Levitz

I have lived abroad, yes. Does the USA make it easy to become a citizen? If the comparison is China, yes, a thousand times yes. Does language and society matter a truckload? Absolutely.

>Short of that, there is a wide spectrum on how countries treats immigrants. This is the most important factor for people actually living in a place.

Yes. Does China treat immigrants better than the US? As I explained, no. There is no contest. The comparison borders on the absurd. The US is a remarkably flawed country in many aspects, but the vast majority of the stigma around its immigration comes from the fact that it's a matter that the US takes very, very seriously. The bar for living somewhere is not necessarily citizenship but it absolutely is a factor if someone is seriously planning to immigrate somewhere.

For an incredibly evident and very current example, the 14th amendment was very recently reaffirmed, with a whole lot of people being horrified it was even thrown into question at all.

>How is getting money and support to live in a place not related to immigration?

Because any quantity of money beyond a livable wage has barely any relation to integrating people into a culture. A model of immigration based on money is not immigration at all, that's just hiring foreign workers.

>I doubt many of the researchers migrating even want Chinese citizenship and the chains that come along with it, so why do most people (presumably Americans) keep harping on and on about it?

Because it's an important matter regarding immigration. If you want to live in a country, you might want to actually be a citizen of that country. Does that need explaining?

>Once you're invited by the CCP for your exceptional research background, you're literally given an open chequebook for both your personal compensation and your future research endeavors.

None of which is related to immigration.

>You're allowed to take your family along with you too, and the language barrier doesn't translate in the professional setting. >Racism is a non-issue since I doubt these researchers will even be interacting with elements of that segment of Chinese Han society, unless they choose to.

Are you seriously suggesting that people can literally just not engage at all with the society they live in?

This just reads like deeply, deeply delusional reasoning attempting to paint China as a good alternative.

>Whether China is immigration friendly or not is debatable.

Compared to the US or Europe? No it's not debatable.

No dual citizenship at all, most probably no citizenship. Harder residency. Good luck bringing family there.

Not going to even mention the obscene difference in racism OR the language barrier, both of which are enormous factors.

I'm almost certain people are different on this point, but I just want to put this out there in case it applies.

A lot of our entertainments and hobbies, especially in urban areas, are mental to begin with. The most evident example would be scrolling on your phone, which evidently is 100% a mental thing, but there's a lot in this box, videogames, music, reading can all really demand a lot from you mentally.

Explicitly physical things are not so common. Gym. Dancing. Climbing. Running. All of these are things that people who work with their brains often talk about as "relaxing" or "great against stress", even if they can put the body until great physical strain.

It is my experience that when mentally worn out, the "don't want to do anything" really translates to "don't want to do anything mentally", problem being, thinking about doing the physical thing instead is actually a little bit of mental, albeit more emotional, work, but once you ACTUALLY do that, then after spending the whole day focused on deep, complex stuff, being the caveman bench pressing is actually absolute bliss.

That's just not true. Most people forgot Bush by Obama's second year.

You can call it a failure, it's just not a military one.

Hell there's an argument to be made that the US should downsize its military because there's no universe in which exercising its full capability is not either the end of the world as we know it or absolute political suicide.

>This is great for competition! Chinese vendors offering a cheaper solution = what economics told me the free market was all about.

Ah yes, systematic fraud and protectionist practices, free market through and through.

>Most of Europe has a "registered building" system, where buildings above a certain age are considered historic.

It feels weird to have to mention this, but although there are a lot of historical buildings in Europe, it's not the norm.

Population grows. There was a noteworthy war not that long ago. The vast majority of buildings are not that old.

It's not an apples to apples comparison. 80%+ of deaths because of heat in Europe are 65+ years old.

When you start handling that range you've to take into account that these people are going to die because of something, save a guy from heat here and that's an extra death because of cancer 4 years later.

Now I'm not saying it's a thing to be ignored, but be wary of playing quick and dirty with statistics.

When you enact 0.1% changes through a population, that's still a 0.1% change.

"If we all do this little thing" thinking is utter nonsense. If all of human consumption or contribution to warming or what-have-you is 1000, applying a change that lowers that to 999 is not doing anything more than that.

This here is not even a 0.1% thing. You could probably get a better result by telling people to read ebooks rather than hardback. It's just absurd.

It's a more nuanced situation than people generally want to accept.

>Marketing is made so they you identify with the product or identify with an aspirational version of yourself. Gaming is seen as heavily male-dominated. Expanding that is smart.

This is the most simple and probably accurate explanation. Companies like to make money, untapped markets look like money.

The problem is that then, the current audience, who is primarily male, can raise concerns about the marketing not catering to them anymore.

There's a political arm who doesn't like that at all, and they will not only attempt to enforce collective delusion to dismiss the whole thing (what do you mean? everybody plays videogames, playerbase is split 50/50 pretty much!), but invalidate the very idea that a primarily male audience can have grievances about being catered to.

This makes them look insane and alienates the original audience politically speaking, and ironically, makes the original audience look bigoted, which puts consumers off.

This dance has been going on for like a decade and a half at this point and it's only recently that signs of it dying down have started to show. I can only hope.

>Scalping provides the service of exchanging money for time, means, and/or luck. People who have no time to camp, no botting tools or skills, etc can exchange their money instead.

Which, again, hurts both the seller and the vast majority of the buyers.

>Scalping is a natural "black" market which always pops up to satisfy market demand whenever artificial restrictions are placed on the market.

>Even in this case, there will be scalpers providing for people with more money than luck, who want a day one steam machine.

Scalpers, the vast majority of the time, deal with markets with non-artificial restrictions, and use them to their advantage. In this case, Valve has very intentionally designed a system to prevent scalpers because they want people to have a fair chance of getting a product that is very much not artificially restricted. Valve is free to sell to whoever they want, consumers are free to purchase from Valve, and scalpers are in the middle, exploiting the system for profit, and willingly or not pushing for DRM and for binding accounts to devices.

Someone who is in full clown costume looks less ridiculous than someone who wears clown shoes and is otherwise dressed "normally", yes.

Scalping adds no value to the product.

Scalping also actively damages the pricing, which is part of the product. Valve wants to sell this product at a specific price, which is targeted to an audience. By scalping and ultimately changing the price, you are hurting both the consumer, who now pays more, and the company, who doesn't see a cent of this increase and is now failing its target.

Scalping also damages the demand for the product, since it creates a submarket that is volatile and unpredictable.

Scalping is a bad thing because by basically any measure, a market with scalping is worse for everybody involved than one with scalping. Except for scalpers, who make money off it by making it worse for everybody else. Which is why scalpers are bad people.

I change clothes all the time too, still match the pieces of clothing each time.

There's aesthetic value to coherence. There's also design, usability value. I have Telegram, Steam and Firefox opened right now and each one of them displays different minimize/maximize/close buttons on the top right. That's not ideal.

The amount of time the average webdev spends actually consciously dealing with the intricacies of the http protocol is just very small.

>The UK is not shy when it comes to invading your privacy or censoring the Internet.

Definitely doesn't shy away from doing it! But one thing I find most irritating is that it seems reluctant to say it proud and loud.

Look at the situation with 4chan and Kiwifarms. They are basically asking to be blocked from the UK and they refuse to. I can't really say why the onus is put on the websites to enact blocks, but my suspicion is the government doesn't like the idea of displaying an official page stating that you are not allowed to see something because the government doesn't want you to.

If your argument is that a group is conspiring to establish policy in a country, the idea that it's happening in many, many countries means the threshold for evidence is now much higher, since the group should be able to have much more control.

>vague terms like "affirmative action" and "diversity statements"

And this is circling the wagons. Sorry but I can't believe someone who is intellectually honest is capable of writing such thing. You are either blatantly ignorant on this matter (and shouldn't be talking about it at all) or taking me for a ride.

It's preposterous that I have to explain how requiring a document in which you state allegiance to leftist ideals has an impact on the political makeup of admissions. I don't have enough frontal lobe damage to take you seriously.

Nobody is proposing this though

>Midjourney already has some very questionable history with medical imagery (like this totally legit image of rat testicles published in "Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology" https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/AI_gener...)

I don't think "someone used their tool to produce a silly result and used it" qualifies as Midjourney having questionable history at all.

When we are talking about a context in which affirmative action and diversity statements were normalized it absolutely is hand-waving

What if it's not that?

Let me give you a hint: the concept of DEI statement to apply for a position exists

Moving towards China because of concerns of autocracy is a hilarious concept.

Yes. For all the concerns about IP theft there can be on OpenAI or Claude, there's not even concern when it comes to Chinese companies since it's fully expected that it's a lost cause. Has been for decades.

If only the US was a little bit more like China, nobody would ever know about the Epstein files.

You think China doesn't get its hands dirty because of some moral superiority? The country is utterly brutal towards its own citizens, what makes you think that the lack of warmongering is anything but inability?

>It's funny how you can look at obscenely overvalued Western AI companies, with capex's that are unsustainable, and along comes a system which pokes a gaping hole in this model, and the response is "Ya, but what do those sneaky Chinese have up their sleeve here?!"

The only way this is funny is if you are completely oblivious to how China usually operates.

I think there's a bit of a "marketing" failure happening in this context.

I've been exercising for most of my life, I'm the guy that has been going to the gym since forever to many of my acquaintances, and so they have often talked to me about how they want to start exercising or how they are doing etc.

Nobody, and I mean nobody has ever said anything like "I'm so happy to decrease my risk of diabetes". My father stopped smoking and started riding a bike, motivated by cardiovascular health, what actually makes him happy though is to be able to go up the stairs without breaking into a sweat.

Ask anyone in a gym why they exercise, they will talk about health, just not in the way doctors do. The stick of "You will die in 20 years rather than 35" pales in comparison of the carrot of "you will feel better basically all the time"

>The more reasonable dating coaches are still out there. They simply aren’t part of the mainstream advice.

I really want to ask: what would their reputation be if they were mainstream, in your opinion?

I find it to be a very interesting spot of culture and society, like at one point you had a bunch of guys who were dealing with the cognitive dissonance between what society asks of men and what society wants from them in a context that wasn't yet politicized.

It is my impression that when it started showing up a little bit in the mainstream, the accusations of misogyny came, and with that most who actually cared about misogyny left the boat, in public terms. So now all we have left is Tate and the likes.

Why settle for play pretend autocracy when you can go all-in amirite?