Plenty of people love to be anonymous trolls.
In addition, having information from anonymous sources casts doubt on whether those sources exist at all, or are credible individuals rather than trolls
drethelin
Karma: 8,067
You are given millions of words of context and examples to learn from.
One of the things to learn is that a few downvotes is basically meaningless, because lots of people disagree in lots of ways and you need to stop caring that much.
I’ve said this many times but downvotes are a valuable signal that wastes way less time of everyone involved.
Explanations of downvotes don’t just take the time of the person writing them, they also take the time of everyone else who has to read them, and multiply the impact of trolls and prolific bullshitters.
If you are getting a lot of downvotes, then it’s almost always for a good reason and rarely that mysterious, and if you pay attention you will soon figure out what people don’t like about your content, for example that it’s whiny.
I think this essay is blatantly manipulative bullshit written in a deliberately hypnotic style, that could be modified to target any topic anyone cares about.
a wood famous for being flimsy seems like a bad choice here
The fact that you highlight Trump as particularly authoritarian and keeping him out of office in 2024 as a priority shows that this is a hopelessly mindkilled effort.
Sorry, this post ignores too many obviously relevant factors to be very convincing.
It makes arguments based on how it would not make sense for someone to take the risk to eliminate Epstein because they would go to jail for murder IF CAUGHT, but the fundamental thing going on with Epstein is people, even well-connected billionaires, are fully willing to do things that will send to prison IF CAUGHT because they believe (for good reason) that they will not be caught, and if caught will not be punished to the full extent of the law. So you’re already dealing with a set of people who are willing to risk going to jail to get what they want, and willing to pay other people to take on that risk to help them.
There’s also no mention of Trump or Clinton, two people that Epstein might obviously be tempted to implicate who have both direct and indirect power over the CIA and other US government agencies and who we know have few to no moral qualms about having people killed. These are also the exact people who would be in position to subvert the Attorney General or anyone else looking at the evidence.
If Epstein still has enough access to money to bribe people to let him kill himself, he has enough money to bribe people to let him live a life of luxury in jail, or to fully stage an escape, perhaps by bribing them to let him stay in a minimum security prison, where there are frequent escapes (https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-prisons-prison-breaks-business-c1979d6ad6e7b3531968dab0e61eb22d)The last time he was arrested, he subverted a ton of people to the extent that he got a relatively low level of punishment that let him spend 12 hours a day doing whatever he wanted outside of prison, zero consequences for breaking the rules (eg flying to other cities when he was supposed to stay in florida on his “work release”), and even with that he still get let out early.
In addition, the fundamental premise of the Epstein story is that dozens if not hundreds of wealthy and well-connected people have in fact been “subverted” for years into covering up or at least not making a fuss about frequent underaged sex and rape.
You can credibly claim that Epstein currently had no plans of talking, but like you said he had turned against a past co-conspirator, so you can’t credibly claim that no one who was at risk if he talked might not believe that it was a better deal to eliminate him than to worry for the next 20 years.
Measuring homelessness by state seems like a deeply flawed approach given that it involves aggregating enormous geographic areas with different conditions.
Real people can and often are extremely dangerous and it is not rude to describe dangerous people as acting in dangerous ways, or if it is then it is a valuable form of rudeness.
At this point I think enough people have tried to make pitches for various cities that have achieved nothing that I don’t really see the value in adding another one to the pile of attempts to get the community as a whole to move somewhere.
On the other hand, a lot of people have moved to a lot of places on an individual or small-group basis so I’m happy to pitch where I live, Madison Wisconsin, as a potential place you might not know about which I think is a pretty good compromise on a lot of things that people want from a place to live.Downtown Madison Wisconsin from Above Madison has a good variety of restaurants, bars, cafes, parks, and other amenities in a small radius. You can rent anything from an efficiency to a whole house in walking distance from all of this without much hassle since there is a large market for student housing due to the relatively huge University in the city.
Rents in this area can vary from 450 a month (if you want to live with me in my house) to around 1800 for a 750 ft 1 bedroom in a brand new high end apartment building a couple blocks away from me.
Crime: In like a decade parking downtown I have never had my car broken into, although I have had it entered a few times when I left it unlocked. I have never been randomly mugged. My roommate is smol and has walked around here at night for longer than I have and has never had a problem. Like many cities we’ve had some rioting/looting and increase in other crimes this summer but it’s mostly not impacting random people.
Culture: In normal years, we have a ton of live music and events in various bars, cafes, and theaters, as well as plays, art shows, and so on. Madison is big enough that touring bands usually stop here, although not always, and sometimes if I want to catch a show I have to drive an hour and a half to Milwaukee or 3 hours to Chicago. There is an enormous gaming scene here, with a ton of great MTG players, lots of roleplaying and LARP, as well as tabletop, boardgaming, etc.
We also have Contra, Swing, and other dance scenes, as well as a few night clubs and an immense amount of bars.
If you like walking outside, Madison has more parks per capita than any other big city, as well as just tons of trees, gardens, and greenery in most neighborhoods, and multiple lakes and rivers in walking distance of downtown. I can walk from my house to the center of government or into a forest equally easily. If you have a car, you can drive to a ton of state parks in an hour, as well as to The House on the Rock, but even if you don’t it’s easy to bike to see nature, if that’s something you’re into.
We have a start-up and tech job ecosystem, mostly focused around biotech and healthcare industry but we do have a Google office and as well as Epic Systems in the next town over so there is a very significant percentage of people in software also. We have good internet options available if you are going to be working from home going forward too.
The biggest downsides about living in Madison from my point of view are:
Winter—Personally I really like having seasons, but if you can’t stand cold and snow you will be miserable here for much of the year.
Population—Madison only has around 250,000 people, which means that your selection of people to hang out with in niche interest areas is fairly limited. We used to have a nice 8-12 person or so Lesswrong meetup group which fell apart after a bunch of people moved to the Bay Area. If you go to nerdy events you will find that you tend to see a lot of the same people over and over. Depending on your interests, you can still find lots of people to hang out with, but if, eg, you are averse to drinking you may have some trouble.
Driving a car is actually very safe. You can expect to drive a car full-time for 100 years before suffering a lethal accident.
The only thing I want to add is that despite pretenses to sameness it’s useful to remember that not all ovens are equal and having a conscious awareness of oven quirks can help a lot to diagnose what went wrong.
the absolutely important part that people seem to miss with a basic 101 understanding of EMH is “hard” in no way means “impossible”
People do hard things all the time! It takes work and time and IQ and learning from experience but they do it.
I believe the reason why is that knowing everyone in the community would literally be a full-time job and no one wants to pay for that.
It is especially the case that it should prioritize braking in uncertainty when it’s a lonely road with no one behind
Simplest answer: twitter is where everyone else is, which makes it the simplest and easiest way to interact conversationally with potentially anyone on earth without an intro or in-person meeting.
In addition, twitter enables easy one-to-many communication for celebrities who want to spread memes, and brevity is the soul of wit.
That just makes an opening like “I have become very, very interested in developing a skill that I call Dependability.” even more annoying to me.
I disapprove of the lesswrongy tendency to try to coin new words or new meanings for old words for concepts that already exist and are useful.
Walmart coordinates 2.2 million people directly and millions more indirectly.
Even the boy scouts coordinates 2.7 million.
Religions coordinate, to a greater or lesser extent, far more.
The key to coordination is to not consider yourself as an individual measuring out a ration of words you can force x number of people to read. Most people never read the bible.
Also for practical purposes it’s much more clear who is being referred to in the local context especially since there’s tons of writing from/about Ziz
Plus it’s just a much cooler name for a community villain.