Bookmarks

I posted that I stand with Israel because I recognize that its enemies are the enemies of civilization.

Someone replied asking in an obviously hostile way how I define "enemies of civilization", and that was followed up with the quoted sarcasm: "The side with the most browns is against civilization, don't you know."

Of course I was supposed to respond to this by scuttling away from my previous position in terror lest I be labeled a raaaacist.

This is a kind of bullying that makes me want to respond "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on!" It's never honest, it's never constructive.

So fuck you. The enemies of civilization are the side with the lower average IQ and higher average time preference. It's the side that demonstrates these traits by publishing the fewest books per capita and, oh look, rewarding itself with orgies of rape and murder and literally dancing in the blood of its enemies.

And yes, it's generally the side with the most browns. I am ornery about speaking the truth and I am going to say that in public, and fuck you again for trying to jerk me around with discourse taboos.

Of course anyone who isn't a moron would understand that the most-browns part isn't causal, it's accidental. The low-average-IQ part is what's essential - stupid savages behave like stupid savages because they have short time horizons and poor impulse control.

It isn't an essential truth that brown people have to be stupid savages; we can observe self-selected populations of them that aren't, usually when they emigrate out of their origin culture to live among white people or Northeast Asians. But even the emigration isn't strictly necessary; high-caste Indians manage to be pretty brown and pretty bright on average at the same time.

The racist is not the person who understands all these things. The racist is the person who jumps straight to "you must despise brown people" as the only possible reason anyone would stand with Israel.

WhatsApp founder Jan Koum explains why he charged $1 for the product to intentionally slow growth

Sam Altman recalls:

“I remember in 2011, people would say WhatsApp is never going to work because they charge a dollar and it’s a viral app and that’s just going to kill it right there.”

But Jan explains that charging $1 was a very intentional lever WhatsApp used to slow growth:

“I know it sounds very counterintuitive - why would you want to slow your growth? We wanted to slow our growth so we could better support our existing users. So we could build servers that don’t crash. So that we could build a product that doesn’t drop messages. So that we could answer their customer support emails.”

A lot of people told Jan and the WhatsApp team this was a bad strategy, but Jan compares it to what Facebook did in the early days: “They were doing colleges only, and they weren’t open to the entire world.”

WhatsApp wanted to do the same thing:

“We wanted to make sure that we have our existing users happy, and that when people sign up, they have a great experience, and that the app works, and it’s fast, and the servers are up and running all the time. And I think that worked for us because we were really able to focus on the product.”

Video source: @ycombinator (2014)