Oceans Yet to Burn
Month
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.
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.)
@compassionisobligatoryI 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.
I’m gonna get a dakimakura of a dakimakura
P-Pillow-Kun, I…
fir the first time in his life he is loved for who he is and not who else is printed on him and I think that’s beautiful
Why does hot coed always refer to a woman?
Because typical straight men value age over status, and typical straight women value status over age.
The male coed has nothing that makes him especially attractive.
You’re bi, however, so your idea of what makes a man attractive doesn’t have to conform.
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?
Whacking square pegs into round holes.
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.
my god, that’s what you’re supposed to do with apples
To prevent it from melting in the dish, ice cream should be served on chilled dinnerware, and the dining room’s ambient temperature lowered to between -12 and -14 C.
Totally false.
Ice cream is better right when it’s on the verge of melting. That makes it creamier and also makes it more flavorful since cold numbs the tastebuds.
I’d read that -12 and -14 C is the ideal serving temperature, but that may be on the assumption that the reader isn’t chilling their dining room, and so assumes ambient heating.
If that’s the case, then we’d need to find out what the ideal eating temperature is, and then serve the ice cream at that temperature in a room of that temperature.
The problem, I think, is that you actually want to catch it while melting. It is optimal when it’s not at thermal equilibrium, so it’s partially but not completely melted.
Like, there’s a reason most people prefer ice cream to ice cream soup, but you also don’t want it completely frozen. You want it in that mixed state where it’s kinda melty but not totally melted.
Note that “completely frozen” for ice cream is more like -20 C. Ice cream gets softer and softer at it warms before truly melting, so the situation you’re imagining may still be below 0 C.
I’ve recently had ice cream sandwiches that came out of the freezer unacceptably soft but which, based on subsequent measurement of the freezer’s temp, would have been -5 C.
(As an aside: this is also an unacceptably high freezer temperature for food safety concerns. A freezer should be around -18 C.)
the dishes themselves are refrigerated, and spray the ice cream with cooled (but not liquid) nitrogen for optimal temperature control
Violence is a tool, it has a class nature. Our violence is good, because it is liberatory. Without violence, we cannot be liberated.
good to know.
Communists - or White Nationalists?
We report, you decide.
They weren’t showing up for me, so I didn’t notice them. Configbox ticked. Or rather unticked.
The issue with racism is that it violates the principle of justice as individual. Someone is being made to suffer for something someone else entirely did, united only by surface characteristics. (E.g., being black is not an ideology and does not cause behavior in the absence of a cultural context which makes it ideological/cultural/political.)
So breaking the principle of individual justice to combat racism probably isn’t such a great idea.
However, while race does not intrinsically alter behavior, culture, ideology, and religion do. Some of this is mostly just aesthetics, like architecture or food. But some of it has much deeper consequences, like multigenerational cousin marriage, or “honor” killings.
However, unlike race (currently), culture is fortunately somewhat mutable. There are limits, however, particularly with regard to ideology.
I guess what I’m saying here is that America should limit the number of North Korean refugees it takes after the War, until it can be determined how safe former adherents of Juche coming over in one mass are, but should be willing to take many thousands of refugees from South Korea after Seoul is destroyed. In-kind aid should be delivered instead, and infrastructure reconstruction should proceed with more funding than originally scheduled.
>Arab anon is a racist piece of shit that lives on double standards and thinks the world is desperate to spend time in their sandy hell-hole.
Huh, what a surprise…
safety vs. comfort
safe spaces vs. comfortable spaces
making someone feel unsafe vs. making someone feel uncomfortable
unsafety vs. discomfort
Easily resolved, friend Argumate. Anyone making my group feel uncomfortable is also making them unsafe.
so Hillary vs. Trump, is that it then?
‘fraid so
Somehow it still is
They want to enforce moral liability for Trump voters, but that only makes sense within the context of the possible alternatives. As such, “Hillary would likely have got the US into a war with Syria right now instead of just doing one missile strike, and the Media would all be cheering her on, further expanding the migrant crisis in Europe” is a valid response. (And I didn’t even vote for Trump, actually.)
Isn’t the alt-right bodycount still at zero? Or did I miss something?
mitigatedchaos said: maybe but if we care about offsetting risks and pricing them in, then by putting insurance we set a more market-based assessment of that
in theory yes, although in practice it just lifts the regulation up one level to apply to the insurance company instead.
Not so!
It lifts some of the regulation up one level to apply to the insurance company!
The difference between being regulated by the state and being regulated by an insurance company is the profit motive: I am going to apply for the insurance that is the cheapest for me, in combined fee-to-insurer and time-spent-on-paperwork.
This encourages the insurance companies to find the most efficient level of regulation, because if it is inefficiently high, they will lose customers, and if it is inefficiently low, they will lose money when their customers customers get sick.
I mean the state typically regulates the insurance industry very closely, to the extent of issuing specific terminology they have to use in contracts
“The state ruins everything, news at 11.”
Obviously nothing* can be done about the state inserting itself to actively ruin value when it doesn’t get punished for ruining value. Read the text more like if you, yourself, were a government official concerned with making the world a better place. You can regulate directly, or you can find some different method - enforce strict liability on restaurants (but then you’d have the inefficiency of lawsuits) or require a bond posted for accident payments (but then…) or you can just require people to have insurance and get out of the way.
*If you disagree, see me behind the tescos at 11, bring a canister of gasoline.
ah instead of the state micromanaging the insurance companies it should just mandate that they need to take out policies from a meta-insurance company!
Also don’t forget that insurance companies will try to sneakily cut out items from the insurance coverage that we wanted to cover the risk in the first place. We want to exclude lesser insurance policies, which is why insurance was mandated to begin with. In this case my motive was not the pure efficiency of the market, but to accurately price risk and put it on the bill, among other things.
I envision a society with lots of mandatory insurance as part of its stealth social safety net and part of pricing in the real cost of recklessness into something people can immediately see.
mitigatedchaos said: maybe but if we care about offsetting risks and pricing them in, then by putting insurance we set a more market-based assessment of that
in theory yes, although in practice it just lifts the regulation up one level to apply to the insurance company instead.
@collapsedsquid: then you have to regulate the insurance as well
Well, you regulate the insurers, the insurers regulate the vendors. What’s perhaps lacking is a high-cost no rules insurance option.
The thing being that if the risk of actual poisonings is low, then once spread out over the population it, hypothetically, shouldn’t cost that much. And if it’s high and the state is responsible for healthcare, selling w/o insurance is potentially a form of free riding.
A lot of these things, we wouldn’t care if people did risky things if we didn’t have to pay for it or strain our empathy because we insisted we not pay for it but they don’t have $$$ for it either.
2357911131719 said: The more obvious reason is that microcredit is seen as a charity while payday loans are seen as a business; there’s a lot more willingness to assume good faith in the former than the latter
right, but microcredit interest rates are really high! the perception may differ, but are they actually different in practice?
I thought the idea was that microcredit was used as an investment to start a business, while payday loans are consumption smoothing to help you get by.
hence the original point that in the developed world it’s almost guaranteed that any business you try to start with a payday loan will be illegal due to contravening one regulation or another, and that’ll get you a stranglin’
in impoverished areas you can just buy a goat and sell the milk or try to exploit arbitrage opportunities by buying stuff here and selling it there, and while you may face a number of challenges including unofficial corruption the state is generally weak enough that it won’t immediately shut you down.
I think it’s more that anything that’s not illegal is already being done much better than can be done with such a small amount of capital.
That’s one of the other major reasons. A lot of things can be productive, but not productive *enough*.
how many businesses are just grandma cooking a big pot of stuff and giving you a bowl of it for money… try that in Australia and you are looking at approximately a thousand pages of paperwork and certification before you even start.
what if we make them buy insurance instead
The Mitigated Chaos Plan for School
…that’s true.
I don’t know what a good solution would look like, but it doesn’t have to involve any more high-IQ individuals than we have now, just a better distribution of resources schools already have.
I want to test solutions to the current system, and to find many different possible set-ups that are different from the one we have now. (They might not scale well, of course.)
Even improvement in a limited geographical area or to some minor aspects, for relatively affluent middle-class individuals, would be really valuable to me.
Roight, let me suggest my plan, which would only help matters that you want tangentially most likely.
Are you familiar with Spaced Repetition? It’s used in programs like Anki. The basic summary is this: your brain flags things as important by whether or not you use them, and forgets them gradually over time. Spaced repetition brings the item up again at a certain point in the forgetting, so that your brain goes “oh hey this came up again, it must be important, I better remember it!”
Gamification is also a thing, and I have a theory that a big part of why people don’t like school stuff is that it doesn’t feel applicable, or that it will ever be applicable. But while I do not enjoy math for its own sake, I feel almost no resistance to doing math when I have to in order to accomplish some other task.
I’d like @argumate to read this post, too, and probably a few of the others as well.
So here’s my proposal:
1. This will be primarily implemented as a computer program. It will be implemented on a custom computer system that is not easily compromised.
2. All textbooks will be presented in both a fuller, contextualized format, and as semi-atomic facts of information, ready for use for spaced repetition memorization.
3. Exercises will be split between grinding and synthesis. Synthesis exercises will sometimes be in the form of game-like programs that have a complex problem which the students must integrate their knowledge of the subject to perform. (That is, students must be able to take the knowledge and use it and apply it, not just repeat it.) Other times, for other subjects like English, they will be items like essays that are manually graded by teachers. Students earn resource points to attempt synthesis exercises through grinding exercises, which are the rote learning component intended to reinforce the knowledge and speed up processing (e.g. of doing math). If you fail the synthesis exercise, you may have to do more grinding to attempt it again.
4. The computer program will conduct a review of all the subjects the student needs to know, based on spaced repetition algorithms and data about the student and their previous performance. This prevents the constant information loss that is pervasive in the American school system.
5. All of this is individualized. Students go at their own pace, and graduate when it has all been completed, or are pushed out of the school system at 21.
6. Homework is mostly rare or non-existent. Instead, students will stay another hour or two at school. Homework is for doing exercises, which we are having them do at school.
7. The school day will be broken up by various social activities to let students’ brains relax in between blocks of studying, which will still be somewhat unified by subject of study to make #8 easier.
8. In addition to grading work, teachers will also act as tutors to individual students. Students will be grouped in classes with students who are in a similar position of progress within the system. Teachers will go around the room answering various questions and helping students with items they are having trouble with. There may be some small lecturing sections, maybe.
The following is less necessary, but additional depending on your balance of Nationalism/Capitalism/Technocracy/etc.
9. Students will be awarded points based on a mix of (about 1/3 each) progress, attendance, and and percentile academic standing within their school. These points can be spent on a very larger variety (over 100) of uniform parts, snacks, media, and other items at participating retailers. This has the virtue of aligning the school’s social hierarchy more closely with the desired outcome of learning & academic performance, as well as giving students practical experience with small amounts of “money”.
10. Research shows that teaching math below a certain age doesn’t actually accelerate learning progress on it much at all, so for very young students, the system will focus on “moral/social” education and socialization and potentially language skills.
Also maybe @xhxhxhx aaaand uh @nuclearspaceheater and maaaaaybe @bambamramfan? And possibly @slartibartfastibast in case there is some hole in Rationalism here I’m bumping into without noticing.
I know there has to be some huge glaring error I’m missing here other than “state-sponsored software project completed successfully”.
IoW, part of the plot here is to avoid the Welfare Trap, where you make more money staying on welfare than getting off of it, up to a certain amount. Making and (profitably) selling cheeseburgers or something generates more value than sitting around, meaning the base wage before subsidy is higher, so the total pay is higher.
We can start by lowering the minimum wage some and adding the subsidy some and then seeing what the level of wasteful behavior is and just how much load we’re putting on the economy. We can then increase or decrease appropriately.
One thing I keep wondering about is the question of “What’s going to happen in the next economic downturn?“ We’re almost 10 years from the last one, and there are all sorts of possible ways the next one could happen. Given that we haven’t really recovered from the last one, what’s going to happen after that? I think it’s in the crisis that the policy for the next economic era is going to made, so what’s it going to be?
mitigatedchaos: Good question. That’s why I keep chanting “wage subsidies” at all of you.
Yes, the unemployed will be very grateful for wage subsidies.
Combined with a much lower minimum wage, it moves a lot of people from “unemployable” to “employable and making enough money to live off of”.
Others should be covered by some sort of disability scheme (which won’t eliminate eligibility for the wage subsidies). Children, of course, are to be supported by their parents and the various other child protection systems we need.
At a low enough minimum wage, but with subsidies so the pay is actually reasonable, the economy will find work for these people to do that isn’t digging holes and filling them back up again.
If we get a wage subsidy, I’m totally doing Matt Bruenig’s idea where I create the Institute for Full Communism and get employees to kick back their salary.
There are ways out of that, but part of why I’m in favor of wage subsidies as a plan is that it can be rolled out and tested gradually to measure the load on the economy of plans like yours. All your kickbackers would be making more money if they did something actually economically productive. The question is how much pressure is necessary. We can test this empirically, and I believe that we should.
One thing I keep wondering about is the question of “What’s going to happen in the next economic downturn?“ We’re almost 10 years from the last one, and there are all sorts of possible ways the next one could happen. Given that we haven’t really recovered from the last one, what’s going to happen after that? I think it’s in the crisis that the policy for the next economic era is going to made, so what’s it going to be?
mitigatedchaos: Good question. That’s why I keep chanting “wage subsidies” at all of you.
Yes, the unemployed will be very grateful for wage subsidies.
Combined with a much lower minimum wage, it moves a lot of people from “unemployable” to “employable and making enough money to live off of”.
Others should be covered by some sort of disability scheme (which won’t eliminate eligibility for the wage subsidies). Children, of course, are to be supported by their parents and the various other child protection systems we need.
At a low enough minimum wage, but with subsidies so the pay is actually reasonable, the economy will find work for these people to do that isn’t digging holes and filling them back up again.
…that’s true.
I don’t know what a good solution would look like, but it doesn’t have to involve any more high-IQ individuals than we have now, just a better distribution of resources schools already have.
I want to test solutions to the current system, and to find many different possible set-ups that are different from the one we have now. (They might not scale well, of course.)
Even improvement in a limited geographical area or to some minor aspects, for relatively affluent middle-class individuals, would be really valuable to me.
Roight, let me suggest my plan, which would only help matters that you want tangentially most likely.
Are you familiar with Spaced Repetition? It’s used in programs like Anki. The basic summary is this: your brain flags things as important by whether or not you use them, and forgets them gradually over time. Spaced repetition brings the item up again at a certain point in the forgetting, so that your brain goes “oh hey this came up again, it must be important, I better remember it!”
Gamification is also a thing, and I have a theory that a big part of why people don’t like school stuff is that it doesn’t feel applicable, or that it will ever be applicable. But while I do not enjoy math for its own sake, I feel almost no resistance to doing math when I have to in order to accomplish some other task.
I’d like @argumate to read this post, too, and probably a few of the others as well.
So here’s my proposal:
1. This will be primarily implemented as a computer program. It will be implemented on a custom computer system that is not easily compromised.
2. All textbooks will be presented in both a fuller, contextualized format, and as semi-atomic facts of information, ready for use for spaced repetition memorization.
3. Exercises will be split between grinding and synthesis. Synthesis exercises will sometimes be in the form of game-like programs that have a complex problem which the students must integrate their knowledge of the subject to perform. (That is, students must be able to take the knowledge and use it and apply it, not just repeat it.) Other times, for other subjects like English, they will be items like essays that are manually graded by teachers. Students earn resource points to attempt synthesis exercises through grinding exercises, which are the rote learning component intended to reinforce the knowledge and speed up processing (e.g. of doing math). If you fail the synthesis exercise, you may have to do more grinding to attempt it again.
4. The computer program will conduct a review of all the subjects the student needs to know, based on spaced repetition algorithms and data about the student and their previous performance. This prevents the constant information loss that is pervasive in the American school system.
5. All of this is individualized. Students go at their own pace, and graduate when it has all been completed, or are pushed out of the school system at 21.
6. Homework is mostly rare or non-existent. Instead, students will stay another hour or two at school. Homework is for doing exercises, which we are having them do at school.
7. The school day will be broken up by various social activities to let students’ brains relax in between blocks of studying, which will still be somewhat unified by subject of study to make #8 easier.
8. In addition to grading work, teachers will also act as tutors to individual students. Students will be grouped in classes with students who are in a similar position of progress within the system. Teachers will go around the room answering various questions and helping students with items they are having trouble with. There may be some small lecturing sections, maybe.
The following is less necessary, but additional depending on your balance of Nationalism/Capitalism/Technocracy/etc.
9. Students will be awarded points based on a mix of (about 1/3 each) progress, attendance, and and percentile academic standing within their school. These points can be spent on a very larger variety (over 100) of uniform parts, snacks, media, and other items at participating retailers. This has the virtue of aligning the school’s social hierarchy more closely with the desired outcome of learning & academic performance, as well as giving students practical experience with small amounts of “money”.
10. Research shows that teaching math below a certain age doesn’t actually accelerate learning progress on it much at all, so for very young students, the system will focus on “moral/social” education and socialization and potentially language skills.
blue-komrade said: But where is the line between ethnocentric nation states and empire anyway. The major european nations all descend from multi lingual, multi ethnic empires… Or is that your point?
yes, the construction of a homogeneous French identity, German identity, Italian identity, etc.
pushing common languages and suppressing dialects, as happened more recently in China and Indonesia.
and forcible movement of people to line up with national borders, as took place at various intervals throughout the 20th century.
Sometimes this is used to argue that nations aren’t really real in any valuable sense, but once you go up enough contrarianism levels from the normies you wrap around and say “actually, constructing nations is Good.”
regardless of whether it’s good or bad, it’s certainly powerful, and the original debate was whether anyone has a more powerful meme for cohesion, and so far the answer is no:
- international community of workers (Great War says no)
- religion (Henry VIII says no)
- united in joyful acclamation of the marriage of our beloved king (hell no)
- neoliberal technocracy (nationalism kicks its teeth in)
I think that last one is arguable. The fighting is going on right now, and Neolib Tech and its global finance isn’t licked yet for sure.
(Admittedly, I’m disappointed that the other Techs are so Neolib, but National Technocracy is always going to lack some appeal in the West.)
Edit: Well, for the meme staying dominant and having power. Cohesion, admittedly, not so much.
teens in unison: today we will live monogamously
