It isn’t as dangerous, but also the number of police shootings is lower than some people expect, if I recall correctly.
But then, I’ve generally lived in areas where the police would actually come and intervene if there were a problem. That varies a lot in my country though, by area.
Lately, in developing a hypothetical/fictional country, I’ve been pondering foot patrol officers assigned to specific neighborhoods (rotated on a five year basis), trained in EMT stuff as well, with the different role of “Community Support Officer”. Separate out the heavy guys for use solely on bank robbers.
Edit: The idea being that you want someone who can use discretion, who lives nearby and is more of a part of the community than an occupying force within the community. All sorts of contextual information. But you don’t want them to stay so long that they set up a bribery network or something. You’d have to combine this with a whole bunch of other stuff to make it work, though. It isn’t so helpful if your CSO arrests some kid for vandalism after several warnings and the prosecutor sends him to prison in order to max his “woo, tough on crime!” ratings. (Instead of, you know, making the kid clean up the spray paint.)
I’ve no clue why I keep reflexively defending cops given the fact that I’ve been a victim of a crime several times and the cops never did anything to satisfyingly help
Based on your blog’s usual content, I imagine you’re encountering people that want to get rid of the police force entirely (or something equally wacky), which will go about as well as that time the police went on strike in Brazil.
You also probably realize on some level that better policing is possible, just like better zoning laws are possible, and better drug laws are possible, and… now if only improving the overall quality of government were as exciting as social wedge issues.
Tfw you wanna be a “good ally” and think you should “play it safe” by defaulting to the most hardline views on cultural appropriation and suddenly you’re a reactionary cultural nationalist
white people shouldn’t participate in cultural appropriation discourse without permission because it doesn’t belong to them
tfw when you take it so far that you loop around to grouping culture by race and not wanting people to leave their racial culture because that would be “inauthentic” and you oppressing them because your racial imperialist aura is just that strong
Because no one in America who doesn't live in NYC or the Bay Area really understands that the stratospheric housing costs there define the merely "rich" in conventional earned income (as opposed to those making literal Wall Street finance money and/or living entirely on capital interest), out of the rich category, so their infelicitous attempts to wrangle their actual horrible money problems get them automatically assigned to the mustache-twirling villain category.
It was fun reading through that OP thinking “well, this seems like a cool way to just remove poor people from an area while possibly dodging regs about affordable housing, but I will withold judgment until I see what benefits you think that captures” only to to realize that those were the benefits.
Imagine being so evil that you spend your days thinking up cool new ways to help the wealthy avoid contact with the poor while simultaneously saving them (the wealthy) money (which they, definitionally, have plenty of).
Fuckin’ imagine.
I think there’s a difference between wanting the rich to segregate themselves off vs accepting that it’s going to happen and trying to minimize the damage.
Unless I’m missing something, the proposal at hand exactly and only minimizes damage to the wealthy? And for a value of “damage” which means “spending money on housing?”
Come at me with a solution that helps those already subject to disproportionate risk and we’ll talk, I guess.
Become Singapore.
Oh, sorry. Let me try again. You can give people money, but you have to actually take it away if they misbehave. A good program would be to lower the minimum wage while issuing hourly direct-to-employee wage subsidies - thus making the effective wage received higher while simultaneously increasing available jobs and negotiating leverage for low-income workers. This has some backing from economists and can be rolled out and tested incrementally. The Democrats should be hype for it but the Democratic Party is dumb.
There are other factors, like dealing with the simultaneous under/overpolicing, punishing wayward children *before* the end up on the wrong end of a police officer, and so on. Get crime under control and you can fix the zoning laws. Fix the zoning laws and you can build cheaper housing where it’s needed.
None of this will actually happen though because the Democratic party is about as much about helping the poor as the Republicans are about saving money.
Yeah, I think it would probably be deemed to be a tip and not a gift. Just *saying* "this is a personal gift and not taxable" isn't a magic spell you can recite to make something nontaxable! Of course, nobody's going to actually care about an unreported, looks like $7 there, per se, but if it's a regular thing it could be a problem.
I think to make it stick you’d have to switch to a complete gift economy, where you regularly give gifts to people who aren’t currently providing you services, and don’t give gifts to people who are (as that is their gift to you).
That works for small groups, but doesn’t work so well in cities of millions where you can’t effectively maintain personal social ties with every single person you might possibly interact with. Then if you use an app or something to keep track of gifts you’ve just invented a new form of currency, which would actually be kind of cool.
Honey, if men* got pregnant, the entire evolutionary balance of our species, including reproductive strategies, would be wildly different. You aren’t just talking about a world where the dialogue on abortion has shifted (and there are plenty of pro-life women), you’re talking about redefining the entirety of human history and social organization.
The forms of organization are themselves dependent on just how the mechanics work! There is a tacit admission of this in the original, but it doesn’t go anywhere near far enough. Is it random? Do men always bear the child? Sometimes? For part of the cycle but not the whole?
And it doesn’t end there. Men would be shaped differently. Men would be sized differently. Women have fat deposits on their bodies because making human babies is so ludicrously expensive that preparations need to be made beforehand in pre-modern societies. Men are in part organized the way they are because they are more expendable biologically. Higher risk/higher reward.
If men got pregnant, then that goes away. The changes would be so drastic that they could not be called men anymore.
(*in the classical sense the kind of people that make this comment use, since otherwise they wouldn’t be be making this comment in the first place)
Well, NIMBYs killed microhousing in Seattle which was going to be the kinds of small, affordable apartments that people could actually afford to live in.
Yeah, that’s one of the problems with the whole “but that isn’t REAL Capitalism! We need to deregulate!” things. The regulatory capture that corrupted the existing process will also corrupt its dismantling unless you fix it, and Capitalism pays people to subvert public ownership of the state.
Hot take: the problem with homelessness does not boil down to “count amount of homeless, count amount of houses, if the latter is larger, then capitalism is intentionally making people homeless and will collapse if they aren’t, therefore get rid of capitalism to instantly solve homelessness”.
Pay attention to the fact that there are much more homeless people per capita in cities than in half-abandoned villages, and you will realize that the problem isn’t just not having a home, but not having a home where you want to have a home, to the extent where they would rather be homeless in a city than landlords in a village.
There are obvious easy solutions, like falsely reporting that you have solved homelessness while carting people out of the city (adjusting visibility), or forcing people to live in certain places regardless of where they actually want to live (adjusting mobility), but they don’t fix the actual underlying issue.
Policy changes to address this are going to be very expensive, unless you want to reduce safety restrictions for houses, which you should not.
And not expensive because robber baron capitalism pigs, but expensive as per LTV - construction is a man hour hungry process.
You have to make other changes that allow you to fix the zoning laws, but even that only gets you so far, so basically this.
Very good point I’m totally convinced now that homelessness is a thing just because it never occured to anyone that we should solve it, and not because it is literally the prerequisite of capitalism.
People keep saying stupid shit making incorrect assumptions about this.
We could fix homelessness with modest improvements to existing policies.
The status quo does not hinge on schizophrenics sleeping rough.
You can fix homelessness by claiming that homelessness has been solved
In Libertopia, homelessness is only a sign that vagrants don’t want homes enough.
Knowing about cognitive biases can hurt some people: Mr Inman is subtly implying that the backfire effect only happens to the red tribe, while simultaneously poisoning the well on counterarguments.
Imagine a version of that comic that tells you stuff about Abraham Lincoln, and ends with “Abraham Lincoln did not think that the American Civil War was about slavery (source)“, and then immediately condescendingly say that certain people are going to write rebuttals on Facebook and miss the point?
Imagine starting out with the famous sentence from the Treaty of Tripoli about the constitution of the USA being agnostic, only to then veer into the white slavery of the Barbary Pirates that made such a treaty necessary.
Moldbug did that all the time. This is a positively Moldbuggian infographic!
Imagine starting out with some statistics about equality, diversity and feminism in Scandinavia, and then adding statistics about decreased social cohesion resulting from ethnic diversity, male-dominated professions resulting from greater female freedom to choose careers, and the effects of the Law of Jante on entrepreneurship and GDP. If you accept one, you must accept the other!
Imagine an infographic about refugees, freedom of the press, ISIS and Erdogan, then suddenly about support for authoritarian Islamic reactionaries, or straight-up Jihadists, among Muslims in the West. Not fair, you say. Backfire effect, I say!
This is what Moldbug did. He roped you in with some well sourced, morally neutral facts, then got into morally repugnant territory, and you were left wondering if you didn’t accept it only because you didn’t want it to be true. “Fine”, Moldbug says: “You appeal to consequences. But are the consequences of a Singapore-style ethnically uniform capitalist dictatorship not so much better than what we have now? You said that free trade brings peace, why stop here?”
Of course, you can accept one and not the other, and the reason Moldbug can get away his arguments is that once you accept that your world view has been shaped by cognitive bias and whig history, every cherished belief of yours is up for grabs. Those beliefs that contradict Moldbug are obviously the ones that are wrong!
Inman does not go as far. He does not lead you to a repugnant conclusion. He just stays in the comfortable confines of bland tribalism. He does not have cognitive biases, or he does not share them. Mr Inman only has pinky toe, and an understanding of cognitive neuroscience that makes the average person who reads his infographic slightly less well-informed about emotion and what an amygdala is.
What price are you willing to pay to solve those problems, ideologically?
If it is necessary to become Singapore, are you willing to do this?
What do you mean by “become Singapore”?
For instance, though this is less Singaporean, suppose that the things social conservatives complain about are true (outside of LGBT), they just happen to apply mostly to lower-class communities, because upper-class communities can survive that level of dysfunction (thanks to money). What would you do?
Or for something more genuinely Singaporean, are you willing to have convicted vandals publicly caned? Are you willing to use conscription for young men? Will you allow schools to punish or exclude problem students?
The Libs have confused Nationalism for a disease because they witnessed auto-immune dysfunction, but once a nation falls below a certain level of Nationalism, it is indeed difficult to raise an army for its defense.
Nationalism is not yet dead in the United States, but it is aspirationally among much of the Left/Libs.
What Wirehead said, but also we as a society need to redevelop the social technologies so that groups other than those who can massively overspend on rent can have comfortable, low-crime communities.
Hey let’s destroy the pernicious myth that preteens were regularly marrying in medieval and early modern Europe and were having children as young teenagers. It’s just not true. Church records show the typical age people got married was around 18-23. Sure, around a third of brides were pregnant at the time of their marriage, but premarital sex was actually completely fine in medieval and early modern Europe if the couple intended to marry. (Oh look! Another historical fact the Victorian period completely mangled!)
Very young girls were not having babies in medieval times, people. The only people who ever bring this non-fact up are paedophiles looking to defend their dangerous paraphilia. So cut it out. Stop spreading this myth. It’s not historical, it’s not factual, it’s not true.
By the way the texts in support of these facts are here and here.
“Emerging evidence is eroding the stereotype of medieval child marriage. Goldberg and Smith’s work on low- and lower-middle-status women has refuted Hajnal’s argument for generally early marriage for medieval women. Even Razi’s ‘early’ age at marriage for girls in Halesowen hardly indicates child marriage, as a large portion of his sample married between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two… . Goldberg has offered evidence from fourteenth and fifteenth-century Yorkshire showing that urban girls tended to marry in their early to mid twenties and rural girls married in their late teens to early twenties, and both groups married men who were close to them in age.” (Kim M. Phillips, Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, c. 1270-1540, p. 37 (x).
Bolded for emphasis.
Reblogging this as a reminder since I just saw another long thread on a social media website about how “the stigma of marrying at age 13-15 is recent”. No it isn’t, you’re just a pedophilia apologist.
This is fascinating, since “well the Medievals married that young” is used to wave off some of the side-effects of polygamy in certain foreign cultures today. But if that isn’t true, then that means culture or religion is responsible and not just economics like we were led to believe.
I’m paying more attention to ideological contradictions…
But what does Liberalism become when it starts saying “yes, some cultures are better than others,” and “yes, some groups practice inbreeding at higher rates than others, and this is terrible,” and “changing demographics through immigration is a feasible angle of attack that can be used in democracy”?
“Because for some transwomen, femininity can feel asymptotic — the closer you get, the more you feel you can never make it.”
This is a…hard, uncomfortable read if you’re a cis woman, but it’s a good read.
a lot to think about.
as someone who has engaged in a lot of shitty misguided misandry in the past, this was a crucial read. who is invested in the stability of men as a category n why? how can one speak to one’s experiences with weaponized masculinity without reinforcing other kinds of structural violence, like cissexism and white supremacy?
This is a bullshit article. It reflects tremendous self-loathing, and it was irresponsible for Medium to publish it. “It’s so hard the other girls don’t know my tragic trans narrative, because I have made a conscious decision to live it only in dreams and online anonymous op-eds and will never ever tell them.”
This is another case of cis people exploiting the pain and suffering of trans people who aren’t in a position to know better.
I originally discussed this article in some depth on facebook so please read on for a (slightly choppy) elaboration of my reaction:
I just read the text. I don’t know what I think about it yet, but I know one thing for sure : wow, fuck you :) @collaterlysisters
let me add on to this, fuck you @collaterlysisters
Ah, yes, I read this some time ago.
I can never be a true traditionalist, because I want to build the switch and obliterate dozens of category distinctions in doing so. It’s the only way to end many of the existing tensions within so many systems. Eventually, you have to go beyond triaging with limited resources and build such an overwhelmingly powerful economy that you can choose all the options you wanted before simultaneously.
Things I wish existed: apartment buildings with a “mandatory savings clause.” Add in whatever is needed to make it palatable, but fundamentally make people contribute to a savings account each month an amount equal to their rent (increase or decrease by factors required), and that savings account can’t be withdrawn from such that it would fall below min(“months paid in * amount per month”, 24) before the person retires or leaves the apartment building.
Why on earth would this be a good idea? Wealthy people may be assholes in many ways, but they aren’t going to be obviously dealing drugs in the corridors, they will be more considerate about loud music and parties, and they generally prefer being around other wealthy people for this and other reasons. Traditionally, we’ve kept poor people out of places by actually charging them money, but this results in low savings, insecurity, and much more being spent on wasteful housing than needs to be spent. This method allows for individuals to live cheaply without having to suffer the injury of dealing with low-income people
This is a good idea, but it won’t happen because it isn’t market-competitive. Only a Rationalist apartment building owner actively trying to help the country would do this.
It’s not obvious to me why it isn’t competitive. If A makes 10 per month and spends 4 on housing, 2 on saving money, 3 on taxes, and 1 on other (clothing, food, etc), they could move into this place instead, spend 3 on housing, and put 3 on savings. My implicit proposal is that a lot of what the fourth dollar spent on housing actually buys you is “the benefit of living with people who can afford to spend the fourth dollar on housing”, and this ensures that you’re only around people with at least six spare each month after taxes and necessities, a better deal than your original, while costing you less. For the landlord, meanwhile, this is probably competitive with just charging 3 a month, with benefits flowing from things like “middle and upper class norms involve less wanton destruction of property”
This is all partly inspired by @sinesalvatorem’s struggles on BART, which suffers from the problem that poor black people can use it. The benefit of tripling the price mostly wouldn’t be in getting more frequent service or better seats or whatever, but in not getting blatant transphobes, who are shunned in the bay area upper and middle classes. In my home of Boston, I ride both the commuter rail (expensive) and the T (cheap). People are quieter and behaviour is generally more in keeping with my preferences in the former.
The market of people that are openly aware of this and will admit to it and express preference for this as a solution probably isn’t that big, and people would instead either spend less on rent and more on other financial instruments (with a higher RoI), or spend more on the housing and gain more comfortable housing and more status.
I know it’s tagged as “#mostly a joke” but it really does get into a whole bunch of issues related to why housing is so expensive and things we normally aren’t supposed to talk about that are undermining modern Liberalism.
Also now that I think about it, despite this whole thing sounding positively Singaporean, eventually you’d get sued by self-identified civil rights lawyers for being exclusionary.
Huh, this dovetails really nicely with my comments on how this actually happens in practice.
Because doing this openly would be a flaming disaster: lawsuits, public shaming, no tenants, everything. But at the same time, doing it stealthily is actually really common!
Security deposits often don’t need to be super high. First/last rent isn’t necessary for people with great jobs and credit scores in easy-eviction states. Assorted ‘signing fees’ and ‘key fees’ and the like are often pretty much unnecessary when they could be bundled into rent. But they’re all plausibly (and genuinely) self-defense for landlords against bad tenants.
And so no one has to talk about the de facto outcome of driving out people who can pay rent, but lack the cashflow or support network to pay up front. After all, most Americans can’t front an unexpected $500 bill - charging three months rent up front is an easy way to price out people on the edge of affording a property.
Things I wish existed: apartment buildings with a “mandatory savings clause.” Add in whatever is needed to make it palatable, but fundamentally make people contribute to a savings account each month an amount equal to their rent (increase or decrease by factors required), and that savings account can’t be withdrawn from such that it would fall below min(“months paid in * amount per month”, 24) before the person retires or leaves the apartment building.
Why on earth would this be a good idea? Wealthy people may be assholes in many ways, but they aren’t going to be obviously dealing drugs in the corridors, they will be more considerate about loud music and parties, and they generally prefer being around other wealthy people for this and other reasons. Traditionally, we’ve kept poor people out of places by actually charging them money, but this results in low savings, insecurity, and much more being spent on wasteful housing than needs to be spent. This method allows for individuals to live cheaply without having to suffer the injury of dealing with low-income people
This is a good idea, but it won’t happen because it isn’t market-competitive. Only a Rationalist apartment building owner actively trying to help the country would do this.
It’s not obvious to me why it isn’t competitive. If A makes 10 per month and spends 4 on housing, 2 on saving money, 3 on taxes, and 1 on other (clothing, food, etc), they could move into this place instead, spend 3 on housing, and put 3 on savings. My implicit proposal is that a lot of what the fourth dollar spent on housing actually buys you is “the benefit of living with people who can afford to spend the fourth dollar on housing”, and this ensures that you’re only around people with at least six spare each month after taxes and necessities, a better deal than your original, while costing you less. For the landlord, meanwhile, this is probably competitive with just charging 3 a month, with benefits flowing from things like “middle and upper class norms involve less wanton destruction of property”
This is all partly inspired by @sinesalvatorem’s struggles on BART, which suffers from the problem that poor black people can use it. The benefit of tripling the price mostly wouldn’t be in getting more frequent service or better seats or whatever, but in not getting blatant transphobes, who are shunned in the bay area upper and middle classes. In my home of Boston, I ride both the commuter rail (expensive) and the T (cheap). People are quieter and behaviour is generally more in keeping with my preferences in the former.
The market of people that are openly aware of this and will admit to it and express preference for this as a solution probably isn’t that big, and people would instead either spend less on rent and more on other financial instruments (with a higher RoI), or spend more on the housing and gain more comfortable housing and more status.
I know it’s tagged as “#mostly a joke” but it really does get into a whole bunch of issues related to why housing is so expensive and things we normally aren’t supposed to talk about that are undermining modern Liberalism.
Also now that I think about it, despite this whole thing sounding positively Singaporean, eventually you’d get sued by self-identified civil rights lawyers for being exclusionary.
Looking to 2020, there’s only one way Trump can surely win from here and that’s a Zuckerberg/Chelsea Clinton runoff for the Democratic nomination.
The good news is I’m 60% sure something close to this will happen because there’s only one party as bad at playing its hand as the GOP and that’s the Democrats.
I mean, give it some time and we’ll see. I’m still forecasting a 50% chance of reelection.
Things I wish existed: apartment buildings with a “mandatory savings clause.” Add in whatever is needed to make it palatable, but fundamentally make people contribute to a savings account each month an amount equal to their rent (increase or decrease by factors required), and that savings account can’t be withdrawn from such that it would fall below min(“months paid in * amount per month”, 24) before the person retires or leaves the apartment building.
Why on earth would this be a good idea? Wealthy people may be assholes in many ways, but they aren’t going to be obviously dealing drugs in the corridors, they will be more considerate about loud music and parties, and they generally prefer being around other wealthy people for this and other reasons. Traditionally, we’ve kept poor people out of places by actually charging them money, but this results in low savings, insecurity, and much more being spent on wasteful housing than needs to be spent. This method allows for individuals to live cheaply without having to suffer the injury of dealing with low-income people
This is a good idea, but it won’t happen because it isn’t market-competitive. Only a Rationalist apartment building owner actively trying to help the country would do this.
It really seems like a lot of the resistance to sex positivity comes from a desire to be able to appeal to a set of socially agreed-upon standards rather than do the work of asserting boundaries. Or, less charitably, out of a desire to artificially increase your dating pool by making people feel like they’re morally obligated to adhere to your standards for a desirable partner.
Higher partner count correlates with lower marriage success rate. Men have also had to deal with paternal uncertainty for millenia. Both are going to have a warping effect. And women are still so protected that men cannot unilaterally order a paternity test in France, so that isn’t going away.
is it too much to ask for someone with ideas opposing mine who isn’t horrifically self-righteous or functionally retarded
like I want to expand my horizons but the pool of “cool people with ideas that challenge my worldview” at this point amounts to Michael Tracey and god bless the guy but he’s certainly no intellectual
I’m guessing I don’t count as sufficiently opposed.
We should outlaw firefighting. We’re exploiting people who need money, coercing them to put themselves at risk so that others may live. What kind of society allows people to sell their own bodies like that?
On an unrelated note, it’s still illegal to purchase kidney transplants everywhere but Iran. 12 people in the United States alone die every day waiting for one. There are few if any long-term negative health impacts of kidney donation, though it does require taking some time off which anyone but the rich would need to be compensated for.
There are probably ways to mitigate the incentive risks in paid organ donation, or opt-out organ donation, but given how conditions are it won’t happen. Even something as simple as “yes Dr. Richmann you may purchase a higher place in the organ recipient list, but you must pay for the procedure for four other people”.
There sure are a lot of Chinese restaurants in this Chinese town in China.
what are these foreigners thinking about
China actually giant authoritarian Chinese-themed theme park - very racist! Needs to be torn down immediately for minority inclusion, end to cultural appropriation.
are you a “makes fun of otherkin” anti-sj or are you a “writes thousand word posts about intersectionality and the evils of normativity” anti-sj
I’m “thinks otherkin are ridiculous since that’s not a realistic variation on human brain designs, but supports their right to morphological freedom in the transhuman future”.
that’s it, I don’t have anything funny to say about it, no hyperbolic analogies
just look at it: webinar. it’s terrible. awful. just bad.
at least once a year we have to bitch about webinar still being a word, it’s like a tradition or an old charter or something.
Blog can be a good thing but is a terrible word; webinar is a terrible word and has no redeeming qualities even if it had an elegant, catchy name.
Has anyone ever “attended” a really fantastic webinar?
uh excuse me but “blog” is a fantastic word. like “quiz”, it’s redundant with earlier terms but has nonetheless increased our quality of life simply because it’s extremely fun to say
“webinar” is pretty bad though. maybe we can change it to “cybernar”, that has some appeal
On Wednesday, a federal judge was told that while Paramount Pictures and CBS have produced a “limited number” of Star Trek television episodes and films, “they do not not own a copyright to the idea of Star Trek, or the Star Trekuniverse as a whole.”
The proposition comes from Alec Peters’ Axanar Productions, which put out on YouTube a 20-minute “mockumentary” titled Prelude to Axanar and was in the midst of pursuing a feature-length version touted as a professional-quality Star Trek fan film before being hit with a copyright lawsuit. The litigation survived an initial motion to dismiss, and despite some hopes expressed by Star Trek Beyond director Justin Lin that all this would go away, Paramount and CBS are marching forward in their lawsuit.
Also of interest: Peters attempted to meet with Netflix to produce a Star Trek show.
One of the challenges of copyright is that it applies to works that are, for many people, part of their formative experiences.
Not that the alternative is better, but we could probably stop Disney expanding the copyright laws for so long if we made it have a shorter period which was renewed by creating derivative works. (Star Trek (as a franchise) would still be copyrighted because they keep making it.)
