent and dig an inscrutable warren of crawlspaces and deadly pitfalls every fucking time we start a new minecraft server.”

Me, wordlessly humming diggy diggy hole:

some liberals overcorrected against “ai” even though there’s plenty of legitimate reasons to not want it around and especially to not have corpos owning the output.

I’m convinced the hyperfocus on generative ai models somehow iNfRiNgInG upon holy copyright protections was entirely a corporate psyop to begin with, because at the end of the day that line of arguing further enshrines the power of corporate property and gives an easy pivot to whitewashing proprietary corporate “not InFrInGiNg” models.

The closest to ethical that AI gets are open source models that can be run locally, and they’re coincidentally the most “infringing” models, while the least ethical ones are the secretive proprietary corporate models being trained on data that’s laundered by corporations unilaterally claiming the right to license it for that purpose.

Like what are the biggest problems? Endless mountains of low-grade slop, mostly coming out of corporate hosted models; companies trying to replace workers with dogshit chatbots, which are 100% proprietary corporate services; media companies threatening to eliminate actors using internal proprietary models they claim they have the property rights to train; etc. Not one problem comes from copyright not being expanded to also cover being able to license and restrict how someone looks at a copyrighted thing, and almost every problem comes from huge corporate property holders with most of the rest coming from petty bourgeois grifters.

Literally more scientific than orthodox neoliberal economics.

At one point he was just the typical tech oligarch failson who was sort of just quietly awful behind the scenes while collecting accolades for other people’s work and getting fluffed up by credulous tech “journalists”. He managed to grift some successful contracts using that publicity and his PR team leveraged it into more and more bullshit hype for businesses he owned and he just failed upwards over and over.

Even after he had a midlife crisis and started just doing lots of drugs and showing his whole ass on twitter all day every day he still had all that inertia and machinery of hype and graft behind him to feed him more and more wealth and power despite anything he actually did. He had to actively piss off enough people that that system started clogging and breaking down to even suffer the most mild of consequences. Hopefully it keeps going and everything he had and has falls apart so he can’t just go back to a quietly parasitic existence like most other tech oligarchs.

What about Shikanoko’s Basilisk, which can be bought over with deer crackers?

Great man theory isn’t wrong in that certain people with power and influence didn’t have a huge impact, it’s wrong because it’s just sort of assuming that they’re this a priori source of change instead of themselves being a result of change and broader movements. Lenin did great things and had a huge impact, but he came out of the context of a larger movement that preceded him and existed without him rather than simply manifesting fully formed to create that movement the way liberal Great Man “historians” portray it.

The key idea of a space elevator is that it’s being held in tension by a counterweight just past the point of a geosynchronous orbit. The problem of course being that even being in tension like that we don’t have anything that could support its own weight let alone the capacity to construct and place such a massive structure.

I think that’s probably what he heard from some pop-sci article video summarizing actual evolutionary biology, and then he proceeded to misunderstand it in the dumbest possible way and incorporate it into the writhing mass of brainworms animating him.

The general fevered absurdity of the worldview in them sometimes makes you forget the absolute malignant evil lurking behind it. It’s easy to laugh at how weird and cringe they are and lose sight of just how monstrous theocrats are on every level.

If that were applied accurately it does actually describe some subset of fascists, who are so incoherent and built on load-bearing warrior vibes that all they want is to actualize themselves through hurting others and destroying things. There’s a long history of the most incoherent fascists adopting the label of nihilist, as well as of outright neo-nazis adopting it to try to smuggle their ideology in under a new label and/or to be able to keep the “N” in the acronym they want without admitting that it stands for “Nazi”.

Touch controls are only acceptable when something absolutely needs to cram a large variety of granular controls into as small a space as possible. Anything where its just showing a picture of analogue buttons should just be analogue buttons and dials instead, and anything with the space for it should have a proper control scheme instead.

Smartphones should not exist, they are an abomination and using them to do anything is like pulling teeth. Tablets should be low-powered e-readers or hardened industrial terminals, not this “it’s like a shitty computer with the worst controls anyone has ever made” shit.

Their stovetop was all touch controlled.

This is apparently normal now. My grandmother had to replace her stove recently and apparently all the budget stoves were those dogshit glasstops with shitty touch control buttons instead of just like cheap exposed coils and physical dials. I don’t get it at all, everything about it is awful and so much worse than the cheaper established options it doesn’t make any sense.

Also many people groups that have been through long famines have a disposition towards gaining weight faster and diabetes.

This is also a multi-generational process involving epigenetics, to further support your point. Parents who suffer famine during their own childhood pass on these epigenetic flags that cause their children to have these adaptations to food insecurity activated, which generally makes them shorter than they would otherwise be (since someone who is physically smaller needs less food) and store fat more readily whenever possible leaving them with more of a safety buffer if food stops being available.

It’s really fascinating on like a meta level how there’s this sort of layer of reactive temporary inheritance for some traits, where an evolved adaptation can be turned on or off based on multi-generational material conditions like that, because something that’s a desirable and life-saving adaptation to an unstable, famine-prone environment becomes a liability in prolonged periods of stability and plenty.

This is a Seinfeld bit. This is the b plot of a fucking sitcom from 30 years ago. Deeply unserious country.

Philip K Dick: “Imagine a horrible dystopia where the state uses magical psychics that are almost always right to stop crime. That would suck and be bad even for you, an eager collaborator and true believer in that system, because they could be wrong about you too.”

The UK: “Oi chatgpt get yer robot calipers out and tell me if 'e’s got a loicence for that telly?”