The world is complex and most phenomenons are high dimensional.
It’s very likely:
- criminal potential populations were reduced
- economics lead to stable options for more individuals in the late 90s
- lead was removed
- a myriad of other improvements in society that generally led to
Less crime
This broadly attributed to the infrastructure spend of the internet and greenspans new “unlimited productivity in the digital age” realization — which Clinton did agree to, but at the price of the promises he made
Several things about LLMs make this a hard or complex experiment and maybe too much for the current tech.
1) context: lack of sensors and sensor processing, maybe solvable with web cams in the field but manual labor required for soil testing etc
2)Time bias: orchestration still has a massive recency bias in LLMs and a huge underweighting of established ground truth. Causing it to weave and pivot on recent actions in a wobbly overcorrecting style.
3) vagueness: by and large most models still rely on non committal vagueness to hide a lack of detailed or granular expertise. This granular expertise tends to hallucinate more or just miss context more and get it wrong.
I’m curious how they plan to overcome this. It’s the right type of experiment, but I think too ambitious of a scale.
The harsh reality is that a federated state system with a very weak governing body economically and politically is extremely unlikely to be the global trade currency.
Let's what-if a scenario where the Fed is made subservient to the President and the President wants the dials turned to 11, let the next guy deal with the consequences.
The dollar isn't indestructible. If not the Euro, what?
I was referring to Europe and america together -- and I think your conjecture is real -- what if we move to a projection of holographic economy over the real one. The answer is, whichever gets the most people to cooperate and support that holographic system will survive. In general collective weak systems tend to not work well there. But hyper centralized systems tend to over index on projection. Which is why we have the separation.
The number of Trump apologists lunatics who do not seem to understand what MAD was about is staggering.
Industrial scale warfare isn't some secret forgotten by accident.
The current American power-trip fantasy delusion is rightfully scaring the shit out of people, and the scary thing is the people who aren't scared.
It's reaching the point that I think the best thing is for Germany to detonate a nuke between the US and Greenland just to wake up the idiots who think it would be unreasonably difficult.
--
Edit: I see people are misunderstanding me as saying they should use the US bombs stationed there. I'm saying they should build their own - to have people remember that It's not really that hard if you have a functioning industrial sector.
Don’t let your hatred blind you to the ground we all stand on.
As pointed out you have built your worldview of drastically misunderstood table stakes.
I do agree Europe should become first mover but they are stuck in a world where they were a dependent and weakened non player for so long now they forgot how.
Germany is a non-nuclear-weapon state. Our bombs are there yes, but if you use one of our bombs without our approval there will be hell to pay. An invasion of Greenland will be all but guaranteed. Whether Germany will retain its military the next day is questionable.
Germany will be glass if they tried. Berlin will glow in the dark. They wouldn't even consider it in government. Their planes wouldn't make it off the ground.
Well observed. And seen in tragic relief as the piles of dead in Russia and China during their most technocratic periods run by engineers.
Which wasn’t just about refusal to interact with humanity but to acknowledge that complex multi factor problems can’t be solved as top down heuristics.
The piles of bodies in China came from Mao and his cultural revolution, and he can hardly be called an engineer. The recent success of China has come when it was run by engineers. And when was Russia ever run by engineers? So I think you have it backwards here.
"Russia was never run by engineers?" That's a massive oversight of 20th-century history. The Soviet Union was the world’s first and most committed technocracy. The GOSPLAN (State Planning Committee) was a literal attempt to run a continent-sized economy as a deterministic engineering problem. By the 70s, the Soviet leadership was more densely packed with engineers than any administration in US history.
They failed because they tried to 'refactor' nature. Stalin’s 'Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature' and Mao’s 'Great Leap Forward' (which applied industrial throughput logic to biology/close-planting) are the ultimate warnings of what happens when you treat complex, probabilistic systems (ecology and humanity) like a closed-loop machine.
Mao wasn’t an engineer by degree, but he was a High Modernist by practice. He believed society could be 'debugged' and 'optimized' through central planning. The result wasn't a more efficient system; it was a total system crash that cost tens of millions of lives.
Current China is a perfect example of 'Success by Engineering'—high-speed rail and ghost cities built on a demographic 'memory leak' (the One Child Policy) that is now crashing the entire stack. This is exactly my point: Engineers optimize for the metric they can see, while ignoring the high-dimensional chaos that actually sustains life.
i dont think this matches what you said earlier, that when there was the most engineers is when there was the most death.
instead, the most engineers corresponds with some time after the mass death. an alternative explanation would be that they started with non-engineers wanting to enforce high modernism and it didnt work, and then they switched to engineers and it did
Those games operate far more probablistically and high dimensionally than programming and I suspect engineers would rather dismiss them as “dumb” than accept they are simply inferior players in those games.
Primary multi agent multi dimension probabilistic resolution problems model human and crowd interaction better than “code do this every time”.
I’ve spent a long time in the valley and I’ve come to the personal conclusion that engineers are often the dumbest (and most narrowly useful) in the room not the smartest. And the rest of them let them think they are very smart (tm) so they do what we say.
Shit rolls downhill...and most people just try to keep an eye on where the next turd comes from without bothering to watch where it goes after it's past them.
I recently moved into a very upper class neighborhood (pacific heights) and enrolled my child in the neighborhood private school.
The social hosting skill I’ve observed and and able to do as well is extraordinarily high. People throw parties, know how to act, are cordial and polite and seem to reasonably enjoy each others company while also teaching their children the same.
This is how I remember mere middle class parents acting in the late 90s and early 2000s but my fellow millennials and z seem to be completely incapable of.
One huge aspect I’ve noticed is that it’s wildly expensive in time and money to host. An open cocktail night cost me nearly 3000 dollars to host. I can imagine this would not be common for Gen Z these days.
That seems to be a very narrow definition of a party. I have friends over for pizza and board games. We've had ice cream making parties. Cheese dinners.
I am a millennial and my parents did no events, since they both worked and had long commutes. I wonder when the middle class entertainment slowed down—I want to guess it’s when you have more two income households, that don’t earn enough to hire home help.
Minimum wages have not increased in decades. Cost of living has increased a lot meanwhile, and the rich vs poor divide has increased. So lower class and middle class are suffering, while upper class have become richer from their labors. In earlier generations, the middle class could work for some years and afford to buy a house (on mortgage). But these days, middle class cannot afford a house, they live in rented apartments. Hosting parties is the least of their priorities, when they are struggling with the monthly bills.
I don't think it's that, my parents weren't two income and never had friends or did events or social things and barely left the house.
My mom would constantly complain she used to be a social butterfly but having kids "ruined" that for her. Which never made sense to me, it's not like she ever interacted with us much.
Christmas dinner for my immediate family almost $500. That was pretty much dinner and our favorite appetizers but does not count the liquor and wine. This was just me, my ex, five kids, a daughter in law and grandchild. I can see getting to 3k pretty fast.
How did you spend $500 on dinner for 9 people? I hosted Christmas dinner for my family with about 10 adults and 10 kids, and it cost at most $200 divided between 5 families, alcohol included.
Dinner for twenty people at $200 is farcical in the US unless your family owns a farm or something. Going to need more details because I'm inclined to say that's bullshit.
Beer and liquor alone would blow past that figure.
No farm is needed. It's not that hard. I spent about: $25 on a chicken dish (chicken from Costco + ingredients), $15 for baked mac & cheese (ingredients from Meijer), $20 on ciders, $40 on 2 bottles of Cherry Republic wine. The other family members: $20 on raw vegetables and cheese platter; $20 on fruit; $10 potato dish; $10 vegetable dish; $15 on dessert; $15 on salad. Oh and $2 on juice boxes for the little kids (~4 from a juice box 40 pack from Costco). I'm estimating what the others spent, but that's what it would cost me to make the same dishes. That totals to $192.
If your version of hosting is "let's outsource it and just open the wallet", then, yes, sure, you can spend a lot of money. It ain't hosting, though. You failed the "what if I just replaced you with a bank account" test.
GP said 'open bar with 2 bartenders'. I.e. commercially priced drinks, and staff. Did you have those? If so, pro tip, next time just get a few cases of various drinks, plonk them on a table with a bunch of glasses (rented, if need be) and call it good. People can't drink soft drink for more than, say, 3 USD worth in an afternoon; and even if you served 12 years Glenfiddich to everyone including the children, enough of it to knock them all out, you still wouldn't have spend more than $1000.
So yeah still wondering what sort of party you threw. I mean, yeah it's easily possible to spend that much, but it's also possible to do it for much less and you don't even need to really try.
That honestly seems quite cheap for 'very upper class' where I imagine everyone's suited and booted, dressed up for the evening, possibly some live music, etc.
People surprised by Mr. $3000-cocktail party's expenses are forgetting about class and wealth differences.
Up to a point, expenses are elastic and proportionate to income. Across different incomes, things like "dinner" or "cocktail" mean (and cost) very different things, to the point that someone on either end of the scale doesn't even know what is on the other end. A very wealthy individual might not know about the $1.50 Costco dog, and a less wealthy individual won't know about the $10,000 bottle of cab sauv (okay I'm making that up, I don't know either, but you get the point).
If you have $100k you'll make do with that, if you have 10x more, most people will find ways to scale the expenses accordingly. If you have 1,000x more, that's just wasted cash that does nothing for society, but that's another discussion...
Also bog standard middle shelf cocktail liquor, wine, glassware, food, and additional (forks, knives, small plates, food prep) for 50 people is gonna cost 3k almost anywhere.
I was highlighting partially how it's just generally expensive to host the first time a large group.
I know the US is ludicrously expensive, but 3000 dollars for a cocktail party? Did you have a couple of hundred guests? The kind of party where you can lock in friendships, have meaningful conversations and personally play host tops out around 30 people. At those kind of numbers, you really don't need to hire a staff - you can provide canapés and make cocktails and or have a friend so at very reasonable cost. Source - I had hundreds of (often fairly raucous parties) at my old apartment. Alas I no longer live in a basement so my entertaining options are much more limited.
I was not looking to 'lock in life long friendships.' I was hosting a cocktail party as a favor for our school at my home and was obligated to ensure the overall experience was somewhat nicer than 'a wild party at an apartment' as fun as that is as well. These are somewhat normal things as part of a knit-community adult life. You have distant people come as well as close friends and open your home. That is ... hosting.
Partly what I was trying to point out is how 'adult life' gets complicated and expensive and most people are understandably just opting out. But at the same time, whats going out with it is just basic manners and social habits -- which is unfortunate.
My point stands - if anything a cocktail party is potentially less expensive to host since you know in advance numbers and preferences.
> These are somewhat normal things as part of a knit-community adult life.
As something of an adult myself (I'm 46), I'm well aware of how community functions. I'm also aware of the 'keeping up with the jones' nature of wealth and how corrosive that is to community - being entirely founded on the selective and exclusive nature of spending.
My contention stands, there is no need whatsoever to spend thousands on a cocktail party. One doesn't need to 'opt out' of social life. It's perfectly possible to serve cocktails yourself, to buy 'off the shelf' brands rather than expensive whiskey etc. It's perfectly possible to prepare your own food, or work with a chef who organises 'super club' style catering, which does not cost thousands.
It's a choice to live this way, not a fate. And doubtless it affords status among other high worth individuals - just as it dooms you to a life of fruitless comparison and ostentatiousness.
This can be said of literally anyone living in the first
World.
I find it deeply laughable anyone would stand on a soap box who lives in a modern first world environment and lecture like this while not seeing the irony that they do it themselves at their level as well.
Please. Stop. Look around. And maybe visit a place where you see how the other half of the planet lives. Likely your world is wildly ostentatious and unnecessary comparatively.
The plank in your eye before your neighbor and all that.
I mean I've spent a couple hundo at Costco buying booze and food and paper supplies for a party I hosted and THAT was flabbergasting. How the fuck do spend three grand on cocktails? Is it like all top shelf liquor or something?
It's a level of excess whose loss is probably a net positive for society. I would argue that there are very, very few cases where such a level is justified.
Part of the problem is that with habius corpus being ignored we don't know how many people who were successfully deported without incident should have been.
50 bad cases also doesn't really summarize it well. Chainsawing through a fence and going through an entire apartment complex and zip typing kids together after violently breaking in really isn't "one" incident. Every single interaction there is potentially bad. Just because people were later released because they weren't illegal or in a gang or whatever does not justify going into people's private space and detaining them in a scary way, especially without warrants. That stuff is going to frighten and traumatize those kids. Home will no longer feel safe. This incitement of fear is in itself a huge part of the point and part of why it's very very bad.
I believe you are belligerently missing the point and think a mere “50 incidents” of pushing people from moving vehicles is fine. As this is absurd.
Since obviously you’d not be ok with yourself or your child thrown from a moving vehicle.
Trust me when I say. ICE is not here to do what you believe. And they will come for you one way or another.
it’s naive and laughable and frankly a bit of a stain against humanity that you can’t see that
It’s very likely: - criminal potential populations were reduced - economics lead to stable options for more individuals in the late 90s - lead was removed - a myriad of other improvements in society that generally led to Less crime