yupitsme123 (u/yupitsme123)

yupitsme123 commented on If the University of Chicago won't defend the humanities, who will? theatlantic.com/culture/a... · Posted by u/atmosx

api · 4 months ago

I place some blame on the humanities themselves.

Mediocre blatherers like Jordan Peterson (to pick just one example) have captured the hearts and minds of young people because most "real" work in the humanities is locked behind not just academic paywalls but an impenetrable wall of inward-focused jargon. Humanities work is written for other people in the humanities, not the public. It also tends to deal with subjects that are not of interest to 90%+ of the public.

A huge vacuum has been created, and it's been filled with shit because it's there so something's going to fill it.

P.S. For the inevitable defenders of Jordan Peterson: go read Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, G.K. Chesterton, and CS Lewis, to name a few. Peterson is one of those people for whom I'd say "what he says that's interesting is not original, and what he says that's original is not interesting." Take away the authors he draws from and what's left is a mix of stoner-esque rambling (though apparently without the pot?) and something like an attempt at highbrow Andrew Tate. The latter is why I genuinely dislike the guy more than I would if he were just, say, a self-help quack, which he also is.

yupitsme123 · 4 months ago

I don't know much about Peterson beyond clips that pop in my feeds, but he appears to be someone who's familiar with world history and the history of thought, and that applies some kind of intellectual rigor in making those ideas relevant to the issues of today, all while making it accessible for the general public. There aren't too many intellectuals doing that right now. He aligns pretty well with my concept of what Humanities is supposed to be.

Meanwhile I routinely hear Humanities students run their mouths about Marxism without even knowing who Hegel is. Or ranting about slavery while thinking that the Arab Slave Trade and the British Anti-Slavery campaign are just revisionist ideas. I ask myself all the time, what exactly do Humanities students get taught these days? Do they learn anything from before the days of Critical Theory?

yupitsme123 commented on Dropping Trust in US Media news.gallup.com/poll/6957... · Posted by u/DaveZale

mesh · 4 months ago

Relevant read is Chomsky's and Herman's Manufacturing Consent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

Basically, there has always been a strong bias and structural constraints toward US / elite views.

I think the core question is why trust has gotten particularly bad over the last decade (I have some ideas, including one side particularly trying to weaken trust in it).

yupitsme123 · 4 months ago

It shouldn't be a surprise that there's no more trust. And blaming it on one "side" makes no sense because in Chomsky's view power has only one side, not two.

Chomsky and other critical theorists and marxists pointed out that those in power get to dictate what's truth, what's news, what values we should follow. Once you realize that, the next step was supposed to be revolution followed by a world with no power structure.

The various revolutions of the 20th century never worked out that way, and nobody wants to risk their life for that stuff anymore. Meanwhile I think we've all assimilated Chomsky's view that the system is rigged and that everything is a lie or a distortion invented to perpetuate the power structure.

There's no more trust because there's nobody to trust in. You either keep your head down and just try to exist, or you lie to yourself and pick out which lies you want to buy into.

yupitsme123 commented on The Sagrada Família takes its final shape newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/pseudolus

lubujackson · 5 months ago

An element of Gaudi's work I didn't appreciate until I was in Barcelona is the usage of biological structures in his architecture. You can see somewhat in the image looking at the ceiling, but the columns really do evoke the sense of being in a forest of pure white, towering trees with the ceiling as its canopy.

yupitsme123 · 5 months ago

This ties in with the Art Nouveau movement which he was a part of. If you look at paintings and other architecture from the time period, there are lots of references to nature and "organic" shapes.

yupitsme123 commented on Not Buying American Anymore xd1.dev/2025/09/not-buyin... · Posted by u/gchamonlive

yupitsme123 · 5 months ago

It's interesting to me that a country that loves consumerism so much doesn't have a pro-consumer movement.

It looks like Ralph Nader led one for a while back in the '70s but it's long dead now.

If someone were to revive such a movement or if some politicians were to attach themselves to it then I think it would be hugely popular.

yupitsme123 commented on National park to remove photo of enslaved man's scars washingtonpost.com/climat... · Posted by u/shitter

glenstein · 5 months ago

At some point in the 20th century the Republican and Democratic parties flipped, in terms of which geographical and ideological blocks they represented. Most people point to the Civil Rights Act, with D's were in favor of and R's were against, as well as Nixon's Southern Strategy, as an explicit turning point, but it was already gradually underway in decades before and after. The inertia and old boys networks lasted well into the 90s and early 00s before the realignment fully played out.

But in the modern day you see revisionist history insisting that no such realignment ever occurred, and that the R's are the same "Party of Lincoln" they always were. Enter news stories such as this one. If you aren't sure that a realignment took place, ask which movement in the present day regularly celebrates and defends and invokes that iconography of the confederate south, and tries to defend and preserve historical artifacts that celebrate the confederate south while removing those that criticize it.

If the history of the 20th century wasn't already clear, I think even just the last 5-10 years, and especially this year, 2025, give all kinds of new evidence demonstrating that the realignment really happened.

yupitsme123 · 5 months ago

During the days of slavery, the Dems were the party pushing to maintain the status quo and the existing power structure. The Republicans were those fighting to change it.

Coming out of the civil rights movement, it was the democrats who wanted to change the status quo and the Republicans who wanted to defend it.

In the present period of endless culture war and polticization of everything, it seems that the democrats are the ones on the side of the status quo and existing power structures. They want to shove everyone into identity groups, put those groups into hierarchies, they want to shame certain groups and grant new privileges to others.

A lot of people are exhausted by the culture war, tired of having every aspect of our lives coopted to remind us to feel bad about ourselves and to hate each other. I don't think Trump is really offering a new path here yet, but he's recognizing what people say all the time in private and which the democrats refuse to accept.

yupitsme123 commented on A 'third way' between buying or renting? Swiss co-ops say they've found it nytimes.com/2025/08/26/re... · Posted by u/lifeisstillgood

awongh · 5 months ago

TICs are a scam though. They are just condos with less legal protections for the relationships between the tenants. They don't solve any of the cost of ownership issues or deal with the idea of appreciation of the value of the real estate. afaik it's actually much worse because you're combining the appreciation of the asset, but you can't sell as easily as with a condo.

yupitsme123 · 5 months ago

Sounds like you want a super liquid asset that's not actually an asset because it doesn't appreciate, and also it needs to be really easy to buy, cheaply. That's unlikely to happen and what we have right now is probably as close as one can get to that.

I wasn't saying that coops or TICs are ideal, just that they show what happens when you remove the speculative and investment aspect as well as the subsidy of below-market interest rates and mortgages that any idiot can qualify for. The result is prices which are lower by 10-20%.

People seem to want an engineered, top-down, state provided solution that makes homeownership more affordable. But we've already tried many of those solutions and they just inflate prices and encourage speculation and securitization.

A better approach might be to end the various implicit and explicit subsidies on mortgages and homeownership, keep speculators, investors, and big developers out of the market, and focus on owner occupied dwellings. I think this would disinflate the housing market and allow it to get back to where it should be.

yupitsme123 commented on A 'third way' between buying or renting? Swiss co-ops say they've found it nytimes.com/2025/08/26/re... · Posted by u/lifeisstillgood

awongh · 5 months ago

This article is really low on actual facts about how these co-ops can actually operate.

I feel like the problem in the US isn't necessarily that the government won't directly pay for these kinds of things like they do in Switzerland, but that it's very very hard to finance a co-op, possibly illegal (that is, you wouldn't have the same legal protections a condo does).

I would be curious to see the finances of the buildings they mention in the article. Assuming that you could arrange the two major financial aspects: 1) financing at a level of a normal home loan 2) cut out the real estate developer profit margin, I wonder if a co-op model would become viable in the US.

Edit to add: Intuitively it seems like the math could work out, if you figure that a co-op takes the appreciation of the real estate out of the picture for the people living there, and that being able to rebalance that lost value towards the initial cost or towards future costs would be a trade-off normal people would be willing to make.

In that sense a co-op is more like an alternative to renting rather than an alternative to home ownership.

yupitsme123 · 5 months ago

I think San Francisco has something like this with their Below Market Rate (BMR) housing program. You have to be below a certain income to be considered, and basically you get to pay a fixed monthly rate to "own" a place that can only be sold for a fixed amount. It always just sounded like rent to me.

I think that NYC's co-ops (TICs in San Francisco) provided an interesting alternative model. They usually require owner-occupancy, can't be rented easily, and are difficult to finance.

These restrictions eliminate investors and speculators, and shields the the units from the inflation that happens from fed intervention and super low rates.

The result is that they're usually priced a lot lower and appreciate more slowly than they would be if they were condos.

yupitsme123 commented on The decline of high-tech manufacturing in the United States blog.waldrn.com/p/the-dec... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

awesome_dude · 6 months ago

> 2) We should bring back manufactured goods so that if we go to war with China, we can still make all the things we need to wage that war.

I think that I have seen that this kind of "independence" has been a driving reason for China's strategies too. I don't think that it's necessarily a defence against a war, maybe more of an economic buffer, ensuring that China, and whomever follows the strategy is no longer dependent on any other entity for parts of their supply chain.

One of the things, too, that people seem to forget is that the West (in general) has neglected their manufacturing capability in favour of the "Asian Tigers" doing the work (Japan, Korea, Taiwan), China is just the current holder of the title (for how long is anyone's guess, Japan especially has endured a sustained stagnation of their economy over the last several decades).

Germany, for a while, was a strong manufacturer, and have (so far) been using the resulting economic position to their advantage inside the European Bloc. Perhaps that's the model that the USA (and others) should be looking toward?

yupitsme123 · 6 months ago

I think a big component of China's imperialist strategy is to de-infustrialize the world, much like what's happened to the US.

yupitsme123 commented on The decline of high-tech manufacturing in the United States blog.waldrn.com/p/the-dec... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

kingofmen · 6 months ago

> we'll need the people to actually fight the war itself.

Will we? It appears to me that modern war works substantially like modern factories - you don't actually want a large mass of semiskilled workers to pull the levers, each of which can substitute for a different one on about five minutes' notice. You want relatively few, highly-trained specialists to instruct the ~~robots~~ drones. It is perhaps less true in war than in manufacturing, quantity still has that quality all its own, but it seems very unclear that just raw numbers of soldiers will be an important bottleneck as between Great Powers.

yupitsme123 · 6 months ago

I'm pretty sure most of the robots and drones are manufacturered in China though. Even if they weren't, a lot of critical components for building things come from there now.

yupitsme123 commented on The Folk Economics of Housing aeaweb.org/articles?id=10... · Posted by u/kareemm

nis0s · 6 months ago

One problem that’s unaddressed is that there isn’t a house building, pricing and mortgage model for people making 50K or less.

One piece of data I’ve found is that 65% of Americans are homeowners (meaning American families, not rentals or investments), which is also about the percentage of Americans who make $50K or more per year (~68%).

For people with a middle class networth (not income, I mean networth, which is about ~1M-9M when compared with the top of US society), homeownership currently works as a wealth-building mechanism because of scarcity. There’s also the desire to live close to certain areas, but why not make more neighborhoods or areas worth living in?

Regardless, if the goal is to maintain scarcity for wealth building, then I think the scarcity mechanism will remain intact if homeownership is increased to a high rate while balancing the cost of materials and labor, and building houses specially for certain income levels, as mentioned already in other posts.

But no one seems to be doing materials innovation, or construction innovation. I don’t think 3D printing is there quite yet, and might be more expensive. Where’s the push on automating construction? Why not build with a genetically engineered bamboo that’s cheaper and more sustainable than wood? Seems materials innovation will help with both housing and sustainability goals.

yupitsme123 · 6 months ago

In the past, people were able to buy a small piece of land and develop it themselves. Literally build the house themselves. Over a long period time if necessary to spread out the cost. They also built 2-4 family homes so they could bring in some rent or house a family member.

None of this is really allowed anymore and it's very hard to find a piece of land to do it with. Enabling this sort of construction and forcing or incentiving small plots of land might open up options for people on the lower end.