This largely depends on luck, though it can improve your chances. There are places where you can be a regular your entire life and never meet a meaningful person, while at other times, simply being in the right place at the right time can lead you to someone with whom you develop a lifelong relationship.
Yes, it does have a component of luck. But it also has a component that's not luck, namely the showing up part. Of course there's no "friend solution" and i wouldn't go looking for friends by sitting in the corner of a cafe on my laptop all day. But i bet going to a makerspace, or a hobby meet, is basically guaranteed to make friends within 1 to 3 months of attendance. So don't let the doubt prevent you from going. There's only one way out and it's to start showing up
Of course you have to be proactive, but even then, people for any reason, might not be open to connect - language, culture, clique, personality, etc. You just have to find the tribe you vibe with, and that is mostly luck.
> Western thinking considers absolutes, right & wrong, black & white. Eastern thinking considers truth relative and time cyclical.
Western culture is more direct and straightforward, while Eastern is the opposite.
"Face saving, excuses, bs, white lies, hypocrisy, beating around the bush, etc." are all under the umbrella of lies in the West, not in the East.
"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes" - Mark Twain
which is funny because I learned the worst kind of "subtle lie" from the west: establishing a favorable interpretation as fact before others have the time to think about an event or circumstance critically and from multiple angles. Because a lot of people don't ask followup questions if you give them An Answer right away.
> "Face saving, excuses, bs, white lies, hypocrisy, beating around the bush, etc." are all under the umbrella of lies in the West, not in the East.
Maybe they are in the umbrella of lies in real of philosophy, but western culture does not see them as a bad thing. West goes out of its way to defend outright lies as long as they are made to help business get money or get more power in politics.
West lives in post-truth world where truth does not matter at all and ability to lie is rewarded. And those who made it happen are getting more powerful, riches, even winning elections and are praised for their ability to convince people that lies are true.
The strategy of "scale for long term market dominance" or the idea of "build it and they will come" [1] were premised on the notion that adoption will be organic.
AI usage seems to have plateaued overall [2], except for niche use cases like coding, that is why companies are forcing it on their employees to justify ROI [3] or creating "products" w/ AI features [4] or embedded addiction.
(I don't quite understand your take?) but overall, companies like cloudflare are basically firing people for the costs associated with AI and layoffs are starting to being questioned with this take.
I don't know what your statement is but if you are an employee, then as your employer is forcing you to tokenmax and forcing you to use slop and creating leaderboards for these token spend which will all end up forcing the company to bleed money afterwards they might even lay off people.
If you are an employer then there are still long term issues associated. For example, cloudflare is a company which hasn't been in profit but it has burnt through 5 million dollars per month for AI as it first created an incentive (shrewd even) for employees to use it (for everything) only to please the investors but in the end, its still unclear how profitable all of it is for cloudflare.
Perhaps I have misunderstood you but I really don't understand how its going to leave a lot of money on the table, the only thing I see is a race to the bottom.
Not shorting TSMC, I’ve lost too much money shorting and it’s just too easy to lose because of timing even if you eventually are correct.
I’ve overweighted EU weapons manufacturers because a Taiwan war will be coupled with an expansion of the war in Europe. With the US busy trying to fight China, Russia will for sure make a bigger move in Europe. European defense budgets will 10x.
Big picture, I think you're right that there will be continued and increased EU spending on weapons. But... Russia is basically at full capacity just standing still (or losing slowly) in Ukraine. Do they even have the ability (people, weapons, fuel, money, logistics) to significantly expand the war further?
The point to short will be when the Chinese army forms up.
With Ukraine we saw it. It was incredibly obvious. Hilariously the Ukrainians themselves saw the huge army on their border and told everyone it wasn’t going to happen and refused to build any defences. Taiwan will be the same. But the satellites will give everyone enough warning.
To be fair my understanding at the time was that Ukraine was well aware the invasion was coming and the government was publicly making claims that helped avoid panic and allowed them to move military assets around more easily.
> the Ukrainians themselves saw the huge army on their border and told everyone it wasn’t going to happen and refused to build any defences
You're going to have to cite that, because Ukraine was already in the low-intensity Donbass conflict when the most recent invasion happened.
But yes, you can't hide an invasion fleet. The Chinese navy only has three aircraft carriers. They've recently had high level purges in the PLA. Invading now would be a disaster for them. But you never know when a disaster is going to get ordered for political reasons.
At the time it did seem like mobilization came very late, after the invasion already began. But like the other commenters pointed out they did prepare for it and a few more days of mobilization wouldn’t have changed the outcome.
> Hilariously the Ukrainians themselves saw the huge army on their border and told everyone it wasn’t going to happen and refused to build any defences.
In terms of gaining political support, being a victim in the modern world is very advantageous. The more of your civilians die unjustly, the more the media will portray you as a great and brave leader. There is nothing hilarious about this, only cynicism of the leaders of the country.
>Hilariously the Ukrainians themselves saw the huge army on their border and told everyone it wasn’t going to happen and refused to build any defences.
Not the full truth. Leadership said publicly that there was nothing to worry about, but the AFU dispersed assets, distributed suppiles and ammunition, and took a defensive stance before the invasion happened.
I'm sure leadership in Ukraine was aware of an impeding war, but naturally that's not the type of thing you're gonna tell your citizens. It doesn't help anything; it would only cause panic, migration, and resource hoarding.
The best people can do is to "vote with the wallets" aka attention: like social media, avoid using AI altogether no matter how "pervasive" they become, they will soon realize they won't need it as much as they think- overcome the addiction and brainwashing...
I personally loathe the kind of shithead bullies highlighted in the article. It's not a crowd I like and it's not the kind of crowd I associate with and in fact they're the kind of dickheads that I have a rather consistent streak of dismissing and actively degrading. In that, I am the majority. These shitheels have little genuine clout or influence in broader communities. The wheat tends to separate itself from the chaff. Isolating a few social media examples of pig-headedness ought not be used as a broader indictment. If some fellas wanna start a discord called "real gamers no wannabes no sluts" then, well, I hope they find some sort of satisfaction there.
Not sure why this matters as most pension index funds also include Meta by the same lines... everyone buying into these indexes is complicit, no surprise
We've successfully campaigned to make many of those same investors divest from fossil fuel investments. I don't see why investments in crazy surveillance tech should get a pass (and yes, Meta absolutely falls in the same bucket)
This. Giving markets free reign, usually doesn't result in alignment with long term best interests or political objectives.
It took years of activism and voting with our money to get banks, pension funds and similar institutions to stop funding cluster munitions, land mines, nukes, oil, tabacco. Now big tech and some AI companies are on the radar.
Land mines and cluster munitions have been essential for Ukraine to defend itself against the Russian invasion. Several other European countries including Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland have recently withdrawn from the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Treaty. It's cheap and easy to for activists to pretend to be morally superior when they're sitting safely behind computers and don't have to deal with real world consequences.
So then the Ukrainians should just roll over and stop trying to resist? Losing your country is a far more serious consequence then dealing with some UXO later.
There is a big leap between not resisting and using weapons that are widely agreed to be abhorrent. You're framing a false binary choice here: either deploy weapons that the majority of countries have deemed unconscionable, or lose your country in its entirety.
There is also a difference between why we fight and how we fight. Fighting in self defence does not give a state the right to conduct a war in any way it chooses.
There are numerous ongoing conflicts in which we've seen states shed hard-won agreements on how wars should be fought. It's an incredibly dangerous trend which is leading us into a new era of horror.
Where would you put the limits on Ukraine's actions? What is beyond the pale?
What an ignorant comment, totally disconnected from reality. It literally was a binary choice: without using land mines and cluster munitions the Ukrainian defenders would have been overrun by superior Russian numbers.
Urm, that they're invaluable in an active warzone is unquestionable.
The issue with this tech is that they - at least historically - didn't have an expiration date. So if that war ends and you let your children play in the woods... Maybe occasionally one won't be coming back anymore.
That's the reason why they got a bad image. Because that's literally what happened post ww2 - for decades.
Maybe nowadays they could built them with a forced timer for exploding - if they did, great! If not, your descendants may consider you insane for that opinion in a few decades
There are expiring ("non-persistent") munitions, though generally they're safed (triggers are deactivated) rather than exploded. The former does leave explosive materials in the field, but makes the likelihood of detonating these much lower.
I've been regularly thinking about Apartheid-era South Africa. It was a massive Thing for me as a Catholic school kid in the '80s because it seemed (to me) so clearly wrong yet accepted. There were clearly "lefties" making it visible without a lot happening but then "How did you go bankrupt? Two ways: Gradually, then suddenly" happened. And a lot of it started with university students petitioning their schools to divest and that spreading. It will not be fast, but these things can happen and we should start to build a framework for it.
And yes, yes, Enemies Lists are fraught with problems and have a history of eating themselves, etc. But the one thing I know is worse is not trying.
If you're asking me to rate things on a scale where human freedom comes behind some economic measure, you are asking the wrong person.
On edit: it would be nice when these GOTCHAs are offered, if the offerer stopped and asked themselves, "Did centuries of colonialism denying education to the natives have any bearing on what I am asking?"
I know you meant this sarcastically, but unironically yes. GDP has more than doubled since the end of apartheid, and it has the strongest economy on the continent
LMAO, now normalize it against world change in GDP since the end of apartheid. Pre-apartheid they were beating the world average, all times after apartheid they have been behind world average.
Especially the last 20 years, it is falling off a cliff in relative performance. Yeah the post-apartheid peak was 10% above the apartheid peak from the 80s.... unfortunately if you can only get 10% better in 40 years it actually represents a massive failure relative to the rest of the world.
I'd agree that apartheid was bad, but it seems to be coupled with other factors that led them to fall behind on the world stage. I'm guessing the kind of ideology that accompanies literal filled stadiums shouting "kill the boer farmer" is not so far fetched from the kind of ideology that resulted in Zimbabwe going for broke.
>I'm guessing the kind of ideology that accompanies literal filled stadiums shouting "kill the boer farmer" is not so far fetched from the kind of ideology that resulted in Zimbabwe going for broke.
Zimbabwe's failure is pretty clear: total corruption under one man. South Africa, post-Apartheid, has an unhappy history of corruption as well. But it is confounding how one reaches for the "anti-white racism" explanation before considering how centuries of colonial "oppression" (which a fun euphemism for violence and denying education) might lead to a situation where government functions poorly when you abandon ship and leave your government setup in place for people with no experience and no mentor to figure out.
Let's not pretend like racism isn't a problem. Just like the bigots that hated the blacks, prejudice against the white populations is just as stupid and evil.
>when you abandon ship and leave your government setup in place for people with no experience and no mentor to figure out.
>>"Kill the boer"
"Kill" doesn't sound like mentorship. You can argue they just mean rip them out of power/office, which they have done, but the ANC's message has not been "lets use the colonizers as our mentors."
>Zimbabwe's failure is pretty clear: total corruption under one man.
I don't think it's that simple. They tried to basically replace the colonial-style farming model almost overnight, handing over agriculture to black citizens. They tried to throw out the bathwater of "colonialization" while thinking they could keep the baby with it. One could argue South Africa is trying some similar things at slow speed and seeing if the trainwreck works better if you play it in slow motion.
If they were really just trying to replicate the success of before except without apartheid, I don't know how you can even do that while simultaneously promising all the socialist reform and goodies of the ANC. It's like having the new guy show up and training him, and he's tell you that you're wrong and he has no idea how to do it but know's you're doing it wrong. If your goal is be mentored you'll have to get proficient at what your mentor is doing so you have some frame of reference to see if your "improvements" even work or are the reason why you're failing relative to your mentor.
> (and yes, Meta absolutely falls in the same bucket)
s/Meta/FAANG
Decoupling Meta and Palantir from your 401k would not derisk your retirement from surveillance technology. You'd have to kick out Microsoft and Apple and Google next, at which point you've already forfeit most of your portfolio's growth.
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