intalentive

>a strange devotion to carrying out every whim of a certain semi-allied state I won't name directly

Israel. The White House is willing to sacrifice American power and prestige for Israel. We have to stop tip-toeing around the elephant in the room.

That’s a nice story. In reality the “open society” is open to takeover by international finance capital. It’s like running a server with “admin”:”password” SSH credentials — a security vulnerability that cedes control to outsiders. Imagine China and Iran allowing Larry Ellison to own their media, or allowing Larry Fink to control a big chunk of their markets, or allowing George Soros to manipulate their currency and operate NGOs within their borders. That would be plainly idiotic and suicidal.

“Open society!” coos the fox to the henhouse. LOL, no thanks!

There won’t be anti-trust as long as elections can be bought and there’s a revolving door between regulators and industry. We need a firewall to separate capital and state.

Seems to be working fine in China. Bad management happens, and does not refute the idea of management itself. Good management works.

Technology did change the world, and technocrats did shape it. This was part of what Burnham called the "managerial revolution". In the 1930s the fascists, communists, and New Dealers all took the reins and governed their societies in new technocratic ways. It has never really changed ever since.

The permanent war economy of the United States never ceased, the constant monetary tweaking by the Federal Reserve never ceased, the "nudge units" and public relations firms that manage opinion never ceased. The television was and is a technocratic tool. The birth control pill, and pharmaceuticals generally, were and are technocratic tools. They are technological means by which to manage populations. As Yuval Harari puts it, the answer to "unnecessary people" is "drugs and computer games".

The main difference between the original technocracy movement, and what actually played out in history, is that the technicians and engineers operating the machinery of population management were never really in charge. They were merely instruments -- means to an end. Aldous Huxley explained the situation in 1958:

"By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manip­ulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms -- elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest -- will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitari­anism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slo­gans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial -- but democracy and free­dom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of sol­diers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit."

Today the biggest challenges to the Western technocratic oligarchy are 1) loss of narrative control via the internet, 2) external threats from other great (technocratic) powers, and 3) internal decline and incompetence.

Where is Germany going to get the fuel to power an ICE fleet? Where is Germany going to get the electricity to power an EV fleet?

Germany faces much bigger problems than the auto lobby.

Iran is the main source of resistance in the region. Libya, Iraq, and Syria have been pacified. Egypt has been bought off. All the groups still fighting Israel (Hezbollah, Houthis, probably Hamas) have received significant Iranian support.

I believe the calculation is this is Israel’s last best window of opportunity to leverage the declining American empire with a compromised asset in the White House. The time to strike is now, since in 10 years US military power and US political will in support of Israel will likely be diminished.

Chaos could be the point. That is the Libya model.

I am going to steal this code and run a different analysis. The author mentions that skeptics avoid grifters without punishing them. I am curious how things play out in the Seven Samurai model, where instead of marks you have peasants and instead of grifters you have bandits. What happens if you have samurai not skeptics? Who both take rice from the peasants and protect them from greater exploitation by bandits.

This would be a simple governance model, and you could predict something like “revolution” when the cost of samurai exceeds their benefit.

Ah I missed that.

I like Hotz’s style: simply and straightforwardly attempting the difficult and complex. I always get the impression: “You don’t need to be too fancy or clever. You don’t need permission or credentials. You just need to go out and do the thing. What are you waiting for?”

Strictures which successfully regulated desire crystallized over the ages into particular forms of tradition and morality. Hence early conservatives like Carlyle and Chesterton were anti-capitalist: they saw the economics of desire as a corrosive force that would break down and nullify the experience of centuries as encoded in customs, tradition and other social bonds.

Successful protest movements are typically successful because they are organized and/or leveraged by a counter elite or foreign actor. One example is the CIA orchestrating protests to topple the PM of Iran in 1953.

Protest movements lacking elite or foreign state sponsorship (like the yellow vests in France, Occupy Wall St, or the Canada truckers) tend to wither away by attrition, get infiltrated and redirected, or else are dispersed by force.

I made the jump to Mint Xfce when MS announced it would stop supporting Windows 7. Pretty seamless transition. I still enjoy that older minimal style reminiscent of the early 00s.

Also — what industrial plan? As far as I can tell, we just have tariffs without a complementary plan to encourage investment, build infrastructure, train workers, reduce labor costs, etc.

I respect him for standing up for his people. It’s honorable, in my opinion. It would be dishonorable (and easy) to be a mercenary, profit-seeking individual with loyalty to no one but himself.

No, not alone, I find GPT far preferable when it comes to fleshing out ideas. It is much deeper conceptually, it understands intent and can cross pollinate disparate ideas well. Gemini is a little more autistic and gets bogged down in details. The API is useful for high volume extraction jobs, though — Gemini API reliability has improved a lot and has lower failure rate than OpenAI IME.

This mirrors the military doctrine of "mission tactics" which entrusts subordinates with wide latitude in executing orders. But it requires a high degree of alignment and competence, which explains why YC focuses on founders over product or idea.

This makes sense in a dynamic environment with sensitive local conditions and "network lag" in the chain of command. But in more static or settled market environments it may be wiser (for investors) to focus elsewhere and restrict founder autonomy. We see this pretty commonly with successful founders who get "phased out" and replaced with more experienced managers.

I wonder how much this sort of "distributed decision-making" has been formalized and studied.

Yes, and a big part of the reason labor costs are so high is that living costs are high. The US worker is saturated with debt, fees, payments, rents of every stripe.

Or Cloudflare, for that matter…

Sounds like Yeltsin-era privatization is on the menu. “What assets can we strip from the Venezuelan people, for pennies on the dollar?”

Geopolitically the US has abandoned world hegemony and is consolidating in the western hemisphere.

Venezuela has massive oil reserves and its leadership has been anti-Zionist since Chavez.

It’s a juicy target close to home, been a thorn for decades, and not as prickly as Iran or Yemen.

But you’re right, it’s noteworthy they are not attempting to sell interventionism to the public anymore. 15 years ago they’d have staged a color revolution and gone with the populist uprising narrative. They seem to have dropped the narcoterrorist narrative already. The use of raw force without moral justification is a sign of decline. The Twitter right is trying to sell this as an imperial / Nietzschean triumph but few are going to buy it.

Great resource. I would also like to see a comparison of variable access times across different scopes.

A big difference is central bank intervention. In the most recent Market Wizards book, the biggest gains came from traders who traded CB announcements and rumors.

The text does not really support the title. It argues: “The Internet is not necessarily good for democracy, as optimists claim. It’s more likely to be a mixed bag that presents new challenges.”

This is a good early example of the “populism is bad for democracy” genre of Ivy League handwringing, with titles like “The People Vs. Democracy”. It’s almost amusing to see how uncomfortable the ruling class is with peer-to-peer discourse unmediated by Fact Checkers, Debunkers, and other Adults In The Room.

I like how the grid pulses with the kick drum. Nice touch.

This essay is missing the words “cause” and “causal”. There is a difference between discovering causes and fitting curves. The search for causes guides the design of experiments, and with luck, the derivation of formulae that describe the causes. Norvig seems to be confusing the map (data, models) for the territory (causal reality).

We can try to breed little chihuahua or pug sized bears that will curl up at your feet.

If you start a website that is too friendly to a foreign regime, it risks being shut down by the FBI. That’s what happened to the American Heritage Tribune. The US power nexus absolutely suppresses dissident speech, whether through lawsuits, deplatforming, de-banking, or any of a variety of other means.

Can’t recall where I heard this, but I’m pretty sure the si=… is tracking information that associates the link with the user who shared it.