Friend-shoring Enthusiast

🇪🇺
Joined April 2013
In regards to this situation, here's the 10 commandments I use to remain sane: 1. Understand Secular trends 2. Don't fight the nature of the beast 3. Money is about security & freedom 4. Protect your health at all costs 5. Life is a meme and there isn't a fairness barometer
Leaked staff survey results from Goldman Sachs (cannot vouch for veracity but are being shared online). drive.google.com/file/d/1jye… Beyond bleak.
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Concave retweeted
Replying to @MacroJason
No region of this world is as destined to be a permanent middle income society as LatAm. Just enough human capital to show promises for a greater future luring in investors, though always to be pulled down by the median. However never so little that society falls into disarray
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Tranquil Saturday in Timisoara, Romania. No chaos, no storefronts boarded up, just families and locals enjoying their time
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Western European Corruption: We will not allow you to build anything to protect our existing RE portfolio Eastern European corruption: We will build more units than usually allowed to sell more.
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The only way you can have a well functioning real estate market: 1. No Rent control 2. No NIMBY'ism 3. Easy pathway to kicking out bad tenants Anything else creates various bottlenecks along the way
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Woke: Let the criminals freely roam Bespoke: Arrest them Baroque: Kill them
Whew, lad. That's quite the headline.
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AI this, SI that -- too much hassle. Yearn to have a business in Rural Romania that requires this level of marketing from you
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No, the actual lesson is to perform your actual duty in life, which is looking after and being there for your wife & kids. Be a sovereign pillar in your own community. Not to become an obedient pawn for powers who tricked you into believing their nonsense
Hypergamy doesn't give a fuck if you're an American Hero
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Russians are so nuts, they'll make a 6 hour youtube video reviewing niche fragrances
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My controversial view is that Brexit was the singular smartest and most prescient decision made democratically by a European nation since the 2010s. It failed miserably because the UK politicians utterly betrayed every want of its people, not because the act itself was wrong. By 2016s, all of the worst excesses of ultra-liberalism were fully showcasing themselves in the EU, open borders, climate hysteria, an increasingly anti-business regulatory environment. The desire to seperate yourself from these policies forced upon you by radicals in Brussels was the objectively correct one, especially now having seen what transpired in Europe since. Yet British politicians went the complete opposite direction and squandered a once in a lifetime opportunity. People wanted less migration -> Migration dramatically increased, especially from the third world People wanted less regulation -> Bureaucracy also dramatically increased, much worse than the EU itself
My view is that Brexit was a somewhat costly mistake (and I opposed it at the time as well) but I am unsettled when I speak to "elites" in Britain who are totally fixated on it as the source of our problems, and reversing/undoing it as the solution. I've had more than one experience over the past few weeks that has given me the impression that many people who run the country or influence those who do believe that Brexit is the silver bullet. I think that's totally wrong – the country's inability to build housing, infrastructure, or cheap energy supply, along with the country's now very high levels of tax and govt spending, are much bigger problems for growth. If anything, AI may mean being outside the EU ends up being quite a good thing, despite the costs so far. Avoiding the EU's AI and data regulations is valuable, and these will probably only get worse. And Britain now has a greater possibility of getting inside the American "tent" and get preferential access to frontier models that most countries cannot get, if that ends up being important.
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The French protests are indicative of a broader trend of the West becoming increasingly difficult to govern. Decades of low productivity growth, poor demographics, and unsustainable promises to retirees have been papered over by deficit-funded fiscal policy. But what can't last, won't. And with bond markets rebelling, there isn't a clear way for politicians to meet voters' rising expectations within tighter fiscal constraints. Politicians get elected by making promises that fiscal reality prevents them from fulfilling. When those promises disappoint, voters swing to the next party offering new pledges. Eventually, people tire of the whole system, and take their frustration to the streets, demanding what government no longer has the ability to give them.
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Pursuing a scholars of Theology that you've invented new sentient beings is as close as one can get to the Biblical definition of Blasphemy and the portrayal of the Anti-Christ Really unbelievable the Anthropic team sought both Rabbis and Priests to accept this view
Note well, apparently Anthropic tried very hard to get the Vatican to alter the text of "Magnifica Humanitas" just prior to its release so that it would not deny AI personhood.
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France has a very large permanent underclass group of people, but because they never leave the country, their nation isn't associated with them. You think of the French by their high performers. Compare that to Romania's case, the gypsies, who are famously migratory thus they have much more of a say in how the country is perceived. I wonder if or when this will also occur for the Western European nations who engaged in mass third world migration. Will the idea of the average Belgian or Frenchman still be of the civilized native?
Young second and third-generation migrants film a French firefighter after setting him on fire during the school protests in Bordeaux 🇫🇷
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Found this old photo of a Nokia 6300 certificate. What a time that was in 2007. Europe was making top of the line phones which were manufacturer between Finland, Germany, and Hungary.
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For comparison there was an identical project done in Romania. Railway on top, 2 lanes on the bottom with the whole structure needing an extension & renovation. ''Pasaj Jiul'' in Timisoara took 1 year and 6 months, cost 5 Million Euros. It also extended it to 5 lanes. But of course if you follow the ''official data'' the UK is a low corruption country whereas Romania is a hopeless land. As @MacroJason says, bearish ''rule of law'' countries
Cars and buses go from Oxford Station down Botley Road for the first time in three years! The project took longer than the construction of The Titanic and saw costs balloon to £237m. Looks good though.
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Praising video games as a way to learn skills is analogous to saying you can learn to have sex through porn. Maybe on the margin it's true, you do technically learn managing resources, people, maybe how to keep your cool. But it's better to keep these as entertainment only
this is a pretty common take on ct especially, like I'm one of those people, I guess, who learned stuff from computer games, but as much as "I want to believe", ultimately it's cope No, the kid who did raids in WoW or grinded eve online or Runescape or whatever else is not a great default hire because of his "skills". The key component you are missing is him being interested/passionate in whatever it is you want him to work on, cause if he is not, he is just going to half ass his job and come home to play WoW... Same for chess grandmasters who frequently make mediocre quant hires. Intelligence is just not directly transferrable and genuine interest (or even better passion) beats inteligence/gaming acquired "skills" 99% of the time
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Goosebumps. For all its faults, Western Christian culture is still worth defending
Goosebumps. For all its faults, Western Christian culture is still worth defending.
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Romania & Moldova, an island of high-trust societies surrounded by a sea of corrupt Europeans. The Black Sea is truly the only ally
Countries with lower corruption than the global average. Source: Transparency International, CPI 2025.
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Concave retweeted
Well let me map this a bit better from a null incentive point of view: First point: It assumes that AI has a will of its own. I will remind you that it is a reactionary or looped reactionary technology. It does not have the ability to be spontaneous as it is trained to respond to tokens not to survive. Please see the recent strategy game simulations where both Astra and Fable do not mind much being turned off in the absence of the biases of a prompter (who primes them on their behalf and are impossible to remove). Second point: There is little to no evidence that a jump in capabilities translates for one company translates into an exponential RSI that leaves the rest behind. As a matter of fact based on the existing data we can see that most competitors are incrementally improving and leapfrogging one another, with open source being a few months behind at best. Also we can see that the specific real world improvements are not that different across models outside cybersecurity, and even then there is a theoretical limit on the damage and previous generation models with human collaboration can achieve the same results (see Sol and Astra). Intellectual work is only useful when directed by humans, else it has no point.
There are two ways AI progress could go very badly and that we must avoid. First, we could lose control of the future to AI. This is unacceptable; we are unapologetically on Team Humanity, and AI must always serve people. To ensure that, we need ways to ensure that alignment and safety techniques stay ahead of progress in model capabilities. Second, we could end up in a world with too much concentration of power. If an extraordinarily powerful AI is used by one person or company to impress their worldview onto everyone else, the results could be extremely dystopian. Avoiding these two threats requires walking a narrow middle path; for example, one country could gain too much power. Another example is one lab ending up with too much power.
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Replying to @GestaltU
Your argument about citizens defecting from the national project is such an incredibly good point. Most countries that harbor this type of "economic project ultra diverse" attitudes are tiny ones with an unfair economic advantage that allows low taxation to sustain itself. No one would be loyal to stay through the thick
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