>“Social democracies like Norway only work because they’re ethnically homogeneous and swimming in oil money”
>Small island nation of Mauritius has highest standard of living in Africa
>No natural resources
>68% Indo-Mauritian, 27% Creole, 5% other
>(Religion also split between Hindu, Catholic, and Muslim)
>Leftist parties make up vast majority of parliament
>Free healthcare and education, including college
>Right-wing Heritage Foundation still lists their economy as 15th “freest” in the world
>Ranked more democratic than the United States by the Economist Intelligence Unit
>mfw
The family planning programs’ success was due to support from the government and eventually the traditionally pronatalist religious communities, which both recognized that controlling population growth was necessary because of Mauritius’ small size and limited resources.
Tight feedback loop, effects of policies more immediately obvious because there is no where to go, and percent control of the polity per person is higher.
Downturns in the sugar and textile industries in the mid-2000s and a lack of highly qualified domestic workers for Mauritius’ growing services sector led to the emigration of low-skilled workers and a reliance on skilled foreign labor.
Hmn, I wonder what impact that might have.
Since 2007, Mauritius has pursued a circular migration program to enable citizens to acquire new skills and savings abroad and then return home to start businesses and to invest in the country’s development.
This is Nationalist. An Internationalist program would involve them leaving the island permanently.
Net migration rate: 0 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2016 est.)
Huh. Doesn’t sound like mass migration to me.
Of course, many of the objections to the United States becoming Singapore are based on things like its size, relative concentration of population, and so on. …criticisms which could also apply to Mauritius.
So, OP, do you agree that the United States could become Singapore?
It seems what we have here is not an argument for Open Borders Neoliberal World™, but rather, an argument for small countries which have tight political feedback loops between policy and its effects, and high percentage of political control per person. (Something I have been considering myself.) This means people have to live with the consequences of their political decisions and have the ability to do something about it.
ETA: The real question here is, can we find one of these that’s big? Japan (127M) and Korea (50M) both fare reasonably well despite being over ten times the size of Norway (5M) and for Japan, about 100x the size of Mauritius (1.3M). …but they’re those evil ethnically homogenous type nations we’re all supposed to hate.
Your ability to constantly dance around what is being talked about and then randomly conclude that All Of Your Beliefs Are Correct continues to impress
So you aren’t in favor of mass migration? Is not “mass migration is actually Good” the entire point of such rhetoric? Otherwise, there is little reason to worry about cultural replacement.
And hey, maybe you’re a full-blooded Communist and not a Neoliberal. That also works on a sufficiently small scale. Or maybe you’re a Libertarian. It doesn’t make that much difference in this case.
“This multi-ethnic, religiously pluralist nation that has near-zero tariff rates and encourages citizens to live abroad for a number of years is nationalist actually, because that term means whatever I want it to”
If you send citizens to study abroad and then come back to improve your own country, that is putting the country over individuals. I see now from this and your other posts that others’ assessments of you were more correct than I thought.
Why do so many leftists, reasonably intelligent (and possibly very socially intelligent) people, write posts about talking-to-upper-class-conservatives that sound like lessons on how to inadvertantly radicalize people into fascism?
If all you have is a hammer and sickle, every problem starts to look like a wheat field
That is the most bizarrely mixed metaphor to date. Especially because what’s the hammer for?
smashing the state obvi
The hammer is for wheat farming why do you think they had so much famine
Inserting random Trump burns into your non-political writing might help your LibCred™, but the Trump voters already knew they were socially disapproved of, and all they’re getting is yet more “I SOCIALLY DISAPPROVE OF YOU” and they Trumped in part to spite that. So you get -1 Activism Points. I hope that feeling of smug condescension is worth it.
By the way, despite the in-jokes, it isn’t the Trump voters that are inbred.
I can tell you who really is, but it’s forbidden to know.
prompt: Trump withdraws the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement convinced that it would have a positive impact on the economy. Little did he know that more and more non-US businesses demand green products and certifcates like Sedex. Write about how america becomes an autarky, isolated from the rest of the world.
honeys, the > sign has been used to denote quotations in flat text since before 4chan even existed. If you’re worried about its ideological contamination, and that the syntax might twist your soul into an Alt-Righter or something, you’re an idiot.
Careful, you will end up with a country where everyone proudly marches on National Day, burning flags held aloft in a unifying display of patriotism…
…and people who douse the burning flags with water are considered terrorists.
Protesters proudly holding up the Unity Flag of the Earth Sphere Federation as flags of the former nations their ancestors belonged to burn beneath their feet in a display of tolerance and multicultural understanding. I grasp the bucket and-
Oh, um. Sorry, I got the timelines mixed up again.
Protesters proudly holding up the flag of the European Union as the flags of the former countries their ancestors fought and died for burn beneath their feet in a display of tolerance, the political power that is rightfully theirs flowing away from them into an unaccountable body that is neither a band of countries nor a true federal superstate, its shining currency draining the blood from their economies.
Hypothesis: the glaring flaws in rationalist ideas that people jump on (a fascist shared house!) are only there to hide the more insidious flaws that are actually far more damaging in retrospect (you can’t build a reliable system if you have components that aren’t 100% reliable, redundancy and fail-over isn’t a thing, relationship drama can be eliminated by agreeing on rules in advance and if necessary inventing new words, object-level critique can be dismissed with meta-level rebuttals, meta-level critique can be dismissed with object-level rebuttals, etc.)
It turned out that Rationalists were only interested in polyamory in order to obtain passive failover relationships configured as redundant arrays of inexpensive drama.
If you’re arguing about whether the U.S. should weaken protections of freedom of speech, I’m likely to find you a lot more persuasive if you examine other Western nations with weaker free speech protections (i.e. most of them) and the observable consequences of that, than if you expound on the most horrifying dystopia that you can imagine resulting from the opposing side.
Yeah. As someone who’s innately a free speech absolutist, it’s hard to admit that moderate limits on speech aren’t necessarily very onerous and can be maintained for decades (at least) without spiraling into anything much worse, but it’s pretty obviously true. Doesn’t mean the restrictions pass a cost-benefit test,
but it’s pretty obviously true.
I do actually think that European and Canadians restrictions on speech are already onerous, and American 1st amendment jurisprudence is the one major thing that is genuinely politically superior about the US compared to those countries. I keep seeing stories about the cops being called on people for hate speech tweets in the UK that would be unambiguously constitutionally protected in the US, and thinking I’m glad my servers are here and not there.
If I lived in one of those counties I would consider it politically important to move local law more towards the US model, or barring that preventing effective enforcement of censorship law; since I live in the US, I consider it politically important to prevent the state of 1st amendment law from moving even a little bit in the direction of Europe and Canada (which I agree are not dystopias).
It’s also worth recognizing that with the advent of the internet, European nations get a lot of benefit from American speech protections. There are lots of things put online by Europeans which would be taken down by lawsuit except that they’re hosted in the US.
Of course, European nations were hardly dystopias before that, but things like bringing legal action against critics of Erdogan really do frighten me.
and there are things hosted in Europe that would be taken down within seconds if they were hosted in America. really the internet strongly benefits from hopping around trying to be a neutral waters territory
I hope people realize that having a single, unified, global government is a terrible idea before it gets locked in as inevitable.
It’s actually beneficial to have a diversity of legal regimes. That’s contra much modern Progressivism, though, which pretends to universality.
>“Social democracies like Norway only work because they’re ethnically homogeneous and swimming in oil money”
>Small island nation of Mauritius has highest standard of living in Africa
>No natural resources
>68% Indo-Mauritian, 27% Creole, 5% other
>(Religion also split between Hindu, Catholic, and Muslim)
>Leftist parties make up vast majority of parliament
>Free healthcare and education, including college
>Right-wing Heritage Foundation still lists their economy as 15th “freest” in the world
>Ranked more democratic than the United States by the Economist Intelligence Unit
>mfw
The family planning programs’ success was due to support from the government and eventually the traditionally pronatalist religious communities, which both recognized that controlling population growth was necessary because of Mauritius’ small size and limited resources.
Tight feedback loop, effects of policies more immediately obvious because there is no where to go, and percent control of the polity per person is higher.
Downturns in the sugar and textile industries in the mid-2000s and a lack of highly qualified domestic workers for Mauritius’ growing services sector led to the emigration of low-skilled workers and a reliance on skilled foreign labor.
Hmn, I wonder what impact that might have.
Since 2007, Mauritius has pursued a circular migration program to enable citizens to acquire new skills and savings abroad and then return home to start businesses and to invest in the country’s development.
This is Nationalist. An Internationalist program would involve them leaving the island permanently.
Net migration rate: 0 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2016 est.)
Huh. Doesn’t sound like mass migration to me.
Of course, many of the objections to the United States becoming Singapore are based on things like its size, relative concentration of population, and so on. …criticisms which could also apply to Mauritius.
So, OP, do you agree that the United States could become Singapore?
It seems what we have here is not an argument for Open Borders Neoliberal World™, but rather, an argument for small countries which have tight political feedback loops between policy and its effects, and high percentage of political control per person. (Something I have been considering myself.) This means people have to live with the consequences of their political decisions and have the ability to do something about it.
ETA: The real question here is, can we find one of these that’s big? Japan (127M) and Korea (50M) both fare reasonably well despite being over ten times the size of Norway (5M) and for Japan, about 100x the size of Mauritius (1.3M). …but they’re those evil ethnically homogenous type nations we’re all supposed to hate.
Does anybody know how to get rid of the small boy in the bottom-right corner of my vision? The one holding a controller that commentates on everything that I say or do and is always thanking people for giving him money? He’s getting kinda annoying and I’m having trouble sleeping because of him.
Cutting budgets does not actually improve programs, and spending more does not necessarily improve programs. Where is the option in which we create better programs?
Oh, good, you have become a language reactionary. Let us revive a 1,000 year old dialect of Chinese in search of true meaning and launch an armed revolution against the Unicode Consortium.
I’m not sure what this emoji is, but Audrey and I use it all the time!
they’re doing the dance from this
This is what it looks like on my current system:
And if that’s just what emoji were like, then I’d be fine with them. Simple, elegant, consistent with letters of normal fonts, and in any case, easily tolerable for the sake of backwards compatibility with Japanese phone encodings.
Except, every platform decided to shit everything up, and anytime I did use the above symbol, for example, I’d have to accept the possibility of it being displayed like this:
…those two symbols do not have the same semantic context god damn
As Simon Davis-Cohen reported for In These Times in 2016,
a constitutional convention has long been a prize of corporate interest
groups and states-rights advocates. While the Maine House rejected a convention proposal last week, 12 other states have recently applied to hold
one. Combined with 16 states that passed resolutions during a
conservative push in the 1980s, that brings the total to 28—just six
short of the 34 needed to trigger the confab.
As Davis-Cohen documents, ALEC—the Koch-brothers-funded dark money group—has been a major force behind the bills, distributing model legislation
to friendly state lawmakers. The group hopes to use the convention to
shift power to the states, proposing amendments to “impose fiscal
restraints on the federal government” and repeal term limits for federal
officials and members of Congress.
ALEC may be close to getting its wishes granted. After the November
elections, Republicans now control both legislative chambers in 32
states. In 25 of those states, they also hold the governor’s mansion.
This shit makes me want to find the looniest group of California separatists I can and join them.
Ah, so others are starting to notice that the the Democrats have allowed the Republicans to get within striking distance of constitutional convention.
Dean Baker’s been doing this whole “Kill intellectual property“ thing for a while, and now he’s published it in Jacobin. He’s also getting an amusing amount of pushback elsewhere about how he’s condoning theft.
My dark fear here though is for software. The way them to deal with this shit is to make everything a subscription service, and already too much shit is subscription service. I want to only have to pay once for something.
Thing is, there’s a lot of ground between axing all the intellectual property and just reducing some of it. I bet the greatest freeing up in resources would occur from removing the first 10% of bad intellectual property law.
It seems that people assume that if only we got rid of conventional beauty standards that everyone’s internal beauty standards would default to some standard that placed themselves at the top. I haven’t seen anyone ever argue for that position explicitly though. I could just be misunderstanding the logic behind other peoples hatred of conventional beauty standards. (I also might be biased because my internal beauty standards don’t seem to be influenced by external culture in a straight forward fashion.)
even if we got rid of conventional beauty standards I suspect that many people would still inexorably end up fixating on a particular aesthetic that isn’t physically possible for them, so transhuman body mods all the way baby
sometimes I fantasize about how nice it’d be to just automatically look really great all the time, like perfect skin, effortlessly excellent posture, everything in place all the time, don’t have to mess with your clothes, and so on, because I covet that look but just do not have the discipline to put the effort into that. BUT
inevitably this leads me to reflecting on how, if everyone was like that, we wouldn’t have a world where everyone is effortlessly beautiful, we’d have a world where people put the same amount of time and expense into their appearance that they do now, and expectations are just as uneven, only the bar is higher, so it’s like you’re totally sloppy if you leave the house without painting a unique abstract art composition over your entire body and crossbraiding your hair with live flowers
like most superpower fantasies, it only works if everyone else is denied it.
That’s only true if the thing in question is 100% positional. If it has both a positional and absolute component, then increasing it across the board is still a benefit. And besides that, it seems to me that ugliness is a distinct thing from beauty. The mere absence of beauty is just plainness, and raising everyone to at least that level would still be an improvement.
Endorsed.
Additionally, is not a world where beauty is determined by how fashionable you are, and not how you were born, an improvement?
Compile and Run Your First Program
This guide is a short introduction to Emojicode and assumes you have a basic knowledge of object-orientated programming and familiarity with the command- line.
The basic structure
All Emojicode source files are named like file.emojic. So let’s get started by creating a file called greeter.emojic and put some content into it:
🏁 🍇
🍉
This is the minimum structure every program must have. 🏁 is a special part of the language after which comes a code block. Every code block begins with 🍇 and ends with 🍉.
When the program is run the code block after 🏁 is executed.
Greetings
As you can see our program does not do anything at the moment, so let’s add a greeting.
🏁 🍇
😀 🔤Howdy, partner!🔤
🍉
Before analyzing this new code we’ll give it a try.
Hint
You must have installed Emojicode to run the following commands. See Installing Emojicode if you haven’t already.
Open a command-line and navigate to the directory containing greeter.emojic. Then run this command.
emojicodec greeter.emojic
This asks the compiler to compile greeter.emojic. If everything goes well it should exit without a message and generate a file called greeter.emojib. This is an Emojicode Byte-Code File, which can be executed by the Emojicode Real-Time Engine. So let’s type:
emojicode greeter.emojib
Congratulations! You’ve written your first program. But how does it actually work?
It’s simple: 🔤Howdy, partner!🔤 is a string literal. Every character between two 🔤 is then part of the string.
Then we call the 😀 method on this string. And guess what, it just prints the string to the standard output. The thing to notice here is, that the method is actually called by putting its emoji before the object. It’s also noteworthy that Emojicode usually does not use parentheses around arguments to method calls.
Warming Up
Let’s call a few more methods to warm up. We’ll now write a method to convert English into Pig Latin. This is a very easy language because to get the Pig Latin word you just have to move the first letter of the English word to the end and add ay.
In Emojicode you can easily extend every existing class, so to follow good object-orientated practices we’ll extend the string class to have a method to convert an English word to Pig Latin. Add the following into the file:
🐋 🔡 🍇
🐖 🐷 ➡️ 🔡🍇

🍉
🍉
🐋 🔡 🍇 says: Extend the class 🔡 (That’s the string class). 🐖 🐷 ➡️ 🔡 declares a method called 🐷 and returning an instance of the 🔡 class.
Ok, let’s take the first letter of this string by using the 🔪 method, which is, according to the documentation, capable of giving us just part of a string. It’s signature is:
🐖 🔪 from 🚂 length 🚂 ➡️ 🔡
This tells us that the 🔪 method takes two arguments named from and length, both of them must be of the type 🚂. 🚂 stands for an integer, and that the method returns an instance of 🔡.
Let’s call it on the string we are currently working on.
🐖 🐷 ➡️ 🔡 🍇
🔪 🐕 0 1
🍉
This should get us a string containing the first character of the string we are currently working on which is represented by 🐕. You can compare 🐕 to this or self in other languages. However, we need to store the result somewhere.
🐖 🐷 ➡️ 🔡 🍇
🍦 firstLetter 🔪 🐕 0 1
🍉
The above code stores the result into the variable firstLetter. The variable is actually declared and initialized here. It’s important to notice that 🍦 was used here to declare the variable which prevents the variable from being changed later. This kind of variable is called “frozen variable”.
You may have also noticed that we didn’t declare a type for the variable. Emojicode supports type inference that is the compiler infers the variable’s type by looking at the type of the value for the variable.
Now we need to get the rest of the word.
🐖 🐷 ➡️ 🔡 🍇
🍦 firstLetter 🔪 🐕 0 1
🍦 rest 🔪 🐕 1 🐔 🐕
🍉
The 🐔 method returns the length of a string, so we get the whole string. You can see that the result of the 🐔 method is used as argument to 🔪.
Finally we just need to concatenate firstLetter, rest and ay and return it from the method.
🐖 🐷 ➡️ 🔡 🍇
🍦 firstLetter 🔪 🐕 0 1
🍦 rest 🔪 🐕 1 🐔 🐕
🍎 🍪 rest firstLetter 🔤ay🔤 🍪
🍉
The 🍪s are the most efficient way of concatenating strings. You can wrap any amount of strings between 🍪 and you will get them concatenated into one string. You should already know the 🍎 from above. It returns a value from the method.
Well done! Let’s update the 🏁 method to give us a few examples. The file should now look like this:
I’m a male feminist, I own a “male tears” mug just to cry into it
Well duh, they’re a crafting component. It would be stupid to waste them.
buying a dozen “this is what a feminist looks like” t-shirts and forcibly putting them on men you pass on the street
feminist alchemists ending every youtube video with “don’t forget to like and subscribe” because every like can be used in a Potion of Intersectionality +2
nightpool said: Okay I wanna back up for a second and say how impressive it was that you wrote a one sentence post and someone replied “I disagree with the first sentence” unironically.
this raises the bar; now I must construct a one word post that manages to be simple, coherent, and wrong.
“Trump,” the Australian typed into the keyboard from behind his owl mask,
I periodically think about that autistic man whose coworkers cut the heads off his stuffed animals, and about how they probably don’t understand even half the import of what they did. It’s not just destroying a favorite toy - the bond between an autist and their stuffed animals is something else entirely.
If somebody hurt my caterpillars, I don’t even think I’d be able to speak. Just shriek with rage.
It strikes me, in relation to your previous post about how you were one biological accident away from being a neckbeard, that being so attached to stuffed animals would be extremely low status in a man.
This got long and I didn’t want to just drop it into your askbox as an unformatted multipart wall-o-text.
…I also have concerns about relying heavily on land tax, depending on implementation. If it’s based on current value, then:
You’ll have poorer people being priced out of their homes and being forced to move if where they’re living ever becomes more valuable. That’s pretty shitty, even if the land could be put to more “efficient” use. Yeah, it already happens–I think that’s the real issue with gentrification, more than the “character of the neighborhood” changing–but that doesn’t mean we should put more pressure in that direction.
1. Forcing people to move is a pretty heavy cost that’s worth at least trying to avoid imposing. Having to move can mean having to find a new job, losing any location-based community, your kids having to change schools and leave behind their friends, plus the expense and hassle of the move itself. In the worst cases it might mean being homeless. It upends your whole life. Even if a move is voluntary it upends your whole life.
2. It means telling people, “You don’t deserve to live somewhere nice. If where you already are becomes nicer, you’ll be kicked out”. That’s a hell of a message.
3. Knowing that you’ll have to go through all that if wherever you’re living ever becomes more desirable seems liable to create perverse incentives.
I’ve seen you express some disdain for the idea that, and I’m not quoting here, just paraphrasing based on memory, that people have a right to stay in the same place forever with nothing changing. But I don’t think people are unreasonable to want to be able to carve out some degree of security and to not have yet another factor outside their control that can potentially fuck up their entire life.
Additional items:
You’re taxing based on value that’s purely theoretical until someone tries to sell. In a way this is true for any property tax, but I think it’s more true for land; it’s hard to directly compare different parcels of land because the location itself is what you’re selling, more than the actual square footage. And it can change without the current owner necessarily benefiting from the “increased” value.
Also, if revenue from land tax is specifically funding services in the area, you get a situation where anywhere cheap to live has underfunded services. In the US, a large chunk of funding for public schools is from local property tax, and it works very poorly.
Anyway. My thoughts on land tax. I think you could avoid some of this–for example, by the tax being a fixed amount based on the last sale price (i.e. if you buy it for $x, then the annual tax is fixed at $y, a percentage of $x, until you sell it–at which point $y is readjusted to reflect the amount you sold it for). But that wouldn’t necessarily be in line with what it seems like you want land tax to do and represent.
It strikes me that part of what you’re after, dear owl-friend, is the moral basis for this taxation.
Either that, or simplifying the taxes.
I don’t think either is really optimal. People will create “moral” arguments against any kind of taxation that is devised, and most likely the burden of taxation should be somewhat diverse in its sources partly to make evasion harder and partly to cause less distortion. It could be simpler and altered in many ways, but having only one tax is probably a bad plan in some way.
And as for the moral basis, we both know that property and law are just force one step removed. Those claiming a higher moral standing on “taxes are theft” are just fooling themselves. (And in part, this can be chased down to a disconnect on the justification for where to root causality, where consciousness is being used to mark personhood to even attempt such philosophies in the first place, but not as the final causal root, which is incoherent.)
I think a lot of the people I regularly spend time with like me *in spite of*, rather than *because of*, who I am. I am not sure if there is a workable solution to this.
it’s basically “oh but you’re one of the good ones”
If it’s any consolation, I’d imagine your blog followers follow your blog because of its content, not just to make you feel better or for some reason following your blog ironically.
GiveWell is like a test case for a centrally planned and managed economy; if they can accurately assess the return on investment and direct funding in the most socially profitable direction in a non-market driven way, then that demonstrates that at least some economic activities are amenable to this approach.
Disagree on the first sentence. Givewell’s planning is not substantially different from the planning executed by any ordinary firm, as the crucial distinction between a planned economy and market economy is use of force. Givewell has no guns, interest in using coercive force, or a democratic mandate, therefore it is not a prototype for a managed economy.
The distinction is perhaps more that more unprofitable organizations die and profitable organizations are rewarded. That’s the real magic. Property is defined by control and exclusion through force, that’s how it exists in the real world. Force was not actually removed, just moved a step back - the case with all law.
but he lies. He never tells the truth. So, why do newspapers put everything he says in the headlines? It’s not true. We know it’s not true and even if some thing true was accidentally said, how would we know?
The boy who cried wolf (in Russian).
Why are liberals like this?
OP kind of has a point though. Trump plays the media like puppets, and they just go along with it like absolute saps.
They don’t care about the country, so all that’s left is ratings. And boy golly gee does Mr. Trump-san bring in the ratings.
Why do so many leftists, reasonably intelligent (and possibly very socially intelligent) people, write posts about talking-to-upper-class-conservatives that sound like lessons on how to inadvertantly radicalize people into fascism?
If all you have is a hammer and sickle, every problem starts to look like a wheat field
That is the most bizarrely mixed metaphor to date. Especially because what’s the hammer for?
A Tumblr user has set their post queue to post once a day. However, they add an average of 1.8 new posts to the queue each day. There are currently 74 posts in the queue. A queue can hold a maximum of 300 posts.
A. How many days will it take the queue to reach its maximum capacity?
B. If the user sets the post rate to two posts per day, how many days will it take for the queue to be emptied?
C. Using universal laws, compute the mind state of a typical Tumblr user matching this statistical description within +/-10% from first principles, and create a sample distribution and tag-based machine-learning algorithm to estimate the percentage of shtposts in a representative post queue. Engrave your answer as a binary representation with associated decoding algorithm on a stone tablet.
It is the year 2201. Prison has been abolished. Empowered by new technology, the state only punishes the part of one’s brain considered to be truly responsible - this is considered the most humane solution. You (or a character) wake up in a recovery clinic for the only crime worthy of lobotomy followed by replacement - murder.
Excellent, my prompt has performed well, and without spamming my notifications.
